The Book of Mormon Study Text (BOMST) is the first and, to our knowledge, the only critical edition of the Book of Mormon produced by a non-Mormon scholar. It was first produced in 2017–2018 by IRR’s executive director (and now president) Robert M. Bowman Jr. Previously, Dr. Bowman had written his PhD dissertation on the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Mormon (2015), and he has continued to engage in academic research on the Book of Mormon.

Originally, the BOMST was available on this website as a collection of 115 webpages. At the present time, the entire work is being thoroughly reviewed and edited. When complete, it will be published as a resource in Logos Bible Software. As such, the entire Book of Mormon will be instantly searchable, something obviously impossible with 115 separate webpages. In addition, the software resource will facilitate comparisons between the Book of Mormon and the King James Version of the Bible, which was heavily used in the Book of Mormon. The BOMST will thus be designed to equip both Christians and Latter-day Saints to do serious research on the Book of Mormon and on its relation to the Bible.

The BOMST is a critical edition of the Book of Mormon that takes into account the two handwritten manuscripts produced by Joseph Smith and his scribes in 1829 along with the first printed edition published in 1830. Elsewhere on this website you can find a free PDF of the 1830 Book of Mormon. The BOMST also compares the early forms of the text with later editions overseen by Joseph Smith (1837, 1840) as well as the current, official text. It engages the work of various Mormon scholars, including Royal Skousen, whose massive, multivolume series of studies on the Book of Mormon text was completed in 2025.

Because the forthcoming edition of the BOMST will be significantly revised in comparison to the web version, we have removed those webpages from the site. Our hope is that the Logos edition will be available sometime in 2027.