Rather, The Book of Mormon is a remarkably assured and comprehensive prolepsis. Its anachronism is unembarrassedly integral. After all, the book’s point of departure is Lehi’s visionary apprehension of the imminent Babylonian captivity, which is revealed to him in the pages of a book that is given to him by twelve angelic figures who, we are told, appear following “One descending out of the midst of heaven . . . [whose] luster was above that of the sun at noon-day” (1 Ne 1:9–11). In other words, Lehi is warned of the Babylonian captivity thirteen years before it happens by way of a book given him by men who will not be born for another 600 years—Jesus and his apostles. The Book of Mormon is a wormhole right from the get-go—its temporality is never anything but extravagantly nonlinear.

Chronology:

1/8 of the way into the text and 1/25 into the time span of its main narrative (around 560 BCE, according to the text’s internal chronology), the Nephite narrators can already do the following: (1) worship Jesus Christ by name (2 Ne 10:3), which includes foreknowledge of his birth by a virgin, baptism, crucifixion, and resurrection, and a thoroughly developed Christian soteriology (a conception of how Jesus is “the savior of the world”); (2) anticipate their own extinction at the hands of their “brethren,” the dark-skinned Lamanites, 1,000 years later around 420 CE, thereby “spoiling” the narrative, for this is how it inevitably ends (1 Ne 12:19–20); and (3) foresee the eventual recovery of their record 2,500 years later by a “seer” named “Joseph,” an event that is imagined as transforming nineteenth-century America (2 Ne 3). The Book of Mormon is a sustained exercise in—to borrow a phrase from one of its prophetic figures, Abinadi—“speaking of things to come as though they had already come,” and this formal feature, apart from what it might suggest about Book of Mormon authorship, defines the text (Mosiah 16:6). This effect is fascinatingly compounded by the apparently nonlinear dictation of the extant text, which began around what is now Mosiah 8 and then doubled back to 1 Nephi.

The Book of Mormon asks to be read as an ancient text. This anachronism becomes a certain sort of non-Mormon reader’s proof of The Book of Mormon’s nonantiquity and that which has to be explained away as nonexistent or nonessential by a Mormon reader who is invested in The Book of Mormon’s antiquity. What we are suggesting, by contrast, is that The Book of Mormon, in its ostentatious anachronism, may not be asking to be read this way at all.
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Book of Mormon using the KJV:

These extended quotations come from Exodus 20, Isaiah 2–14, 29, 48–55, Micah 4–5, Malachi 3–4, Matthew 5–7, Mark 16, Acts 3, 1 Corinthians 12–13, and 1 John 3. Some are specifically introduced as quotations, while others are worked into the text with no note of their origins, aside from Jesus concluding his New World version of the Sermon on the Mount with the words “Behold, ye have heard the things which I taught before I ascended to my Father” (3 Ne 15:1).

Parallels with Isaiah 48, KJV

A large use of sayings from the NT:

Even from a believer’s perspective, there is no reason why, in the first example, Lehi in 597 BCE should express his pious awe with a phrase that would not be penned until the first century CE, or why Alma would have advised his son in terms taken from the future gospel of Matthew. If The Book of Mormon is to be regarded as a translation, it has to be a rather free rendering, adapted to the biblically formed aesthetic sensibilities of nineteenth-century Americans.

Echoes of biblical phrases. There are several hundred more Book of Mormon verses that echo specific, identifiable biblical phrases (as opposed to the expressions I earlier identified as generically biblical, meaning that they appear in multiple verses throughout the Bible). These phrases are not as complex as the allusions in the previous section, their original contexts matter much less, and they may or may not have been consciously cited by the author or translator. That is, they could simply be part of his religious vocabulary—formed by years of reading the scriptures and hearing them preached—without him knowing exactly where in the Bible they came from, and not necessarily expecting his readers to recognize them by chapter and verse either. These verbal echoes are not evenly distributed through the text since they are much more common in passages of preaching than in the regular narrative. An example of somewhat thick usage occurs at 1 Ne 17: 45–47:

Effects of Intertextuality:

3 examples of when biblical phrases are used in new contexts:

Theological innovations:

Complexity of Sex/Race

The Book of Mormon that at first seem straightforwardly damning: its almost complete failure to speak of women and its apparently unreflective racism.

In this way The Book of Mormon adapts itself to a series of drearily familiar racist tropes of the American nineteenth century: about Indians as remnants of the lost tribes of Israel, or, more saliently, about nonwhiteness as a God-ordained and indelible accursedness. The Book of Mormon, we might say, swallows these conventional racist premises whole, and metabolizes them into an intractably racist cosmology, haphazardly wrought round with a settler-colonial white supremacism that will be unfamiliar to few students of antebellum America. In this context, what Jared Hickman rightly describes as American Mormonism’s “deplorable record of theological racism” oughtn’t to surprise us much at all. On the contrary, such racism would appear to be stranded through the very DNA of early Mormonism, written indelibly into its foundational theological text .

The cursing of the descendants of Laman with dark skin early on makes plain enough their Cain-like racialization, whereby nonwhiteness and spiritual malignancy are made into the simplest of figures for one another. The passage comes in 2 Ne 5:21:

• And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.

Authorship:

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