Supposedly, one of the tribes of Israel hopped on hollowed out logs with magic rocks in them and floated across the Atlantic to the Americas where they set up shop building a new Israel. Then Jesus visited while doing the whole "I'm dead. Psych!" thing, a war broke out, and all the "good" Native Americans were killed. Their history of the whole thing was written on some solid gold plates and buried in upstate New York and found by con artist and aspiring prophet Joseph Smith, who read the hieroglyphic "reformed Egyptian" text on the plates by putting them in a hat with a pair of magic "divine" rocks that translated them for him by God's will. The text that came from this was the Book of Mormon.

So the different wording was part of the con from the aforementioned "reformed Egyptian" text.