Comparable to the Bible: The Joseph Junior Prophecy

So it's been a long time since I wrote anything on my blog. I'd like to continue my Comparable to the Bible series.  Right after the Book of Mormon's discussion of Duelism, how the Fall was a good thing, and how God actually lengthened human lifespans after the Fall (2 Nephi 2:21)--in contrast to the Bible's strict monotheism, consistent stance that the Fall was a bad thing, and repeated shortening of human lifespans (Genesis 6:3)--Lehi continues his sermon. Ostensibly, he's blessing his youngest son, Joseph, but he gets sidetracked into a lengthy discussion of the prophecies of Joseph (the son of Jacob, of Genesis fame) about the coming of Moses and about the later coming of one super important prophet: Joseph Smith, Jr.

Trying to argue that this whole chapter isn't blatant self-promotion fabricated by Joseph Smith, Jr, himself runs into a host of problems.  The most immediately apparent of these is the fact that the Joseph of the Bible never made any such prophesies. Oh, he did make a number of prophecies which came true during his lifetime, and he did actually prophesy about the coming of Moses. But this is what he said:

And Joseph said unto his brethren, "I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he swear to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob."  And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, "God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from hence." Genesis 50:24-25 (KJV)

That's literally the only prophesy Joseph ever made that wasn't fulfilled in his lifetime, the only one touching on Moses (whom God would use to do the aforementioned visiting and bringing), and that's enough for the Bible.  But it's not enough for Joseph Smith. Smith wants to build himself up with an impressive prophetic pedigree. He wants to be foretold by someone famous, someone he feels a connection toward, and he wants them to build him up as a super-important figure. And so in the Book of Mormon, he has Lehi quote the following prophesies as coming from Joseph, in Genesis.

For Joseph truly testified, saying: "A seer shall the Lord my God raise up, who shall be a choice seer into the fruit of my loins." Yea, Joseph truly said: "Thus saith the Lord into me: 'A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins. And unto him will I give commandment that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren, which shall be of great worth into them, even to the bringing of them to the knowledge of the covenants which I have made with thy fathers. And I will give into him a commandment that he shall do none other work, save the work which I shall command him. And I will make him great in mine eyes; for he shall do my work. And he shall be great like Moses, whom I have said I would raise up into you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel. And Moses will I raise up, to deliver thy people out of the land of Egypt. But a seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and unto him will I give power to bring forth my word unto the seed of thy loins--and not to the bringing forth [sic, missing word, "of"] word only,' saith the Lord, 'but to the convincing them of my word, which shall have already gone forth among them. Wherefore, the fruit of thy loins shall write; and the fruit of the loins of Judah shall write; and that which shall be written by the fruit of thy loins, and also that which shall be written by the fruit of the loins of Judah, shall grow together, unto the confounding of false doctrines and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace among the fruit of thy loins, and bringing them to the knowledge of their fathers in the latter days, and also to the knowledge of my covenants,' saith the Lord. 'And out of weakness he shall be made strong, in that day when my work shall commence among all my people, unto the restoring [sic, "of"] thee, O house of Israel,' saith the Lord."  

And thus prophesied Joseph, saying: "Behold, that seer will the Lord bless; and they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded; for this promise, which I have obtained of the Lord, of the fruit of my loins, shall be fulfilled. Behold, I am sure of the fulfilling of this promise; and his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father. And he shall be like unto me; for the thing, which the Lord shall bring forth by his hand, by the power of the Lord shall bring my people unto salvation." 

Yea, thus prophesied Joseph: "I am sure of this thing, even as I am sure of the promise of Moses; for the Lord hath said unto me, 'I will preserve your seed forever.' And the Lord hath said: 'I will raise up a Moses; and I will give power unto him in a rod; and I will give judgment unto him in writing. Yet I will not loose his tongue that he shall speak much, for I will not make him mighty in speaking. But I will write into him my law by the finger of mine own hand; and I will make a spokesman for him.' And the Lord said to me also: 'I will raise up [sic, missing word "him"] unto the fruit of thy loins; and I will make for him a spokesman. And I, behold, I will give unto him that he shall write the writing of the fruit of thy loins, unto the fruit of thy loins; and the spokesman of thy loins shall declare it. And the words which he shall write shall be the words which are expedient in my wisdom [sic, missing word] should go forth into the fruit of thy loins. And it shall be as if the fruit of thy loins had cried unto them from the dust; for I know their faith. And they shall cry from the dust; yea, even repentance unto their brethren, even after many generations have gone by them. And it shall come to pass that their cry shall go, even according to the simpleness of their words. Because of their faith their words shall proceed forth out of my mouth unto their brethren who are the fruit of thy loins; and the weakness of their words will I make strong in their faith, unto the remembering of my covenant which I made unto thy fathers.'" 2 Nephi 3:6-21

Obviously that's a whole lot more than Joseph ever actually said in the Bible. It's nearly a chapter of prophecies! To help organize things, I made the following outline:

• The seer will be a descendent of Joseph the son of Jacob
o His name and his father's name will be Joseph
o He will be really awesome
o He will convert and bring peace to the descendants of Joseph (the Native Americans)
o His writings (the Book of Mormon) will combine with the writings of Judah (the Bible) confound false doctrines and end contentions
o His enemies who seek to destroy him will be confounded
• God will deliver Israel from Egypt via Moses
o Moses will have a powerful rod
o Moses will be given God's law, written by His own finger
o Moses won't be good at speaking and will have a spokesman
• Also the author really likes the phrase "fruit of thy loins" and keeps forgetting necessary words (in the "most correct" book)
Contrast to what the Bible says:
• God will bring the Israelites out of Egypt to Canaan

This problem wasn't lost on Smith, who produced the following revised passage from Genesis 50 to resolve the crisis later in his life:

And Joseph said unto his brethren, "I die, and go unto my fathers; and I go down to my grave with joy. The God of my father Jacob be with you, to deliver you out of affliction in the days of your bondage; for the Lord hath visited me, and I have obtained a promise of the Lord, that out of the fruit of my loins, the Lord God will raise up a righteous branch out of my loins; and unto thee, whom my father Jacob hath named Israel, a prophet; (not the Messiah who is called Shilo;) and this prophet shall deliver my people out of Egypt in the days of thy bondage.  And it shall come to pass that they shall be scattered again; and a branch shall be broken off, and shall be carried into a far country; nevertheless they shall be remembered in the covenants of the Lord, when the Messiah cometh; for he shall be made manifest unto them in the latter days, in the Spirit of power; and shall bring them out of darkness into light; out of hidden darkness, and out of captivity unto freedom. A seer shall the Lord my God raise up, who shall be a choice seer unto the fruit of my loins. 

"Thus saith the Lord God of my fathers unto me, 'A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins, and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins; and unto him will I give commandment that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren. And he shall bring them to the knowledge of the covenants which I have made with thy fathers; and he shall do whatsoever work I shall command him. And I will make him great in mine eyes, for he shall do my work; and he shall be great like unto him whom I have said I would raise up unto you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel, out of the land of Egypt; for a seer will I raise up to deliver my people out of the land of Egypt; and he shall be called Moses. And by this name he shall know that he is of thy house; for he shall be nursed by the king’s daughter, and shall be called her son. 

 "'And again, a seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins, and unto him will I give power to bring forth my word unto the seed of thy loins; and not to the bringing forth of my word only,' saith the Lord, 'but to the convincing them of my word, which shall have already gone forth among them in the last days; Wherefore the fruit of thy loins shall write, and the fruit of the loins of Judah shall write; and that which shall be written by the fruit of thy loins, and also that which shall be written by the fruit of the loins of Judah, shall grow together unto the confounding of false doctrines, and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace among the fruit of thy loins, and bringing them to a knowledge of their fathers in the latter days; and also to the knowledge of my covenants,' saith the Lord. 'And out of weakness shall he be made strong, in that day when my work shall go forth among all my people, which shall restore them, who are of the house of Israel, in the last days. And that seer will I bless, and they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded; for this promise I give unto you; for I will remember you from generation to generation; and his name shall be called Joseph, and it shall be after the name of his father; and he shall be like unto you; for the thing which the Lord shall bring forth by his hand shall bring my people unto salvation.'" 

  And the Lord sware unto Joseph that he would preserve his seed forever, saying, "I will raise up Moses, and a rod shall be in his hand, and he shall gather together my people, and he shall lead them as a flock, and he shall smite the waters of the Red Sea with his rod. And he shall have judgment, and shall write the word of the Lord. And he shall not speak many words, for I will write unto him my law by the finger of mine own hand. And I will make a spokesman for him, and his name shall be called Aaron. And it shall be done unto thee in the last days also, even as I have sworn. 

 Therefore, Joseph said unto his brethren, "God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land, unto the land which he sware unto Abraham, and unto Isaac, and to Jacob."  Genesis 50:24-36 (JST)

There are some problems with this though. First off, this quote doesn't match the quote given by Lehi in the Book of Mormon. A few of the words and phrases are the same, but many are different and the passage here is visibly shorter. More importantly, the content of the prophecy is different. Let me break it down with the same outline from before. Additions have been marked in italics, subtractions with strikethroughs.

• The seer will be a descendent of Joseph the son of Jacob
o His name and his father's name will be Joseph
o He will be really awesome
o He will convert and bring peace to the descendants of Joseph (the Native Americans)
o His writings (the Book of Mormon) will combine with the writings of Judah (the Bible) confound false doctrines and end contentions
o His enemies who seek to destroy him will be confounded
• God will deliver Israel from Egypt via Moses
o Moses will have a powerful rod
o Moses will divide the Red Sea
o Moses will know his heritage because of his name
o Moses will be raised as a son of the daughter of a king
o Moses will be given God's law, written by His own finger
o Moses won't be good at speaking and will have a spokesman
o Moses' spokesman will be named Aaron
• Also the author really likes the phrase "fruit of thy loins" and keeps forgetting necessary words (in the "most correct" book)
• The Messiah is coming and will be named Shilo

On the essential points of the coming Seer (Joseph Smith Jr) the prophecy agrees, but with regards to Moses and other figures, the prophecy is different. Some parts are left out and others are added in. Why would this be? Taking the Book of Mormon at its word, both Lehi and Nephi had access to the full text of Joseph's original prophecy, and Joseph Smith claimed to have "translated" the above Genesis quotation himself under divine inspiration...but how can both of this quotes be right when they are not the same?

But there is an alternate explanation. Remember the first quote from Genesis in this post and how it didn't have anything like this huge prophetic passage at all? That's because no such passage appears in any of the ancient manuscripts. It was never a part of Genesis at all. Then where did Joseph Smith find it? Simple, he made it up. The "JST" following that last quote stands for the "Joseph Smith Translation" which he liked to call, the "Inspired Version" of Scripture (the man had an ego). The problem with it is the same as the problem with Joseph Smith's quotations from Isaiah in the previous book (1Nephi): it's basically a rehash of the KJV with extra archaic words thrown in to make it harder to read and numerous alterations thrown in to change the meaning of the original text. This is one of those changes, and it's nowhere to be found in any ancient text. Joseph Smith simply made it up. Even the LDS Church itself admits it and refuses to recognize the Joseph Smith Translation as canon. Instead they hold it as "Bible commentary" by their prophet. In other words, even they believe that none of the additions in the Joseph Smith Translation, including this one, actually belong there--all of them were made up by Joseph Smith himself.

Some have tried to defend Smith's flagrant additions by quoting 1 Nephi 13 and its claim that parts of the Bible have been removed. However that claim doesn't work here because the Book of Mormon promises that the Bible will remain untarnished until after the death of the Apostles, but the oldest copies of Genesis we have predate the Apostles by hundreds of years and don't contain any prophecies about Joseph Smith: they match the original text we have today. So, if the Book of Mormon is true, Smith could not have simply been restoring missing passages to the Bible. There is, in the end, no other explanation but that he made these prophecies up himself.

And of course if Smith did make these up himself and if he is a false prophet, then we would expect some of these prophecies to be untrue. And that is exactly what we find in returning to the outline.

• The seer will be a descendent of Joseph the son of Jacob

There is absolutely no evidence that Joseph Smith Jr was of Jewish descent, much less of the family of Joseph.

o His name and his father's name will be Joseph

This is true, but also true of every other kid named Joseph Jr in the history of the world

o He will be really awesome

This claim needs to be broken down some. Specifically, the prophesies claim he will be "highly esteemed" among the offspring of Joseph, meaning the Native Americans. That definitely isn't true, as we'll see later. They also claim he will "do no other work" but what God commands him. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that Smith was sinless, which he certainly never was.

o He will convert and bring peace to the descendants of Joseph (the Native Americans)

This prophecy is a huge bust! As I've mentioned before, the Mormons and the Indians don't have a great history. Joseph Smith himself never really interacted with them to start with. Later on the LDS Church tried to convert the Indians and live in peace with them, but this plan fell apart when the Ute tribes weren't interested in a white people claiming they were a degenerate race (who would be?) and the Mormons and Indians came to blows over scarce resources, with the Indians ending up trapped on reservations in poverty. Needless to say, they do not think to kindly of Mormonism or Joseph Smith.

o His writings (the Book of Mormon) will combine with the writings of Judah (the Bible) confound false doctrines and end contentions

The Book of Mormon spawned numerous false doctrines, including some the Mormon church itself doesn't believe (like eternal hell and other things right in the Book of Mormon but not in the Mormon Church). It caused quite a lot of contention by starting a cult, which itself split into several smaller sects. So if anything, the opposite of this is true.

o His enemies who seek to destroy him will be confounded

Far from being confounded, the vigilantes who killed Smith were very successful in destroying him and ending his martial law over the area and his bid for presidency.

• God will deliver Israel from Egypt via Moses

True, but easily faked by Smith.

o Moses will have a powerful rod

True.

o Moses will divide the Red Sea

False in that the prophecy says he will part it by hitting it with his staff. He actual held his staff and hand above it.

o Moses will know his heritage because of his name

Absolutely false, as Moses' name was given to him by his adoptive mother, the Pharaoh's daughter, and had nothing to do with his Hebrew heritage.

o Moses will be raised as a son of the daughter of a king

True.

o Moses will be given God's law, written by His own finger

True.

o Moses won't be good at speaking and will have a spokesman

Moses claimed this as an excuse, but it's doubtful that he really needed a spokesman that badly. After all, he had no trouble speaking against Aaron when he got out of line during the golden calf incident.

o Moses' spokesman will be named Aaron

True.

• Also the author really likes the phrase "fruit of thy loins" and keeps forgetting necessary words (in the "most correct" book)

The overuse of there words and the appearance of grammatical errors leads one to conclude this is not of God.

• The Messiah is coming and will be named Shilo

False. The Messiah was Jesus. Shiloh appears once in the Bible and could refer to a person or place...and it's spelled with an h!

With so many of these being false and the whole passage being a blatant addition to scripture, it's pretty plain that Joseph Smith the false prophet made this one up to promote himself.

Comparable to the Bible: Dualism

I'm taking a break from the Egalitarian series (even though it's not yet finished) and coming back to my series on The Book of Mormon.  It's been a while since I wrote about it, but since last writing I've run into a sort of Mormon seeker coming to my church and he asked to study The Book of Mormon with me, hoping to get back into the swing of evangelizing and sharing the good news of Mormonism.

He's had some rather eye-opening surprises.

Meanwhile, reading with him has put me well into the "book" of 2 Nephi and given me lots to write about.  The book opens where 1 Nephi left off.  For those of you who've slept since my last post (I know I have), the story so far is that Lehi, a Jew living in Jerusalem around 600 BC, is told by God to pack up his family and get out before the city is destroyed (by the Babylonians, though I don't think they're ever really mentioned).  Lehi has a number of sons, three of which are important to the plot.  Leman and Lemuel are the eldest sons who are constantly doubting God, antagonizing their brother, and falling into egregious sins, such as rudeness.  Nephi, the younger son, is faithful.  He is also the first-person narrator who wrote these books.  He will let you know that he is Nephi, the author!  He will say it again, and again (one of the most common phrases in the book is I, Nephi, just in case we might have forgotten who he was in between sentences).  He will waste whole chapters telling you that he wrote these books, named them after himself, and wrote them in the language of his own Jewish subgroup (reformed Egyptian, naturally)...and then he will complain about how much he has to leave out because of all the space he wasted telling you the above (not to mention how much space he wastes telling you he's having to leave stuff out...or all the other unnecessary stuff he does).  He goes on to have many adventures with many teachable moments, such as how to murder someone in cold blood when the spirit of god commands you to in a highly uncharacteristic manner, nearly starve your entire family to death because you broke your (historically impossible) steel bow and everyone else's bows "lost their springs" (exact quote, I kid you not), and be given divine instructions on how to build a very special ship to cross the ocean to the Americas and somehow forget to write them down.  And to be honest, that's just the highlights reel.  I could go on all day.  But anyway, after faithfully following god's directions via a magical compass powered by one's own belief (because one of the major lessons of this book is that all truth comes from direct revelation of God and that it's completely dependent on us believing the truth as hard as we can before we get any proof) to the Promised Land (by which we mean America...somewhere), Nephi, his brothers, and his aged parents (who were left ambiguously hanging on the edge of death when the narrator forgot about them in chapter 18) finally arrive at book two.

Here, having just completed an important journey by God's grace and power alone, anyone familiar with the Old Testament Jews and their habits might expect Nephi and his family to offer a sacrifice in thanks or build an altar of some sort as a memorial (as did Noah in Genesis 8:20 and Joshua in Joshua 4:5-9), but despite professing multiple times to be a faithful follower of the Law of Moses (which is full of sacrifice requirements), Nephi has yet to mention offering a sacrifice of his own even once.  Apparently, he's just that kind of Jew.

But I don't want to get too bogged down here in the many, many details I could nit-pick—like how The Book of Mormon is consistent with saying that everyone in Jerusalem was killed and the city was completely destroyed, whereas history and the book of Jeremiah in the Bible tell us that there were a significant number of survivors still living in Jerusalem at the time (including Jeremiah himself), or how it explicitly claims that God hid the Americas from every other nation except Nephi and company because otherwise it'd be overrun with other peoples, even though history and even The Book of Mormon itself tell us there were other people in the Americas long before the children of Lehi.  Yeah, I could go on for a while, but I want to get to the titular issue for this post: Dualism.

Dualism, strictly speaking is a theology wherein both an evil and a good deity exist, equal in power.  Almost always, these two have each been around as long as the other and will always be around because neither can conquer the other.  In fact, in some way, they need each other.  It's this last part of Duelism that's most popular today, and that finds its way into the most places.  It's a popular idea that good and evil coexist in some way, even with their obvious conflicts, and that one really can't exist without the other.  It's a sort of justification for evil in all of its forms, an answer to the Problem of Evil.  Why are there bad things in the world?  Well, because without them, we wouldn't have good things either!  So the story goes, anyway.

In 2 Nephi, Lehi opens the book by going into a multi-chapter sermon, in which he's supposedly blessing his sons on his deathbed, but gets very distracted along the way.  One of the points he winds up talking about is definitely an endorsement of Dualism.  "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things," he says in 2 Nephi 2:11.  Right there, you have the definition of Dualism embraced in a nutshell.  But just in case you missed it, Lehi will reiterate it and spell it out several times in the rest of the verse, and the verses that follow (even Mormons call this the Gospel of Repetition).  Specifically he claims that the following cannot occur outside of opposition "[neither] righteousness...[nor] wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad."  This need for "opposition" (that is, Dualism) is expounded upon until it becomes clear that it encompasses all of existence, and even the existence of God, for "if these things are not there is no God," as 2 Nephi 2:13 asserts.  Even life cannot exist without death, sense without insensibility, purity without corruption (2 Nephi 2:11).  Though it is not stated outright that there is a second Dualistic god out there, it's an almost inescapable conclusion from the text.  If God is good, if God is love, if God is life, and wisdom, purity, joy, and peace, and if none of these can exist outside of opposition (and even god is not immune to this principle, as per 2 Nephi 2:13), then surely there must exist a deity who has been around as long as god and who is his opposite in every way: evil and hateful, a god of death, folly, corruption, misery, and war.  Some outside The Book of Mormon have proposed Satan to be that very god, an eternal, undefeatable, and necessary opposite to the God of the Bible.

However, when we examine the Bible, we find that the Dualistic good-god is, in fact, not the God of the Bible.  First and most obviously, the God of the Bible stands alone.  He does not even know of any other gods that do or ever have (or ever will) exist (Isaiah 44:8).  Satan, certainly, is not a Dualistic equal and opposite god to our God.  Satan cannot even inflict the most basic of miseries without God's express permission (Job 1:8-12), and He is a created being who has not always existed, nor will he always be free to cause trouble.  That alone should make it clear that the Bible does not share Lehi's Dualism.  But for further proof, we need look no further than the creation account in Genesis.  At the end of chapter 1, God declares His creation finished and "very good."  He has made a wonderful paradise full of life, love, purity, joy, and peace...and there is not a trace of evil, hate, folly, misery, war, or death anywhere in creation.  Clearly all things do not have to exist in opposition.

In fact, claiming the need for Dualistic opposition leads to some very strange interpretations on the creation story, particularly the Fall.  Lehi spells it out for us.  Was man made to serve and glorify God (as per Isaiah 43:7, and numerous other Bible passages)?  Not at all!  According to 2 Nephi 2:16, man was created to "act for himself."  Here, the Humanistic all-importance of man's agency in Mormonism appears (it's so pervasive that they explicitly teach that Satan's evil plan is essentially just predestination—and must be rejected because it takes away our agency!).  Humankind needed to have a choice to do good or evil from the beginning.  Going further, Lehi claims that they needed to do evil, in order to balance out all of that good and secure their own existence in the cosmic Dualism.  "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy," says 2 Nephi 2:25.

That verse might be a little surprising to anyone familiar with the Bible.  In fact, it should be.  That's because there is no passage anywhere in the Bible giving a positive spin to the Fall.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam's Fall was necessary.  Nowhere does it say that it was ultimately a good thing.  In fact, in Genesis 3, God pronounces a terrible curse on all of Creation because of Adam's Fall.  Paul in Romans goes on to elaborate that it was this one act of Adam that brought sin and death down upon all mankind, and that Christ came as a type of second Adam specifically to free us from these.  In the Bible, the Fall was such a terrible thing that it wrecked all of creation and fundamentally broke all of Adam's descendants in such a way that, in order to make healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness possible the very Divine Son of God had to suffer and die on a cross thousands of years later.  That's what the Bible says the Fall was like. It's not exactly the portrait of a positive and liberating necessary event.

Nor should it be.  There's a very simple reason why the fundamentally Dualistic theology and philosophy of The Book of Mormon clashes so badly with the Bible: Dualism isn't a Biblical idea, nor does it come from any culture that existed in Lehi's time.  It comes from the ancient Greek philosophers.  From them, the idea passed on to us and has gained a certain credence, despite its logical problems (like how it would, logically, require that logical principles such as squares not being able to be triangles could only exist in opposition with some nonsense place where squares could be triangles if they wanted to be).  It became popular with humanism, which saw it as a way to excuse our flaws and turn a blind eye to the evils of the world.  After all, there's no use sweating over your own shortcoming when you believe that, without them, you couldn't be great!  Evidently Smith found this train of thought appealing.  He certainly would have been exposed to it, the Burned-Over District where he came from being a melting pot of Christian-like philosophies.  This of course, explains exactly how Dualism found its way into The Book of Mormon and exactly why it doesn't agree with the Bible...because Smith was it's human, uninspired author.

Comparable to the Bible: Quoting Scripture

It's time for me to finish up my reading of 1 Nephi.  Three chapters remain, chapters 20-22.  Of these, the first two consist Nephi quoting Isaiah chapters 48 and 49 in their entirety.  The last chapter of 1 Nephi consists of him discussing these chapters with his brothers.

One might b tempted to think that quoting an extensive passage of scripture like this would guarantee a favorable comparison, that any source that quotes the Bible must be true, especially if it quotes it so extensively.  But Satan, the Father of Lies, quotes scripture himself, in Matthew 4:6, distorting it with lies in an attempt to convince Christ to throw Himself from the tower.  One of the best ways to hide a lie is in a deluge of other information.  In the world of hardball negotiations, this is known as a snowjob.  The sheer amount of material quoted immediately raises this suspicion in my mind.  In the New Testament we have many different people and authors quoting passages from the Old Testament, but none of the quotes are more than a few verses long.  The quote in 1 Nephi is 2 chapters or 48 verses long, many times the length of the longest quotation in the New Testament (which appears to be Acts 2:17-21, a sermon by Peter which quotes a mere 4 verses from Joel 2:28-32).  Why such a long quotation?  The chapters quoted cover multiple prophesies and topics.  What, out of all of that, is Nephi trying to convey to his readers?  Why reproduce in whole such a vast portion of scripture, when Nephi has already complained multiple times that space is limited in his magical gold book?  Already the genealogies of his family (which were extremely important to Jews, as evidenced by all the genealogies in the Bible) have been left out simply because they're recorded in another set of plates (supposedly).  Supposedly both of these chapters are simply being quoted from the brass plates Nephi murdered Laban for liberated from Laban.  Why quote them at all instead of simply referencing them?

It does not make any sense from a standpoint of Nephi being the Hebrew author of this book, especially given how much he's already compressed and abridged in earlier parts supposedly out of a need to conserve space.  But if we accept Smith as the author, it makes perfect sense.  Smith's foremost aim would be to legitimize his manuscript as scripture, and the surest way to connect his work with the Bible would surely be to quote the latter as extensively as possible.  As we've seen, him trying to make this sort of connection has already driven him to extensively abuse archaic English throughout his manuscript.  After that, a two chapter quote is no big surprise.

However careful reading of these chapters in the Book of Mormon reveals that simply quoting scripture wasn't Smith's sole intent.  He wanted to change and reinterpret it.  We know this because there are a number of substantive changes between Isaiah 48-49 as they appear in 1 Nephi and as they appear in all other Bible translations.  Both additions and subtractions have been made in order to change the meaning or favor a certain interpretation.

One might try to defend these changes.  The first argument might be that it is our Bibles that have been changed and that 1 Nephi 20-21 represents a textually pure reading of Isaiah 48-49.  However, in 1 Nephi 13:25-26, the Book of Mormon claims that the textual purity of the Bible was intact during the time of the twelve Apostles and the genesis of the Gentile church in the late 1st Century AD.  We have copies of the book of Isaiah dating back to 150 BC that agree with ours today.  This means that the book of Isaiah could only have been corrupted some time before that date...and if it was, then the Book of Mormon's statement in 1 Nephi 13 is a lie.  The other argument might be that Nephi rephrased to illuminate some new meaing, but this contradicts the practice of the Bible.  In the Bible many passages are given new meaning, but always by placing them in new context, so as to bring out a double-meaning in the original.  The passage itself is always quoted exactly from either the Hebrew text or the Septuagint.  Since no other translations of the book of Isaiah existed during Nephi's time (in fact, that even one copy of the book should have found its way to Nephi is a strain on credulity), Nephi—if following the Biblical example—should have quoted the words with no additions or modifications at all.  The only explanation that remains is that Nephi, or Smith, altered the meaning deliberately.  There is a precedent for this: in Matthew 4:6 Satan quotes Psalm 91:11-12, but deliberately leaves out a portion, so as to make God's actual promise of angelic protection against everyday accidents a blanket promise of protection that can be applied to suicidal stunts.

Here follows a list of the changes.  Several Bible versions have been listed for comparison, which are the KJV (the most common in Smith's day, as today) and the ESV (a similarly literal translation, but using modern English).  Both translations are used so that readers may rest assured that the differences are not simply alternative translations of the original text.  Additions are in italics.  Subtractions struck through.  At the bottom I'll look at how each change effects the reading of the verse:

• "Hear this, O house of Jacob, who are called by the name of Israel, and who came from the waters of Judah, who swear by the name of the LORD and confess the God of Israel, but not in truth or right."—Isaiah 48:1, ESV
• "Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, which swear by the name of the LORD, and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in truth, nor in righteousness."—Isaiah 48:1, KJV
• "Hearken and hear this, O house of Jacob, who are called by the name of Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, or out of the waters of baptism, who swear by the name of the Lord, and make mention of the God of Israel, yet they swear not in truth nor in righteousness."—1 Nephi 20:1
• The additions here serve two purposes.  The first at the end clarifies the slight ambiguity of the verse's final phrase, but does not appear to alter the overall meaning.  The addition in the middle of the verse, however, forces the meaning of "baptism" onto "the waters of Judah."  There is no reference to baptism in any Old Testament text: it wasn't practiced until the New Testament.  Placing a reference here is a blatant attempt to alter the meaning of the text to address not Jews but people who have been baptized.

• "For they call themselves after the holy city, and stay themselves on the God of Israel; the LORD of hosts is his name."—Isaiah 48:2, ESV
• "For they call themselves of the holy city, and stay themselves upon the God of Israel; The LORD of hosts is his name."—Isaiah 48:2, KJV
• "Nevertheless, they call themselves of the holy city, but they do not stay themselves upon the God of Israel, who is the Lord of Hosts; yea, the Lord of Hosts is his name."—1 Nephi 20:2
• A meaningless repetition of "the Lord of Hosts" has been added, probably by mistake, like other Book of Mormon repetitions.  The other changes give the verse a more negative slant.  While the original lists only the claims of these individuals, Smith is already busy using the language of the verses to counter these claims.

• "The former things I declared of old; they went out from my mouth, and I announced them; then suddenly I did them, and they came to pass."—Isaiah 48:3, ESV
• "I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they went forth out of my mouth, and I shewed them; I did them suddenly, and they came to pass."—Isaiah 48:3, KJV
• "Behold, I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they went forth out of my mouth, and I showed them.  I did show them suddenly."—1 Nephi 20:3
• Another meaningless word has been appended to enhance the archaic feel of the language.  The big change comes toward the end.  By inserting the word "show" Smith has implied that God did not bring His prophesies to pass suddenly (as in the originals) but that the making of the prophesies themselves was sudden.  This changes the meanings of the next verses, which reference what God has done to refer to His making rather than fulfilling the prophesies.

• "I declared them to you from of old, before they came to pass I announced them to you, lest you should say, 'My idol did them, my carved image and my metal image commanded them.'"—Isaiah 48:5, ESV
• "I have even from the beginning declared it to thee; before it came to pass I shewed it thee: lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them, and my graven image, and my molten image, hath commanded them."—Isaiah 48:5 KJV
• "And I have even from the beginning declared to thee; before it came to pass I showed them thee; and I showed them for fear lest thou shouldst say—Mine idol hat done them, and my graven image, and my molten image hath commanded them."—1 Nephi 20:5
• The change in this verse implies that God worked to counteract idolatrous boasting out of fear.  The Bible nowhere says that God, or even Christ, can or ever has been afraid (for "God is love" and "perfect love casts out fear," per 1 John 4:8 and 18).  To say that God not only fears but is motivated by fear is radically contrary to the Bible.

• "They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them, lest you should say, 'Behold, I knew them.'"—Isaiah 48:7, ESV
• "They are created now, and not from the beginning; even before the day when thou heardest them not; lest thou shouldest say, Behold, I knew them."—Isaiah 48:7, KJV
• "They are created now, and not from the beginning, even before the day when thou heardest them not they were declared unto the, lest thou shouldst say—Behold I knew them."—1 Nephi 20:7
• The passage quotes the KJV exactly up to the point of the addition, which at first seems simply to clarify the passage, but when looking at the other two passages its clear that it should have been left ambiguous: the passage is not meant to say that the Isrealites have already been told about these things (as shown by the ESV and NIV).  The addition, therefore changes the meaning to say they have been and didn't listen, so that their ignorance becomes their own fault rather than something planned by God for His glory.

• "For my name's sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off."—Isaiah 48:9, ESV
• "For my name's sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise will I refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off."—Isaiah 48:9, KJV
• "Nevertheless, for my name's sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise will I refrain from thee, that I cut thee not off."—1 Nephi 20:9
• Another meaningless "nevertheless."  The big change though is saying that God will refrain Himself from the Israelites, rather than restraining His anger for them.  This depicts a god who cannot allow himself to love them and must cut off all contact.  This is the god of man-made religions, contrasting with the God of the Bible, who died for us while we were sinners, not even abandoning us when we were enemies to Him.

• "Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction."—Isaiah 48:10, ESV
• "Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction."—Isaiah 48:10, KJV
• "For, behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction."—1 Nephi 20:10
• A meaningless transitional word is inserted.  All reference to silver is removed, obscuring the metaphor of the verse and making it overall seem more positive than it was in the original text.

• "Assemble, all of you, and listen! Who among them has declared these things? The LORD loves him; he shall perform his purpose on Babylon, and his arm shall be against the Chaldeans."—Isaiah 48:14, ESV
• "All ye, assemble yourselves, and hear; which among them hath declared these things? The LORD hath loved him: he will do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be on the Chaldeans."—Isaiah 48:14, KJV
• "All ye, assemble yourselves, and hear; who among them hath declared these things unto them?  The Lord hath loved him; yea, and he will fulfil {sic} his word which he hath declared by them; and he will do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be upon the Chaldeans."—1 Nephi 20:14
• There's nothing in the originals about God fulfilling the word of "them."  Also, fulfilled is spelled incorrectly.

• "I, even I, have spoken and called him; I have brought him, and he will prosper in his way."—Isaiah 48:15, ESV
• "I, even I, have spoken; yea, I have called him: I have brought him, and he shall make his way prosperous."—Isaiah 48:15, KJV
• "Also, saith the Lord; I the Lord, yea, I have spoken; yea, I have called him to declare, I have brought him, and he shall make his way prosperous."—1 Nephi 20:15
• A repetitive and unnecessary attribution is added.  Then God's calling to His servant is said to be for him "to declare" something, when this meaning is not in the original text.

• "'Draw near to me, hear this: from the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there.' And now the Lord GOD has sent me, and his Spirit."—Isaiah 48:16, ESV
• "Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now the Lord GOD, and his Spirit, hath sent me."—Isaiah 48:16, KJV
• "Come ye near unto me; I have not spoken in secret; from the beginning, from the time that it was declared I have spoken; and the Lord God, and his Spirit, hath sent me."—1 Nephi 20:16
• For a minor change in wording, this changes a lot.  While the original affirms that God has existed and "been there" from the time that "it came to be," the changes remove all references to both God's ongoing existence and instead make the whole verse about God declaring things.

• "Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: 'I am the LORD your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go.'"—Isaiah 48:17, ESV
• "Thus saith the LORD, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go."—Isaiah 48:17, KJV
• "And thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I have sent him, I am the Lord thy God who teacheth thee to profit, who leadeth thee by the way thou shouldst go, hath done it."—1 Nephi 20:17
• Another pointless transitional word has been added.  Then the meaning of the second part of the verse has been completely altered.  Rather than being about God's identity, it is now about the servant from the previous verse, saying God sent him and performed "it" (presumably the sending of the servant).

• "'There is no peace,' says the LORD, 'for the wicked.'"—Isaiah 48:22, ESV
• "There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked."—Isaiah 48:22, KJV
• "And notwithstanding he hath done all this, and greater also, there is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked."—1 Nephi 20:22
• This large addition to the beginning makes it seem as though the lack of peace for the wicked is despite everything God has done in an effort to give them peace: as though God were trying to give them peace and failing—which seems like a classic thing for the overly-simplified nice-god of some Christians to do.  In the original there remains a very real possibility that the wicked do not have peace because God will not give them any.

• "Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar. The LORD called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name."—Isaiah 49:1, ESV
• "Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name."—Isaiah 49:1, KJV
• "And again: Hearken, O ye house of Israel, all ye that are broken off and are driven out because of the wickedness of the pastors of my people; yea, all ye that are broken off, that are scattered abroad, who are of my people, O house of Israel.  Listen, O isles, unto me, and hearken ye people from far; the Lord hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name."—1 Nephi 21:1
• A very long addition to the beginning of the verse completely alters the verse's intended audience, inserting the idea of Israelites forced into exile by corrupt rulers, an idea foreign to the passage.  It seems to be an attempt to make the passage apply directly to Nephi and his companions.

• "Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nation, the servant of rulers: 'Kings shall see and arise; princes, and they shall prostrate themselves; because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.'"—Isaiah 49:7, ESV
• "Thus saith the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant of rulers, Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the LORD that is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose thee."—Isaiah 49:7, KJV
• "Thus saith the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel, his Holy One, to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nations abhorreth, to a servant of rulers: Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the Lord that is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose thee."—1 Nephi 21:7
• An article has been left out in the middle of the sentence, probably by accident (and I thought this was supposed to be the "most correct book" in the world!).  At the end of the sentence the second reference to God being the Holy One of Israel and him choosing the "deeply despised one" is removed.  This makes it seem as though the adoration of the rulers is all that is promised and/or that it won't arise as a result of God's choice.

• "Thus says the LORD: 'In a time of favor I have answered you; in a day of salvation I have helped you; I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people, to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages,'"—Isaiah 49:8, ESV
• "Thus saith the LORD, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee: and I will preserve thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages;"—Isaiah 49:8, KJV
• "Thus saith the Lord: In an acceptable time have I heard the, O isles of the sea, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee; and I will give thee my servant for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages;"—1 Nephi 21:8
• Two additions are used to change this verse from one addressing God's servant to one addressing the isles of the sea.

• "Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the LORD has comforted his people and will have compassion on his afflicted."—Isaiah 49:13, ESV
• "Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains: for the LORD hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted."—Isaiah 49:13, KJV
• "Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; for the feet of those who are in the east shall be established; and break forth into singing, O mountains; for they shall be smitten no more; for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted."—1 Nephi 21:13
• Two large additions break the flow of the poetry of the verse and insert a new meaning, referencing the establishment of the people "in the east" and the end of their afflictions.  Who these are is not clear, but it's certainly possible that Smith is trying to reference Nephi and his ilk.

• "But Zion said, 'The LORD has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me.'"—Isaiah 49:14, ESV
• "But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me."—Isaiah 49:14, KJV
• "But, behold, Zion hath said: The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me—but he will show that he hath not."—1 Nephi 21:14
• Again, "behold" is interjected for no reason.  Then an emphatic ending is appended.  While it is positive, the original does not promise that God will do some action to prove Himself, but the altered version implies that He will and must.

• "Your builders make haste; your destroyers and those who laid you waste go out from you."—Isaiah 49:17, ESV
• "Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee."—Isaiah 49:17, KJV
• "Thy children shall make haste against thy destroyers; and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee."—1 Nephi 21:17
• By the addition of a single word, what was a verse about rebuilding Zion and its destroyers leaving it in a hurry has now become a military action, with the destroyers not being repelled by God but by the force of Israelite arms.

There are many other minor changes, but these are the most substantial, and they give an overall feel for what has been changed and why.  Numerous archaic words were inserted to impede the flow and thus make the KJV sound more like Smith's own laborious prose.  Various other additions and subtractions were made to cause ambiguous verses to come to a chosen meaning (which may not necessarily be correct).  More alarming are the many changes that were made in order to alter the meaning entirely, like the addition of the reference to baptism in 1 Nephi 20:1, when baptism is not even a concept appropriate to this time period.  Again, this is very different from the way the Bible quotes itself, and much more akin to how Satan quoted scripture, changing it in order to alter its meaning.

After this long quotation, the book of 1 Nephi concludes with Nephi giving his brothers his interpretation of the previous chapters, which seems somewhat uncertain and confused.  Nephi says that part of the passage has spiritual and some literal application.  He says it means that the house of Israel will be scattered, but will eventually be nourished and cared for by the Gentiles.  He goes on to say that a great Gentile nation (America) will arise in this land and scatter "our seed" (the Indians, supposedly Nephi and his brothers' descendants) on this continent.  But don't worry, because then God will do some "marvelous work among the Gentiles" (the Book of Mormon) which will also be good for the Indians/Jews (which are, supposedly, the same) and this is "likened unto their being nourished by the Gentiles and being carried in their arms and upon their shoulders" (1 Nephi 22:8).  It will also evidently reveal God to all the world, causing the evil church mentioned in 1 Nephi 13 to self-destruct "for they shall war among themselves" (1 Nephi 22:13).  Similar fates are predicted for any nation that wars against Israel, which will lead to a time when Satan has "no more power over the hearts of the children of men" (1 Nephi 22:15).  This lack of power will be "because of the righteousness of his [God's] people" (1 Nephi 22:26).  During this time, God will judge the wicked and the righteous will be spared.  After making this interpretative speech, Nephi closes and the book ends.  The sudden end of the book, it should be noted, is because the book is split into two parts...but it should be noted that it's not an entirely artificial end.  Nephi does get to address the reader one last time with a final thought about how both he, his father, and the words on the brass plates (supposedly the Bible) are all addressing the same truth and then end with an "amen."  Contrast books of the Bible which were split later, which have no such natural end points.  1 Nephi was written to end right there.

There are several things to point out in this interpretive chapter.  First of all, out of the 2 chapter quotation Nephi just used the "scarce" space in his book to reproduce, he uses only one verse in his interpretation.  Clearly quoting the entire passage was unnecessary...for him.  This is further evidence that the long quote was engineered by Smith in order to draw parallels to the Bible.

Second, Nephi's interpretation presents prophesies that are false and have not come true.  To start with, Indians and Jews are not related, as genetic testing and cultural heritage have both shown time and time again.  Even if they were, Gentiles getting the Book of Mormon in 1830 is not the same as Jewish children getting nursed and brought back to the Israelite homeland by foreign royalty (as in Isaiah 49:23, the one verse Nephi uses).  This is made brutally evident by the fact that shortly thereafter a series of fronteer wars and massacres would decimate the populations of the remaining American Indians and drive the survivors into reservations, where they remain in scandalously impoverished conditions even today.  Notably the Mormons themselves had a hand in these wars, fighting the Black Hawk Wars against native Ute tribes in Utah, driving them off and, at times, slaughtering men, women, and children of friendly bands indiscriminately.  So much for the great blessings of Mormonism to the Indians!

Third, saying that our own righteousness can prevent Satan from having power of us seems, to me, to be an idea more from man-made religion rather than the Bible.  In the Bible we have power against Satan because "greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world" (1 John 4:4).

Finally, when it comes to God judging the wicked and sparing the righteous, Nephi has this to say, "Wherefore the righteous need not fear; for thus saith the prophet, they shall be saved, even if it so be as by fire." (1 Nephi 22:17).  Searching for an exact quote along those lines will not turn up any result, so at first you might thing this was another unknown (or made-up) prophet, like Zenos from 1 Nephi 19.  But the phrase "saved...as by fire" is an undeniably familiar one to anyone who has read the King James Version of the Bible extensively...as well it should be.  The phrase actually occurs in the writings of a prominent Bible author: "If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire."  The problem is that this author is Paul, who is writing these words in the mid to late 1st century AD, over 600 years after Nephi supposedly cross-referenced him.  Once again Smith's eagerness to draw connections with and steal words and imagery from the Bible has led him to make an impossibly anachronistic connection between his writings and Paul's.  This time, though, it is far worse.  The ripoff of the olive tree metaphor could be excused with the improbable idea that two writers inspired by God just happened to use the same detailed metaphor at very different times.  But here, Nephi comes right out and says he's quoting someone, and the only one who's written anything remotely like that is Paul.  Once again the Book of Mormon proves to be an incredibly transparent fake, a consistent disappointment when compared to the Bible.

Comparable to the Bible: Engraven Plates and Made-up Prophets

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.

Comparable to the Bible: Failing the Test of Testability

To supplement my previous article, I wanted to do a look into the feasibility of Nephi's ocean voyage.  Unfortunately, such a test is impossible.  First of all, as pointed out in a previous post, while Nephi's ship is said to have been specially designed and constructed under divine direction, we have no idea what any of that direction is.  We don't even have the most basic of dimensions for it and, while we assume it was driven by sails, we don't know this for a fact.  For all we know, Nephi built a wooden jet-powered hovercraft and flew to the Americas, the text gives us that little detail.

The second problem revolves around the complete lack of knowledge we have on the journey or the route itself.  While it's generally assumed that the party would have headed west, across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they could just as easily have passed east, around the Horn of Africa and across the Atlantic.  The only details we have about the journey are that it took "many days," that it was interrupted briefly by a four-day storm, and that it eventually ended somewhere in the Americas.  That's literally all the text gives us.  We're not told which direction they were sailing in, whether they encountered or steered around islands, nothing.  The lack of detail is simply astonishing.

Compare to the Bible's famous voyage, that of Noah in the Ark.  We have a fairly detailed description of the Ark, which was specially designed by God (Genesis 6:14-16).  It was about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall.  It had three decks, enclosed internal holds, a side entrance, and an enclosure over its upper deck extending at least 12 inches up.  It was made of wood and coated inside and out with pitch for waterproofing.  It had no means of propulsion and relied solely on the currents.  We further know exactly how many people were aboard the Ark (8—we have no idea how many were on Nephi's ship), for how long (370 days), and where they got off (Mount Ararat in modern day Turkey).  Skeptics may take these details and try to prove the journey couldn't happen and the faithful may do the same and prove that it could have (as both sides have, and I personally find the arguments for the Ark more convincing than their opposites, which usually hinge upon requiring Noah to bring representatives of every living species aboard, ignoring the fact that many of these species can interbreed and would have been considered the same kind of animal for Noah's purposes).  In other words, Noah's Ark gives us enough information that it is testable.  We can see whether the information measures up, whether the story is true or not.  We can verify it, and in doing so, prove that the Bible is a true book from God.

Contrast that with Nephi's ship and its journey, of which we know almost exactly nothing.  While Mormon apologists and skeptics have tried to put the ship and its sea journey to the test, its impossible to do so because so little detail is given.  It is simply too vague a claim to be testable.  This would be downright uncharacteristic, coming from the God of the Bible who urges us to test every claim (1 Thessalonians 5:21), the same God who's given us, in the Bible, detailed designs for a ship, a tabernacle, three temples (one of which hasn't been built yet), a city (also not built yet, nor buildable in our world), and a multitude of altars and sacred furniture.  For Him to suddenly become evasive about the design of something said to be as specifically and specially designed as Nephi's ship would be very out-of-character indeed.  Further, it would run counter to the purpose of glorifying God—in 1 Nephi 18:4 the design and finished product of Nephi's ship is said to impress his brothers and cause them to humble themselves before god...but since the design isn't described in the slightest detail in the book, readers are prevented from sharing that experience.  For all we know, Nephi's brothers were in worshipful awe of a rowboat.

However, there is one purpose that would be served by leaving out all of these important details and thus rendering the text totally unverifiable: not God's, but that of the false prophet Joseph Smith.  If Smith wrote The Book of Mormon and if he was a false prophet, then he would have wanted to do everything in his power to cover his tracks.  This means in his writing that he'd have to stick to two kinds of claims: claims that he could manufacture false validity for himself (which would be, by necessity, very few) and claims that he believed could never be put to the test.  As seen earlier with his choice of "Reformed Egyptian" as a language rather than Hebrew or some other real language, Smith errs on the side of non-verifiability.  He deliberately leaves out any details in his story that the reader might be able to verify or prove wrong, including only a few references to supernatural guidance, which can be invoked in case someone should later come along and point out that the ancient Israelites didn't have the ability to build seaworthy ships that could handle such a voyage or that normal routes to the Americas from the Arabian Peninsula wouldn't work.  In such a case, Smith and his followers can always pull the "trump card" that god had Nephi do something extraordinarily special that didn't make it into the text.  However, in the end, its an argument from silence, one that essentially relies on us blindly trusting Smith and The Book of Mormon and taking them at their word...which is, of course, what they want us to do anyway.

Fortunately, God's not like that.

Comparable to the Bible: The Sin of Rudeness

It's been a while since I picked up the Book of Mormon or wrote anything in this series.  Today, though, I was contacted out of the blue by some Mormon missionaries who somehow got my phone number, so I decided to open it up and remind myself of what I was dealing with, starting in 1 Nephi 18.  Here Nephi's remarkably descritionless ship is completed and launched.  Nephi and company board, with provisions, and set sail for the "promised land"—by which we mean the Americas.  They follow the winds and the magic compass mentioned earlier for "many days" and everything seems to be going well, but then the company falls into a terrible sin.  Nephi says he "began to fear exceedingly lest the Lord should be angry with us, and smite us because of our iniquity, that we should be swallowed up in the depths of the sea" (1 Nephi 18:10).

What is this horrible sin?  Jonah faced a similar dilemma and fate after ignoring God's command to go to Nineveh and trying to flee in the opposite direction (Jonah 1:1-16).  What terrible thing had happened on Nephi's ship to cause him to fear a similar fate?  1 Nephi 18:9 helpfully tells us:

And after we had been driven before the wind for the space of many days, behold, my brethren and the sons of Ishmael and also their wives began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness, yea, even that they did forget by what power they had been brought thither; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness.

The verse lists several things that Nephi's brothers and in-laws did that troubled him:

• making merry
• dancing
• singing
• rude speech/actions
• forgetting what power got them this far in the first place

Of these five items, only the last can be taken seriously as a sin.  Forgetting God's power and provision does have a track record of being a very effective way of angering Him (Hosea 2:6-13).  However, that's not what Nephi fixates on, nor is it really revisited anywhere else in the chapter.  His main concern, the only one that is repeated twice, is how these merry-makers have lost their manners and delved into the "iniquity" of "exceeding rudeness."

The Bible says a lot about sin, and the Bible lists a great many sins, some of which our society today is not keen on acknowledging.  However one "sin" the Bible never addresses is this: the sin of rudeness.  The word "rude" is very hard to find in the Bible, in fact.  In the KJV (the version of Joseph Smith Jr's day) the word appears only once, in 2 Corinthians 11:6, where Paul defends his apostleship against accusations from the Corinthian church.  Here he acknowledges that he is "rude in speech" (that is, his speech is common and unsophisticated) but dismisses it as unimportant because he knows what he's talking about.  In modern translations this reference to rudeness is replaced with the translation "unskilled in speaking."  In such translations only one reference to rudeness remains, 1 Corinthians 13:5, which says that love is "not rude" (or, in the KJV "doth not behave itself unseemly").  Aside from this brief reference and the Bible's positive affirmations that we are to be kind to one another (Ephesians 4:32), the Bible does not seem to consider rudeness a serious infraction, or even a sin.  Jesus, who is explicitly without sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), broke social conventions almost habitually and did a number of things even we today would consider extremely rude (driving merchants out of the Temple with a whip and flipping over their tables, refusing service to a Gentile woman, calling His opponents the spawn of Satan, etc).  He did so without sin.

So why was the rudeness of Nephi's brothers and the sons and daughters-in-law of Ishmael such a big deal?  No firm connection is built between their rudeness and forgetting god.  They are not said to have blasphemed.  The biggest connection is between their celebratory antics, "making merry," "singing," and "dancing."  While it's popular in religious communities that are more about following rules than following God to believe that god is opposed to the egregious sin of having fun.  Of such societies its sometimes joked that couples will never have sex standing up because someone might see it and think they were committing the unpardonable sin of dancing.  The Mormon religion is famous for its many rules, including prohibition on caffeinated beverages (which is nowhere in the Bible, in case you were wondering), and falls solidly into this category.  God however, does not.  He gives us dancing, singing, and merriment, and enjoys us enjoying Him and the things He's given us (Jeremiah 31:13).

But despite Nephi's fears, it's not this sin of merriment and rudeness that almost dooms the travelers.  Instead it's when Nephi's brothers respond to his preaching of restraint by tying him to the mast for four days.  This caused the Liahona, the faith-driven god-given compass to stop working.  As I mentioned in the post when the Liahona was first introduced, I've been suspicious of the compass from the beginning.  Sure, God can use anything he wants to direct people (he used a cloud for the Israelite exodus), and he could make a compass if He wanted to, but the whole concept of a compass as the group's source of direction and guidance seemed suspiciously modern.  I've been waiting for some sign that the Liahona is a modern idea, originating from a culture spoiled by hundreds of years of reliance on compasses, to the point where navigating without them is virtually unthinkable to the average man.  Sadly, my suspicions were confirmed.  The compass stops working in verse 12 and in the very next verse—at the very beginning of the verse—the crew of the ship completely loses all sense of direction and blunders into a storm.  This is a hallmark of a plot hatched in an age dependent on magnetic compasses, for such a thing would have been implausible as late as the 17th century, at which time sailors were still navigating by the stars, as all travelers did in the time before the compass.  If Nephi and his companions were really ancient Israelites who'd navigated by the sun and stars their whole lives, they would have never become lost by the failure of their compass.  They simply would have fallen back on more familiar means of finding their way.  That they did become lost immediately is a telling sign that The Book of Mormon has a modern author (Joseph Smith, who was born into a 19th century already hopelessly dependent on the magnetic compass).

After four days in the storm, Nephi's brothers fear for their lives because of the storm and release him.  At this point I do have to give credit to Smith for one accurate detail: when released in verse 15, after four days of being lashed to the mast, Nephi's wrists and ankles are said to have swollen and been very sore.  While I couldn't find any concrete evidence of this, it does strike me as realistic and I seem to recall people trying to set records for longest time standing upright (which is essentially what anyone tied to a mast for four days would have been forced to do) facing similar problems.

But if this was a stroke of genius on Smith's part, he immediately spoils it.  The narrative has just reached the point of greatest tension, where the wicked brothers have repented in fear of the storm and freed Nephi, who may or may not be able to do anything to save them all, when it suddenly jumps backwards.  Why?  Because the narrator forgot to tell us what Nephi's parents, wife, and children were all doing during these four days and felt the need to explain to us why they couldn't have just freed him sooner.  It's a fair question, to be sure, but the solution presents more problems to the narrative than it resolves.  First of all, it completely wrecks the flow of the narrative.  More damaging, it introduces a major problem: it states that the reason that Nephi's parents (who were also the parents of Laman and Lemuel) didn't intervene was because they were on their sickbeds, very near death.  It goes on for two verses about how frail and how close to death Lehi and his wife are...and then forgets about them.  There is absolutely no mention of them either dying or recovering.  Skipping ahead, I can see that they do live on, since Lehi's death is mentioned as taking place in the Americas after a long speech in 2 Nephi 4, but the narrative in chapter 18 does not make that clear.  Before, I might have glossed over the question of why Nephi's parents (who are probably old and badly outnumbered) did not try to free Nephi themselves, but now I'm transfixed by a question of whether or not these very important characters will even survive the trip—a question which the writer leaves totally unanswered.  After telling us how sick they are and adding in a note about why their younger children (Jacob and Joseph, added to the family earlier in this chapter) and Nephi's own wife and children didn't intervene, the narrative skips back to the point where Nephi is freed and calms the storm with a prayer.

Many days and one verse later, the party lands on the shores of the "promised land" (which is so called twice in the same sentence).  They pitch their tents, plant crops brought as seeds from Jerusalem, and discovered a wealth of animal and mineral wealth in the forests surrounding their landing site.  This is where the final problem of the chapter presents itself.  While the last verse says that Nephi and his family found "beasts in the forest of every kind" it specifically names four species: cattle ("the cow and the ox"), horses, donkeys ("the ass"), and goats ("the goat and the wild goat").  Now I have heard from other sources that The Book of Mormon had problems regarding anachronistic animals in pre-Columbian America, but I hadn't expected anything so severe.  As it turns out every one of the species listed here is an anachronism: cattle, horses, donkeys, and goats were all introduced to the Americas centuries later, following European contact.  One species might be a fluke of translation or a mistake of modern archaeology, but all four?  That's a dead giveaway that, unlike the Bible, The Book of Mormon is fiction, not history.

Comparable to the Bible: the Ark vs Nephi's Ship

It has been a while since I wrote or read anything about the Book of Mormon.  It is good, however, to remember what we have in the Bible and to appreciate it in contrast (and comparison) to those books (like the Book of Mormon) which pretend to be its equal.

So resuming where I left off, after the incident with the bow, Nephi and company travel eight years eastward until they eventually reach a sea they call "Irreantum" on the shore of a land they call "Bountiful, because of its much fruit" (the name and the reason behind it being repeated twice in the space of two verses).  Where this is in the real world is a little difficult to parse out since the only point of known geography mentioned in the book has been Jerusalem.  However, since the overall direction of the journey has been southeastward of Jerusalem, we can say it's probably the Indian Ocean and the southern shore of the Arabian Peninsula.  This is, in fact, the only possible destination given their direction of travel.

Upon their arrival at the seashore, Nephi goes up into the mountains and God commands him to build a ship with which to cross the ocean.  This will be a special ship, not made in the fashion of any normal human shipbuilding but according to special divine instructions (1 Nephi 18:1-3).  Nephi then asks where he will get the ore to make the metal tools necessary for ship building.  Much is made of the manner in which Nephi constructs these tools, down to describing how Nephi constructed a bellows and started the fire to melt the ore to make the tools, etc.

The curious thing is that Nephi's question and the descriptions of his work that follow miss the point.  Tools are the easy part of any such ship-building endeavor.  Primitive shipbuilding did not require much in the way of specialized metal tools.  Even a small ax could be used to accomplish much of the work, cutting, splitting, and planing wood, as well as driving in nails with the back side (axes are, really, terrifically useful tools common to every culture and era, which is one reason why Gary Paulson was able to convincingly write two books revolving around a plane crash victim surviving alone in the wilderness with only a small hatchet).  Knives could be used for chisels or for sealing the cracks between boards with cordage.  In fact, it is difficult to conceive of any primitive tool shipbuilding would require which would not have been with Nephi's party already.  Without an ax, they would have been unable to cut wood either for the making of Nephi's bow in chapter 16 or for the making of the forge fire in chapter 17.  Without a knives, they would be unable to skin and dress the game they survived upon in the wilderness for eight years...so either they had pretty much all the tools they needed already or they couldn't have made it this far in the narrative to start with.

Of course, we might assume that more specialized tools might have been required, but again, making them should not be too difficult.  What would unquestionably be difficult and what explicitly required direct input from God was designing and building a ship.  Curiously, this part is glossed over.  There is absolutely no description of the design of the ship Nephi built, nor of its materials or manner of construction, even though all are said to have been directly commanded by God.  In the Bible, God commands Noah to build a ship with a specific design, but there in Genesis the design of the ship is described in detail, as are its construction materials.  There the hard part which required God's direct intervention is described to us while irrelevant details (where Noah got the tools) are left out.  In the Book of Mormon the opposite is true.

It is difficult to believe that the same God who painstakingly described the special design of Noah's ark would be sidetracked from doing the same with the special design of Nephi's ship.  However, an alternate explanation exists.  The designs for the Ark contained in Genesis are complete enough to allow scientists and engineers to create scale models of the Ark to test its seaworthiness and estimate its cargo capacity, both of which verify the Biblical accounts.  If God truly designed Nephi's ship as well, inclusion of its design would similarly result in proof of the Book of Mormon.  But no design is included.  This may be because, in fact, God did not give a design to Nephi, Joseph Smith did.  Smith grew up in a landlocked region as a farmer and knew nothing of nautical engineering.  However, he did know that people would have trouble accepting the idea that ancient Jews from Jerusalem managed to build a vessel seaworthy enough to cross the oceans to the Americas over 2,000 years before Columbus.  Someone was bound to object that the Israelites of the 6th Century did not know how to construct such ships, so Smith claimed the design was special from God and even used different techniques.  However, if he included the design and techniques to verify his claim there was always a chance someone would test them and find him a fraud.  As he did with the Lost Pages, Smith took the easy way out and omitted any reference to an actual design, anything that could be tested and verified.  Smith calls us to trust blindly.  God calls us to test Him and see that He is true.