Use of Messiah and Christ in the Book of Mormon

There is something special about the use of the terms Christ and Messiah in the Book of Mormon. Messiah occurs 32 times, while Christ occurs 391 times. Although Christ is the preferred word in The Book of Mormon, both terms have a very special context in the Small and Large Plates of Nephi. 

Occurrences of Messiah

30 occurrences of Messiah are in the Small Plates. It goes to lengths to make the connection that the Messiah is the Son of God (1 Nephi 10:7) and that he is the one to atone for the sins of humanity.

In the Large Plates the title occurs only twice, once by Abinadi and the other time by Nephi the prophet (Mosiah 13:33, Helaman 8:13). Every time it occurs in the Large Plates it is paired with a reference to Moses's prophesying of a chosen one¹ (see also 1 Nephi 10:4, which also takes the same interpretation). The expectation these figures in The Book of Mormon have for the Messiah aligns well with the end-time Messiah attested in Qumran sources from the Dead Sea.²

It seems that Messiah is used more by the earlier authors of The Book of Mormon (Nephi et al) and hardly at all by the later authors. The composition of the terms starts to shift after 2 Nephi 10. Before Christ appears in the Small Plates, Messiah occurs 20 times; after the first occurrence of Christ, it only occurs 10 more times.

Occurrences of Christ

The first occurrence of Christ in The Book of Mormon chronologically occurs in 2 Nephi 10:3 where Jacob states “for in the last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name”. 

In the words of Mormon, Christ occurs 5 times. Every other occurrence is in the large plates. Mormon appears to favor Christ over Messiah in his own narration. 

The last occurrences chronologically of the title are found in Mosiah 3, where it occurs 4 times (Mosiah 3:8, 12-13, 16); it never occurs again in the Large Plates.

Chi-Squared Test of Independence

Below is a table of the number of words used in each work that employs either term.

There are two hypotheses:

H₀ → The frequency to use either term is independent of the records that attest them.

H_A → The frequency to use either term is not independent of the records that attest them.

Below are the Chi-Squared table values for each category:

Then the values are computed for each category using the following formula: $\frac{(O_i - E_i)^2}{E_i}$

$$\chi^{2} = \sum_{i=1}^{k} \frac{(O_i - E_i)^2}{E_i} = 27.0 + 3.18 + 0.526 + 0.062 + 15.65 + 1.85 \approx 48.27$$ $$df = 2$$ $$\chi^{2}_{0.05,\, df=2} = 5.99$$ $$\chi^{2} = 48.27 > 5.99$$

The results indicate a statistically significant association between the record and word occurrence, $\chi^{2}(2,\, N = 304) = 48.27,\, p < 0.05$ . This suggests that the occurrence of these words is likely not independent of the record. In other words, it is highly unlikely that occurrence frequency of the terms Messiah and Christ among the different records is due to random chance. Therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected, and we conclude that the frequency to use either term depends to some extent on the records that attest them.

Future Research

• The most obvious analysis I would need to perform would be over the authorship and usage of the terms. I need to separate the voices out of The Book of Mormon authors for the text. A SQLite database of this will be available in a forthcoming repository.