Translating Sacred Texts:

Integrity, Discernment, and Truth

1. We Don’t Have to Imagine the Process

Translation isn’t guesswork—it’s a disciplined process:

• Step one: Transcribe the original text faithfully.
• Step two: Research the characters, symbols, and linguistic structures, comparing them to known languages and pictographic systems.
• Step three: Involve experts in ancient languages, history, and theology to ensure accuracy and context.

If the text claims Hebrew origins—as Joseph Smith did—then it should align with known Hebrew patterns. “Reformed Egyptian” has no historical attestation, and modern tools make such claims easier to test.

NOTE: Modern verification tools include Unicode script databases, Egyptian hieroglyphic corpora, Semitic language corpora, paleographic comparison systems, and digital epigraphy databases.

2. Languages Don’t Work in Degrees

Natural languages do not operate in vague layers of translation. Either the translator understands the source language or they do not. If someone cannot succeed at the first level of linguistic comprehension, they cannot succeed at deeper ones. Translation requires clarity, not intuition.

All legitimate translation processes share one requirement: the source language must constrain the output. The vocabulary, grammar, and structure of the original text limit what the translator can produce. If the source language does not restrict the resulting text, then the process is not translation — it is composition.

If the process is revelatory rather than linguistic, then the resulting text is not constrained by the source language at all. Revelation may produce meaningful content, but it produces content independent of the source text. In such cases, the correct category is revelation or dictation, not translation.

This raises a simple question: If the content does not come from the source language, then why call the process “translation” at all? A process that does not derive its meaning, grammar, or vocabulary from the original text is not a translation in any linguistic sense. It is a separate category of religious production — revelation, inspiration, or dictated scripture — and should be identified as such.

3. Expected Terms in Ancient Texts

If a text is genuinely ancient and Hebrew‑rooted, its vocabulary should reflect the linguistic world of its time.
For example, terms like virgin, savior, and messiah would appear in their ancient forms:

• Virgin → Maiden or Unmarried woman
• Savior → Redeemer, Holy One, Deliverer
• Messiah → Anointed one, Chosen one, possibly Shiloh or Son of Man

In Daniel, the KJV translators rendered māšîaḥ (“anointed one”) as Messiah because the phrase “to anoint the most Holy” clearly refers to God. Their decision to transliterate the term as a title was theologically sound — and they marked interpretive additions with italics to maintain transparency.

🕒 Language Must Be Consistent with Time and Culture

A genuine sacred text reflects the vocabulary, worldview, and cultural limitations of its claimed origin. What we would never expect are terms that are future, foreign, or culturally disconnected from the setting. The Book of Mormon contains many such anachronisms.

📜 Language-Based Anachronisms

Christ – Greek title unknown to pre-Christian Israelites.

Bible – From Greek biblia, centuries after the Book of Mormon’s timeline.

Church, Synagogue, Alpha and Omega, Christian, Apostle, Crucifixion, Baptism – All rooted in Greek or Roman contexts.

These terms cannot appear in a pre‑Christian Hebrew‑rooted record without violating linguistic and cultural chronology.

🐎 Cultural and Technological Anachronisms

Horses, Cattle, Swine, Elephants

Steel, Chariots, Silk, Wheat

Compass (called “Liahona”), Coins

These items reflect Old World or post‑classical technologies and animals not present in pre‑Columbian America.

🧠 Conceptual Anachronisms

Priestcraft – Reflects Protestant-era critiques. See 2 Nephi 26:29

Democracy and Elections – Mirrors Enlightenment political ideals.

Free agency – A modern LDS theological term.

These concepts belong to post‑biblical, post‑Reformation, or modern theological frameworks.

The presence of future vocabulary suggests retroactive insertion or cultural borrowing — not ancient authorship. True prophecy may foreshadow future events, but it does not use future terminology unknown to its original audience.
A text may predict future realities, but it cannot use future words. Vocabulary is tied to culture, not foresight. A term that has no meaning within the original linguistic world would not communicate anything to the people receiving the revelation. Prophecy can reveal future events, but it cannot reveal future lexicons.

These words would have no meaning at that time and to that culture. In theory, they may not even have the characters to write them down, let alone convey a clear meaning that would survive into the future.
Examples: iPhone, teleportation, paramecium, carburetor.

4. What Might the Word “Bible” Look Like?

When evaluating a purported ancient manuscript, we should distinguish between the original language of the manuscript and the terminology used by later readers to describe it.

The English word Bible ultimately derives from the Greek biblia, meaning “books,” and became the conventional name for the collection of Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Therefore, finding the English word Bible in an alleged ancient Hebrew record would raise a translation question: Is the word being presented as the original terminology, or is it an English rendering supplied by the translator?

An ancient Israelite or Hebrew-rooted record could instead be expected to employ concepts familiar to its own cultural and religious world, such as:

• writings
• scrolls
• scriptures
• testimony
• the words of the prophets
• the word of God

The important question is not whether one particular English word appears. A legitimate translation is expected to render an ancient expression into an understandable modern equivalent. The real test is whether the underlying concept, terminology, historical setting, and literary style are consistent with the claimed source.

That principle becomes especially important when examining the Book of Mormon.

5. Testing a Claimed Prophecy

Once a text claims divine revelation, its prophetic claims can be examined against history, chronology, culture, and scripture.

The question is not simply whether a believer can construct a possible interpretation after the fact. A stronger test is whether the prophecy has a clear meaning before the alleged fulfillment is known and whether that meaning coheres with the historical framework supplied by the text itself.

If a prophecy depends upon historical circumstances that never occur, or if its interpretation requires meanings that are substantially different from the words themselves, the prophetic claim becomes difficult to sustain.

That does not by itself prove who wrote the passage. It does, however, provide legitimate grounds for questioning the claim that the passage originated through divine revelation.

6. Does the Text Read Like Scripture?

If a book claims to be revelation from God, readers are entitled to examine whether its language, themes, and portrayal of God are consistent with the Scriptures it claims to supplement.

This is not merely a question of whether the writing sounds ancient. A successful translation of an ancient sacred text should preserve the character, meaning, and rhetorical qualities of its source rather than merely imitating the surface appearance of biblical language.

If a book claims to be “Bible,” or divine revelation, it should bear the marks of scripture: clarity, reverence, and the spirit of Christ. When we test the Book of Mormon against that standard, the results are telling.

7. Translation Requires Honesty

Even poetic or contextual choices should be explained. When a translator renders a phrase such as “anointed one” as “Messiah,” the translation should be supported by linguistic, historical, or contextual evidence. Where the evidence is uncertain, the uncertainty should be acknowledged.

Academic integrity requires a clear distinction between:

• what the source text actually says,
• what the translator believes the source means, and
• what the translator understands through personal experience or religious conviction.

A translator may reasonably state that an interpretation is based on personal experience, theological conviction, or a belief that God has provided guidance. However, such claims should not be presented as objective features of the source text without evidence.

In particular, a translator should not attribute a specific word choice or interpretation directly to God unless there is a genuine and independently defensible basis for making that claim.

8. The Danger of False Attribution

If a translator presents personal interpretation or commentary as direct revelation from God, the issue extends beyond ordinary translation error. It becomes a question of false attribution: attributing human words, interpretations, or conclusions to divine authority.

“To attribute human words to God is not merely an error of translation; it is a false claim of divine authority. Such attribution is presumptuous and, in biblical terms, may constitute blasphemy when human words are knowingly presented as the words of God.”

9. The Case of Daniel and the KJV Translators

The KJV translators provide a useful example of responsible interpretive translation. In Daniel, they rendered language concerning an “anointed one” as “Messiah,” allowing the surrounding context to inform their choice of English terminology.

The phrase “to anoint the most Holy” provides important theological context for that interpretation. The translators understood the passage as referring to a uniquely holy figure rather than merely to an ordinary anointed person. Their rendering therefore reflects the theological meaning they understood from the context.

This illustrates an important distinction in translation: the translators made a contextual and theological judgment about how the term should be rendered; they did not claim that God personally dictated the English word they selected. A translator may make a reasoned contextual choice while remaining honest about the nature of that choice. This is the difference between translation and divine dictation.

✨ What a Divinely Guided Process Would Require

• Clear and verifiable revelation: Not merely vague impressions or subjective feelings, but communication that can reasonably be distinguished from the translator’s own thoughts.
• Spiritual confirmation: Witnesses, signs, or prophetic consistency that align with known truths.
• Transparency in method: A clear account of how the text was received, interpreted, translated, and presented.
• Accountability to the community of faith: Willingness to subject the work to examination by those knowledgeable in Scripture and the relevant historical and linguistic evidence.
• Alignment with God’s character: The content should reflect holiness, wisdom, justice, and consistency with God's previously revealed character.
• Agreement with the Holy Bible and the prophets of old: A claimed revelation must harmonize with the established Word of God and should not contradict established biblical revelation.
• Prayerful dependence: Seeking God’s guidance throughout the process rather than relying solely upon personal intellect, emotion, or preference.
• Testing of spirits and supernatural claims: As instructed in 1 John 4:1, claims of spiritual or supernatural origin should be tested by the Word of God rather than accepted without examination.
• No spiritualism, necromancy, or occult practices: Practices expressly forbidden in Scripture should not be presented as legitimate means of receiving divine revelation.
• No contradictions or historical impossibilities: A claim of divine revelation should not require demonstrably false historical or factual claims in order to sustain its authority.

“If this were truly a translation, the spirit behind it would be Christ. Yet the tone and content reveal another spirit entirely. What we have is not divine revelation, but Joseph Smith’s commentary — or his attempt to sound prophetic by inserting himself into ‘scripture.’ This is not the word of God. See Genesis 49:16; John 7:24”

🔤 Degrees of Translation Problem
Book of Abraham

1. No historical precedent

No recognized translation tradition — ancient or modern — treats translation as producing the contents of a document without deriving them from the source language.

Translation requires the target text to be derived from the source text, whether directly or through an established intermediary. Translators may vary in proficiency, but the resulting translation must derive its meaning from the vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and context of the source.

Without the source text contributing meaningfully to the target text, there is no linguistic translation. There is no recognized “degree” of translation in which the source language contributes nothing to the production of the target text.

If the English text is not derived from the source language, the process is more properly described as revelation, inspiration, dictation, or composition — not linguistic translation.

The modern apologetic concept of “degrees of translation,” in which a text may be translated without being linguistically derived from the underlying document, has no recognized parallel in historical translation practice or modern linguistics.

See translation integrity above.

2. No evidence for it

There is no manuscript, linguistic, historical, or doctrinal evidence that “degrees of translation” corresponds to any attested translation method in historical practice or religious translation traditions.

There is likewise no evidence that any recognized translator, scribe, linguist, or scholar in any culture or era used “degrees of translation” as a method in which the source text contributes no meaningful linguistic content to the target text.

From antiquity to the present, known linguistic translation processes require a source text, a source language, and some identifiable means by which meaning is transferred from the source to the target language.

No known translation tradition — including Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Syriac, and later European traditions — contains a category or method resembling “degrees of translation” in which the source language does not contribute meaningfully to the resulting text.

And there is the logical problem of getting more from less.
If the translator does not see the source text, does not examine its characters, does not know the source language, and does not employ any linguistic method, then producing a detailed English text from that source through linguistic translation is impossible.

No recognized translation process produces target-language content that is not grounded in, or constrained by, the information present in the source language.

“Degrees of translation” therefore attempts to explain how a translator could produce substantially more linguistic content than can be derived from the source — a concept that has no recognized basis in linguistic translation or textual transmission.

One might interject that the process was revelatory. But that does not resolve the problems presented by the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL). The GAEL presents itself as a structured linguistic framework, yet it does not demonstrate a functioning or verifiable method for translating Egyptian into English.

It provides no testable or reproducible system by which Egyptian characters reliably correspond to English meanings, nor does it demonstrate how its proposed system would actually produce the English text of the Book of Abraham.

The GAEL also does not demonstrate how its process — whether natural or revelatory — operated or why its proposed meanings should be considered reliable. If the GAEL were intended as a genuine translation system, one would expect it to exhibit identifiable features of such a system: consistent rules, reproducible results, and clear relationships between characters and meanings. None of these features appear in the GAEL.

Likewise, if the GAEL were intended as a record of divine or inspired communication, one would expect it to exhibit recognizable indicators of such a process — coherence, consistency, and a clear method by which meaning is conveyed. The GAEL provides no indication of these features. It contains no internal evidence of divine involvement and no structural elements that would distinguish it from a purely human attempt to construct a linguistic framework.

Historically, the surrounding practices associated with the translation claims — such as using a stone to obtain hidden information — closely resemble early American folk‑magic scrying and divination traditions. This connection is noted by multiple historians, including Latter‑day Saint scholars, and is well documented in the historical record. These practices align with folk‑magic techniques rather than with established linguistic or academic translation methods, and rather than with biblical or Christian models of revelation.

3. Standard Translation Practices Were Not Used

The surviving evidence does not show that standard linguistic methods — such as grammatical analysis of Egyptian or Hebrew, or consultation of known translation tools or systems — were used in the translation process. These are the types of methods typically associated with documented cases of linguistic translation involving written languages.

The available historical record provides no indication of a conventional linguistic translation process as understood in historical or modern translation studies.

These features are integral to every recognized model of linguistic translation in documented historical practice. None are present.

On that basis, the process described in the historical record does not align with standard models of linguistic translation. The record also shows later efforts to reinterpret, reframe, or minimize the original method, reflecting a clear discomfort with how the process was actually carried out.

4. No purpose for it

There is no stated or documented rationale for “degrees of translation” within translation theory or historical translation practice. The concept has no identifiable logical purpose and serves no function in any known translation process — ancient, modern, linguistic, or revelatory.

Translation traditions across cultures and eras all share a basic premise: the translated text must be meaningfully derived from the source language. “Degrees of translation” provides no mechanism, no category, and no purpose for producing a text that is not linguistically constrained by the source.

Because it has no theoretical, historical, linguistic, or revelatory function, the concept operates as an artificial construct designed to explain problems that cannot be accounted for by any actual translation method. It bears no resemblance to anything grounded in the practices of the Lord or His prophets.

Neither Joseph Smith nor the institutional LDS Church has ever provided a stated purpose, doctrinal rationale, or functional explanation for “degrees of translation.” The concept appears only in modern apologetic literature, further underscoring that it serves no role in historical translation practice or in Joseph Smith’s own descriptions of the process.

5. No method of verifying authority or authenticity

This is the most critical flaw.
Every legitimate translation process requires a:
• verifiable text
• verifiable language
• verifiable method
• verifiable authority

The Book of Abraham translation had none of these.

No one verified the characters.
No one verified the language.
No one verified the method.
No one verified the authority.

Without verification, the process cannot be called translation at all.

If a process has no verifiable text, no verifiable language, no verifiable method, and no verifiable authority, then it cannot be classified as a translation. In such cases, the only remaining category is that the resulting document is a dictated religious text — a text produced through personal inspiration, imagination, or internal narrative rather than through any identifiable translation process.

This classification does not address motive; it simply identifies the nature of the process based on the absence of all translation requirements.

6. The chosen method contradicts the claim entirely

The stated method of producing the text did not involve the plates, the characters, or any identifiable linguistic or revelatory translation model.

Eyewitness accounts and later historical analysis consistently describe a process consisting of:
• seer‑stone use — a single stone placed in a hat
• light exclusion — Joseph Smith placing his face into the hat
• no plate consultation — the plates not consulted during dictation
• no character analysis — no linguistic materials examined
• visual dictation — Joseph reporting that words appeared through the stone
• oral dictation — Joseph dictating English aloud
• scribal transcription — the scribe writing the dictated English
• plate absence — the plates often covered, not present, or located elsewhere

These elements of the method are described in accounts from:
Emma Smith
David Whitmer
Martin Harris
Joseph Smith (in later descriptions)
Latter‑day Saint historians (Bushman, Ashurst‑McGee, Brown)
Other historians (Vogel, Quinn, Brooke)

This method contradicts every known translation procedure — linguistic, historical, dynamic, inspired, or revelatory.

The described mechanics do not resemble translation in any form. Instead, they align closely with scrying or divination practices documented in early American folk‑magic traditions, as noted by multiple historians, including Latter‑day Saint scholars. These techniques are not part of biblical or Christian models of revelation and do not correspond to any prophetic or scriptural translation process.

7. The text reflects a modern (early 1800s) American audience, not an ancient one

If “degrees of translation” were a legitimate concept, it would help explain how an ancient record could be rendered for a modern readership. However, the Book of Mormon does not show signs of an ancient origin being adapted for modern readers. Instead, it shows signs of having been composed directly for a nineteenth‑century English audience.

The text consistently reflects:
• English idioms and syntax
• English rhetorical structures
• King James Bible phrasing
• King James Bible theological framing
• Nineteenth‑century Protestant concerns
• Nineteenth‑century cultural assumptions

These features do not correspond to any ancient Israelite or ancient American audience. They correspond to the expectations of contemporary English readers. “Degrees of translation” cannot account for this, because the issue is not the degree of translation — it is the identity of the audience for whom the text was composed.

In other words, the text does not show signs of an ancient record being translated at varying degrees. It shows signs of a modern record being composed directly for its contemporary audience.

8. “Degrees of translation” contradict Joseph Smith’s own statements

If “degrees of translation” were a legitimate concept, it would appear in Joseph Smith’s own descriptions of the process. It does not. Instead, Joseph Smith consistently described a direct, complete, and authoritative translation, performed “by the gift and power of God,” with no indication of partial translation, paraphrase, expansion, or modern composition.

None of these claims allow for “degrees of translation.” They describe a single, unified process in which an ancient record was rendered faithfully into English. The apologetic concept of “degrees of translation” requires partial translation, loose translation, or modern expansion—none of which appear in Joseph Smith’s own accounts.

In other words, “degrees of translation” contradict the translator’s own description of the translation.