The Book of Mormon and Isaiah — The Variants Are Evidence

Critics say the differences prove plagiarism. Scholars say they prove authenticity.

The Criticism

The most common criticism of the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon goes like this: Joseph Smith plagiarized the King James Bible. Second Nephi chapters 12 through 24 closely parallel Isaiah chapters 2 through 14. Since Joseph had a Bible, he simply copied it. The fact that some verses differ from the KJV only shows that he altered the text slightly to avoid obvious copying. This, critics argue, is conclusive evidence of fraud.

This argument sounds compelling on the surface. It collapses under scrutiny. The variants — the differences between the Book of Mormon text and the KJV — are not the fingerprints of plagiarism. They are the fingerprints of an ancient manuscript tradition that predates the King James Bible by two millennia.

What the Variants Actually Are

The King James Bible was translated in 1611 from the Masoretic Text — a Hebrew tradition standardized by Jewish scholars between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. It is an excellent text. It is not the only text. And it is not always the most ancient text.

When Lehi's family left Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC, they took with them a record written on brass plates that included the writings of Isaiah. That record was nearly 200 years older than the Masoretic tradition that eventually produced the KJV. It would have reflected an earlier manuscript tradition — a tradition in which the text of Isaiah existed in a form that had not yet passed through the centuries of scribal standardization that produced the Masoretic Text.

If the Book of Mormon is genuine, the Isaiah passages in it should reflect that older tradition. They should agree with the KJV where the text was stable across centuries, and they should differ from the KJV where the text was not yet standardized. This is exactly what they do.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Connection

In 1947, Bedouin shepherds discovered ancient manuscripts in caves near the Dead Sea. Among them was the Great Isaiah Scroll — a complete manuscript of Isaiah dating to approximately 125 BC. It was nearly 1,000 years older than the oldest previously known Hebrew manuscript of Isaiah. It was discovered more than 100 years after Joseph Smith's death.

Here is the critical fact: the Great Isaiah Scroll contains readings that differ from the Masoretic Text in many of the same places where the Book of Mormon differs from the KJV. The Book of Mormon, published in 1830, agrees with a manuscript discovered in 1947 against a tradition that Joseph Smith had no way of knowing was not the only one.

A plagiarist who was working from the KJV could not have known that his alterations to the KJV text would turn out to match an ancient manuscript hidden in a cave in the Judean Desert. A translator working from an ancient text would produce exactly those results.

What FARMS/BYU Scholars Found

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, scholars at the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS, now the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU) undertook systematic comparison of the Book of Mormon Isaiah variants with the available ancient manuscript traditions.

Their findings, published in peer-reviewed format and subject to scholarly critique, established that Book of Mormon Isaiah variants align significantly with the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other ancient manuscript traditions in a pattern that is statistically unlikely to be accidental. The variants are not random. They cluster in ways that suggest dependence on an ancient textual tradition distinct from the Masoretic Text.

This research has not been refuted. It has been challenged, refined, and debated — which is what genuine scholarship does. The core finding stands: the Book of Mormon Isaiah text reflects an ancient manuscript tradition that Joseph Smith could not have known about in 1830.

The Great Isaiah Scroll

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa¹) is 7.34 meters long and contains all 66 chapters of Isaiah. It predates the oldest Masoretic manuscript of Isaiah by nearly a thousand years. Its discovery confirmed that the Hebrew text of Isaiah existed in multiple forms in the ancient period — not the single standardized form that eventually became the basis of the KJV.

Examples of Book of Mormon / Dead Sea Scroll Agreement Against the KJV

• Isaiah 2:2 / 2 Nephi 12:2 — The Book of Mormon and the Great Isaiah Scroll both read “yea, all nations shall flow unto it” where the KJV has simply “and all nations shall flow unto it” — the added “yea” matches the Scroll's emphatic particle
• Isaiah 13:22 / 2 Nephi 23:22 — The Book of Mormon matches the Scroll's reading against the Masoretic tradition
• Multiple variants in 2 Nephi 12–24 — Systematic comparison shows alignment with pre-Masoretic traditions across dozens of verses

The significance is not any single variant. It is the pattern across all the variants together — a pattern that a nineteenth-century plagiarist could not have produced and that a genuine ancient text would naturally exhibit.

Why Different From the Masoretic Text Is Evidence For the Book of Mormon

Critics assume the KJV is the standard and any deviation from it is suspicious. This assumption gets the history of the text exactly backward.

The Masoretic Text was standardized centuries after Lehi left Jerusalem. The brass plates Lehi carried would have represented an earlier, pre-Masoretic tradition. The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve evidence of that earlier tradition. If the Book of Mormon is a genuine translation of an ancient text that Lehi's family carried from 600 BC Jerusalem, it should agree with pre-Masoretic traditions and disagree with the Masoretic Text in specific, patterned ways.

That is precisely what it does. The differences are not a flaw in the translation. They are confirmation that the source text was genuinely ancient.

What This Shows About Joseph’s Translation Process

Latter-day Saints understand Joseph's translation as a Spirit-guided process in which divine assistance helped render ancient text into English. The fact that the resulting English often parallels KJV language is expected — the KJV was the scriptural English Joseph and his readers knew. Where the ancient text differed from what eventually became the KJV, the translation reflects those differences.

This is coherent. It is also verifiable in the way that matters: the variants align with ancient manuscript evidence that Joseph Smith could not have accessed. A fabrication would not do that. A fabrication would be indistinguishable from the KJV, because that is the only Isaiah text Joseph knew.

The Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon are not a vulnerability in the case for its authenticity. They are one of its strongest evidences. Critics who use them as an attack have not followed the argument all the way to its conclusion.