Book of Mormon Evidence: The Book of Mormon's Miraculous Translation Speed

Lengthy novels often take years to write. The process normally involves preliminary research, multiple drafts, and extensive editing. The Book of Mormon, however, was produced in a very different way. According to witnesses, the 23-year-old Joseph Smith dictated its nearly 270,000 words to various scribes. He did this day after day, without using any books, notes, or outlines to aid his memory. He also didn’t make any major revisions. Not a single sentence from the original available manuscript was deleted, rearranged, or significantly altered before publication.

Creating a polished, final draft under these circumstances is remarkable. Yet the Book of Mormon is truly astounding when we consider just, how, fast it was produced. Based on historical sources, we can be confident the entire text was dictated in just under three months. Several lines of evidence help support this timeframe, including various historical sources and early Church documents.

On its face, the timeframe allows for 85 possible days of translation, but the translators were often occupied with other activities. So when known disruptions and time constraints are accounted for, only about 60 actual working days would have been available! Scholars have described this rate of translation as “blistering” and “truly prodigious.”

If Joseph Smith had hastily created the Book of Mormon on the fly, or tried to recall its contents from memory, we might expect its plot, setting, and characters to be fairly simple. Instead, the text immediately throws readers into a believable ancient world, featuring hundreds of proper names, a consistent internal geography, three calendar systems, a developed system of weights and measures, complex narratives, dozens of editorial promises, cohesive doctrines, layers of underlying source texts, realistic battles, hundreds of poetic structures, multiple literary genres, scores of internally fulfilled prophecies, and many other authentic or consistent details.

In other words, the Book of Mormon has the variety and complexity that we might expect from a truly ancient abridgment of records spanning about a thousand years of history. It looks nothing like what a young, poorly educated frontier farmer could be expected to dictate to scribes in about 60 working days. When all these factors are considered together, the breakneck speed of the Book of Mormon’s translation is truly miraculous.