Question: Did Joseph Smith plagiarize passages from Gilbert Hunt's book ''The Late War, between the United States and Great Britain, from June, 1812, to February, 1815''?

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Question: Did Joseph Smith plagiarize passages from Gilbert Hunt's book The Late War, between the United States and Great Britain, from June, 1812, to February, 1815?

The critics make an assumption that Joseph Smith must have read Gilbert Hunt's The Late War

Chris Johnson, Duane Johnson, in "A Comparison of The Book of Mormon and The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain," (http://wordtreefoundation.github.io/thelatewar/) propose a number of parallel sentence structures between Gilbert Hunt's book The Late War and the Book of Mormon. The authors conclude that Joseph Smith read Hunt's book while in school (without any actual evidence that Joseph ever actually saw the book). They base this conclusion upon the assumption that the book was widely available, and therefore Joseph must have read it. Hence, they conclude that Joseph constructed the Book of Mormon by using structural elements of The Late War. The evidence is presented as a series of comparisons between the Book of Mormon and The Late War.

When we analyze or compare writing, often what seems intuitive or logical isn't

This happens because we don't normally compare writings in this way - we only do it to answer specific kinds of questions. And since most of us never really do it at all, we have no idea what we should really expect. So we don't usually know how to evaluate this kind of thing. This is why there needs to be an explanation, and why, after the findings were challenged, it didn't move forward towards a formal publication.

The basic premise behind this sort of study is an act of comparison

We compare a whole bunch of things, and see which are the most similar. This can be a bit misleading. If one takes a box full of forks, and then toss in a spoon, one can compare all the forks to see which one is most like the spoon. But will this make the spoon a fork or the fork a spoon? The funny thing about this study is that if we removed The Late War from the list of potential sources, the model would still kick out another book that was most like the Book of Mormon, and if we removed that one, we would still get another, and so on. What this modeling cannot tell us is how alike they really are. To create a kind of visual image, the way we would often deal with this is to create a space around the book (draw a circle or a sphere around it), and place that at an outside limit for what we might think would illustrate a connection. And if the closest book falls within that circle, then we would look for more information. But if it was outside, we would conclude that there was no likely connection. But without such a mechanism (and there was no mechanism in this study), we will always get a closest book - no matter what our options are.

The authors employ a fallacy that is called the Texas Marksman (or the Texas Bulls Eye)

In trying to make the best argument, they give us these lists of similarities. In presenting this list, we get presented with a fallacy that is called the Texas Marksman (or the Texas Bulls Eye). Essentially, the way the reference works is that you shoot a bunch of rounds into the side of your barn, and then you go up to the holes and paint your target around them (giving you the best and tightest clustering). Usually, the way these models work in accepted applications is that you start by testing the model in situations where you already know the outcome. That way, you can see how reliable your new model is. And if it is highly reliable in known cases, then you can start cautiously applying it to unknown models (you don't create your own target this way). By intuiting that it must be right, this model used with The Late War simply skipped the testing part. But this created one of the biggest obvious problems with the theory. They didn't stop with the Book of Mormon. They ran a test on a Jane Austin novel, and found a source (a relatively unknown book from 1810). Why is this important? Austin was a prolific writer, sending thousands of letters during her lifetime detailing what she was reading, her influences, writing about her writing, and so on. We have a huge body of literature devoted to dealing with her writing (she was one of the most important writers of the period). So when you have a statistical model that produces a brand new source, not noticed by anyone previously, not mentioned in any of her letters, and so on - there ought to be a bit of a red flag raised. But there wasn't. Had this theory been introduced to academic literary theorists - this would have been the major point of dispute (since they don't really care about the Book of Mormon). Did this model really find a previously unknown and unidentified source of Jane Austin's work? Or did it simply create the illusion of doing this by painting a bulls eye after clustering its data? I am pretty confident it was the second option here. (As a side note, discovering a new source for Jane Austin would be a thesis significant sort of discovery).

Seventy-five of the parallels identified as significant between the two texts came from the Copyright statements of the two books

Computers are not good yet at qualifying data. Perhaps the best illustration of this came from the data in the study. Seventy-five of the parallels identified as significant between the two texts came from the Copyright statement. Why? Because the copyright statement was a fill-in-the-blank form. It had a certain set of language that was standardized for the period. So books copyrighted in the same general area at the same general time would have nearly identical copyright statements. And this study found 75 parallels between the two. This shouldn't surprise us, because of course, both books had copyright statements that were reliant on a common source. And we can see from this dense material that there is a relationship between the two. But anyone who actually looks at the texts will also see that this has nothing to do with what might be termed the creative content in each work. Most of the similarities occur because they both use the language of the King James Bible. For both, the language choice seems like a stylistic decision (and not determined by the content). And in fact, the Book of Mormon quotes from Isaiah a couple of dozen chapters. This creates a relationship between the Bible and both of these books. The computer model doesn't have a way of separating style or word choice from content and meaning (and both texts can use the same phrase in different ways). We have to read it to realize that while one is simply copying the Bible (mining it for phrases), the other is creating theological discussion by taking a passage and expanding on it. 2 Nephi 2 quotes from Genesis about Adam and Eve, and then goes from there to provide commentary and discussion about the theology involved. The Late War may use the language or even quote from the Old Testament, but it never goes through commentary and theological discussion. That isn't its purpose. Sometimes the same passages get used. The Late War makes references to a specific battle and describes it as a David versus Goliath encounter. The Book of Mormon uses the David and Goliath narrative in an allusion to the Old Testament. They are very, very different ways of using the Old Testament text - even if on the surface, they use the same bit of material. All of this is important because if The Late War served as a model, or lent its language, we would expect perhaps to see other things influenced by it as well. And, we don't. But the computer model isn't capable of judging the quality of the parallels being offered.

Computer modeling tends to get rid of boundaries, so it doesn't help us visualize the data density

Finally, computer modeling tends to get rid of boundaries. That is, we can take this whole pile of material, and it looks important, but it doesn't help us visualize the data. For example, those seventy-five parallels are placed into a copyright statement, which only represents a page or a page and a half in the text. How densely the material gets used does matter. So we have this list of phrases. If we take all the four word sequences in the Late War and look in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon uses a four word sequence from the Late War less than one for every 400 different four word phrases. Where do the other 399 phrases come from? At some point, we are going to find a bunch that occur simply by chance. In this case, there will be more connected through Biblical language. But if we take each one and start to compare the content, do we find them to be similar enough to make such claims? It is likely that we don't.

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