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Close on the heels of the announcement that the New International Version Bible would be revised, comes the publication of the “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text” by the Yale University Press. The book is the result of a two-decade long painstaking labor undertaken by Royal Skousen, a professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University.
Mr. Skousen who is also a Mormon, embarked on the project with the intention of creating a document that was error-free in the sense that it was closest to what the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith Jr., originally translated. It is believed that numerous errors were generated from the time Smith dictated the translation to his scribes till the first edition was published. Even after that the text continued to get altered with every new edition. The sources of these errors were varied, beginning from the mistaken understanding of Smith’s scribes when they heard him wrong or simply wrote the wrong word by mistake, to alterations made by Smith himself when he tried to change the King James style of the first edition into standard American English.
Royal Skousen has tried to restore the nonstandard English that was edited out by the church over time. “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text” also does away with chapter summaries, notes and columns that were added by LDS leaders. Overall this edition differs in more than 2,000 places when compared to the standard text. However, most of these differences are not very important as they do not shed a new light on the text. Some of the changes, for example, include replacing words like ‘inequality’ with ‘unequality’, or ’sword’ of justice with ‘word’ of justice. In the latter example, although the change appears to be more substantial, it does not actually contribute anything new to the big picture.
According to Mr. Skousen the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not want him to publish his work. Although he does not claim that his work depicts the actual revealed text, he does put forward that it is closest to the original revelation.
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