I saw this post from Blake Ostler on Facebook a few minutes ago and thought you guys might want to see it, so here goes:
“I have seen several claim that there is no evidence for the Book of Mormon at all. I believe that this claim is uninformed.
To account for the Book of Mormon, one must explain the following in the Book of Mormon:
1. An accurate description and recitation of the Hebrew Covenant Renewal Festival Form -- not detected by Hebrew and biblical scholars until the late 1950s (4 times in the BofM);
2. An accurate description and recitation of the prophetic lawsuit procedure and Formsgeschichte -- not detected by biblical scholars until the 1960s (3 times in the BofM);
3. An accurate recitation of the Prophetic Call Form in 1 Nephi 1 -- not detected by biblical scholars until the 1970s;
4. Resemblances between Israelite law, international treaties, and laws governing war and oath forms (Rasmussen 1982; R. Johnson 1982; Moriss1982).
5. Hebrew, Egyptian, and classical names which appear in the Book of Mormon but not in the Bible (Nibley 1973, 192-96; Nibley 1957, 242-54;Nibley 1948, 85-90; Carlton and Welch 1981; Tvedtnes 1977). Though many of these names could be biblical variants, others are difficult to explain as Joseph Smith's inventions. Paanchi, Pahoran, and Pacumeni, for example are Egyptian names which are sometimes transliterated exactly as they stand in the Book of Mormon, while Korihor is a close variant of Herihor, predecessor to 'Amon-Pi'ankhy in about 734 B.C. (Baer 1973).
6. Description of military, social, and political institutions of sixth-century Israel corroborated by the Lachish letter and other recently discovered sources (Nibley 1982b; Nibley 1952, 4-12, 20-26, 107-18; Nibley 1957, 47-111; R. Smith 1984).
7. Accurate and consistent geographical detail (England 1982; Nibley 1952,123-28).
8 . Ancient forms of government (Bushman 1976; Nibley 1973, 281-82; Nibley 1952, 20-26; Nibley 1957, 82-86).
9. Evidence that the Book of Mormon assigned value to the cardinal directions with south representing the sacred and north the profane (Alma 22; 46:17; Eth. 7:6). It also presents a social organization revolving around a ritual center from which government, territorial order, and communal sanctity flowed. The moral order of life and understanding of the covenant were also linked to territoriality (Olsen 1983). These symbolic aspects of territoriality are common in ancient societies.
10. Studies have demonstrated an ingenious structure characterized by literary typologies, or exposition of symbolic similarities between peoples, places and events (Tate, Rust, and Jorgensen, 1981).
11. Other unifying structures are the various forms of parallelism (synthetic, antithetic and synonomic) that are the basis of Hebrew poetry (Welch 1969 and 1981). Steven Sondrup (1981) has demonstrated that the poetic parallels with numerous ancient works in the Ancient Near East. The Book of Mormon parallelism of 2 Nephi 4 resembles poetic structure in the Psalms. Noel Reynolds (1982) has argued that chiasmus (inverted parallelism) is the organizing principle for the entire book of 1 Nephi.
12. Several Computer Word Print studies show that the appearance of non-contextual words showing patterns that differ significantly from author to author AND THAT NONE OF THE WORDPRINTS MATCH JOSEPH SMITH.”