Richard Dawkins: Speaking From Ignorance

In the video short below, we see Richard Dawkins (an evolutionary biologist) claim to have read a portion of The Book of Mormon, and assert that it was a fake because it was written (translated) in the 19th Century but used 16th Century English and overuses the term "it came to pass". Dawkins doesn't know what he is talking about. 

    First, as the video explains, the Hebrew phrase translated in the Bible as "it came to pass" is actually used at a high frequency in the Hebrew text. 

“And it came to pass” occurs frequently in the Old Testament.[1] The actual Hebrew Bible has some 1,200 occurrences of the phrase, so the King James translators probably found it to be redundant and cumbersome. As a result, they often translated it as “and it became,” “and it was,” or “and.” On a number of occasions they simply ignored the expression altogether. By the time they finished their work on the King James Version, some 727 instances of the phrase remained in the text.   

Thus, since the people in The Book Of Mormon came Jerusalem circa 600 B.C., it would be expected that their writing would similarly have a high occurrence of "and it came to pass".  

    Second, Dawkins claims about 19th Century English differing greatly from 16th Century English is not universal--I only recently linked to a video discussing how British English rapidly changed in the 19th Century--and there were areas of England that spoke essentially what was 16th Century English up through at least World War II. In Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser, he recounts his service in the Burma Campaign alongside troops from Cumbria--a region of Northwest England bordering on Scotland. And their English is very much a King James Bible type of English full of "ye," "thee," and "thou". So much so, that I obtained my copy of Fraser's book from a friend who couldn't decipher it and gave it to me, whereas it was not difficult for me because I regularly read from scripture. 

    As for the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French intellectual who traveled through America in 1831 noted the prevalence of the Bible and commented that he  saw “hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Thus, not only would have Americans on the frontier in the early 19th Century have been familiar and comfortable with 16th Century English, it may have been the only English they regularly read.

 VIDEO: "Richard Dawkins: 'The Book Of Mormon Is An Obvious Fake'."