Biblical inerrancy is one thing, Book of Mormon inerrancy is another

Any time human beings are involved, it's going to be a little messy.

I’ve always felt like the 8th Article of Faith is worded very intentionally.

We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

This statement makes a concession for the Bible and its long translation history, acknowledging that humans have been involved all along and that errors might have been introduced along the way. This feels prescient for a statement written in 1842; the King James Version was by far the dominant English Bible at the time, and serious challenges to the KJV’s text wouldn’t come until later in the 19th century.¹ Joseph Smith had some idea at the time that the KJV’s translation wouldn’t hold up.

The Article of Faith doesn’t make that concession for the Book of Mormon. But there were human beings involved throughout its formation as well, and we should be prepared to extend the same grace to the Book of Mormon as we do to the Bible.

“The Gift and Power of God,” by Anthony Sweat (cropped).

The past 50 years have been a heyday for Bible scholarship and new translations, with the NASB, NIV, and NRSV all released in the 1970s-1980s. New historical sources (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the 1940s-1950s) added to the idea that the King James Version may not always be, as we say, translated correctly.

There are those in Christianity (especially western, evangelical Christianity) who believe that the Bible is inerrant, which generally means they believe it to be free of any error, although interpretations of that concept vary. The prevailing idea is that 1) the Bible contains God’s complete word, so that nothing is needed beyond the Bible, and that 2) every word written in its pages, or at least every idea, is inspired.

Some variation of a belief in biblical inerrancy shows up in the creedal documents or official statements of many major Christian denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic Church, and the Presbyterian Church in America, each describing the Bible in its own way as “infallible truth and divine authority”.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints explicitly does not subscribe to the concept of biblical inerrancy, stating that Latter-day Saints “do not believe the Bible, as it is currently available, is without error.” But sometimes we push this a little far, and take some pride in this stance. If this ever verges on feelings of superiority, we should recognize that many Latter-day Saints’ approach to the Book of Mormon aligns closely with ideas of biblical inerrancy.²

First, some background. Biblical inerrancy comes in a couple of flavors; these are Christian theological categories that we will apply to an LDS context:

• Dictation theory asserts that God verbally dictated every word of the Bible to its authors. Taken to its extreme, this would mean that the personalities, biases, and even writing styles of the scribes don’t show up in the text; instead, it is literally written by God Himself, with the book’s authors serving only as hands, writing down the words exactly as given.

• Verbal plenary inspiration grew out of dictation theory, and makes a little more space. The rough idea here is that God inspired the authors of scripture in such a way that the resulting words were what God intended to be written. The outcome is more or less the same, but the process is different, and it allows for the personalities of the authors.³

Do we think either of these are true for the Book of Mormon? If you polled Latter-day Saints, I think you’d find an overwhelming, yes. But it’s more complicated than just that.

The Book of Mormon’s provenance is a major factor when we’re talking about dictation theories. Like the Bible, the Book of Mormon has a variety of authors (Nephi, Alma, Mormon, etc.), who may have been inspired in different ways to write their records. It’s possible that they wrote words that were dictated by God (dictation theory), or that they wrote their own thoughts and were inspired as they did (verbal plenary inspiration)—the latter is the more common idea in LDS circles. It’s also possible they wrote things that were meaningful to them but not inspired by God.

Then there’s the abridgment step, by Mormon. Some records, including the small plates of Nephi (comprising 1 Nephi through Omni) were included in the gold plates as-is without abridgment or commentary. But the most significant chunk of text, from Mosiah up to Mormon, was abridged by Mormon. If the original authors—King Benjamin, Alma the Younger, and others—were inspired, was Mormon also inspired when he abridged their words?

But there’s also the translation step, and Book of Mormon translation is wholly different from Bible translation. While the most popular Bible translations have had teams of scholars on the project (the NIV had over 100), the Book of Mormon was translated entirely by Joseph Smith, word for word and linearly from start to finish.

Further, Joseph Smith used a seer stone, meaning that he wasn’t always even looking at the plates as he translated them. Scholars Gerrit J. Dirkmaat and Michael Hubbard MacKay, in a BYU Religious Studies Center paper, confirm that “…the translation usually occurred while the plates lay covered on the table (although some accounts suggest that the plates were sometimes kept in a nearby box under the bed or even hidden in the Whitmers’ barn during translation).”

Which raises the point—if Joseph Smith wasn’t even looking at what was etched on the plates, does that mean that Latter-day Saints subscribe to dictation theory when it comes to the Book of Mormon? The idea that Joseph translated without looking at the plates gives unexpected credibility to a dictation theory-style inerrancy in the Book of Mormon text.

Did God give every word to Joseph Smith, word-for-word? Some will make the argument that He did. But what did He dictate? Is it an accurate translation of what Mormon and other authors wrote on the plates? Is it a revision of their words? Is it something else entirely? Consider the Joseph Smith Translation, which isn’t a re-translation in the truest sense; Joseph Smith added additional revelatory material beyond what’s in the KJV text (we see some of this in the Pearl of Great Price, in the books of Moses and Joseph Smith-Matthew). Is this what happened with the Book of Mormon text, too?

If dictation theory holds true, then it would imply that the Book of Mormon is free of error. Except even then not really in its fullest sense, because we also know the Book of Mormon has been edited since its original translation, and corrections have been made a few times. In the 2013 edition—the newest—there were 38 verses with changes in the Book of Mormon text itself (not including chapter headings, etc.).⁴ It’s an interesting dichotomy if the Lord dictates a perfect record, only to allow errors to be made in the publishing process.

There are clearly questions here that we can’t answer. And they point to a similar conclusion for the Book of Mormon that the eighth Article of Faith comes to for the Bible: We believe it is the word of God, to the extent that us humans haven’t messed it up somehow.

Sometimes we get a little hung up on the concept of the Book of Mormon being “true,” without defining our terms. By being “true”, do we mean that every word is factual history? This is a difficult claim to make; even modern professional historians struggle to remove their own personal bias when recording history. Allowing authors to have their own personalities introduces their biases into the text, which can be at odds with objective historical accuracy.

But if, by saying the Book of Mormon is “true”, we mean that it teaches true principles, that’s a different claim entirely. In that case, it’s entirely acceptable to have the authors show their personalities and proclivities. It’s not a big deal if there are edits to the text. The records can change hands as many times as needed, and go through as many abridgments and translations as needed, and still teach the truths that we need to grow closer to God. And that, I believe, is the purpose of scripture.

This is how I understand Joseph Smith’s statement that “the Book of Mormon [is] the most correct of any book on earth”; it doesn’t mean that the Book of Mormon is a more accurate history than any other, or that the printing process introduced fewer errors than in other books. In fact, the back half of that quote spells out exactly what I think Joseph Smith meant: “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth… and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.” If the correctness is the book’s ability to bring people nearer to God, then generations of Latter-day Saints will attest to its “correctness.”

As a Church we assert that “we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly,” and the grace that we give to human errors in the Bible is rightly extended to the Book of Mormon as well. Because in reality, a text doesn’t need to be inerrant to be scripture. It doesn’t need to be a perfect history or a direct transcription from God’s lips to the printed page.

There are Christians who believe the Bible is without error. There are Latter-day Saints who believe the Book of Mormon is without error. I’m not in either camp. I think both books demonstrate the human-ness and fallibility of their authors. And that’s reassuring to me.

“As far as it is translated correctly” doesn’t mean it’s not scripture if humans have touched it. It means we acknowledge the humanity found in its pages.

1. See more about this here (scholarly) and here (Reddit thread). As a milestone, we can perhaps look to the release of the Revised Version in 1881 as the first major acknowledgment that the KJV could be supplanted by newer, better scholarship—although the KJV would continue to be popular for many decades after (and even now).

2. Not to mention the Doctrine and Covenants, and the words of present-day prophets and apostles.

3. There’s a really helpful description of dictation theory and its relatives here.

4. Many of these were small, inconsequential changes, such as changing “to-day” to “today”. All these changes officially explained by the Church here.