The Book Of Mormon

[inactivetx]

Ray,

I haven't found one good scientist that thinks that praying is the best way to discover the cure to cancer. People have been praying to have their diseases go away for millenia, and it wasn't until cold hard science discovered things like bacteria, virus and then things like penicillin that we made any significant inroads. Same thing applies to everything in this world. Praying for knowledge is just the lazy way out. First study, use science, do the research, then, if it makes you feel better pray. But its the former that will solve the problem, not the latter. History shows that when ever theology tries to "one up" science, theology always loses. So, ignore science at your peril.

Better not tell the Christian Scientists!

InActiveTx

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Everytime I read about the 'challenge' and am always amazed that a critic of the Church doesn't point out that Joseph Smith was visited by Moroni FOUR years before the coming of the BoM. That gives a person a long time to forumulate a story line. In light of this, the '60 day' translation time frame could be a stretch. Anyways, just to play devil's advocate. I think the BoM is scripture regardless.

Okay - what evidence do you have that Joseph Smith was following a pre-thought-out story line?

I don't have any evidence. I was just throwing the question out there as I said as "devil's advocate". Anyways - to continue with the 'advocating' I bet Stephen King could work out a plot over four years and dictate the book rather coherently within 60 days. Just a thought.

For the record - The BoM is scripture. I just think the 60 day translation period isn't a strong argument, personally.

InActiveTx

[Snow]

I don't have any evidence. I was just throwing the question out there as I said as "devil's advocate". Anyways - to continue with the 'advocating' I bet Stephen King could work out a plot over four years and dictate the book rather coherently within 60 days. Just a thought.

For the record - The BoM is scripture. I just think the 60 day translation period isn't a strong argument, personally.

InActiveTx

Then let me ask you - is there another case in the whole of human history where someone has dictated such a book, off the top of his head, no notes, no referring to what he had written when he last left off, hundreds and hundreds of characters with obscure names, multiple calendar systems, etc, etc?

And by the way - Stephen King is a educated, polished, best-selling author of over a hundred novels, not an uneducated farm boy who couldn't even write a coherent letter.

People always say: I betcha someone could do it... but in point of fact, no one ever has.

[Nicole]

Scholarly Look at Evicence

Book of Mormon Online Evidence of the Book of Mormon

AScholarly Look at Evidence of the Book of Mormon

by Daniel C. Peterson

I'd like to speak with you today about some of the evidences for the Book of Mormon. I think the primary evidence for the Book of Mormon will always be what it always has been: mainly the spiritual witness that people receive when they pray sincerely and in faith about the Book of Mormon. But there are other things that can be said about it, and I'd like to talk about some of the more recent evidences and interesting scholarly developments on the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon, it seems to me also, is one of the chief evidences of the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith, perhaps with the temple. There is a great deal that is happening with Book of Mormon studies right now that I think is of interest, or should be of interest, to members of the Church and those investigating the Church.

One thing that needs to be said about the Book of Mormon from the beginning is that the very existence of the book is an astonishing thing. The sheer speed with which it was produced is a miracle. Many probably already know that it was produced in a little over two months. Now that may not seem as impressive to some people as it actually is. A few years ago, I was invited to prepare a book for a company that wanted a book on the Near East. They wanted it fairly quickly; in fact, they wanted it remarkably quickly. I asked them how much time I would have to produce the book if I accepted the offer, and they said a little over two months. Well, I accepted. One of the reasons I accepted was because I wanted to see if I could actually do that. Well, I did. I produced a book of about 140,000 words in a little over two months. I was pretty pleased with myself, and other people commented that I wrote very rapidly and so on.

But then I began thinking about it. The Book of Mormon is about 250,000 words long, and it was produced in about the same amount of time. But remember, it was dictated without any revisions. I had a word processor and a very sophisticated computer that could transfer things around, and I had been working on this for some time, since this particular subject, Near Eastern studies, is my specialty. Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon, never made any serious changes, and produced a book much longer and, I would say, much more impressive than mine, in about the same amount of time. Some people would say, "Oh yes, his imagination simply overflowed." I challenge them to produce a book like that. The very existence of the book, produced under the circumstances under which it was, is a remarkable thing--especially considering the fact that the men involved were not well educated. Joseph Smith was barely educated at all. He was always very ill at ease about his writing skills and his abilities. He always preferred to dictate to a scribe because he was embarrassed. Some of his own writings have survived, and it's obvious that he was not well educated. His wife, Emma, who knew him extremely well, said it was simply beyond his capacity to have produced the Book of Mormon. And yet, the book exists, and that right there is a prime challenge to the world of how to explain this book. It's one thing to talk easily about it being there and being produced by Joseph Smith. It's another to see how that could have happened.

Well, it's not only the speed of the book's production that I think is impressive, it's also the plausibility of the book as history. I spend a lot of my time reading ancient and medieval history by ancient and medieval writers, and this book reads plausibly as history. The people in it behave the way historical people did. The societies and civilizations in the Book of Mormon behave in the way ancient societies and civilizations did behave. This is impressive. This is something that I think was beyond the capacity of someone like Joseph Smith to prepare. I'll try to give you some examples of that as we go on.

I would also say that the details of the Book of Mormon, the complexity of the book, are also impressive. John Sorenson published what I think is a classic book a few years ago called An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon in which he produces plausible correlations for the Book of Mormon with features and locations in Mesoamerica. That is, I think, impressive, and I'm struck by many of the correlations he adduces. I would go beyond that and say that the first and primary impressive thing about that is the fact that a plausible and coherent geography can be deduced from the book that was produced so rapidly--so plausible and coherent that a little tiny town mentioned at one point in the Book of Mormon would show up two hundred pages later in the same place. Now this is beyond the capacity of my students to do. It's beyond my capacity to do in two months without a lot of aid and assistance from electronic gadgets and so on.

The only book that I could think of that may even resemble it in some way (some people have pointed this out) is something like J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. But we need to remember that Lord of the Rings was produced over a period of about thirty years by a man with a doctorate who taught at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. It's quite a different thing than a book that was produced in about two months. So the very existence of the book is an astonishing thing. It was not something that could just be produced by an upstate New York farm boy just off the top of his head. There are other things I'll mention in passing.

The witnesses to the Book of Mormon-have always been extremely impressive to me. Some people seem to deal with them by simply waving them aside. This can't be done. Richard Anderson's work on the three witnesses and the eight witnesses demonstrates conclusively that these were sincere, competent, honorable people who believed that they had seen what they claimed to see. More recently, Lyndon Cook has published a collection of interviews with David Whitmer, who was the last survivor of the three witnesses. There are almost ninety interviews there and what is impressive about it is the sheer monotony of the interviews, the monotony of the story that he tells---because it is the same story over and over and over again. David Whitmer, you will remember, left the Church and never came back and at times, felt some hostility towards the Church and some dissatisfaction with the direction it had gone. But that is irrelevant; those are just his opinions. Where he is important is as a witness. He was given many opportunities to step back from his witness, to say, "Well, I might have been mistaken" or "Joseph Smith fooled me" or something like that. He never availed himself of that opportunity. He always stood by his witness. In fact, he did more than stand by it--he insisted on it. He had his testimony of the Book of Mormon placed on his tombstone. That, I think, is striking.

It seems to me that it is very, very difficult for critics to dismiss the testimony of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. I remember something that B. H. Roberts said, which I think is very true. He said that, taken together, the testimonies of the three witnesses and the eight witnesses are exceptionally strong. Why? Because you could say that the three witnesses, with their story of an angelic visitor and a supernatural environment, were hallucinating. I don't believe you can say that, but if someone wanted to, that is an approach that can be taken. On the other hand, you have the eight witnesses, who had no supernatural manifestation. They were in a grove of trees in a little clearing in the woods a little after noon. And they saw the plates in a very matter-of-fact way. You have two very different experiences here that reinforce one another. You could say in the case of the one, "Well, there was some kind of charlatanry or fraud going on there. Joseph Smith or someone put together the plates and placed them there on that log out there in the clearing." That might explain the eight witnesses, though I don't really see how it could. Where did a poor boy like Joseph Smith get sixty to eighty pounds of gold, for one thing? But taken with the miraculous elements in the testimony of the three witnesses, you have two very different accounts that reinforce one another because they are so different. It's striking and it's strong.

Now, I want to get into some other things that have been brought forth more recently. I want to talk about the accuracy of things in the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith could not have known about or that it is extremely unlikely that he would have known about. Remember, this is a man (or a boy really) with very little formal education, who lived not exactly in a great center of culture, Palmyra, New York. Much of the translation was done in Harmony, Pennsylvania, which is such a nothing place in some ways that it really has ceased to exist. There were no great libraries there, no sophisticated people to whom he could have gone for advice. And yet he came up with a book, produced a book in a way that he described as miraculous. But in many ways, it hits the target. It describes the ancient world in ways that he could not have known about, that nobody knew about in those days. Not the most learned person in the early nineteenth century could have known. He hit a target that he probably didn't even know he was aiming at.

One of the things that Hugh Nibley has talked about at some length in his book Since Cumorah is the volcanic and earthquake activities described in 3 Nephi, which is so detailed and accurate in so many ways that I think one has to conclude that it was written by an eyewitness, or by someone who had access to eyewitness accounts. Joseph Smith had no such access. Joseph Smith had never seen an earthquake or volcano, so far as we know.

There are other things to consider. Many of you probably already know about chiasmus, which was discovered in the Book of Mormon years ago by Jack Welch. I think classic examples include the Alma 41 discussion of the term restoration, or Alma 36 with its Christ-centered chiasmus focusing on Alma's experience in the depths of despair when he remembers the name of Christ and turns himself over to Christ and is redeemed. These are spectacular instances in ancient writing. They are spectacular examples of chiasmus structures that Joseph Smith knew nothing about, that really nobody knew anything about in his day. They have only been discovered in ancient writings in this century. I know of one person at UCLA, a very distinguished Eastern European scholar of Semitic languages, who read a book that Jack Welch put together called Chiasmus in Antiquity. He was talking about it to his class--he didn't know that there was anyone in the class who was LDS and in a very thoughtful voice, he said, "Well, it is a very interesting book. This chapter on the Book of Mormon is remarkable. I don't know what to make of it." That I think has been the response of critics for a long, long time. They just don't know what to make of it and it is a remarkable thing.

There is more that can be said. My good friend William Hamblin in just the past few months has produced an article (and there is on-going research) on the question of metal plates. When Joseph Smith first announced the claim that he had found metal plates, interestingly enough a lot of the people in his own neighborhood believed him. But the early critics said, "This is ridiculous, writing on gold plates? How absurd." Now the argument seems to be turning in a different direction. People are saying that with so much evidence for gold plates in antiquity, this is something that Joseph Smith must have picked up in his environment. What was once seen as an absurdity and used against Joseph Smith now is viewed as just a commonplace thing that everybody knew about, and so it is also used against Joseph Smith. But that doesn't work either. It turns out, as William Hamblin indicates, that the idea of gold plates seems to have been especially prominent in the area of Syria and Palestine at almost exactly the time Lehi and his family left Jerusalem. From that area it spread to other areas, for example, Greece. But this is again striking because Joseph Smith produced a book that reflects in specific, detailed ways things that we are only now beginning to realize about the ancient Near East, the area from where the Book of Mormon purports to come.

There is more that can be said. One area that I have worked on is the Gadianton robbers. They are some of my very favorite people in the Book of Mormon, a cheery lot, who did a great deal for Nephite and Lamanite history. One of the disreputable hobbies that I had as a teenager in high school is that I was very interested in guerrilla warfare. I don't know why. But I began reading a great deal about it. The foremost theorists of guerrilla warfare in the twentieth century, which is the only time anyone has actually written about the theory of guerrilla warfare, have been Marxists: Mao Tse-tung in China, Vo Nguyen Giap in North Vietnam, and Che Guevara in Cuba, who is associated with Castro. I certainly don't endorse their political views, but on guerrilla warfare they were authorities, because they'd practiced it successfully and they wrote about it. And so, I spent a fair amount of time reading their books about guerrilla warfare theory, for no particular purpose. Years later it clicked for me, though. I was teaching a Gospel Doctrine class in the Jerusalem branch in Israel, and we were reading Helaman and 3 Nephi. Suddenly, I realized that what I was seeing there in the Gadianton robbers was a textbook instance of both success and failure according to the rules that Giap, and Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung had outlined.

And let me just tell you something about those rules. Particularly if you look at the end of Helaman and the beginning of 3 Nephi, you see very clearly, the very kinds of things that the theorists were talking about. When the Gadianton robbers start off, they start off as an urban terrorist group really, involved in assassinations. But they eventually have to flee into the mountains and this is typical of guerrilla groups in our own century. And they'll talk at length about how the best places to work are in cities, where you can hide among the urban masses. Or if that doesn't work--as it didn't work for the Gadianton robbers--they then flee into inaccessible territory, almost always mountains. It was, in all three cases (in China, Vietnam, and Cuba), the mountains into which the guerrillas fled. Then they make lightning raids out of the mountains to attack settled civilizations. But they choose only those times when they can win. They can make a lightning strike, do some damage, then get away. This, of course, irritates the authorities no end. And the authorities then will send troops into the mountains after the guerrillas, but the mountains are the guerrilla’s native territory. The guerrilla then chooses the place to fight from. He ambushes the regular troops that come after him. He causes them immense casualties.

In the Book of Mormon you read that the commanders come back and report overwhelming numbers of Gadianton robbers. Well, this is probably not true; the very reason they were hiding in the mountains is that they didn't have overwhelming numbers. But they wanted to seem like overwhelming numbers, a little bit the way some of our own LDS ancestors behaved during the Utah war when they were trying to slow down the advance of the federal columns. They hid out in the mountains and masqueraded as having many more people than they had, in order to give the federal troops something to think about. This is a time-honored practice.

Now, fortunately, the Latter-day Saints weren't actually shooting anybody; they were just trying to slow things down for negotiations. The Gadiantons were not quite so nice. They caused great casualties to the Nephite troops. Eventually the point comes when a guerrilla army needs to start to hold territory though, and this is the really sensitive time in any guerrilla war. Mao Tse-tung called it regularization, turning a guerrilla army into a regular army, one that holds territory. Guerrillas don't hold territory; they'll strike and then flee. The object is not to have any casualties or to keep them to a minimum. They want to harass and demoralize, but not to hold territory yet. When they feel themselves strong enough, then they decide to occupy cities, to occupy territory and hold it. But that, of course, exposes them to direct attack. It means that they can't retreat and withdraw; they can't maneuver quite as freely. Here's a problem now identified as "premature regularization," which is when a commander too soon thinks that he's ready to stand up to a regular army. He makes the transition too soon. This can be disastrous, and it was in the case of the Gadianton robbers.

At a certain point (you read this in the Book of Mormon in 3 Nephi 4), the Gadianton robbers come down out of the mountains; they issue an ultimatum to the leaders of the Nephites and tell them to surrender, but the Nephites don't surrender. What they do, under the leadership of a governor named Lachoneus, is withdraw into their cities. They declare a kind of "scorched earth" policy. They destroy or carry away all of the food down in the agricultural areas and they take it and hole up in their fortified cities.

This actually reverses the situation, which is what guerrillas should not allow themselves to be trapped into. What happens now is that the Nephites are in their strongholds. It's the guerrillas, the Gadianton robbers in this case, who are out exposed on the plain, and they can't find any food because none has been left and the crops have been destroyed. So they are forced, at times that are not suitable to them, to attack the Nephites to try to get food, or they are forced to disperse themselves to look for game. But every time they disperse or scatter themselves, the Nephites make lightning raids out of the fortress, out of the city, and attack them. The Nephites now choose the time of attack. What they've done is reversed the situation so the Nephites become, in effect, the guerrillas, and the Gadianton robbers are trying to hold territory. It's a disaster for the Gadianton robbers, and they lose.

And this all behaves (I've tried to show this in some detail in a published article) as a textbook illustration. You could not pick a better illustration' of the virtues, if you will, and the problems of a guerrilla army--the mistakes they can make and the successes they can have.

All this was written by a young man, supposedly, as critics would say, who knew nothing about guerrilla warfare and whose idea of military activity was, at least later on in his life, to get on his black horse Charley and parade in a nice uniform, romanticizing the wars of American history: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812. This would have been typical of his period. I think many people had these same attitudes. What's striking about the Book of Mormon is how utterly absent those attitudes are. From the account given of the Gadianton robbers, or indeed of the Nephite wars that take place in the Book of Mormon and are recorded there, there's no dressing up in fancy uniforms, there are no parades, there are no reviews of the troops, or anything like that. It's a very different atmosphere, and guerrilla warfare, particularly, is rather unromantic. This is something that Mao and others had to defend themselves against. Some people fighting in their forces were a little bit disappointed with this idea of hitting and running; it wasn't heroic, it wasn't romantic. But it was extremely effective, and it's effective for the Gadianton robbers too, as long as they obey those rules that were first formulated really in this century--but rules that we now know went back into the ancient world. So it's very striking to me how very foreign the Book of Mormon accounts are from what we would expect if Joseph Smith had written the book. It's a quite different world indeed.

There are other things that Joseph Smith could not have known. One of the most impressive things that I first remember encountering about the Book of Mormon happened years ago, again when I was living in Jerusalem. I ran across an unpublished paper at that point by John Tvedtnes (who's now living in Salt Lake City but at that time was living in Jerusalem) in which he identified a feast of tabernacles celebration going on as sort of a background to King Benjamin's speech in the book of Mosiah. Now, having read that, I have never been able to read that account again without seeing the feast of tabernacles there. It's absolutely clear once you recognize it. But until then no one had recognized it, so far as I know. It's one of those things that I think Joseph Smith didn't know about. He could not have boasted about putting a feast of tabernacles into his Book of Mormon because he didn't know it was there. And yet it's an authentic mark of an ancient document. If a fraud had pulled this off, if I had pulled this off, I would have been very proud of it. I would have pointed to it and said, "See how clever I am that I put this in." But no one recognized it until just a few years ago really, and yet it's there--again, another authentic ancient detail.

There is something else that particularly interests me as an Arabist (that's my particular field). I work in mediaeval Arabic studies. In 1975 Lynn and Hope Hilton of Salt Lake City, who were living in the Middle East off and on, made a trip down the coast of Arabia over what we know as the ancient frankincense trail, which we also believe, many of us, was the ancient trail that Lehi followed. They were able to confirm many of the details recorded in 1 Nephi, following as led by Hugh Nibley some years earlier in his classic book Lehi in the Desert, in which Brother Nibley proposed a course, a path, for that journey of Nephi and Lehi from Jerusalem down to the Arabian Sea. That has now been built upon by later writers and explorers.

I am particularly pleased and indebted to Warren and Michaela Aston of Australia, who have, I think, performed one of the most interesting services to Book of Mormon scholarship in recent years. They have managed to identify two plausible Book of Mormon sites--again, far beyond the capacity of Joseph Smith to have known anything about. In fact, Eugene England some years ago in 1982 published an article in which he demonstrated that nobody knew anything really about Arabia in the days of Joseph Smith. Even if Joseph Smith had lived in an area with a fabulous public library or university library, he could not have learned very much from it about the geography of Arabia. What's more interesting is that the things he could have learned about it would have been for the most part wrong. But in fact, 1 Nephi gives a very accurate depiction, right down to the details of where the trail turns and so on, of a trip through ancient Arabia.

The Astons have actually been to some of these places and have taken other people to them, culminating so far in a couple of 1993 expeditions to the area. They have found a place or located a place in the modern country of Yemen, right down there in South Eastern Arabia, which is called Nahem. And Nahem seems very like the ancient word Nahom, which appears in the Book of Mormon as the place where Ishmael was buried. Now it's an important name for many reasons. First of all, the account in the Book of Mormon usually tells of Lehi naming a place, giving a certain name to a certain place; he's naming it himself. In this case, the name is already there. Ishmael was buried at the place which was called Nahom. Now Nahom and Nahem are virtually the same word. Anyone who knows anything about Arabic or Hebrew or ancient Semitic languages knows that it's the consonants that are important. The vowels can shift and change. So these names are virtually indistinguishable. And what does the root NHM mean? It can mean things like to cry out in grief, to sigh, to mourn, to console; it's a perfect name for an ancient graveyard. And it turns out that in this place Nahem, which is in exactly the right location, there is an ancient graveyard going back to we don't know how long ago, because archaeological excavations have not been permitted there yet and may never be. But in any event, there is an ancient graveyard there, and the place is in exactly the right position on that trail where it ought to be.

But Nahem does not stand alone, and this, I think, is one of the most impressive things about it. What you have here is a complex of not one site alone, but of two sites that reinforce one another. In the Book of Mormon account, Lehi and his party traveled due east from the place where they buried Ishmael and went over to the place that they called Bountiful, on the coast of Arabia. Now, critics for one hundred and sixty years have made fun of this, because everyone knows there is no place "Bountiful" in Arabia. There is no place that has that kind of timber, that kind of greenery. Arabia is a vast empty desert, a place that makes the Mojave Desert look like a tropical rain forest. And that's true, by and large. But in fact there are a few places on the coast of Arabia (most of them weren't known until very recently) where you do have fairly lush, green areas and timber. Now, in fact very recently, a critic of the Church wrote to me and said, "I know for a fact that there exists no such place as this Bountiful on the coast of Arabia." And I could write back to him, "I know that such places exist; in fact, as I'm writing to you, right above my computer I have a poster picture of the very place, or a place very much like it." Well, he can't really refute that because, of course, one picture is worth a thousand words, and I have a picture of it. It is true that places like this exist.

Now if you go due east from Nahem, from the place that has been identified tentatively as Nahom in the Book of Mormon, you arrive at a place called Wadi Sayq. It's very hard to get to, except probably by camel caravan down a very narrow wadi, an intermittent river valley. But when you reach the place, you find trees that are large enough to produce timber for a boat. You find a beach, you find greenery, you find fresh water. It's a remarkable thing, and it's in exactly the place where the Book of Mormon says it should be. And it's in exactly the same relationship to Nahem or Nahom that the Book of Mormon says it should be in. And again, places like this in Joseph Smith's day were thought not to exist. Everyone could have told Joseph if he had asked for advice while he was concocting some yarn about ancient Arabia and Ancient America, "Don't waste your time. There is no such place." And yet it is there. It's been seen, it's been examined, and it's still under investigation. That, I think, is a remarkable thing, a shot in the dark that hits the target, a target that Joseph didn't even know he was aiming at. Once again he's vindicated by developments that came about after his career had ended, long after his life ended.

I think maybe one of the most intriguing ways to look at Joseph Smith is to look at some of the "mistakes" he made and see how he's been vindicated by them. There are two that I think of in connection with the Book of Mormon. One that I'm particularly fond of is the personal name Alma. Now, we know the name Alma. It's been a woman's name in the West for quite some time. You find it in phrases like alma mater. It's a Latin-based woman's name not given to men. Critics of the Church for a long time have made fun of Latter-day Saints because they say it's only among the Mormons that you will find men with the name Alma. How ridiculous. This is not an ancient Semitic man's name; this is a relatively modern Latin woman's name. So Joseph Smith clearly made a mistake. Well, it's here I think that his performance is most impressive, because if Joseph Smith had ever heard the name Alma before, that's exactly how he would have heard it, as a woman's name.

So how is it applied to a man in the Book of Mormon? Well, it is, to at least two prominent people in the Book of Mormon. And it's only been recently that discoveries have come forth that have vindicated that name as an ancient Semitic man's name. The discovery was made not by a Latter-day Saint, but by Yigael Yadin, probably the most prominent of all Israeli archeologists in this century, a man who went on to become deputy prime minister of Israel. He was chief of staff of the Israeli military in the 1948 war of independence. His is a very impressive man and a great scholar. While investigating a cave down by the Dead Sea, he found a document that bore the name Alma son of Judah. It is unmistakably written A-L-M-A in everything Yadin published about that excavation. It's a remarkable thing. Again, Joseph Smith probably, had he sought guidance from people around him on what to come up with as a masculine name for his Book of Mormon character, would have made a mistake. It turns out that a seeming mistake is not a mistake at all, but a powerful vindication of Joseph Smith's prophetic claims. And yet you will still see articles written ridiculing that name by people who should know better. In fact, in one case people that I happen to know do know better go on making the claim, repeating the old tired argument as if it were true, which it's not. Alma is a vindication of the Book of Mormon.

There is another one that's currently fashionable among critics of the Book of Mormon. And that is the claim of Alma 7:10 that Jesus Christ would be born (it's yet future for Alma) at Jerusalem, which is the land of our fathers. Now critics of the Book of Mormon have even produced bumper stickers that say, "Mormonism or Christianity, Jerusalem or Bethlehem." And quite often they'll exclaim in mock disbelief, "Oh come on, every school child knows that Jesus was born at Bethlehem," but that of course is precisely the point. Every school child does know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Joseph Smith certainly knew that Jesus was born at Bethlehem. Imagine the situation here---you have a man who, if you believe the critics, was clever enough to produce this book, which foreshadows so many things that we only now are learning about the Middle East, that quotes from the Bible in so many complex ways, that plays on biblical themes and so on in sophisticated ways. And yet he can't get the birthplace of Jesus right, one thing that's known to absolutely the simplest student of the Bible. But in fact once again, we find that the Book of Mormon is right and the critics are wrong.

It wasn't that long ago that we found the so-called Amarna letters and in them is a reference to a place that W. F. Albright, probably the greatest American archeologist of the twentieth century, has identified as Bethlehem. And it's referred to as being in what? In the land of Jerusalem. So here's a reference to Bethlehem as being in the land of Jerusalem, just as the Book of Mormon describes it. Now the Amarna letters date back to 1400 B.C., and some people have said, "Well, that's too early." Well, Okay, let's give them that, although I don't find that a plausible counterargument. We can look at other things. The Bible in fact repeatedly talks about cities having the lands around them named after the cities. It's true that there is no reference in the Bible to the land of Jerusalem it gets very close a couple of times. But we know of the land of Damascus, we know of the land of Samaria, we know of probably twenty lands named after their cities. And it's probably only chance that the actual phrase land of Jerusalem doesn't occur in the Bible. But it does occur in the Book of Mormon. The real place to look for the usage of this phrase is in the Book of Mormon, which routinely talks about the city of Zarahemla and the land of Zarahemla, the city of Bountiful and the land of Bountiful. This is the kind of linguistic pattern that shows up in the Book of Mormon, and Alma, of course, is writing several centuries after his people have left Jerusalem. So it's really the Book of Mormon style that should be the measure here for how that phrase is used. And Bethlehem, which is only five or six miles out of Jerusalem, is clearly within the land of Jerusalem, which is a much bigger city and was always the capitol, the seat of the king, and so on and so forth.

But even more interesting is that, just very recently a new document has been published from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have taken so long to be published. This is something called 4Q385 or Pseudo-Jeremiah, and it claims to go back to precisely the period of Lehi. And what does it do? It talks about the land of Jerusalem. While we are talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, I'd like to say something just generally about them. When the Book of Mormon was published the whole idea of an ancient civilization that would deliberately bury its records to come forward at a later time seemed silly. And yet now we know that there was a group in the ancient Near East that did precisely that and that's the dead sea scrolls community, probably based at Qumran. We know that their scrolls were hidden up probably at the time of the Roman attack on Judea in the first Jewish revolt, somewhere around A.D. 70. And so you can imagine the situation: As the Roman troops, fresh from their conquest of Jerusalem, move down the Dead Sea valley, they come down somewhere around Jericho and begin moving southward toward the final place of Jewish resistance at Masada. Well, in order to get to Masada, they're going to have to run right over the community of Qumran, which realizes that its days are numbered and begins to make preparations to abandon its site---which has remained abandoned until it was found of course only very recently. And what they do is they begin placing their most important documents in caves. And you can actually see the process by which they were doing it. At first they are doing it very carefully. In fact, one of their documents actually gives instructions on how to preserve a document for this kind of burial. The documents are put in caves very carefully, and then toward the end, you can see they are running out of time. Maybe the Romans are actually visible coming down the valley. And they begin throwing things into the caves. It gets much more hurried.

But what you see here is a community that has fled from Jerusalem, because Jerusalem was not righteous enough for it, and was calling down judgments upon Jerusalem--very much in the same way that Lehi had left Jerusalem. Then when destruction is coming upon them, they fear it. They take their documents and they seal them up to come forward at a later time, some other time when things will be better, when there will be more righteousness, whatever the circumstances will be. And those documents are eventually found and become in many ways a witness to some of the very things the Book of Mormon talks about. Now that's a pattern that recurs in the Book of Mormon that seemed implausible to people for a long time, but that we now know actually occurs in the ancient Near East. One of those documents of course was the so-called Copper Scroll, writing on metal just the way that the Book of Mormon describes it. So it's a remarkable set of parallels there.

I think there are other parallels that could be found, although some people have gone too far with them. But I think it's fair to say that the Book of Mormon peoples behave in certain ways, much the way that the people of Qumran and of the Dead Sea Scrolls do. In fact there is an Austrian writer who said years ago in German that a good name for the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls, since they anticipated the coming of the Messiah and the last times, would be to call them Latter-day Saints; but he said that unfortunately this name has already been taken over by a sect in America. Well, there are some interesting parallels here.

There are other things that could be said about how the ancient world has now begun to produce evidence for the Book of Mormon in remarkable ways. One of the most remarkable, from my point of view, is Lehi's vision of the Council in Heaven. It's recorded in the very first chapter of 1 Nephi. In that vision it says that Lehi "thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels" (1 Nephi 1:8). Lehi is entrusted with a message of judgment and of destruction that he is to deliver to the city of Jerusalem. Now, this idea of a prophet having access to' the Council in Heaven is a very old one. It's certainly biblical. You find it in Isaiah 6, in Jeremiah, in Zecharia, and elsewhere in the Bible and beyond the Bible. But it's a very important notion, and the importance of it has only begun to be recognized probably in the latter part of this century. Basically, the notion is that the Council of the Gods (depending on the religion) or the Council of God and his angels (as you see in Job, for instance, in the Bible) is dosed to the public, obviously. It's something that not everyone has access to, but the prophet has access to it. He overhears the secrets and the decrees of the Council, and because of that, he's able to bring that knowledge back to his fellow human beings upon the earth. And this constitutes a great deal of his authority. It's a very powerful notion that we have now begun to recognize runs through many of the writings from the ancient and even early medieval Near East.

I remember a few years ago when a colleague of mine and I presented a paper on the idea of the throne theophany vision, or the Council in Heaven vision, in Boston. We included a whole list of about twenty-five cases of this particular motif. One of them was I Nephi. Now, of all those cases, 1 Nephi is probably, or possibly, one of the best. There are about twenty or so specific elements of the motif that can be isolated and have been isolated by scholars. Not any one of those particular instances has all of the twenty characteristics, but the one, in my experience, that comes closest to being a textbook case is precisely this instance from the first chapter of 1 Nephi. It's a remarkable thing, and it's something that I doubt very much that Joseph Smith could have done from his own fairly limited reading in the Bible.

Now, a related notion to that is the notion of the heavenly book. The idea of an angel delivering a book to a young man has been mocked by many people. One critic of the Book of Mormon said, "You don't get books from angels. It's just that simple." Well, it's not at all that simple. This turns out to be an extraordinarily common idea throughout the ancient Near East. Geo Widengren, who is a very important Swedish historian of religions and a 'specialist on ancient Iran and the ancient Middle East, has said, "Few religious ideas in the ancient East have played a more important role than the notion of the heavenly tablets or the heavenly books, which are handed over to a mortal in an interview with a heavenly being." Now, the idea is certainly biblical. You find it in Exodus, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in the Revelation of John, which is a particularly good example, and also, I would say, in more detail in nonbiblical books. Think of I Enoch, for example. I think one of the very best cases of it is in the Muslim book known as the Koran, the holy book of Islam, which is brought by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. Now, whatever you think about the true origins of the Koran, that's a remarkable instance of a very ancient Near Eastern idea. And it is, by no means, the latest instance. That's the early seventh century A.D. It's a very clear case of a book being delivered by an angel.

Now, the pattern that has been isolated by scholars basically has four features. First of all, a divine being gives a book to a mortal. The mortal is then commanded to read the book, number two. Number three, he's told to copy the book or do something like that with the book. Sometimes he's told, actually to ingest the book, to eat it, to show that he has totally digested the contents of the book. Number four, he's told to preach the book's message to other mortals. There's a very good instance of that in the Book of Mormon. Think of the case of Lehi, again, from the very first chapters of the Book of Mormon, who is given a vision of a divine book. He's told of the judgments that will fall upon Israel. He's commanded to take that message to the people around him in Jerusalem, which of course subjects him to a great deal of danger and risk. But there's also the case of Joseph Smith himself. So here once again we see not only in the Book of Mormon, but in the story of the Book of Mormon--the nineteenth century events surrounding it--a textbook instance of this ancient notion of a heavenly book, a transcript from the heavenly records that is brought down and delivered to mortal men, or mortal human beings, and then distributed among them. It's a very good instance.

In fact, in one early case that I can think of, a very early Christian book known as the Visions of Hermas, an angel--a female angel in this case, or a female personage--offers the book to Hermas, and Hermas at the end wants to take the book with him. But the messenger tells him he has to return the book to her; he can't just take it with him. It's very much like the much-mocked and derided aspect of the Joseph Smith story, which is that after he gets the book and does with the book what he's supposed to do transcribes it, translates it--he is then told to give it back to the heavenly messenger.

There are other features from the ancient Near East that I think it's very doubtful Joseph Smith could possibly have known. One remarkable thing fairly recently discovered is the idea of the figure of the Moshiah. (That's not to be confused with the Messiah; it's probably from a different root.) Now, recent scholarship has identified this term--which occurs in the Hebrew of the Old Testament but never shows up in the English of the King James Version, so Joseph Smith could not have gotten it from reading his King James Bible---they've identified this term Moshiah as referring to a champion of justice in a situation of controversy, battle, or oppression. He's a kind of savior figure. And there are again four factors, or four aspects, of this personage known as the Moshiah that are worth keeping in mind: (1) he's appointed by God; (2) he liberates a chosen people from oppression, from a controversy, from injustice after they cry out for help; (3) their deliverance--and I think this is striking--their deliverance is usually accomplished by nonviolent means, usually by escape or by negotiation; and (4) the people return to a state of justice where each person has access to and control over his or her own rightful property, the things that belong to that person.

Now, if you look at the book of Mosiah--and the name is strikingly similar to Moshiah (the way, the Hebrews usually render it is Mosiah or Moshiah)--if you look at the book of Mosiah, what to you find? You find a whole series of these deliverances, mostly nonviolent (e.g., by escape), under a chosen leader. Alma the Eider is a classic instance of this, but I think maybe the most striking instance, in fact, is a figure named Mosiah. That may actually be the name Moshiah. If you look in the book of Omni in the Book of Mormon, that very brief little book, you get an account of one of these people. Starting with verse 12 of the book of Omni:

Behold, I will speak unto you somewhat concerning Mosiah, who was made king of the land of Zarahemla; for behold, he being warned of the Lord that he should flee out of the land of Nephi, and as many as would hearken unto the voice of the Lord should also depart out of the land with him, into the wilderness-- And it came to pass that he did according as the Lord had commanded him. And they departed out of the land into the wilderness, as many as would hearken unto the voice of the Lord; and they were led by many preachings and prophesyings. And they were admonished continually by the word of God; and they were led by the power of his arm, through the wilderness until they came down into the land which is called the land of Zarahemla. (Omni 1:12-13)

What do you have here? You have the deliverance of a people by nonviolent means by a figure whose name may well be connected with this idea of the ancient Hebrew deliverer from oppression. So, Mosiah then founds a line of kings, including another one named Mosiah, whose entire history is characterized by this idea of delivering people from oppression. It's a remarkable thing, I think.

There is another very strongly ancient Near Eastern aspect that I'd like to think about, and that is one on which a whole new book is available. That's the famous allegory of the olive tree in Jacob 5. Jacob 5 is a very extended story taken from a prophet named Zenos who is not known to the Bible; he probably comes from the northern kingdom of Israel sometime, obviously, preceding the time of Lehi. Zenos tells a long parable about the lord of a vineyard and his servant or servants and their care of an olive tree. Now, recently a symposium at BYU was held on Jacob 5, and it's remarkable how very much you can get out of one single chapter of the Book of Mormon. The book is almost infinitely rich. A very large book on that chapter was produced, and there were a number of very fascinating aspects to that. One is that a group of horticulturists (specialists in tree culture) looked at the account of olive culture and olive production in the Book of Mormon in Jacob 5 and found that in virtually every detail, it matches what we actually know about how olive trees are treated, how they are grown, cultivated, and cared for.

Now, it has to be understood that olive trees do not grow in New York State. Joseph Smith probably didn't ever see any. He certainly wouldn't have known much about olive trees and olive cultivation, and olive cultivation is very, very different from the kinds of trees he would have known. So where did he get this information from? It seems to me that the most conservative notion, the best explanation, is that whoever wrote the parable of the olive tree in Jacob 5 knew olive cultivation at first hand. He knew how it was done. It's a very detailed account, a very rich account, because of course it's an account of the history of the world (in the past and on into the future) using the olive tree as a metaphor for the house of Israel. You have graftings in and cuttings off and the dispersion of branches of the olive tree into the farthest parts of the vineyard, and so on. And it's all accurate down to the last detail--with one notable exception. And that is that in the account in Jacob 5, it said that graftings from wild olive trees or little pieces of wild olive trees--are grafted into the main olive tree, the domesticated olive tree, and then they produce tame fruit. Now, that doesn't happen. A wild olive branch, even if grafted into a tame olive tree, will still produce wild fruit. It will survive, but it won't produce tame fruit simply because it's grafted into a tame olive tree. So, is this an error on the part of the Book of Mormon? No, not really.

One of the articles--an article that I was involved with--in this book on Jacob 5 uncovered evidence that in the ancient Mediterranean world, they were aware of the possibility that miraculously, a wild olive branch grafted into a tame olive tree could produce tame fruit. It doesn't happen naturally, but it can happen miraculously. And the prophetic figures of the ancient Mediterranean, specifically Greek thinkers and so on, saw this as a sign from God. It was a miraculous intervention from God, something that contravened the normal laws of olive cultivation and production.

Well, what does it stand for in that account of the Book of Mormon? It stands for the conversion of Gentiles into people of the house of Israel. It's a miraculous transformation, exactly what the Book of Mormon would have it to be. And this is a remarkable thing. It's a very long, a seventy-seven-verse long, description of olive culture. This is certainly enough rope for Joseph Smith to have hanged himself if were making it up, but he didn't. He got it right, and on the one detail which seems to be wrong it again has precedent in the ancient Near Eastern world and in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. It's a remarkable thing, and I challenge critics of the Book of Mormon to come up with any counterexplanation of this idea that it was produced by someone who actually came from the area where olives were produced. And that is precisely the area Zenos and Lehi came from originally--the eastern Mediterranean in general.

Once again, something else that I think is of great interest with regard to the Book of Mormon is this: In our usage today, we don't distinguish very rigorously between thieves and robbers. We kind of use the words interchangeably, and the King James Bible does that too---it talks about thieves, and it talks about robbers, and it doesn't distinguish them. But ancient Near Eastern law did distinguish between thieves and robbers very rigidly, and particularly, ancient Israelite law did. Thieves were thought to be local. They stole from their neighbors; they were common; they were a nuisance, but they weren't really a threat to society. So when they were caught, they were dealt with judicially, civilly, usually by their neighbors, their townspeople, and they weren't a big deal.

Robbers, on the other hand, were a very big deal. They were a threat to society. They were seen as outsiders, as brigands, as highwaymen. They would organize in groups, they would swear binding oaths; they would extort ransom from the people around them. And when they were caught, they were often caught by the military. This was a military thing, a kind of war. They were dealt with not civilly, but militarily, and they were subject to summary execution. They were quite a different thing [from thieves]. Now, it's notable that in the Book of Mormon, thieves and robbers are never confused, and robbers--specifically the Gadianton robbers--are dealt with as a military problem, just as they would have been under ancient Israelite law, but not necessarily the way we think of them today because we don't make that dear distinction. So the Book of Mormon is found to be in precise agreement with ancient Near Eastern--and specifically, Israelite---concepts and usage.

There is something else that I'd like to talk about and that is the presence of "simile curses," or symbolic actions. It's, again, only in this century that people are beginning to recognize this very, very important aspect of ancient behavior. Now, I'd like to read you a passage from Alma 46, starting with verse 21 (you remember the story of Captain Moroni with his title of liberty, which itself is a very interesting thing):

And it came to pass that when Moroni had proclaimed these words, behold, the people came running together with their armor girded about their loins, rending their garments in token, or as a covenant, that they would not forsake the Lord their God; or, in other words, if they should transgress the commandments of God, or fall into transgression, and be ashamed to take upon them the name of Christ, the Lord should rend them even as they had rent their garments.

And then it goes on to say in verse 22:

Now, this was the covenant which they made, and they cast their garments at the feet of Moroni, saying: We covenant with our God, that we shall be destroyed, even as our brethren in the land northward, if we shall fall into transgression; yea, he may cast us at the feet of our enemies, even as we have cast our garments at thy feet to be trodden under foot, if we shall fall into transgression.

Now, the thing that needs to be pointed out in this context about this particular scripture is that in this century, people, scholars, have begun to note that this idea of what they call the "simile oath," or "simile covenant," is very common among the ancient Hebrews, among the ancient Hittites--the idea of using some physical object to demonstrate what should happen to you if you violate your oath. A friend of mine, for example, who is a specialist in the ancient Middle East and who is critical in many regards of the Book of Mormon (he doesn't know it very well perhaps) has read those passages and has been very much impressed by them. He admits to me that he doesn't really know what to do with them because it is so vintage ancient Near Eastern.

I teach Arabic about half -time at Brigham Young University, and one of the linguistic forms in Arabic that's common in other Semitic language as well is something that's called a "cognate accusative"--where you use a noun that's related to a verb in a sentence. You say, "I hit him a great hitting" or, "I have dreamed a dream." And the example that I often use to illustrate this, which is not naturally English, is one right out of I Nephi, where Lehi reports to his sons, "Behold I have dreamed a dream, or in other words I have seen a vision." Now this "I have dreamed a dream" is a perfect cognate accusative, and when the students hear about this--the ones who know the Book of Mormon--they say, "Ah, yes! Now we understand," because this is an authentic example of the Arabic or Semitic construction.

Even the second part of the sentence (though we lose something in English) when Lehi says, "Behold I have dreamed a dream; or, in other words, I have seen a vision," (1 Nephi 8:2) demonstrates this. You have to remember that English is based on two different languages. English is a hybrid of a sort of Latin or French with a Germanic language -- the Anglo-Saxons and then the Norman Conquest, of course. So you have two different words for many things, a sort of low Germanic word and a high Latin-style word. For example, a handbook: we also have the Latin word manual coming from the word Manis for "hand." They mean the same thing. Likewise, with the words "I have seen a vision"--what he's really saying is "I have seen a seeing." The Latin word seeing was related to the word for vision, and you have a related German word, sehen, or "I have seen a vision," using the Latin word. But in the original it was probably something like: "Behold I have dreamed a dream; or in other words, I have seen a seeing." So I use this verse in the Book of Mormon in my Arabic grammar class, just to make a point to the students. Now, I ask you how a nineteenth-century farm boy could have come up with something like that, which is a perfect illustration of an Arabic grammatical point. Probably he did a lot of his work in the graduate school there at Palmyra University--well, of course there wasn't such a place. And there was no such Joseph Smith. This came to him via another route, not through academic study.

There is something else that could be said linguistically, something that I work with a great deal. One of my specialties is Arabic philosophy, and one of the texts that we read quite commonly in that is a book by a very famous rabbi of the Middle Ages, probably the most famous of all Jewish rabbis of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, whose great philosophical work is a text called Guide of the Perplexed. That guide was written in something called Judeo-Arabic. Let me tell you what it is: Judeo-Arabic is simply Arabic, but written in Hebrew letters. What you have, in other words, is a kind of reformed Arabic, or reformed Hebrew if you will. And this leads me to an important point.

Some people have thought for a long time that the idea of writing one language in the script of another is crazy. That seems to be what we have in the Book of Mormon, a text in Hebrew written in some sort of Egyptian characters. But in fact it's not crazy at all, it's done all the time. It was done in the ancient world. We now have an example of one of the psalms that was written in much this way, using Egyptian characters. Maimonides used it in his great book, writing an Arabic text in Hebrew letters. We do it all the time even today. If you take a class in Chinese, usually you don't start off reading the Chinese characters. You begin learning it in romanization. What is that? That's reformed Chinese. That's Chinese written in roman letters. So there's nothing unusual here. But Joseph Smith was very unsophisticated linguistically. He barely had a handle on written English. He could not have possibly forecasted something like this or known about it. It simply was beyond his capacity.

I bear you my testimony that there is much more that can be said about this, many more scholarly evidences for the Book of Mormon. The most important evidence that can be received for the Book of Mormon, though, is the testimony of the Spirit. I bear you my testimony that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be. It is truly an ancient work revealed through a prophet by the angel of God in these latter days for our guidance, a second witness to Jesus Christ.

© Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies

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[Nicole]

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Home Broadcast General Conference Archives Conferences April 2002 Some Basic Teachings from the History of Joseph Smith

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Some Basic Teachings from the History of Joseph Smith

Elder Carlos H. Amado

Of the Seventy

Conversion is a personal and spiritual process. Every individual must examine these principles for himself.

The history of Joseph Smith was written to share the story of the Restoration of the Church in these latter days. The essence of the story is a demonstration of trust in the promises of the Lord, and a source of joy and certainty for all those who believe.

I have been able to read it many times and in different circumstances. It impressed me as a child; it was a guide and source of strength when I was a teenager; I shared it with courage and enthusiasm as a young missionary; and even now it continues to fill me with astonishment and a deep sense of gratitude. Since Joseph Smith first recorded it, it remains as a blessing and a gift of faith, a legacy, for the sincere believer; it is an open invitation for those who look for the truth, and a permanent challenge to the unbeliever.

For those who are not yet members of the Church, I suggest you read the testimony of Joseph Smith with an open mind and real intent. You will feel his sincerity, and you will discover the establishment of the Church, restored in a miraculous way!

Although there is ample spiritual content to this fascinating story, I will limit my remarks to sharing five principles which, just as they did for the Prophet, will help you to come to know God.

Principle 1: Have a sincere desire to know the truth.

Joseph Smith had an intense desire to know God and to do His will. You can develop that same desire, and God Himself can lead you to the truth. When you recognize that truth, do all that you can to live your life in accordance with it.

Principle 2: Learn the importance of reading the scriptures.

Joseph Smith knew them because he studied them. He said: "I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him" (JS—H 1:11).

During his short ministry, Joseph Smith also received many other important revelations which were the result of reading the scriptures. You need to study them in order to come to know God, who is the source of all truth.

Principle 3: Learn the value of prayer.

The young Joseph said:

"At length I came to the conclusion that I must either remain in darkness and confusion, or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God. . . .

" . . . It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.

" . . . I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. . . .

" . . . I had found the testimony of James to be true—that a man who lacked wisdom might ask of God, and obtain, and not be upbraided" (JS—H 1:13–15, 26).

Our Heavenly Father, as a perfect father, knows all your spiritual and material needs and wants to bless you, which is why He has given you the commandment to seek Him and ask Him.

Joseph came to know the truth because he prayed. In our time, millions of members of this Church also testify of the reality of the Restoration because, following that counsel, they asked the Lord with faith. You have the same right to receive an answer to your prayers, because a testimony is a gift that God gives only to those who ask with real intent. Try it, and the promise will be fulfilled.

Principle 4: Discover the blessing of meditation.

Joseph Smith meditated often; he thought, analyzed, compared; he tried to find answers to what he read in the scriptures. He said:

"During this time of great excitement my mind was called up to serious reflection and great uneasiness. . . .

" . . . I often said to myself: . . . Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it? . . .

"Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again" (JS—H 1:8, 10, 12).

To meditate about eternal truths is to think and to ask ourselves, over and over: "How can I know?" "How have others come to know?"

How can you come to a knowledge of these things? Please meditate about it seriously.

Principle 5: Experience the joy of going to church.

In his desire to know the truth, Joseph Smith went to various denominations in his community. About his experience with God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ, he described clearly the instructions he received about other churches:

"I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join. . . .

" . . . It was not my duty to join with any of them, but to continue as I was until further directed" (JS—H 1:18, 26).

All of us need to come to know the kingdom of God on earth and to receive a testimony of its truth. We go to church to feel the Spirit, learn His doctrine, renew our covenants, and receive the ordinances of salvation and exaltation to return to the presence of God with our families. You are cordially invited to come to church and see for yourself all these things.

Conversion is a personal and spiritual process. Every individual must examine these principles for himself. It is not enough to make a halfhearted attempt, accompanied by doubts, fear, or lack of trust. God promises us, because of His mercy, that He will answer our petitions in accordance with our sincerity. Only those who seek with real intent will receive their answer, as a gift from God, through the Holy Ghost.

The Holy Ghost is also called the Comforter and the Witness. To Him we owe our knowledge and our testimony that Christ is the Son of God.

After you are baptized, if you remain worthy and faithful to your covenants, you will have the constant guidance of the Holy Ghost, through whisperings, impressions, feelings, dreams, and warnings.

History and the scriptures tell us of people who heard, talked with, or in some other way had concrete evidence of the existence of God and His plan for our salvation. Nevertheless, many of them did not remain true to their convictions.

We learn from this that it is not what we learn through our physical senses but that which comes under the influence of the Holy Ghost which allows us to understand God's purposes and to follow Him.

When someone has learned these basic principles and ceases to practice them, he loses the light and guide which helps him to understand God and His prophets. The outward sign we see is that they separate themselves, become less active, or even contend against the Church. The inward sign is that they have ceased to practice one or more of these five things:

They no longer have a sincere desire to know all the truth.

They no longer read the scriptures.

They no longer pray.

They no longer meditate about eternal truths.

They no longer go to church.

It is wonderful that in a time of great religious confusion, while not yet 15 years old, in the midst of opposition and even persecution, Joseph Smith patiently and diligently demonstrated obedience and showed us the simple but effective way to draw closer to God.

This process requires that we learn, precept upon precept, a little here and a little there, until we develop faith and clear understanding of our divine potential (see 2 Ne. 28:30).

It is our responsibility to strengthen, day by day, the impressions that we feel through the Spirit, by applying these five principles.

It is my prayer that we may do this, constantly, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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[Jason]

Nicole,

Sweetie, there's this thing called Bandwith abuse. Just post the link next time.

Then let me ask you - is there another case in the whole of human history where someone has dictated such a book, off the top of his head, no notes, no referring to what he had written when he last left off, hundreds and hundreds of characters with obscure names, multiple calendar systems, etc, etc?

Snow,

The "60 days" thing is tossed about a lot. But don't forget that Smith was, according to his mother, telling stories about Indians being Israelites since he was a kid. It was a common belief in the day that the Indians were the lost Tribes. Plenty of time then to come up with a plot.

Also, just how many actual days passed from the start of writing to the end? Let's also consider that essentially, First Nephi is but a repitition of the "lost 116 pages" of the would be "Book of Lehi". And it's my understanding that a year's time passed from the time he lost his manuscript until he began translating again? Haven't you ever written something, then lost it, then re-written essentially what you said before in less time? I have.

Now this doesn't count for the rest of the BoM, but let's consider than much of First and Second Nephi is copied out of the King James Bible. And let's also consider that he could well have taken his time, with a few days here and there, to think of the next segment before sitting down to dictate the remaining text.

Also, I know that everyone says Smith had "no notes" etc when dictating, but since there was a sheet blocking Smith from the scribe, what evidence do we actually have the proves that Smith wasn't using notes or some other thing to aid in his work? I mean, let's be honest here, Joseph could have a box of notes stuffed away from view, that he pulled out and read from when "translating" and then put them away before covering up the Plates and walking around to the other side of the sheet after he was finished for the day.

[Traveler]

Better yet, let's make claims for which nothing can ever be proved or denied. Let's alter our understanding of this text so that each time something appears to discredit our text, we can make up a new theory (like other races inhabiting the Americas, even though this actually negates the theory of a promised land for God's people alone...).

Then, as we alter our theories for a generally benign text that could plausibly have taken place in multiple locations throughout the western hemisphere, we can continue to subscribe to a literal event, though no known place exists.

That should make it easy. And let's change locations from Tibet to Antartica. That way, anything found might give our believers a shred of hope, all the while knowing that it doesn't matter what is found or not found, that our believers will keep the faith no matter what!

Jasen: I can give you 100 historical facts in the Book of Mormon that relate to the Arabian peninsula and traveling there that could not have been known by Joseph Smith in 1830 that are 100% accurate and demonstrate accuracy. Can you point me to a more accurate book published within 50 years of the Book of Mormon that can be shown to be that accurate today? Can you point out any historical fact in the Book of Mormon about the Arabian peninsula that is known to be wrong?

The reason I bring this up concerning the Arabian peninsula is that we know exactly where the Arabian peninsula is. There can be confusion about where is the America's the Book of Mormon took place but there is evidence of migrations from the middle east to the Americas when the Book of Mormon suggested it.

The Traveler

[Jason]

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Better yet, let's make claims for which nothing can ever be proved or denied. Let's alter our understanding of this text so that each time something appears to discredit our text, we can make up a new theory (like other races inhabiting the Americas, even though this actually negates the theory of a promised land for God's people alone...).

Then, as we alter our theories for a generally benign text that could plausibly have taken place in multiple locations throughout the western hemisphere, we can continue to subscribe to a literal event, though no known place exists.

That should make it easy. And let's change locations from Tibet to Antartica. That way, anything found might give our believers a shred of hope, all the while knowing that it doesn't matter what is found or not found, that our believers will keep the faith no matter what!

Jasen: I can give you 100 historical facts in the Book of Mormon that relate to the Arabian peninsula and traveling there that could not have been known by Joseph Smith in 1830 that are 100% accurate and demonstrate accuracy. Can you point me to a more accurate book published within 50 years of the Book of Mormon that can be shown to be that accurate today? Can you point out any historical fact in the Book of Mormon about the Arabian peninsula that is known to be wrong?

The reason I bring this up concerning the Arabian peninsula is that we know exactly where the Arabian peninsula is. There can be confusion about where is the America's the Book of Mormon took place but there is evidence of migrations from the middle east to the Americas when the Book of Mormon suggested it.

The Traveler

It's my understanding that those "facts" you speak of are also disputable and not concrete. Likewise, there's nothing there to indicate any "Nephite" presence anywhere in Arabia. In other words, there's no cave in one of the theorized locations that has "Nephi was here".

Though I like the theories better than any of the BOM America locations, they are still just theories as far as I've read.

[Jason]

Snow,

Still waiting for your thoughts on post #30.

[Guest Elder 2006]

Here is a challenge for any of you who think that Joseph Smith made up the Book of Mormon. Keep in mind as you read this, that you need to put yourself in the year 1828.

The Challenge of the Book of Mormon

John M. Pontius

Condensed from a talk by Elder Hugh B. Brown

1. Write a history of an ancient Tibet covering a period of 2200 B.C. to 400 A.D. Why ancient Tibet? Because you know no more about Tibet than Joseph Smith (or anyone else) knew about ancient America.

2. You must be 23 years of age.

3. You must have no more than three years of formal education and must have spent your life in a backwoods farming community

4. Your book must be 522 pages, and over 300,000 words in length.

5. Your history must be written on the basis of what you know. There was no library, and no published works on Ancient America for Joseph Smith to reference, so you must use none. There is to be no research of any kind.

6. Other than a few grammatical errors and corrections, you must make no changes in the text. The first edition you dictate to your secretary must stand forever.

7. This history is to contain the history of two distinct and separate nations, along with histories of different contemporary nations or groups of people.

8. You must describe their religious, economic, political, and social cultures and institutions. You must cover every phase of their society, including the names of their coins, weights and measures.

9. You must change your style of writing many times to make the book appear to have been written by many authors since you will claim many ancient authors contributed to the book, each with his own style.

10. You will weave into your history the religion of Jesus Christ, and the pattern of Christian living, and the Mosaic law.

11. You must claim that your narrative is not fiction at all, but a true and sacred history.

12. You must include in your book 54 chapters dealing with wars, 21 historical chapters, 55 chapters on prophecy and visions, and remember when you begin to write on visions and prophecies you must have your record agree meticulously with the bible. You must write 71 chapters on doctrine and exhortation, and here again, you must check every statement against a flawless memory of the Bible (since you can have no resource documents,) or you will be proven a fraud. You must write 21 chapters on the ministry of Christ, and everything that you claim He said and did and every testimony you write in your book must agree absolutely with the New Testament even though you may not reference it.

13. Many of the facts, claims and ideas and statements given as truth in your writings must be entirely inconsistent with the prevailing beliefs of the world. Some of your claims must prove to be the direct opposite of the prevailing worldly beliefs of the time.

14. Included in your narration will be authentic modes of travel; whether or not those ancient people used fire; descriptions of their clothing, crops, animals, roads, war strategies, mourning customs, and types of government. You must invent about 280 new names that will stand up under scrutiny through the years as to their historical roots and derivations.

15. You will have to use properly, figures of speech, similes, metaphors, narrations, expositions, descriptions, oratory, epic, lyric, logic, and parables.

16. You must invite the ablest scholars and experts to examine the text with care, and you must strive diligently to see that your book gets into the hands of those eager to prove it a forgery, and those who are most competent to expose every flaw in it.

17. Through investigation, scientific and historical evidence, and archeological discovery for the next 175 years, your critics must verify your claims and prove detail after detail to be true; for many of the details you put into your book are still buried beneath the soil of Tibet and won’t be discovered until after your death.

18. You must publish it to every nation, kindred, tongue and people, declaring it to be the word of God, and another witness for the Lord Jesus Christ.

19. The book must not contain any absurd, impossible or contradictory statements. Your history must not contain any statement that will contradict any other statement elsewhere in the volume.

20. Many theories and ideas as to your book’s origin must arise, and after examine all the facts, they must all fall. You have claimed that your knowledge has come from a divine origin, and this claim continues to stand as the only possible origin and explanation. The strength of this explanation must not decrease as time passes, but actually increase to the point to where it becomes the only logical explanation.

21. Your record is to fulfill many Bible prophecies, even the exact manner in which it shall come forth, to whom delivered, its purpose and its accomplishments.

22. You must call down from heaven an angel in the middle of the day and have him bear witness to four honest, dignified citizens of your community and the world. They must remain steadfast in their testimony, not for profit, or gain, but under the great sacrifice and severe persecution, even to their death beds. You shall put their testimony to the test by becoming enemies to these men, and yet have them never recant their words.

23. Thousands of great men, intellectual giants, national and international personalities, and scholars for the next 175 years must accept your history and its teachings even to the point of laying down their lives rather than deny their testimony of it.

24. You must include in your record this promise, “And when ye shall receive these things I would exhort you, that ye would as God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask, with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, He will manifest it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost.”

25. Millions must bear record to the world for the next 175 years that they know the record to be true because they put your promise to the test and found it to be true. The truth of it was manifested unto them by the power of the Holy Ghost.

26. Over 80,000 competent salesmen must be convinced of the truth of your book that they gladly give up two or more years of their lives to take it to all parts of the world for distribution. They not only pay their own way during these two years, but return bearing their testimonies that their time spent will remain as one of the highlights of their lives. They receive nothing for their journey and efforts but the joy of having shared your book with others.

27. Your book is not only to raise the standards of millions of people, but do it in such a way that those people may become one of the great moral, ethical and dynamic marvels of the day. They must become known and receive world renown for this.

28. To substantiate your claims you must for the next 20 years watch those that follow you, your family, and dearest of your loved ones be persecuted, driven time after time from their homes, beaten, tortured, starved, frozen and killed. Tens of thousands must undergo the most extreme hardships in your presence just because they believe your claims concerning the origin and content of what your have written to be true.

29. You must gain no wealth from your wok but many times lose all that you have. Like those that believe you, you must submit yourself to the most vile persecutions. And after 20 years of this, give your own life in a very savage and brutal manner for your testimony concerning your book. All this you must do willingly and without remorse.

30. Start right now and produce this record, which covers 2700 years of history, doing it, not in the peaceful atmosphere of your community, but under the most trying of circumstances, which includes being driven from your home several times, and receiving constant threats upon your life. Please have your book completed; talk a friend into mortgaging his farm to raise the money to have it printed, and do it all in under 60 working days.

Wow it seems like the book of Morman is the word of god, as far as it is translation is correct. I mean its based on a book that may not have been translated right at all, so realy the book of morman is the only book we can trust.. Im glad that we now let black people into the priesthood. Joseph Smith wasent with the times when he said blacks were the cursed children of Cain. So he was wrong there. Of corse if he was reading actual accounts from the golden tablets he should have gotten that right.

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<div class='quotemain'>

Better yet, let's make claims for which nothing can ever be proved or denied. Let's alter our understanding of this text so that each time something appears to discredit our text, we can make up a new theory (like other races inhabiting the Americas, even though this actually negates the theory of a promised land for God's people alone...).

Then, as we alter our theories for a generally benign text that could plausibly have taken place in multiple locations throughout the western hemisphere, we can continue to subscribe to a literal event, though no known place exists.

That should make it easy. And let's change locations from Tibet to Antartica. That way, anything found might give our believers a shred of hope, all the while knowing that it doesn't matter what is found or not found, that our believers will keep the faith no matter what!

Jasen: I can give you 100 historical facts in the Book of Mormon that relate to the Arabian peninsula and traveling there that could not have been known by Joseph Smith in 1830 that are 100% accurate and demonstrate accuracy. Can you point me to a more accurate book published within 50 years of the Book of Mormon that can be shown to be that accurate today? Can you point out any historical fact in the Book of Mormon about the Arabian peninsula that is known to be wrong?

The reason I bring this up concerning the Arabian peninsula is that we know exactly where the Arabian peninsula is. There can be confusion about where is the America's the Book of Mormon took place but there is evidence of migrations from the middle east to the Americas when the Book of Mormon suggested it.

The Traveler

It's my understanding that those "facts" you speak of are also disputable and not concrete. Likewise, there's nothing there to indicate any "Nephite" presence anywhere in Arabia. In other words, there's no cave in one of the theorized locations that has "Nephi was here".

Though I like the theories better than any of the BOM America locations, they are still just theories as far as I've read.

It sounds like you guys are having fun.. I wonder, even though the book of Morman is proven wrong by the very words inside of the book itself, how can people faithfully stake their lives and souls on its clames. It scares me.. Like Islam. We know Allah is not god, and Muhamid is not gods prophet but yet millions follow. it scares me that the Bible has never been proven wrong but yet we Mormans say that it hasent been translated correctly

[Outshined]

I wonder, even though the book of Morman is proven wrong by the very words inside of the book itself, how can people faithfully stake their lives and souls on its clames. It scares me.. Like Islam. We know Allah is not god, and Muhamid is not gods prophet but yet millions follow. it scares me that the Bible has never been proven wrong but yet we Mormans say that it hasent been translated correctly

Are you LDS? I have to wonder, as you consistently spell "Mormon" wrong and make incorrect statements about our beliefs.

Examples:

+The BOM is "proven wrong by the very words inside the book itself." -Wrong (At least back up your opinion here with some scriptural examples).

+"the Bible has never been proven wrong but yet we Mormans say that it hasent been translated correctly".-Wrong again.

I suggest you at least read the Book of Mormon and familiarize yourself with the doctrines of the LDS Church before making such claims.

It's my understanding that those "facts" you speak of are also disputable and not concrete. Likewise, there's nothing there to indicate any "Nephite" presence anywhere in Arabia. In other words, there's no cave in one of the theorized locations that has "Nephi was here".

It's well known that Lehi's family was counseled against vandalism, and graffiti in particular... B)

[Palerider]

The Book of Mormon is false.......thats news to me...........I know Wally Martin and Ed Decker and some Tanners try to claim its false.....ITS ANOTHER TESTAMENT OF JESUS CHRIST.....