About
What this is
Book of Mormon Compare is a tool for textual-critical study of the Book of Mormon. It presents manuscript and print witnesses side-by-side, with word-level differences highlighted so that additions, deletions, and substitutions between any two versions are immediately visible.
Available versions span the documentary record from early manuscripts through modern printed editions. See Versions for details on each one.
Textual criticism
Textual criticism is the discipline of reconstructing a text's history by comparing its surviving manuscript and print witnesses. Developed primarily in the study of classical and biblical literature, it identifies copying errors, scribal interventions, editorial changes, and transmission variants — the accumulated differences that arise each time a text is copied, typeset, or revised.
The Book of Mormon presents an unusual case in this field. No autograph exists; the text originates in dictation rather than authorial manuscript. Yet two early manuscript witnesses survive — the Original Manuscript and the Printer's Manuscript — alongside a clear chain of printed editions. This gives scholars a more complete documentary record than is typical for 19th-century texts of comparable length.
For a fuller treatment of the transmission chain, categories of change, and key scholarly resources, see Textual Criticism.
Sources
Manuscript transcriptions are drawn from the Joseph Smith Papers Project who sourced from Royal Skousen's Critical Text Project. The Original Manuscript fragments and Printer's Manuscript are now held at the Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
Printed editions have been sourced from Joseph Smith Papers, online archives and their respective publishers.
How to use it
- Pick a version for each column using the selectors at the top of the reader.
- Use the < and > arrows to move between chapters, or tap the chapter title to jump to any book and chapter.
- Click any word to highlight every matching word in both columns — useful for tracing a phrase across editions.
- Where a chapter exists in one edition but not the other, the missing side is marked "Non-extant."