The Anachronism Trend — What 190 Years of Criticism Shows

In 1844, 90.2% of the alleged anachronisms in the Book of Mormon stood unconfirmed. Today the figure is 9.29%. Forgeries do not improve with age.

The List Everybody Recites

The list is familiar and it is delivered as a volley. Horses. Steel. Cement. Barley. Wheat. Silk. Chariots. Elephants. Metal plates. Each one is a feature of the Book of Mormon text that, at the time it was raised, had no support in what was then known about the ancient Americas or the ancient Near East.

And the argument? That a nineteenth-century farm boy furnished his imaginary ancient world with the contents of his own, and that the furniture gives him away.

So should we answer these one at a time? No, because that is a losing format from the start — the debate never ends, every item eats a page, and the man reciting the list has nothing invested in any single entry on it. There is a better method and almost nobody applies it. Stop arguing individual items. TRACK them instead.

Somebody Actually Counted

Matthew Roper compiled the anachronism claims made against the Book of Mormon from 1830 forward — not a selection, the whole body of them — and recorded what happened to each claim over time. The study, Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms, was published by the Interpreter Foundation.

Now what do those labels mean? Note this carefully, because it is exactly where critics and defenders talk past each other. Does “confirmed” mean the Book of Mormon has been proved true? It does not, and Roper never claims that it does. It means the textual feature that somebody once called flatly impossible has since been documented in the ancient world by people with no stake in the argument, and so the objection built on it no longer stands.

Roper’s Three Phases

1830–1844 — 102 items alleged anachronistic: 7 confirmed, 2 partially confirmed, 93 unconfirmed — 90.2%.

1845–1965 — 168 claims: 36 confirmed, 10 partially confirmed, 122 unconfirmed.

1966–2024 — 226 claims: 174 confirmed, 31 partially confirmed, 21 unconfirmed — 9.29%.

Roper’s own summary of the finding:

“Whereas 90.2% of the items remained unconfirmed in 1844, today that figure has dropped to a meager 9.29%. Thus, the key finding of this study is that, over time, allegedly problematic features of the Book of Mormon text have strongly trended towards confirmation or partial confirmation, especially in the past fifty-eight years.”

Notice also that the number of CLAIMS rose across the phases — 102, then 168, then 226. Did the critics run out of objections? Not at all. They kept generating them at an accelerating rate, and the objections kept right on resolving in the wrong direction.

Why the Direction Is the Argument

Any single item can be argued forever. The trend cannot, and the trend is what a forgery cannot fake.

So what happens to a genuine nineteenth-century fabrication as scholarship advances? Its author knew what his era knew and nothing more. Every excavation after him, every decipherment, every dig season, is one more fresh opportunity for his guesses to be caught out. The errors should MULTIPLY as knowledge grows, because the gap between what he assumed and what was actually there keeps widening year over year.

Now what happens to a genuine ancient record? Its unfamiliar features are unfamiliar for one reason only: the modern world has not caught up to them yet. Every excavation is a chance for another one to be vindicated. The errors should SHRINK over time.

Two predictions, pointing in exactly opposite directions, and 190 years of accumulated data is more than enough to tell you which one of them actually happened out in the world. Ninety percent unconfirmed became nine percent unconfirmed. Which kind of document behaves that way? Not the first kind.

Four That Turned Around

Abstractions persuade nobody, so take specific items that were once presented as fatal.

Writing on metal plates. Ridiculed in 1830 as an obvious absurdity — ancient records were written on papyrus and parchment. Then came the Copper Scroll from Qumran, gold and silver foundation plates from the Persian empire, the Pyrgi gold tablets, and more. An entire category of ancient practice that nobody in 1830 knew existed.

Cement. Helaman 3:7 describes people building with cement. Mesoamerican archaeology has since documented extensive cement and lime-plaster construction — the great sites are full of it.

Barley in the Americas. Called an obvious import from Joseph Smith’s own farm. In December 1983, Science 83 reported the discovery by professional archaeologists of what they took to be pre-Columbian domesticated barley at a Hohokam site in Phoenix, Arizona.

Nahom. First Nephi names a burial place called Nahom in the Arabian wilderness. A German archaeological team excavating the Bar’an temple at Marib, Yemen, recovered altars bearing the tribal name NHM, dated to roughly the seventh to sixth centuries BC — the era of Lehi’s journey, in the right region.

Nahom deserves a second look, because it is a different kind of item from the others. Can a general claim about crops or building materials be lucky? Certainly it can. But a specific place-name, in a specific region, matching an inscription from the right century, is a target that a lucky guess does not hit. And Joseph Smith was not consulting an excavation that happened more than a century and a half after he was dead.

What This Does and Does Not Prove

Be honest about the limits, because overclaiming here would forfeit the advantage.

Does this prove the Book of Mormon is scripture? No. Archaeology cannot do that for any sacred text, and it has never done it for the Bible either. Items remain unresolved, and an honest apologist says so out loud: twenty-one of them on Roper’s own count, with horses still among the hardest of the lot.

What it does is remove a specific argument from the table. “The book contains things that could not have existed” was once a powerful claim. It has been running at a loss for a hundred and ninety years, and anyone repeating a bullet-point list today should be asked how many items on that list were also on the 1844 list — and what happened to those.

The Verdict

The anachronism argument has been run continuously since 1830, by many people, in good faith and bad, with every advantage that expanding scholarship could give it. It has a scoreboard.

So read the scoreboard. In 1844, 90.2% of the items stood unconfirmed; today the figure is 9.29%. Metal plates? An entire category of ancient practice recovered, one nobody in 1830 knew existed. Cement? The ruins are built out of it. Barley? Found in Arizona in 1983 by archaeologists who were not looking for Nephites. Nahom? An altar in Yemen carrying the right letters from the right century in the right stretch of desert.

A fabrication gets WORSE as the world learns more. This one keeps getting better. Is that a proof? No, and it is not offered as one — but it is a hard fact about the last two centuries of scholarship, and anybody still leading with the anachronism list ought to be made to account for it before he reads out the first item.