Archive for August, 2010
Every member a missionary
Friday, August 20th, 2010The joys of Sunday fishing
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Paradox
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Double booked
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Young at heart
Monday, August 16th, 2010
Stake dance
Saturday, August 14th, 2010
The truth shall make you flee
Friday, August 13th, 2010
Door approach
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Mark Twain – and it came to pass
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010Most of us are aware of Mark Twain’s quip about the phrase “and it came to pass” in the Book of Mormon. In chapter 16 of Roughing It, Twain said:
“The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures. . . Whenever he found his speech growing too modern–which was about every sentence or two–he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as ‘exceeding sore,’ ‘and it came to pass,’ etc., and made things satisfactory again. ‘And it came to pass’ was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.”
Myth Busters is probably not going to tackle this, so I will.
Loading the entire Book of Mormon into my word processor and asking for the word count, I got 297,596 words. However, this is including chapter and verse numbers and such, so rather than remove all these and try again, I searched on line and found that someone came up with 268,163.
Close enough.
I searched my document for “and it came to pass” with case turned off so it would include both capitalized Ands and lower case ands. It found 1,093. (YMMV)
Just to be fair, I searched for “it came to pass” so I could get not just the and-it-cames, but also “wherefore, it came to pass,” “behold, it came to pass,” “now it came to pass,” etc. This got 1,323 hits. I went with that.
I then multiplied 1,323 times five–there being five words in “and it came to pass”– and got 6,615 words.
Now for the final math. If I divide 6,615 by 268,163, multiply by 100, and add a percent sign, I get 2.5 percent (after rounding up).
Thus we see that “and it came to pass” and similar phrases make up 2.5 percent of the Book of Mormon. Interesting.
If we subtract 6,615 from 268,163, does the resulting word count of 261,548 make the Book of Mormon a pamphlet?
I don’t know. How many words in a pamphlet?
Perhaps the most famous pamphlet in American history is Tom Paine’s Common Sense, of which more than 500,000 copies were printed in its first year alone. By my count it has 19,524 words.
The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx is a well-known pamphlet. The English translation, again by my count, has 11,367 words.
Most pamphlets seem to be smaller than these–more along the lines of two to three thousand words.
According to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), a pamphlet has “at least five but not more than 48 pages, exclusive of the cover pages.”
A dictionary site says a pamphlet usually has less than 80 pages.
If you took all the and-it-came-to-passes out of the Book of Mormon, they would make a respectable-sized pamphlet all by themselves. Not a very interesting one, but, hey, we’re just talking word count.
The resulting 261,548-word Book of Mormon qualifies easily, not as a pamphlet, but as a book. In fact, a large book.
Large compared with what?
Oh, I don’t know, how about compared to Mark Twain’s Roughing It, which clocks in at a mere 168,320 words, almost 100,000 short of the Book of Mormon.
And behold it came to pass that this myth is busted.
I am now removing my tongue from my cheek.
Have your hearts knit together
Monday, August 9th, 2010