At the beginning of the summer of 1992, Ron Burgerner, one of my friends in The Nottingham Country Ward, issued his annual challenge to read The Book of Mormon over the summer. Having been told The Book of Mormon could not be true because it did not describe the temple nor the endowment, I decided to look for anything remotely related to the temple as I read this summer. I was pleased to find 20 some odd passages which could be related to the temple. The following summer I generalized my search and discovered 78 passages which seemed to have a pattern paralleling the pattern taught in sacred places.
During the summer of 1994 I generalized this pattern more to include 18 key concepts, to which I subsequently assigned colors:
The summer of 1994 I read a reprint of the original publication of The Book of Mormon, without the distraction of verses. This time I found portions of the pattern repeated in order 553 times. These web pages document in color my exploring a word pattern. On the day I finished the Burgerner Book of Mormon reading challenge in 1994, I sat down and wrote out the following summary of my discovery:
Extracted and Posted Patterns; Extracted Patterns in pdf format.
H. Roice Nelson, Jr.
rnelson@walden3d.com
P.S. As I have gone through the formal exercise of putting the patterns identified in my minds eye back in 1994 on web pages (it is now the year 2000), I have come to recognize the identified patterns are neither as scientific nor as quantifiable as I initially imagined. Several of the initially identified pattern sets have been broken into two or even three sets of patterns. Sometimes the pattern subject headings seem out of context relative to the original text context. However, I have more confidence than ever this orignial (I believe inspired) effort has a scientific basis. It seems logical to me that the authors of The Book of Mormon had experienced and internally understood what I call an endowment pattern. It appears to me as Mormon and his son Moroni took from the stories of their ancestors and their lives, they packaged the words in a type of repeative poetry, which repeated this word pattern over and over again. This is why you can learn about the Savior on almost every page of The Book of Mormon. Or about prayer, or about the creation, etc. This is a more complicated pattern, a bigger picture integration, than the parallelism of chiasms. Hopefully, this effort can spark interest and research into a new and I believe exciting new way to evaluate and demonstrate The Book of Mormon as another testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Title Page of The Book of Mormon
First Pattern
Book of Mormon Index
Pattern Statistics