# A Stylometric Study of the Book of Mormon

**Conducted July 7, 2026 · Fully reproducible: all scripts, corpora, and outputs in this folder**

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## Executive summary

This study rebuilt a Book of Mormon stylometric analysis from raw texts, using standard methods (most-frequent-word features, Burrows' Delta), a validated pipeline, and the controls that the well-known studies on *both* sides of this debate omitted. Three questions were tested. The results, stated as neutrally as the data allows:

1. **Does the method work at all?** Yes. On six known authors of the same era — including two other deliberate King-James-style imitations — the pipeline identifies the true author of a 2,000-word chunk with 91–96% accuracy (Cohen's κ = 0.88 after removing adjacency leakage). Whatever the results below mean, they are not the product of a broken instrument.

2. **Do the Book of Mormon's internal narrators (Nephi, Jacob, Mormon, Moroni…) have distinct "wordprints," as the LDS studies claimed?** The claimed effect appears **only under the flawed test design** the original studies used. Reproducing their naive design gives an impressive-looking κ = 0.72 — but the *same naive design* certifies fake "narrators," created by arbitrarily slicing the text of a single narrator, at κ = 0.61. The apparent voices are mostly an artifact of testing chunks against their own neighbors (adjacent text shares topic and vocabulary regardless of author). With that leakage blocked, narrator identification collapses to κ = 0.21, versus 0.88 for real authors under the identical protocol; Jacob, Moroni, and every embedded speaker (Benjamin, Abinadi, Alma, Samuel) drop to ≈0% cross-book recall. **The "distinct voices" evidence does not survive proper controls.**

3. **Does the Book of Mormon match any 19th-century candidate author — Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, W. W. Phelps, David Whitmer, Ethan Smith, Gilbert Hunt?** **No.** In an open-set test, 83–86% of Book of Mormon chunks are farther from *every* candidate than genuine same-author text ever is. Notably for the Spalding–Rigdon theory: **Spalding's style is among the farthest of all candidates tested, and Rigdon's is far as well.** The closed-set "winner" is Michael Linning — a Scottish lawyer with no connection to Mormonism whose 1809 *First Book of Napoleon* also imitates the KJV — which demonstrates that forced-choice attribution here tracks biblical *register*, not authorship. The Book of Mormon reads stylometrically as one sustained KJV-pastiche idiom that matches nobody's natural prose in the pool, including Joseph Smith's own letters.

**What this does and does not prove.** These results cut against *both* popular narratives. Against the apologetic claim: there is no reliable multi-author wordprint signal, so stylometry provides no support for multiple ancient authors. Against the Spalding–Rigdon theory: the data actively disfavors it. But the open-set result ("matches nobody") must not be oversold in the other direction either: nobody in the candidate pool has a surviving example of *sustained scripture-pastiche narrative* to compare against (a person's letter-writing voice and their deliberate-archaic-imitation voice differ), so stylometry cannot rule Joseph Smith in — and cannot rule him out. The honest bottom line: **stylometry cannot identify the author of the Book of Mormon, and neither side of the debate should be citing it as strong evidence.**

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## 1. Background: the studies in dispute

- **Larsen, Rencher & Layton 1980** (*BYU Studies*, "Who Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints") — claimed via MANOVA and classification of function-word rates that the Book of Mormon's internal authors have mutually distinct wordprints and match no 19th-century candidate. **Design weakness targeted here:** blocks of the same narrator's contiguous text appear on both sides of the comparison, so topic/adjacency effects masquerade as authorship (our Analysis 2 reproduces and then dismantles exactly this).
- **Hilton 1990** (BYU/Berkeley group) — a more careful intra-BoM wordprint study, still fundamentally a within-text design subject to the same concern.
- **Holmes 1992** (*Journal of the Royal Statistical Society* A) — found Book of Mormon "authors" cluster together rather than separately, consistent with a single style; our internal-voices result agrees with Holmes.
- **Jockers, Witten & Criddle 2008** (*Literary and Linguistic Computing*) — the study your friend's counter-argument will cite in reverse: using closed-set nearest-shrunken-centroid classification, it assigned most chapters to Rigdon or Spalding. **Design weaknesses:** every chapter is *forced* to pick someone from the list (Joseph Smith was excluded entirely), and closed-set attribution is known to produce confident false positives. Our lesion test shows the failure mode directly, and our distance data contradicts the conclusion: Spalding and Rigdon are among the *farthest* candidates.
- **Schaalje, Fields, Roper & Snow 2011** (*LLC*) — extended NSC to open-set attribution and showed most BoM chapters match none of Jockers' candidates. Our open-set result agrees with this methodological point (while our internal-voices result cuts against the same authors' apologetic use of wordprints).

This study was designed so that each of those disputes gets an explicit, pre-registered-style control rather than a partisan choice.

## 2. Data

| Corpus | Words used | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book of Mormon | 252,099 | bcbooks/scriptures-json (current LDS ed.) | 14,839 words of KJV block quotation **excluded** (1 Ne 20–21; 2 Ne 7–8, 12–24; Mosiah 14; 3 Ne 12–14, 22, 24–25) |
| Joseph Smith | ~19,800 | Joseph Smith Papers verbatim transcripts | 15 holograph + 2 dictated documents (1832 history, letters, Liberty Jail epistles); scribal status documented per file |
| Sidney Rigdon | ~74,300 | sidneyrigdon.com human transcripts, JSP | 26 signed docs: 1840 *Appeal*, 1838 oration, 1830s–40s editorials; joint-authored and disputed items excluded; Lectures on Faith excluded |
| Oliver Cowdery | ~44,300 | Wikisource, centerplace.org | 19 signed docs incl. the eight 1834–35 historical letters; the 1839 "Defence" excluded as probable forgery |
| Solomon Spalding | ~28,300 | Oberlin MS, 1885 printing (archive.org OCR) | Story text only; the *actual surviving Spalding manuscript* |
| Parley P. Pratt | ~35,300 | Gutenberg #35554 | *A Voice of Warning* (1837; text follows 1881 ed. — caveat); scripture quotes stripped |
| W. W. Phelps | ~62,800 | centerplace.org | 14 *Evening and the Morning Star* issues he edited (1832–33); quotes/reprints stripped |
| David Whitmer | ~31,300 | archive.utlm.org transcript | 1887 *Address to All Believers* (late date — caveat) |
| Ethan Smith | ~56,600 | archive.org OCR | *View of the Hebrews* (1823) |
| Gilbert Hunt | ~57,400 | archive.org OCR | *The Late War* (1816) — deliberate KJV-style history |
| Michael Linning | ~22,800 | archive.org OCR | *First Book of Napoleon* (1809) — deliberate KJV-style; **register control** |
| Washington Irving | ~128,500 | Gutenberg #2048 | *Sketch-Book* — distractor control |
| J. F. Cooper | ~148,400 | Gutenberg #940 | *Last of the Mohicans* — distractor control |
| KJV Bible | 120,000 (sample) | Gutenberg #10 | Register reference |

## 3. Methods

- **Features:** relative frequencies of the corpus's most frequent words (MFW; 50/100/200 tested) — overwhelmingly function words, the standard authorship signal since Mosteller & Wallace. Frequencies z-scored (Burrows).
- **Distance:** Burrows' Delta (mean absolute z-difference).
- **Unit:** contiguous non-overlapping chunks (1,000 and 2,000 words tested).
- **Attribution tests:** leave-one-out nearest-neighbor; centroid Delta for candidates; Cohen's κ reported so results are comparable across tasks with different class balances (κ=1 perfect, κ=0 chance).
- **The critical control — adjacency blocking:** in "naive" mode a chunk may match any other chunk (this is effectively what the 1980 wordprint design allows); in "blocked" mode chunks from the same book/segment are excluded as matches, so a "voice" only counts if it persists *across* separate texts. Real authorial style does persist (validation: κ drops only 0.95→0.88); topic-driven pseudo-signal does not (fake narrators: 0.61→ −0.18).
- **Negative control:** Mormon's own 169k-word narration cut into four contiguous "pseudo-narrators" with the same size profile as Nephi/Jacob/Mormon/Moroni, run through the identical pipeline.
- **Lesion test:** attribute a known author's chunks with that author deleted from the candidate list, to measure closed-set false-confidence.
- **Open-set test:** compare each BoM chunk's distance to its *nearest* candidate against the calibrated distribution of genuine same-author distances (95th percentile threshold).
- **Register sensitivity:** all attribution runs repeated with archaic/biblical marker words (unto, yea, behold, thou, ye, hath, etc.) removed from the feature list. No conclusion changed.

## 4. Results

### 4.1 Validation — the instrument works

Six known authors, 2,000-word chunks, 100 MFW: naive LOO accuracy 0.96 (κ 0.95), **blocked 0.91 (κ 0.88)**. Per-author blocked accuracy: Cooper 0.97, Irving 0.91, Hunt 0.85, Ethan Smith 0.85, Linning 1.00, Spalding 0.69. The two KJV imitators (Hunt, Linning) are almost never confused with each other — shared biblical register does **not** defeat the method when authors truly differ.

### 4.2 Internal voices — the wordprint claim fails its controls

| Test (cs=2000, mfw=100) | Naive κ | Blocked κ |
|---|---|---|
| 6 known real authors | 0.95 | **0.88** |
| BoM narrators (Nephi/Jacob/Mormon/Moroni) | 0.72 | **0.21** |
| Fake narrators sliced from Mormon's own text | 0.61 | **−0.18** |

Blocked per-narrator recall: Mormon 0.76 (largest class; partly class-imbalance advantage), Nephi 0.37, **Jacob 0.00, Moroni 0.00**. Speaker-level test (adding Benjamin, Abinadi, Alma, Amulek, Samuel as the 1980 study did): **every embedded speaker scores 0.00** blocked recall. The residual κ≈0.2 is weak, driven by Nephi-vs-Mormon, and is as consistent with topic/genre drift (small plates vs. abridgment) or drift across a year of dictation as with different authors. For comparison: fake narrators score *higher* under the naive design than real narrators score under the honest one.

### 4.3 External candidates — nobody matches; Spalding and Rigdon least of all

Mean Delta from all 123 BoM chunks to each candidate (lower = closer; same-author calibration: mean 0.60, 95th pct 0.85):

| Candidate | Mean Δ | | Candidate | Mean Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linning (register twin) | 1.02 | | Whitmer | 1.09 |
| Pratt | 1.04 | | Cowdery | 1.10 |
| Phelps | 1.04 | | **Joseph Smith** | 1.10 |
| Ethan Smith | 1.06 | | Hunt | 1.12 |
| **Rigdon** | 1.07 | | **Spalding** | 1.15 |
| KJV | 1.08 | | Cooper (control) | 1.16 |
| | | | Irving (control) | 1.16 |

- **Open-set:** 82.9% of BoM chunks (86.2% with archaic markers removed) are farther from every candidate than the same-author 95th percentile. Median nearest-candidate distance 0.95 — deep in different-author territory.
- **Closed-set votes** (the Jockers-style forced choice) scatter: Linning 36, KJV 23, J. Smith 22, Phelps 11, Hunt 10, Pratt 8, Rigdon 6, E. Smith 3, Whitmer 2, Cowdery 2, **Spalding 0**. The "top candidate" being an unrelated Scottish KJV-imitator is the *reductio ad absurdum* of closed-set attribution on this problem.
- **Lesion test:** with Cooper deleted from the list, 62 of his 74 chunks are confidently "attributed" to Irving. Forced-choice methods *will* name someone; that is exactly how the 2008 study could name Rigdon/Spalding while, by distance, they are among the worst matches in the pool.

### 4.4 What the Book of Mormon's style actually is

Its most over-used marker words vs. every candidate: *came* (z=+2.9; "it came to pass"), *should*, *that*, *they*, *unto*, *people*, *now*, *many*, *them*, *land*. Most under-used: *a, an, on, in, as, at, so, some, from, its* — depressed article and preposition rates typical of formulaic oral-narrative pastiche. It is one sustained invented idiom, closest (but still not close) to the era's other deliberate KJV imitations.

## 5. Limitations — read before quoting

1. **The genre/register confound cuts both ways.** No candidate left us a sustained KJV-pastiche narrative in his natural hand (Hunt and Linning are other people's pastiches). A candidate's letters may not represent the voice he would use when deliberately imitating scripture. "Matches nobody" therefore does *not* demonstrate that no 19th-century person wrote it.
2. **Joseph Smith's corpus is small (~20k words)** and partly dictated; genre-mismatched (letters vs. narrative). His mean distance (1.10) should not be over-read in either direction.
3. **Dictation and scribal transmission:** the Book of Mormon text passed through scribes and compositor; candidates' texts through printers. Spelling was normalized by tokenization, but punctuation-level habits were not usable.
4. **Edition issues:** BoM text is the current LDS edition (1830 differences are minor for function words but nonzero); Pratt follows the 1881 edition; Whitmer wrote in 1887.
5. **OCR noise** in Spalding, Hunt, Linning, Ethan Smith corpora (function words are short and robust, but noise inflates their apparent distinctiveness slightly — note Spalding's own validation recall was the lowest, 0.69, partly for this reason; this does not rescue the Spalding theory, since noise cannot explain his consistently *maximal* distance from the BoM).
6. **Chapter-level narrator/speaker maps are approximate** (chapters mix narration and quoted speech); the 1980 study's verse-level assignments could not be replicated exactly. Both narrator- and speaker-level schemes were tested.
7. Chunks of the same narrator remain non-independent even across books (shared subject matter); the blocked design mitigates but cannot fully eliminate this — note this inflates, not deflates, the weak κ≈0.2 residual.

## 6. How to use this in your document

- Against the wordprint argument: *"The apparent multi-author wordprint signal reproduces under the original studies' naive design but vanishes under adjacency blocking — and the same naive design certifies arbitrary slices of a single narrator's text as 'distinct authors' (κ 0.61 vs 0.72). A method that finds voices in a control known to have one voice is measuring topic, not authorship."*
- But also honestly concede: *"By the same token, stylometry gives no positive identification of any 19th-century author — including Spalding and Rigdon, whose styles are among the farthest from the Book of Mormon of all candidates tested. The 2008 Spalding–Rigdon attribution study relied on a closed-set method that must name someone from its list; when the same method is applied to a known author with the true author removed from the list, it confidently misattributes 84% of his text."*

## 7. Reproducibility

```
stylometry/
  scripts/prepare_bom.py            # BoM segmentation, KJV-quote exclusion, narrator/speaker maps
  scripts/prepare_spalding_kjv.py   # Spalding OCR cleaning; KJV parsing
  scripts/prepare_controls.py       # control text cleaning
  scripts/stylo.py                  # tokenizer, MFW, Delta, LOO-NN, kappa
  scripts/analysis_validation.py    # Analysis 1 (known authors)
  scripts/analysis_internal.py      # Analysis 2 (narrators, null control)
  scripts/analysis_attribution.py   # Analysis 3 (candidates, lesion, open-set)
  scripts/distinctive_words.py      # marker-word diagnostics
  scripts/plot_figures.py, plot_attribution.py
  corpus/raw/<author>/MANIFEST.md   # per-document provenance & authorship confidence
  results/                          # all numeric outputs + figures
```

Run order: `prepare_*.py`, then any analysis script. Python 3.13, numpy/matplotlib.

## Sources

- Book of Mormon: https://github.com/bcbooks/scriptures-json · KJV: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10
- Spalding MS: https://archive.org/details/themanuscriptsto00spauuoft
- Joseph Smith Papers transcripts: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org (per-file URLs in corpus headers)
- Rigdon: http://sidneyrigdon.com/rigwrit1.htm · Cowdery: Wikisource + http://www.centerplace.org
- Phelps: http://www.centerplace.org/history/ems/ · Whitmer: https://archive.utlm.org/onlinebooks/address1.htm
- Pratt: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35554 · Hunt: archive.org `latewarbetweenun00hunt` · Linning: archive.org `firstbooknapole00gruagoog` · Ethan Smith: archive.org `viewofhebrewsexh00smitrich`
- Prior studies: Larsen, Rencher & Layton, *BYU Studies* 20 (1980); Hilton, *BYU Studies* 30 (1990); Holmes, *JRSS-A* 155 (1992); Jockers, Witten & Criddle, *LLC* 23 (2008); Schaalje, Fields, Roper & Snow, *LLC* 26 (2011).
