Rough draft thoughts from my original comment here

Sam Brown would argue “we expect to see anachronisms” in the book (because of Joseph’s imprint). But this model has some significant deficiencies:

  1. Several central theses of the book itself are undermined:

    • The eternal nature of the Gospel demonstrated by Christian teachings before Christ. A central claim of the Book of Mormon is that the Gospel was practiced in a very “Christian” way by those who came before Christ. If we concede that the vast majority of those doctrines are merely unimaginative re-hashes of early 1800s Christian doctrine, what support is left for the central thesis? The Book of Mormon no longer acts to demonstrate that God, or his gospel, is eternal and unchanging.
    • God speaks to all his sheep. A central claim of the Book of Mormon is that Christ visited other sheep. If this was not historical, then it undermines the teaching espoused by the book itself.
    • A needed restoration or clarification of plain and precious truths. 1 Nephi 13 states “These last records, which thou has seen among the Gentiles, shall establish the truth of the first…” A major advantage claimed for the Book of Mormon is that it is the “word of God” whereas the Bible is merely “the word of God insofar as it is translated correctly”. The Book of Mormon, because it was translated by “the gift and power of God” was meant to better preserve the actual, pure Gospel and at least clarify plain and precious truths. If Joseph Smith infused his own thinking and environment into the Book of Mormon at every turn, this substantially undermines the usefulness of the Book of Mormon being translated by “the gift and power of God” and it leads to the same problem the Book of Mormon was meant to address–what exactly are the plain and precious truths? How much of these truths are plain, precious and eternal and how many are mixtures with the theology of the 1800s? If we concede that JS infused much of his own milieu into the book then arguably the Bible then becomes a better, more accurate representation of the Gospel (at least as it was taught anciently) than the BoM.
  2. If we allow that any holy book purporting to be a holy record may contain as much as, say, 50% of the translator’s thinking and milieu, on what grounds would you dismiss the other purportedly holy books? Let’s just say that the Book of Jeraneck is 50% a perfect transmission of the ancient record and 50% Matthew Gill’s own thinking about the ancients’ thinking and lives. Are you prepared to accept Gill’s book as “the word of God” if 50% of it can be shown to be theologically or historically anachronistic?
  3. God apparently performed an incredible series of gymnastics thousands of years ahead of the loss of the 116 pages (see Words of Mormon 1:3-7) in order to ensure that “all those parts of my gospel which my holy prophets, yea, and also my disciples, desired in their prayers should come forth unto this people” (D&C 10:46). Why would God have done so much to ensure that the loss of the 116 pages wouldn’t hamper his work and then allow for Joseph to be so incredibly careless in translating, generally?
  4. If so many of the teachings become suspect as being merely borrowed from Joseph Smith’s milieu (opposition in all things, the anti-Pelagian description of the Fall, the discussion in Alma 40 about the state of the soul after death, the “infinite atonement” and the handling of the atonement generally, etc) how can we ever inspect a Book of Mormon doctrine again and say, “yes, this was what some group in ancient american ‘literally’ believed thousands of years ago”? Isn’t that a very slipperly slope into taking the BoM wholly symbolically? And, what do we then do with the fact that leaders taught it all as literal for most of the history of the Church? Isn’t truth “knowledge of things as they are, and as they were”? At that point, the BoM has become a vehicle for spreading mis-information because Lehi (if he existed) probably never talked to Jacob about opposition in all things and the fall in the manner recorded in 2 Nephi, and Alma (if he existed) never really talked with his son about the state of the soul the way it was recorded.

[older version using for fodder]

  1. A central claim of the Book of Mormon is that the Gospel was practiced in a very “Christian” way by those who came before Christ. If the vast majority of those preChristian-Christian doctrines are merely unimaginative re-hashes of early 1800s Christian doctrine, what support is left for that central thesis?
  2. A major advantage claimed for the Book of Mormon is that it is the “word of God” whereas the Bible was “the word of God insofar as it is translated correctly”. The Book of Mormon, because it was translated by “the gift and power of God” was meant to better preserve the actual, pure Gospel. If Joseph Smith infused his own thinking and environment into the Book of Mormon at every turn, this substantially undermines the usefulness of the Book of Mormon being translated by “the gift and power of God.” Arguably, the Bible then becomes a better, more accurate representation of the Gospel as it was taught anciently than the BoM.
  3. If we allow that any holy book purporting to be a holy record may contain as much as, say, 50% of the translator’s thinking and milieu, on what grounds would you dismiss the other purportedly holy books? Let’s just say that the Book of Jeraneck is 50% a perfect transmission of the ancient record and 50% Matthew Gill’s own thinking about the ancients’ thinking and lives. Are you prepared to accept Gill’s book as “the word of God” if 50% of it can be shown to be theologically or historically anachronistic?
  4. God apparently performed an incredible series of gymnastics thousands of years ahead of the loss of the 116 pages (see Words of Mormon 1:3-7) in order to ensure that “all those parts of my gospel which my holy prophets, yea, and also my disciples, desired in their prayers should come forth unto this people” (D&C 10:46). Why would God have done so much to ensure that the loss of the 116 pages wouldn’t hamper his work and then allow for Joseph to be so incredibly careless in translating, generally?
  5. If so many of the teachings become suspect as being merely borrowed from Joseph Smith’s milieu (opposition in all things, the anti-Pelagian description of the Fall, the discussion in Alma 40 about the state of the soul after death, the “infinite atonement” and the handling of the atonement generally, etc) how can we ever inspect a Book of Mormon doctrine again and say, “yes, this was what some group in ancient american ‘literally’ believed thousands of years ago”? Isn’t that a very slipperly slope into taking the BoM wholly symbolically? And, what do we then do with the fact that leaders taught it all as literal for most of the history of the Church? Isn’t truth “knowledge of things as they are, and as they were”? At that point, the BoM has become a vehicle for spreading mis-information because Lehi (if he existed) probably never talked to Jacob about opposition in all things and the fall in the manner recorded in 2 Nephi, and Alma (if he existed) never really talked with his son about the state of the soul the way it was recorded.