http://farms.BYU.edu/display.php?table=transcripts&id=1
This was also amusing:
One thing that needs to be said about the Book of Mormon from the beginning is that the very existence of the book is an astonishing thing. The sheer speed with which it was produced is a miracle. Many probably already know that it was produced in a little over two months. Now that may not seem as impressive to some people as it actually is. A few years ago, I was invited to prepare a book for a company that wanted a book on the Near East. They wanted it fairly quickly, in fact, they wanted it remarkably quickly. I asked them how much time I would have to produce the book if I accepted the offer, and they said a little over two months. Well, I accepted. One of the reasons I accepted was because I wanted to see if I could actually do that. Well, I did. I produced a book of about 140,000 words in a little over two months. I was pretty pleased with myself and other people commented that I wrote very rapidly and so on.
It amazes me that apologists use this canard. The fact is that Joseph Smith had far more than two months to produce the Book of Mormon. He publicly – ie, in front of friends and family – produced it in two months, but the idea of the Book of Mormon had been germinated YEARS beforehand.
And this:
Well, it's not only the speed of the book's production that I think is impressive, it's also the plausibility of the book as history. I spent a lot of my time reading ancient and medieval history by ancient and medieval writers, and this book reads plausibly as history. The people in it behave the way historical people did. The societies and civilizations in the Book of Mormon behave in the way ancient societies and civilizations did behave. This is impressive. This is something that I think was beyond the capacity of someone like Joseph Smith to prepare. I'll try to give you some examples of that as we go on.
The people in the Book of Mormon did not behave at all like the people in ancient Mesoamerica, with the exception of the most generic human traits.
I would also say that the details of the Book of Mormon, the complexity of the book, are also impressive. John Sorenson published what I think is a classic book a few years ago called An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon in which he produces plausible correlations for the Book of Mormon with features and locations in Mesoamerica. That is, I think, impressive, and I'm struck by many of the correlations he adduces. I would go beyond that and say that the first and primary impressive thing about that is the fact that a plausible and coherent geography can be deduced from the book that was produced so rapidly—so plausible and coherent that a little tiny town mentioned at one point in the Book of Mormon would show up two hundred pages later in the same place. Now this is beyond the capacity of my students to do. It's beyond my capacity to do in two months without a lot of aid and assistance from electronic gadgets and so on.
Sorenson's book is riddled with errors, and yet this, apparently, is still the best the apologists have. That, in and of itself, is telling, as well as pathetic.