The Book of Mormon (BoM) is the foundational scriptural document of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as established by Joseph Smith in the 1830s. Its truthfulness and historical accuracy are absolutely essential to that religion, for if the BoM is found to be false then the entire edifice of Mormonism collapses. Indeed, the official LDS Church INTRODUCTION to the 1981 edition of the BoM directly challenges readers thusly: “We invite all men everywhere to read the Book of Mormon, to ponder in their hearts the message it contains, and then to ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ if the book is true.” The following is a brief non-theological evaluation of the BoM. A good place to start is a quick overview of the purported history chronicled in the BoM:
Around 600 B.C. (before the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon) God led the Jewish patriarch Lehi and his family and friends east into the wilderness to escape the coming destruction. They took with them the Hebrew Scriptures written in “reformed Egyptian” on brass plates (1). Along the way, Lehi found a brass ball with a pointer that Divinely guided them through the wilderness (2). After at least eight years of wandering eastward through the wilderness they came to a coastal area where God gave them divine instruction on how to build an oceangoing sail ship (3). They boarded the ship and after a journey of “many days” they came to the “land of promise”—America (4). Soon after arriving they split into two mutually hostile tribes, and warfare erupted. The tribes grew into two warring kingdoms. This strife and bloodshed continued for centuries. All the while they continued the record keeping—again written in Egyptian on brass plates (5).
Around 121 B.C. one of the kings sent out a scouting party. They stumbled onto the ruins of a vast and ancient civilization and found records written on gold plates in a totally unknown language. The scouting party returned with the plates which were divinely translated by a seer, and then re-translated into Egyptian and re-recorded on brass plates (6). The ancient civilization was the descendants of those people God brought to America just after the Tower of Babel. They grew to several millions in population, but in a degenerate fit of rage and mutual hatred they all gathered near the hill Cumorah in New York State where every last man woman and child of them engaged in a terrible slaughter to total extinction (7).
Meanwhile, God had been sending prophets to the descendants of Lehi. These prophets were extremely (I might say suspiciously) specific in details of the coming of Christ—even to the extent of naming Jesus and his mother Mary! (8) These prophets foretold that right before the arrival of Jesus in America there would be total darkness and natural disasters upon the land (9). Supposedly in 34 A.D. this took place and Jesus appeared in America. He preached and taught for an unspecified (though obvious from the text) short period of time and then ascended into heaven. (Read 3 Nephi for details)
About 300 years of peace followed, but again division and warfare erupted. This climaxed in 421 A.D. with one kingdom virtually annihilating the other in a final battle—again near the hill Cumorah in New York! Mormon and his son Moroni were among the few survivors on the losing side. Mormon, as the last senior official record keeper, passed all of the brass plates (which had to have weighed several hundred pounds by this point) to his son Moroni who finished the last of the records and then buried all of the plates in a stone vault on the west side of the hill Cumorah, where they would rest for the next fourteen hundred years (10).
In 1823 the resurrected, glorified Moroni (generally mischaracterized as an “angel”) appeared to Joseph Smith and showed him the location of the vault. In 1827 Joseph Smith opened the vault and took possession of the plates (showing them to a few select “witnesses”, all personal friends or direct family members of Joseph Smith) and began the translation of them from Egyptian into seventeenth century archaic KJV-style English through Divine inspiration. In 1830 Moroni took all of the brass plates up into Heaven; Joseph Smith went to press with the BoM; and the rest, as they say, is history (11).
Well, this is quite an epic story even in condensed form. Indeed, this story makes up about 95% of the bulk of the BoM. Only about 5% of the BoM deals with Jesus' appearance and teachings in the New World after His death and resurrection in Jerusalem, Judea. I would like to say that I wish the Book of Mormon was genuine and true; that the archeological evidence, verified history and in-hand brass plates supported it; that Christopher Columbus had been met by Christianized Indians having clear linguistic and genetic linkage to the Semitic Middle East. All of this would be a tremendous boost to modern orthodox Christianity. But there are no plates—nor even copies of them. Joseph Smith offers only the doubtful written testimony of “witnesses”, now long dead. And everything else works against the BoM.
I start my critique with the most serious flaw of the BoM: its reason for existence as explained in 1 Nephi 13:26-29 (supposedly written around 592 B.C.):
“And after they go forth by the hand of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, from the Jews unto the Gentiles, thou seest the formation of that great and abominable church, which is most abominable above all other churches; for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away. And all this have they done that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord, that they might blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men. Wherefore, thou seest that after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God. And after these plain and precious things were taken away it goeth forth unto all the nations of the Gentiles; and after it goeth forth unto all the nations of the Gentiles, yea, even across the many waters which thou hast seen with the Gentiles which have gone forth out of captivity, thou seest—because of the many plain and precious things which have been taken out of the book, which were plain unto the understanding of the children of men, according to the plainness which is in the Lamb of God—because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.”
These four verses clearly indicate that orthodox Christianity is to be regarded as utterly corrupt, and that the Christian New Testament is totally unreliable. The above charges against orthodox Christianity and the New Testament Scriptures are very serious. Christianity would be severely weakened or destroyed if the charges proved to be true. Joseph Smith held out the hope of an alternate Scripture; pure and untainted.
But the picture today is very much different from that of the 1830s. The past one hundred and fifty years have seen tremendous improvements in New Testament manuscripts, archeology, historical research, and critical textual scholarship. At this point even if the BoM was true it simply wouldn't be needed! Though none of the original New Testament manuscripts are known to exist, the critical analysis of existing manuscripts is such that our best modern translations of the New Testament can be accepted for all practical and theological purposes as completely faithful to the original manuscripts. It is the BoM that must pass similar scrutiny.
Which brings me to the second problem area: translation. The BoM does not explicitly tell the language that Lehi and his descendents used for ordinary everyday speech, but 1 Nephi 1:2 says that the records were started “…in the language of my father…”—Lehi; presumably the common Hebrew of 600 B.C. when all of this supposedly began. Mosiah 1:4 made clear that Lehi, “…having been taught in the language of the Egyptians…”, therefore the brass plates were written in “reformed Egyptian”—whatever that is (12). Supposedly Moroni took all of the brass plates up into Heaven and Joseph Smith made no copies. This means that Smith's work must be accepted entirely on faith since it can't be tested or double checked by qualified Egyptologists. Compounding the problem is that Joseph Smith made no claim to knowledge of any Egyptian language. Recall that the Rosetta Stone had been deciphered only as recently as 1822. The work by Smith in the late 1820s was done entirely by Divine inspiration. This means that it really didn't matter in what language the plates were written—even childish scribble—for Joseph Smith didn't know what he was looking at. In fact, with total Divine inspiration he didn't even need the plates at all!
More subtle problems emerge when we remember that Lehi and his clan supposedly left the Middle East around the year 600 B.C., thereby freezing their language and knowledge in that timeframe. I don't think that Greek was a well known or common language in Judea at that time. Indeed, the word ‘Greek’ is not used in the BoM. But the BoM uses many Greek-derived words such as Jesus, Christ, church, apostle (13), Christians (14), Bible (15), etc., etc. Would these Hebrew Jews have been able to find Egyptian characters that would translate directly into Greek-derived KJV English equivalents? This is a particular problem in Ether 3:14, because the explicit name “Jesus Christ” is used in text that was supposedly translated from the totally unknown ancient language on the golden plates from the time of the Tower of Babel into Egyptian, and then retranslated by Joseph Smith from Egyptian into the Greek-derived KJV-style English used in the BoM. In Jacob 7:27 Joseph Smith even used the French word “adieu”! Now, what Egyptian symbol gives that word? 3 Nephi 12:22 quotes Jesus as saying the Aramaic word “Raca”. Would these people have known and remembered Aramaic after 600 years of isolation in America? Is there an Egyptian character specifically for “Raca”? I doubt it.
I close this particular problem with the observation that there was absolutely no reason why a nineteenth century translation of an ‘Egyptian’ text would have been Divinely ‘inspired’ by God into archaic—not to mention extremely stilted—seventeenth century KJV-style English. By the time of Joseph Smith in the 1820s, no one in America was talking like that except as an affectation. My conclusion is that Joseph Smith ‘revealed’ the BoM in King James Version-style English solely for the purpose of trying to tap into the credability, reputation, and the general acceptance of the KJV Bible. If the BoM was a genuine work, then it would have been rendered by God through Divine inspiration into the commonly used and understood nineteenth century American-style English of that time.
The third problem is simple geography. The BoM is wonderfully vague on many subjects, but none more so than leaving you in the dark as to where you're at. Once the story leaves Jerusalem, you're lost! Where did Lehi & Co. set sail from after eight years of wandering east through the wilderness: the Arab Sea; Bay of Bengal; The South China Sea? The BoM gives no clue! Did they sail west across the Indian/Atlantic Oceans or east across the Pacific? Again, who knows? It doesn't say. And where did they land in the “land of promise”? Once again, it doesn't say; at least not explicitly. But it does give clues. The area where almost everything was supposed to have happened was a land rich in timber, gold, silver, iron (including carbon and any other alloy metals to make “steel”), copper, zinc, and the ability to make silk fabric centuries before the art arrived in the Middle East (17). Also, it must have been possible to walk from the coast of the “sea east” to the coast of the “sea west” in anywhere from one and a half days to three weeks (18).
Looking at my National Geographic world map, the only area in the whole Western Hemisphere that could reasonably satisfy all of these requirements is the southern half of Mexico and Central America. But this means that in the end several hundred thousand men, women and children would have had to abandon all of their long-established cities, and then battle each other across more than two thousand miles of rugged mountains, deserts, plains and woods (not to mention several major rivers) in order to fight the final slaughter at the hill Cumorah in New York State!
To close, if ever there was a historical book that should be confirmed by overwhelming physical evidence and the endorsement of relevant experts, it is the Book of Mormon. If ever there was a historical book utterly lacking physical evidence and expert endorsement, it is the Book of Mormon. The evaluation of the BoM in this article has focused on three major points. While I could go on and on with many other details, the above points are more than sufficient to lead me to the inescapable conclusion that the Book of Mormon is utterly false; that Joseph Smith fabricated the plates himself (if, indeed, any plates ever existed at all) and wrote the whole BoM out of his own imagination—with liberal plagiarism from the KJV Bible. Rather than stand on the solid rock of actual truth, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sinks into the shifting sands of falsehood and intentional fraud.
(Referenced to the 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon: The BoM)
The Mormonizing of America
by Stephen Mansfield
Worthy Publishing (2012)
The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
F. F. Bruce
Intervarsity Press (2003)
ISBN: 0-87784-691-X
The Origin of the Bible
Philip Wesley Comfort (ed.)
Tyndale House Publishers (1992)
ISBN: 0-8423-4735-6