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 Objection — Stated Fairly

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.

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

Answering these one at a time is a losing format, because the debate never ends and each item takes a page. There is a better method, and almost nobody applies it: stop arguing individual items and TRACK them.

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.

Note carefully what the labels mean, because this is where critics and defenders talk past each other. “Confirmed” does not mean the Book of Mormon has been proved true. It means the textual feature that was called impossible has since been documented in the ancient world — the objection 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. Critics did not run out of objections. They kept generating them, and the objections kept resolving in the wrong direction for the critics.

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.

Think about what happens to a genuine nineteenth-century fabrication as scholarship advances. Its author knew what his era knew. Every subsequent excavation, decipherment, and dig season is a fresh opportunity for his guesses to be exposed. The errors should MULTIPLY as knowledge grows, because the gap between what he assumed and what was actually there keeps widening.

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

Those two predictions point in opposite directions, and 190 years of data is enough to tell which one happened. Ninety percent unconfirmed became nine percent unconfirmed. That is the behavior of the second kind of document, not the first.

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. A general claim about crops or building materials can be lucky. A specific place-name, in a specific region, matching an inscription of the right century, is a target that a guess does not hit. And Joseph Smith could not have consulted an excavation that happened more than a century and a half after he died.

What This Does and Does Not Prove

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

This does not prove the Book of Mormon is scripture. Archaeology cannot do that for any sacred text — not for the Bible either. Items remain unresolved, and the honest apologist says so: twenty-one of them, on Roper’s own count, and horses remain among the hardest.

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.

This is what the record shows: 90.2% unconfirmed in 1844, and 9.29% unconfirmed today. This is what happened to metal plates: an entire ancient practice recovered. This is what happened to cement: the ruins are made of it. This is what happened to barley: found in Arizona in 1983. This is what happened to Nahom: an altar in Yemen with the right letters and the right century.

A fabrication gets WORSE as the world learns more. This one keeps getting better. That is not a proof, and it is not offered as one — but it is a fact about the last two centuries, and anyone still leading with the anachronism list should have to account for it.