1 Nephi 13 is a critical chapter in the Book of Mormon. Indeed, it presents the reason why the Book
of Mormon exists and is necessary, and why its words and those of the Mormon
Church should be taken over the Bible, even when there’s an apparent and glaring
contradiction between the two. It is in
this chapter that the Book of Mormon alleges that the Bible has been tampered
with and is no longer trustworthy, opening up the door for extra-Biblical
revelation to “correct” it.
It is an old play and a common one, to be sure. I cannot think of any cult that goes without
it. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have it, as
do the lesser-known cult called The Twelve Tribes. Even Islam uses the ploy. It’s practically standard and unavoidable in
all these groups because any time you want to claim to follow the same God as
in the Bible, but want to teach doctrines with which the Bible disagrees, you
have to figure out some way to make the Bible wrong. In predominantly Protestant areas, this
reason is almost always the Catholic Church.
Since all Protestants can be counted on to agree that the Catholic
Church is in error and many believe they have already messed with the Bible by
canonizing the books of the Apocrypha, it is a short step from there to
believing that the Catholic Church has deviously and fundamentally altered the
words of the Bible itself, so as to obscure the truth. After all, even Catholics boast that they
“gave us the Bible” in their commercials, so it seems not so much of a stretch
to believe that they may have deliberately fouled up the delivery.
Since this is basically the thrust of 1 Nephi 13, I entitled
this post “blame Catholics” after the ploy itself. But in talking with Mormons, I have found out
that they do not, in fact, blame Catholics.
Surprisingly, while the chapter itself is pretty transparent about
playing the blame-the-Catholics game, Mormons try to make it symbolic and
obscure. I was at first surprised that
they were not willing to take their own holy book at face value, but then, of
course, I realized that the Book of Mormon itself does not agree with Mormon
teaching, since Joseph Smith’s teachings, and those of the church itself,
evolved over time. For example, Mormons
do not believe in an eternal hell, but 1 Nephi 14:3 plainly states that hell
“hath no end.” So given these
contradictions and the rise of a more politically correct Mormonism, it’s
hardly surprising that Mormons are unwilling to make the Catholic connection in
1 Nephi 13.
Nevertheless, it is there.
The chapter tells us that a “great and abominable church” (I will ignore
the fact that “church” is a Greek word/concept that belongs nowhere in a
document supposedly by an ancient Hebrew writer—I would be here all day if I
stopped to point out every contradiction and anachronism!) will arise (founded
by “the devil” of course) among the Gentiles after the death of the apostles (I
am also ignoring the fact that “apostles” is an equally Greek word), and that
it will enslave the Gentiles and persecute the saints. This church, it says, removed “plain and
precious” parts from the Bible in order to distort it, parts without which
people “stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.” It then
tells about some Gentiles breaking free and crossing the “many waters” (why isn’t
a Jew using one of the many perfectly good Hebrew words for sea when that’s what he means?) to the
“promised land” (by which he means America) and fighting and winning a war of
independence against their “mother Gentiles” (because the idea of a “mother
country” so-called was totally contemporary to Jeremiah and came from the
ancient Hebrews, rather than being an invention of Europe over 2,400 years
later). Here we can identify clearly the
American Revolution, the Pilgrims, the Inquisition, and the founding of
Catholicism, at least in jarring anachronistic caricature. Clearly, the author was referring to
Catholicism and playing the Catholics-changed-the-Bible gambit.
Whether or not Catholics are really as bad as the Book of
Mormon portrays them or actually bad at all is beyond the scope of this
post. Instead, I want to focus on the
Bible itself and the question of whether or not the gambit is actually
conceivable.
To start with, the Bible seems to be against this idea. Jesus says that “not one jot or tittle shall
pass away” and the Psalms and Proverbs talk about the enduring nature of God’s
Word as well. But as the Mormons would
point out, Jesus’ promise is conditional (“till all be fulfilled,” which is
vague enough that one might say that point lies in the past—though, given
Revelation, that argument is probably false).
And then of course, there’s the logical problem that, if the Bible has been changed these passages
promising that it wouldn’t could simply be a part of the tampering.
But, as it turns out, there is an easier way to prove the
reliability of the Bible: the manuscript evidence. While critics of the Bible are quick to point
out that we don’t have the originals (autographs) of any of the books of the
Bible, we do have lots of copies (manuscripts) written at various times, all of
them agreeing pretty much completely with the copies we use today (and I say
“pretty much” because, with the exception of a couple of non-vital passages,
the only differences are in spelling, grammar, and exact word choice—none of
which change the meaning). Because the
number of manuscripts and the degree of agreement between them is so high, we
can have much more confidence that the Bible we have today is the same as it was
originally written than we can have in any other ancient document—by orders of
magnitude!
The manuscript evidence pretty much rules out the
possibility of anyone having tampered with the Bible. If anyone had, it would be pretty transparent
from the manuscripts. The results can be
pretty clearly pictured by imagining that every other church or Bible-using
group were to phase out of existence over the next century or so to be replaced
by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who use the substantially-altered New World
Translation to support their unique heresies.
If, after a thousand years or so, people of the future were to search
through the ruins of our civilization looking for ancient copies of the Bible
to compare to the NWT-based copies they were using, they would find an
abundance of KJV, NIV, ESV, and NLT Bibles, as well as the remnants of our
scholarship supporting them, and a very small number of NWT Bibles. If they went back even further, they would
find no manuscripts at all that lined up with their present NWT-based
Bible. They would be forced to conclude
that all of their Bibles traced their origins to tampered versions written in
the 20th Century…and if they made any new translations, they would
correct the content by using the oldest known manuscripts, predating the
creation of the NWT.
The above thought exercise tells us what to expect if the
Book of Mormon is right and Catholics (or some other group) really did change
the Bible at some point. When digging up
old manuscripts, we should find that most manuscripts that were written around
or after the Bible was changed will disagree with our current Bibles, and all
manuscripts written before the point of change will consistently disagree with
modern versions.
Given this, we have enough evidence to clear the Catholics
of the charge of changing the Bible. The
Roman Catholic Church was formed somewhere between the reign of Constantine
(300AD—before which time Rome persecuted all forms of Christianity) and the
Great Schism (1000AD—the time at which Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism
split, and the first time the Roman Catholic cornerstone belief in the primacy
of the Bishop of Rome [the Pope] was asserted).
We have consistent agreement between all manuscripts dating all the way
back to 120AD in the case of the New Testament and 150BC in the case of the
Old. This means that anyone who changed
the Bible had to have done so hundreds of years before these dates, long enough
for all of the manuscripts that disagreed with them to be destroyed or
forgotten (as opposed to people continuing to make fresh copies of these
manuscripts for us to find). For the New
Testament, this equates to certainty that no change is possible (the oldest New
Testament manuscripts date to within 50 years of the writing of the
originals). For the Old Testament, this
means that any changes in the Bible had to have occurred hundreds of years
before the time of Christ. Effectively,
then, the blame-the-Catholics gambit collapses.
Not only is it impossible for the Catholics to have changed the Bible,
it’s impossible for any other group to have pulled it off either (at least if
we want to say the change happened after Christ’s coming—which the Book of
Mormon explicitly does).
The collapse of this gambit leaves the Book of Mormon in a
sorry state. Not only is it caught
spreading a bald-faced lie in 1 Nephi 13 (no “abominable church” could possibly
have changed the Bible after the apostles, since we have manuscripts affirming
that the Old Testament is unchanged that predate the apostles themselves and
manuscripts affirming the same of the New Testament which are too near to
apostle’s lifetimes for any church to have arisen, made the changes, and
stamped out their competition), but it now has no defense for its many points
of disagreement with the Bible.
Furthermore, since the chapter ties the reason for the Book of Mormon’s
existence, content, and subsequent discovery to the blame-Catholics gambit, the
collapse of the gambit opens a gigantic, gaping plot hole into the larger story
of Mormonism itself! Fortunately, there
is a simple solution for this conundrum.
In 1830, the oldest known manuscripts of the Old and New Testament dated
back hardly more than a few hundred years (we had just started looking for
them), and so while God would have known the blame-Catholic’s gambit was historically
and factually impossible, it was perfectly plausible in the mind of any human
living in the early 19th Century.
In other words, God would not have given a vision that supported the
inaccurate claims of 1 Nephi 13, but a 19th Century author may well
have made up and written about such a vision, being unaware that evidence would
be found to prove it wrong a hundred years or so later. The facts will not allow us to blame
Catholics for changes in the Bible, but they will certainly allow us to blame
the current and original content of the Book of Mormon on Joseph Smith.
No comments:
Post a Comment