Home / Out of Place?
Since 1830, critics have kept a list of things in the Book of Mormon that supposedly didn't exist in the ancient world — scholars call these anachronisms — and this page tracks every distinct claim on that list, all 46 of them, because the list has been shrinking for two centuries, and it only ever shrinks in one direction.
Here is how to read this table. Each row names something the book mentions, the critics who flagged it as impossible, and what has been dug up, decoded, or discovered since — with the source for every claim, so that you can check us. Where the answer is real, we say Found; where the answer is partial, we say so; and where the question is still open, as it honestly is for horses, we print Still open rather than pretend, because a single overstated row would poison every honest one. Open does not mean dead, though — where active research is probing a question, the row carries a Being investigated note with the sources, so that you can watch these questions move.
A word about the count, because you may have seen claims of "hundreds" of anachronisms. Lists that reach into the hundreds get there by counting the same claim several times — horses, "horses pulling chariots," and "no horse bones found" become three entries when they are one question — so we consolidate: every distinct claim in the critical literature, from Alexander Campbell in 1831 to the CES Letter in 2013, gets exactly one row. If you believe we have missed one, tell us, and it gets a row with an honest status like every other. Two famous criticisms are absent on purpose, because they are population-scale arguments rather than out-of-place items: DNA and the absence of Old World language links live on the criticisms pages, treated at full strength.
| What the book mentions | Who said it was out of place | What we now know | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animals — 5 claims | |||
| Horses1 Nephi 18:25; Alma 18:9 | The flagship item on every critical list since the 1830s Coe, Dialogue (1973); CES Letter (2013) | Mainstream science holds that American horses died out around the end of the Ice Age, and until that consensus moves, this row stays open. The naming alternative is real, though: when the two worlds finally met, the Yucatec Maya named the horse after the tapir, and Spaniards called bison "cows." Restall, Maya Conquistador (1998) on tzimin; Sorenson (1985), ch. 7 Being investigatedTwo active research fronts are pushing on the extinction date itself: environmental-DNA work in Yukon permafrost found horse DNA persisting to roughly 9,000 and perhaps 5,700 years ago — thousands of years past the last bones — published in Nature Communications by mainstream paleogeneticists; and a 2022 study of a Mexican site reported nineteen radiocarbon dates suggesting extinct horses survived into the last few thousand years, though its methods await independent confirmation. If either line holds, the gap this row must close shrinks dramatically. Murchie et al., Nature Communications 12 (2021); Miller et al., Texas Journal of Science 74 (2022); methodological cautions at A Careful Examination (2023) | Still open |
| ElephantsEther 9:19 (Jaredite era only) | Standard critical lists since the 19th century CES Letter (2013) and predecessors | Elephants appear only in the book's oldest era, which helps, because mastodons and mammoths really did overlap with humans in the Americas — but no accepted find yet puts them in Jaredite country in Jaredite centuries, so the row stays open. Surovell et al., PNAS (2005) Being investigatedThe extinction date keeps moving in the book's direction: mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago and on St. Paul Island until about 5,600 — facts unknown until this century — and the same Yukon environmental-DNA work that found late horses found mammoth DNA persisting to roughly the same window. Researchers now speak of "ghost ranges": populations that outlived their last known bones by thousands of years. Vartanyan et al. on Wrangel; Graham et al., PNAS 113 (2016) on St. Paul; Murchie et al., Nature Communications 12 (2021) | Still open |
| Cattle, oxen, sheep, goats, swine, assesEnos 1:21; Ether 9:18 | Standard critical lists CES Letter (2013) and predecessors | No Old World domesticates are attested, and we say so plainly; the serious question is translation, because loan-shifting is documented at contact in both directions — Maya "tzimin" (tapir) for horse, Spanish "vaca" (cow) for bison — and the candidate animals (bison, peccary, bighorn, camelids) all exist. A documented precedent is not a find, so the row stays open. Restall (1998); Sorenson (1985), ch. 7 Being investigatedZooarchaeology keeps finding more animal management in ancient Mesoamerica than anyone expected: isotope studies show deer and turkeys raised on human-grown maize, and evidence of penned and traded animals is accumulating — which narrows the distance between "no domesticates" and the herding the text describes. Thornton, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (2016); Sugiyama et al., PNAS (2015) on managed animals at Teotihuacan | Still open |
| Cureloms and cumomsEther 9:19 | Mocked as invented animals 19th-century reviews onward | These two words were left untranslated — which is exactly what an honest translation does when the target language has no word for an animal that no longer exists. A forger invents familiar animals; a translator transliterates unknown ones. No identification is accepted, so the row stays open. Text of Ether 9:19; translation-practice parallels in KJV (e.g., untranslated "shittim" wood) Being investigatedCandidate work continues on which late-surviving big animals the Jaredite-era words could name — ground sloths, glyptodonts, and tapirs all overlap humans in the Americas — with the candidate lists refined as megafauna dating improves. Wade Miller, Science and the Book of Mormon (2010); Book of Mormon Central, KnoWhy 435 | Still open |
| Bees and honey ("deseret")Ether 2:3 | "No honeybees in the pre-Columbian Americas" standard critical lists | The text places the Jaredites' bees only in the Old World, on the journey — it never says they shipped them — and in any case Mesoamerica had its own ancient beekeeping: the Maya kept stingless bees for honey long before Columbus. Ether 2 text; Crane, The World History of Beekeeping (1999) | Dissolved |
| Plants & food — 5 claims | |||
| BarleyMosiah 9:9; Alma 11:7 | Listed among impossible crops for centuries standard critical lists; CES Letter (2013) | Pre-Columbian cultivated little barley turned up at Hohokam sites in Arizona — reported in Science 83 in December 1983, with naked (threshing-ready) grains at Snaketown in layers reaching back to roughly 300 BC — and later work treats domesticated little barley as an established New World crop. Science 83 (Dec 1983); Bohrer (1970); Adams (2014); Kinder et al., Kiva (2017) Honest note: a native American barley species, not the Old World grain — which is what a translated grain-word would look like. | Found |
| "Sheum" and "neas" — supposedly made-up cropsMosiah 9:9 | Cited as gibberish Joseph Smith invented 19th–20th century critical lists | Sheum is the standard Akkadian grain word (še'um) from ancient Mesopotamia — and cuneiform was not deciphered until the 1850s, a generation too late for anyone in 1829 to have known it. Neas remains unidentified, which is what real ancient crop lists look like: some words survive translation, some don't. Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, s.v. še'um; Hoskisson, JBMS 3/1 (1994) | Found |
| WheatMosiah 9:9 | Standard critical lists CES Letter (2013) | No pre-Columbian wheat has been found. The barley reversal and the sheum precedent show how grain words behave in translation, and amaranth or huauzontle may sit behind the English word — but nothing has been dug up, so this row is open, full stop. Sorenson (1985), ch. 8 Being investigatedThe roster of known New World crops is still growing, because the science that finds ancient seeds — flotation and starch-grain analysis — is barely two generations old: an entire agricultural complex of domesticated grains in eastern North America went unrecognized until the 1980s, and barley itself sat on the impossible list until 1983. Absence in a young field is weak evidence. Bruce D. Smith, Science 246 (1989); Adams (2014) | Still open |
| Wine and vineyardsMosiah 11:15 | "No grapes, no wine" standard critical lists | Fermented drinks pressed from cultivated plants were everywhere in ancient Mesoamerica — pulque from maguey, balché among the Maya — and the Spanish themselves called such drinks "wine of the country," which is precisely the naming behavior a translation would show. Grape wine specifically remains unattested. Bruman, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico (2000); colonial "vino de la tierra" usage | Partly |
| Flax and linenMosiah 10:5 | "No flax in the Americas" standard critical lists | Flax is unattested, but the fabric is not: conquest-era Spaniards repeatedly described fine maguey- and cotton-fiber cloth as linen, because that is what it looked and handled like — so the English word may name the fabric grade, not the plant. Díaz del Castillo, conquest accounts; Sorenson (1985), ch. 8 | Partly |
| Metals & materials — 9 claims | |||
| Writing on metal plates1 Nephi 19:1 | Ridiculed from 1829 onward; M. T. Lamb called ancient metal records unknown to history The Golden Bible (1887) | Sacred writing on metal is now abundantly attested in exactly Lehi's world: the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, excavated in Jerusalem in 1979 and dated to about 600 BC, carry the oldest known biblical text; Darius I buried gold and silver foundation plates; the Pyrgi gold tablets record a temple dedication. Barkay, Tel Aviv 19 (1992); Israel Museum; Persepolis excavation reports | Found |
| Gold plates too heavy to carrywitness accounts | Critics computed 200 pounds for solid gold plates and called the story physically impossible critical literature on the witnesses | The witnesses consistently estimated forty to sixty pounds, which is wrong for solid gold but right for tumbaga — the gold-copper alloy that ancient American metalsmiths actually used for precious objects — whose surface treats and gilds to look like pure gold. The criticism assumes a metallurgy the text never claims. Putnam, Improvement Era (1966); Grover, Ziff, Magic Goggles, and Golden Plates (2015) | Dissolved |
| A steel sword in 600 BC Jerusalem1 Nephi 4:9 (Laban's sword) | "Steel was not invented yet" CES Letter (2013) and predecessors | A meter-long sword excavated in 1982 at Vered Jericho, dated to about 620 BC — Lehi's own generation, twenty kilometers from Jerusalem — is described by the Israel Museum as "iron hardened into steel, attesting to substantial metallurgical know-how." Carburized steel in the region is older still. Eitan excavation (1982); Israel Museum; Shanks, BAR 12/4 (1986) | Found |
| Nephi's bow "of fine steel"1 Nephi 16:18 | Called doubly impossible: steel too early, and steel bows unknown anciently standard critical lists | The King James Bible itself says "bow of steel" three times — Job 20:24, Psalm 18:34, 2 Samuel 22:35 — translating a Hebrew word for bronze, because "steel" in older English named hard metal generally. Nephi's phrase is the ordinary scriptural-English rendering of a bronze-reinforced bow, a weapon type well attested in the ancient Near East. KJV concordance, s.v. steel; Hamblin, Warfare in the Ancient Near East (2006) | Dissolved |
| The brass plates1 Nephi 3:3 | "Brass wasn't invented until later" occasional critical lists | "Brass" is the King James word for copper alloys of every kind — the KJV's Old Testament says brass hundreds of times for what metallurgists call bronze — and copper-alloy plates and tablets are attested across the ancient Near East, so the criticism dissolves into a vocabulary quibble with the entire English Bible. KJV usage; copper scroll of Qumran (3Q15) as a later parallel | Dissolved |
| "Ziff" — an unknown metalMosiah 11:3, 8 | Mocked as a made-up word 19th-century reviews onward | Ziff remains unidentified — an honest open row — but unknown metal terms are what genuine ancient records produce (scholars still argue over several biblical metal words), and Hebrew ziv, "brightness," gives the word a plausible Semitic shape. Biblical metal-term debates (e.g., ḥashmal in Ezekiel 1:4); Book of Mormon Onomasticon, s.v. ziff Being investigatedThe leading proposal identifies ziff with tumbaga or another gilded copper alloy documented in ancient American metalwork, with metallurgical analysis of the proposal published and debated in the last decade. Grover, Ziff, Magic Goggles, and Golden Plates (2015) | Still open |
| Iron and steel industry in the New WorldJarom 1:8 | Standard critical lists CES Letter (2013) | No New World steel industry is attested, and we say so; what exists is meteoric-iron working (Olmec mirrors, Hopewell iron beads) and the possibility that "steel" translates a hardened alloy like tumbaga, on the same KJV precedent as Nephi's bow. The text's "dross" and the rusted Jaredite blades of Mosiah 8:11 belong to this same open question. Olmec iron-ore mirrors, Science 164 (1969); Sorenson (1985) Being investigatedThe history of American metallurgy keeps getting older and richer as labs re-examine museum collections: Andean metalworking now reaches back past 1000 BC, West Mexican metallurgy scholarship keeps revising its dates and origins, and analysis of Hopewell meteoric-iron artifacts continues — a field young enough that its map still has blank regions. Burger & Gordon, Science 282 (1998); Hosler, The Sounds and Colors of Power (1994); McCoy et al., Journal of Archaeological Science (2017) | Still open |
| Cement constructionHelaman 3:7–11 (~46 BC) | Ridiculed in the 19th and early 20th centuries as absurd for ancient America documented in Roper, FARMS Review (2006) | Mesoamerican builders were expert in lime cement by exactly the period the text names: a Johns Hopkins doctoral study concluded cement work was "technically well advanced in America in the first century A.D.," and Teotihuacan alone carries an estimated twelve million square meters of lime plaster. Hyman, Precolumbian Cements (Johns Hopkins, 1970); Barba & Córdova (1999) | Found |
| Glass and glass windowsEther 2:23; 3:1 | Glassmaking called out of reach for the eras described standard critical lists | Glass itself is far older than the critics assumed — Egypt and Mesopotamia made it by 1500 BC, well before the Jaredite verses in question — and "windows... dashed in pieces" is Moroni's own late wording; still, no New World glassmaking is attested, so the row stays partial. Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials (1994); Shortland (2012) | Partly |
| Words & names — 9 claims | |||
| "Alma" as a man's nameMosiah 17:2 | Mocked for a century as a Latin woman's name on a Hebrew man e.g., Walter Martin, The Maze of Mormonism (1962) | A land deed from the Bar Kokhba era, excavated by Yigael Yadin in 1961 near the Dead Sea, is signed by "Alma son of Judah" — a Semitic male name, in Hebrew, from the ancient Jewish world. Yadin, Bar-Kokhba (1971), p. 176 | Found |
| Greek-derived words: "Christ," "Alpha and Omega," "church"2 Nephi 10:3; 3 Nephi 9:18 | Alexander Campbell's founding objection: Greek words in a Hebrew record Campbell, Delusions (1831) | These are English words — the book is an English translation, and English carries its religious vocabulary through Greek, so "Christ" renders "anointed one" exactly as it does when English Bibles translate the Hebrew mashiach. The objection would disqualify every English Bible ever printed. Standard translation practice; KJV renders Hebrew qahal as "congregation/church-assembly" | Dissolved |
| Modern-sounding words: "adieu," "Bible," "Jews"Jacob 7:27; 2 Nephi 29:3 | Presented as French and modern English leaking into an ancient record standard critical lists | "Adieu" was ordinary American English in 1829 — Webster's 1828 dictionary lists it — and a translation uses the translator's language by definition; "Bible" appears in a prophecy about the future; and the King James Bible itself calls pre-exilic Judahites "Jews" (2 Kings 16:6), so each word convicts the English, not the record. Webster (1828), s.v. adieu; KJV usage | Dissolved |
| Greek personal names: Timothy, Lachoneus3 Nephi 3:19; 19:4 | "How did Greek names reach Hebrew colonists?" standard critical lists | Greeks were already in Lehi's world: Judahite ostraca from Arad, written in Lehi's own generation, record rations for the "Kittim" — Aegean mercenaries serving in Judah's forts — and a Greek mercenary garrison site sits on the Judean coast at Mesad Hashavyahu. Greek names in a family six centuries later need even less explaining. Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (1981); Naveh on Mesad Hashavyahu, IEJ (1962) | Found |
| "Isabel" — a Spanish name?Alma 39:3 | Flagged as a European name out of time occasional critical lists | Isabel is simply the Romance-language form of the Semitic name that appears in the Bible as Jezebel — the name family is ancient Near Eastern, and its bearer in the text plays a Jezebel-like role, which reads more like literary aptness than accident. Standard etymology of Isabel/Elisheba/Izebel; Book of Mormon Onomasticon | Dissolved |
| "Reformed Egyptian" — no such scriptMormon 9:32 | Called an invented language by critics from the beginning Campbell (1831) onward | Egyptian script "reformed" twice in antiquity — hieratic and then demotic are literally simplified, evolved Egyptian — and Israelite scribes really did mix systems: Judahite ostraca use hieratic (Egyptian) numerals inside Hebrew texts, and Papyrus Amherst 63 writes an entire Aramaic scripture collection in demotic Egyptian script. Semitic language in Egyptian characters is no longer a hypothesis; it is a museum object. The New World half of the question we state plainly rather than explain away: some fifteen Mesoamerican scripts are documented, most remain undeciphered, and none deciphered so far shows a Semitic connection. Wimmer, Palästinisches Hieratisch (2008); Steiner & Nims on Papyrus Amherst 63; Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (1981); Macri, The World's Writing Systems (1996) | Found |
| Nephite coinsAlma 11 (heading only) | "No Book of Mormon coin has ever been found" standard critical lists; CES Letter (2013) | The text never mentions coins at all — the word entered through a chapter heading added by editors in 1920 and corrected in later editions — and what Alma 11 actually describes is a standardized system of metal weights tied to grain measures, which is precisely how pre-coinage economies worked — and Mesoamerican money, for the record, was measured commodity (cacao, cloth), exactly that kind of economy. 1830 text; heading history in FAIR; Welch, JBMS 8/2 (1999); Coe, The Maya (2002) on cacao currency | Dissolved |
| The Liahona called a "compass"Alma 37:38 | "Magnetic compasses didn't exist in 600 BC" standard critical lists | The text describes a miraculous pointer-ball prepared by God, never a magnetic instrument, and "compass" in older English names anything round that encompasses — the same word family the KJV uses for encircling. The criticism reads a 19th-century instrument into a word the text uses differently. Text of 1 Nephi 16:10, 28; OED, s.v. compass | Dissolved |
| "Cimeters" (curved swords)Enos 1:20; Mosiah 9:16 | Claimed to be a medieval-Islamic weapon impossible before Muhammad Key, "The Book of Mormon in the Light of Science" (1985) | Curved sickle-swords (the khopesh) were standard in the ancient Near East two thousand years before Lehi, and Mesoamerican armies carried curved-edged weapons of their own, so the word describes a weapon class that existed on both ends of the story. Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands (1963); Hassig, Aztec Warfare (1988) | Found |
| Places & the Old World journey — 6 claims | |||
| A place called Nahom in Arabia1 Nephi 16:34 | Dismissed as an invented name; later critics argued NHM is too common a root to matter e.g., Philip Jenkins (2015) | Three altars naming the tribe of Nihm, excavated at the Bar'an temple near Marib, Yemen (1988–1997), date to the seventh–sixth centuries BC — the right name, in the right place on the incense trail, in Lehi's century, where the trail turns east toward the one fertile stretch of Arabian coast. Vogt, Bar'an excavation reports; Brown, JBMS 8/1 (1999); Aston, JBMS 10/2 (2001) | Found |
| Bountiful: a garden coast in "empty" Arabia1 Nephi 17:5–6 | 19th-century readers "knew" Arabia was wall-to-wall desert, so a coast with fruit, timber, water, and ore was called proof of fraud 19th-century reviews; the era's gazetteers | The Dhofar coast of Oman — nearly due east of the Nihm region, exactly as the text requires — catches the monsoon and turns green: fresh water, sycamore-fig timber, wild honey, and accessible ore have all been documented at candidate sites like Khor Kharfot. The "impossible" coast exists, in the right place. Aston & Aston, In the Footsteps of Lehi (1994); Aston, Lehi and Sariah in Arabia (2015) | Found |
| A river "continually running" to the Red Sea1 Nephi 2:8–9 | "Arabia has no perennial rivers" standard critical lists | Candidate wadis with year-round flow in protected canyons have been documented three days' travel down the Red Sea coast — Wadi Tayyib al-Ism is the leading proposal — though whether its ancient flow matched the text's description is still argued, so the row stays partial. Potter, JBMS 8/1 (1999); subsequent field surveys | Partly |
| Christ born "at Jerusalem"Alma 7:10 | Ridiculed as the book's plainest blunder — everyone knows Bethlehem critical literature from the 19th century onward | The verse says "at Jerusalem, which is the land of our forefathers" — land, not city — and "land of Jerusalem" as a district including its satellite towns is exactly how ancient sources talk: the Amarna letters from Egypt's archives use "land of Jerusalem" centuries before Lehi, and a Dead Sea Scroll places events in "the land of Jerusalem." Bethlehem sits five miles from the city, inside that district. Amarna letters EA 287, 290; 4Q385a (Pseudo-Jeremiah); discussion in Welch & Seely, eds. | Dissolved |
| Israelite temples outside Jerusalem2 Nephi 5:16 | Called a violation of Deuteronomy no faithful Israelite would commit 19th-century critiques onward | The Jewish colony at Elephantine in Egypt built and operated its own temple in the fifth century BC — we have their papyri discussing it — and an Israelite temple stood at Arad in Judah itself, so diaspora and frontier temples are now documented fact. Elephantine papyri (Cowley, 1923); Aharoni, Arad, BASOR (1968) | Found |
| Synagogues before the exileAlma 16:13 | Synagogues supposedly arose only after the Babylonian captivity standard critical lists | The English word translates whatever assembly places the Nephites built, and gathering places for worship and reading demonstrably predate the formal synagogue institution — but because the institution's early history is genuinely debated among scholars, the row stays partial rather than claimed. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue (2000), on origins debates | Partly |
| Buildings & technology — 6 claims | |||
| Massive earthen fortificationsAlma 49–53 | Dismissed as fantasy warfare in a supposedly empty wilderness 19th-century reviews; Coe, Dialogue 8/2 (1973) | Excavations at Becán and elsewhere revealed exactly the described system — dry ditches, earthen banks topped with timber palisades, narrow entries — dated to Book of Mormon centuries. Webster, Defensive Earthworks at Becán (1976); Sorenson, Mormon's Codex (2013), ch. 20 | Found |
| Highways "cast up"3 Nephi 6:8; Helaman 14:24 | Engineered roads called absurd for ancient America 19th-century reviews | The Maya built raised, surfaced causeways — sacbeob, literally "white roads," elevated beds of stone finished in lime plaster — including a sixty-mile engineered highway from Cobá to Yaxuná. "Cast up" describes their construction method with uncomfortable precision. Shaw, "Maya Sacbeob," Ancient Mesoamerica 12 (2001); Cobá–Yaxuná causeway surveys | Found |
| MarketplacesHelaman 7:10 | Formal markets doubted for Mesoamerica into the 20th century older archaeological consensus | Marketplace archaeology has since matured: soil chemistry identified an ancient market at Chunchucmil, and painted murals at Calakmul show market vendors and buyers in action, tagged with glyphs — the institution the text casually assumes is now excavated and illustrated. Dahlin et al., Latin American Antiquity (2007); Carrasco Vargas et al., PNAS 106 (2009) | Found |
| Ancient American writing & sacred booksMosiah 1:3–4 | "The Indians had no writing" — settled fact to 19th-century critics e.g., Shook, Cumorah Revisited (1910) | The Maya wrote a full script in bound books; Epi-Olmec writing reaches back before Christ; the San Bartolo murals carry glyphs from roughly 300 BC; and scribal culture — kept by an elite, in a script most people couldn't read — matches the book's own description of record keeping. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (1992); Saturno et al., Science 311 (2006) | Found |
| Wheels (implied by "chariots")Alma 18:9 | "The wheel was unknown in the Americas" standard critical lists; CES Letter (2013) | Wheeled figurines — dozens of them, from roughly 100 BC onward — show the wheel-and-axle concept was known in Mesoamerica after all; what remains missing is any functional vehicle, and the text itself never describes chariots rolling or wheeling in battle. Ekholm, American Antiquity 11/4 (1946); Diehl & Mandeville, Antiquity 61 (1987) | Partly |
| ChariotsAlma 18:9–12; 3 Nephi 3:22 | Standard critical lists CES Letter (2013) | The wheel concept is now attested (see the row above), and the text never actually shows a chariot rolling, being ridden, or fighting — it may name a litter or cart-like conveyance — but no vehicle remains have been found, so the row stays open. Ekholm (1946) Being investigatedTwo directions are live: textual work on what "chariot" translates — Mesoamerican kings demonstrably traveled by litter, which fits every chariot verse in the book — and the archaeology of wheeled objects keeps expanding beyond the first finds, with new examples and contexts still being catalogued. Book of Mormon Central, KnoWhy 51; Gardner, Second Witness vol. 4; Diehl & Mandeville (1987) | Still open |
| Scripture, text & chronology — 4 claims | |||
| Isaiah chapters written after Lehi left?1 Nephi 20–21; 2 Nephi 6–8 (Isaiah 48–54) | Mainstream scholarship since 1892 dates Isaiah 40–55 to the Babylonian exile — decades after Lehi's departure Duhm tradition; Brueggemann (2003); Stromberg (2011) | This is the strongest textual criticism on this page, and we treat it as such: if the exile dating of Second Isaiah holds, chapters Nephi quotes had not yet been written when he left Jerusalem. Responses exist — a minority of scholars still argues for substantial Isaianic unity, and some believing scholars accept the consensus while treating the quotations as translation-level framing — but none of these is a discovery, so the row stays open. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, NICOT (unity defense); survey in Gee & Madsen, eds. Being investigatedIsaiah studies remain genuinely active — arguments continue over pre-exilic material inside chapters 40–55 — while on the Latter-day Saint side, critical-text work is establishing exactly which Isaiah readings the Book of Mormon reflects, since the answer constrains every theory of how the quotations got there. Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants; Interpreter Isaiah studies | Still open |
| "The five books of Moses" on the brass plates1 Nephi 5:11 | The Pentateuch was not compiled as five books until after the Babylonian exile, so a 600 BC library shouldn't contain them Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament (2014); McDermott (2002) | If the consensus dating of the Pentateuch's compilation holds, then "five books of Moses" must be the translation describing an ancient library in the reader's terms — the way any translation names familiar things — and meaningful parts of the underlying material (Deuteronomic and priestly traditions) are argued by a range of scholars to predate Lehi. Because that response leans on contested dating and on translation framing rather than on a find, the row stays open. Berman, Inconsistency in the Torah (2017); Bokovoy (2014) — a believing scholar's own treatment Being investigatedPentateuch dating is itself a moving field, with credentialed voices arguing for substantially earlier compositional layers than the older consensus allowed, and with believing scholars modeling how a genuine translation would frame an ancient collection in modern labels. Berman (2017); Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003) | Still open |
| King James wording — including its mistakes2 Nephi 12:16 ("ships of the sea"); 2 Nephi 23:21 ("satyr"); NT phrasing throughout | The book tracks the KJV closely "even when it mistranslates," doubles a Septuagint reading in Isaiah 2:16, and carries hundreds of New Testament-length phrases Wright, Dialogue 31/4 (1998); Huggins, Dialogue 36/1 (2003); Hardy, Annotated Book of Mormon (2023) | The facts are real and we will not shrink them: biblical quotations follow the King James text, translation-era readings included, and New Testament phrasing threads the book. The live question is what they prove, because on the model many believing scholars hold, the translation rendered biblical quotations through the English Bible its readers already knew — a translator's convention rather than a forger's slip — while the harder cases, like New Testament phrasing outside quoted blocks, push into deeper questions about how the translation worked at all. Full treatment on the criticisms pages; until then, open. Gardner, The Gift and Power (2011); Skousen, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon Being investigatedThis is the most actively studied question in Book of Mormon textual scholarship: the critical-text project has catalogued every King James interaction and argues on linguistic grounds that the translation's base language predates Joseph Smith, while syntax studies complicate simple copying models — and critics keep sharpening the phrase-parallel data on their side. Skousen & Carmack, The Nature of the Original Language (2018); Wright (1998) | Still open |
| Six hundred years from Lehi to Christ1 Nephi 10:4; 3 Nephi 1:1 | Zedekiah's reign began in 597 BC and Jesus was born by 4 BC — roughly 593 solar years, not 600 Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon (2010), n. 15 | The gap is real if Nephite years were solar years — but ancient Judah demonstrably kept 360-day administrative years, a practice documented from Judahite portable calendars in a 2021 Harvard Theological Review study, and six hundred such years from 597 BC land almost exactly on the historical window for the Nativity. Because the calendar identification is a model rather than a find, the row takes partial credit only. Ben-Dov, HTR 114 (2021); Chadwick, BYU Studies 49/4 (2010) | Partly |
| Beliefs & practices — 2 claims | |||
| Baptism before Christ2 Nephi 31:5–6 | Alexander Campbell's list: Christian ordinances centuries early Campbell, Delusions (1831) | Ritual immersion turns out to run deep in pre-Christian Judaism — hundreds of stepped immersion pools (mikva'ot) from the Second Temple era are excavated, and the Qumran community practiced covenant washings — so immersion did not appear with John the Baptist out of nowhere; how far back the practice reaches is still studied, which keeps this row partial. Reich, Miqwa'ot (2013); 1QS (Community Rule) on washings | Partly |
| Christian teachings centuries before Christthroughout | Campbell's core objection: the book resolves "every question discussed in New York for the last ten years" — with modern critics naming the anti-Universalist arguments and satisfaction-atonement theology specifically Campbell, Delusions (1831); Brodie (1945); Vogel on anti-Universalism | This one is a worldview question wearing an anachronism costume: the book openly claims its prophets saw Christ's coming in advance, so the "error" is partly the book's own premise, which evidence can neither dig up nor bury. The sharper modern form — that specific 19th-century debates like Universalism echo in Alma's sermons — draws serious believing responses ranging from prophetic anticipation to the expansion model, in which an ancient core reached English through a translator whose language carried his century. What archaeology did change: the Dead Sea Scrolls showed pre-Christian Judaism far richer in messianic expectation than Campbell's generation believed possible. Full treatment on the criticisms pages. Collins, The Scepter and the Star (1995); Ostler, Dialogue 20/1 (1987) | Partly |
A closing word about the direction of this table, because the direction is the argument. In 1830, every one of these 46 rows stood against the book, and the critics of that generation treated the whole list as settled. Since then, 26 rows have flipped or dissolved — metal plates and Nahom, Alma and barley, cement and the steel sword, the garden coast in "empty" Arabia, the "land of Jerusalem," the highways and marketplaces and fortifications, and a dozen more — while not one row has moved the other way. Eleven remain open, and the hardest of them — the Isaiah chapters, the King James wording, horses — may stay open for a long time; we would rather carry them honestly than trade them for applause. But if you are weighing which way this book's story bends as the ground keeps talking, the trend line is not subtle.
If you know a distinct claim this table is missing, send it — with its source — and it will get a row and an honest status like every other.