I disagree, STM. . One can find many similarities between Solomon Spalding’s Manuscript story and the Book of Mormon. A guy by the name of Vernal Holley studied that intensely.:
sidneyrigdon.com/vern/vernP1.htm
Apparently, his idiosyncratic ways of expressing himself, and some plot themes found their way into the BoM, probably through a work apparently no longer in existence, which was used in compiling the BoM.
So one can find people quoting themselves, not necessarily intentionally, quite frequently. One could theoretically compose a text of many posts on the internet by one identity, and discover if that person wrote other posts, or IRL works.
LongJourney,
You might try reading the “study” you linked and use your own intelligence to compare with actual words and sentence structure and word usage in the Book of Mormon. Here is a passage from that “study” that is an example of the level of scholarship offered:
"Many of the war stories in the Book of Mormon contain tactical stratagems and descriptions of battles that are almost identical to Spaulding’s battle narratives. In the Spaulding account, the war was fought to “avenge” their “country’s wrongs,” [Manuscript Story p. 79, 83]. In the Book of Mormon, “the war was waged to avenge” the “wrongs” [caused by] their enemies, [Alma 54:24; 61:6]. Warriors in both “died in the cause of their country and their God,” [Manuscript Story p. 79, cf. Alma 56:11]. Both records develop the theme of a small band of young, daring “warriors,” who were called “their sons” and who were “determined to conquer or die,” [Manuscript Story p. 91, cf. Alma 56:17] in the defense of their country. The terms used to describe this [very large “small band”] of young warriors are similar in both works. In Spaulding, they are described as a “chosen band of warriors ,” “my brave warriors,” “my brave sons,” “young heroes,” “a band of about three thousand resolute warriors,” a “small band of valiant citizens,” and a “little band of desperate heroes” (Manuscript Story pp. 89, 90, 98, 100, 108). In the Book of Mormon, they are described as “two thousand stripling warriors,” “my two thousand sons,” “two thousand young men,” “my little army,” “my little band of two thousand,” “young men valiant for courage,” and “my little band (who) fought most desperately” (Book of Mormon: Alma Chapter 53 Heading [not in 1830 edition]; Alma 56:9,10, 33; 57:6; 53:20; 57:19).
In both stories, night-time stratagems were developed and given special importance. Each tells of enemies caught off guard while they were “in a profound sleep” [or sleeping in a profound silence. (Manuscript Story p. 98; cf. Mosiah 24:19; Alma 55:16-17)]
In the Spaulding account, the remains of the dead were secured from “the voracious jaws of carniverous beasts” by “digging into the ground about three feet deep . . . they there deposited the bodies in it . . . and then placing others upon them until the whole were deposited, they then proceeded to throw dirt upon them, to raise over them a high mound” (Manuscript Story p. 95). A similar description is found in the Book of Mormon’s story of Zoram. It reads: “. . . in one day it (the city) was left desolate; and the carcasses (of the dead) were mangled by . . . wild beasts . . . Nevertheless after many days their dead bodies were heaped up upon the face of the earth, and they were covered with a shallow covering” (Alma 16:10,11). [The “heaped up” Book of Mormon battlefield dead parallel Spaulding’s “heaps” of battlefield dead (Manuscript Story p. 100).] "
The Book of Mormon has no expression “the voracious jaws of carniverous beasts”. The mounds were something that were known to exist in various places in the eastern United States, so if a person were writing a story trying to make it realistic they would use those features. “Wars to avenge wrongs” could be expected in any war book, as also a small valiant band and using the hills and mountains to advantage.
What that supposedly scholarly study fails to do is demonstrate patterns of language usage extensively that could be said to be “lifted” from Solomon Spaulding’s writing. The idea of the native Americans having come from the Old World and being Israelites was not a novel idea–it was already an extant idea. Of course Spaulding would come up with dark-skinned and lighter skinned people–that would take about two seconds to figure out as a plot line. That doesn’t mean Joseph Smith copied the idea from Spaulding. It just means it made a good plot line for Spaulding’s made-to-be-believable account.
One can certainly see why assumptions galore point to the Book of Mormon and say “that is not original material”–but the idea of sentences, word usage, language usage, account complexity, and religious genuineness and sincerity being in any way similar is about an eighth grade level “study”, it seems to me. If someone were going to try, for example, to get their doctorate in English by making such a “study” they would have to demonstrate far deeper thinking and comparisons than are made in the study you linked, or they would be laughed out of the doctoral review board and told to go back to their writing and do a much more thorough job or forget the whole thing.
And, it would also mean that the second part of the quote was completely inaccurate as well since it claims that one would get nearer to God through the BoM than through the Bible.
