My Mormon bishop friend recently presented a lecture about how statistics show that the Book of Mormon defies naturalistic explanations. How did Joseph Smith as a "subsistence farmer" write a book with long-form structural chiasmus and different voices?
Let's jump into some of these statistical claims to see if the Book of Mormon is truly a miracle and that it shows that Joseph Smith had to be translating an ancient record.
Sources Cited:
"The Insane Statistical Impossibility of the Book of Mormon’s Origin | Matt Vallejo"
"Chiasmus," churchofjesuschristoflatterdaysaints.org.
Robert Patterson, "Hebraicisms, Chiasmus and Other Internal Evidence for Ancient Authorship in Green Eggs and Ham," Dialogue Journal 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 163-168.
Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards, "Does Joseph’s Letter to Emma of 4 November 1838 Show that He Knew about Chiasmus?" Dialogue Journal (paperless), August 26, 2006.
ImTheMarmotKing, "I'm glad that FAIRMormon exists. The FAIRMormon apologists do an excellent job of pushing people away from Mormonism," May 3, 2017.
Daniel Mynyk, "Planned Parenthood’s Founder Fought Against Abortion," The American Spectator, October 19, 2025.
Matthew L. Jockers, Daniela M. Witten, and Craig S. Criddle, "Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification," Literary and Linguistic Computing 23 (December 2008): 465 - 491, doi 10.1093/llc/fqn040.
D. I. Holmes, "A Stylometric Analysis of Mormon Scripture and Related Texts," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society) 155, no. 1 (1992): 91-120.
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