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From: russ@dadla-a.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Statistical Authorship Analysis of the Book of Mormon
Message-ID: <406@dadla-a.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Jan-84 22:06:15 EST
Article-I.D.: dadla-a.406
Posted: Tue Jan 10 22:06:15 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Jan-84 05:36:04 EST
References: azure.2485
Lines: 26

Jon White is right in his quotes that the wordprints are not a proof of
multiple authorship of the Book of Mormon.  But it is another of the several
supports that I have been presenting for the Book of Mormon.  Each one of
them by themselves are not conclusive, but taken as a whole they start to
make a significant case.  Also most of the criticisms in the Sunstone articles
which Jon quoted from were also discussed in that same issue.  Many of the
problems were dealt with but had not been mentioned in the original
publication of the results.  I tried to use a later publication were the
informaton was more complete, but I still only included a small portion
of the information.  Even if I had included more, it still is just one aspect
of the Book of Mormon.

  >There is another problem with the study that is not likely to be mentioned by
  >Mormon scholars.  As Jerald and Sandra Tanner have pointed out, it would be
  >very difficult to make a valid stylistic analysis of a book that plagiarizes 
  >from so many different sources.

This might be claimed by the Tanner's and they do see support for their theory,
but one of the things that was interesting about the Wordprint study is that
the Book of Mormon authors not only groups separate from Joseph Smith and his
contemporaries, but each author also grouped by himself.  Each author had a
style that was somewhat unique from the other authors and was clustered in one
area of the statistical result.

Russell Anderson
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