Commenting
on the Gospel Topics Essay, “Book
of Mormon Translation,” Christina Darlington wrote:
This essay claims that the Mormon Church officially
endorses the Book of Mormon as “the most
correct of any Book on earth & the keystone of our religion & a man
would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts than by any other Book.”
This is a key statement because many changes
have been made to the text of the Book of Mormon over the years . . . (Christina
R. Darlington, Misguided by Mormonism But
Redeemed by God’s Grace: Leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints for Biblical Christianity [2d ed.; 2019], 49, emphasis in original)
Darlington
seems to believe that Joseph Smith’s statement about the “correctness” of the
Book of Mormon is nullified by there having been changes to the text. However,
this only shows her lack of research and critical thinking skills. How so?
Joseph Smith said this about the Book of Mormon on 28 November 1841, one year
after the third (1840) edition of the Book of Mormon which Joseph Smith and
others help edit, as he did for the 1830 and 1837 editions, too. The historical
context clearly does not support this
being a statement about textual purity but doctrinal purity or “correctness,”
explicated by how Joseph ties this correctness to the precepts contained in the text. A prime example of such explicit
teachings in the Book of Mormon can be seen in it containing the most lucid
discussions of Christ’s atonement in scripture (e.g., 2 Nephi 2; 9; Mosiah 15;
Alma 34; 42).
As for the
changes in the text itself, such has been addressed in great detail by LDS
scholars and apologists for decades now, for instance, all 6 parts of Royal
Skousen's Analysis of Textual Variants in the Book of Mormon (over 4,000 pages
of text[!]) is available online
here on the Interpreter Foundation Website.
Interestingly,
the Gospel Topics essay itself does admit
that changes have been made to the text (you would never get that impression
from Darlington’s comments). Let us quote from one such portion of the essay
where justifications for some of the changes are under discussion:
In addition, some grammatical constructions
that are more characteristic of Near Eastern languages than English appear in
the original manuscript, suggesting that the base language of the translation
was not English.
Let us
discuss one such example of a change in the Book of Mormon where the original
is reflective of a Semitic background to the Book of Mormon. Let us begin by quoting another critic of the Book of Mormon:
One late-19th century critic of the Book of Mormon levelled the following charge against Alma 46:19 in the Book of Mormon:
The simplicity of many portions of the Book of Mormon is very touching; witness the following:
“And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent!!!”*--[page 334.]
. . .
* That a “rent” can be visible—sometimes too visible—is an undoubted fact, but how a man could write upon a rent is not so easy of demonstration. Possible corroborative evidence of the practicability of this performance might have been given by the Irishman who gave as a recipe for making a cannon: “Take a round hole and pour melted iron around it.” (Thomas B.H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints [1873], 544, emphasis in original)
Stenhouse was not the only critic of the Book of Mormon to level this charge against the Book of Mormon. Catholic William Whalen wrote the following about this passage in 1967, almost a century after Stenhouse’s volume:
[T]he strangest malapropism appears in Alma 46:19. “And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent [part] of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote [written] upon the rent [part] . . . “ The words in brackets have been added or altered in recent editions but the original edition seemed to give the impression that a “rent” is something on which a man can write! (William J. Whalen, The Latter-day Saints in the Modern World [rev ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967], 48)
This is actually evidence of a Hebrew background to the Book of Mormon. Hebrew does not have to add the word part to a verbal substantive like rent as English requires. Thus, broken in Hebrew can refer to a broken thing or a broken part, while new can refer to a new thing. As John Tvedtnes explained:
[I]n the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, we read that "when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air" (p. 351). When the word "rent" is used as a noun in English, it may refer to a hole caused by rending, but not, to my knowledge, to a portion of a rent cloth; the unlikely usage of "rent" in English as a noun no doubt contributed to the fact that, in subsequent editions of the Book of Mormon, it was changed to read "rent part" (Alma 46:19). But the Hebrew would, in this instance, use but one word, qera’, "rent (part)," coming from qāra', "he rent, tore," for nouns, in Hebrew, are derived from roots--as are Hebrew verbs--by addition of certain vowel patterns that distinguish them from other parts of speech. (John A. Tvedtnes, Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey)
There are many instances in the Hebrew Bible of this. The word piece (קְרָעִים) in the KJV text could be literally translated as rent:
And Ahijah caught the new garment that was on him, and rent it in twelve pieces (1 Kgs 11:30; alt. “twelve rents”)
And he said to Jeroboam, Take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee. (1 Kgs 11:31; alt. “ten rents”)
And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more: and he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces (2 Kgs 2:12; alt. "two rents")
Instead of being a problematic verse for the Book of Mormon, Alma 46:19 is another piece of evidence for the authenticity of the text.
This is yet another instance of Darlington proving herself to be greatly misinformed as well as lacking a shred of intellectual integrity, notwithstanding presenting herself as an "expert" on the topic of "Mormonism."