Surprising results from BYU study on lost 116 pages

Artist's rendering of 116 pages

PROVO - A group of linguists at Brigham Young University have recently concluded a study dealing with the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, and their findings are shocking. Jeff Trent, professor of ancient near east literature and krumping, called the results of the study groundbreaking. "Studying the 116 pages is obviously impossible since they aren't extant but we have found some interesting workarounds that have allowed us to move forward. Relational comparison within a classical framework for example." The group urged people to be patient while they normalized the data but they nevertheless remained optimistic.


"While these findings are preliminary, I feel 73% confident that they are accurate, though there's only a 42% of that. Still, I'd say we are on the cusp of something that could cause a paradigm shift in the way we think about the 116 pages. In a nutshell, our group feels that while we are missing 116 physical pages of manuscript we are only missing about 72 pages of useful, interesting material.

Professor Trent continued, "The way we reached this conclusion was by studying all extant pieces of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. When you look at a the manuscript you can see that most of the pages are taken up with the phrase "and it came to pass" or "murmuring". If you extract those superfluous phrases you are left with a much shorter manuscript."

Original manuscript with redactions

We were provided a specially prepared copy of the original manuscript to help us visualize what Professor Trent was talking about. All instances of "and it came to pass" and "murmuring" have been removed.

"You can see what a difference that makes. I kind of cringe when I hear people talk about how huge of a loss the 116 pages were. Yeah, it wasn't optimal, but when you think about the actual useful content that was lost, double digits is easier to deal with. Maybe we shouldn't be so hard on Martin Harris. His wife is still a jerk though."

Professor Jeff Trent

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