Deutero-Isaiah Verses in the Book of Mormon
Overview of the Deutero-Isaiah Problem in the Book of Mormon:
In the Book of Mormon, there are many chapters of Isaiah directly incorporated from the King
Deutero-Isaiah Verses in the Book of Mormon
Overview of the Deutero-Isaiah Problem in the Book of Mormon:
In the Book of Mormon, there are many chapters of Isaiah directly incorporated from the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, complete with translation errors that were obviously not possible to have been recorded on the gold plates since the KJV was not available until thousands of years later. This by itself is a massive problem for the Book of Mormon's claim to authenticity, as it contradicts the narrative that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by putting his seer stone in a hat, sticking his head fully inside to block out light, and then writing down the words that appeared from the stone. Only after the words were written down correctly would the words change, so there is no room for Joseph Smith to switch between dictating from the seer stone and then reciting passages from the KJV Bible. It is important to remember that the gold plates were never used in the translation of the Book of Mormon, so it is impossible to change between a tight and loose translation.
While the overall use of chapters and phrases from the KJV is problematic enough for the credibility of the Book of Mormon considering the translation method described above, the use of Deutero-Isaiah is where it turns from a big problem to a smoking gun against the authenticity of Joseph Smith. The problem is that in the time since Joseph Smith, scholars have discovered that there are chapters of Isaiah that are written by a second author (or possibly a group of authors) with an 8th century origin. This means that the chapters would be impossible to be included in the Book of Mormon since they could not have been on the gold plates, which puts the inclusion of them as a massive anachronism. Just as with the Book of Abraham issues, Joseph Smith had no idea that in the years following his death we would have a much better understanding of these texts, and he was clearly unaware that including these chapters would be an issue due to the multiple authorship issue.
Why It Matters:
Critics have long charged Joseph Smith with creating the Book of Mormon using sources available to him, and there are a lot of resources to corroborate that charge. There are a lot of literary elements in The Late War, a book that also is written in the language of the King James Bible, that mirror elements that some claim make the Book of Mormon unique such as chiasmus. The View of the Hebrews contains a lot of similar themes to the Book of Mormon, and there are many other additional writings that talked about the Indians being descendants from Israel before Joseph Smith introduced the Book of Mormon.
Those are all fairly circumstantial ideas since the correlations are more vague with themes and literary styles, however, so apologists tend to mock the idea that Joseph Smith could write the book himself and move on. The problem with Deutero-Isaiah, however, is that we now have an example where Joseph Smith not only copied source material, but copied material that has no place in the Book of Mormon. And to complicate matters further, it also calls into question Joseph Smith's prophetic abilities that he did not know the texts copied were not available to Lehi.
Further complicating the problem for apologists is that the Book of Mormon needs to have either a 'tight' or 'loose' translation, but it can't be both. The witnesses all describe Joseph Smith reading off the stone in his h