I listened to this Stick of Joseph podcast this morning where a group broke down the statistical probability that Joseph Smith could have “written the Book of Mormon.” When you actually look at the data, the naturalistic explanation collapses.

Joseph was a 24-year-old subsistence farmer with a second-grade education, no literary training, and not a single prior written work. Yet critics claim he produced a 265,000-word manuscript in roughly 65 working days—averaging over 4,000 words a day—faster than trained novelists using modern keyboards. That alone makes no sense. Then add the fact that the Book of Mormon contains more distinct narrative voices than elite authors like Dickens or Twain, and includes complex structural Hebrew chiasmus that scholars in the 1820s didn’t even know existed. Statistically, each of those features is already an extreme outlier. Combined, the odds that Joseph Smith produced all of them by himself fall somewhere between one in billions and one in tens of billions.

And that doesn’t even include the unusual research and writing conditions that Joseph had no library, no notes, no drafts, no hidden manuscript, and no evidence that he ever wrote anything privately. He dictated the text in one flowing pass, with scribes reading back the words. Nothing about that resembles the behavior of someone secretly composing a massive, structured literary work.

The reason this impossible feat happened is because Joseph Smith did not write the Book of Mormon. He translated it—not in the modern academic sense of knowing two languages, but in the sense that the text was revealed to him word by word. He dictated exactly what he saw through the seer stone or Urim and Thummim, and his scribes wrote it down. That is why the pace, structure, and consistency are so far outside anything a normal human process could produce.

The critics knew how impossible the coming forth of the Book of Mormon was from Joseph Smith.  That is why they always had to try and explain that it was stolen from the works of Solomon Spaulding, Ethan Smith, or Sydney Rigdon.

The Book of Mormon is true. It is of God, and it leads us to Jesus Christ.

The video does a great job illustrating just how statistically impossible the alternative really is.