Book of Mormon Evidence, Part 2 of 10: The Berkeley Wordprint Test In the 1980s a group in Berkeley spent about 10,000 hours testing the Book of Mormon's "wordprint," the unconscious way a writer uses small words and word patterns. Most of the group weren't Latter-day Saints. John Hilton, the group's main Latter-day Saint contributor, wrote that he was "little different from my agnostic and Jewish colleagues" in doubting whether measurement could settle a question like this. They used 65 word-pattern ratios on 5,000-word blocks. Before touching the Book of Mormon, they tested the method on 26 texts by 9 control authors, with 325 pairwise comparisons. The controls are the interesting part: - Mark Twain and Robert Heinlein didn't change their own wordprints when writing as different characters. - A German-to-English translator carried over the separate wordprints of the authors he translated. That matters for a book that presents itself as a translation. Then the Book of Mormon. Their conclusion: "it is statistically indefensible to propose Joseph Smith or Oliver Cowdery or Solomon Spaulding as the author of the 30,000 words" attributed to Nephi and Alma. Nephi and Alma also measured as independent of each other, the same way other uncontested authors do. Hilton's summary: the book "measures multiauthored, with authorship consistent to its own internal claims." Stay tuned for Part 3: The "Someone Else" Problem, tonight. #BookofMormon