King James English

Taken from The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, page 59.

(Both quotes from Hugh Nibley)

"The only alternative to Joseph Smith's explanation (of how the Book of Mormon came to be) is to assume . . . the existence of a forger who at one moment is so clever and (skillful) as to imitate the archaic poetry of the desert to perfection and supply us with genuine Egyptian names, and yet so incredibly stupid as to think that the best way to fool people and get money out of them is to write an exceedingly difficult historical epic of six hundred pages. Endowed with the brains, perseverance, and superhuman cunning necessary to produce this monumental forgery, the incredibly sly genius did not have the wit to know, after years of experience in the arts of deception, that there are ten thousand safer and easier ways of fooling people than by undertaking a work of infinite toil and danger which, as he could see from the first, only made him immensely unpopular. This is the forger who never existed."

(Next taken from, the Prophetic Book of Mormon, pages 216-218)

The Church News recently received (1957) a letter from an interested non-member of the Church making an inquiry.   Dr. Nibley's reply, published herewith, is worth the reading of every Latter-day Saint.

Why did Joseph Smith, a nineteenth century American farm boy, translate the Book of Mormon into seventeenth century King James English instead of into contemporary language?

"The first thing to note is that the "contemporary language" of the country-people of New England 130 years ago was not so far from King James English.

Even the New England writers of later generations, like Webster, Melville, and Emerson, lapse into its stately periods and "thees and thous" in their loftier passages.

For that matter, we still pray in that language and teach our small children to do the same; that is, we still recognize the validity of a special speech set apart for special occasions. My old Hebrew and Arabic teacher, Professor Popper, would throw a student out of the class who did not use 'thee' and 'thou' in constructing.

'This is the word of God!  he would cry indignantly. 'This is the Bible!  Let us show a little respect; let us have a little formal English here!'

Furthermore, the Book of Mormon is full of scripture, and for the world of Joseph Smith's day, the King James Version was the Scripture.  Large sections of the Book of Mormon, therefore, had to be in the language of the King James Version…

We must not forget that ancient scribes were consciously archaic in their writing, so that most of the scriptures were probably in old-fashioned language the day they were written down. To efface that solemn antique style by the latest up-to-date usage is to translate falsely…

The Book of Mormon avoids the necessity of having to be redone into "modern English" every thirty or forty years.  If the plates were being translated for the first time today, it would still be King James English!"