SANDY, UTAH
A persistent but many times refuted theory meant to debunk the divine origin of the Book of Mormon was itself disputed yet again in a presentation at the Aug. 5 session of the FAIR conference.
The Spaulding-Rigdon theory, first proposed in 1834 by E. D. Howe, holds that Sidney Rigdon concocted the Book of Mormon by plagiarizing a novel written by one Solomon Spaulding, then used Joseph Smith, an uneducated farm boy, as a patsy to pass it off to the world as scripture.
At the conference, statistical analyst Paul Fields presented an assessment of one of the latest attempts to validate the Spaulding-Rigdon theory, a stylometric, or "wordprint," analysis of the Book of Mormon.
Brother Fields' study scrutinizes a 2008 paper published in the Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing, written by Matthew Jockers, Craig Criddle and Daniela Witten of Stanford University that identified Sidney Rigdon as the Book of Mormon author.
The paper is titled "Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon Using Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification."
The authors observed from the Book of Mormon the frequency in use of 110 non-contextual words (such as a, an, but, however, then, to, with, without,) and applied to that observation innovative statistical techniques assuming Solomon Spaulding and early Church leaders Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery and Parley P. Pratt as the candidate authors for the Book of Mormon.
In a response article published in the same journal in January of this year — and in his FAIR Conference address — Brother Fields criticized the paper on a number of points. Speaking to the FAIR Conference audience, he characterized their work as "opinion masquerading as research."
Most surprising, Brother Fields said, is that the authors failed to include Joseph Smith as a candidate author. "If anyone would have been the author, it must have been Joseph Smith, one would think, being otherwise uninformed," he said.
"They also confused the concept of things being closest with being close," Brother Fields said. To illustrate, he posed the question of which city is closest to Los Angeles out of New York, Chicago and Salt Lake City. While Salt Lake City is the closest, most people would not consider it anywhere near Los Angeles. Similarly, while Sidney Rigdon might have the closest probability out of the four candidates to being the Book of Mormon author, even that probability is not very close.
Brother Fields displayed a scatter plot graph showing the candidate authors' words being close to one another, and those of one of the authors being closest to the Book of Mormon text, but showing a substantial gap between the candidates as a group and the Book of Mormon text.
"They have built a fatal flaw into their analysis, because they contend that only these four individuals could have written the Book of Mormon," Brother Fields said. "From the very start, they have cooked the books."
To illustrate the flaw in the analysis, Brother Fields said that, using the Stanford researchers' methodology, it can be shown that Sidney Rigdon wrote 34 of the 85 Federalist Papers (even though he wasn't yet born) and that he wrote 30 percent of the chapters in the Bible.
"But how about their own paper?" Brother Fields asked. "If we say the author of their paper had to be one of these four candidates and could not have been anyone else, the winner is Oliver Cowdery. Although he died in 1870, he wrote their paper that was published in 2008. If they want to stand by the findings in their paper, they must acknowledge Oliver Cowdery, at least as a co-author."
Concluding, Brother Fields said: "The Spaulding-Rigdon theory, then, in our view is nothing more than mere conjecture. It simply comes from someone's imagination, and the allegation of 19th century authorship of the Book of Mormon remains unsubstantiated. Joseph Smith's definite description of the book's origin remains the only viable, tenable description of where it came from."
