Wordprint and Modern Book of Mormon Apologetics (ERI Pt. 9)
How BYU's nuclear missile engineers invented a new way to prove the Book of Mormon true.
I declare these things unto the fulfilling of the prophecies. And behold, they shall proceed forth out of the mouth of the everlasting God; and his word shall hiss forth from generation to generation. And God shall show unto you, that that which I have written is true. - Moroni 10: 28-29, The Book of Mormon
Believing in the Book of Mormon is one of the main tenets of being Mormon, and also one of the biggest challenges to keeping one’s faith. The book of scripture — believed by church members to be of equally divine origin as the Bible — is not just central to church doctrine, it’s a make-or-break test of Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims.
The story of the book goes like this. Around 600 B.C there was a prophet in Jerusalem named Lehi. Like his contemporary Jeremiah, he prophesied that Jerusalem will be destroyed. Unlike Jeremiah, Lehi is commanded by God to leave the city with his family and start an epic trek to settle in a land prepared for the righteous: the American continents. After much adventure, Lehi and his family sail across the sea and land in America. Once there, his two most charismatic sons, Nephi and Laman, fight over the course of the new civilization. Nephi wants to follow God, Laman doesn’t. They are unable to reach an agreement and Lehi’s children split into two nations: the Nephites and the Lamanites. To ensure the Nephites don’t commingle with the Lamanites, God curses the latter with dark skin. For the next thousands years the two nations fight, eventually culminating in the complete destruction of the Nephites. The sole survivor of the genocide, Moroni, carries his father Mormon’s history of the Nephites and buries the book in upstate New York. The history is written like the Bible, consisting of sub-Books written by ancient authors and compiled (with some editorial notes) into one text.
For the next fourteen hundred years the Lamanites spread throughout the Americas, becoming what we know as the Native Americans. Then, in 1823, a young farm boy named Joseph Smith receives a divine call to find the book and translate it into the modern Book of Mormon.
The problem, to put it succinctly, is that there is no evidence any of this actually happened. The origins of the indigenous Americans are well studied, and there are no archeological discoveries in either North or South America that implies either the Lamanites or Nephites existed. Unlike other ancient civilizations like say, Rome, you can’t walk into Mesoamerica and find Nephite ruins.
But if they don’t exist, that means Joseph Smith was a liar. So instead of relying on direct evidence, Mormon apologists have had to resort to more indirect ways of scientifically proving the truthfulness of the book. The church-approved standard method is to pray and rely on your instincts. Feel good about it? That means the Nephites existed.
More academically minded Mormons (read: those with a tenured position at BYU) aren’t content with this subjective experience; they want the hard facts, good scientific proof. Since you can’t do archeology to prove the Book of Mormon true, they rely on textual analysis. If they can prove that the Book of Mormon is a real history by analyzing how it is written, then it follows that the Nephites and Lamanites were real. Doesn’t matter that we haven’t found evidence of them: the text is proof in and of itself.
A classic technique is to look for Hebraisms in the book. Since the book says that Lehi’s family was Jewish, there should be literary quirks in the text that would indicate the authors spoke Hebrew as their first language. According to the book, the nations that emerged from Lehi’s group both retained usage of Hebrew as their native tongue throughout their 1,000 year history. BYU professors argue that this is why, for example, the book uses the term “and it came to pass” so often. Book of Mormon critics going back to Mark Twain have identified this phrase as a way for Joseph Smith to give the book a more Biblical vibe, but apologists claim this is actually indicative of the text’s Hebrew origin. In that language, the phrase can be represented by a single word, which means it takes up less space in the original text. However, according to the book itself, the Nephites did not write it in Hebrew, but a language called “reformed Egyptian,” an otherwise unattested tongue supposedly used in ancient Jerusalem to write books due to its orthographic compactness. This all gets a little convoluted.
A more sophisticated approach is to study the “wordprint” of the book. Spend some time in internet circles where you brush up against Mormon apologists (official ones from BYU, or would-be social media stars looking to develop a brand) and you’ll see this come up. Of the many ways Mormon apologists have worked with the Book of Mormon, this seems to be the technique that they feel is the most scientifically sound. It only became possible once computers reached their maturity.
BYU? Computers? Strange pseudo-science? Turns out the Eyring Research Institute is involved.
Wordprint, otherwise known as stylometry, is a way to establish the authorship of documents. The idea is that authors have a specific style that is unique to them much like a fingerprint is unique to an individual. Using statistical techniques, a wordprint analyst can mathematically quantify an author’s style. Once that’s done, it can be used to compare the author’s style against other texts. Famously, this technique has been used to study Shakespeare’s works and determine whether all the writing attributed to him actually were written by the playwright.
These studies have limitations, however. For one, an author’s style is not as necessarily unique to them as a fingerprint. Very good authors, and especially experienced forgers, can replicate the style of another person. The Mormon church learned this the hard way during the Mark Hoffman affair. Additionally, the outcome of the analysis will naturally be dependent on the statistical tools one uses.
The Mormon goal when applying wordprint to the Book of Mormon is to prove that multiple authors wrote the book. According to the story, Moroni’s dad created the text by compiling the writings of previous prophets into one book. Like the Bible, each of these records is delineated from each other by the author: the Book of Nephi, the Book of Alma, the Words of Mormon, etc. If this story is true, each of these books should have a unique wordprint. If Joseph Smith was the author instead, the whole Book of Mormon should bear the same wordprint.
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The first attempt to verify the authorship of the Book of Mormon was published in 1980 by Wayne A. Larsen, Alvin C. Rencher, and Tim Layton in Brigham Young University Studies.
Wayne A. Larsen was the leader of the study and was working at the time as the director of Advanced Research Systems at the Eyring Research Institute (ERI). Looking at the org chart given by the ERI during their bid to upgrade the US Navy’s helicopter simulators there is not a department with this name. However, there is something called “Advanced Systems” under the Defense Systems Group led by C. Monroe Hart, a former naval officer noted for his work developing the guidance systems for the Polaris submarine-launched nuclear missile.
Larsen’s work is hard to pin down. There really isn’t much trace of what he did at the ERI. Presumably, a department called Advanced Research Systems at a weapons development lab did a lot of work that is not publicly available.
What has survived of his work is mostly statistical analysis papers. According to his faculty page on the BYU website he conducted Minuteman II accuracy testing and statistical studies. The Minuteman II work comes up a lot in the background of ERI researchers, since applying statistical techniques to the study of effective nuclear annihilation seems to have been a main goal of the center. The BYU website lists the Book of Mormon authorship paper as his only published work.
Otherwise, there isn't much to see. Confusingly, there is another Wayne A. Larsen in the world, this one an Air Force officer who has written papers arguing that NATO was justified in bombing Serbian radio stations during Operation Allied Force, but that’s not the Book of Mormon guy.
Rencher was a fairly unexciting statistical analyst, but good enough that BYU gives out a yearly award in his name to Department of Statistics faculty members that have shown outstanding undergraduate mentoring. Tim Layton took his statistical skills and used them to co-found a venture capital firm. He served as a mission president to the Bakersfield, California mission.
The group decided to use a statistical technique called multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). This technique has broad applications. For wordprint analysis, here’s the basics of how this works. Suppose you have ten texts, and you know that they are written by two different authors (we’ll call them Author A and Author B). Divide the texts into two groups (Group A and Group B) based on who you suspect the author is. After that, choose some words from the texts, for example, the word and. Then run the analysis. MANOVA will show the probability that all the texts in Group A are written by Author A, as well as the probability that the texts in Group B are written by Author B. If Author A and Author B are in fact different writers, the analysis should show that the texts in Group A and B are unlikely to be written by the same author. The probability is generated by comparing the relative frequency of the key word you chose at the beginning.
Larsen’s team studied 251 blocks of texts using ten common words in the English language: and, the, of, that, to, unto, in, it, for, and be. They divided those 251 text blocks into groups depending on who the alleged author was according to the Book of Mormon. For example, 98 of the blocks were attributed by the book to Mormon himself.
When they ran the analysis, they found that there were 24 distinct authors of the Book of Mormon. That seemed to verify Joseph Smith’s claim that the text was a compilation of work from ancient times. Whoever wrote the Book of Alma was a distinct person from whoever wrote the Book of Nephi, who was a distinct person from whoever wrote the Book of Mosiah, and so on. Most importantly, the study showed that all the Book of Mormon authors were distinct from Joseph Smith.
From this, they concluded that the Book of Mormon was in fact an ancient work, compiled like the Bible from pre-existing texts, none of which were written by Joseph Smith. It only took 150 years, but in 1980 an ERI scientist had objectively proved that the Book of Mormon was a real book of scripture. Presumably patting himself on the back for a job well done, Larsen went back to figuring out how to efficiently saturate the Soviet Union with nuclear missiles.
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Unfortunately for the Mormons, Larsen actually hadn’t done that good of a job. The approach was simplistic. Nowadays, even the Mormon apologists admit that the study was fundamentally flawed, but naturally they still agree with the conclusion. In a BYU review of the history of wordprint analysis, they admit:
Although somewhat overstated, it is hard to disagree with the Larsen study’s main conclusion that “our study has shown conclusively that there were many authors who wrote the Book of Mormon.”
Two years after their study, another BYU researcher, John Hilton, decided to try a more sophisticated approach. This time, instead of using single words, Hilton would analyze phrases and patterns, which was expected to give a better read on an author’s style.
Like Larsen, Hilton was a military guy, though unaffiliated with the ERI. After fighting in World War II, Hilton studied statistics and got involved with United States nuclear weapons research and development. He worked with telemetry groups out at White Sands, helping build transducers for nuclear missile analysis equipment. Later, he found a job at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. According to a meeting of the United States Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, Hilton and Ron L. Iman were the “fathers of Latin Hypercube Sampling.”
Latin Hypercube Sampling is less well-known than its most common application: Monte Carlo simulations. This statistical technique is a way to use random sampling to generate numerical values. Physics students often encounter it as a way to compute definite integrals, or as a fun way to estimate the value of pi. Monte Carlo methods require a random series of numbers to work, and the Latin Hypercube is a technique to generate those values, generalized (as the name suggests) to an arbitrary number of dimensions.
Hilton, then, had a much more sophisticated statistical background than Larsen’s group. He got some non-Mormon colleagues at Berkeley involved, and together they ran their analysis on two books in the Book of Mormon; Nephi and Alma. Amazingly, they found that there was a 1 in 15 trillion chance that the authors of Nephi and Alma were the same person.
Within two years, two separate groups of nuclear missile engineers had used computers to prove that the Book of Mormon was an ancient text. That should have settled it. Right?
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Statistical analysis relies on assumptions, and human beings have to use their own brains to make sense of the numbers the algorithms spit out. The Hilton study, though compelling at first glance, leaves some open questions. The Books of Nephi and Alma being written by two different authors does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that Joseph Smith’s story is true. The two Books very well could have been written by separate authors in the 1830s. We know Joseph Smith had collaborators; the Book having dozens of different writers doesn’t mean those authors have to be ancient.
If the Book has been proved ancient by statistical analysis, it also begs the question as to why no physical evidence of the continent-wide Nephite/Lamanite civilization has ever been found. The Nephites lasted 1,000 years, the Lamanite civilization supposedly spawned every indigenous population in the Americas, but the only concrete proof we have of all this history is one 500-page book.
Hilton and Larsen’s techniques could also just be wrong. That’s what David Holmes (of Bristol Polytechnic), a non-member, suspected when he did his own analysis for his 1985 doctoral dissertation. Instead of relying on the frequency of specific words, he focused on vocabulary richness. Using a much more straightforward Poisson distribution, he concluded that all the alleged ancient authors of the Book of Mormon had about the same vocabulary richness, and thus were the same person.
To take things a step further, Holmes brought in other texts:
Joseph Smith’s personal journals.
The Biblical Book of Isaiah, many chapters of which are included word-for-word in the Book of Mormon.
The Doctrine and Covenants: another book of Mormon scripture composed of revelations written by Joseph Smith.
The Book of Abraham: Joseph Smith’s translation of a piece of Egyptian papyrus that is also considered scripture.
Holmes found that the authors of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Book of Abraham were all the same person. Interestingly, Smith’s personal journals grouped separately from the scriptures. Unsurprisingly, the Book of Isaiah was distinct from them all, being a genuine ancient text. This seems to imply that Joseph Smith could adopt a pseudo-scriptural style when writing allegedly prophetic texts.
BYU actually includes this study in their history of wordprint analysis, but concludes:
The Holmes study shows only that the Book of Mormon texts, although consistently distinct in terms of noncontextual word usage and word-pattern ratios, display similar vocabulary richness. This might reflect simply that the Book of Mormon texts are the work of a single translator, as Joseph Smith claimed, and thus were limited by his vocabulary.
Interestingly, on the wordprint page written by the church’s semi-official apologetics aggregator, the Holmes study isn’t mentioned at all.
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Wordprint studies came at a transition point for Book of Mormon apologetics, and can be seen as the first attempt to use modern scientific advancements to prove the historicity of the book. Before that, apologetics were focused on the linguistic characteristics of the text and their implied cultural context, such as the Hebraisms mentioned above.
The work of ERI employees dovetailed with another semi-official BYU organization’s founding; the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, a group formed to conduct academic research into the Book of Mormon. In 1997, it became an official part of BYU, and is one of the premier Book of Mormon apologetics outlets. Their scholars write article after article showing how the Book of Mormon is a real ancient text, and even publish their own journal with the findings. Yet, like everything else surrounding the book, none of their results have been accepted by the mainstream scientific establishment. The descriptions in the book are just not what the historical record tells us about ancient America.
Still, that hasn’t stopped these ideas from perpetuating decades later. Given new reach by social media, the church continues to fund semi-official apologetic outlets that expose a new generation of Latter-day Saints to the analyses of the past. Bearing names like FairLatterDaySaints and ScripturePlus, they’ve found footing in our fractured information landscape, carving out TikTok-friendly niches that are easily lampooned by critics but prove that these apologetic techniques still have staying power.
What gives things like wordprint or FARMS studies their credibility is their scientific tone and pretensions of academic honesty. I remember coming across a FARMS journal for the first time and feeling my faith reaffirmed: here was a scientific journal that studied my faith. It had an air of sophistication that appealed to my intellectualism more than the way I was taught to believe in the Book of Mormon growing up: praying about it and relying on a subjective experience of “good feelings” to accept it as a real text of ancient history.
And that leads to the conundrum of all these apologetics studies and influencer-driven podcasts. Now that we are in the modern world, with high-tech information technology ready to objectively prove Joseph Smith’s story, which path are Mormons expected to take when developing faith in their sacred book? Is a sacred experience with the Holy Ghost enough, or does faith in the Book of Mormon require reading statistical analysis papers and learning how multivariate distributions work? If the second path is equally valid, then why is it that most Mormons are only exposed to the “science” after they start to lose their faith and are sent by their priesthood leaders down the apologetics rabbit hole to stop them from exiting the church altogether? You’d think that church lessons would lead with the fact that statistical analysis has produced a one-in-a-trillion chance that Joseph Smith made it all up.
That said, critics and believers alike end up coming to the same problem. These events happened almost 200 years ago, and the records we have from them are all written by the people who stood to benefit from their contemporaries believing the story as it was told. Theorizing about the creative process that birthed the Book of Mormon means looking back through the mists of time, and guessing what was going on in a farmhouse on a plot of land in an unremarkable part of upstate New York.
So, dear readers, the question is now turned to you.
Do you believe?
It all came from England. Don't know how they did it but they did it. Who else would write something like, "Great are the promises of the Lord unto those on the isles of the sea." Who else would convince people that people from England or who have English descent are from the tribe of Ephraim? They have to have some very sophisticated technology that is being kept hidden.