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Book of Mormon Critical Text Project
The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text
The most accurate and readable edition of the Book of Mormon ever published, based on the earliest sources available
"The product of over two decades of painstaking labor by Royal Skousen . . . this Yale edition aims to take us back to the text Smith envisioned as he translated, according to the faithful, from golden plates that he unearthed in upstate New York."—Stephen Prothero, Wall Street Journal
“Will forever change the way Latter-day Saints approach modern scripture. Two hundred years from now… students of the Book of Mormon will still be poring over Skousen’s work. What he has accomplished is nothing short of phenomenal.”—Grant Hardy, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies
First published in 1830, the Book of Mormon is the authoritative scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its estimated 13 million members. Over the past twenty-one years, editor Royal Skousen has pored over Joseph Smith's original manuscripts and identified more than 2,000 textual errors in the 1830 edition. Although most of these discrepancies stem from inadvertent errors in copying and typesetting the text, the Yale edition contains about 600 corrections that have never appeared in any standard edition of the Book of Mormon, and about 250 of them affect the text's meaning. Skousen's corrected text is a work of remarkable dedication and will be a landmark in American religious scholarship. Completely redesigned and typeset by nationally award-winning typographer Jonathan Saltzman, this new edition has been reformatted in sense-lines, making the text much more logical and pleasurable to read. Featuring a lucid introduction by historian Grant Hardy, the Yale edition serves not only as the most accurate version of the Book of Mormon ever published but also as an illuminating entryway into a vital religious tradition.
"The product of over two decades of painstaking labor by Royal Skousen . . . this Yale edition aims to take us back to the text Smith envisioned as he translated, according to the faithful, from golden plates that he unearthed in upstate New York."—Stephen Prothero, Wall Street Journal
“Will forever change the way Latter-day Saints approach modern scripture. Two hundred years from now… students of the Book of Mormon will still be poring over Skousen’s work. What he has accomplished is nothing short of phenomenal.”—Grant Hardy, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies
First published in 1830, the Book of Mormon is the authoritative scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its estimated 13 million members. Over the past twenty-one years, editor Royal Skousen has pored over Joseph Smith's original manuscripts and identified more than 2,000 textual errors in the 1830 edition. Although most of these discrepancies stem from inadvertent errors in copying and typesetting the text, the Yale edition contains about 600 corrections that have never appeared in any standard edition of the Book of Mormon, and about 250 of them affect the text's meaning. Skousen's corrected text is a work of remarkable dedication and will be a landmark in American religious scholarship. Completely redesigned and typeset by nationally award-winning typographer Jonathan Saltzman, this new edition has been reformatted in sense-lines, making the text much more logical and pleasurable to read. Featuring a lucid introduction by historian Grant Hardy, the Yale edition serves not only as the most accurate version of the Book of Mormon ever published but also as an illuminating entryway into a vital religious tradition.
848 pages, Hardcover
First published September 22, 2009
15 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
Royal Skousen
54 books3 followersRoyal Jon Skousen is a professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. He is "the leading expert on the textual history of the Book of Mormon" and the founder of the analogical modeling approach to language modeling.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 11, 2016
Dr. Skousen is an internationally renowned linguistic theorist and editor of this edition of the Book of Mormon. This magnum opus consists largely of the best, up-to-date scholarship on the prepublication manuscripts and early editions, edited by the Prophet Joseph Smith. The book documents various discrepancies and revisions in later editions, and gives the reader a word-for-word rendering as it came from the mouth of Joseph Smith. This book is a must for anyone interested in textual criticism, as well as those interested in the translation process by which the Book of Mormon came forth.
April 18, 2011
Okay, so I didn't actually read the entire text itself. You can get most of what this book has to offer by reading the introductory, historical materials, and from reading the appendix at the back that has a listing of all the significant changes. In all it took about two hours, but it was well worth it.
November 24, 2020
The Book of Mormon was a written history compiled by Mormon, but the words of the book as we have them were dictated—spoken—by Joseph Smith. As Joseph’s scribe Oliver Cowdery once said regarding the translation, “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude of this bosom!”
Linguist and BYU professor, Royal Skousen, in studying the original manuscript and other early manuscrupts and printings of the Book of Mormon, has captured as closely as possible the exact words as Joseph Smith spoke them. This means the book contains the original colloquialisms of Joseph’s speech, along with original spellings of proper names (Muloch instead of Mulek for example). It also lacks the inspired clarifications and edits that Joseph Smith subsequently made for the second edition of the Book of Mormon.
There is another aspect of the original translation of the Book of Mormon that is lost in the modern editions and that is the chapter breaks. The original chapter breaks were indicated by Joseph Smith as he translated. The current chapter breaks and versification were introduced in 1879 by Orson Pratt. While these changes improve the ability to reference passages in the book, they obscure the original groupings of longer ideas by adding divisions and chapter headings in the middle of what had originally been larger, continuous works. This version shows the current chapter and verse in the margins while indicating the chapter breaks as translated in the flow of the text.
Another big difference from current printings is the formatting of the text itself. Because the Book of Mormon, as dictated, had no punctuation, Skousen organizes the text into “sense lines”, clauses of meaning—often sentences, with one sense line per line of text and a blank line between paragraphs. This makes it look, visually, like lines of poetry, but Skousen is quick to point out that the Book of Mormon is not poetry.
What the original text combined with Skousen’s formatting accomplish is to make the Book of Mormon a particular joy to read, especially aloud. The rhythms and cadences of Joseph’s spoken word are highlighted, and you can almost imagine yourself in the room with Joseph and Oliver as the Book of Mormon is being translated.
Linguist and BYU professor, Royal Skousen, in studying the original manuscript and other early manuscrupts and printings of the Book of Mormon, has captured as closely as possible the exact words as Joseph Smith spoke them. This means the book contains the original colloquialisms of Joseph’s speech, along with original spellings of proper names (Muloch instead of Mulek for example). It also lacks the inspired clarifications and edits that Joseph Smith subsequently made for the second edition of the Book of Mormon.
There is another aspect of the original translation of the Book of Mormon that is lost in the modern editions and that is the chapter breaks. The original chapter breaks were indicated by Joseph Smith as he translated. The current chapter breaks and versification were introduced in 1879 by Orson Pratt. While these changes improve the ability to reference passages in the book, they obscure the original groupings of longer ideas by adding divisions and chapter headings in the middle of what had originally been larger, continuous works. This version shows the current chapter and verse in the margins while indicating the chapter breaks as translated in the flow of the text.
Another big difference from current printings is the formatting of the text itself. Because the Book of Mormon, as dictated, had no punctuation, Skousen organizes the text into “sense lines”, clauses of meaning—often sentences, with one sense line per line of text and a blank line between paragraphs. This makes it look, visually, like lines of poetry, but Skousen is quick to point out that the Book of Mormon is not poetry.
What the original text combined with Skousen’s formatting accomplish is to make the Book of Mormon a particular joy to read, especially aloud. The rhythms and cadences of Joseph’s spoken word are highlighted, and you can almost imagine yourself in the room with Joseph and Oliver as the Book of Mormon is being translated.
March 6, 2020
One of the best editions of The Book of Mormon out there. Skousen's textual work on the BOM is unparalleled, and the layout of this book benefits from his expertise. Next to Grant Hardy's excellent versions (Reader's Edition and Maxwell Institute Study Edition), there is no better edition available!
Highly recommended, especially if you want to get an idea of what the early text of the BOM was.
Highly recommended, especially if you want to get an idea of what the early text of the BOM was.
June 4, 2024
After this, I can't read any other edition of The Book of Mormon. The print quality and formatting are sublime and make for an incredibly satisfying read. The text itself is also more accurate to the words Joseph Smith received via revelation, with all-new punctuation and paragraphs by an actual English scholar.
February 17, 2018
Reading this was nice, both to see the earliest text (confirming my sense that the differences between editions are not significant) and because the beautiful formatting in sense lines makes for pleasant reading.
December 8, 2024
Too much conjecture by the author, adding or changing words and phrases because he thought they should be in the "original text".
December 15, 2024
A terrific companion to my study of the Book of Mormon.
August 1, 2016
Royal Skousen is the mastermind behind a decades-long project to recover the "original" text of the Book of Mormon—original meaning "what Joseph said as he dictated." He has examined every. single. word. in every. single. edition. of the Book of Mormon ever made, from the Church's current version back to the 1830 edition and from there back to what's left of the original manuscripts Joseph's scribes worked on. He's peeled back several layers to correct mistakes that were made at every step of the process, including mistakes the scribes made as they first wrote what they heard Joseph say.
This volume, published by Yale University Press, is the result of all that research: the words of the original dictation as close as we can possibly recover them by scholarly means. When academics now write on the Book of Mormon or early Mormonism, this is the definitive scholarly edition that they cite.
Interested but don't have cash on hand? The book is now available to view for free at https://bookofmormoncentral.org/conte....
This volume, published by Yale University Press, is the result of all that research: the words of the original dictation as close as we can possibly recover them by scholarly means. When academics now write on the Book of Mormon or early Mormonism, this is the definitive scholarly edition that they cite.
Interested but don't have cash on hand? The book is now available to view for free at https://bookofmormoncentral.org/conte....
November 21, 2012
What Skousen has done here is just remarkable. The Earliest Text is the culmination of his work on The Book of Mormon critical text project. It is disappointing that more readers of The Book of Mormon are not familiar with this improved (and reformatted) text. The changes (both in format and language) provide for an entirely new experience reading this book.
Listen to our audio interview with Skousen about this project here:
http://www.themormonbookreview.com/20...
Listen to our audio interview with Skousen about this project here:
http://www.themormonbookreview.com/20...
July 23, 2014
Fascinating. Sheds much light on the nature of scripture, Joseph's revelatory translation and dictation process, and the eventual production of the BoM. Some fascinating nuggets in the intro and appendix. Royal Skousen has done Mormondom a great service, spending decades on this project. This is the culmination of his work, where he gives us the very closest text of the BoM as it came from the lips of the prophet. If only we had 100% and not 28% of the original manuscript...
May 16, 2022
This is the work of Royal Skousen to reconstruct the earliest known text of the Book of Mormon. I liked reading the text in this format. I could concentrate on just reading the text and not be detracted by footnotes and the tight 2 column formatting--it was just plain.
I love this book. It is so powerful and I learn something from it every time I read it.
I love this book. It is so powerful and I learn something from it every time I read it.
May 15, 2012
Absolutely amazing to see how many, and at the same time, how few changes there have been to the text of the Book of Mormon in the almost two-hundred years since Joseph Smith dictated it to scribes.
November 21, 2014
A monumental effort to find the origins of the Book of Mormonby comparing the original manuscript with the printers manuscript and later editions.A useful reference tool. In some instances Skousen makes what appears to be arbitrary decisions though.
September 20, 2013
A monumental achievement. This is a great addition to my Book of Mormon collection.
January 4, 2024
Use as reference.
Read
February 14, 2019reference for my BOM book
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews