Last year I wrote up
a brief piece responding to my former branch president who left the Church on
the topic of how many plates composed Mormon's abridgement, revealing his embarrassingly
bad mathematical skills:
How many metal plates composed Mormon's Abridgement? Answering a Criticism
How many metal plates composed Mormon's Abridgement? Answering a Criticism
The Interpreter Foundation just posted a new article on this issue
Bruce E. Dale, How
Big A Book? Estimating the Total Surface Area of the Book of Mormon Plates
(.pdf)
Here is the conclusion:
The
total surface area required to engrave the characters in which the Book of
Mormon is written on the plates is unknown. However, we do have a considerable
amount of eyewitness testimony as to the dimensions and weight of the plates.
We also have a modern language, Arabic, which is likely similar to the language
in which the Book of Mormon plates were written. We know approximately how much
surface area was required to write the Qu’ran, using very small Arabic
characters. Based on this and other information, several questions can be
asked: 1) Can we estimate the surface area required to engrave the Book of
Mormon? 2) Can we check that estimate using an independent method of
calculation? 3) Do these two estimates give physically reasonable results?
Two
separate and completely independent calculation approaches were taken to
address the question of the surface area of the Book of Mormon plates. The
results of the calculations are between about 30 and 86 square feet, a
difference of less than three-fold. The average of these two values is about 60
square feet, meaning the Book of Mormon was engraved on about 40 individual
plates. This is roughly 15 percent of the surface area of the text of the Book
of Mormon in our modern English translation. Thus the two independent
calculation approaches give consistent and reasonable values. They also support
the idea that the Book of Mormon authors achieved great economy of space in
writing the Book of Mormon.