The second criticism that he makes of the restored Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, relates to the Book of Mormon. He begins his criticism with the following subheading:
“2. The Book of Mormon is Man-Made”
And tries to justify it with the following arguments:
“The Book of Mormon claims to be ‘an abridged account of God’s dealings with the original inhabitants of the American continent from about 2247 BC to AD 421.’ Mormons claim that it was originally engraved on gold plates by ancient prophets in the language of ‘Reformed Egyptian,’ deposited in a stone box, and buried in the Hill Cumorah in New York. … Smith is said to have ‘translated’ the Book of Mormon from the gold plates using a ‘seer stone’. In this process, every word and every letter was supposedly given to Joseph Smith by God. However, ‘history proves there have been more than 3,913 changes between the original edition of the Book of Mormon published in 1830 and the ones printed and issued through the mid-1970s.’ If every word and every letter were given directly to Joseph Smith by God, then why would there be a need for nearly 4,000 changes?”
That is a slanderous accusation and a perverse falsehood. It is a pernicious lie. 99.99% of those supposed “changes” were either punctuational revisions, or spelling adjustments, or corrections of scribal, typographical, and printers’ errors. The text of the Book of Mormon was revealed without any punctuation marks. The first punctuation of the Book of Mormon was done by the printer, who was not even a believer in the restored gospel. He did the best job of it that he could, given the limited time he had; but it was not optimal, and attempts have been made since then to improve on it. In my opinion, the punctuation of the Book of Mormon is still not optimal, and there is plenty of room for its improvement. If I had it my way, I would do another 2,000 punctuational changes in it. That takes care of most of those supposed “4,000 changes”. Another source of the “changes” were spelling adjustments. American spelling was not standardized in those days. People spelled words according to how they sounded. It took a long time before American spelling was standardized, and the spelling of the Book of Mormon was adjusted accordingly over time.
Another source of change was scribal, typographical, and printers’ mistakes. There were no computers in those days. Manuscripts had to be copied by hand, and scribes made mistakes. The original manuscript of the Book of Mormon was dictated by Joseph Smith, and written down by scribes. Then that manuscript had to be copied by hand for submission to the printer. That introduced errors. In those days books were typeset manually, letter by letter, and typesetters made mistakes. Sometimes they misread the hand-written manuscript they were typesetting from; and sometimes they made other inadvertent errors. That was another source of errors entering into the Book of Mormon. If you eliminate all of those, that takes care of 99.99% of the supposed “4,000 changes” in the Book of Mormon.
The actual changes made in the Book of Mormon that could be considered to be “editorial,” and intended to make a difference to the meaning of the text have been few, and most of them were made by Joseph Smith himself, in the second edition of the book.
I thought Christians were supposed to be honest, and not tell lies about other people. Where does it say in the Bible that it is okay to tell lies about others with whom one might have a theological disagreement? The biblical injunction is not to “bear false witness” (Ex. 20:16; Matt. 19:18). And lying is specifically forbidden:
Revelation 21:
8 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
Telling lies and bearing false witness against others is not something that a reputable Christian scholar and theologian should want to associate himself with. He then continues his criticism of the restored Church as follows:
“In addition, while the accuracy of the Bible has been repeatedly confirmed by thousands of archaeological discoveries in the ancient Mediterranean world, there is no archaeological support for the Book of Mormon. According to Mormon scriptures, the Nephite and Lamanite nations had huge populations that lived in large, fortified cities. They waged large-scale wars with each other for hundreds of years, culminating in a conflict in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed in AD 385, near Hill Cumorah in present-day New York State. … But there is no evidence that it occurred.”
Archaeological evidence has been adequately dealt with by others. There is plenty of evidence for ancient civilizations having lived in Central America, where the Book of Mormon events mostly took place. There is no archaeological evidence that the Israelites ever lived in Egypt, or that the Exodus ever occurred, or of the Israelite wandering in the Sinai desert for 40 years, or of the conquest of Canaan etc. There are no archaeological evidence for the miracles of Moses. Archaeological evidence will never prove to anyone that the Bible is the word of God, and the same applies to the Book of Mormon. He then continues as follows:
“The Book of Mormon also contains plagiarism, such as ‘whole chapters that have been lifted from the book of Isaiah’ in the King James version. But the King James Version was not published until 1611, while Mormons claim the ‘Reformed Egyptian’ tablets that were translated by Joseph Smith were written sometime before AD 421, over 1,000 years before the King James Version. How then could the Book of Mormon, based on AD 421 tablets, just ‘happen’ to have the exact wording of a number of chapters from a 1611 translation of the Bible?”
I had previously dealt with the question of “plagiarism” in the Book of Mormon in an earlier blog post, which can be seen here. No need to add to that. I will only briefly mention as a side-note that “Reformed Egyptian” was not a “language,” but a form of writing script that acted like a kind of “shorthand,” that enabled them to condense a large amount of text in a small amount of space, for the purpose of engraving it on metal plates. The language itself that they used was a dialect of Hebrew. But they transcribed it in what they called Reformed Egyptian script, in order to condense large amounts of text in a small space for engraving it on metal plates. His other criticisms of the Church will be dealt with in the other blog posts.
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