Overview:






The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ and one of four books of scripture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a geoscientist, it seems important to always question data about everything, and these pages are a place where I post data and thoughts about The Book of Mormon.








Principle Concepts:






There are evidences within the pages of The Book of Mormon which demonstrate it's truthfulness as a book of scripture. Key external evidences are the histories of those whose lives have been touched by The Holy Ghost after receiving a testimony of the truthfullness of The Book of Mormon. These evidences and histories are supported by word patterns and maps and scientific correlations, each of which support the premise The Book of Mormon is a scriptural record of a group of people who lived in the ancient Americas, a people who had prophets, which. like Old Testament prophets, interacted with God, and who having seen modern times, abridged the record of their people to be relevant to our time, the time leading up to the second coming of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.



Spreadsheets:






In 2015 and 2016 I translated The Book of Mormon to a spread-sheet on my i-Pad using Apple's NUMBERS spreadsheet software. Examples are under the Histories Tab above. A few thoughts about the process:
  • The process started by creating a worksheet in NUMBERS for each chapter in each book in The Book of Mormon. The columns were "Book" [text], "Chapter" [#], "Verse" [#], "Verses" [text], "Time" [text related to time], and "Temporal" [text related to life and spatial information]. By the time I finished going through the first time, there was different context being put in the "Time" and "Temporal" columns.
  • So the process was repeated, adding three additional columns for "Location-Place" [text], "People-Named" [text], and "Specific-Time" [text]. This proved to be a very good editing project. It was interesting how often text was repeated, or how often things about "Time" were missed. This process split each verse into a "Time" and a "Temporal" subset, and was finished in December of 2016.
  • A copy of the spreadsheet was made, and the data in the 9 columns in each worksheet was combined into worksheets for each individual book in The Book of Mormon. This NUMBERS file was named "1.0_BoM_161225B_Numbers" for books, and the original "1.0_BoM_161225C" for chapters. An attempt to copy all of the books into one worksheet with 9 columns named "1.0_BoM_161225A" was made. NUMBERS did not allow this many rows.
  • These three spread-sheets were transferred to a Windows machine as both NUMBERS format and EXCEL format, and renamed appropriately. The EXCEL format allowed all of the books to be merged into one worksheet, now named "1.0_BOM_161225_All_Excel.xls". However, Excel would not allow the alignment to wrap the text for this many rows, and so the row height for everything past Mosiah is only one line of text. These rows can be manually expanded.
  • I believe the more eyeballs editing something like this project, the better the results. At the same time, this seems to be a new idea, which has commercial value. So I decided to copyright (© 2016) this work and to claim all commercial rights. A copyright worksheet was added to the 3 NUMBERS and the 3 EXCELL files (click here to see. The text that does not show up on the EXCEL spreadsheets beneath where it says where the spreadsheets can be downloaded says: "For an unrestricted license to redistribute this work commercially go to the above website, or send $500.00 by check or money order to the above address, along with the commercial entity name, location, phone, e-mail, and website. An unrestricted license to redistribute derivatives of this work will be returned. Thank you for your interest and contribution! All copies of this work, private or commercial, must include this copyright notice."
  • To download the Book of Mormon Spreadsheets go to http://www.walden3d.com/BoM

The three articles below tell a little about H. Roice Nelson, Jr., the author of these pages: