Bullet-Proof Evidence Against the Book of Mormon

Speaker 0    00:00:00    Well, hey everybody. Welcome to the unveiling Mormons and podcast from Pursue. God. I’m Brian. That’s Ross over there. Ross. Today we’re gonna continue to unveil Mormonism and we’re gonna talk today about what we’re titling Bulletproof evidence against the Book of Mormon. And we initially thought this would be one episode, but quickly we realized there was quite too much for one  

Speaker 1    00:00:22    <laugh>. Yeah. Because yeah, there’s a lot of issues that the Book of Mormon has challenges and problems with the claims that it makes. And so we thought, you know, we better to give them their, do we better like, take two episodes to explore  

Speaker 0    00:00:35    That? Yeah. We, uh, again, I think we need to check our hearts right off the bat. Some people might even be listening to this waiting to pick a fight. We’re really not trying to pick a fight, even though we use kind of a catchy title. We’re we’re doing what we would invite anyone to do with the Bible, right. We’re we would invite anyone to bring, bring evidence for and against the Bible. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> what we believe to be God’s word. And, you know, we wouldn’t tell our kids or people in our churches, we wouldn’t tell them, uh, not to read this book or that book. We would say, yeah, bring it on because we believe that the Bible will stand the test of time.  

Speaker 1    00:01:09    Yeah. And you know that that’s so true. And, you know, actually the leaders of the LDS church have invited us to, to test what they’re saying. So Elder Jeffrey Holland, who is one of the apostles of Mormonism, he, he made this quote, this challenge to us. He laid down the gauntlet. Really? He said either the Book of Mormon is what the prophet Joseph said it is. Or this church in its founder or false, a deception from the first instant onward. Joseph must be accepted either as a prophet of God or else as a charlatan of the first order. Now my hunch is that that’s insider talk, that he’s talking to people who are already, you know, confirmed in their beliefs, uh, you know, to help rally the troops and stuff. But I, I really, it’s a fair analysis and that it’s really true. Either the, the whole Mormon, um, system rises or falls on the Book of Mormon, the, the prophetic claims of Joseph Smith rise and fall in the Book of Mormon. Cuz if you accept the Book of Mormon, then it follows the Dominoes fall, then Joseph Smiths a prophet. And then, and then, you know, everything that he taught and everything that he established is therefore validated. And so we should test the claims of the Book of Mormon. He, in fact, the Bible invites us to do that in First Thessalonians five, verse 21 says, test everything that is said and hold on to what is good.  

Speaker 0    00:02:39    So we’re gonna do that. Yeah. And we do Now, today we’ll do that with the Book of Mormon. But again, we encourage people to do that with scripture because we believe that scripture stands the test of time. And not to give it away, but we believe the Book of Mormon fails miserably. And again, we’re not, we’re not trying to be mean spirit. He spirited here anyone who really wants the truth. I hope you would keep listening if you’re not interested in hearing some critiques of the Book of Mormon mm-hmm. <affirmative>, then probably just turn it off cuz you’ll get frustrated because in, in full transparency here, we’re gonna be critical in a few different areas. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but not with a critical spirit.  

Speaker 1    00:03:14    Well, we really wanna approach this with kindness and with love for LDS people. And, um, we’re not trying to win points or score argument point, you know, kinda kind of come up, get over on anybody mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But we think it’s fair to do this evaluation and it’s really should be helpful to people to listen.  

Speaker 0    00:03:33    All right. So Ross, real quick, for people who are not familiar with the Book of Mormon, give us a 62nd overview. What do we mean when we say the Book of Mormon? Uh, for someone who doesn’t even know what we’re talking  

Speaker 1    00:03:45    About. Yeah. The, just in a nutshell, without going into all the detail about it, we can just simply say that the Book of Mormon claims to be an ancient scripture that tells the story of God’s people in the American continent. So the Latter Day Saints, I believe that it’s a companion val volume to the Bible. The Bible tells the story of God’s people in the old world. The Book of Mormon, in their mind tells the story of God’s people in the new world.  

Speaker 0    00:04:10    And so then the Book of Mormon, according to Joseph Smith, um, he translated the Book of Mormon. But Mormon was actually, uh, well, uh, a person at one point in the Americas. Right, right. And later in, later in Angel.  

Speaker 1    00:04:25    Yeah. Is that right? Uh, moroni. I was the angel moroni. They two are related. Yeah. So, Mor the, the idea, the story of the Book of Mormon is that there were all these records that were kept throughout the history of these people of God. They, they migrated from Jerusalem just before the fall of Jerusalem, which the Bible talks about. So that’s 600 BC ish. They migrated from the old world to the new world and set up here and established two great civilizations in time as they multiplied. Um, and they kept records along the way. And so Mormon took all these, the guy named Mormon took all of these records and he abridged them into like a, a summary type, a digest kind of type from all these. And then, and that’s, he, um, inscribed them on plates made of gold. And he buried that in a hill, um, where Joseph Smith, um, recovered it and then went on to translate those ancient records into what’s now the Book of Mormon. That’s the story. Anyway,  

Speaker 0    00:05:27    That’s the story. And I wanna make sure, I wanna make sure to say this, that’s the story of the Book of Mormon. We don’t believe it’s true. Right. And this is this, in this episode and the next episode, we’re gonna tell you why we don’t believe it’s true. So we’re gonna, I think the best place to start is archeology. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because shouldn’t archeology have something to say about all this?  

Speaker 1    00:05:48    Right. Ar and the, the science of archeology looks at, um, the artifacts that are left from past, uh, human occupation from past civilizations. And so, um, we can look at archeology to say what happened in the past. And so, um, from the point of view of archeology, there certainly was there certainly archeological evidence for, um, ancient civilizations in the American continent, but it just doesn’t line up with the story of the Book of Mormon.  

Speaker 0    00:06:23    Yeah. So it, it, it more, it more than doesn’t line up. It actually kind of disproves  

Speaker 1    00:06:28    In any case, in some points, in some, when we talk about archeology to some, uh, some extent, it’s an argument from silence that we can say, for example, two different, two or three different kinds of evidence. One is inal evidence that things that people carved on stones a lot of times in, at least in the ancient world. And, uh, in the old world, rulers would carve on their victories on stones, and they would, you know, erect monuments themselves. There’s a second kind of evidence that is material evidence, and what did, what did people leave behind? And so that would be buildings and foundation. So, uh, basically we’re looking for ruins of buildings and ruins of cities and so forth. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And part of that might have, might be that there were artifacts left behind in, say, uh, ancient kings maybe were buried with ano with artifacts, and we could learn what they were buried with to learn something about the culture. Um, what what they threw away becomes part of a, the trash heat becomes part of the evidence of their culture. And then, and then related to that, there were, there’s artwork that was, uh, ancient civilizations, uh, created artwork. And the artwork tells us what they, what they depict and how they depict it tells us something about their civilization. So those are the kind of evidences that archeology is looking at.  

Speaker 0    00:07:49    Okay. So let’s go back to that first one, the inscriptional evidence. So let me ask you a question, Roth, of all the names in the book of Mormon, of all the names in the book of Mormon, I don’t even know all the names, but, or some of the names. So names like Morona or mm-hmm. <affirmative> or Lehigh Yeah. Or Nephi. So those names that you’d find in the Book of Mormon, how many of those have been found on inscriptions in the Americas?  

Speaker 1    00:08:16    Yeah, let me think about that for a minute. Uh, none <laugh>. So, so zero. Zero. Yeah.  

Speaker 0    00:08:22    Now, again, for me, help me because I know more, you grew up with a Mormon background, how mm-hmm. <affirmative>, how would, like, how would a Mormon, how would someone from the Mormon faith explain that away? Like, how would a I mean, I’m a genuinely asking, how would somebody explain that away?  

Speaker 1    00:08:39    Well, again, partly it’s an argument from silence. And so we can say nothing has ever been found, but we don’t know with certainty that nothing ever will be found. Right. So the Mormon person holds out this hope that Yeah. It’s just all it takes is gonna be a few more archeological digs or, or a few more. And then they’ll finally find, you know, an inscription, you know, from King Mosiah or something like that. So what, what the LDS world, because there’s such a lack of positive confirming evidence, what, what the LDS apologist will do is to create at least the aura of plausibility based on some vague similarities between the Book of Mormon’s story. And the ancient, you know, say the Meso American, um, remains from the toll texts or the Mayans or the Aztecs and so forth. No. Now, by the way, not every Mormon person believes that the Book of Mormon took place in Central America. Hmm. So that’s been a common, um, dominant view for a long time. But now new views are coming up that maybe it took place more in the North American continent and so forth, but so that they’ll hold out a hope that, that something will be emerged. And then there’s enough, okay. There’s enough generic sense that, oh, there were these great civilizations that they’ll just connect the dots because they’re already committed to the idea that, that this is a real thing.  

Speaker 0    00:10:04    Okay. So, but there’s no inscriptional evidence, there’s no name from the Book of Mormon that shows up in inscriptions in the Americas. Uh, before we move on from inscriptions, I guess I need to go back to ask about the inscriptions on those gold plates. So what about those? Yeah, I guess you could say, wait, there, those names are inscribed there. Right? So just show me those plates. And you got me, right?  

Speaker 1    00:10:30    Yeah, exactly. The LDS claim is that the gold plates, when Joseph Smith was done translating them, God took them back up into heaven. Mm. So the gold place don’t exist anywhere in our concrete universe, in our, in our world. And so, okay, maybe if God took them back up into heaven, then there’s no way to falsify that their claim. There’s no way to test it, because we don’t, we don’t have access to the punitive gold plates.  

Speaker 0    00:10:59    The skeptic in me wants to say so many things right now mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but I, I guess the skeptic in me would say, well, then that, that must be the case for all the other inscriptions with names on it as well. Maybe  

Speaker 1    00:11:10    They, they were all  

Speaker 0    00:11:10    Just taken up to  

Speaker 1    00:11:11    Heaven. I don’t know. I, I I would say how convenient that is Yeah. For them, you know, to make the story, um, put put the story beyond any kind of test or proof.  

Speaker 0    00:11:23    Okay. What about, let’s talk about for a minute, about animals in the Book of Mormon. Mm-hmm. Right? So, right. We can’t, we can’t we dig up archeologically, can’t we figure out what animals were around and sort of match up the, the animals that they say were here in the Book of Mormon?  

Speaker 1    00:11:41    Yeah. There’s two ways. I think there might be more. Cause I’m not a, I’m not an archeologist, but there’s two ways to look at that or think about that. One is what kind of bones and what, you know, uh, actual, actual remains of dead animals might exist. Um, and the other one is to look at the artwork, um, of the, of that ancient civilization. So with respect to animals. So the Book of Mormon mentions a lot of different kinds of animals, cattle, sheep, goat, horses, pigs and so forth. None of those have ever been found in terms of remains. And if you look at the artwork, especially of the, um, the middle American cultures, Mayans and so forth, we, we see in their murals, we can clearly identify animals that were native to that area, like deer, jaguar, the pecker, kind of a kind of a, a pig kind of thing. Tapers, there’s other species that are native that are in, that are clearly seen in their artwork and their murals. But for example, a horse has never been found depicted. And, and, and it’s surprisingly because a horse is pretty like large and noteworthy, and yet, you know, none of them have ever been depicted in, in any of the thousands of samples of art from the period.  

Speaker 0    00:13:01    And obviously the reason seems to be that horses were brought to the Americas by the Europeans, right. Correct.  

Speaker 1    00:13:09    Right.  

Speaker 0    00:13:09    And the Europeans came. Let’s do a little bit of, let’s do a little bit of history here. The Europeans came to the Americas roughly in what year?  

Speaker 1    00:13:17    1520 say.  

Speaker 0    00:13:19    Okay. And the Book of Mormon, to go back with your opener, Ross, the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Mormon, they say that these were Jewish people, Jewish families, or a Jewish family that came over from the Middle East in around 600  

Speaker 1    00:13:35    Bc 600 bc. And the book of Mormon timeframe ends about 400 or 4 25  

Speaker 0    00:13:42    Ad ad. Okay. So they were, they were, it was about a thousand years of history. And horses are everywhere.  

Speaker 1    00:13:50    Yeah. In the Book of  

Speaker 0    00:13:51    Mormon, in the Book of Mormon. And yet horses didn’t come to the Americas until the 15 hundreds. Yeah.  

Speaker 1    00:13:59    Yep. And we’re gonna talk about that more in the, in our next podcast. Yeah. Uh, we’ll get into some more detail about that kind of discrepancy that occurs in the Book of Mormon.  

Speaker 0    00:14:08    Okay. So can we at least go to talk about language for a second now that we’re talking? Are we gonna cover that next time or  

Speaker 1    00:14:14    Language? Uh, no, not really.  

Speaker 0    00:14:16    Okay. So then let me throw  

Speaker 1    00:14:17    This. You can talk about  

Speaker 0    00:14:17    That. Here, let me throw this one at you. In my mind, this kind of goes back to inscriptions in my mind. If this is true that we’ve got, you know, Jewish people coming over, then shouldn’t we find Jewish inscriptions all over the place in the Americas?  

Speaker 1    00:14:36    Yeah. Or Jewish related, let’s say that, um, the language of the Native Americans, you’d expected to be at least influenced by Semitic, uh, type of languages in different kinds of language features that show up in different languages. And, and there really isn’t any evidence of that.  

Speaker 0    00:14:57    Okay.  

Speaker 1    00:14:58    Let, let me throw in one other thing about archeology. And that is, um, this is, this is a big one, uh, for me. It’s like the Book of Mormon talks about people using, uh, gold, silver, iron, brass, copper, but especially alloys like brass, or the use of iron to create tools or weapons requires a complicated process of mining, smelting, casting. And that process leaves traces, you know, you can, you can identify a smeltery because you know, you’ve got slag and you’ve got byproducts of, and, and so, um, but, but scholars generally agree that this, this idea of metallurgy or working with metals like that was not introduced into the Americas until several centuries after the Book of Mormon’s story ends. And so there’s another point of, um, archeological like, uh, uh, uh, area where the Book of Mormon doesn’t fit the archeological record.  

Speaker 0    00:16:01    Okay. So we have all these problems, Ross, with the Book of Mormon. But again, I’m gonna try to be a fair skeptic here. Well, couldn’t you say all these same things about the Bible?  

Speaker 1    00:16:11    Yeah. You, you know, you’d, if you did, you’d be in, um, inaccurate. This is one of the great things that differentiates the Bible from the Book of Mormon, because the Bible, uh, has repeatedly been demonstrated as reliable by archeology over and over and over again, historically in geographically. Now, archeology doesn’t have the ability to tell us whether the Bible is true spiritually, but wherever it can be tested for truth, it, it, it, um, it meets the mark. So, for example, that use of metals, we talked about metals that are described, the ones described in the Bible can be verified. You can find archeological evidence for the use and production of those metals. Um, you can go to Jericho, you can go to Jerusalem. There are places that are described in the Bible that, that have had ongoing existence, um, for centuries. And they can be visited.  

Speaker 1    00:17:09    You can’t find where, you know, you can’t go to the book of Mormon, city of Zer Hemla. Nobody knows where, what it is or where it is. So a few months ago, I was able to visit the British Museum in London, and where they have, um, just incredible, one of the things I saw that was like, so encouraging along this line, they have these massive stone panels from ancient Ninevah. Um, they’re erected by the, um, the Assyrian Emperor Sakib. Now, that name might be familiar to our listeners if you’re familiar with the Bible, because he’s mentioned in the Bible and he, um, he, he names cities that he conquered. And among those are cities that are named in the Bible Lake ish. And others who we said, oh, well I know where to find that on the map, south of Jerusalem, whatever. And there’s other inscriptions and, and, um, monuments that mentioned specific names of kings of Judah. And so those are attested by archeology, completely independent of the Bible that those people in those places really existed.  

Speaker 0    00:18:18    So when it comes to archeology, then really the Bible, the Bible stands the test of time. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and that, and the test of time for the Bible is much longer than the test of time. Yeah. For the Book of Mormon even. Yeah. And yet the Book of Mormon doesn’t stand the test of time, which from my vantage point, my answer to that, and this is just one, I think about this rock Ross, like, we’re stacking bricks. We’re just, we’re gonna, I did this with a friend, an LDS friend of mine years ago. I said, let’s just, let’s just stack some bricks here. I said, you go ahead and stack bricks that, that speak against biblical Christianity, and I’ll stack some bricks that would make, kinda like throwing flags at, at Mormonism. Right, right. And I had, through this hour long conversation, I had this huge stack over here on mine. He had nothing. And it was really interesting cuz, and it was this kind of stuff that we were talking about, and he wasn’t debating it. He wasn’t, I mean, it’s really, you kind of appeal to faith, I guess, a little bit is what he did, at  

Speaker 1    00:19:14    Least. Yeah, for  

Speaker 0    00:19:15    Sure. He wasn’t trying to say, no, you’re right. He wasn’t trying to say, no, you’re wrong, and here’s why. He just said, okay. Yeah, no, that one’s, that’s a good question. We had all this stuff, and to me, after a certain point, it takes more faith. It takes a lot, a heck of a lot more faith to really believe in that. The Book of Mormon is what Joseph Smith purported that it was. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> to me, it’s far more likely if we’re just doing probability, it’s far more likely that he was inventing these stories and he didn’t have all this information. Right. He didn’t have all this archeological information that we now have. Or he probably would’ve been a little bit smarter about how he invented, he wouldn’t have talked about horses.  

Speaker 1    00:19:53    Right.  

Speaker 0    00:19:53    He wouldn’t have, maybe he would’ve tried to use some names that he, that he knew were in some inscriptions. Right,  

Speaker 1    00:19:59    Right. Yeah. But he didn’t. Right. That’s a great point. Joseph Smith was completely ignorant of because, uh, at the time that he wrote, there really was no science of New World archeology. Yeah. Right. None of it had really been done. These digs had, and digs and sites had never been developed. So he is operating out of, it looks like he’s operating out of, he’s just taking his own, his own framework, European animals and European style processes of, of, of industry and so forth. And he’s just superimposing them Right. On an American past. Right.  

Speaker 0    00:20:29    Okay. But, but here’s the crazy thing is archeology isn’t, in my mind, it’s not even the biggest problem with the Book of Mormon because I think there’s an even bigger problem that modern science really exposes. And that’s the problem of, of DNA evidence. Talk us us through that, Ross.  

Speaker 1    00:20:47    Yeah. So the original story of the Book of Mormon, again, as I mentioned earlier, it’s about this migration of Jewish people from Jerusalem over to the New World. And the story, the, the Book of Mormon, um, talks about how this one family ended up becoming two larger civilizations. They divided in opposition to each other. There was the good guys and the bad guys, good guys called the knee fights, bad guys called the Laymanites. That’s an oversimplification. But, uh, and the Book of Mormon talks about how the land was empty when they got there. And it talks about how, you know, these civilizations really grew and kind of spread throughout the land. Now that would, that would assume that then these Jewish people would have the markers in their DNA of a Semitic background. Well, in the last probably 30 years, the science of genetics, they’ve been able to look at kind of more closely at different kinds of, of g genetic material. And they’ve discovered that the nor the Native American populations really don’t have a Semitic origin that, um, that they really have an Asian origin. And so, uh, DNA sampling, pretty broad DNA sampling through the whole Native American population continues to support that conclusion over and over and over again. They just haven’t found, uh, Semitic markers that would’ve been common to a, um, a Middle Eastern ancestry, which  

Speaker 0    00:22:26    Really makes sense. If you look at a map, it would make sense that the Native Americans, if we, if we start with the biblical hypothesis, that life started in the Middle East, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it makes sense that following the land, land bridges that native am that Amer the Americas would be populated coming from coming from Asia. Yes.  

Speaker 1    00:22:46    Right. Siberia and Yeah. Asia coming  

Speaker 0    00:22:49    Across Russia mm-hmm. <affirmative> and, and then through, through here, you’re not, they’re not gonna probably be that long ago. They’re not gonna be making boats, you know?  

Speaker 1    00:22:58    Right. Yeah. Yep.  

Speaker 0    00:22:59    5,000 years ago and coming across to the Americas. So it makes, it, it makes sense that the Native Americans have Asian descent. So this is a real problem then for the Book of Mormon. Yeah. Because the Book of Mormon makes a big deal. But my understanding, Ross, is really, when Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, it was the religious answer to how did the Native Americans get here. There were other answers to that, but there was no religious answer. And so I think young entrepreneur, Joseph Smith had an idea, how about we give a religious answer to this? I betcha this is going to gonna sell a lot of  

Speaker 1    00:23:33    Books. Right. And he wasn’t dealing, that was a pretty common, we’ll talk about this next week, but that was a pretty common assumption in America at the time, that somehow than the Native Americans, uh, reflected a different civilization from, from like the lost 10 tribes of Israel or so forth. And that was, it was definitely a big question about what is the origin of the American Indians? And so that was, those are many attempts to try to answer that question. Joseph Smith had his attempt to answer the question, but again, he didn’t have the benefit of, of, of scientific understanding of genetics.  

Speaker 0    00:24:08    Okay. So, but now we do. So to, in my mind, and this has been in the last, what, 20 years. So now does, it makes sense to me, Ross, that this would be sort of the nail in the coffin for the Mormon church. So how did the Mormon church handle this?  

Speaker 1    00:24:25    Well, they, they’ve pivoted. What they’ve done is they, they’ve shifted a little bit from saying that. So for example, in the Book of Mormon in 1981, the Book of Mormon preface identified these laymanites. It says they were the principle ancestors of the American Indians.  

Speaker 0    00:24:45    So the Laymanites were the people who came, layman was one of the people from, uh, from Israel Yes. Who came over on the boat.  

Speaker 1    00:24:52    Yeah. And the laymanites are, are his progeny. Gotcha. But in, in 2006, they changed the preface to talk about how Laymanites are among the ancestors of the American Indians.  

Speaker 0    00:25:04    Okay, hold on a second. Wait a sec. I thought the Book of Mormon was the most perfect book and didn’t ha it was a direct translation. I thought there were no mistakes. Are you saying that there are different versions of the Book of Mormon?  

Speaker 1    00:25:16    No, this is just the preface. This wasn’t part of the gold plates. Oh, okay. This is just what the church has published as a, as an introduction to what follows. So  

Speaker 0    00:25:24    Who wrote the original preface?  

Speaker 1    00:25:27    Um, I don’t know. That’s a question. Would it  

Speaker 0    00:25:28    Have been Joseph Smith?  

Speaker 1    00:25:29    Or Might have been, but probably not. Probably written later. Yeah. Yeah. Um, now Joseph Smith certainly believed that the Native Americans were submitted. There was no question about that. That he believed that. Yeah. So they’re pivoting to take this science into account now. Um, one, one way that they’re answering that, there’s a, there’s a, um, a article in the LDS church’s gospel topics essays that deals with this. They’re trying to help their people understand, you know, kind of how to handle these objections. And basically the gist of that article is to say, well, genetic science is really unproven and we don’t really know that much. And so, you know, it’s a kind of a, it’s kind of a very filtered analysis. Yes. Genetic science is not absolutely perfect, and there’s things that could, that could creep. They’ve created this sort of sense of, well, you know, it’s, it’s not everything they say it is, which is kind of a dodge, I think, um, from that.  

Speaker 1    00:26:33    But the thing is, Joseph Smith believed it. He acted like it. And so the church has acknowledged it, but one of the theories that they have now is that there were lots of people living in the American continent who were from Asiatic origins, and the Nephites in Leites were a small subset. And they, and they established their civilizations there within these other peoples. But the problem is, is that the Book of Mormon never makes reference to those other people. Hmm. So you would expect these righteous knee fights to go do missionary work among the, among these other tribes that surrounded them, or you’d expect them to have commercial dealings with them, or, or that they’d enter into the different wars and so forth, that there’s just never any mention of them. So it, it just seems, it doesn’t really fit the Book of Mormon narrative if you look at it at face value.  

Speaker 0    00:27:28    Yeah. It makes sense. When you read the Old Testament, the, the Jewish nation was a small nation, but there was all this interaction with the surrounding nations and surrounding people, and yet the Book of Mormon doesn’t make mention of these other people of Asian descent.  

Speaker 1    00:27:45    Yeah. Which would, which you’d have to assume for them from the genetics to vastly outnumber the Nephites and the Laymanites. There’s no, there’s no picture of that in the Book of Mormon.  

Speaker 0    00:27:56    Yeah. So, again, Ross, to me, this is just a major brick. And I know, I know this was sort of the, probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of Mormons my age and mm-hmm. <affirmative> and younger that, that said, I just don’t buy it. I, it’s too hard, it’s too big of a leap, and I just can’t buy it because of this DNA evidence. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I know, I know. It’s created a lot of, a lot of frustration and confusion and, and in my mind, rightly so. Right. If, yeah, if DNA evidence came out and disprove the Bible, that would be ama Like, I think I’d look for a new job, Ross.  

Speaker 1    00:28:33    Yeah, I know. Really.  

Speaker 0    00:28:34    I like, I, I don’t think I would just hang onto it because of cultural concerns or whatever. I think I would, intellectually, I think that would be too much for me  

Speaker 1    00:28:42    As it has for many people. Now, now, let me interject this, because the LDS people, typically, they don’t believe the Book of Mormon because of, its because it matches a list of objective criteria. They don’t believe it because it has archeological evidence or because of, they believe it, because they’re taught to follow a subjective kind of experiential test. And so they say, pray about the Book of Mormon and ask God to reveal the truth of it to you, which he’ll do through a personal feeling. And so that personal feeling that that experiential witness trumps everything else. And so if I’ve had the Holy Spirit bear witness to my spirit through this experience, that this is true, then, you know, the mindset is that, you know, well, there, there’ll be all of this other stuff. We’ll, nu we’ll understand how it all fits together at someday, you know, we’ll understand someday maybe in heaven or whatever, we’ll understand, or maybe God will reveal it someday. But I know it’s true because the Holy Spirit has told me that it’s true. And so that makes many latter Day Saints when it comes to the Book of Mormon, kind of imper impervious to the kind of evaluation that we’re talking about today.  

Speaker 0    00:30:02    And yet, the Bible says, I’m gonna read this again, Ross. This is kind of our theme verse for today. First Thessalonians 5 21, the Bible tells us to test everything that is said and hold on to what is good. So how, I guess, how would you explain that process for an evangelical Christian? Because we believe in the Holy Spirit. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and we do believe, I was just talking with a Mormon, a former Mormon friend just last night about this very thing that we believe that the spear, the Holy Spirit does have a role to play mm-hmm. <affirmative> in, in opening our eyes to the truth of God’s words. So what’s the difference?  

Speaker 1    00:30:41    Well, the dif the difference is ultimately we’re gonna test things according to the Bible. Um, because this is, we have objective evidence, and God, we have internal evidence from the Bible. We have the objective evidence, we said earlier of archeology and all the rest. Um, we have the internal consistency. And, you know, there’s articles on pursue God that explore all of the reasons why the Bible’s reliable. And so we have reason to say that’s gonna be our number one. And whatever experiences we have, again, they can be valid, and God can use those to confirm the truth, but they have to be subservient to this, to this larger picture. So we’re gonna go, we’re gonna ask, oh, how does that compare to what God has already said in the Bible? How does that compare with what we already know to be true from scripture?  

Speaker 0    00:31:29    Yeah. So Mormons would say that truth is subservient to my feelings. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but, but God himself would say no, he, he owns the truth. Yeah. And so your feelings are subservient to the truth. You don’t, it doesn’t, there doesn’t have to be a battle between those two. And if, and if I do have a feeling that goes against what God has plainly revealed in his word, then I need to trust God’s word above my feelings.  

Speaker 1    00:31:53    Yeah. And I think, I think we can have a great conversation in some future podcast about that whole experiential Yeah. Approach and what it, what it means should we pray to know if the Book of Mormon is true, and, and whether or not that’s a valid approach that would, we can bracket that for later.  

Speaker 0    00:32:10    And by the way, in the show notes, we’ll put a link to that gospel topics essay from the LDS church to see how they tried to answer this. And I encourage people to read it. Yeah. I mean, really read it like  

Speaker 1    00:32:20    There’s nothing to hide from, you know, hide.  

Speaker 0    00:32:22    So read it and see how the Mormon apologist try to get around that. But I also will also put a link to, uh, what you mentioned, Ross, it’s actually topic two in the pursuit [email protected], where we talk about the archeological evidence for the Bible and the textual evidence for the Bible and the personal evidence for the Bible. It’s a really powerful topic. Uh, and so I encourage you, especially if you’re questioning the Bible’s reliability, go check that one out. Mm-hmm.  

Speaker 1    00:32:49    <affirmative>.  

Speaker 0    00:32:49    Yeah. But Ross, for today, let’s just cover one more, and then we’re gonna inm part two of this little mini two-part thing we’re doing here. We’ll talk some more about some anachronisms, but let’s talk about plagiarism. I remember Ross, when I was in high school, <laugh>, man, if you plagiarized a work you were in big,  

Speaker 1    00:33:10    You done. Yeah. Big  

Speaker 0    00:33:11    Trouble. And yet Joseph Smith must not have had my same teachers. You’re right. My same English teachers.  

Speaker 1    00:33:19    Well, you know, you might have plagiarized something to give, to make your, uh, your term paper sound authoritative. Right. And I think that’s what’s happening with the Book of Mormon, that the plagiarism of, uh, the Book of Mormon contains extensive material in common with the Bible. And so, just to be objective, you could say, well, there’s two, two ways that could, that could happen. Well, you know, they either, they have a common source, they’re both drawing from some common source. So who would know? There’s no way to identify that there would be, or one is borrowing from the other. Well, the Bible doesn’t borrow from the Book of Mormon because it predates the Book of Mormon. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> most of it. And then, or, but does the Bible, does the Book of Mormon borrow from the Bible? And so, uh, there’s a great deal of, I think, buff plagiarism in the Book of Mormon. And I think the reason why is because it gave, it, it made the Book of Mormon sound like scripture. It made, it gave it a credibility because it sounded like a lot of the common phrases and words that people would’ve heard from the Bible.  

Speaker 0    00:34:26    Well, and that’s probably also why it was written in King James English. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Now, remember the King James version was in the 16 hundreds. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> in the Book of Mormon was translated by Joseph Smith in the 18 hundreds, where King James English wasn’t really a thing anymore. Right. But yet that it goes from the, directly from the gold, ancient golden plates into King James English.  

Speaker 1    00:34:50    Right.  

Speaker 0    00:34:51    Again, to me, that’s, that’s Joseph Smith trying to make it sound authoritative.  

Speaker 1    00:34:56    Right. To sound common, uh, to sound familiar. Yeah. In order to give it the, a the aura of that the bi that the King James Bible had Yeah. In that culture.  

Speaker 0    00:35:06    All right. Now with, when it comes to plagiarism, there are three types of sort of shared material from the Bible that Joseph Smith used. The first one is just a direct quotation or simple repetition.  

Speaker 1    00:35:19    Right. There’s, there’s phrases that occur in the Bible in the Book of Mormon all the time that are just, uh, also in the Bible. Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, often says, it came to pass, it came to pass. It says it way more than the Bible says. It seems like Joseph Smith latched onto certain phrases and incorporated in there like, so Jesus says, again, this isn’t the King James verily, verily I say unto you. Yeah. Um, that shows up in the Book of Mormon as well. Okay. So, mm. Makes you wonder why. Okay. Yeah. Then the second type is when there’s actual biblical texts that are used, but there’s, there’re change, there’s an interpretive change in them. And so there’s an example where in second Nephi, it’s talking about the biblical, biblical account of Eve’s temptation, and it draws on Genesis three versus four and five, where, where Eve is tempted in the Garden of Eden. But it adds a bunch of things to it. It adds some, um, nuances or some changes to what that, what that passage means. But it’s definitely directly drawn from, from Genesis chapter three.  

Speaker 0    00:36:25    And then there’s a third type, and that would be what we would call structural parallels to the Bible.  

Speaker 1    00:36:31    Yeah. It’s not exactly like a word for word quotation, but there’s literary forms. There’s, um, common motifs, there’s certain character types that occur in the Book of Mormon that seem to really be parallel to similar stories in the Bible. The biggest one, probably the most obvious one, is there’s a character named Alma, and he undergoes a conversion to faith. That’s, that’s very similar to the, uh, to Paul’s conversion story in Acts chapter nine. And so, like, there, there’s so many parallels there. It doesn’t feel like it could just be coincidence.  

Speaker 0    00:37:10    So really the point is that Ross, in, in many cases, the Nephite writers right from the Book of Mormon, mimic wording from the New Testament, and it was a doc to which they would’ve had no access at  

Speaker 1    00:37:24    All. Right. They would’ve. So the new Testa, they’re, they’re, they’re in another part of the world, you know, um, how they wouldn’t have any access to the New Testament, but they’re using New Testament phraseology and, and New Testament words. So for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, so here’s part of the book of Mormon’s story is they believe that j Jesus showed up in the American continent. And apparently during the 40 days after his resurrection, he’s with his disciples and so forth, uh, until he ASNs into heaven. But we don’t know, like if the Bible doesn’t say he was there 24 7, or doesn’t give us an itinerary of those 40 days, so that the Book of Mormon portrays Jesus as showing up in the new world and interacting for a period of time with, with the Nephites and that that population. And so he gives an a public address in third Nephi, uh, 12 through 14. That looks very, very much like the Sermon on the Mount we find in Matthew five through seven. There. There’s just a lot of parallels between the two.  

Speaker 0    00:38:31    Okay. So all, all of this shared content raises this, you know, when we think about it, Ross, it raises an obvious question. You mentioned it already, does the common material come from independent sources? Right. That if I’m trying to be a Mormon apologist, that’s what I would say. I would say, well, look, it must be, it must just be, this is proof that the Book of Mormon is  

Speaker 1    00:38:54    Scriptural, right. Cuz God, yeah. They would, they would describe these parallels to God and to divine inspiration. Right?  

Speaker 0    00:38:59    So they would say, yeah, the, the, it’s, that’s where it comes from. Right. Whereas we would say, no <laugh>, we think Joseph Smith just copied from the Bible. Right? Right. He plagiarized,  

Speaker 1    00:39:11    Um, latter day Saint Apologists have answers for all these questions. The question in, in my mind is whether their answers are credible or not. For a lot of latter Day Saints, they just need to know that an expert says it’s okay. They’re not gonna dig in and really weigh it. As long as somebody that they consider an expert has an answer, they go, okay, it’s all good. You know, they know more than me. They said that that archeology is not a problem. Or, or, or that there is a couple of obscure, uh, points of archeology that if taken, if stretched, pretty far can go like, oh yeah, that proves the Book of Mormon is really real. If you’re loyal as a letter, they see, that’s all you need to, to confirm your testimony, your, your subjective testimony. Um, they’re already convinced. And so they don’t need a lot of proof, just enough, you know, to, to shore up their, their faith. But most people who don’t have that grid already in place, or that interpretive framework already in place, really are not convinced that the Book of Mormon passes the test.  

Speaker 0    00:40:16    Let’s just real quick, let’s look at two test cases, Ross, and just kind of dive a little bit deeper on this. Let’s look first at the Sermon on the Mount. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Right. Which is, we can find that in the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, but we also see some kind of parallel in the Book of Mormon. Right?  

Speaker 1    00:40:36    Right. And so I wanna like, talk about this some more next time we’re gonna look at a particular focus of it. But, you know, Jesus gave this sermon on the Mount somewhere in the middle of his earthly ministry. So, you know, if this, if the Book of Mormon story really happened during Post resurrection, then, you know, a couple years before Jesus had come and, and, uh, had and given, given this address. So on, on one hand, it’s plausible that Jesus could have given the same sermon, you know, to a different group of people. Now, the, the challenge is when you look at what he actually said in Nephi, in in third Nephi 12 through 14, he uses a lot of information or says a lot of things that would’ve been meaningful in the Jewish context, but not really meaningful in the New World context. So he talks about, like, he uses phraseology in the Sermon on the Mount where Gentiles are referred to as dogs.  

Speaker 1    00:41:39    Well, why would that be an issue in the new world, the Nephite context? Because who were the Gentiles? Yeah. For them, you know, it’s, they were not a theme for them. It’s not a theme for them or, or the idea of in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, if somebody asks you to go one mile, go the second mile. Well, the specific context of that in the old world was the Roman occupation. The Romans had the right to, um, to, to make a person carry their stuff for one mile. So Jesus saying, go beyond that, carry their stuff for two miles. Well, that, that context did not exist in the new world. The Roman, there was no Roman occupation. It was not a Roman law that you had to carry somebody’s some soldier’s stuff for a mile. So those things creep into the new world context, and you go, why would those exist there? Yeah. You know, so that helps us see, oh, well maybe he’s just, maybe he’s just borrowing, you know, boom, boom, boom from the Bible.  

Speaker 0    00:42:36    Well, yeah, because even for us, if we recycle a sermon, Ross, we’re still gonna contextualize it to our audience. Right. And we’re not as good at this <laugh> as Jesus  

Speaker 1    00:42:46    Was. Exactly. So  

Speaker 0    00:42:47    Jesus certainly would’ve contextualized this for the new world  

Speaker 1    00:42:51    Audience. Right. And it so would’ve sounded different in many respects. There would be flags or markers Yeah. That, that reflected that context.  

Speaker 0    00:42:59    Oh, that’s a really good case. The second test case, Ross, and we don’t have time to dive into this, but it’s, it’s really the book of Isaiah mm-hmm. <affirmative> from the Old Testament. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, there’s so much from the book of Isaiah that is just plagiarized word for word in the Book of Mormon.  

Speaker 1    00:43:15    Yeah. There’s 19 complete chapters from the book of Isaiah that are just reproduced in the, in the Book of Mormon. Now, the story is that, that Lehigh the, the, the Jewish migrants from Jerusalem carried with them a copy of the book of Isaiah on a set of brass plates. And so that’s why they could quote from it. It wasn’t, so, Joseph Smith is not pretending that these things were said by somebody else, but he’s basically just cut and pasting in stuff from the book of Isaiah that would have, according to the story, been found on those brass plates. But there’s some challenges with that because bib biblical scholarship has advanced since the time the King James version was written. And we recognized in retrospect that the King James version had some, some phrases and some ideas in the book in the, in the book of Isaiah, that the scholars of that time in 1611 did not fully understand the Hebrew language, or, and so as, as those language studies have progressed, now we realize that, oh, we have a better sense of how to translate those phrases. Well, Joseph Smith, in the book of, of Mormon, it brought in the misconceptions from the King James version. You’d think if he was translating from scratch, or especially if it was from a, um, document from farther that far, um, in the past, you would think that those misconceptions or those faulty translational assumptions would be corrected, and he would, he wouldn’t have incorporated them into, um, this document. So that’s a  

Speaker 0    00:44:59    Clue. Yeah. So the question is, how would translation problems from the King James version from the 16 hundreds find their way into the Book of Mormon, which was translated from plates in the purportedly in the in 400? Yeah. It shouldn’t have happened. Right. So, but it did. So that suggests a direct relationship between the King James version and the Book of Mormon mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Which again, is a problem. It, it, first of all, it’s just a problem that there’s so much plagiarism. That was one of the shocking things for me. I just thought to myself, like, how did Joseph Smith get away with this plagiarism from, from back then? Now, maybe, I guess I, I guess maybe nobody’s, nobody’s like looking at that. It’s not copywritten. I don’t know. I don’t know when copyright laws,  

Speaker 1    00:45:42    Yeah, I don’t know. It’s not copywritten the King James version by then, but, you know, because it had the aura of scripture, then people just assumed, oh, it must be scripture two. And of course, you know, and I don’t think anybody looked at it that closely, but, and as they began to look at it closely, it, you know, by then people who had embraced Mormonism had already, you know, made up their mind,  

Speaker 0    00:46:07    Well, Ross, were out of time, but there’s more bulletproof evidence against the Book of Mormon. And we’ll cover some of that next time. Why don’t you give us just a quick preview. We’re gonna be talking about something called an anachronism,  

Speaker 1    00:46:19    Right? We’re gonna look at several forms of anachronism. Anachronism means that you have, when you’re, when you’re reading a story or whatever, you have events or, um, or, or artifacts, objects that don’t fit the time and place. So in anachronism, let’s say you’re reading Moby Dick and, and it’s about whaling in the 1840s. And, um, and somebody pulls out a cell phone that would be in anachronism cell phone did not belong in that time and place. And so that’s the kind of thing we’re gonna look at anachronisms in the book of one.  

Speaker 0    00:46:55    So join us next time.