I had always heard that Mormons believe God has a wife, and that he and his wife had spiritual offspring. We are his offspring. We existed as spirits before we came to earth. Jesus, I had heard, was the literal firstborn of God and his wife. That meant Jesus had a beginning. He was not eternal.
I also asked about that on Yahoo Answers, and I learned something new. Mormons don't believe anybody had a beginning of existence. We have all existed from eternity--first as "intelligences," then as spirits, and then as flesh and blood.
That answered another question I had also. The first Mormon missionaries I talked to had told me that God had a father before him, and that father had a father before him, etc. So not even God was eternal. But God is eternal just like everybody else, even if he was once just as we are now--ordinary human beings.
But that is not the BOM view. Moroni 8:18 says, "For I know that God is not a partial God, neither a changeable being; but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity." That's pretty explicit. Not only does God exist from eternity to eternity, but God is unchangeable from eternity to eternity. So he could not have been an intelligence who became a spirit who became flesh and blood who became exalted to godhood. The God described here in the BOM is worlds apart from the god Joseph Smith described in the King Follett Discourse. If the BOM really is another God-given testament of Jesus Christ, then Joseph Smith was a false prophet.
Even if the BOM is an ancient American document, and even if it is the word of God, and even if Joseph Smith accurately translated it, he is still a false prophet since he preached a different God from the BOM. According to Deuteronomy 13:1-3, Joseph Smith may have given a sign or wonder by translating the BOM, but that certainly doesn't qualify him as a true prophet.
I noticed some anachronisms while reading the BOM I thought I'd mention. I think anachronisms are one of the strongest evidences against the BOM.
There are several references to synagogues in the new promised land. Keep in mind that Lehi and his people left the land of Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile. Synagogues were an innovation of post-exilic Judaism, so Lehi's people shouldn't have known about them. Yet Alma 16:13 says, "And Alma and Amulek went forth preaching repentance to the people in their temples, and in their sanctuaries, and also in their synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews." Joseph Smith would've known about them, but not Lehi's descendants.
Alma 46:13-15 says all the true believers in Christ who belonged to the church of God were called "Christians" by those who did not belong to the church. That is either an interesting coincidence or it is an anachronism. It's only an accident of history that Christians were called Christians, since according to Acts 11:26, "the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch," presumably by nonbelievers. But it's curious that these people in Alma were being called Christians even before Christ came.
Alma 47:7 makes reference to somebody named "Antipas," which is a Greek name. The Greeks didn't influence the Jews until well after the Babylonian exile.
3 Nephi 2:12 talks about the Lamanites fighting for "their rights, and the privileges of their church and of their worship, and their freedom and their liberty." That sounded like a very American thing to say. At the very least, you'd think the author had been influenced by certain enlightenment ideals.
In 3 Nephi 9:18, Jesus calls himself the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." Alpha and omega would've meant a lot to a Greek speaking audience since they are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, but I don't know what they would've meant to ancient Hebrews who would not have known Greek. The only thing I could figure is maybe the gold plates had the first and last letters of the reformed Egyptian they were written in. Maybe they were translated as alpha and omega since that would've been more familiar to the readers than the 'a' and the 'z.' If so, then reformed Egyptian would have to have been a phonetic script quite unlike Egyptian.
In 3 Nephi 27:3ff, Jesus' disciples asked Jesus what they should call the Church. That struck me as anachronistic since people didn't seem to worry about naming churches until the protestant reformation. Even "Catholic Church" wasn't a proper name so much as a description. "Catholic" means "universal." Of course the issue of naming churches would've made perfectly good sense to somebody like Joseph Smith who was familiar with the Methodist church and the Presbyterian church, but I don't know if it would've made much sense to the disciples of Jesus who were founding the only church there was!
In 2 Nephi 24:29,31, it refers to the land of Israel as "Palestina." Although "Palestine" is derived from the word for "Philistine," the land of Israel was never called "Palestine" until after the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century. The Romans are the ones who gave it that name. I was curious why the BOM would say "Palestina" instead of "Palestine." According to Wikipedia, the Latin word for Palestine is Palaestina.
I already mentioned the horses, elephants, steel, and all that. Even Ether 7:9 mentions steel swords. The interesting thing about that is that Ether is a record of the Jaradites who migrated to America after the tower of Babel incident, thousands of years before Lehi and his family. They had all died off long before Lehi got to America, but they left their records.
In the introduction to the BOM, it says that of the three groups written of in the BOM--the Jaredites, the Nephites, and the Lamanites--all were destroyed except for the Lamanites, and the Lamanites "are the principle ancestors of the American Indians."
DNA tests have confirmed that Native Americans came to the Americas from Asia, not the middle east. Mormons are well aware of this. The explanation I've heard most often is that there were other natives here when Lehi's people migrated to America from Jerusalem, and that Lehi's people made up a small percentage of the population of north and south America. Essentially, they are arguing that the Lamanites are not the principle ancestors of the American Indians, and that's why they haven't shown up in DNA tests. These DNA tests have been done extensively in both North and South America, and there have been no traces of any native Americans of Jewish descent.
The BOM doesn't mention any civilizations that were already in America that didn't come from Jerusalem, and I get the impression from this passage that there were no natives in the land. They must've spread pretty wide, too, because they built cities, had large populations, and waged massive wars. The "promised land" had to have been pretty big.
In Alma 22, it talks a little bit about the geography of some of the land. In verse 31-32, it mentions two areas of land that share a boarder--Desolation to the north and Bountiful to the south. There is a sea on the east and west of these lands, and it takes a day and a half to walk from the east sea to the west sea along the boarder between Desolation and Bountiful. It goes on to say, "and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward." That sounded to me like a good description of central America. That's the only place where one can walk a day and a half to get from the east sea to the west sea.
But then later we find both the Lamanites and the Nephites in the land of Cumorah, by a hill called Cumorah. That's where the final battle between the Lamanites and the Nephites took place, and according to the official LDS website, the hill Cumorah is in New York. It's where the prophet Moroni hid the gold plates, and that's where Joseph Smith found them. Surely, the Nephites and Lamanites were spread more widely than Mormon apologists seem to think.
The Lamanites eventually wiped out the Nephites. In Mormon 6:12-15, it says 220,000 Nephites were killed. But this slaughter was merely the last of a long series of battles in which massive numbers of Nephites were killed. And if there were that many Nephites, think how many Lamanites there must've been! In Mormon 5:6, it says the Lamanites were beating the Nephites because the Lamanites were so great in number. Surely, they outnumbered the Nephites. I think it is unlikely that such large numbers of people would be confined to an insignificant area of land.
Toward the end of the BOM, after the Nephites had all been wiped out except for maybe five people, it says, "And now, behold, I say no more concerning them, for there are none save it be the Lamanites and robbers that do exist upon the face of the land" (Mormon 8:9). The Lamanites are descendents of Lehi, who was a Jew who migrated from Jerusalem in 598 BCE.
There is one more piece of evidence that I think indicates the BOM intends to make the Lamanites out to be the principle ancestors of the native Americans. There are two prophecies concerning the Gentiles' interaction with the descendents of the Lamanites.
These two prophecies seem to be about Europeans coming over to America. They did not "utterly destroy" the native Americans, but they did kill a bunch of them. The native Americans did "dwindle in unbelief," assuming they ever believed in the first place. The "fulness of the gospel" came to the gentiles by way of Joseph Smith restoring the church of Christ. From there, the gospel ought to reach the native Americans. So the BOM presumes that the descendents of the Lamanites are still around, and that they will convert to Mormonism. They must be among the native Americans. That seems to be the assumption of these "prophecies."
I majored in history when I was in college, so I can't always remember whether I first learned something in grade school or whether I learned it in college. That makes it difficult for me to know what's common knowledge and what isn't. But there were some things in the BOM that didn't seem quite right based on what I've learned in my history classes.
When I read this, I texted it to Kay who responded by saying something like, "Sounds like the new world." I wanted to say that didn't sound at all like the new world. There were no horses in north or south American until they were introduced by the Spanish. There was a prehistoric horse that once existed in north America, but it was really small, and it became extinct about 12,000 years ago.
I remember after reading this last year that I searched the internet for Mormon responses. I found a web page that had pictures of cave drawings. The cave drawings looked like people riding horses. The author said something like, "Archaeologists call these dogs, but judge for yourself." I would show you a picture, but I can't seem to find it.
I found this FARMS article on "Horses in the Book of Mormon" by Robert R. Bennett. FARMS is a Mormon apologetics organization. He said that "archaeological evidence for the presence of the horse in the pre-Columbian Americas is presently scant and inconclusive." He makes several suggestions, though. One is that perhaps there were so few horses that they just haven't survived in the archaeological record. He says, "the Book of Mormon claims only that horses were known to some New World peoples before the time of Christ in certain limited regions of the New World."
I know Mormon apologists like to argue that the stories in the BOM happened in a small geographical area, but if you just read the book, you don't get that impression. But I also doubt his claim that there were few horses. Just look at some of the references he cites. In Enos 1:21, it says that the Nephites had "many horses." Well, the Nephites were one of the major people's of the BOM, engaged in battles that killed tens of thousands of people. If you ran into a rancher who said he had "many horses," you might think forty would be enough to justify such a claim. But if a group of 50,000 people said they had "many horses," you wouldn't think forty would be enough to justify the claim. So it seems to me that the Nephites, being as populous as they were, had to have had a pretty significant herd. And they weren't the only people who had horses, either.
In 3 Nephi 3:22, it says the Nephites took "their horses, and their chariots, ...and did march forth by thousands and by tens of thousands..." Of course it doesn't say how many horses there were, but I figure if they were significant enough to mention among tens of thousands of people, there must've been a lot of them.
Just a few chapters later in 3 Nephi 6:1, it says, "And now it came to pass that the people of the Nephites did all return to their own lands in the twenty and sixth year, every man, with his family, his flocks and his herds, his horses and his cattle, and all things whatsoever did belong unto them." Now maybe the author was exaggerating when he said they did all return, every man with his horses, but even if half of them had horses, that's still a pretty significant number of horses. And remember that these horses were in the land for hundreds of years, which means many generations of significant herds of horses.
If these horses became extinct, it had to have been fairly recently. At the very latest, they became extinct around the time of Christ, just 2000 years ago. Yet we have no problem discovering a prehistoric horse that became extinct 12,000 years ago. That's not to mention the many mammoths we've found. But no trace of the BOM horses.
Later in the article, Bennett suggests that perhaps Lehi's people saw something similar to a horse and called it a horse when it really wasn't. But there are two problems with that. First, if it wasn't a horse, then what else might one use to pull chariots? A llama, maybe? Second, it casts doubt on the supposed divinely inspired translation of the BOM. After all, words get their meaning from their use. Whatever token the Nephites used to refer to this animal, you would expect that an accurate translation would use the equivalent English word. If the Nephites meant "llama" by whatever word they happened to use, even if it had previously been used of horses, then the correct English translation would've been "llama."
Well, I think it's always possible that something existed which we just haven't dug up. I can't dismiss the possibility that there were horses in America during the time of the Nephites and Lamenites. Bennett makes a good point about the Huns and the paucity of horse fossils in their lands in spite of the significance of horses in their culture. But I remain suspicious.
The BOM also mentions extensive use of steel swords, and battles where tens of thousands of people are killed. As far as we know, there was no steel in the Americas until the Spanish brought them over, and I don't think the Israelites had steel in 600 BCE either, but I could be wrong about that. This seems to me to be a bigger problem than horses. Some Mormons have suggested maybe they were talking about other metals and "steel" is just being used in a generic sense to mean "metal." The problem is that "steel" is distinguished from other metals in the BOM.
The author of the article said, "Critics say those are parrots. What do YOU think?" I have to admit they look like elephants to me.
The interesting thing is that among all the crops the BOM mentioned, it didn't say much about the food we know native Americans did grow, such as maize and various kinds of squash.
There is a wealth of Mormon apologetic literature on these subjects. I was interested in knowing if any of this information had ever been submitted for peer review or published in academic journals. I know there are some Mormon academic journals, but I wanted to know if anybody had ever submitted an article to a secular academic journal arguing anything like there being horses, elephants, steel swords, etc. in ancient American civilizations. I posted a question about it on Yahoo Answers. I got a link to Jeff Lindsay's web page, but nobody gave me any references to peer reviewed academic journal articles. I would be interested in knowing whether such articles would survive peer review and what other scholars would say about them.
A long time ago, I read a book called The Gentile Times Reconsidered by Carl Olof Jonsson. It was about how Biblical, archaeological, and astronomical evidence pointed to 587 BCE as the date for the destruction of the Jewish temple rather than 607 BCE, which is when the Jehovah's Witnesses date it. The book pointed out many problems with Jehovah's Witness chronology.
The BOM also has a specific chronology, so I was curious how it would work out. The BOM repeatedly says that Jesus will be born 600 years after Lehi left Jerusalem (1 Nephi 10:4, 2 Nephi 25:19, etc.). Lehi left Jerusalem in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah (1 Nephi 1:4, 1 Nephi 2:2-4, etc.). That means Jesus should be born 600 years after the 1st year of Zedekiah.
The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the 11th year of Zedekiah, which was the 19th year of Nebachadnezzar (2 Kings 24-25; 2 Chronicles 36; Jeremiah 39; Jeremiah 52). That happened in 587 BCE, which means that Lehi left Jermusalem in 598 BCE.
If Lehi left Jerusalem in 598 BCE, that means Jesus was born in 3 CE.
But the problem is that according to Matthew 2, King Herod was still alive when Jesus was born. Herod died in 4 BCE, which means Jesus had to have been born in 4 BCE or earlier.
It seems like the only way to make the BOM chronology work is to argue for a different date than 587 BCE for the destruction of the temple, but that date is supported by some pretty strong evidence, which you can read about in Carl O. Jonsson's book. Another way would be to argue for a different date for King Herod's death. I've read (I can't remember where) that some people date Herod's death as late as 1 BCE, but there seems to be a strong consensus in favour of the 4 BCE date.
The footnotes in my copy of the BOM say that Lehi left Jerusalem in 600 BCE, and that Jesus was born in 1 CE. That would put the destruction of the Temple in 589 BCE, and the death of Herod no earlier than 1 CE.
I brought this up in the comment section of this blog and Kevin Winters directed me to a FARMS article called "The Jewish/Nephite Lunar Calender," by Randall P. Spackman, which addressed the points I raised. The rest of what follows is just cut and paste from my response to the article.
The article was actually kind of surprising to me because in the end, the author claimed to have solved one problem, but in doing so, created another--the problem of whether Lehi left Jerusalem in the 1st year of Zedekiah, as Mormon said in the heading of 3 Nephi, or whether he left between 588 and 587 BCE, as the author argued (being the 10th or 11th year of Zedekiah). To deal with THAT problem, the author quoted the preface to the BOM, which says, "And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ."
That is a really interesting response. It sounds like the author is saying in that section that Mormon made a mistake. There's a contradiction in the BOM about when Lehi left Jerusalem. But if that's the case, then why go through this long explanation, trying to reconcile the 600 year prophecy? Why not just begin with this claim about human error and avoid the whole thing?
This "human error" solution creates another problem, too. The introduction of the BOM quotes Joseph Smith as saying that "the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth." If the BOM is fallible, then there isn't an infallible book on earth--neither the Bible nor the BOM. We might as well give up worrying about contradictions and chalk them up to human error.
I admit that the author's solution works. I did the math, and, indeed, 600 lunar years (without adding a 13th month every three or so years) is equal to about 582 solar years, so 600 lunar years before 5 BC is 587 BC.
But I am highly skeptical that if this story were true, the Nephites, out of ignorance, would've failed to add the 13th month every 3 or so years. After all, they had every reason the Mesoamericans, Hebrews, and Egyptians had to notice a problem--harvests and festivals, especially. And living in the Hebrew/Egyptian world for much longer than 3 years before leaving like they did, and being acquainted with their calender, surely they would've known about the 13th month.
But if that's the case, then why not just say these are "the mistakes of men" and live with it?
The first thing that jumped out at me last August when I began to read the BOM was that the characters, who were supposedly Jews, did not have a Jewish worldview.
According to the BOM, there's a fellow named Lehi who took his family and left Jerusalem in the first year of Zedekiah and left for America. That was eleven years before the third exile and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which means Lehi left Jerusalem in 598 BCE. They wandered in the wilderness for eight years, and then built a boat and sailed for America.
In the beginning of the story, while Lehi is prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem, Nephi (the son of Lehi, and the author of 1 Nephi) keeps referring to "the Jews" as "they." In 2 Nephi 29:13, the author distinguishes between the Nephites, the Jews, and the lost tribes of Israel.
Notice how "the remnant of this people" are distinguished from the twelve tribes of Israel.
Part of the worldview of Judaism included the promises God gave Abraham that his children would possess the land, and the story of how God delivered the people of Israel from Egypt and brought them into the promised land. It was a land they were promised forever. This worldview affected how they interpreted later historical events. First, the Assyrians scattered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, leaving only the kingdom of Judah in the south. Few of them ever returned. Then the Babylonians exiled the Jews in three stages culminating in the destruction of the temple and the final exile in 587 BCE. Since that time, the prophets predicted there would be a return from exile that would even include the reunion of Judah and Israel. The whole house of Israel would be able to return from exile and reestablish their national sovereignty. This worldview is what drove the Jews to despair the whole time they were in vassalage to other nations, and it explains why they fought so hard in the Maccabean revolt and the two revolts against Rome to reestablish their national sovereignty.
In the BOM, it talks about the people of Lehi being rescued from Jerusalem in much the same way the Bible talks about the Hebrews being rescued from Egypt. And it talks about wandering in the wilderness for eight years in the same way the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness for forty years. And it talks about the people of Lehi crossing the Atlantic ocean to enter the promised land, which is America, in the same way the Bible talks about the Hebrews crossing the Jordan to enter the promised land, which is Palestine.
While the themes are certainly similar, something is terribly awry.
Somebody with a Jewish worldview would've interpreted such a statements as a promise to be banished from the real promised land (i.e. the land promised to Abraham's seed) forever, and ironically, to be banished from the real promised land because of their faithfulness to God's commandments! A real Jew would've seen these supposed promises to Lehi to actually be broken promises since God had promised the land of Israel to Abraham's seed forever, and to always return the people of Israel to that land in fulfillment of his promises and in answer to their obedience.
When Jesus visits America, he tells the people that with the help of the Gentiles, they will build a New Jerusalem in America, and all those who had been scattered by the Gentiles will be gathered into the New Jerusalem (3 Nephi 21:32-24). There is also a New Jerusalem that will come down out of heaven in America (Ether 13:3). The old Jerusalem will also be rebuilt as a holy city, but "it could not be a new Jerusalem for it had been in a time of old" (Ether 13:5). So Israel would be forever split in two.
In Judaism, there has only ever been one temple or tabernacle at a time. It represented God's dwelling place and his presence among Israel. Priests offered sacrifices on behalf of the people. Jews traveled to Jerusalem on special occasions to offer those sacrifices. The building of the temple was a big deal. David had wanted to do it, but God wouldn't let him. Instead, God said that Solomon would build the temple. Jews in the diaspora never built new temples; they built synagogues.
In the BOM, it says that Nephi built a temple "after the manner of the temple of Solomon" (2 Nephi 5:16). The building of Nephi's temple takes all of one verse to narrate. There's no discussion about God telling Nephi to build the temple or Nephi feeling the need to ask God for such a privilege. There's no discussion of how the temple was dedicated or of its function. But what seems even more odd is that there was no legitimate priesthood to officiate in the temple. In the Bible, there are very strict rules about who can enter the Holy of holies, who can offer sacrifices, the garments they have to wear, etc. The priests were among the sons of Aaron and the tribe of Levi. Lehi's people were from the tribe of Joseph and had no priesthood authority.
According to the footnote in my copy of the BOM, all of this happened between 588 and 570 BCE. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 BCE, so perhaps there were not two temples at the same time. But eventually, the temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt, so surely there were two temples at one time. There's no indication in the BOM that this would've been a problem. But for somebody with a Jewish worldview, surely something would've seemed awry.
The BOM talks quite a bit more about Jesus Christ than the Old Testament does, and it is quite a bit more explicit than the Old Testament is. In fact, the parts of the BOM that were supposedly written before Jesus arrived seemed to have a fully developed New Testament theology.
But I don't get the impression that the author(s) of the BOM understood what a Jewish messiah was. (I wish I had taken better notes on this subject when I read the BOM so I could demonstrate the point, but I remember that was the impression I had when I read it.) The eschatological messiah in Judaism is a fulfillment of a promise God made concerning the throne of David.
David's dynasty came to an end as a result of the Babylonian exile, but the prophets said God would fulfill his promise by raising up a descendant of David who would reestablish his throne and rule forever.
In 1 Kings 2:4 and 8:25, it says that David "shall not lack a man to sit on the throne of Israel," as long as his sons are obedient. The messianic prophecy in Jeremiah 33:14-22 is explained as a fulfillment of that promise.
Apparently from this verse, the author thought "messiah" was just another way of saying "savior of the world." Granted, Christians do believe Jesus is the savior of the world, but that is not what "messiah" means.
The odd thing about this verse is that the author appears to think "messiah" is a title, whereas "Jesus Christ" is a proper name. It is strange that the translation of the BOM would make such a distinction between "messiah" and "christ," since both mean the same thing. "Messiah" is derived from the Hebrew word for "anointed one," and "christ" is derived from the Greek word for "anointed one." It makes you wonder what the original language of the BOM actually said and whether it made such a distinction. Of course this is just one thing that makes me doubt the BOM is a translation at all, but that is a topic for another blog entry.
For all these reasons, I seriously doubt that the author(s) of the BOM really were Jews. But it would not be surprising if this story was written by somebody in the 19th century who had a Christian upbringing.
Mormons often ask me how I feel when I read the BOM. I find that a little frustrating because it doesn't matter how I feel when I read it. It only matters whether it's true. I don't think you can tell whether it's true by how you feel when you read it, so it doesn't matter how you feel. I wrote more about that in my series on Mormon epistemology.
I don't mind saying how I felt, though. When I was first visited by the Mormons over ten years ago, I prayed about the BOM like they asked me to, and all I felt was a foreboding. It was the same foreboding I felt before I prayed about it, though. Now I don't attribute this foreboding to the Holy Spirit. I attribute it to the fact that I already had serious doubts about it. But I didn't read the whole BOM back then. I only read the passages the missionaries gave me to read.
Last August, I read the whole BOM. When I met with Kay's bishop later on, he asked me how I felt when I read it. I told him I couldn't remember since I wasn't really thinking about my feelings when I was reading it.
But reading the BOM caused me to have far more doubts about it than I had before I read it. So I don't feel very good about the BOM at all now.
The BOM is much better when read cover to cover. What kept me from reading it before was pure boredom and lack of interest. But I was only reading isolated passages. I couldn't possibly see how it all fit into the story. The BOM isn't like the Bible where you have a collection of independent books from different genres. The BOM is more like a novel. You can read it from cover to cover, and it's just one long story. I think that's the way it ought to be read, at least the first time you read it. Then you can go back and read passages over again and know how they fit in the broader story.
I hope this book brings you light and happiness.
He sent this to me after I had written him a letter telling him I had been visiting with some Mormon missionaries. The missionaries gave me references to read, which I did, but I didn't read the whole book at the time.
The first thing I noticed about the BOM was that it imitated the King James Version. It was not written in modern English, which made me suspicious. The King James Version had been the most widely read translation of the Bible for a few hundred years, so it would make sense that if you're going to try to pass off your writing as scripture that you might want to immitate what was already widely accepted as scripture. Putting it in Elizabethan English might give it an illusion of authenticity. But if it were translated by the power of God, then such pretensions would be unnecessary. God would speak in the language of the people he was talking to just as he did in the Bible. I asked the Mormon missionaries why it was in King James English, and they said it was for the sake of formality, or something like that.
My impression since then has not changed. I don't think the style of the BOM proves it is a fake, but it does make me suspicious. My suspicions have been heightened by my discovery that the original 1830 publication of the BOM had some grammatical errors that are not at all surprising under the assumption that the BOM was written (not translated) in the 1800's, but that would be surprising if the BOM was translated the way it supposedly was.
David Whitmer was one of the three witnesses who in the introductory pages of the BOM signed a statement saying they had seen the plates (or a vision of the plates, depending on how you interpret it) and that they "had been translated by the gift and power of God."
Now I suppose a Mormon might say that grammatical mistakes are no indication that it was not translated by the power of God since perhaps grammar was not standardized among the early Mormons, and God was simply writing in their language. But if that's the case, we shouldn't expect it to be in King James English either. You see, that's the thing. There's an inconsistency. Was the Book of Mormon translated in 19th century backwoods language, or was it translated in 15th century King James language? Both, apparently. Though not a solid proof, I suspect the best explanation is that a 19th century author was simply making an imperfect attempt to imitate the language of the Bible, and he lapsed sometimes into his own vernacular.
You can use google to find a list of the grammatical changes made between the original 1830 edition of the BOM and subsequent editions, but I'll provide you with a few examples along with a link to a scanned copy of the 1830 edition so you can see for yourself.
These same kinds of mistakes are found throughout the the BOM. The longest list I've been able to find through Google is here. Given the URL, it's obviously an anti-Mormon site, but you can easily check them out by looking up the references here and see it in a scanned copy of the 1830 edition. I've looked up a few on that page, and so far they all check out.
One last thing before moving on. If David Whitmer's account of how the BOM came to be is accurate, then that throws the whole enterprise into question, I would think. If it's true, then the golden plates were not consulted at all during the production of the BOM. They might as well have been left in the hills. How can anybody be sure that the BOM is a translation of those plates? What role did the plates play in anything? It seems to me that Joseph Smith himself ought to have had some questions about it.