Study of the LDS Church - 6.7 Change to the Book of Mormon

Over the 175+ years of the LDS faith's history, there have been several changes to the Book of Mormon...over 4000 actually, not including punctuation.

This is one huge hurdle to overcome for the LDS church, which teaches that the Book of Mormon was translated verbatim by Joseph Smith and was the most correct book on earth. According to accounts of the translating process,

"I will now give you a description of the manner in which the Book of Mormon was translated. Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English." (An Address to All Believers in Christ, by David Whitmer, 1887, page 12)

"But at the outset it must be recollected that the translation was accomplished by no common method, by no ordinary means. It was done by divine aid. There were no delays over obscure passages, no difficulties over the choice of words, no stoppages from the ignorance of the translator; no time was wasted in investigation or argument over the value, intent or meaning of certain characters, and there were no references to authorities. These difficulties to human work were removed. All was as simple as when a clerk writes from dictation. The translation of the characters appeared on the Urim and Thummim, sentence by sentence, and as soon as one was correctly transcribed the next would appear." (Myth of the Manuscript Found, 1883 edition, page 71) [bold emphasis mine]

So you can see that there should be no errors within the pages of the Book of Mormon. However, there are many...and some of them are doctrinal.

So much like the last post, I am now going to link over to a source which I have previously typed for my own printable purposes so that you too can see some of the more blatant changes to the Book of Mormon.

I will later cover the accuracy of the Bible and its translational challenges, so please don't get ahead of me and start that argument now. That too is coming and will be covered fairly.

In the meantime, lets look at some of the most obviously changes to the Book of Mormon.

For an outline of more changes between the original 1830 and the current version, use this source to see a side-by-side comparison.

Study of the LDS Church - 6.8 Grammatical Errors in the Book of Mormon