New scholarly article on Rigdon-Book of Mormon connection

[Jerusha]

I got it. a very interesting study. the things that stand out to me are:

1. Smith was not one of the authors they focused on, because his writings are very rare. He dictated to scribes, but those scribes, principally rigdon and cowdery who have plenty of their own writings, evidently re-wrote whatever he wrote, because their own writings are very similar to what Joseph dictated to them.
2. They did not include god, ye, thy, and behold because they are so Biblical in usage.
3. Their measures were frequency counts of a list of 110 words. The statistic was developed from the study of DNA “Words”, and used in the diagnosis of cancer.
4. They used Longfellow and Joel Barlow as controls because the content of their works was similar to that of the BOM. This means that if the analysis technique were wrong, the study would erroneously find these authors to have contributed.
5. Isaiah and Malachi were used as positive controls because of the extensive verbatim passages. Thus, if the analysis technique were wrong, no passages taken verbatim from those works would show as primarily coming from those authors.
6. They initially ran the study with the controls. This came off as predicted. They then ran their numbers without them.
7. Five chapters of the 239 chapters studied “incorrectly” came from Longfellow. I wonder if they were chapters about Samuel the Lamanite, who is similar in character to Hiawatha. One “Longfellow” chapter was Mosiah fourteen, borrowed from Isaiah 53. We know that that is not a Samuel the Lamanite chpater.

NSC and delta agree on the first place [authorship] assignment for 147 of 239 chapters (62%) agreement. In cases where there is not first place agreement between the two methods, there are seventy-six chapters in which the first candidate of one method agrees with the second place method in the other, There are a total of 223 chapters (93%) in which the two methods name the same author in either the first or second place. !!!]…Rigdon is either the first or second most probable candidate author in 187 out of 239 chapters; Spalding is either the first or second most likely candidate in 110 ourt of 239 chapters; and Isaiah-Malachi is first or second in 101 chapters.

Longfellow, of the controls, did better than Barlow, but, then, expectedly, very poorly. Of the most likely authors, they were rarely in least likely positions for individual chapters.

Rigdon, Isaiah-Malachi and Spalding were the primary authors according to both statistical analysis methods. The Nearest Shrunken Centroid method seemed more effective in analyzing the data. 85% of the chapters analyzed came from any one or combination of these three authors. Rigdon-Spalding assignments tended to occurr together, Isaiah-Malachi assignments tended to be independent.
There are twenty chapters

attributed to Isaiah-Malachi for reasons that are not obvious. We note, however, that many of these twenty chapters have thematic similarity to Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews…

to be continued as I digest this windfall.

 

[William_M]

Jerusha

Take a look at 4 links I have given in earlier postings which offer preliminary criticisms of this article.

One criticism I have noted recurring is that the article/study simply ranks, among just five hpothesized authors, which of the five is the most likely to have written particular chapters of the Book of Mormon. If that is correct, then the ASSUMPTION of the article/study is that one or more of those 5 authors wrote the Book of Mormon.

1. Is the above paragraph a fair characterization of this article study?
2. If the answer to question 1 is “yes”, then what is the basis of the assumption? Is it Dr. Criddle’s previous non-linguistic and non-statistical embrace of the often-proposed and often-debunked Spalding-Rigdon hypothesis?
3. If the answer to question 1 is “yes”, is it correct to conclude that the article/study says nothing (other than by assumption)about the probability that any of the five hypothesized authors wrote chapters of the Book of Mormon versus whether (a) the book of Mormon was translated by Joseph Smith and/or (b) whether it was written by a number of ancient men?
4. Conceding for the sake of argument that Joseph Smith’s writings were not sufficient to include him in the analysis (a point that at least one LDS commentator is not prepared to concede), in any case, does excluding Joseph Smith from the analysis beg the question in the most fundamental way?

BTW Just as matter of curiosity, and none of my business if you do not care to answer, why are you interested in the Book of Mormon?

 

[Jerusha]

Jerusha

Take a look at 4 links I have given in earlier postings which offer preliminary criticisms of this article.

Those preliminary criticisms are from a mormon perspective. I am looking at it from a more objective perspective.

One criticism I have noted recurring is that the article/study simply ranks, among just five hpothesized authors, which of the five is the most likely to have written particular chapters of the Book of Mormon. If that is correct, then the ASSUMPTION of the article/study is that one or more of those 5 authors wrote the Book of Mormon.

that is the way research is done-- generate hypotheses, then test them. The key word therefore is not assumption, but possibility. If one cannot generate and test hypotheses, one cannot do research.

1. Is the above paragraph a fair characterization of this article study?

NO, if you are referring to your above paragraph

1. If the answer to question 1 is “yes”, then what is the basis of the assumption? Is it Dr. Criddle’s previous non-linguistic and non-statistical embrace of the often-proposed and often-debunked Spalding-Rigdon hypothesis?

You are claiming that Craig is biased because he is exmo. You need to take a look at Bart’s postings on Craig’s statement that he helped set up the study and then stepped back to let the numbers fall where they would. I believe that the Spalding-Rigdon hypothesis is provable, I have been waiting for further study on it.

Craig may have been disconcerted to find sime minimal evidence for Longfellow, given the similarity between some of the BOM’s characters and Hiawatha.

I DO SO understand why you believe in JS as sole author, divinely inspired. I am grateful to be conversing with someone who follows BH Roberts. Much more mature POV than some. But this is not the sole possibility.

1. If the answer to question 1 is “yes”, is it correct to conclude that the article/study says nothing (other than by assumption)about the probability that any of the five hypothesized authors wrote chapters of the Book of Mormon versus whether (a) the book of Mormon was translated by Joseph Smith and/or (b) whether it was written by a number of ancient men?

I think it says a lot, since Longfellow and Barlow were lowest among the five, and Rigdon and Spalding and Isaiah-Malachi were highest.

1. Conceding for the sake of argument that Joseph Smith’s writings were not sufficient to include him in the analysis (a point that at least one LDS commentator is not prepared to concede), in any case, does excluding Joseph Smith from the analysis beg the question in the most fundamental way?

That certainly is a flaw in the study. I would like to see data that proves that his scribes edited what he wrote to such an extent that using him as a possible author would not be reasonable. I do believe that he made plenty of adaptations to the text as he read the copy that Rigdon gave him.

I would also like to see and expansion of the study, using the entire BOM to check out other authorship possibilities, since I believe that either Spalding or Rigdon plagirized from an authentic text describing the Viking invasion of 800 AD to 1421AD, and its aftermath. One possible author could be Buck Watie,(the Cherokee Elias Boudinot) (B1802?,D 1839) who had the skills and contacts to do so.

why are you interested in the Book of Mormon?

I am examining the BOM from a native and Catholic perspective, rather from an exmormon or mormon perspective, since both are limited by their culture.

Some of my ancestors were in the Nauvoo area in 1844, and somehow rabid LDS seem to be particularly bigoted against me because of that.

 

[Jerusha]

Hiawatha was written in 1855. Therefore, such passages as

Over them he stretched his right hand,
To subdue their stubborn natures,
To allay their thirst and fever,
By the shadow of his right hand;
Spake to them with voice majestic

As the sound of far-off waters,
Falling into deep abysses,
Warning, chiding, spake in this wise :
[note]

 "O my children! my poor children!

Listen to the words of wisdom,
Listen to the words of warning,
From the lips of the Great Spirit,
From the Master of Life, who made you!

 "I have given you lands to hunt in,

I have given you streams to fish in,
I have given you bear and bison,
I have given you roe and reindeer,
I have given you brant and beaver,
Filled the marshes full of wild-fowl,
Filled the rivers full of fishes:
Why then are you not contented?
Why then will you hunt each other?

 "I am weary of your quarrels,

Weary of your wars and bloodshed,
Weary of your prayers for vengeance,
Of your wranglings and dissensions;
All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforward,
And as brothers live together.

 "I will send a Prophet to you,

A Deliverer of the nations,
Who shall guide you and shall teach you,
Who shall toil and suffer with you.
If you listen to his counsels,
You will multiply and prosper;
If his warnings pass unheeded,
You will fade away and perish!

 "Bathe now in the stream before you,

Wash the war-paint from your faces,
Wash the blood-stains from your fingers,
Bury your war-clubs and your weapons,
Break the red stone from this quarry,
Mould and make it into Peace-Pipes,
Take the reeds that grow beside you,
Deck them with your brightest feathers,
Smoke the calumet together,
And as brothers live henceforward!"

May have been taken from a common source with the BOM, or adapted form it. More likely the first.

This man, or his wife, is a strong possibility:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Schoolcraft

Now I’m making progress!!

 

[Jerusha]

No, they used the entire BOM. They just renumbered the chapters consecutively, ignoring “Books”. I see there are links for taking a closer look at the data. More later.

 

[Jerusha]

The strongest Longfellow chapter is Mosiah 14, which is known to be derived from Isaiah 53. The similarity can be accounted for by Longfellow comparing Hiawatha to Jesus.

 

[Jerusha]

the data from the study indicate that Rigdon wrote 37%, Spalding wrote 28%, Isaiah-Malachi wrote 20%, Cowdery wrote 9%, and Parley Pratt wrote 5%. This does not eliminate the possibility of borrowings from people such as Buck Watie (cherokee Elias Boudinot) and Mr and Mrs Schoolcraft.

Spalding wrote the story, Rigdon wrote the theology and inserted passages from the Bible. :coffeeread:

We are definitely talking about multiple authorship in recent times (except for excerpts from the Bible) Nephi and Moroni, according to the Book of Mormon, “lived 1000 years apart”. Yet 1 Nephi 10 and Moroni 8 were both written by Rigdon to a more than 93 % probablility. Other evidence disconfirms Mormon apologetics for ancient multiple authorship.

 

[mellman]

I have access to the paper, so I’ll copy it here for those who want to read it.

1 Background
Since its publication in March 1830, the origin of the Book of Mormon—particularly its claim of ancient origins—has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate. Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr (1805–44) claimed that an angelic messenger delivered to him a record written from around 2200 BC to 421 AD by ancient Native Americans in ‘reformed Egyptian’. Smith claimed to have used a seer stone to translate the record into English. By February 1831, two competing theories had appeared: Alexander Campbell (1831), founder of the Campbellite religious movement, proposed Smith himself as author while the Cleveland Advertiser (1831) proposed Sidney Rigdon.1 Rigdon was a former Campbellite preacher who acquired ecclesiastical status on par with Smith’s almost immediately after his rapid conversion in October 1830. Campbell (1844Go) eventually concluded that Rigdon was the probable author of the Book of Mormon, but his initial explanation held that Smith wrote the book by drawing from sermons and local folklore.2

One year later, in February 1832, a third candidate-author was named when Mormon missionaries Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith read passages from the Book of Mormon at a schoolhouse in Conneaut (New Salem), Ohio. Nehemiah King, who was present at these readings, claimed that Hyde ‘had preached from the [novelistic] writings of Solomon Spalding’ (Wright, 1833Go).3 Spalding (often ‘Spaulding’) was a frustrated novelist who, prior to his death in 1816 (i.e. from 1811 to 1815), shared his unpublished novel with his neighbors, family, and associates in Conneaut. In 1833, the Spalding allegations came to the attention of E. D. Howe, who joined with ex-Mormon Philastus Hurlbut to investigate the matter. Hurlbut collected affidavits from Spalding’s former neighbors and family in Conneaut.4 The witnesses recalled having heard much of the plot and several names from the Book of Mormon in a draft novel titled ‘Manuscript Found’, a now-lost text that Spalding submitted for publication to a Pittsburgh publisher in late 1812. In Mormonism Unvailed [sic] (1834, 1977) Howe linked Rigdon to Spalding through this publisher. The resulting ‘Spalding-Rigdon Theory’ holds that Rigdon acquired the Spalding manuscript through his connections to the Pittsburgh publishing shop, added his own theology, and then revealed it to the public through Smith as the Book of Mormon. In the years after Howe’s publication, others provided testimony supportive of the theory, including Spalding’s widow, Spalding’s daughter, the owner of the Pittsburgh publishing shop, and others who claimed that Spalding shared his work with them5 or who claimed to have seen a copy of ‘Manuscript Found’ after Spalding’s death.6 Expansions to the theory followed, including a detailed analysis of Rigdon’s life by William H. Whitsitt (1886, 1891Go), and of other likely collaborators, including Smith’s second cousin Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher with editing experience (Deming, 1888Go) and Parley P. Pratt, a former disciple of Rigdon (Schroeder, 1901Go).7

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Spalding-Rigdon Theory was the favored explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon, but Fawn Brodie’s (1945Go) rejection of this theory in her controversial biography of Smith marked a turning point in the debate. Invoking witness tampering and ‘false memory syndrome’, Brodie dismissed the affidavits collected by Hurlbut. She believed that a Spalding holograph discovered in Honolulu, Hawaii, and stored within a large envelope with the penciled-in title ‘Manuscript Story–Conneaut Creek’ (1810), was in fact the lost Spalding document known to the Conneaut witnesses as ‘Manuscript Found’.8 Despite having no evidence that the Honolulu manuscript was the same text that the Conneaut witnesses heard Spalding read to them (and subsequently recognized as a source text for the Book of Mormon), Brodie nonetheless concluded that Spalding could not have been an author of the Book of Mormon because the similarities between the Book of Mormon and the text found in Hawaii were ‘not sufficient to justify the thesis of common authorship’.9 Her rejection of the Spalding-Rigdon Theory was so widely accepted that the Spalding-Rigdon Theory came to be regarded by most students of Mormon history as ‘an historiographical artifact without credibility among serious scholars’ (Bushman, 2005Go).

Among contemporary secular scholars of Mormonism, the theory of Smith as solitary author is a generally accepted explanation. Twentieth century advocacy of this theory began with I. Woodbridge Riley (1902Go) who proposed that Smith drew inspiration from locally available source materials, including Ethan Smith’s (1825Go) View of the Hebrews. Riley also speculated that Joseph Smith’s writing was influenced by epilepsy-induced visions and that Smith created characters modeled on members of his family, including himself. Brigham Roberts (1857–1933), a Mormon leader and intellectual whose writings are collected in Studies of the Book of Mormon (Madsen, 1985Go), likewise concluded that Smith had the imagination and source material to produce the Book of Mormon on his own (1985). Smith’s textual sources, Roberts argued, likely included View of the Hebrews and Josiah Priest’s (1825Go) Wonders of Nature and Providence. Brodie (1945Go) advanced similar arguments, and followed Riley’s footsteps with speculation regarding Smith’s psychology (1971). In recent work, David Persuitte (2000Go) provides textual parallels to strengthen connections to both Ethan Smith and Josiah Priest, while historian Dan Vogel (2004Go) expands the psychological speculation, suggesting that the Book of Mormon is best explained as the result of Smith family dynamics and Smith’s willingness to engage in a pious fraud.

 

[mellman]

part 1 continued

In addition to historical studies of Smith and the origins of the Book of Mormon (such as those noted above), there have been a smaller number of quantitative, or ‘stylometric’, studies. A team of Brigham Young University researchers led by Wayne Larsen conducted the first among these (Larsen 1980Go).10 Employing multivariate, cluster, and classification analysis, Larsen, Rencher, and Layton set out to test the proposition that the Book of Mormon is the work of a single author (perhaps Smith) or multiple authors (ancient or nineteenth century). Larsen’s study included analysis of thirty-eight frequently occurring common non-contextual words and forty-two rarely occurring non-contextual words. To generate frequency lists, the researchers first assumed that ‘the writers of each verse, or partial verse, could be identified according to information given in the text’ and thus they ‘assigned’ verses and partial verses to classes based on their ‘careful scrutiny’ of the text (1980). They concluded from statistical analysis of this material that the text was not the work of Joseph Smith and that many authors likely wrote it. Using samples of known writings from Solomon Spalding, Sidney Rigdon, and other Smith contemporaries, Larsen claimed further that the multiple styles they detected in the Book of Mormon were not likely to be the work of any of these nineteenth-century authors.

Several problems are now apparent in the methodologies employed by Larsen et al. (1980Go). First, they grouped verses and partial verses from the Book of Mormon into clusters based on their understanding of speakers (or characters) in the Book of Mormon (i.e. Nephi, Alma, etc.). Because the characters had distinctive vocabulary ‘wordprints’ within these selections, they concluded that the Book of Mormon was a multi-authored work.11 They further reasoned that because their selections did not match the styles of potential nineteenth-century authors, they could conclude that the text was not the work of a nineteenth-century author. However, their analysis did not exclude the possibility that their chosen selections were composites containing different fractional contributions from different nineteenth-century authors.

A further problem stems from Larsen’s reliance upon context sensitive words. Though Larsen claims to use only non-contextual words, his list of selected words is questionable. It includes words such as ‘behold’, ‘forth’, ‘lest’, ‘nay’, ‘O’, ‘unto’, ‘wherefore’, and ‘yea’—words that are common in scripture and thus contextual. They occur at a much higher frequency in the Book of Mormon than in the writings of nineteenth-century authors. Take the word ‘unto’, for example: It occurs 3,610 times in the Book of Mormon, a rate of 135 occurrences for every 10,000 words. In the entire Chadwyck-Healey (2000Go) Early American Fiction collection, a collection of 875 novels spanning the period from 1789 to 1875, the word ‘unto’ appears 2,346 times, a rate of just 3.8 occurrences for every 10,000 words.12 Even sympathetic scholars, such as the statistician D. James Croft (1981Go), caution against reading too much into Larsen’s results.13

In a paper from around 1988,14 Mormon investigator John L. Hilton claimed that his group had significantly improved Larsen’s techniques and that their results reconfirmed his conclusion that the Book of Mormon is a work of multiple, though ancient, authors. For his analysis of the Book of Mormon, however, Hilton chose to analyze subjectively grouped and edited selections from the Book of Mormon put together in the form of 5,000 word blocks of text. Like Larsen, Hilton assumed that characters such as Nephi and Alma can be viewed as candidate authors, and he selected blocks of text from what he referred to as ‘didactic’ sections for the characters ‘Nephi’ and ‘Alma’. He then followed Larsen in assuming that each selection could only be the work of a single nineteenth century author, not the work of multiple nineteenth century authors. At best, one might hope to conclude from such an analysis that the chosen selections are not by the same author, but the methodology used does not exclude the possibility of multiple nineteenth century authors. Hilton’s methodology thus did not address a key aspect of the Book of Mormon authorship question.

In Appendix 3 of his essay, Hilton identifies the sources for his compilation: not a single manuscript, or the published 1830 version of the Book of Mormon, but instead, a composite compilation of selections from four sources based upon what he and his team judged to be the oldest. The provenance of this material is questionable. Also problematic is that Hilton’s compilation of old Mormon manuscripts did not include significant sections and direct quotations from the King James Bible—sections and quotations that are an acknowledged part of the 1830 Book of Mormon.15 Most importantly, Hilton’s analysis neglected to include a comparison with the work of Rigdon. This omission is difficult to understand given the other potential authors whose work Hilton analyzed. In our work, we include a large amount of newly available Rigdon text of certain provenance, adding to the limited amount available at the time of Larsen’s study.

 

[mellman]

part 1 continued

More compelling than the work of Hilton and Larsen is the work of statistician David Holmes (1985Go, 1991aGo,bGo, 1992Go). In separate papers from 1991 and 1992, Holmes investigated Book of Mormon authorship using a multivariate measurement of vocabulary richness. Holmes compared the Book of Mormon to thirteen writing samples from Joseph Smith, Joanna Southcott, and the King James Bible.16 He measured the richness of noun usage in the various works: a technique that Holmes claims enables him to discriminate between the ‘personal’ and the ‘prophetic’ writings of Joseph Smith as well as between the personal writings of Smith and those of Joanna Southcott. Using this technique, Holmes further discriminates between the prophetic voice of Smith and that of Southcott. Holmes’s derives the ‘signal’ for Smith’s prophetic voice from Smith’s revelations as they are recorded in Doctrine and Covenants; the personal voice he derives from the letters and diary entries collected in Dean Jessee’s The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith.

Detecting differences between Smith’s prophetic and personal voice was a key discovery for Holmes. His technique appeared to prove effective in discriminating between authors and between authorial voices in different contexts. From this, Holmes argued that his multivariate measurements of vocabulary richness offered no evidence to support the argument that the Book of Mormon is a work of multiple authors. This conclusion stood in direct contradiction to the previous analyses by Larsen and Hilton. However, two problems are apparent in Holmes’s work: first, his reliance upon the letters and diary entries collected by Dean C. Jessee in Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Smith and Jessee, 2002Go) as a reliable source for Smith’s personal voice and second, his reliance upon the Doctrine and Covenants as a reliable source for Smith’s prophetic voice.

Though Holmes was careful to select ‘only those letters written by Smith himself [in Smith’s hand], or preserved in the handwriting of clerks who state specifically that Smith is dictating’ (Holmes, 1991bGo), even this subset of Dean Jessee’s collection is problematic. In the opening sentence of his introduction to Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, Jessee declares: ‘it matters very little whether or not a person writes his own journals, letters, and speeches or delegates others to write for him’ (Jessee, 2002). His point here is that even if written by others, the material reflects the mind of the Smith if not the actual words as written. For authorship attribution analysis, however, we are less concerned with whether a document captures the ‘spirit’ of an attributed author and more specifically interested in whether the document is written by and in the natural style of the attributed author. With Smith, however, we cannot reasonably conclude this point, that the documents attributed to him are indeed reflections of his individual literary style. On the contrary, in studying Smith and reading Jessee’s collection of documents, one becomes immediately and acutely aware of how little we can, even blithely, attribute to Smith and Smith alone. Jessee notes the problems associated with claiming that Smith was the author of the words attributed to him: ‘His philosophy’ writes Jessee, ‘was that “a prophet cannot be his own scribe” ’.17 Indeed, even Jessee avoids use of the word ‘author’ preferring instead ‘writings attributed to him [Smith]’. Jessee points out that while Smith ‘produced a sizable collection of papers, the question remains as to how clearly they reflect his own thoughts and personality [because] we inherit the limitations that produced them … the wide use of clerks taking dictation or even being assigned to write for him, and the editorial reworking of reports of what he did and said’ (Smith and Jessee, 2002Go). Jessee notes further that the ‘practice … of inserting eyewitness writings that have been changed from indirect to direct discourse … gives the impression that Joseph wrote them’, when in fact he did not. Referring to one particular case, Jessee writes that the ‘impressions of Joseph Smith given … probably reflect the personality of the editor more than they do Joseph’s’. Even for the twenty-three letters in Smith’s hand, which Jessee republishes in facsimile form, we cannot easily assume that Smith is the sole author. Many of the letters in Jessee’s collection show the handwriting of Smith along side and intermingled with the handwriting of other authors, including Rigdon and Cowdery. Even when writing something as personal as a journal entry or letter, we see consistent evidence of collaboration and co-authorship. Unfortunately, such writing cannot be used as a reliable sample of known authorship.18

Second, and equally problematic, is Holmes’s use of the Doctrine and Covenants as a reliable example of Smith’s prophetic voice. This text of revelations is ascribed to Smith, but as is the case with many of his letters and diary entries, he did not write it unaided. Rather, he is reported to have dictated the revelations to one of his scribes. From 1829 to 1838, two of Smith’s main scribes were none other than Sidney Rigdon and Oliver Cowdery, who according to the Spalding-Rigdon theory, participated in writing the Book of Mormon. In fact, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon Church) acknowledges that many sections of the Doctrine and Covenants were revealed jointly to Smith and Rigdon or to Smith and Cowdery.19 The voice signals of one of these men or a mix of their signals could be the ‘prophetic voice’ Holmes ascribes to Smith. That Holmes would find similarities between the ‘prophetic’ voice of the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon, therefore, is at best evidence of common authorship for the two texts but in no way demonstrates that Smith’s ‘voice’ (divinely inspired or otherwise) is anywhere to be found.

 

[mellman]

**2 A New Approach **

For many, the question of who wrote the Book of Mormon remains unresolved. Historical and stylometric research has so far not given us a reliable answer. We offer here a new approach that differs from past work both in source selection and methodology. We examine the entire 1830 Book of Mormon without any a priori assumptions, modifications or pre-selection, and compare it to new, candidate-author samples. Our methodology does not isolate word categories (i.e. contextual or non-contextual nouns), but instead uses the entire corpus as a starting point and a mathematically based selection process to define the features of the author samples and the Book of Mormon that we will compare. Our work employs two techniques to determine the probability that each chapter of the Book of Mormon was authored by each of seven authors: Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, Isaiah-Malachi (from the Bible), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Joel Barlow. The first five have known or alleged connections to the Book of Mormon. The last two are prominent, period-authors who were added as controls.21

The first technique, ‘delta’ (Burrows, 2002Go, 2003Go; Hoover, 2004aGo,bGo) is well-documented in the literature of computational linguistics, so we omit a detailed description here. The second is ‘nearest shrunken centroids’ (NSC). NSC is a statistical technique for classification in high-dimensional settings. The problem of authorship attribution is a classification problem because we seek to classify a text sample of unknown authorship into one of a fixed number of known author categories—in this case a closed set of candidate authors: Rigdon, Spalding, Cowdery, Longfellow, etc. The problem is high-dimensional because we seek to perform classification on the basis of a very large number of words. The method is as follows. First, we compute average word frequency vectors, or centroids, for each known author, on the basis of the text samples of known authorship. Next, we shrink these centroids towards the overall average word frequency vector across all of the authors, in order to make our method more robust to small changes in word frequencies. Finally, we classify a text of unknown authorship by computing its word frequency vector and determining to which of the shrunken centroids it is most similar. NSC was initially intended for a completely different purpose: it was developed to assist cancer diagnosis by classifying patient tumor samples into cancer subtypes based on gene expression measurements. However, from a machine learning perspective, the problem of authorship attribution is surprisingly similar to that of cancer diagnosis: rather than classifying tumors by cancer subtype, we classify texts by author, and instead of using gene expression measurements to perform the classification, we use word frequencies.22 This creates the seven author categories described above. The same kind of analysis is then done on a Book of Mormon chapter, and the resulting pattern is compared to the pattern of each of the seven potential author categories (Rigdon—90%; Longfellow—1%; etc.) On this basis, NSC assigns a probability that each potential author wrote each Book of Mormon chapter; just as it would assign a probability that a tissue sample manifests a particular cancer sub-type. More details regarding NSC can be found in Tibshirani (2002Go, 2003Go)

 

[mellman]

3 Source Selection

Because several theories for the origin of the Book of Mormon propose multiple authorship, we cannot investigate it as if it were a single unified text written by a single author, but must instead break it into meaningful samples. Smith reportedly dictated the original document in a series of sessions with scribes.24 These scribes allegedly wrote down everything he said, without punctuation or attention to grammatical form. A key scribe, Oliver Cowdery, is alleged to have provided the initial editing before publication. Subsequent editors altered punctuation, improved grammar, eliminated redundant phrases, and, in some cases, made changes in the text’s content. Our investigation thus begins by excluding any analysis of punctuation (e.g. comma frequency) or of form (verse length, sentence length, etc.), and is limited to words alone. Since it was the published 1830 version of the text that was authorized by the Mormon Church, we examine the entire text, excluding only the chapter summaries that appear before First Nephi, Second Nephi, Jacob, Alma, Helaman, Third Nephi, Forth Nephi, and Ether.

We opted to use the chapter structure currently recognized by modern Mormon Church editors to create our text samples. This results in a total of 239 text segments for testing. This approach yields texts that are generally of adequate size (verses are too small and books too large), recognizes natural breaks in the narrative, facilitates cross-referencing to online resources,25 and avoids the chance that we have imposed our own bias. We consider it important that this method tests the entire corpus approved by Smith in 1830. Book of Mormon samples averaged 1,117 words and ranged in size from 95 to 3,752 words. Our candidate-author samples were equally varied and ranged from a small sample of 114 words to a large sample of 17,797 words with an average sample size of 2,172 words.26

For comparative purposes, we acquired digital versions of the Books of Isaiah and Malachi from the King James Bible as well as samples of known writings of Solomon Spalding, Sidney Rigdon, Parley Pratt, and Oliver Cowdery (Appendix A provides a detailed list of source materials). For control purposes, we selected two texts: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1855Go) Song of Hiawatha and Joel Barlow’s Columbiad (1825Go). Barlow and Longfellow were initially selected as control authors because both are roughly contemporary to the Book of Mormon, both deal to an extent with concepts found in the Book of Mormon, and both employ formulaic patterns consistent with patterns of verse seen in the Book of Mormon.27 To further test the appropriateness of these control texts, we performed a series of simple hierarchical classification tests using frequently occurring non-contextual words and fifty novels of the same era (1789–1850).28 The texts written by Longfellow and Barlow consistently clustered close to the Book of Mormon indicating that they were appropriate choices for use as control texts. The Isaiah and Malachi texts also served as pseudo-control texts, since large sections of the Book of Mormon are known to be almost verbatim extracts from them.29 All of the known author samples were segmented in order to obtain estimates of the variance associated with each author’s word use. In total, 239 chapters of the Book of Mormon and 217 samples of known authorship were tested. Using scripts developed for this project, each sample was tokenized in order to produce word counts and relative frequency data for each word within each sample.30 We did not include Joseph Smith in the analysis because, as noted above, there is currently no reliable corpus of Joseph Smith text.

 

[mellman]

4 Methodology

As described in the previous section, our data consist of 239 samples of unknown authorship (corresponding to chapters from the Book of Mormon) and 217 samples written by seven known authors. We refer to this analysis as the ‘seven-author case’. The number of text samples used for this analysis is as follows: Cowdery (nineteen), Pratt (fifty-three), Rigdon (twenty-three), Spalding (seventeen), Isaiah-Malachi (seventy), Barlow (twelve), and Longfellow (twenty-three). We used a set of 110 words or ‘features’, obtained in three steps:

1. We selected the words that occurred at least once in the samples from each author and also at least once in the Book of Mormon. This resulted in a set of 521 words.
2. We selected the subset of these 521 words that have a mean relative frequency, across the 456 samples, of at least 0.1%. This resulted in a set of 114 words.
3. We removed the words ‘god’, ‘ye’, ‘thy’, and ‘behold’, as these occurred at much higher frequencies in texts relating to biblical subject matter.

The resulting list of 110 words is available in Appendix B.31

In order to compute delta scores and apply NSC, we first converted the 110 word counts for each text into relative word frequencies. For NSC, we formatted the data as a matrix of dimension 456 x 110 (number of samples by number of words). We subtracted out the mean from each column and divided the entries in each column by the standard deviation for that column. We then applied NSC to the data, using the ‘pamr’ (Prediction Analysis for Microarrays) package that is freely available on the R-statistical software website.32

Both delta and NSC involve the selection of tuning parameters. For both methods, this tuning parameter determines the number of words to include in the classifier. In order to determine the success rates of NSC and delta at classifying chapters of known authorship, and in order to select a value for the tuning parameters, we performed cross-validation. Roughly speaking, cross-validation is performed as follows, for a range of values of the tuning parameter:

1. Randomly split the samples of known authorship into two sets: a ‘training set’, containing most of the samples, and a ‘test set’, containing a smaller portion of the samples.
2. Perform the classification method of interest (either delta or NSC) for a given value of the tuning parameter, training on the training set and testing on the test set.
3. Compute the error fraction from the number of misclassified test set samples.

Cross-validation allowed us to estimate the error that we would obtain if we tried to classify the samples of known authorship using NSC and delta. The above process was repeated multiple times, and the average misclassification error rate recorded. The lowest delta error rate of 11.1% was obtained using ninety words. This means that if we used delta to classify a new sample written by one of the seven known authors, then the probability of correct classification would be 88.9%. The lowest NSC error rate was obtained when all 110 words were included; the error rate was 8.8%. This means that we would expect to classify correctly a new sample written by one of the seven candidate authors 91.2% of the time. Since there are seven candidate authors, a classifier that selected an author completely at random would give a correct classification rate of 1/7 or 14.3%, and an average misclassification error rate of 6/7, or 85.7%. Therefore, the low error rates obtained using NSC and delta are impressive. The fact that NSC results in lower error rates indicates that this method is appropriate for authorship attribution, and may in this case be superior to delta.

Using delta, five of the 239 chapters of the Book of Mormon were incorrectly assigned to control author Longfellow (none to Barlow), an error rate of 2.1%. Using NSC, only two chapters were assigned incorrectly to Longfellow (none to Barlow), an error rate of 0.8%. To provide best estimates of individual chapter authorship for the five authors who are linked historically to the Book of Mormon (Spalding, Rigdon, Cowdery, and Pratt) or who are known to have contributed (Isaiah-Malachi), we also performed a second delta and NSC analysis (hereafter referred to as the ‘five-author case’) in which we omitted the Barlow and Longfellow control texts. In the five-author case, the lowest NSC error rate was obtained using 108 words (listed in Appendix B).

 

[mellman]

5 Results

For each chapter of the Book of Mormon, using both NSC and delta, we compared the relative probability that a candidate author or a control author contributed to that chapter. We then established a ‘ranking’ for each of the seven authors (1–7) from most likely to least likely and calculated the percentage point difference between candidates in terms of their probability. In Alma forty-seven (Chapter 147), for example, the first place ranked candidate (using NSC) has a probability of 46.5% where the second place candidate is 46.3%. Given this close proximity, it would be impossible to conclude that one candidate is more likely than the other. In the majority of chapters, however, we do not observe this sort of close probability between first and second candidates. Most chapters (57%) show at least a fifty percentage point difference between first and second choice. Indeed, in forty chapters (17%), the difference between first and second most probable author is over ninety percentage points. Second Nephi twenty-two (chapter forty-four), for example, is a chapter known to contain strong borrowings from the Book of Isaiah. NSC ranks the probability of Isaiah-Malachi as the source for this chapter at 99.99%. In fact, twenty of the twenty-one chapters known to have been borrowed from Isaiah or Malachi are properly attributed at a probability at or above 91% certainty.33 There was thus only one ‘false negative’ for chapters that are known to be derived from Isaiah-Malachi (Mosiah fourteen is borrowed from Isaiah fifty-three but was attributed to Longfellow). This is evidence for the effectiveness of NSC classification. Further evidence comes from a consideration of ‘false positives’—chapters attributed incorrectly to Isaiah-Malachi. There are twenty-one known Isaiah chapters and another sixteen that have some relationship to Isaiah or Malachi (about 15% of the chapters in the Book of Mormon). But delta assigns 47% to Isaiah-Malachi, while NSC assigns 27%. This indicates that both delta and NSC had ‘false positives’ for Isaiah-Malachi, but the NSC false positive error rate was about half that of delta.

NSC and delta agree on the first place assignment for 147 of 239 chapters (62% agreement). In cases where there is not first place agreement between the two methods, there are seventy-six chapters in which the first place candidate of one method agrees with the second place candidate in the other. There are a total of 223 chapters (93%) in which the two methods name the same author in either the first or second place. In the 147 chapters where both methods agree on first place, there are two chapters assigned to Cowdery, two to Longfellow, four to Pratt, thirty-four to Spalding, forty-six to Rigdon, and fifty-nine to Isaiah-Malachi. In the seventy-six chapters where there is agreement between a first choice in one method and a second choice in another, there are forty-two cases, which are inverses of each other, that is there are forty-two cases in which the author listed as first place in one method is listed in second place in the other method. In these instances, there are nine cases in which Rigdon is paired with Cowdery, twenty cases in which Rigdon is paired with Isaiah-Malachi, eight cases in which Rigdon is paired with Spalding, two cases in which Spalding is paired with Pratt, and three cases in which Spalding is paired with Isaiah-Malachi.

Examining the NSC results (Table 1), we note the following for the most likely positions of the first and second most probable candidate: Rigdon is either the first or second most probable candidate author in 197 out of 239 chapters; Spalding is either the first or second most likely candidate in 110 out of 239 chapters; and Isaiah-Malachi is first or second in 101 chapters. Cowdery appears thirty-seven times in first or second place and Pratt appears twenty-four times. Barlow is never seen in first place and appears only once in second place. Longfellow is first in just two chapters and second in only six. Additionally, we note that for the least likely positions of the sixth and seventh most probable candidates, Rigdon never shows up in last (seventh) place and appears only twice in sixth place. Spalding never shows up in either seventh (last) or sixth place. Isaiah-Malachi appears four times in last place and fourteen times in sixth. Cowdery appears 116 times in sixth or seventh place, Pratt thirty-four times. Barlow appears in the sixth or seventh place 175 times and Longfellow 133 times. Table 2 shows similar results generated from the delta classification.
In both classification methods, the signals for Rigdon, Isaiah-Malachi, and Spalding are dominant and the signals for control authors Longfellow and Barlow are comparatively small or altogether absent. The Pratt and Cowdery signals are present but small beside the signals for Rigdon, Isaiah-Malachi and Spalding. Both NSC and delta tend to agree closely in terms of the relative presence of the Rigdon and Spalding signals. The greatest disagreement between the two methods appears in relation to the Isaiah-Malachi signal where delta assigns 47% of the chapters to Isaiah-Malachi as a first choice while NSC assigns 28%. The actual Isaiah-Malachi percentage can be estimated at around 36 chapters, or 15% of all chapters. In other words, 15% of the Book of Mormon is derived from Isaiah-Malachi or contains excerpts from Isaiah-Malachi. This indicates that while both delta and NSC had false positives, NSC had many fewer and is closer to the actual or true value.

 

[mellman]

results contd

Figures 3 and 4 show the number of chapters assigned to each author as either the first or second most likely attribution. Again, we note the dominance of Rigdon, Isaiah-Malachi, and Spalding in both first and second place assignment and the comparatively small presence of both the control authors and the other candidates.

All of the above results are for the seven-author case. The five-author case gave highly similar results. For the first most likely attribution, identical results were obtained for 226 of the 236 chapters (96% agreement). For the first and second most likely attributions, identical results were obtained for 223 of the 239 chapters (93% agreement).

I’m not sure how to show the tables, if you’d like to see them I can try by personal email.

 

[BartBurk]

You realize this is a violation of copyright don’t you?

I have access to the paper, so I’ll copy it here for those who want to read it.

 

[mellman]

6 Discussion

In the cross-validation tests, NSC was more effective, so our discussion and conclusions are based on the NSC data unless otherwise specified. Use of NSC enabled assignment of author probabilities based on the closeness of each chapter within the Book of Mormon to the known linguistic signals of a set of candidate nineteenth-century authors. These probabilities in turn made it possible to gauge the relative presence of one signal over another. The low signals for the control texts indicate that NSC effectively identified and did not select the control authors (Figs 5 and 6).
At a macro level, the signals for Rigdon, Isaiah-Malachi, and Spalding dominate the Book of Mormon, with NSC assigning 85% of the text to one of these three candidate authors (delta assigns 93% to these three). Taken together, Rigdon and Spalding account for 57% of the first place assignments and 68% of the second place assignments. Isaiah-Malachi accounts for 28% of the first place assignments and 16% of the second place assignments. Overall only ten chapters lack a signal for Rigdon or Spalding in one of the two most probable positions and four of these ten chapters are chapters known to be derived from the Book of Isaiah, as discussed below. In other words, of the 239 chapters in the Book of Mormon, 229 show either the Rigdon or Spalding signal prominently. Together Rigdon and Spalding receive 64% of the combined first and second place assignments, Isaiah-Malachi receives 21% and other candidates or control authors receive 15% (Fig. 3).

It is well-accepted that some chapters from the Old Testament books of Isaiah and Malachi served as source material for the Book of Mormon. Both delta and NSC correctly classified all twenty-one chapters of the Book of Mormon that contain strong borrowings from Isaiah and/or Malachi, and all were classified with a probability at or above 84% by NSC.34 That said, both methods also detected the Isaiah-Malachi signal in chapters that are not obviously derived from the Old Testament. For NSC, there are forty-three such chapters and, in thirty-six of these, the probabilities strongly favor Isaiah-Malachi over the other possible candidates.35 These are chapters where the style and word usage patterns are close to those in the Old Testament. Others (Walters, 1990Go; Tanner, 1998Go; Marquardt, 2000Go; Persuitte, 2000Go; Palmer, 2002Go) have spent considerable time tracing the direct correspondences between the Book of Mormon and the King James version of the Bible, so we will not delve into the specifics of these Isaiah-Malachi attributions other than to note that fifteen of these thirty-six chapters are directly related to Isaiah and one of the thirty-six is a chapter borrowed from the New Testament.36 Discounting the sixteen chapters that have some connection to the Bible, this leaves twenty chapters attributed to Isaiah-Malachi for reasons that are not obvious. We note, however, that many of these twenty chapters have thematic similarity to Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews (Walters, 1990Go; Persuitte, 2000Go), which is believed by many to be linked to the Book of Mormon through Cowdery,37 and a future analysis might utilize Ethan Smith’s text as a potential source. Figure 7A shows the relative presence of the Isaiah-Malachi signal across the entire Book of Mormon and Fig. 7B shows chapters attributed to Isaiah-Malachi.
The prominence of the Rigdon and Spalding signals are significant and provide strong support for the Spalding-Rigdon authorship theory: that Rigdon acquired one or more manuscripts written by Spalding and then modified them, by incorporating his own theology, to create the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon. Figure 8A illustrates the presence of the Rigdon signal through each chapter of the Book of Mormon, and Fig. 8B shows chapters attributed to Rigdon. The graph shows a dominant Rigdon signal in First Nephi, the non-Isaiah fraction of Second Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Words of Mormon, Mosiah, Helaman, the non-Isaiah fraction of Third Nephi, Mormon, Ether, and Moroni, with an intermittently strong signal in the Book of Alma. Especially, noteworthy here is the fairly regular distribution of the signal across the entire text. A gap in the Rigdon signal appears in sections known to be copied from Isaiah (Fig. 7), in portions of the book of Alma attributed to Spalding (Fig. 9), and it is sporadic in the first quarter of the text, in the section known to scholars of Mormonism as replacement material added after Smith’s loss of 116 pages he claimed to have translated.38 The lost pages contained material that would have ended near the beginning of the Book of Mosiah. It is generally held that Smith resumed his purported translation at Mosiah and continued through to the end of the Book of Mormon, returning at the end of the process to replace the lost pages. One possible scenario is that Smith and/or Rigdon prepared a replacement in fall of 1828 by drawing from source material at hand such as the Book of Isaiah (which features prominently in this part of the text) and perhaps from Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews.

 

[mellman]

discussion contd

Figure 9A illustrates the presence of the Spalding signal through each chapter of the Book of Mormon and Fig. 9B the chapters attributed to Spalding. Noteworthy here is (1) the small Spalding signal in sections of the Book of Mormon that were likely added to replace the 116 pages (i.e. the first quarter of the book—First Nephi through Words of Mormon), and (2) the fact that the chapters with a dominant Spalding signal are primarily narrative and non-theological, and thus consistent with descriptions of ‘Manuscript Found’, the missing Spalding document that is alleged to be foundational to the Book of Mormon (Howe, 1834, 1977Go). The prominence of the Spalding signal in the Book of Alma is especially noteworthy. Dale Broadhurst has identified these chapters as likely Spalding contributions based on his careful comparison of phrases found both in the Book of Alma and Spalding’s ‘Manuscript Story’.39 Similar thematic and linguistic patterns between the Book of Mormon and Spalding’s ‘Manuscript Story’ have also been identified by Holley (1989Go).40

Figure 10A shows the distribution of the Oliver Cowdery signal and Fig. 10B the chapters attributed to Cowdery.41 The Cowdery signal is most prominent in the middle third of the book with a strong cluster of authorial assignments (fourteen first-place and four second-place) in the Book of Alma. Where Cowdery is the most probable author, he is paired with Rigdon as second most probable author in all but two cases; where Cowdery is assigned as second most probable author (seventeen chapters), Rigdon is first most likely in fourteen of these. All of this suggests a strong correlation between Cowdery and Rigdon and the likelihood that if Cowdery contributed to the Book of Mormon, he may have done so in collaboration with Rigdon. The Cowdery signal appears only where the Rigdon signal is also prominent and in many cases the difference between the strength of the two signals is marginal. Also noteworthy is that the Cowdery signal appears most prominently in the middle third of the book. His signal appears after the Book of Mosiah and near the beginning of the Book of Alma—the point in the manuscript where Smith supposedly began to dictate with Cowdery as his scribe, and when the speed of translation reportedly increased significantly.42 It is in these sections of the Book of Mormon, especially the third quarter of the Book of Alma, that we find the Cowdery signal—in well-composed chapters that deal with such topics as the nature of faith (Alma thirty-two), atonement through Christ (Alma thirty-six),43 and liberty (Alma sixty-one). Still, if Cowdery had a direct hand in the authorship of the Book of Mormon it was likely a lesser one.44 It is more likely that his primary role was editorial given both the historical and stylometric data.
Figure 11A shows the distribution of the Parley P. Pratt signal and Fig. 11B the chapters attributed to Pratt.45 Pratt is the most likely author for nine chapters with five occurring in First Nephi, one in Mosiah, and two small chapters appearing, back-to-back, in Moroni (Fig. 11B). Pratt was an early leader in the Mormon church and one of the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. In 1826, however, he was a wandering tin peddler who ‘knew everybody in Western New York and Northern Ohio’ (Schroeder, 1901Go; Shook, 1914Go). He lived near Rigdon’s residence in Bainbridge, Ohio, and joined Rigdon’s congregation.46 During the same period, Rigdon is reported to have collaborated with ‘two or three different persons’ in ‘adjacent places’ to create the Book of Mormon.47 Sometime around 1827, Pratt decided to sell all his goods and take up the ministry. It has been suggested that Pratt was ‘the medium through whom Rigdon made the acquaintance of Smith when seeking a suitable tool for his purpose’ (Williams, 1842Go; Eaton, 1882Go).48 While traveling in 1830, ostensibly to see family, Pratt reported sudden inspiration that led him to Palmyra, New York, where he quickly converted to Mormonism and was baptized by Oliver Cowdery. He and Cowdery then reportedly delivered a copy of the published 1830 version of the Book of Mormon to Rigdon. Pratt’s conversion is described in contradictory accounts, as is his role in delivering the Book of Mormon to Rigdon (Schroeder, 1901Go).

 

[mellman]

discussion contd

In five of the nine chapters attributed to Pratt, Pratt is paired with Spalding in second place and in four with Rigdon in second place. Pratt receives fifteen second-place assignments: most of them (ten) as a second to Spalding, and three as a second to Rigdon. The largest proportion (one-third) of the assignments to Pratt as the second most probable author occurs in Alma, and there are two cases in First Nephi. If Pratt contributed to the Book of Mormon, he played a minor role and was likely most involved in First Nephi, where there are several first and second place Pratt assignments.

In the stylometric studies cited earlier, Larson et al. (1980Go) and Hilton (1988Go) attempted to test the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon’s purported ancient authors had dissimilar writing styles. Recent studies in cultural and linguistic evolution suggest another relevant hypothesis by demonstrating that writing styles in ancient texts tend to become increasingly divergent over time (Farmer, 2006Go). Our chapter-by-chapter analysis tested both hypotheses and found that the Book of Mormon does not display patterns consistent with the type of ancient record it purports to be. For example, two of the Book of Mormon’s alleged principal authors were Nephi and Moroni. They allegedly lived about 1,000 years apart. NSC assigned many of their chapters to Rigdon. For example, NSC assigned both First Nephi ten and Moroni eight to Rigdon with >93% probability. The Book of Mormon also attributes many chapters to a single ancient author, but our results frequently disconfirmed this. For example, where the Book of Mormon attributes Mormon five, six, and seven to an ancient author named Mormon, NSC assigned chapters five and seven to Rigdon (89 and 92% probability, respectively) and chapter six to Spalding (72% probability). Chapters five and seven contain references to the future redemption of the House of Israel, a concept popular in the early nineteenth century and embraced by Rigdon, while chapter six is a war narrative similar to other such narratives penned by Spalding, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. These results stand in contrast to claims that the Book of Mormon is of ancient authorship.

 

[mellman]

7 Conclusions

NSC has proved highly useful for authorship classification. It has a lower cross-validation error rate than delta, a lower rate of false positive assignments, and a probability-based output that enabled in-depth interpretation of the results, including speculation regarding possible connections between candidate authors. The NSC results are consistent with the Spalding-Rigdon theory of authorship. Evidence supporting this conclusion includes the prominence of signals for Spalding and Rigdon; the presence of strong Spalding signals in sections of the Book of Mormon previously linked to Spalding; the presence of a dominant Rigdon signal in most theological sections, and a strong Spalding signal in the more secular, narrative sections. Our findings are consistent with historical scholarship indicating a central role for Rigdon in securing and modifying a now-missing Spalding manuscript. The high number of Spalding-Rigdon pairings in first and second place strongly suggests that Spalding and Rigdon were responsible for a large part of the text. Pearson’s chi-square test of independence was performed and indicates that the distribution of first-place assignments is significantly different from uniform (P < 2 x 10–16). Similarly, the distribution of second-place assignments differs significantly from uniform (P < 2 x 10–16). Clearly, far more chapters are attributed to Rigdon, Spalding, and Isaiah-Malachi than might be expected due to mere chance. Other connections detected through this work are also consistent with the historical record, including the likelihood of a lesser, largely editorial role for Cowdery and a possibly minor, if unexpected, role for Pratt.

Based on this evidence, we find the original claims of Howe (1834, 1977Go) and the more recent assertions of Cowdrey and coworkers quite plausible; it seems likely that the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon was the creation of Sidney Rigdon, a Reformed Baptist Preacher, who had motives, means, and opportunity to carry out the project (Cowdrey et al., 2005Go). We acknowledge that because our samples of Rigdon prose all come after 1830, some could argue that Rigdon’s prose was influenced by the Book of Mormon and not vice versa. To raise such an objection, however, one would have to argue that Rigdon was so influenced by the Book of Mormon that he consciously or unconsciously adopted, even internalized, the most subtle and unremarkable linguistic patterns found in certain portions of the text, but not in others.

Prior exposure to the Book of Mormon most certainly did not influence Solomon Spalding who died fourteen years before it was published. Yet our data strongly support the historical claim that a lost Spalding manuscript served as a source text for the backbone narrative of the Book of Mormon. The document that we used for samples of Spalding’s writing (‘Manuscript Story’ also known as ‘The Oberlin Manuscript’) does not match the eyewitness descriptions of ‘Manuscript Found’, the draft novel that Spalding read to friends and family in Conneaut, nor does it match the Book of Mormon.49 The Spalding-Rigdon theory rests heavily on the assumption that additional Spalding manuscripts once existed, and that material from one of these manuscripts provided the narrative framework for the Book of Mormon. This additional manuscript would be the one that the Conneaut witnesses and others identified as being the ‘source’ of the Book of Mormon. While not that manuscript, the Oberlin Manuscript nevertheless provides us with a reliable sample of Spalding’s prose and the linguistic signal detected in it appears with significant regularity throughout the Book of Mormon.

Of course, we have not considered every possible candidate-author who may have influenced the composition of the Book of Mormon. We have, however, selected from among the most likely candidates, excepting perhaps Joseph Smith. In the case of Joseph Smith, we had no reliable samples of prose to test. When reliably identified materials become available, their addition to this analysis would be worth considering. An effort to compile such writings is currently underway.50

Knowledge of who likely constructed the Book of Mormon has significant implications for scholarship in Mormon history and for religious and cultural studies generally, as it addresses the foundation of an emerging world religion now estimated at thirteen million members. Our analysis supports the theory that the Book of Mormon was written by multiple, nineteenth-century authors, and more specifically, we find strong support for the Spalding-Rigdon theory of authorship. In all the data, we find Rigdon as a unifying force. His signal dominates the book, and where other candidates are more probable, Rigdon is often hiding in the shadows.51