I'm taking a short break from posting the concluding parts of my Noah series (part one here) while I study some complex topics in more depth. In the mean time, I have a few interesting details to highlight.
I've long believed the Book of Mormon text is extremely intricate. Its complexity has a purpose. On this blog we've written much about internal consistency and other elements of this complexity. Psalms language is another topic of interest related to complexity.
In this post I'd like to focus on the phrase "it came to pass" and how its distribution in the text is yet another evidence of the intricacy of the Book of Mormon. The impetus for this post came from a comment made by Brian D. Stubbs in his book "Changes in Languages from Nephi to Now." He notes that writers of the Book of Mormon only use "it came to pass" when speaking of past events. This claim surprised me a little bit, since off the top of my head I would have guessed that pretty much every single chapter in the Book of Mormon contains "it came to pass" at least a few times.
I never take claims like this at face value even when I have full trust in the rigor, integrity, and sincerity of the author. I know that digging into the text to see for myself always yields interesting discoveries.
So I made a chart plotting instances of "it came to pass" by original chapter breaks. (One caveat is that this study was done using the current edition, not the earliest text, though I am building a tool to allow me to search older versions and may revisit this analysis once those tools are completed.)
A few surprising things stood out to me as a result of this analysis:
- Sermons do not contain "it came to pass." As in, zero total instances in the words of King Benjamin, Abinadi, King Mosiah, Samuel the Lamanite, Jesus, etc., even when those sermons span many verses and chapters.
- Alma never uses it in his sermons, but does use it when recounting his missionary efforts and when recounting his conversion experiences to two sons.
- Zenos uses it many times in his allegory, but Jacob does not use it when speaking about the allegory.
- Mormon only uses the phrase when he is recounting events from the past. Notable breaks from the narrative which are written by Mormon do not contain the phrase. (See notes below on 3 Nephi 5, Helaman 12, Mormon 7, for example.)
- When Nephi is recounting events from the past, he uses this phrase very often. Once he catches up to the present in 2 Nephi 5, he does not use it again.
- This is also true for Moroni, who uses it liberally in the Jaredite history (though not at all in his prophetic breaks from the narrative, such as in Ether 4-5), and not a single time in his own book which does not recount the past (aside from the second epistle from his father in Mormon 9 -- see the next item below).
- Interestingly, when Mormon recounts past events in an epistle to his son (found in Moroni 9), he does not use the phrase a single time. It seems he reserved it for times when he was formally abridging the history of his people.
- In the Book of Alma alone, I count a little over 400 instances of "it came to pass." Though Mormon's words only make up half of the total text of this book, he is responsible for ~86% of the instances. The others come from Helaman's epistle (which is quoted directly), a quote from an epistle from Gid quoted within Helaman's epistle, and direct quotes from the records of Alma-2 and Amulek found in Alma 9-14 and Alma 36-38.
Therefore, what?
This analysis certainly doesn't prove anything beyond what I stated above: the Book of Mormon text was carefully prepared. Its complexity is an indication that a lot of time and effort that went into preparing it, and that the author drew from a variety of sources written by many different individuals. One need not conclude that this proves historicity.
Raw notes from my search
Below is the raw table of my notes. (I believe the "speaker" column is accurate, but it gets a little complicated in some parts of Alma when trying to decide who is speaking, so I'm definitely open to correction if I got something incorrect.)