Joseph Smith Couldn't have Written the Book of Mormon
Modern computers have given birth to a new science of analyzing word patterns in documents whose authorship is disputed.
By wordprint analysis, it is now possible with a high degree of certainty to tell which suspected authors did not write a given work.
Wordprinting is based on the somewhat surprising fact that every author has been studied thus far subconsciously uses sicty-five identifiable patterns,
involving words like "and," "the," "of," "and "that," at statistically different rates from others. For the last seven years a team of researchers has been at work refining the
techniques of this "stylometry." Wordprinting is an objective measurement. Its significance may well be debated, but its detection of phenomena in a text cannot be argued.
The group that developed teh measuring techniques for these studies came from varying religious and philosophic backgrounds, yet they achieved consensus regarding the techniques used
to measure wordprint data. At the bottom line, teh report concludes that people who pay attention to wordprint studies can no longer speculate that the Book of Mormon consists of writings
by Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowderey or Solomon Spaulding. Such a notion is now statistically indefensible. Moreover, the didactic writings of Nephi and Alma are statistically independent from each other. While
further stylometric studies are yet underway, a simple explanation of all this data is that the Book of Mormon was indeed written by different original authors and translated by a stranger with a restricted word vocabulary.
(Andrew Q. Morton, Literary Detection, New York:Scribner's Sons, 1979).
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