The Book of Mormon is anachronistic because its text-based religious worldview is inconsistent with the oral, ritual-centered cultures of the time and place it is supposed to inhabit.

“In the Book of Mormon, religion is managed through texts and is accessed through texts. You read Isaiah, you search the scriptures. Everything is uh managed by texts. In the ancient world, religion was not practiced through texts. It was practiced through rituals”

The sheer number of thematic parallels between the Book of Mormon's claims and 19th-century literature makes it highly probable that Joseph Smith derived his concepts from his environment.

“I think regardless of what people believe about the Book of Mormon's um ancient or, you know, more contemporary to Joseph Smith historical origins, it seems very clear to me that it is more likely from a historical methodological standpoint that Joseph Smith almost certainly was hooking into this id”

The Book of Mormon's description of plates is not comparable to the historical accounts of metal records from Joseph Smith's time, which were generally decorative or non-text-dense.

“And that's actually evidence against long records on metal more than it is evidence for the Book of Mormon. Cuz the Book of Mormon is about 270,000 words and was translated off of 14 plates according to Sidney Rigdon. So, if we use Sidney Rigdon's number for a moment, that means each plate of the Bo”