Marcel Kahne, a former atheistic Jew from Belgium who converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served as a translator, wrote the following about the positive influence of old-school FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, now the Neal A. Maxwell Institute) scholarship, which, fortunately, still exists now in the Interpreter Foundation:
There was not any doubt in my mind [that] I needed to prepare by studying the [Book of Mormon] thoroughly. Other works of Hugh Nibley such as An Approach to the Book of Mormon and Since Cumorah kept strengthening my conviction of the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon . . . I was requested to translate an article by ethnologist John Sorenson entitled “Digging into the Book of Mormon.” Being very interested by its contents, I looked up the footnotes and discovered the address of a foundation called FARMS, made up of LDS researchers and university professors. I procured their catalog and brought all the booklets that had already been published. Sorenson had also just published his seminal work An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, the reading of which strengthened my conviction even more that the Book of Mormon was dealing with real people within an actual geographical and cultural framework and that the English text concealed treasures of historical authenticity that required my translation to be as close to the English original as possible. Professor John Welch’s articles on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon and on the difference between the terms theft and robbery, articles by John Tvedtnes and others on Hebraisms, Donald W. Parry’s treatise on parallelisms in the book and shows that translators, including myself, sometimes did not know what they were translating . . . I went away from the experience [of being acquainted with the scholarship from FARMS] being more convinced than ever that the Book of Mormon was an authentic historical document and that the only way its existence could be explained was to admit the authenticity of the Joseph Smith story. (A Global Testimony: Sixty Different Countries One Power Message [comp. Katarina Jambrešić; New York: A Global Testimony, 2014], 95, 96, 97; comments in square brackets added for clarification)
