Abstract: When Orson Scott Card wrote "The Book of Mormon: Artifact or Artifice?" in 1993, he applied keen skills as an author of fiction to help readers understand how to detect the many hidden assumptions an author brings into a text. Subtle details such as the choice of what to explain or what not to explain to readers can quickly reveal the era and environment of the author. The value of Card's analysis is reconsidered in light of extensive Book of Mormon studies since 1993 and has been found, for the most part, to have withstood the test of time well, like the Book of Mormon itself.

Twenty-five years ago — long before the founding of The Interpreter Foundation and even predating FARMS’s affiliation with BYU by half a decade — a famous name among fiction writers, Orson Scott Card, gave a speech at BYU that provided a novel way of evaluating Book of Mormon claims. In "The Book of Mormon: Artifact or Artifice?" at the 1993 BYU Symposium on Life, the Universe, and Everything,1 Card applied his literary skills to examine the artifacts of fiction we should find if the Book of Mormon had been fabricated and not merely translated by Joseph Smith.

Upon reading Card's article today, one familiar with Book of Mormon studies may be impressed with how well Card's analysis and conclusions have stood the test of time. Many of the points he made have become more relevant or strengthened by subsequent explorations into the text of the Book of Mormon, the details of its translation and publication, [Page 254]the scholarship into the lives of the witnesses, and many new studies relevant to evidence for the plausibility of the Book of Mormon and the meaning of the text.

When Card spoke in early 1993, he did not have the benefit of the recent discoveries related to Lehi's Trail from the work of Warren Aston, who has highlighted the plausibility of numerous details such as the existence and location of an ancient place with a name like Nahom and the existence of a fully plausible site for Bountiful exactly where it should be. 2 He would not have seen the 1999 notice from S. Kent Brown about the discovery of ancient altars in Yemen providing hard archaeological evidence for the rare place name Nahom in the right place and time to be relevant to Lehi's Trail.3 He did not have the benefit of the field work of George Potter examining the prospects for what was once said to be impossible, the River Laman in the Valley of Lemuel three days south of the beginning of the [Page 255]Red Sea, where Lehi preached to his sons.4 He didn't have the massive body of evidence from John Sorenson's Mormon's Codex5 or the insights about the Mesoamerican perspectives in the Book of Mormon uncovered by Brant Gardner.6 He lacked the revolutionary insights from the study of the earliest Book of Mormon texts by Royal Skousen or the analysis of the language of the Book of Mormon by Stanford Carmack.

Card's speech was also before Latter-day Saint scholars became familiar with the work of Scottish researcher Margaret Barker and before she became familiar with the Book of Mormon. Barker has sought to reconstruct the early Jewish religion before the reforms of Josiah and before the major changes of the Second Temple period.7 Barker was impressed with what she found in the Book of Mormon, for it seemed to reflect an ancient environment and anci...