1 Nephi 19 begins with Nephi being commanded by god to make "plates of ore" (gold, presumably) and engrave the records of his father Lehi and various other religious matters, after which (at a later time apparently) he made the plates we're reading and other plates for secular records.
The first notable thing about this passage is the use of the word "engraven" as in "I did engraven the record of my father," etc. The word engraven appears, as spelled at least five times in two verses. This obsolete past-participle of the verb engrave word appears once in the entire KJV translation of the Bible (2 Cor 3:7). Notably Young's Literal Translation of the Bible (published 1862, a mere 32 years after the publication of the Book of Mormon) does not contain a single instance of the word. That means that engraven had fallen into disuse in the two centuries between the KJV and Smith's supposed translation of the Book of Mormon. So, why did he use (and use, and overuse) a word so obsolete at the time of it's publication as to almost be considered a spelling error? It would be like a translator today attempting to make ancient documents in a foreign accessible to us by translating them deliberately into Middle rather than Modern English. If Smith is genuinely only the translator of these supposed ancient Hebrew holy texts (written, as we've been told, in an undiscovered language) then the presence of this and other obsolete words and phrases makes no sense. If he was instead an author trying to give his work a veneer of Biblical authenticity, then it's a bold faced (and foolish) attempt to copy the acquired archaic style of the popular KJV in hopes of co-opting the Bible's legitimacy as well.
Moving beyond that, the very fact that there's (another) account of how the this book and others by Nephi were written is decidedly strange. I can think of only a handful of places where there's any reference to writing parts of the Bible in the Bible (in both cases what's being written is a letter). By contrast the Book of Mormon seemingly cannot shut up about how, when, and why it was written. Why is that? Most authors are too busy fulfilling the purpose of their writing to describe why, where, or in what way they're writing (this actually is an efficient use of space and effort—which again brings to mind the fact that Nephi is wasting space he's supposedly short on). It makes no sense...unless telling readers about how, when, and why he wrote this book is a big part of his purpose in writing. That doesn't make any sense for Nephi, but it does make a lot of sense for Smith, who would want to detail the book's origins as proof of its legitimacy (while a truly legitimate work would need no such proof).
But 1 Nephi 19 is something different. Nephi goes on for quite a while about how he and his descendants are going to write on these plates...and then he gets totally sidetracked and winds up discussing Messianic prophesy. It doesn't appear to be an intentional segue. It reads as if Nephi was going along, giving a head nod to the fact that not everyone might agree with his choices of what was and wasn't sacred enough to include in his text, making passing mention that some people didn't even think God was sacred...and then that last idea snagged his attention and he went off talking about how Christ was coming in 600 years (again, not true by the math) and was going to judge them all for this. He never returns to the original topic. It's not easy to understand how someone writing on gold plates would do this, because, presumably, you'd at least have a draft before you went and ruined something as valuable as gold by losing your train of thought mid-page, and also, presumably, Nephi's writings have been edited and compiled by other writers. It is, however, very easy to see why Smith might have done this. By all accounts, Smith dictated the Book of Mormon one phrase or sentence at a time, having each repeated back to him for accuracy before moving on: not a big deal if he's just translating, but as a writer this means he had the handicap of only really being able to look back one sentence at most into what he'd already written before moving on. This would make losing his train of thought, repeating himself, and overall having poor narrative flow very easy to do. That the Book of Mormon is marked by all of these things is evidence that Smith was, in fact, the author.
As for the prophesies themselves they are odd to start with, and then they get weirder. First of all, there's a description of how Christ will scourged and abused in other ways and "suffer it...because of his loving kindness and long-suffering towards the children of men." There is no mention of the idea that Christ suffered to atone for our sins, an idea that is everywhere in the Bible, even in the Old Testament prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53:5—"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."). I would not be surprised if this idea was totally absent from Mormon scriptures. After all, it is absent from the Mormon Church. When Mormons talk about "the Atonement," in my experience, they are almost always referring to Christ's suffering in prayer at Gethsemane. When you think about it from a human perspective, this makes sense. If Christ only suffered for our sins in the garden, then our sins are not really all that bad (sweating drops of blood vs getting scourged beyond human recognition, having thorns beaten into your scalp, and then getting executed in the most disgusting, humiliating, and painful way known to man), and no human or human religion wants to admit that our sins are that bad. Also, if we talk about Christ's death applying to us, then the Bible verses about how He took away our sins and gave us His righteousness (2 Cor 5:21; Isaiah 53:11) have to be taken seriously as well. Any church that does that cannot convince their followers that they must earn their place in Heaven through good deeds and obedience: a principle that is as much a cornerstone of Mormonism as it is of every other man-made religion.
But this oddity is nothing compared to what happens next. In verse 10, Nephi begins referencing a number of people who've made Messianic prophesies before him. Why is this odd? Because all of these prophets are made up. First, he cites the word of "the angel"—probably the angel he saw in 1 Nephi 11 (there was another reference to this angel earlier in this chapter). If we assume that the Book of Mormon is legitimate, then it's not terribly odd. But next he references three more prophets, Zenock, Neum, and Zenos. I'll give you a minute to look those up, but don't take too long. In fact I could probably save you some time by telling you not to even bother. Outside of the Book of Mormon, there is no evidence that any of those three men ever existed.
To be fair, there are a great many prophets mentioned in the Bible who have no prophesies recorded within it, or are only mentioned ever giving one prophesy (the prophet Agabus and the four prophetess daughters of Phillip the Evangelist being examples from Acts 21:8-11), with no books to their name. However, when it comes to these prophets, the Bible gives us all their important prophesies straight out in the books where they're mentioned. It does not vaguely allude to their prophesies as though quoting from some source that wasn't included in scripture. That's what Nephi appears to be doing here. Why?
It's certainly possible, even probable, that there were prophets who wrote down prophesies that never made it into scripture and were eventually lost to history. However that a collection of important Messianic prophesies should be lost would seem to violate God's promises to preserve His word. Still, we can give the Book of Mormon the benefit of the doubt by proposing that perhaps it preserves all of the important prophesies of these three men that are necessary for us today.
But a darker explanation also exists. If Smith were the author instead of Nephi, then it's very easy to see how he could have come upon a situation where he wanted one of his characters to reference something specific by an earlier writer, but been unable to find any writer they'd have access to that would have actually said such a thing. In that situation, the tempting alternative would be to simply make a prophet up for them to reference. Zenock Neum, and Zenos may simply be products of Smith's imagination. To determine which is the more likely explanation, we have to go back to the text and look at what these three prophets supposedly said.
First there's Zenock, who says that the Messiah would "[deliver himself] as a man, into the hands of wicked men, to be lifted up." This isn't so objectionable, but it does raise the question of why Christ didn't reference Zenock as well in John 3:14, when prophesying His own crucifixion. If Zenock really existed as a prophet, why did Christ make a more obscure reference to the Messiah being lifted up like the image of the serpent made by Moses instead of referencing this prophet? Still, it's hardly damning evidence.
Next, there's Neum, who is said to have prophesied that the Messiah would be "crucified." This is more problematic. In the Old Testament there are various references to the Messiah's death which can be (and are, in the New Testament) interpreted as depictions of crucifixion, but none of them actually use the word. Why? Well, that turns out to be very important. Looking up the history of crucifixion, it seems the first people to employ it were the Persians. But Nephi here is writing over 70 years before the dawn of the Persian Empire, and his source (Neum) presumably wrote much earlier. The word and concept of crucifixion had not yet been invented. How then could anyone say that the Messiah would be crucified? Even if God miraculously gave them that word (a Greek word, by the way) and an understanding of its meaning, they couldn't use it to communicate the message to others because they wouldn't know what a crucifixion was to start with—they would have had to use some other word or more elaborate description. Neum's prophesy is anachronistically impossible!
Finally, there's Zenos, who has the most important prophesies. According to 1 Nephi 19, Zenos says a great many things, verse after verse of his prophesies are quoted or paraphrased. These range in importance on the one hand from saying things like the Messiah will be buried in a sepulchre to saying that his death will be accompanied by three days of darkness, earthquakes, and other calamities. It's this last that gets me. The Bible does record calamities surrounding and following the death of Christ...but not at anywhere near the scale Zenos predicts. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all list a period of worldwide darkness lasting "from the sixth hour...unto the ninth hour." This is not a three day darkness, but a three hour darkness. Additionally the earthquakes described following Christ's death were not nearly severe enough to destroy entire nations, as Zenos seems to be saying they will be. Some Mormon apologists have attempted to rescue the passage by claiming that Zenos is foretelling a local and separate catastrophe that would overtake the Americas alone. A this point, there's nothing in Zenos' prophesy to either confirm or deny this theory, since the scope of the darkness is not mentioned. However, again, the question must be asked why such an important prophet was never quoted in the Bible, if he was real. Unfortunately, as with the other two, the best explanation (and the best explanation for the three days of darkness) appears to be that he wasn't.
The first notable thing about this passage is the use of the word "engraven" as in "I did engraven the record of my father," etc. The word engraven appears, as spelled at least five times in two verses. This obsolete past-participle of the verb engrave word appears once in the entire KJV translation of the Bible (2 Cor 3:7). Notably Young's Literal Translation of the Bible (published 1862, a mere 32 years after the publication of the Book of Mormon) does not contain a single instance of the word. That means that engraven had fallen into disuse in the two centuries between the KJV and Smith's supposed translation of the Book of Mormon. So, why did he use (and use, and overuse) a word so obsolete at the time of it's publication as to almost be considered a spelling error? It would be like a translator today attempting to make ancient documents in a foreign accessible to us by translating them deliberately into Middle rather than Modern English. If Smith is genuinely only the translator of these supposed ancient Hebrew holy texts (written, as we've been told, in an undiscovered language) then the presence of this and other obsolete words and phrases makes no sense. If he was instead an author trying to give his work a veneer of Biblical authenticity, then it's a bold faced (and foolish) attempt to copy the acquired archaic style of the popular KJV in hopes of co-opting the Bible's legitimacy as well.
Moving beyond that, the very fact that there's (another) account of how the this book and others by Nephi were written is decidedly strange. I can think of only a handful of places where there's any reference to writing parts of the Bible in the Bible (in both cases what's being written is a letter). By contrast the Book of Mormon seemingly cannot shut up about how, when, and why it was written. Why is that? Most authors are too busy fulfilling the purpose of their writing to describe why, where, or in what way they're writing (this actually is an efficient use of space and effort—which again brings to mind the fact that Nephi is wasting space he's supposedly short on). It makes no sense...unless telling readers about how, when, and why he wrote this book is a big part of his purpose in writing. That doesn't make any sense for Nephi, but it does make a lot of sense for Smith, who would want to detail the book's origins as proof of its legitimacy (while a truly legitimate work would need no such proof).
But 1 Nephi 19 is something different. Nephi goes on for quite a while about how he and his descendants are going to write on these plates...and then he gets totally sidetracked and winds up discussing Messianic prophesy. It doesn't appear to be an intentional segue. It reads as if Nephi was going along, giving a head nod to the fact that not everyone might agree with his choices of what was and wasn't sacred enough to include in his text, making passing mention that some people didn't even think God was sacred...and then that last idea snagged his attention and he went off talking about how Christ was coming in 600 years (again, not true by the math) and was going to judge them all for this. He never returns to the original topic. It's not easy to understand how someone writing on gold plates would do this, because, presumably, you'd at least have a draft before you went and ruined something as valuable as gold by losing your train of thought mid-page, and also, presumably, Nephi's writings have been edited and compiled by other writers. It is, however, very easy to see why Smith might have done this. By all accounts, Smith dictated the Book of Mormon one phrase or sentence at a time, having each repeated back to him for accuracy before moving on: not a big deal if he's just translating, but as a writer this means he had the handicap of only really being able to look back one sentence at most into what he'd already written before moving on. This would make losing his train of thought, repeating himself, and overall having poor narrative flow very easy to do. That the Book of Mormon is marked by all of these things is evidence that Smith was, in fact, the author.
As for the prophesies themselves they are odd to start with, and then they get weirder. First of all, there's a description of how Christ will scourged and abused in other ways and "suffer it...because of his loving kindness and long-suffering towards the children of men." There is no mention of the idea that Christ suffered to atone for our sins, an idea that is everywhere in the Bible, even in the Old Testament prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53:5—"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."). I would not be surprised if this idea was totally absent from Mormon scriptures. After all, it is absent from the Mormon Church. When Mormons talk about "the Atonement," in my experience, they are almost always referring to Christ's suffering in prayer at Gethsemane. When you think about it from a human perspective, this makes sense. If Christ only suffered for our sins in the garden, then our sins are not really all that bad (sweating drops of blood vs getting scourged beyond human recognition, having thorns beaten into your scalp, and then getting executed in the most disgusting, humiliating, and painful way known to man), and no human or human religion wants to admit that our sins are that bad. Also, if we talk about Christ's death applying to us, then the Bible verses about how He took away our sins and gave us His righteousness (2 Cor 5:21; Isaiah 53:11) have to be taken seriously as well. Any church that does that cannot convince their followers that they must earn their place in Heaven through good deeds and obedience: a principle that is as much a cornerstone of Mormonism as it is of every other man-made religion.
But this oddity is nothing compared to what happens next. In verse 10, Nephi begins referencing a number of people who've made Messianic prophesies before him. Why is this odd? Because all of these prophets are made up. First, he cites the word of "the angel"—probably the angel he saw in 1 Nephi 11 (there was another reference to this angel earlier in this chapter). If we assume that the Book of Mormon is legitimate, then it's not terribly odd. But next he references three more prophets, Zenock, Neum, and Zenos. I'll give you a minute to look those up, but don't take too long. In fact I could probably save you some time by telling you not to even bother. Outside of the Book of Mormon, there is no evidence that any of those three men ever existed.
To be fair, there are a great many prophets mentioned in the Bible who have no prophesies recorded within it, or are only mentioned ever giving one prophesy (the prophet Agabus and the four prophetess daughters of Phillip the Evangelist being examples from Acts 21:8-11), with no books to their name. However, when it comes to these prophets, the Bible gives us all their important prophesies straight out in the books where they're mentioned. It does not vaguely allude to their prophesies as though quoting from some source that wasn't included in scripture. That's what Nephi appears to be doing here. Why?
It's certainly possible, even probable, that there were prophets who wrote down prophesies that never made it into scripture and were eventually lost to history. However that a collection of important Messianic prophesies should be lost would seem to violate God's promises to preserve His word. Still, we can give the Book of Mormon the benefit of the doubt by proposing that perhaps it preserves all of the important prophesies of these three men that are necessary for us today.
But a darker explanation also exists. If Smith were the author instead of Nephi, then it's very easy to see how he could have come upon a situation where he wanted one of his characters to reference something specific by an earlier writer, but been unable to find any writer they'd have access to that would have actually said such a thing. In that situation, the tempting alternative would be to simply make a prophet up for them to reference. Zenock Neum, and Zenos may simply be products of Smith's imagination. To determine which is the more likely explanation, we have to go back to the text and look at what these three prophets supposedly said.
First there's Zenock, who says that the Messiah would "[deliver himself] as a man, into the hands of wicked men, to be lifted up." This isn't so objectionable, but it does raise the question of why Christ didn't reference Zenock as well in John 3:14, when prophesying His own crucifixion. If Zenock really existed as a prophet, why did Christ make a more obscure reference to the Messiah being lifted up like the image of the serpent made by Moses instead of referencing this prophet? Still, it's hardly damning evidence.
Next, there's Neum, who is said to have prophesied that the Messiah would be "crucified." This is more problematic. In the Old Testament there are various references to the Messiah's death which can be (and are, in the New Testament) interpreted as depictions of crucifixion, but none of them actually use the word. Why? Well, that turns out to be very important. Looking up the history of crucifixion, it seems the first people to employ it were the Persians. But Nephi here is writing over 70 years before the dawn of the Persian Empire, and his source (Neum) presumably wrote much earlier. The word and concept of crucifixion had not yet been invented. How then could anyone say that the Messiah would be crucified? Even if God miraculously gave them that word (a Greek word, by the way) and an understanding of its meaning, they couldn't use it to communicate the message to others because they wouldn't know what a crucifixion was to start with—they would have had to use some other word or more elaborate description. Neum's prophesy is anachronistically impossible!
Finally, there's Zenos, who has the most important prophesies. According to 1 Nephi 19, Zenos says a great many things, verse after verse of his prophesies are quoted or paraphrased. These range in importance on the one hand from saying things like the Messiah will be buried in a sepulchre to saying that his death will be accompanied by three days of darkness, earthquakes, and other calamities. It's this last that gets me. The Bible does record calamities surrounding and following the death of Christ...but not at anywhere near the scale Zenos predicts. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all list a period of worldwide darkness lasting "from the sixth hour...unto the ninth hour." This is not a three day darkness, but a three hour darkness. Additionally the earthquakes described following Christ's death were not nearly severe enough to destroy entire nations, as Zenos seems to be saying they will be. Some Mormon apologists have attempted to rescue the passage by claiming that Zenos is foretelling a local and separate catastrophe that would overtake the Americas alone. A this point, there's nothing in Zenos' prophesy to either confirm or deny this theory, since the scope of the darkness is not mentioned. However, again, the question must be asked why such an important prophet was never quoted in the Bible, if he was real. Unfortunately, as with the other two, the best explanation (and the best explanation for the three days of darkness) appears to be that he wasn't.
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