How likely is it that a young man of Joseph Smith’s limited education could produce such a lengthy book as a first-time author?

Limiting our scope to just the length of the Book of Mormon, shouldn’t our starting point be that it is unlikely a first-time author like Joseph would have produced such a long book on his own?

In 2021 Kyler Rasmussen analyzed 116 authors with prominent literary works published between 1800 and 1860 and compared:

• how old they were when they published their first fictional work (of more than 50 pages)
• how long that work was (in pages)
• how many years of formal education they received. 

Just looking at page counts, Joseph Smith was a clear outlier. He was younger than average, had substantially less education than average. Taking that into account, he produced a work far larger than anyone would have guessed (around 531 dense pages).

Isn’t the length of the Book of Mormon a simple piece of evidence that Joseph Smith likely did not write it himself?

See: 

• Kyler Rasmussen – Estimating the Evidence – Episode 1: On Ages and Pages

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