Well, to be fair, shouldn’t we subtract the bits of the Book of Mormon that have been lifted straight out of the Bible? That kind of tends to put a bit of a damper on this argument, doesn’t it?the Qur’an — to which the Book of Mormon is occasionally compared — is 77,797 words long in its original Classical Arabic. That is approximately 80% of the length of the New Testament (which, accordingly, totals something close to 100,000 words altogether). And, according to Islamic sources, the Qur’an was revealed over the space of twenty-two years, between AD 610 and Muhammad’s death in AD 632. That’s rather longer than the 2.5 months required for the dictation of the Book of Mormon.
The Old Testament book of Isaiah is 25,608 words long in its original Hebrew text. Jeremiah, the longest book in the entire Bible, is 33,002. No single book in the New Testament even comes close. Between his own gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which he also wrote, Luke weighs in at a total of 37,932 words. A well-educated physician, he is the most voluminous contributor to the New Testament. By contrast, with all of his many epistles, the apostle Paul comes in at second place, with 32,408.
The Torah or Pentateuch — Genesis (32,046), Exodus (25,957), Leviticus (18,852), Numbers (25,048), and Deuteronomy (23,008) — is sometimes known as the Five Books of Moses. Taken altogether, it is at the absolute core of Judaism. And, in their entirety, those five books reach the impressive sum of 124,911 words. But that’s substantially less than half the word count of the Book of Mormon.
So far as I’m aware, therefore, the Book of Mormon stands as the single largest purportedly revealed text in the Abrahamic tradition, and it does so by a considerable margin.
Regardless, it seems to me that the Afore is losing some of his polemical edge if he is really making such a dumb argument with a straight face. The Book of Mormon is somehow on a par with other religious texts simply because it is *long*? Gee, is Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past the greatest work of literature due to sheer length?
He goes on to pose a question:
Yes, it’s the old “How could this uneducated farm boy have done it!”, but the Afore is also answering his own question. What, really, is the difference between the “obscure actors,” seeking to imitate Joseph Smith, vs Joseph Smith himself, seeking to imitate the Bible?I simply pose the question of why, if Joseph set out to pretend to prophethood, he chose to go to the enormous effort of creating such a massive work. Nobody else in the entire Abrahamic tradition of whom I’m aware, perhaps (though I can’t think of any) with the possible exception of one or two obscure actors who have plainly sought to create something in explicit imitation of Joseph Smith, has done anything of comparable magnitude.
