FAIR: Wordprint analysis and the Book of Mormon

SANDY — A persistent but many times refuted theory meant to debunk the divine origin of the Book of Mormon was itself disputed yet again in a presentation at Friday's concluding session of the FAIR apologetics conference.

FAIR, the Foundation for Apologetics Information and Research, holds the conference annually to answer criticisms against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though it is not formally affiliated with the church.

The Spaulding-Rigdon theory, first proposed in 1834 by E. D. Howe, holds that Sidney Rigdon concocted the Book of Mormon by plagiarizing a novel written by one Solomon Spaulding, then used Joseph Smith, an uneducated farm boy to pass it off to the world as scripture.

At the FAIR Conference, statistical analyst Paul Fields presented an assessment of one of the latest attempts to validate the Spaulding-Rigdon theory, a stylometric, or "wordprint," analysis of the Book of Mormon.

Fields' study scrutinizes a 2008 paper published in the Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing, written by Matthew Jockers, Craig Criddle and Daniela Witten of Stanford University that identified Rigdon as the Book of Mormon author.

Criddle is a civil engineer and a contributor to an Internet message board for ex-Mormons. According to a Dec. 12, 2008, website post, he recruited his Stanford colleagues, Jockers, a professor of English, and Witten, a graduate student in statistics, to help prepare the paper, titled "Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon Using Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification," with Jockers being the lead author.

The authors observed from the Book of Mormon the frequency in use of 110 non-contextual words (such as a, an, but, however, then, to, with, without) and applied to that observation innovative statistical techniques assuming Solomon Spaulding, Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery and Parley P. Pratt as the candidate authors for the Book of Mormon.

In a response article published in the same journal in January of this year — and in his FAIR conference address — Fields criticized the paper by Jockers, Criddle and Witten on a number of points. Speaking to the FAIR conference audience, he characterized their work as "opinion masquerading as research."

Most surprising, Fields said, is that the authors failed to include Joseph Smith as a candidate author. "If anyone would have been the author, it must have been Joseph Smith, one would think, being otherwise uninformed," he said.

"They also confused the concept of things being closest with being close," Fields said.