Fullscreen | Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Fullscreen | Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship: "First of all, the evidence strongly supports the traditional account in saying that the original manuscript was orally dictated. The kinds of errors that occur in the manuscript are clearly those that occur from a scribe mishearing, rather than from visually misreading while copying from another manuscript. (The printer's manuscript, by contrast, shows precisely the types of anomalies that one would expect from a copyist's errors.) Skousen's meticulous analysis even suggests that Joseph was working with up to thirty words at a time.8

It is apparent, too, that Joseph could see the spelling of names on whatever it was that he was reading from.9 When the scribe had written the text, he or she would evidently read it back to Joseph for correction.10 So the Prophet seemingly had something with him from which he was dictating and against which he could check what his scribes had written. But what was it? The witnesses are unanimous that he did not have any books, manuscripts, or papers with him during the translation process, a process that involved lengthy periods of dictation."



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