Book of Mormon textual changes

The published text of the Book of Mormon has been corrected and edited through its various editions. Critics claim that this is evidence that Joseph Smith and other Church leaders were attempting to cover up errors that would expose the book as a work of man, not God.

Joseph Smith taught "the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth." By this he meant correct in principle and teaching, not in grammar or spelling. The authors of the Book of Mormon explained several times that their writing was imperfect, but that the teachings in the book were from God (1 Nephi 19:6; 2 Nephi 33:4; Mormon 8:17; 9:31-33; Ether 12:23-26).

The critical issue is not the number of changes that have been made to the text, but the nature of the changes. If one counts every difference in every punctuation mark in every edition of the Book of Mormon, the result is over 100,000 changes (Skousen, 2002).

There are, of course, thousands of insignificant changes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. For example, the word meet -- meaning "appropriate" -- as it appears in 1 Nephi 7:1, was spelled "mete" in the first edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. "Mete" means to distribute, but the context here is obvious, and so the spelling was corrected in later editions.

What really matters is:

• which changes are substantial AND
• could possibly change the doctrine of the book OR
• could be used as evidence that the book was written by Joseph Smith.

There are surprisingly few of these.

EXAMPLES

CONCLUSION

Further reading

FAIR web site

• FAIR Topical Guide: Changes in the Book of Mormon

Printed material

• Royal Skousen, "Changes In the Book of Mormon," 2002 FAIR Conference proceedings.
• Stan Larson, "Changes in Early Texts of The Book of Mormon," Ensign, September 1976, pp. ??-??.