The Anomaly in the Field, a phrase-fingerprint of the Book of Mormon

The ranking

Bars show σ, standard deviations above the median book in the field. Near zero is unremarkable. A tall bar is a real outlier. Click any book to read the phrases it shares and where to find it. Colours mark the tradition. Click the key to filter.

filter:

How to read a match

σStandard deviations above the field median. The headline outlier number.

coverageShare of the Book of Mormon's distinct phrases this book accounts for.

registerShared phrases that are only KJV or biblical cadence, common to the era and not distinctive.

blockHow much of the overlap sits in one contiguous span. High would mean a single quoted block, not a pervasive echo.

What this does, and does not, show

The Late War is not the closest book to the Book of Mormon. In the full field eight books rank above it, and every one of them is scripture, is the Bible (Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job is the King James text of Job), or quotes the Book of Mormon directly. Latter-day Saint canon. Church histories. Even a hostile 1842 exposé that quotes the book to attack it. None is an independent composition. Strip out everything that is or quotes scripture, and the closest text left, the strongest independent match, is The Late War. An obscure 1816 history of the War of 1812 written in deliberate King James cadence. A secular war history. That is the anomaly.

Switch the field to Full corpus above and the bars colour by tradition. The picture is plain. The closest matches are Latter-day Saint scripture (yellow) and Bibles (blue), exactly as you would expect, and only four genuinely independent works (red) clear the bar at all. Nothing is hidden, and you can filter the types in or out yourself. This is not a verdict. "Closest independent book" is not "the source," and the original study searched a hundred thousand texts. But it holds up with the honest controls on, register down-weighted rather than deleted, rarity read against five hundred period books, names droppable, every score weighed against the whole field. The anomaly survives all of it.

The similarity map

Drop the target. Compare every book with every other by cosine similarity over rarity-weighted phrases, and let the corpus sort itself. No labels, no priors. What falls out is a map of who writes like whom.

Authors cluster with themselves. Every Austen beside every other Austen, Scott with Scott, Cooper with Cooper. That is the control. A metric that rediscovers authorship from phrasing alone is measuring something real.

Against that metric, the Book of Mormon's tightest bond is the King James Bible. It sits in one biblical-register block with the LDS canon (Pearl, Doctrine & Covenants), View of the Hebrews, and The Late War, its nearest secular neighbour. The novelists, the political writers, and the travellers each keep to their own corner.

The full corpus

The same clustering over all 451 books, the six focal texts plus four hundred and forty-five drawn from the period at large. Each pixel is one book against another. The bright diagonal blocks are clusters the phrasing alone found. Hover any cell to name the pair.

Four hundred and forty-five mostly secular books fan out into their own author and genre blocks, and they leave the Book of Mormon in one tight cluster (top-left, framed) with the King James Bible, the Inspired Version, and the rest of the Mormon canon. The metric was never tuned for this. The structure simply falls out.

Here is the tell. The one Latter-day Saint history that happened to land in the random four-hundred-book sample, the History of the Church, drifted straight into that same corner with no prompting. The heatmap is the full corpus with a register filter, phrases in more than 45 books dropped. The is the curated close-up.

Holy books

A field of scripture alone. The Book of Mormon, five Bible translations, a 1611 original-spelling KJV, the Latter-day Saint canon, and two Qurans (George Sale 1734, Rodwell 1861). What does the phrasing alone make of them?

One block holds nearly everything. The Book of Mormon (its nearest neighbour is the King James Bible), the five Bibles, and the LDS canon, all bound by shared King James English. The two Qurans hang off the end, alone. Sale's Koran is about 0.01 similar to the Bibles and the Book of Mormon, an order of magnitude below the Bible family's own internal similarities.

This map measures shared phrasing, not doctrine. The real kinship between Islam and Latter-day Saint belief, prophets and a sealed book and continuing revelation and a restoration after apostasy, is conceptual. It lives in ideas the two scriptures render in completely different words. It also deflates an old claim. The Book of Mormon's overlap with Sale's Koran is 0.009, down at the noise floor. No shared text, only shared themes.

Journal of Discourses

The method run in reverse. Twenty-six volumes of Brigham-Young-era sermons (1854 to 1886, reported by G. D. Watt), clustered with the scripture they preach, the Book of Mormon, the King James Bible, and the Latter-day Saint canon, plus the two Qurans for contrast.

The twenty-six volumes close ranks into one tight block (framed), a single coherent corpus, every volume's nearest neighbour another volume. They sit beside the Latter-day Saint scripture and the King James Bible they quote. The two Qurans keep their distance. The volume labels are tinted by decade, oldest to newest.

This is influence read backward. The Journal of Discourses postdates the Book of Mormon, and the ranking finds it echoing the scripture's own distinctive idiom, "yea behold," "abominable above all," "fruit is most," sermons carrying the language forward for decades. The same engine that surfaces what the Book of Mormon may draw from (upstream, like The Late War) surfaces what draws from it (downstream, these sermons).

Joseph Smith

Did the man write like the book? Here is his own first-person prose, the History of the Church ("by Himself"), the Teachings, and the Lectures on Faith, clustered with the Book of Mormon, the scripture he produced, and a few novels for contrast.

Joseph Smith's own writing (framed) clusters right in with the Book of Mormon and the scripture he produced. His History volumes and Teachings are each other's nearest neighbours and the book's, while the novelists (Austen, Cooper) keep to their own corner. Of everything measured, the King James Bible, The Late War, five hundred period books, the authorial voice closest to the Book of Mormon is his.

This cannot prove he wrote it. The History volumes directly quote the Book of Mormon and the revelations, so part of the overlap is transcription rather than style. And a believer saturated in a sacred text echoes it the same way. The shows a whole community doing exactly that. "Sounds like Smith" cannot separate authorship from devotion. (The Lectures on Faith sit slightly apart, fitting their disputed authorship, often credited to Sidney Rigdon.)