The Book of Mormon Editions Project is an independent, nonpartisan digital resource dedicated to documenting and presenting the historical textual development of the Book of Mormon. Its purpose is to provide readers, researchers, and students with clear, direct access to multiple published editions, enabling careful study and transparent comparison over time.
All textual data used in this project is sourced from the
BYU Open Scripture Project, whose meticulous work in digitizing historical editions of the Book of Mormon has made rigorous textual study possible. This project gratefully acknowledges their contribution and relies on their data as its authoritative textual foundation.
This project seeks to present historical textual data as accurately and transparently as possible, without interpretation or editorial bias. While absolute neutrality is impossible, I value openness and clarity. I therefore acknowledge that I am a member in good standing of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and personally believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.
Read the complete text of each of the following edition with clean, consistent formatting:
1830, 1837, 1840, 1841, 1879, 1920, 1981, and 2013
Browse editions →
Compare editions with inline highlights showing additions, deletions, and modifications.
Try a comparison →
View all editions at once to quickly compare changes.
Open simultaneous view →
Browse a comprehensive, structured record of textual changes across editions.
View all changes →
Note on Verse Divisions and Introductory Material: The Book of Mormon was not divided into verses until the 1879 edition. For consistency and ease of reading, the text from earlier editions has been arranged into verses following the later structure. Additionally, certain content, such as introductory pages, has been omitted from this project to focus on the main scriptural text.
You can find more about me and this project on My Website.
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/
Home page with links to each edition, explanations, and links to the changes pages. -
/about
About the project
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/en/<edition>
Info on a specific edition (e.g.1830,1920,1981), with links to each book (1 Nephi, Alma, etc) in that edition.- example
/en/1830
- example
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/en/<edition>/<book>
Info on a specific book (e.g.1-nephi,alma,moroni), with links to each chapter in that book.- example
/en/1830/1-nephi
- example
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/en/<edition>/<book>/<chapter>
Read a specific chapter from a specific edition- Example:
/en/1830/1-nephi/1
- Example:
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/en/<edition>/<book>/<chapter>?showFootnotes=true
Read a specific chapter from a specific edition with footnotes enabled -
/en/<edition>/<book>/<chapter>?compare=<editionX>
Read a specific chapter from a specific edition with inline strikethroughs for removed text from 'edition' to 'editionX' -
/en/simultaneous/<book>/<chapter>
Read a specific chapter from all editions at once.- Example:
/en/simultaneous/1-nephi/1
- Example:
-
/changes
Info of basic textual changes between editions. Links to the "all changes" page and changes between each edition -
/changes/all
All changes across every edition -
/changes/<edition>
Example:/changes/1920Changes from 1830 → 1920
This project uses NextJS for good speed, SEO, and SSG.
Uses @tanstack/react-virtual for fast loading of thousands of changes on the changes routes.
I'll be using diff-match-patch to calculate differences between editions
To run locally:
npm i
npm run devAlternatively, this code is deployed on Vercel at https://bom-editions.vercel.app/
- I'm storing full JSON for each edition. (I realize I could store the baseline 1830 edition and then store diffs for each newer edition, but I don't think it's worth the work at this time.)
- I want to eventually be able to have this work for different languages too, which is why I have an
enfolder, but for now I will only work on English.
/public/data/
en/
1830/
1-nephi/
1.json
1837/
1-nephi/
1.json
1920/
1-nephi/
1.json
Example JSON file (/public/data/en/1830/1-nephi/1.json):
{
"book": "1 Nephi",
"chapter": 1,
"edition": "1830",
"verses": [
{ "verse": 1, "text": "I, Nephi, having been born of good parents..." },
{ "verse": 2, "text": "Yea, I make a record..." }
...
]
}
The data is from Open Scripture. I've included a git submodule and the processing steps in the data-source folder. This repository has the text data of all the editions in a tab seperated value file.
- Make it so if the church releases a new version of the bom, all you need to do is add a new folder of json in public/data.
- I've set up but haven't completed a lot of the
footnotefunctionality. The idea of footnotes was that it would allow readers to see reversions in text. For example, some editions would make a change that brought back an original state of the text. See 1 Nephi 1:16 below:
1837: ... my father hath written, ...
1840: ... my father had written, ...
1841: ... my father hath written, ...
The reason I haven't finished is because the simultaneous edition page shows changes like this well, and I'm not sure anymore if footnotes in the reading routes are neccesary.
- on edge broswer when scrolling up at the top of the page on a chapter page the topbar scrolls down which looks bad.
- on mobile if the sidebar is open and its at the bottom and i scroll down on it, it closes the sidebar.
- there's too little space between the last character of the longest verse and the end of the code block in the simultaneous page.
- when i expand moroni on the sidebar, it should scroll down for me to see moronis chapters (its the last book.)
- custom dropdowns.
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Bug fixes and UI improvements
Help improve the website’s performance, accessibility, or user experience. -
Adding new editions
Contribute digitized editions of the Book of Mormon, in English or other languages. -
Data improvements
We're missing introductory pages and other content that's not the main story of the Book of Mormon. If you have access to it, please add it. -
Documentation
Help improve the site’s guides, explanations, or technical documentation.
To maintain the scholarly and historical integrity of this project, all data contributions should adhere to the following:
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Source Requirements
- Text must come from a verified edition of the Book of Mormon.
- Preferably from public domain sources or with explicit permission to share.
- Include full bibliographic or institutional attribution whenever possible.
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Formatting Requirements
- Follow the existing JSON structure in the repository.
- Preserve original spelling, punctuation, and formatting.
- Fork the repository.
- Create a feature branch for your changes.
- Make your improvements, following the formatting guidelines.
- Submit a pull request (PR) with a clear description of your changes.
- Include references or links to sources when contributing textual data.
If you find a bug, formatting error, or missing data, please open an issue on GitHub.
If you’d like to support this work, please reach out to me directly at jonny-jackson.com.
Financial support helps with domain/hosting costs, research, and further development of this project.