I’d like to hear what other faithful LDS say on this convergence. That includes critical arguments like the Vernal Holley map or Comoros-Moroni or Late War similarities and also faithful arguments like Nahom and some of the other names in the BOM with ancient Hebrew or Egyptian ties. I’ve seen the concept of parallelomania at play so many times in these studies, that I’m skeptical of drawing too strong of a conclusion. No reason to downplay Joseph’s use of sources. Why should those of us who believe keep beating around the bush? Let’s be open about what is happening in the text and then show how it still can be inspired. Here, Alma 40 is direct source borrowing. Linguists can be very confident in distinguishing the differences between some common cultural ideas and direct source borrowing. He was just using sermonic language from the synagogue.” Scholars would never say “the author of Matthew didn’t really have the Hebrew Scriptures open (and quoting from it) when writing his gospel. The linguistic similarities are too great to say “well Joseph was just swimming in the terminology of the day.” I give my thoughts in this exchange in a private forum. Does this shed any light on the Book of Mormon translation process? Or could it be completely random? See the graphic above used as the featured image and the analysis of this midway through the article. But this is a time I made a discovery in my own research. I am primarily a collator and aggregator of others who are producing original research and ideas. He published this as a book recently, and I see discussion about this quite regularly in social media lately, so it’s a good time to review this original post.

The following is a blog post originally posted on the churchistrue blog in 2016 following Tad Callister’s BYU devotional talk titled “The Book of Mormon man-made or God-given.” A year later in LDS General Conference, he gave this same presentation in shortened form.

Tad callister