The Book of Mormon and Stemmatic Evidence
The Book of Mormon is a religious book comprising almost 600 pages of history, and presents the unfolding epic of several civilizations stretching from approximately 2300 BC to 421 AD. It was first published in 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed he received and translated the record through the ministration of angels. The book itself claims to be an ancient documentary record written mainly by descendents of pre-conquest Hebrew expatriates who fled Jerusalem in 600 BC and eventually were led, by divine intervention, to the western hemisphere. It records the political, military, and religious history of the subsequent civilization which emerged from this cultural transplant.
Because of the supernatural origins claimed for the Book of Mormon, it has attracted a steady stream of detractors through the ensuing 178 years. Critics have tried, without fail, to demonstrate one or the other of two explanations for the origins of the book:
1. Most commonly, critics have tried to demonstrate a dependence upon the environment from which Joseph Smith derived his ideas. They insist that folklore, fictional literature, dependence upon the King James Bible, Joseph Smith's own fertile imagination, and plain old fashioned coincidence, can best explain the book's many ancient characteristics.
2. The second, and less popular, explanation asserted (mainly by a few Evangelicals) is that Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon through Satanic manipulation. While this second explanation cannot be tested or weighed through empirical methods, the first explanation can be.
The following, then, will briefly consider one narrow aspect of the first explanation.
One of the fundamental requirements for this "environmental" explanation for the Book of Mormon is establishing that there was adequate source material for Joseph Smith to draw from. Thus, critics have searched far and wide for any material which appears to parallel (thus providing possible stemma) any of the nearly 600 pages of Book of Mormon prose. Upon finding such material, critics convince themselves that, "aha!", they have indeed found the "smoking gun" for Book of Mormon synthesis.
Without delving deeply into the methodological shortcomings of this above approach, it should be pointed out that one would be hard pressed, in the face of the sheer volume of 600 pages of prose, to not find any contemporaneous nineteenth century English literary parallels. Literary English parallelisms in and of themselves, do little to the argument of the Book of Mormon question of authenticity (See an excellent demonstration of this fact at the website owned by Mr. Kerry Shirts). One would only expect Joseph Smith to utilize expressions and phrases which were typical of his environment.
That said, consider a rather fascinating text, the Narrative of Zosimus, which mirrors the Book of Mormon in several significant ways. This text employs numerous specific imagery and ideas which were not apart of the nineteenth century conscience, but which are manifested in the Book of Mormon in similar (if not identical) contexts:
*Recording the history of a group of people who escaped the destruction of Jerusalem at the time of Jeremiah (circa 600 BC)
* Dwells in the desert
*Being led by prayer and faith
* Wandering through a dark and dreary waste
* Experience mystic ascension and enlightenment
* Being caught away to the bank of a river (called in Narrative: Eumeles)
* Crossing to the other side of the river or abyss and passing through a great mist
* Coming to a tree whose fruit is most sweet above all other fruit
* Eating from the tree, which also gave forth a fountain of living waters
* Being greeted by an escort* Being interrogated as to desires
* Beholding a vision of the Son of God or of those like sons of God
* Keeping records on soft plates or tablets
* Crossing bodies of water by divine assistance
* Being led to a land of promise and of great abundance because of righteousness
* Practicing constant prayer
* Keeping high standards of chastity and piety
* Receiving revelations concerning the wickedness of the people of Jerusalem and the Old World
*Obtaining the assurance of the mercy to be extended to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the world who repent and enter into a covenant with God.
*Bookof Mormon Authorship Revisited* (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1997, p. 327...(pp 323-374 inclusive)).
Unfortunately for the critic's argument, the Narrative of Zosimus was not available in Joseph Smith's day. It is a Jewish document with origins dating to at least as far back as the fourth century, with some scholars asserting a textual chronology which predates the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD (Charlesworth, Psuedepigrapha and Modern Research, pp. 223-28). Aspects of its tradition undoubtedly go back even further yet. The story of the Narrative itself, written originally in Hebrew, begins in approximately 600 BC Jerusalem. The Narrative was apparently a popular early Christian text, with discoveries extant in Slavonic, Syriac, Greek, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Karshuni. It was dropped off the list of canonicity in 850 AD, and in short order was lost to the scholastics until its discovery and re-emergence in the 1870's as a Russian translation.
In other words, Joseph Smith could not have had access to it. Which does create an interesting difficulty for the critics, does it not?
What of the similarities between the Narrative of Zosimus and the Book of Mormon? As has been shown above, there are in fact many, with some segments of the Book of Mormon coincidentally following verbatim the Greek-to-English text of the Narrative, and in precisely the same context. However, it should not be said that there is an established stemmatic connection between the two texts, although such a possibility should not be ruled out, either. The point is mainly that we cannot assume that the Book of Mormon is dependent on nineteenth century literature based upon a few parallels, impressive as they at times may appear to be. To do so would ignore that such parallels may be nothing more then coincidence, just as some Book of Mormon critics would say that the above outlined Narrative of Zosimus parallel is merely coincidence.
At the very least, we can say that it is a fact that the Book of Mormon closely follows this particular, specific ancient Hebrew thought -- thought unavailable in Joseph Smith's day -- in remarkable ways. This enigma will be swept aside by many critics of the Book of Mormon, insisting that this is merely a coincidence. And herein we find the crux of the critic's flawed methodology: they accept only evidence which fits their preconceived notions, while also trying to patchwork -- through scores of widely disparate books -- a nineteenth century origin for the Book of Mormon. They utterly ignore the long odds of Joseph Smith providing so many points of contact between these two documents -- all in a relatively compressed written space. In the case of the Narrative of Zosimus, Joseph Smith scored a "direct hit" with antiquity.
So ponder: is there a stemmatic connection between these highly similar documents? You decide. To read the entire text of this Narrative, click HERE
