If witness accounts are correct, Joseph Smith “translated” the Book of Mormon by reading and dictating a visioned text. The words that he saw were already in English. Witness accounts also tell us that Joseph Smith didn’t make use of any reference books, including the Bible. The text of the Book of Mormon was delivered to him in its final English form.

This is hinted at in the Book of Mormon itself (2 Nephi 27:19-20):

Wherefore it shall come to pass, that the Lord God will deliver again the book and the words thereof to him that is not learned; and the man that is not learned shall say: I am not learned. Then shall the Lord God say unto him: The learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them, and I am able to do mine own work; wherefore thou shalt read the words which I shall give unto thee.

According to this scripture, both “the book” (the gold plates) and “the words thereof” would be delivered to Joseph Smith, a young man of meager education. All he had to do was “read the words.” That pretty much describes what the witnesses saw–Joseph Smith dictating the English words that he saw in vision.

But if Joseph Smith didn’t translate the ancient record into English, who or what did?

Was it his seer stone? Not likely. Nowhere in sacred history has a stone translated anything. The Urim and Thummim of the Bible, which likely consisted of one or more stones, was used by the high priest to receive the words of Jehovah. Joseph Smith’s seer stone (which he later called a Urim and Thummim) may have functioned in the same way, to aid in receiving God’s word. Joseph Smith may have thought his seer stone was somehow doing the translating, and that he, as the one working it, was the sole “translator.” In a broad sense of the word, he did translate the book — he converted it from a whatever it was before to a modern printed text. And at the time, there wasn’t a better word for what he did than the word translate.

Did God do the translating? Maybe. That may have been the belief of Joseph Smith, who reasoned, based on Mormon 9:34, that “the Lord, and not man, had to interpret, after the people were dead.”[1]

Or angels in heaven? That is one possibility that has been suggested.[2]

But God’s earthly work is usually done by mortals. He didn’t miraculously create the ark for Noah. He doesn’t preach the gospel for us, or miraculously provide names of our ancestors for temple work. And when the Book of Mormon needs to be translated into a new language today, a mortal human with knowledge of the appropriate languages does the task by normal scholarly means. Could the English translation Joseph Smith saw by use of his stone have been produced the same way?

If the Nephite record was translated by mortal effort, who was the translator? The book appears that it is written mostly in a style of English of about the 1500s and 1600s. Some recent papers (see the links below) provide evidence that the language of the Book of Mormon is genuine Early Modern English, rather than an attempt to mimic the style of the King James Bible. Was it translated by someone who lived and learned English in that period? Or by someone who absorbed the English of texts from that period? Were multiple individuals involved? If the translation of the book into English was started in the 1500s or 1600s, it wasn’t finished until later, since its Isaiah chapters contain variants from later editions of the King James Bible. What’s clear is that the English of the Book of Mormon is the earliest English that was more or less standardized (English started to become stable with the use of the printing press in the 1500s and 1600s) and that the King James text in the book is from a King James Bible edition somewhat later than the 1611 edition.

I find this new information about the translation of the Book of Mormon exciting because it suggests a deeper, richer history for this book than either believers or skeptics have supposed. Not everyone shares this excitement, and some have experienced crises of faith over such ideas. How one responds to such ideas is partly a matter of expectations and the ability to change the way you see things without doubting everything you have believed.

FOOTNOTES

1. Joseph Smith, Times and Seasons 4 (15 May 1843): 194.
2. For example, see Roger Terry, “Archaic Pronouns and Verbs in the Book of Mormon: What Inconsistent Usage Tells Us about Translation Theories,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 47/3 (2014): 59–63.

More Fascinating Reading

The Archaic Vocabulary of the Book of Mormon
The Implications of Past-Tense Syntax in the Book of Mormon
Tyndale Versus More in the Book of Mormon
What Command Syntax Tells Us About Book of Mormon Authorship
A Look at Some “Nonstandard” Book of Mormon Grammar
Sorting Out the Sources in Scripture
Changes in The Book of Mormon
The Original Text of the Book of Mormon and its Publication by Yale University Press

and Video!

2015 Exploring the Complexities in the English Language of the Book of Mormon Conference