I believe that Mr. Walters has overstated the case when he claims that Joseph Smith was well acquainted with the Bible because of his early Methodist involvement. Though I have been an avid Bible reader since the age of eight (with earlier exposure through Bible classes with the Assembly of God), I have only recently come to realize how much of the Old Testament is reflected in the Book of Mormon. I typically read the Bible once a year and the Book of Mormon once or twice. Extensive academic preparation has also given me insights unavailable to the general public.
Presentism, anyone? In his recent McManis lecture, Dr. Timothy T. Larsen wrote the following of Victorian Britain (I can't say how much this applies to the US during the same time period, but I'd guess the two were fairly analogous):
the more I have studied it, the more I have come to realize that it would be hard to set any limit on the extent to which Victorian culture was shaped by a shared knowledge of the Bible. The Scriptures were a significant presence throughout people’s entire lives. In the beginning was the Word. It was standard practice for Victorian children to learn to read on the Authorized Version (often called the King James Version in America) of the Bible. The Bible was the primary text in schools. Universal state education was not enacted until 1870. Before that time, many poor children received all the formal education they would ever have from a church. It must be borne in mind that Sunday schools originally really were schools. Children worked all week long and then learned to read by going to a church-run school on their one day off, Sunday. Not surprisingly, the Bible was central at Sunday schools. Some poor children were able to attend a proper, day school as well. The vast majority of these weekday schools were run by a denominational or non-denominational Christian charity, and also used the Bible as their main text.
[Dr. Larsen goes on at great length giving further evidence, but the above is representative.] [...]
The Bible, therefore, was the common cultural currency of the Victorians.
By contrast, Dr. Larsen says of modern biblical literacy,
it has been demonstrated that biblical literacy has continued to decline yet further since 1985. Gallup polls have tracked this descent to a current "record low". Not even able to get started with the canon in either testament, most Americans now cannot name the first book of the Bible and half cannot name even one of the four Gospels. Stephen Prothero, professor of religion, Boston University, highlighted this in a 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times which was bluntly entitled, "We live in the land of biblical idiots".
Joseph Smith didn't need "extensive academic preparation". And if Tvedtnes really read the Bible as a youth as much as he says he did, it's hard to believe that he didn't notice how much it is reflected in the Book of Mormon. I can only suppose that in reading through his quad as a young adult, the Bible and the Book of Mormon blended together for him as they do for so many Mormons, so that he was not aware enough of the line between them to notice where the one intrudes into the other. (If so, that just brings the point home!) When I read the Book of Mormon for the first time as a sophomore in high school, there was nothing in it that stood out quite as starkly as its biblical influences.
-Chris