Comparing LDS Beliefs with First-Century Christianity

Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks, “Comparing LDS Beliefs with First-Century Christianity,” Ensign, Mar 1988, 7

Since the inception of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many critics have denied that it is Christian. Surprisingly, the basis for the claim has little to do with the standard definition of Christian: anyone or any group that believes in Jesus Christ as the Savior and Son of God. Rather, it has to do with Latter-day Saint doctrines that some feel are alien to “traditional Christianity,” where “traditional Christianity” means that body of beliefs held by most present-day Christian churches. The argument essentially goes that if the LDS church believes in certain doctrines not believed in by most present-day Christian churches, then the LDS church cannot be Christian.

The problem with this argument is that the major doctrines under attack are amazingly similar to Christian beliefs held during the New Testament period and the generations immediately following.

Does the New Testament define Christianity?
The Gospels lack any explicit treatment of the word Christian. Indeed, the word appears only three times in the New Testament, and never from the mouth of Christ himself. The word Christianity is entirely absent from the New Testament.

Acts 11:26 tells us that “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” Here, the passive construction “were called Christians” suggests that the term was first used not by Christians, but by non-Christians. (Similarly, the names Yankee and Mormon were first used by outsiders.)

The term was probably modeled on such words as Herodian and Caesarian, already in circulation at that time, and meant nothing more complicated than Christ’s people or, perhaps, partisans of Christ. Note that the Christian congregation at Antioch represented a wide range of backgrounds, including Jews and non-Jews. These believers displayed the whole spectrum of attitudes toward the Jewish law—from continued adherence to the traditions of Judaism to rejection of all things Jewish.

The next mention of the term Christian is in Acts 26:28, where Agrippa makes his famous reply to Paul: “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” The Apostle had related to Agrippa and Festus the story of his conversion. The doctrinal content of Paul’s speech is simple and straightforward: Paul bears witness that Jesus had been foretold by the Jewish prophets, that he suffered and rose from the dead, and that forgiveness may be obtained through him. Paul described Christ’s mission as summoning people to “repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.” (Acts 26:20.) The scriptural account gives no indication that Paul had to correct Agrippa’s use of the word Christian to describe one who believes in these basic doctrines.

First Peter 4:16 is the last instance of the word’s appearance in the New Testament. This verse is virtually without doctrinal definition, merely assuring the believer that he need not be ashamed if he suffer as a “Christian.” Even here, the term may be one that persecuting outsiders were using. It may have derived from current Roman, that is, non-Christian, legal usage.

In each of these instances, the term appears to originate from someone outside the community of believers themselves. In neither of the two passages from Acts does Paul use the word himself; it is non-Christians who use it. Where the term is used, the stated and implied beliefs of the Christians are far different from the present-day beliefs used to deny that Latter-day Saints are Christians, as can be clearly shown.

Is it true that because Latter-day Saints reject the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, they are not Christians?
The Church’s first Article of Faith is “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” This is a straightforward statement of belief that there are three members in the Godhead. However, Latter-day Saints do reject the doctrines of the Trinity as taught by most Christian churches today. For the most part, these creeds—the most famous of which is the Nicene Creed—were canonized in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. following centuries of debate about the nature of the Godhead. Consequently, it is highly questionable whether these creeds reflect the thinking or beliefs of the New Testament church.

“The exact theological definition of the doctrine of the Trinity,” notes J. R. Dummelow, “was the result of a long process of development, which was not complete until the fifth century, or maybe even later.” 1 As Bill Forrest remarks, “To insist that a belief in the Trinity is requisite to being Christian, is to acknowledge that for centuries after the New Testament was completed thousands of Jesus’ followers were in fact not really ‘Christian.’ ” 2 Certainly the revelatory manner by which Joseph Smith learned of the doctrine of the Godhead pierces through the centuries-old debate on the subject.

Is it true that because Latter-day Saints believe that human beings can eventually become like God, they are not Christian?
As even a cursory glance at early Christian thought reveals, the idea that man might become as God—known in Greek as theosis or theopoiesis—may be found virtually everywhere, from the New Testament through the writings of the first four centuries. Church members take seriously such passages as Psalm 82:6 [Ps. 82:6], John 10:33–36, and Philippians 2:5–6 [Philip. 2:5–6], in which a plurality of gods and the idea of becoming like God are mentioned.

The notion of theosis is characteristic of church fathers Irenaeus (second century a.d.), Clement of Alexandria (third century a.d.), and Athanasius (fourth century a.d.). Indeed, so pervasive was the doctrine in the fourth century that Athanasius’s archenemies, the Arians, also held the belief 3 and the Origenist monks at Jerusalem heatedly debated “whether all men would finally become like Christ or whether Christ was really a different creature.” 4

According to an ancient formula, “God became man that man might become God.” Early Christians “were invited to ‘study’ to become gods” (note the plural). 5

Though the idea of human deification waned in the Western church in the Middle Ages, it remained very much alive in the Eastern Orthodox faith, which includes such Christian sects today as the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches. 6 Jaroslav Pelikan notes, “The chief idea of St. Maximus, as of all Eastern theology, [was] the idea of deification.” 7

Is the subject of deification truly a closed question? After all, echoes of man becoming like God are still found in the work of later and modern writers in the West. For instance, C. S. Lewis’s writings are full of the language of human deification. 8 Even Martin Luther was capable of speaking of the “deification of human nature,” although in what sense it is not clear. 9

Related to the claim that Latter-day Saints are not Christians because of their belief in deification is the assertion that if they hold to some kind of belief in deification then it must be that Church members do not view Jesus as uniquely divine. Such an assertion is totally erroneous. The phrase “Only Begotten Son” occurs with its variants at least ten times in the Book of Mormon, fourteen times in the Doctrine and Covenants, and nineteen times in the Pearl of Great Price. Basic to Latter-day Saint theology is the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the Only Begotten Son of the Father in the flesh.

Is it true that because Latter-day Saints practice baptism for the dead, they are not Christian?
The argument that Latter-day Saints cannot be Christians because they practice baptism for the dead presumes that it has been definitely established that 1 Corinthians 15:29 [1 Cor. 15:29] has nothing to do with an early Christian practice of baptism for the dead. The argument ignores the fact that such second-century groups as the Montanists and Marcionites—who are invariably referred to as Christians—practiced a similar rite. The practice was condemned in a.d. 393 by the Council of Hippo, which certainly implies that it was still a vital issue. 10 As Hugh Nibley has shown in great detail, many of the Church Fathers understood this verse literally, even when they did not always know what to make of it. 11

Mormon temple ritual in general is another source of controversy, largely because many think that the reticence to talk about it is not Christian. But the New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias has shown that “the desire to keep the most sacred things from profanation”—a concern shared by the Latter-day Saints—is widely found in the New Testament and in the early Christian community. 12

The second-century church father Ignatius of Antioch was known to have held “secret” doctrines. The historian Tertullian (second century a.d.) even takes the heretics to task because they provide access to their services to everyone without distinction. As a result, the demeanor of these heretics becomes frivolous, merely human, without seriousness and without authority. 13

The pagan critic Celsus (second century a.d.) probably referred to Christianity as a “secret system of belief” because access to the various ordinances of the church—baptism and the sacrament—was available only to the initiated. In his response to Celsus, Origen (third century a.d.) readily admitted that many practices and doctrines were not available to everyone, but he argues that this was not unique to Christianity. 14 As late as the fourth century, some groups were making efforts to return to an earlier Christian tradition of preserving certain doctrines and practices for the initiated only. 15

Is it true that because Latter-day Saints do not accept the Bible as their sole authority in faith and doctrine, they are not Christians?
Latter-day Saints accept the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price as scriptural, in addition to the Bible. But the whole question of canon—which writings are sacred, inspired, and binding on disciples—has always been a complicated one in the history of traditional Christianity.

In the earliest period of the Christian church, it is difficult to see a distinction being made between canonical writings and some books not in the present Protestant canon. For example, the Epistle of Jude draws heavily on noncanonical books such as 1 Enoch and The Assumption of Moses. As E. Isaac says of 1 Enoch, “It influenced Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, Hebrews, 1 John, Jude (which quotes it directly) and Revelation (with numerous points of contact) … in molding New Testament doctrines concerning the nature of the Messiah, the Son of Man, the messianic kingdom, demonology, the future, resurrection, the final judgment, the whole eschatological theater, and symbolism.” 16

The so-called Muratorian Fragment, dating from the late second century a.d., shows that some Christians of the period accepted the Apocalypse of Peter as scripture. Clement of Alexandria, writing around a.d. 200, seems to admit a New Testament canon of thirty books, including the Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement, and the Preaching of Peter. Origen recognized the Epistle of Barnabas and the letter from the Shepherd of Hermas. 17

Even in more recent times, the question of canon has not been unanimously resolved. Martin Luther characterized the Epistle of James as “an epistle of straw”—largely because it seemed to disagree with his teaching of justification by faith alone—and mistrusted the book of Revelation. 18 Roman Catholics and the Orthodox churches tend to accept the Apocrypha as canonical—books included in their Bibles but left out of most Protestant Bibles, including the current King James Version. In fact, Eastern Orthodox churches have never settled the question of canon. A number of scholars have pointed out that the church has priority, both logically and historically, over the Bible—that is, a group of believers existed before a certain body of texts, such as the books of the Old and New Testament, were declared canonical. 19

Is it true that because Latter-day Saints deny the doctrine of original sin, they are not Christian?
The notion of original sin as it is usually understood today in traditional Christianity is a distinctly late invention that evolved from the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. Tertullian (second century a.d.), who was very concerned with the idea of sin, says nothing of the doctrine of original sin. Indeed, very few of the Church Fathers up to the fourth century show any interest in it at all. It was not clearly enunciated until Augustine (fourth/fifth century) needed it in his battle with the Christian Pelagians, who denied the doctrine, and it came to be associated with the Council of Carthage in a.d. 418. 20

As Norbert Brox points out, “Pelagian theology was the traditional one, especially in Rome. But the Africans, under the theological leadership of Augustine, managed to make their charge of heresy stick within the church, thereby establishing the Augustinian theology of grace as the basis of the Western tradition.” 21 Some modern scholars now raise the issue that Augustine, and not Pelagius, was the real heretic. 22

Is it true that because Latter-day Saints reject the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, they are not Christians?
Perhaps the most famous statement of the Latter-day Saint understanding of the relation between grace and works is in 2 Nephi 25:23: “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” [2 Ne. 25:23] This idea is sometimes called synergism—a term Van A. Harvey has used to describe Roman Catholicism. 23

The doctrine that salvation depends both on God’s grace and man’s good works is very old in Catholic theology. One of the canons at the Council of Trent specifically repudiates the notion of grace alone: “If anyone saith that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sin for Christ’s sake alone; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified, let him be anathema.” 24 Are we to say, then, that Roman Catholicism is not Christian because it does not subscribe to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone?

The doctrine of salvation through faith alone, sometimes called solafidianism, is not a biblical doctrine: there are no instances in the New Testament of the phrases “grace alone” or “faith alone.” The philosopher-theologian Frederick Sontag argues that Jesus himself was interested not in words, and not even in theological dogma, but in action: For the Jesus in Matthew, he says, “Action is more important than definition.” 25 Richard Lloyd Anderson shows that even in Paul’s major treatments of the doctrine of grace, particularly in Romans and Ephesians, there is a balancing element of works as well. 26 Other New Testament writers, most notably James, make it clear that saving faith can only be recognized through works: “Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” (James 2:17.)

The generations immediately following the New Testament period also recognized the need for both grace and works for salvation. The famous Didache—The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles—which dates back to before a.d. 70, is conspicuous for its moralism and legalism. 27 It is also significant that “the oldest datable literary document of Christian religion soon after the time of the Apostles”—the letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, written in the last decade of the first century—emphasizes “good works, as it is in the Epistle of James, which may belong to the same time.” 28 The second-century document Shepherd of Hermas contains twelve commandments. J. L. Gonzales writes that they “are a summary of the duties of a Christian, and Hermas affirms that in obeying them there is eternal life.” 29

Even F. F. Bruce, who contends that Paul taught a doctrine of salvation by grace alone, concurs sadly that the doctrine was not a part of the early Christian church: “The Biblical doctrine of divine grace, God’s favour shown to sinful humanity, … seems almost, in the post-apostolic age, to reappear only with Augustine. Certainly the majority of Christian writers who flourished between the apostles and Augustine do not seem to have grasped what Paul was really getting at. … Marcion has been called the only one of these writers who understood Paul.” 30

Marcion, incidentally, was a second-century gnostic Christian who distinguished between the gods of the Old and New Testament. He felt that the Old Testament deity was a lesser deity than the God of the New Testament and rejected the Old Testament entirely, as well as any New Testament writing “tainted” with Old Testament ideas. Marcion produced a canon of scripture that recognized no Apostle of Jesus except Paul. He considered the other Apostles falsifiers of God.

By contrast, in the fourth century, one prominent Christian bishop was teaching the necessity of rituals. “If any man receive not Baptism,” wrote Cyril of Jerusalem, “he hath not salvation.” He also wrote about an ordinance of anointing, which he called “chrism”: “Having been counted worthy of this Holy Chrism, ye are called Christians. … For before you were deemed worthy of this grace, ye had no proper claim to that title.” 31

The Eastern Orthodox churches also do not accept solafidianism, the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. “Eastern Orthodox Christians emphasize a unity of faith and works. For the Orthodox, being conformed to the image of Christ … includes a response of our faith and works.” 32 Sensing the danger that a “grace alone” position could become “cheap grace” (to borrow an expression from the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer) or “a theologically thin, no-sweat Christianity,” some modern Protestant writers have adopted a similar position, recognizing that works also play a vital role in salvation. 33

With so many other past and present Christians rejecting the position that grace alone brings salvation, excluding the Latter-day Saints from “Christianity” for their belief in faith and works is not justified.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints easily meet the definition of a Christian as implicitly defined in the New Testament: they believe that ancient prophets foretold Christ’s coming, that Jesus Christ suffered for our transgressions, that he was put to death but rose from the dead, that through him we may obtain forgiveness of our sins, and that he will come again in glory.

The doctrinal reasons some Christians give for excluding the Latter-day Saints from Christianity make little sense, because many of the doctrines used by traditional Christianity are late developments, reflective of creeds formulated in the fourth and fifth century or developed during the Reformation.

Given the wide variety of beliefs among the various Christian churches, it is better to take persons claiming to be Christians at their word and to let the Lord be the judge.


Notes
1. Cited by Bill Forrest, “Are Mormons Christians?” Mormon Miscellaneous Response Series (Salt Lake City: Mormon Miscellaneous, n.d.).

2. Ibid.

3. See appropriate index entries in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600): The Christian Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971) and the index entry “Salvation—defined as deification,” in The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700): The Christian Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974). See also K. E. Norman, Deification: The Content of Athanasian Soteriology, Ph.D. dissertation, Duke Univ., 1980.

4. Clyde L. Manschreck, A History of Christianity in the World, 2d. ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1985), p. 52.

5. P. Barlow, “Unorthodox Orthodoxy: The Idea of Deification in Christian History,” Sunstone 8 (Sep./Oct. 1983):16–17.

6. See G. I. Mantzarides, The Deification of Man: Saint Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Tradition, trans. Liadain Sherrard (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).

7. The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, p. 10.

8. A Grief Observed (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), pp. 84–85; Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 138–40, 174, 187.

9. Jack R. Pressau, I’m Saved, You’re Saved … Maybe (Atlanta: John Knox, 1977), p. 57; A. Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 734.

10. Samuel M. Gilimour, “Baptism for the Dead,” in An Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. V. Ferm (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 54.

11. “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” Improvement Era, Dec. 1948, pp. 786–88, 836; Jan. 1949, pp. 24–26, 60; Feb. 1949, pp. 90–91, 109–10, 112; Mar. 1949, pp. 146–48, 180–83; Apr. 1949, pp. 212–14.

12. The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), p. 130.

13. Tertullianus, Apologia 7–8; De praescriptionibus adversus haereticos 41.

14. Origen, Contra Celsum 1:7.

15. Norbert Brox, Kirchengeschichte des Altertums (Düsseldorf, West Germany: Patmos Verlag, 1983), p. 134.

16. E. Isaac, “1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. J. H. Charlesworth, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 1:10. See also “Apocrypha,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G. A. Buttrick (Nashville: Abingdon, 1953), 1:161–69.

17. Manschreck, p. 33.

18. R. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950), pp. 177, 331–32; Max Lackmann, Sola Fide: Eine exegetische Studie über Jakobus 2 zur reformatorischen Rechtfertigungslehre (Gütersloh, West Germany: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1949).

19. H. Holzapfel, Die Sekten in Deutschland (Regensburg, West Germany: Verlag Josef Koesel & Friedrich Pustet A. G., 1925), pp. 20, 23–27; P. Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1983), p. 22.

20. K. Rahner, “Original Sin,” in Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Rahner et al., 6 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1969), 4:329.

21. Kirchengeschichte, p. 141 (authors’ translation).

22. W. E. Phipps, “The Heresiarch: Pelagius or Augustine?” Anglican Theological Review 62 (1980):124–33.

23. A Handbook of Theological Terms (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 199.

24. Session VI, Canon 12, cited in L. Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Phillipsburg, N.J.: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1986), p. 261.

25. “The Once and Future Christian,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 19 (1986):116–18.

26. Understanding Paul (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1983), pp. 185–86, 272–76, 355–62.

27. Justo L. Gonzales, A History of Christian Thought, 3 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), 1:69, 94–96.

28. Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 12, 15–16.

29. Gonzales, p. 89.

30. The Spreading Flame (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979), p. 334.

31. Catechetical Lectures 3:10; 21:5.

32. W. G. Rusch, “Getting to Know the Orthodox,” The Lutheran, 2 Apr. 1986, p. 12.

33. Pressau, p. 38. See also J. Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 144–49.

“Mom, Are We Christians?”

Gary J. Coleman, “‘Mom, Are We Christians?’,” Ensign, May 2007, 92–94


I am a devout Christian who is exceedingly fortunate to have greater knowledge of the true “doctrine of Christ” since my conversion to the restored Church.




Christianity celebrates the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God the Eternal Father. Christian churches with great variations of doctrine dot the land the world over. When 14-year-old Cortnee, a daughter of a mission president, entered a new high school as a freshman, she was asked by classmates if she was a Christian. They scoffed at her response that she was a Mormon, a common reference to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Upon arriving home she asked her mother, “Mom, are we Christians?”

Growing up in my family, we lived as devout members of another Christian faith. I was baptized a member of that church shortly after my birth. Our family went to church each week. For many years my brothers and I assisted the pastors who conducted our Sunday services. I was taught the importance of family prayer as our family prayed together each day. I thought that someday I would enter the full-time ministry in my church. There was no question in our minds that we could define ourselves as devout Christians.

When I was a university student, however, I became acquainted with the members and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Christian faith centered on the Savior. I began to learn about the doctrine of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in these latter days. I learned truths that I had not known before that changed my life and how I viewed the gospel. After much studying, prayer, and faith, I chose to embrace beautiful restored truths found only in this Church.

The first restored truth that I learned was the nature of the Godhead. The true Christian doctrine that the Godhead consists of three separate beings was known in biblical times. God bore witness of Jesus, His Only Begotten Son, on several occasions. He spoke at Jesus’s baptism: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”1 Jesus Himself testified of God, His Father, when He said, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”2 After Jesus’s death and Resurrection, we learn that Stephen, “he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.”3 What a dramatic testimony of the Godhead from that disciple of Christ.

The knowledge of God and His physical separateness from His Son and the Holy Ghost was lost after the death of Christ and His Apostles. Confusion and false doctrines about the Godhead were fashioned out of the Nicene Creed and Constantinople councils, where men declared that instead of three separate beings, the Godhead was three persons in one God, or the Trinity. Just as Christian Protestant reformers struggled with these creeds of men, I did as well. The teachings about the Trinity that I learned in my youth were incomprehensible to me.

However, when I was introduced to the glorious truths of the First Vision experienced by the Prophet Joseph Smith, it was a stunning awakening for me to finally understand the truth about the nature of God the Eternal Father and His Only Begotten Son. Joseph declared: “I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”4 This heavenly vision restored the wondrous yet plain and precious knowledge of God and His Son to the earth again, dispelling at once the teachings I had learned about the Trinity.

I know that heaven-sent revelations have replaced the gross errors of man-made doctrines concerning the Godhead. I know that God is our Heavenly Father. His Son, Jesus Christ, is my Savior. The Holy Ghost testifies of the Father and the Son. I express my profound gratitude to God for introducing the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ to mankind in these last days. The Savior lives; He has been seen; He has spoken; He directs the work of His Church through apostles and prophets today. What magnificent truths He has taught as the Good Shepherd who continues to look after His sheep.

The second restored truth I learned as an investigator of this Church was the reality of additional scripture and revelation. The prophet Isaiah saw in vision a book that he proclaimed was part of “a marvellous work and a wonder.”5 I testify that the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ is that book. It is a sacred record written by prophets of God to persuade all people to come unto Christ, and it helps to reveal the gospel of Jesus Christ in its fulness. The Book of Mormon tells of prophets and other faithful members of the Church who took upon themselves the name of Christ, even before the Savior’s birth.6 This book tells of the resurrected Christ teaching men what they must do to gain peace in this life and eternal salvation in the world to come. What could be more Christian than seeking to take His name upon ourselves and follow His counsel to become like Him?

President Gordon B. Hinckley has said, “I cannot understand why the Christian world does not accept this book.”7 I first read the Book of Mormon at the age of 21. I then asked God if it was true. The truth of it was manifested unto me by the comforting power of the Holy Ghost.8 I know that the Book of Mormon is a second testament of Jesus Christ. I join my testimony with the prophets of this sacred book to declare that “we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ.”9 I am deeply grateful for every word that He has spoken and for every word He continues to speak as He quenches our thirst with living water.

Another restored truth of the gospel I became acquainted with was the restoration of priesthood authority, or the power to act in God’s name. Former prophets and apostles, such as Elijah, Moses, John the Baptist, Peter, James, and John, have been sent by God and Christ in our day to restore the holy priesthood of God. Every priesthood holder in this Church can trace his priesthood authority directly to Jesus Christ. Men now possess the keys to establish the Church so that we can come unto Christ and partake of His eternal ordinances of salvation.10 I testify that this is the Church of Jesus Christ—the only church authorized with true priesthood authority to exercise the keys of salvation through sacred ordinances.

Cortnee asked, “Mom, are we Christians?” As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you are a Christian, and I am too. I am a devout Christian who is exceedingly fortunate to have greater knowledge of the true “doctrine of Christ”11 since my conversion to the restored Church. These truths define this Church as having the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Like other members of the Church, I now understand the true nature of the Godhead, I have access to additional scripture and revelation, and I can partake of the blessings of priesthood authority. Yes, Cortnee, we are Christians, and I testify of these truths in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Notes
1. Matthew 3:17.

2. John 17:3.

3. Acts 7:55–56.

4. Joseph Smith—History 1:17.

5. See Isaiah 29:14; see also vv. 11–12, 18.

6. See Alma 46:14–16.

7. The Marvelous Foundation of Our Faith,” Liahona and Ensign, Nov. 2002, 81.

8. See Moroni 10:4–5.

9. 2 Nephi 25:26.

10. See D&C 2; 13; 110; 112:32.

11. 2 Nephi 31:2; see also 3 Nephi 11:31–36.

The Mormon View of the Book of Mormon

The Mormon View of the Book of Mormon

The first step in what the Mormons consider the Restoration of the Gospel in the Dispensation of the Fulness of Times was the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. More than anything else this fixed the unique status of the new religion, of which Eduard Meyer wrote: "Mormonism . . . is not just another of those innumerable new sects, but a new religion of revelation (Offenbarungsreligion)." fn The Latter-day Saints "believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God" in exactly the same sense as the Bible (Article of Faith No. 8)—a proposition which has caused great offense to many Christians and led to long and severe persecutions, the Book of Mormon being the principal object of attack.

The book does not, however, take the place of the Bible in Mormonism. But just as the New Testament clarified the long-misunderstood message of the Old, so the Book of Mormon is held to reiterate the messages of both Testaments in a way that restores their full meaning. Its professed mission, as announced on its title page, is "to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations." Until recently, most Mormons have not been zealous in the study of the book, considering it on the whole a strange and alien document with little relationship to modern life. Its peculiar effectiveness has indeed been as a messenger (it was brought by an angel) to the world at large.

The Book of Mormon professes to present in highly abridged form the history of a peculiar civilization, transplanted from the Old World to the New around 600 B.C. Of complex cultural background and mixed racial stock, the society endured only a thousand years, of which period the Book of Mormon contains an unbroken account, taken supposedly from records kept almost entirely by the leaders of a minority religious group. The first of the line was Lehi, who with his family and some others fled from Jerusalem to the desert to live the Law in its purity and prepare for the coming Messiah. Commanded by God after much wandering to cross the seas, the community reached the New World and there broke up, only a minority choosing to continue the ways of the pious sectaries of the desert. Lehi's descendants in time met and mingled with yet other migrants from the Old World, and indeed for almost five hundred years they had, unawares, as their northern neighbors, warlike hunting tribes which, according to the Book of Mormon, had come from Asia thousands of years before. The racial and cultural picture of the Book of Mormon is anything but the oversimplified thing its critics have made it out to be. For the Mormons, the Book of Mormon contains "the fulness of the gospel." Six hundred years of its history transpire before the coming of Christ, and four hundred after that. In the earlier period the faithful minority formed a church of anticipation, their charismatic leaders "teaching the law of Moses, and the intent for which it was given; persuading them to look forward unto the Messiah, and believe in him to come as though he already was" (Jarom 1:11). There are extensive quotations from the Old Testament prophets, especially Isaiah, with remarkable variant readings, and much that is reminiscent in language and imagery of early Jewish apocryphal writings. The boldest part of the Book of Mormon is the detailed account of the visit of Jesus Christ to his "other sheep" in the New World after the Resurrection, including his instructions and commandments to the new church. This episode closely parallels certain of early Christian apocrypha dealing with post-resurrectional teachings of the Lord to his disciples in Galilee and on the Mount of Olives, although none of these sources was available in Joseph Smith's day.

The historical parts of the Book of Mormon bear witness to its good faith, which never claims for it any sort of immunity, religious or otherwise, from the most searching scientific and scholarly criticism. Lack of comparative historical documents is offset by an abundance of cultural data: over two hundred nonbiblical Hebrew and Egyptian names offer ample material to the philologist, and a wealth of technical detail invites critical examination, thanks to precise descriptions of such things as the life of a family wandering in the Arabian desert, a great earthquake, the ancient craft of olive-culture, a major war in all its phases, the ways of the early desert sectaries, and the state of the world during a protohistoric Völkerwanderung, and so on.

Along with cultural-historical particulars the religious message of the book is richly interspersed with peculiar expressions, legends, traditions, and customs supposedly derived from the Old World, which may today be checked against ancient sources. Thus it describes certain practices of arrow-divination, an odd custom of treading on garments, a coronation ceremony (in great detail), the evils of the archaic matriarchy, peculiar ways of keeping and transmitting sacred records, the intricacies of an ingenious monetary system, and the like.

Of particular interest to Latter-day Saints are the prophetic parts of the Book of Mormon, which seem to depict the present state of the world most convincingly. The past 140 years have borne out exactly what the book foretold would be its own reception and influence in the world; and its predictions for the Mormons, the Jews, and the other remnants of scattered Israel (among which are included the American Indians) seem to be on the way to fulfillment. The Book of Mormon allows an ample time-scale for the realization of its prophecies, according to which the deepening perplexities of the nations, when "the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people" (2 Nephi 30:10), shall lead to worldwide destructions by fire, for "blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke must come; and it must needs be upon the face of this earth." After this, the survivors (for this is not to be the end of the world) shall have learned enough to coexist peaceably "for the space of many years," when "all nations, kindreds, tongues and people shall dwell safely in the Holy One of Israel if it so be that they will repent" (1 Nephi 22:26, 28).

The Book of Mormon is the history of a polarized world in which two irreconcilable ideologies confronted each other, and is addressed explicitly to our own age, faced by the same predicament and the same impending threat of destruction. It is a call to faith and repentance couched in the language of history and prophecy, but above all it is a witness of God's concern for all his children, and to the intimate proximity of Jesus Christ to all who will receive him.

Postscript: The preceding statement was written on request for a journal which is published in eight languages and therefore insists on conciseness and brevity. Teaching a Book of Mormon Sunday School class ten years later, I am impressed more than anything by something I completely overlooked until now, namely, the immense skill with which the editors of that book put the thing together. The long Book of Alma, for example, is followed through with a smooth and logical sequence in which an incredible amount of detailed and widely varying material is handled in the most lucid and apparently effortless manner. Whether Alma is addressing a king and his court, a throng of ragged paupers sitting on the ground, or his own three sons, each a distinctly different character, his eloquence is always suited to his audience, and he goes unfailingly to the peculiar problems of each hearer.

Throughout this big and complex volume, we are aware of much shuffling and winnowing of documents, and informed from time to time of the method used by an editor distilling the contents of a large library into edifying lessons for the dedicated and pious minority among the people. The overall picture reflects before all a limited geographical and cultural point of view—small localized operations, with only occasional flights and expeditions into the wilderness; one might almost be moving in the cultural circuit of the Hopi villages. The focusing of the whole account on religious themes as well as the limited cultural scope leaves all the rest of the stage clear for any other activities that might have been going on in the vast reaches of the New World, including the hypothetical Norsemen, Celts, Phoenicians, Libyans, or prehistoric infiltrations via the Bering Straits. Indeed, the more varied the ancient American scene becomes, as newly discovered artifacts and even inscriptions hint at local populations of Near Eastern, Far Eastern, and European origin, the more hospitable it is to the activities of one tragically short-lived religious civilization that once flourished in Mesoamerica and then vanished toward the northeast in the course of a series of confused tribal wars that was one long, drawn-out retreat into oblivion. Such considerations would now have to be included in any "minimal statement" this reader would make about the Book of Mormon.

Footnotes

1. This article was published in the multilingual journal Concilium: Theology in the Age of Renewal, 30 (New York: Paulist Press, 1968), 170-73; also printed in England under the same title in Concilium: An International Review of Theology, 10 (December 1967), 82-83, and in other foreign-language editions of this journal in French, pages 151-53; Portuguese, pages 144-47; and German, pages 855-56. It was reprinted in Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1978), 149-53, under the title "The Book of Mormon: A Minimal Statement" with the note that appears here as a postscript.

2. Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen (Halle: 1912), 1; published also as The Origin and History of the Mormons, tr. H. Rahde and E. Seaich (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1961), 1.


(Hugh Nibley, The Prophetic Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book Co., Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1

The Book of Mormon: True or False?

It is impossible to read the Book of Mormon with an "open mind." Confronted on every page with the steady assurance that what he is reading is both holy scripture and true history, the reader is soon forced to acknowledge a prevailing mood of assent or resentment.

It was the same uncompromising "yea or nay" in the teaching of Jesus that infuriated the scribes and Pharisees against him; the claims of the Christ allowed no one the comfortable neutrality of a middle ground. Critics of the Book of Mormon have from the beginning attempted to escape the responsibility of reading it by simple appeal to the story of its miraculous origin; that is enough to discredit it without further investigation.

Thanks to its title page, the Book of Mormon "has not been universally considered by its critics," as one of them recently wrote, "as one of those books that must be read in order to have an opinion of it." fn Even Eduard Meyer, who wrote an ambitious study of Mormon origins, confessed that he had never read the Book of Mormon through. fn

So it was something of an event when, not long since, an eminent German historian read enough of the strange volume to be thoroughly disturbed by it. He found in it "the expression of a mighty awakening historical consciousness" fn and declared that "the problem of America and Europe has in fact never again been so clearly perceived and pregnantly treated as here." fn

Clear perception? Skillful treatment? In that book? Of course the whole thing is a monstrous hoax; Professor Meinhold will not even deign to consider any alternative: in spite of the witnesses and all that, the story of its origin needs and deserves no examination; it is simply unerhört ("unheard of"), and we don't discuss things that are unerhört. fn

Worst of all, the Book of Mormon bears such alarming resemblance to scripture that, for Meinhold, it not only undermines but threatens in a spirit of "nihilistic skepticism" to discredit the Bible altogether. fn Since one can reject the Book of Mormon without in any way jeopardizing one's faith in the Bible, and since no one ever can accept or ever has accepted the Book of Mormon without complete and unreserved belief in the Bible, the theory that the Book of Mormon is a fiendish attempt to undermine faith in the Bible is an argument of sheer desperation. Recently Professor Albright has noted that the Bible is first and last a historical document, and that of all the religions of the world, only Judaeo-Christianity can be said to have a completely "historical orientation." fn

Modern scholarship has, up to recent years, steadily undermined that historical orientation and with it the authority of the Bible; but today the process is being reversed and the glory of our Judaeo-Christian tradition vindicated. "Characteristic of the compelling force of this orientation," according to Albright, are the "marked historical tendencies" of Islam and Mormonism, the most complete expression of which is Mormonism's "alleged historical authentication in the form of the Book of Mormon." fn

What shocks Professor Meinhold in the Book of Mormon is the very thing that shocked the past generations of German professors in the Bible: its claims to be a genuine history. When the whole Christian world had forgotten that "historical orientation," which was one unique distinction, the Book of Mormon alone preserved it completely intact.

It is said that John Stuart Mill, the man with the fabulous I.Q. (and little else), read the New Testament with relish until he got to the Gospel of John, when he tossed the book aside before reaching the sixth chapter with the crushing and final verdict, "This is poor stuff!" Any book is a fraud if we choose to regard it as such, but Professor Meinhold cannot be nearly so experienced or well-educated as John Stuart Mill that he can simply serve notice that this book is a laughing matter.

But why would anybody be upset by what a Harvard pedant of our own day calls "the gibberish of a crazy boy"? Because the Book of Mormon is anything but gibberish to one who takes the trouble to read it. Here is an assignment which we like to give to classes of Oriental (mostly Moslem) students studying the Book of Mormon (it is required) at the Brigham Young University:

Since Joseph Smith was younger than most of you and not nearly so experienced or well-educated as any of you at the time he copyrighted the Book of Mormon, it should not be too much to ask you to hand in by the end of the semester (which will give you more time than he had) a paper of, say, five to six hundred pages in length. Call it a sacred book if you will, and give it the form of a history. Tell of a community of wandering Jews in ancient times; have all sorts of characters in your story, and involve them in all sorts of public and private vicissitudes; give them names—hundreds of them—pretending that they are real Hebrew and Egyptian names of circa 600 B.C.; be lavish with cultural and technical details—manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions, include long and complicated military and economic histories; have your narrative cover a thousand years without any large gaps; keep a number of interrelated local histories going at once; feel free to introduce religious controversy and philosophical discussion, but always in a plausible setting; observe the appropriate literary conventions and explain the derivation and transmission of your varied historical materials. Above all, do not ever contradict yourself! For now we come to the really hard part of this little assignment. You and I know that you are making this all up—we have our little joke—but just the same you are going to be required to have your paper published when you finish it, not as fiction or romance, but as a true history! After you have handed it in you may make no changes in it (in this class we always use the first edition of the Book of Mormon); what is more, you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely, explaining to them that it is a sacred book on a par with the Bible. If they seem over-skeptical, you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim—they will love that! Further to allay their misgivings, you might tell them that the original manuscript was on golden plates, and that you got the plates from an angel. Now go to work and good luck!

To date no student has carried out this assignment, which, of course, was not meant seriously. But why not? If anybody could write the Book of Mormon, as we have been so often assured, it is high time that somebody, some devoted and learned minister of the gospel, let us say, performed the invaluable public service of showing the world that it can be done.

Assuming that it was not Joseph Smith but somebody else who wrote it gets us nowhere. If he did not write it, Joseph Smith ran an even greater risk in claiming authorship than if he had. For the first important man among his followers to turn against him would infallibly give him away. Sidney Rigdon, full of ambition and jealous of the Prophet, never claimed authorship of the Book of Mormon (which has often been claimed for him) or any part in it, nor in all the years during which he fought Smith from outside the Church did he ever hint the possibility of any other explanation for the Book of Mormon than Joseph Smith's own story.

Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer all turned against the Prophet at one time or another, but neither they nor any other of the early associates of Smith, no matter how embittered, ever gave the slightest indication that they knew of anybody besides Smith himself who had any part whatever in the composition of the Book of Mormon. fn For years men searched desperately to discover some other possible candidate for authorship, making every effort to find a more plausible explanation of the sources of these scriptures.

From the first, all admitted that Joseph Smith was much too ignorant for the job. We grant that willingly, but who on earth in 1829 was not too ignorant for it? Who is up to it today? If the disproportion between the learning of Smith and the stature of the Book of Mormon is simply comical, that between the qualifications of an Anthon or a Lepsius and the production of such a book is hardly less so. We can't get rid of Joseph Smith, but then it would do us no good if we could. Just consider the scope and variety of the work as briefly as possible.

First Nephi gives us first a clear and vivid look at the world of Lehi, a citizen of Jerusalem but much at home in the general world of the New East of 600 B.C. Then it takes us to the desert, where Lehi and his family wander for eight years, doing all the things that wandering families in the desert should do. fn The manner of their crossing the ocean is described, as is the first settlement and hard pioneer life in the New World dealt with in the book of Jacob and a number of short and gloomy other books. The ethnological picture becomes very complicated as we learn that the real foundations of New World civilization were not laid by Lehi's people at all, but that there were far larger groups coming from the Middle East at about the same time (this was the greatest era of exploration and colonization in the history of the ancient world), as well as numerous survivors of archaic hunting cultures of Asiatic origin that had thousands of years before crossed the North Pacific and roamed all over the north country. fn

The book of Mosiah describes a coronation rite in all its details and presents extensive religious and political histories mixed in with a complicated background of exploration and colonization. fn The book of Alma is marked by long eschatological discourses and a remarkably full and circumstantial military history. fn The main theme of the book of Helaman is the undermining of society by moral decay and criminal conspiracy; the powerful essay on crime is carried into the next book, where the ultimate dissolution of the Nephite government is described. fn

Then comes the account of the great storm and earthquakes, in which the writer, ignoring a splendid opportunity for exaggeration, has as accurately depicted the typical behavior of the elements on such occasions as if he were copying out of a modern textbook on seismology. fn The damage was not by any means total, and soon after the catastrophe, Jesus Christ appeared to the most pious sectaries who had gathered at the temple.

The account of Christ's visits to the earth after his resurrection are exceedingly fragmentary in the New Testament, and zealous efforts are made in early Christian apocryphal writing to eke them out ; fn his mission to the Nephites is the most remarkable part of the Book of Mormon. Can anyone now imagine the terrifying prospect of confronting the Christian world of 1830 with the very words of Christ? Professor Meinhold still shudders with horror at the presumption of it, fn and well he might, as the work of an impudent impostor who knew a year ahead of time just what mortal peril he was risking. The project is indeed unerhört; as the work of an honest, well-meaning Christian it is equally unthinkable.

But the boldness of the thing is matched by the directness and nobility with which the preaching of the Savior and the organization of the church are described. After this comes a happy history and then the usual signs of decline and demoralization. The death-struggle of the Nephite civilization is described with due attention to all the complex factors that make up an exceedingly complicated but perfectly consistent picture of decline and fall. fn Only one who attempts to make a full outline of Book of Mormon history can begin to appreciate its immense complexity; and never once does the author get lost (as the student repeatedly does, picking his way out of one maze after another only with the greatest effort), and never once does he contradict himself. We should be glad to learn of any other like performance in the history of literature.

The book of Ether takes us back thousands of years before Lehi's time to the dawn of history and the first of the great world migrations. A vivid description of Völkerwanderungszeit concentrates on the migration of a particular party—a large one, moving through the years with their vast flocks and herds across central Asia (described at that time as a land of swollen inland seas), and then undertaking a terrifying crossing of the North Pacific. Totally unlike the rest of the Book of Mormon, this archaic tale conjures up the "heroic" ages, the "epic milieu" of the great migrations and the "saga time" that follows, describing in detail the customs and usages of a cultural complex that Chadwick was first to describe in our own day. fn

Here in this early epic, far beyond the reach of any checks and controls, our foolish farm-boy had unlimited opportunity to let his imagination run wild. What an invitation to the most gorgeously funny extravaganza! And instead we get a sober, factual, but completely strange and unfamiliar tale.

Even this brief and sketchy indication of thematic material should be enough to show that we are not dealing here with a typical product of American or any other modern literature. Lord Raglan has recently observed that the evolution of religions has been not from the simple to the complex, but the other way around: "The modern tendency in religion, as in language, is towards simplicity. The youngest world religion, Islam, is simpler both in ritual and dogma than its predecessors, and such modern cults as Quakerism, Baabism, Theosophy, and Christian Science are simpler still." fn

The work of Joseph Smith completely ignores this basic tendency; whatever he is, he is not a product of the times. The mere mass, charge, and variety of Mormonism has perplexed and offended many; but it is never too much to digest. The big, ponderous, detailed plot of the Book of Mormon, for example, is no more impressive than the ease, confidence, and precision with which the material is handled. The prose is terse, condensed, and fast-moving; the writer never wanders or speculates; beginning, middle, and ending are equally powerful, with no signs of fatigue or boredom; there is no rhetoric, no purple patches, nothing lurid or melodramatic—everything is kept sober and factual.

The Book of Mormon betrays none of the marks of "fine writing" of its day; it does not view the Gorgeous East with the eyes of any American of 1830, nor does it share in the prevailing ideas of what makes great or moving literature. The grandiose, awesome, terrible, and magnificent may be indicated in these pages, but they are never described; there is no attempt to be clever or display learning; the Book of Mormon vocabulary is less than 3,000 words! There are no favorite characters, no milking of particularly colorful or romantic episodes or situations, no reveling in terror and gore.

The book starts out with a colophon telling us whose hand wrote it, what his sources were, and what it is about; the author boasts of his pious parents and good education, explaining that his background was an equal mixture of Egyptian and Jewish, and then moves into this history establishing time, place, and background; the situation at Jerusalem and the reaction of Nephi's father to it, his misgivings, his prayers, a manifestation that came to him in the desert as he traveled on business and sent him back post-haste "to his own house at Jerusalem," where he has a great apocalyptic vision. fn

All this and more in the first seven verses of the Book of Mormon. The writer knows exactly what he is going to say and wastes no time in saying it. Throughout the book we get the impression that it really is what its authors claim it to be, a highly condensed account from much fuller records. We can imagine our young rustic getting off to this flying start, but can we imagine him keeping up the pace for ten pages? For 588 pages the story never drags, the author never hesitates or wanders, he is never at a loss. What is really amazing is that he never contradicts himself.

Long ago Friedrich Blass laid down rules for testing any document for forgery. fn Let us paraphrase these as rules to be followed by a successful forger and consider whether Joseph paid any attention to any of them.

1. Keep out of the range of unsympathetic critics. There is, Blass insists, no such thing as a clever forgery. No forger can escape detection if somebody really wants to expose him; all the great forgeries discovered to date have been crudely executed (for example, the Piltdown skull), depending for their success on the enthusiastic support of the public or the experts. The Book of Mormon has enjoyed no such support. From the day it appeared, important persons at the urgent demand of an impatient public did everything they could to show it a forgery. And Joseph Smith, far from keeping it out of the hands of unsympathetic critics, did everything he could to put it into those hands. Surely this is not the way of a deceiver.

2. Keep your document as short as possible. fn The longer a forgery is the more easily it may be exposed, the danger increasing geometrically with the length of the writing. By the time he had gone ten pages, the author of the Book of Mormon knew only too well what a dangerous game he was playing if it was a hoax; yet he carries on undismayed for six hundred pages.

3. Above all, don't write a historical document! They are by far the easiest of all to expose, being full of "things too trifling, too inconspicuous, and too troublesome" for the forger to check up on. fn

4. After you have perpetrated your forgery, go into retirement or disappear completely. For vanity, according to Blass, is the Achilles' heel of every forger. fn A forger is not only a cheat but also a show-off, attempting to put one over on society; he cannot resist the temptation to enjoy his triumph, and if he remains in circulation, inevitably he gives himself away. Joseph Smith ignored any opportunity of taking credit for the Book of Mormon—he took only the responsibility for it.

5. Always leave an escape door open. fn Be vague and general, philosophize and moralize. Religious immunity has been the refuge of most eminent forgers in the past, beautiful thoughts and pious allegories, deep interpretations of scriptures, mystic communication to the initiated few, these are safe grounds for the pia fraus ("pious fraud"). But the Book of Mormon never uses them. It does not even exploit the convenient philological loophole of being a translation: as an inspired translation it claims all the authority and responsibility of the original.

Granted that any explanation is preferable to Joseph Smith's, where is any explanation? The chances against such a book ever coming into existence are astronomical: Who would write it? Why? Trouble, danger, and unpopularity are promised its defenders in the book itself. Did someone else write it so that Joseph Smith could take all the credit? Did Smith, knowing it was somebody else's fraud, claim authorship so that he could take all the blame?

The work involved in producing the thing was staggering, the danger terrifying; long before publication time the newspapers and clergy were howling for blood. Who would want to go on with such a suicidal project? All that trouble and danger just to fool people? But the author of this book is not trying to fool anybody: he claims no religious immunity, makes no effort to mystify, employs no rhetorical or allegorical license.

There are other things to consider too, such as the youth and inexperience of Smith when (regardless of who the author might be) he took sole responsibility for the Book of Mormon. Faced with a point-blank challenge by the learned world, any impostor would have collapsed in an instant, but Joseph Smith never weakened though the opposition quickly mounted to a roar of national indignation. Then there were the witnesses, real men who, though leaving the Church for various real or imagined offenses, never altered or retracted their testimonies of what they had seen and heard.

The fact that only one version of the Book of Mormon was ever published and that Joseph Smith's attitude toward it never changed is also significant. After copyrighting it in the spring of 1829, he had a year to think it over before publication and yield sensibly to social pressure; after that he had the rest of his life to correct his youthful indiscretion; years later, an important public figure and a skillful writer, knowing that his book was a fraud, knowing the horrible risk he ran on every page of it, and knowing how hopelessly naive he had been when he wrote it, he should at least have soft-pedaled the Book of Mormon theme. Instead he insisted to the end of his life that it was the truest book on earth, and that a man could get nearer to God by observing its precepts than in any other way. fn

Parallelomania has recently been defined as the double process which "first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connections flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction." fn It isn't merely that one sees parallels everywhere, but especially that one instantly concludes that there can be only one possible explanation for such. From the beginning the Book of Mormon has enjoyed the full treatment from Parallelomaniacs. Its origin has been found in the Koran, in Swedenborg, in the teachings of Old School Presbyterians, French Mystics, Methodists, Unitarians, Millerites, Baptists, Campbellites, and Quakers; in Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, Gnosticism, Transcendentalism, Atheism, Deism, Owenism, Socialism, and Platonism; in the writing of Rabelais, Milton, Anselm, Joachim of Flores, Ethan Smith, and the Early Church; in Old Iranian doctrines, Brahmin mysticism, Free Masonry, and so on.

Now a person who has read only Milton, or Defoe, or Rabelais would have an easy time discovering parallels all through the Book of Mormon, or any other book he might read thereafter. It is not surprising that people who have studied only English literature are the most eager to condemn the Book of Mormon. fn

Book of Mormon: True or False? (Chapter 11) footnote: At a Portland Institute Symposium, Nibley subsequently gave a talk that developed several of these same themes further, along with discussing the negative reviews of Fawn Brodie's biography of Thomas Jefferson. The main body of the talk is included in the following transcript:

There are two rigorous tests to which we can subject the Book of Mormon: There is the internal test and the external test. This is true for every document. At the time of the Renaissance, which they usually say began with the fall of Constantinople (actually that is not true—the Turks treasured those documents from ancient times), all of a sudden they discovered them, not so much in the East as in the monasteries. They discovered thousands of manuscripts from ancient times. They didn't know what to do with them, or how to arrange them in order, or whether they were genuine or not. It became the stock assignment of scholarship to go through a great big pile of nondescript documents in quite a number of languages and decide what can they tell us about the human race—what here is authentic, what isn't, what have they been doing. It was just a mess, and some of the great scholars devised a very efficient method for processing these documents, and also for testing them for authenticity. Their test became foolproof, not only just intuitive; they could do marvelous things. They could take documents damaged almost beyond recognition and restore them. And later, years later, they would discover a complete document, and, sure enough, the restoration was correct. They were often going on mere intuition.

The first question that you have when you get an ancient document is—is it real? That is the first question they wanted to know. They could very well be not just copies of copies, but they could be fakes. That is very common too and, well, what part of it is real? Because there is no such thing as a perfect document. There is no such thing as a flawless document—never has been, never will be. The Book of Mormon recognized this—remember in the title page: "If there are mistakes therein they are the mistakes of men." And men do make mistakes. Well, if parts are real, what parts? What has been going on? How have they been treating the document? An interesting thing—you read the document itself without any reference to anything outside. If it is a historical document, you say, "Oh, sure, this claims to be at a certain time and place"—you can go back and check to see if this was going on. You do not have to do that. The classic work on the criticism of ancient documents is by Frederick Blass. It was written almost a hundred years ago. It is a massive work by a German. I think he is most memorable because of his equally classical work on classical rhetoric. He begins by saying (which is so typical of German scholarship), "I have never been able to get interested in classical rhetoric." Then the great man begins to exhaust the field and the reader too. I don't think anybody ever read it through except me, once. Well, as Blass says, you never have to go outside of a document, you never have to check from outside sources; just read the thing itself and it easily becomes clear whether it is authentic or not. Regardless of the period, regardless of how much else is known about it, regardless of what other documents go along with it, simply read it and see if it is convincing in itself.

Now today interesting things are happening on many fronts. They are dealing with things differently than they ever have before. If it looks like an elephant, call it an elephant; no matter how queer it may sound, you have to pay attention to it now. Things must be explained. You just can't fit everything into the well-known, established patterns. Before, if anything seemed odd, strange, or weird, you just discounted it; but you can't do that anymore. It is these things that are odd that are most significant. For example, speaking of documents, the best kind of document is the one that has fantastic mistakes in it—when you get a weird anomaly or contradiction or something impossible. That is the time to start looking; that is not the kind of thing that copyists put in. Copyists have a weakness for correcting texts they don't understand, so they write it so they can understand. So if you have a flawless text, look out; it has been faked, doctored; the copyists have taken care of it, they have brought it up to date. But if you have one that is full of the weirdest stuff, there you have a real gem, because that stuff came from somewhere. Someone picked it up from somewhere, and you just need to look at the document itself. It is not necessary to go beyond the internal evidence, because it is impossible to fake an ancient document on two conditions, first the internal—especially if it is of any length at all (and the Book of Mormon is long) you multiply the danger, you compound it with every word you add (mathematical progression). Every time you add a word you get yourself in deeper and deeper. So keep your documents short if you want to fake one. Never write a long document—that will hang you just as sure as anything. Nobody has ever faked one successfully.

The second condition, of course, is external. Does it purport to be historical? If you are going to write a document, write one of beautiful thoughts, and no one can object. If you say it is history, then you are in trouble because it has to be checked at various points. So this first thought is going to be about internal evidence of the Book of Mormon, just the internal evidence. I'm not going to use anything outside at all. The internal evidence for the superhuman origins of the Book of Mormon is so overwhelming today that the story of the angel, as far as I am concerned, has become the least baffling explanation. If you think of other explanations, good—but they rejected the story of the angel out of hand because it was absurd. Well, Blass says (this is a very important principle) you should always begin by assuming that a document is authentic. Why not give it the benefit of the doubt? It will quickly become apparent if it isn't. If you proceed on the grounds of authenticity, and if it isn't, the first thing you will know you will be caught up short. So, the first thing, you begin by assuming that your document is authentic, and you say, "Well, that isn't playing fair." All right then, you think of a better explanation. If it isn't a fourteenth-century document, were did it come from? If the famous Turk map of North America of pre-Columbian times isn't authentic, then who did produce it? The more fantastic it is, the easier it is to select a substitute and alternative. Well, I can't think of a more fantastic explanation of the Book of Mormon than the story of the angel. Think of another way to explain it. By George, it turns out that the story of the angel is the least fantastic story that you can think of—everything else is even more weird.

You are welcome to try to explain how the Book of Mormon came to exist. What would be your plausible explanation of the existence of the Book of Mormon? How would you explain its mere existence? "Well," you say "let me give some parallel examples." Okay, tell us of another book, anything like that at all. The only way you can do it is to reconstruct the crime yourself. How did Joseph Smith get or how did he produce this book? You ask yourself how you would go about it. Try to imagine how you would go about reproducing the book.

I tried this out at family home evening last week on some very, very literary students, some foreign students, some investigators—a very skeptical group. And since they were literature people, I asked them, "How would you do it?" Consider the problems facing you if you are undertaking to do what Joseph Smith did. Mere physical problems: he must produce a big book. All right, sit down and produce a big book. That means a lot of work, just putting it together. It means you have to find the time, you have to find the resources, you have to find the continued motivation to keep going. Just try to keep any student or anybody going on a project like that! What is the motivation, what is going to keep you going right up until the end? Again you see, immediately the internal evidence comes. Does it have an even flow, does he run out, does he peter out, does he start repeating himself, does he weaken? These are all internal evidences. The Book of Mormon starts out with a bang, a rush—it is a marvelous beginning and it never drags, things happen very rapidly. You will find that it is when people don't know exactly what they are going to write about that they can string things out endlessly. All your big books do that. But the pace of the Book of Mormon is quite breathtaking—the number of episodes that occur, the rapidity of things that occur. You would be surprised to compare any ten pages with the next ten pages and see what happens—you are in a different world entirely. Things really keep moving, and they keep moving, so it not only starts out with a rush like a rocket, but it ends up like a rocket. It ends up with a magnificent display of fireworks. It never loses from beginning to end, and in the middle it is the most exciting of all.

So this is the test we put to our book. Remember, you are a young man struggling to make a living, tied up in such projects. Of all the things to get tied up in when you are trying to make a living! Remember, Jesse Knight's father tells in his journal how he first met Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, and they were living in a shack translating the Book of Mormon. He said they were hungry and they didn't have a penny, and he brought them a sack of potatoes; and it was that sack of potatoes that enabled them to survive the winter. They were that hungry doing it—he should have better things to think of than a long, long book and a very complicated book that no one was going to believe in. So you have to have the motivation just to create a big book.

You ask the people, "Can you think of any other such performance for comparison?" Who else wrote a long book like the Book of Mormon? What young fellow ever produced anything like that? We think of the great, massive, impressive works in English literature. There is Macaulay and the History of England, Carlyle's Frederick the Great, Gibbons' Decline and Fall; but you see how different these all are. There are plenty of big historical works, but these men were paraphrasing. They had all the records in front of them. They rearranged the chronological order and told the story. They just retold the story, and sometimes very interestingly, but they had all their materials provided them. They could do what they wanted with the materials as far as that was concerned. Joseph Smith had no such handbook. The most terrifying assignment that you can ever give students is to say, "Write on anything you want," because that is where you give yourself away. Joseph Smith could write anything at all; no one knew about Central America in those times long ago. That is just the challenge; that is the hardest thing of all to do. Just try doing it. If you can follow a text, if you have historical records or something to follow, you are on safe ground; you can move securely, you can go step by step, you have handles. He had no such thing to go by.

Joseph Smith had to start from scratch and produce a brand new epic. Instead of making things easier for himself, he made something never seen before. Now we have epics being produced in our generation, and some of them become very popular, strangely popular. Begin with Walter Scott at the beginning of the nineteenth century producing his ponderous works, or, in our time, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, who have invented cultures and worlds all of their own. They are free to do this, but notice here they are not held to historical accuracy at all, though they still have material supplied. Walter Scott is nothing else but a story, and he read and read and read for years. He was thoroughly saturated in the literature, and so was Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He just retold old English stories. Shakespeare was the greatest creative genius of them all, but not a single plot, not a single sentiment in all of Shakespeare, is original. They are all lifted from somewhere else but fit in a real and marvelous new structure. It is like saying, "Oh, yes, he used all those words you will find in the dictionary, so there is nothing original about that." You can say, "Bach just used the eight notes of the scale and composed this; anybody could do that if he had a piano." No, you can't compose like Bach. Joseph Smith does not write like that. These men have this license; they can be creative as they wish, but they are all completely saturated from material from a time and place and are just rewriting it in their imagination. The same thing with C. S. Lewis; he mixed his religion in with the theme, a sort of science fiction, and he goes off into the blue. These people were not held to historic accuracy, and their material is already provided. And then they are given a special license by the reading public and they write, and even so they are all monotonous. Nobody reads Walter Scott today. Tolkien had a big run with young people a while ago, but what do Tolkien's characters do? They are always eating and traveling and having wars and having things in court. They just go through the regular thing of the Medieval court—hunting and feeding and traveling and fighting. That is it, the same routine. Joseph Smith isn't going to be able to get away with anything as easy as that. C. S. Lewis always has boy meets girl on Jupiter, or boy meets girl on Mars. It is the same story, you just put it in a different setting. That is what all your science fiction people do anyway.

Well, back to Brother Joseph—you can do the same with your piece you are writing. Remember, you are writing a big book—nothing has to be trimmed—just a big book. Right there you have a terrific challenge. What am I going to do? I'll go crazy. I can't go on writing day after day, year after year. What is this? Won't you give me some help, won't you tell me what to say? Oh sure, you can go to the Bible. They tell us again and again that anyone looking at the Bible can write a Book of Mormon. It is all there after all—just try that again. You can do the same thing with our piece; you can put in anything you want to. But as soon as you start borrowing, you will give yourself away. As the scripture tells us, "My words shall be of the uprightness of my heart" (Job 33:3).

Brigham Young used to have a black leather couch in his office. A window faced the couch; when people came to see him, they would sit on the couch with Brigham Young's back to the window, the desk between them. Brigham Young would just look at the person for three minutes, that was all. He was never fooled; he could figure them out every time. After all, they had come to see him; he didn't ask for them. If they had anything to say, they could talk and he would say nothing. He would just let them talk, and lots of rascals came, people plotting against his life, people wanting to get money from him, all sorts of things. The man never had to talk more than three minutes. Here is your nondirect interview which is so effective to the psychologist—Brigham had it worked out completely. My grandfather said he was never wrong. After three minutes he knew his man. Well, the same way, if you sit down and write a book 600 pages long, you are going to give yourself away all over the place—what a revelation of your character. Your background will come to the fore all over the place. Enemies tried to catch Joseph Smith in this trap. There are things common to all human affairs. For example, in the Book of Mormon, people eat; well, they eat in the Bible—aha! See, he stole it from the Bible. Somebody actually used that as an argument. The problem here is to make a big book.

Secondly, the book has to have some sort of quality. You didn't have to make your book good, but Joseph Smith had to make his book good. So it would be nice, if you are going to write a book, to write a decent one while you are at it. The book can't be complete nonsense. You can't waste your time and everyone else's. You've got to make a book that is something. Well, now you are in real trouble, because 99 percent of the books published today are not worth the paper they are printed on. Here you are, twenty-three years old, and you must live with this book over your head the rest of your life. No matter who writes it, you are going to be wholly and completely responsible for it—Joseph Smith, author and proprietor. He had to do that for the sake of the copyright. Before the book even came out, all the scandalous stories were circulating, and in the Painesville Telegraph they made a parody of what it must be. In order to protect it against complete manipulation, the author had to copyright it under the copyright law. Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon just as James was the author of the Epistle of James. Although he could write, the author was the Lord. It was given by revelation. That would never do—we assign the authorship of the Bible to the men who wrote it, by revelation or not. Joseph Smith takes complete responsibility—no matter who wrote it; that isn't the question. He is going to be responsible for it, and be responsible for it the rest of his life. How often he must think back, "Oh, what I did when I was a fool kid. If I could only amend that book!" It would be easy—get more inspiration and have a revised edition. The first edition was reprinted by Wilford C. Wood. It is very useful; it hasn't been divided up into chapters and verses—Orson Pratt and Brother Talmage did that later. It is an interesting book to use. There are some mistakes, but the text is actually a better one than the 1920 edition. The point is, it was never changed, and Joseph Smith was never haunted by it. Right to the end, he kept insisting, "This is the most correct book on the earth today." Imagine that—even more correct than a book on mathematics. Sure, I have books of mathematics that are hopelessly out of date today. They are not used today. They were when I was in school. They are not used anymore because they are hopelessly wrong. You are going to be stuck with the correctness of the book.

It should have some literary quality, don't you think? If you are going to have to live with it the rest of your days, it should be consistent; it should hang together. You are feeling bad when you write one part, you are feeling good when you write another. The thing must drag out for years. What are the different parts going to read like? What are they going to be like? In talking or writing for 600 pages, you can't choose but to lay bare your own soul. That is going to be exposing your mental quality and your mental bankruptcy. It will show if you have nothing but gibberish, if you are devious and scheming, if you are honest, and also the degree of education. You can see what Blass means when he says you don't need anything but internal evidence.

You can tell whether a man is faking a book or not if it is long enough, if he gives himself enough room—and it doesn't take much. The only successful forgeries have been very short ones, just brief inscriptions, two or three words or a half-dozen words. As soon as forgeries get long, and there have been some famous ones, it becomes easy to discover. Why do you think Blass states this as a categorical principle: "There never has been a clever forgery." People say the Book of Mormon was a clever forgery. There never has been a clever forgery. "Well, how do you know? A really clever one would have never been discovered," you say. "You won't have even known he was a forger." Such a statement can be justified on the grounds that every forgery discovered so far has not been clever but crude and very obvious. The only reason it ever got by at all is that people wanted to accept it, wanted to very badly. The Royalist boy Chatterly is an example. He was just a child when he faked a lot of Middle English poetry, and everyone was so thrilled about the discovery of old documents that they never bothered to read them with particular care. The first person who read them with any critical eye discovered they were done by a kid, and very crudely. See, when you discover a forgery, it is very obvious; the author gives himself away.

This brings up an interesting thing: When I taught at Claremont, I had a next-door neighbor who was the wife of the most famous of all American scholars. Her husband had just died the year she came to live in Claremont, and since we both rode bicycles, we got to be pretty good friends. She told me that her husband, a very conscientious, public-minded man, decided he would do the world a good deed and save a lot of people the trouble of mixing themselves up and being confused in their ignorance and hopelessness by taking a few hours off and going through the Book of Mormon (and that was all it would take, a few hours) and showing them it was a fraud. He would thereby perform a valuable service to the Mormons, too, because it was of no value to them to be led astray. If they were being fooled, they should be grateful to him to know that. So he began to do it. He thought it would take twenty minutes or so. Twenty hours, twenty days, and his work never came out. I asked her what happened to that public service—well he just dropped it, that was all.

It should be very easy under these circumstances, the Book of Mormon being produced under such conditions, to make a monkey out of Joseph Smith, because, as I say, there is no such thing as a clever forgery. You just can't get away with it. It was many years later when he had developed a fine style of his own, yet he still proclaimed, "This is the most correct book around."

All right, you have just the work of producing the book, and you can smell the quality all over. Then the disposal of it after you write it: What are you going to do with it? Do you really expect this to be popular? Are you crazy? In competition with the Bible? People don't read the Bible anyway, but when they do, you now tell them there is more Bible to read! They won't thank you for that, I'm sure. As a holy book, it is going to be kept perpetually before the public. They are going to be dogged with it, they are going to be bothered with it, you are going to wear them down with it. I was on a short-term mission here many years ago, and by that time everyone in Portland had been visited so much by the Mormons they were sick and tired of them, but they are still hearing of the Book of Mormon. This is an important thing. This book has to be kept perpetually before the public. Also, through the years literary tastes are going to change, and styles in reading are going to change. Sometimes they go for things, sometimes not. You notice the Book of Mormon is being peddled back East now. You see it in the Chicago airport, for example. This takes us into external evidence. This is a very great risk you are taking now: you are going far beyond a book of opinion, sage remarks, the wisdom of the ages, which are always very repetitious. There is nothing original in any of those books. The expressions are sometimes very catching, the forms in which they are conveyed to us. As I said, Shakespeare was not original, but how he says it was excellent. The Jewish rabbis will tell you that there is nothing in the philosophy in the Sermon on the Mount that you won't find in the Old Testament or in the rabbinical writings, and that is true, too. You are not going to issue this just as a book of your ideas and thoughts. It is not a book of essays, but a story of things that really happened. It has got to be reality. It has to have substance in this book. And you can expect unlimited criticism, unsparing criticism without a supporting voice, because no critic in his right mind is going to accept this book just on your say-so. And what lies at the end—what can you look forward to in this dangerous product? It is dangerous: terror not only knocks at the door, but every time you leave the house someone is waiting for you. Shots are fired in the night, and mobs come. The worst rioting and mobbing occurred before the Book of Mormon ever came out. Some of the most harrowing experiences that the Prophet Joseph ever had were caused simply by the Book of Mormon. The advance publicity brought down such a storm of denunciation that it put his life in the most imminent danger. Here is another motive. Are you going to write that kind of book? Yes, you are not in any doubt about that. You get a horrifying foretaste of what merely the process of getting it into print is going to get you into while you are dictating the book. This is no way to win friends; you are asking for trouble. Every day while writing the book, the sheer audacity of the theme is brought to you with great force.

Read the literature about Joseph Smith's undertaking. Who were his critics from the first? They say he was writing for some gullible bumpkins, a lot of yokels that would swallow anything. No, it was the ministers and teachers. It was the establishment back East that immediately had this book in their hands and were criticizing it. It was the ministers that wanted to defend their ignorant flocks against Joseph Smith. You might be able to fool the gullible people, but they weren't the ones who read it and they weren't the ones Joseph Smith was concerned about, as far as that goes. What did these men protest? They protested, "Blasphemy, alias the Golden Bible." The main protest was that in this enlightened age, in the advanced nineteenth century, in this age of science and understanding, that such a fraud should appear, such a scandal. This was the thing they couldn't stand. It was an offense to the intellect. It was an offense to the mind of men. It wasn't on spiritual or religious grounds that they protested. Those were the reasons they gave their flocks, the religious mobs, that it was a blasphemous work. But always the writings against the Book of Mormon were that it was an offense to intelligent people. So these were the people that criticized it.

Speaking of only internal contradictions here, historical and literary epics fairly shriek their folly to anyone who reads them. Here we have a long history. It is full of proper names and of people and places; it recounts their comings and goings and even their thoughts and prayers and their dealings with each other; their wars and their contentions and rumors of wars; their economic, social, dynastic, military, religious, and intellectual history. Now the main problem here, from an internal point of view, is how in all this human comedy can you as the author establish a ring of similitude from readers who have read a lot of stuff, who know how things are supposed to happen or how they do happen, who spent their lives immersing themselves in the doings of dynasties or families or nations? A thousand clues spring to the ear immediately of any educated practitioner: "This reads all right. This sounds pretty good. Oh, this is bad here." And you are not educated. Do you have any idea what you are up against?

Footnotes

1. This article appeared in the Millennial Star 124 (November 1962): 274-77. 2

2. Thomas F. O'Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 26.

3. Eduard Meyer, Ursprung and Geschichte der Mormonen (Halle: Niemeyer, 1912); published also as The Origin and History of the Mormons, tr. H. Rahde and E. Seaich (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1961), iii.

4. Peter Meinhold, "Die Anfänge des amerikanischen Geschichtsbewusstseins," Saeculum 5 (1954): 67.

5. Ibid., 86.

6. Ibid., 85-86.

7. Ibid., 86.

8. William F. Albright, "Archaeology and Religion," Cross Currents 9 (1959): 112.

9. Ibid., 111.

10. More recently, see Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1981).

11. Hugh W. Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1957), 47-57, 79-91; reprinted in CWHN 6:59-70, 95-108.

12. Hugh W. Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1952); reprinted in CWHN 5.

13. Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 256-70; CWHN 6:295-310.

14. Ibid., 164-89; CWHN 6:194-221.

15. Ibid., 336-50; CWHN 6:378-99.

16. Hugh W. Nibley, Since Cumorah (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1970), 261-96; reprinted in CWHN 7:231-63.

17. Hugh W. Nibley, "Evangelium Quadraginta Dierum," Vigiliae Christianae 20 (1966): 1-24; reprinted in CWHN 4:10-44.

18. Meinhold, "Die Anfänge des amerikanischen Geschichtsbewusstseins," 76-78.

19. Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 351-65; CWHN 6:416-30.

20. Hugh W. Nibley, "There Were Jaredites," Improvement Era 59 (January 1956): 30-32, 58-61; reprinted in CWHN 5:285-307, 380-94; H. Munro Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1932-40), vol. 1.

21. Lord Raglan, The Origins of Religion (London: Watts, 1949), 44.

22. Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites, 1-26; in CWHN 5:3-24.

23. Friedrich W. Blass, "Hermeneutik and Kritik," Einleitende und Hilfsdisziplinen, vol. 1 of Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Nördlingen: Beck, 1886), 269, 271.

24. Ibid., 270.

25. Ibid., 271.

26. Ibid., 270.

27. Ibid., 269.

28. Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1976), 194.

29. Hugh W. Nibley, "Mixed Voices: The Comparative Method," Improvement Era (October-November 1959): 744-47, 759, 848, 854, 856; see above 193-206.




(Hugh Nibley, The Prophetic Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book Co., Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1989], .)

Jesus Christ and the Plan of Salvation

JESUS CHRIST AND THE PLAN OF SALVATION

Latter-day Saints believe there is purpose in life, that there are things to be felt and experienced and accomplished in this existence that bring peace and contentment; there are other attitudes and actions that lead to misery and despair. The Latter-day Saints hold tenaciously to the principle that God our Father has a plan for us. The plan—called variously the plan of salvation, the plan of redemption, the great plan of happiness—serves as a guide, a roadmap of sorts, through trying and confusing and even ironic circumstances in life. In this chapter we will focus on the vital role of Jesus Christ in that plan of salvation.

AN ETERNAL GOSPEL

Latter-day Saints have a rather unusual view of Christianity. They believe that Christian doctrines have been taught and Christian sacraments administered by Christian prophets since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve were Christians. Noah warned the people in his day to repent, believe, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Abraham and Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel were Christian prophets. If all of this seems odd, anachronistic in the sense that there could obviously be no Christianity until the coming to earth of the Christ, Latter-day Saints believe otherwise. They believe and teach that among the plain and precious truths lost from the holy records that became the Bible is the knowledge of Christ's eternal gospel, the message that a gospel or plan of salvation was had from the dawn of time. In this sense, the Latter-day Saints do not accept a developmental or evolutionary approach to the New Testament. They do not accept the view that the antediluvians, for example, were primitives or that the so-called Christian era we generally associate with the birth or ministry of Jesus is in some way superior, on a higher plane, or more spiritually advanced than the eras of the Old Testament patriarchs or prophets. It is true that the Latter-day Saints speak of the Christian era as "the meridian of time," but this has reference to the centrality of Christ's ministry, teachings, and atoning sacrifice more than to the uniqueness of the message delivered in the first century.

Latter-day Saints believe that God has revealed himself and his plan of salvation during different periods of the earth's history; these periods are known as dispensations. The Adamic dispensation was the first. LDS scripture declares that Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, called upon God in prayer and came to know the course in life they should pursue through God's voice, by the ministry of angels, and by revelation through the power of the Holy Ghost. They then taught the gospel to their children and grandchildren, and thus the knowledge of God, of a coming Savior, and of a plan for the redemption and reclamation of wandering souls was in effect early on. (See Pearl of Great Price, Moses 5:1-8.) From the Pearl of Great Price comes the following counsel of God to Adam:["[God] called upon our father Adam by his own voice, saying: I am God; I made the world, and men before they were in the flesh. And he also said unto him: If thou wilt turn unto me, and hearken unto my voice, and believe, and repent of all thy transgressions, and be baptized, even in water, in the name of mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth, which is Jesus Christ, the only name which shall be given under heaven, whereby salvation shall come unto the children of men, ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." (Moses 6:51-52.) Adam was further instructed to teach his children of the necessity for spiritual rebirth, that by "transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death, and inasmuch as ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven, of water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten." (Moses 6:59.)

Other dispensations followed, periods of time wherein the heavens were opened, prophets were called and empowered, and new truths and new authorities were restored to the earth, usually following a time of falling away or apostasy. Thus the ministries and teachings of Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Joseph Smith introduced major dispensations, periods wherein God—his person and plan—was revealed anew. Lest there be misunderstanding at this point, I hasten to add that Jesus Christ is chief, preeminent, and supreme over all the prophets. Latter-day Saints would acknowledge Jesus as a prophet, a restorer, a revealer of God, but more than this, they stand firm in attesting to his divinity. While the prophets were called of God, Jesus is God. He is the Son of God. Under the Father, his is the power by which men and women are forgiven, redeemed, and born again to a new spiritual life. LDS scriptures teach that all the prophets from the beginning testified of Christ—that all of those called as spokesmen or mouthpieces for God were, first and foremost, witnesses of the Redeemer, inasmuch as "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." (Rev. 19:10.) In the words of Peter, to Christ "give all the prophets witness." (Acts 10:43; see also 1 Pet. 1:10-11.)

In the Book of Mormon, one of the prophet leaders, living in about 73 B.C., explains to his son, "Behold, you marvel why these things"—the coming atonement of Jesus of Nazareth—"should be known so long beforehand. Behold, I say unto you, is not a soul at this time as precious unto God as a soul will be at the time of his coming? Is it not as necessary that the plan of redemption should be made known unto this people as well as unto their children? Is it not as easy at this time for the Lord to send his angel to declare these glad tidings unto us as unto our children, or as after the time of his coming?" (Alma 39:17-19.) In that same vein, Joseph Smith recorded the following in April of 1830:

The Almighty God gave his Only Begotten Son, as it is written in those scriptures which have been given of him. He suffered temptations but gave no heed unto them. He was crucified, died, and rose again the third day; and ascended into heaven, to sit down on the right hand of the Father . . .; that as many as would believe and be baptized in his holy name, and endure in faith to the end, should be saved—not only those who believed after he came in the meridian of time, in the flesh, but all those from the beginning, even as many as were before he came, who believed in the words of the holy prophets, who spake as they were inspired by the gift of the Holy Ghost, who truly testified of him in all things, should have eternal life, as well as those who should come after, who should believe in the gifts and callings of God by the Holy Ghost, which beareth record of the Father and of the Son. (D&C 20:21-27; emphasis added.)

The fullness of the gospel plan, the covenant between God and humankind, is thus known as the new and everlasting covenant. It is new in the sense that it is new to those to whom it is restored and revealed; it is everlasting in the sense that it has been around for a long, long time. We will speak in some detail of the nature of the covenant in a later chapter. For now, let us quote briefly from Joseph Smith on the eternal nature of the gospel covenant:

Perhaps our friends will say that the Gospel and its ordinances were not known till the days of John, the son of Zacharias, in the days of Herod, the king of Judea.

But we will here look at this point: For our own part we cannot believe that the ancients in all ages were so ignorant of the system of heaven as many suppose, since all that were ever saved, were saved through the power of this great plan of redemption, as much before the coming of Christ as since; if not, God has had different plans in operation (if we may so express it), to bring men back to dwell with Himself; and this we cannot believe, since there has been no change in the constitution of man since he fell. . . . It will be noticed that, according to Paul (see Gal. 3:8) the Gospel was preached to Abraham. We would like to be informed in what name the Gospel was then preached, whether it was in the name of Christ or some other name. If in any other name, was it the Gospel? And if it was the Gospel, and that preached in the name of Christ, had it any ordinances [sacraments]? If not, was it the Gospel?<#>1

To say this another way, Latter-day Saints teach that the knowledge of a Savior and the plan of salvation have been revealed throughout history, and not simply since the mortal ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. This may be one reason why so many elements common to Christianity, remnants of a primitive Christian message—a god becoming a man, a virgin birth, the sacrifice of a god, and so on—are to be found in cultures far and wide, even dating well before the birth of Jesus. As Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the Prophet Joseph and himself sixth president of the Church, explained, "When I read books that are scattered broadcast through the world, throwing discredit upon words and teachings and doctrines of the Lord Jesus Christ, saying that some of the ideas Jesus uttered, truths that he promulgated, have been enunciated before by the ancient philosophers among the heathen nations of the world, I want to tell you that there is not a heathen philosopher that ever lived in all the world from the beginning, that had a truth or enunciated a principle of God's truth that did not receive it from the fountain head, from God himself."<#>2 On another occasion he stated:

Let it be remembered that Christ was with the Father from the beginning, that the gospel of truth and light existed from the beginning, and is from everlasting to everlasting. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as one God, are the fountain of truth. From this fountain all the ancient learned philosophers have received their inspiration and wisdom—from it they have received all their knowledge. If we find truth in broken fragments through the ages, it may be set down as an incontrovertible fact that it originated at the fountain, and was given to philosophers, inventors, patriots, reformers, and prophets by the inspiration of God. It came from him through his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, in the first place, and from no other source. It is eternal.

Christ, therefore, being the fountain of truth, is no imitator. He taught the truth first; it was his before it was given to man. When he came to the earth he not only proclaimed new thought, but repeated some of the everlasting principles which had been heretofore only partly understood and enunciated by the wisest of men. And in so doing he enlarged in every instance upon the wisdom which they had originally received from him, because of his superior abilities and wisdom, and his association with the Father and the Holy Ghost. He did not imitate men. They made known in their imperfect way what the inspiration of Jesus Christ had taught them, for they obtained their enlightenment first from him.<#>3

THE ATONEMENT OF CHRIST

Gospel means "good news" or "glad tidings." The bad news is that because of the fall of our first parents we are subject to the effects and pull of sin and death. The bad news is that because of the fall men and women experience spiritual death—separation and alienation from the presence and influence of God and of things of righteousness. The bad news is that every man, woman, and child will one day face the grim reaper, the universal horror we know as physical death. The good news is that there is help, relief, extrication from the pain and penalty of our sins. The good news is that there is reconciliation with God the Father through the mediation of his Son, Jesus Christ. The good news is that there is an atonement, literally an at-one-ment with the Father. The good news is that the victory of the grave and the sting of death are swallowed up in the power of One greater than death. (1 Cor. 15:54-55; see also Isa. 25:8.) The good news is the promise of eventual life after death through the resurrection. In short, the gospel is the good news that Christ came to earth, lived and taught and suffered and died and rose again, all to the end that those who believe and obey might be delivered from death and sin unto eternal life. This good news Latter-day Saints have in common with Christians throughout the world.

Latter-day Saints believe that Jesus was and is a perfect man, that he did what no other man or woman has ever done—he lived a perfect life. He was tempted in all points just as we are, but he did not yield. (Heb. 4:15; 1 Pet. 2:22.) Jesus was the truth and he taught the truth, and his teachings stand as a formula for happiness, a guide for personal, interpersonal, and world peace. His messages, as contained in the New Testament, are timely and timeless; they are a treasure house of wisdom and divine direction for our lives. Other men and women have spoken the truth, offered wise counsel for our lives, and even provided profound insight as to who we are and what life is all about. But Jesus did what no other person could do—he atoned for our sins and rose from the dead. Only a god, only a person with power over death, could do such things.

Mormons teach that the atonement of Christ began in the Garden of Gethsemane and was consummated on the cross of Calvary. His sufferings, as described in the four Gospels, represented far more than the anticipation and fear of the cross,

although no sane person would do other than dread such a cruel fate. Rather, his sufferings in the Garden—including sweating blood (Luke 22:44)—came because of his agony for the sins of the world. One of the direct consequences of sin is the withdrawal of the Father's Spirit, resulting in feelings of loss, anxiety, disappointment, fear, alienation, and guilt. Latter-day Saint scripture and prophet leaders affirm that Jesus experienced the withdrawal of the Father's Spirit and thus suffered in both body and spirit.<#>4 The withdrawal of the Spirit lasted for a period of hours in Gethsemane and reoccurred on the cross the next day. It was for this reason that Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46.) A Book of Mormon prophet described our Lord's sufferings as follows: "He cometh into the world that he may save all men if they will hearken unto his voice; for behold, he suffereth the pains of all men, yea, the pains of every living creature, both men, women, and children, who belong to the family of Adam." (2 Ne. 9:21.) Another Nephite leader explained, "He shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and the abominations of his people." (Mosiah 3:7.)

How this atonement took place is unknown. The Latter-day Saints believe in Christ and trust in his redeeming mercy and grace. They accept the word of scripture, both ancient and modern, in regard to the ransoming mission of Jesus the Christ. They know from personal experience—having been transformed from pain to peace, from darkness to light—of the power in Christ to renew the human soul. But, like the rest of the Christian world, they cannot rationally conceive the work of a God. They cannot grasp how one man can assume the effect of another man's error, and, more especially, how one man, even a man possessed of the power of God the Father, can suffer for another's sins. The atonement, the greatest act of mercy and love in all eternity, though real, is, for now, incomprehensible and unfathomable.

In a subsequent chapter we will discuss the LDS view of the premortal and postmortal nature of men and women. For now, let us simply observe that physical death is the separation of spirit and body. Following death, the spirit goes into a spirit world to await the time when spirit and body are reunited, the time we know as the resurrection. Latter-day Saints accept the account in the New Testament that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, was taken down by his disciples, and was placed in a tomb. On the third day he rose from the dead. His physical body was joined again with his spirit. With that physical body he walked and talked and taught and ate and ministered. The resurrection of Jesus is of monumental importance; it was the first occurrence of a resurrection and stands as a physical proof of the divine Sonship of Jesus. Again, in a way that is incomprehensible to finite minds, the LDS people believe, as do Christians everywhere, that Christ's rising from the tomb opened the door for all men and women to rise one day from death to life. In short, because he rose, we shall also, in the proper time: "He cometh unto his own, that salvation might come unto the children of men even through faith on his name; and even after all this they shall consider him a man, and say that he hath a devil, and shall scourge him, and shall crucify him. And he shall rise the third day from the dead." (Book of Mormon, Mosiah 3:9-10.) Also: "If Christ had not come into the world . . . , there could have been no redemption. And if Christ had not risen from the dead, or have broken the bands of death that the grave should have no victory, and that death should have no sting, there could have been no resurrection. But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ. He is the light and the life of the world; yea, a light that is endless, that can never be darkened; yea, and also a life which is endless, that there can be no more death." (Book of Mormon, Mosiah 16:6-9.)

In the Pearl of Great Price are recorded the following words of God to Moses the Lawgiver: "This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." (Pearl of Great Price, Moses 1:39.) This is a capsule statement, a succinct summary of the work of redemption in Christ. Latter-day Saints believe there are two types of salvation made available through the atonement of Jesus Christ—universal and individual. All who take a physical body—good or bad, evil or righteous—will be resurrected. That is, all will one day rise from death to life, their spirits reuniting with their bodies, never again to be divided. "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." (1 Cor. 15:22.) This is universal salvation. It is salvation from physical death, a salvation available to all. Immortality is salvation from the grave. It is endless life. It is a universal gift.

Individual salvation is another matter. Though all salvation is available through the goodness and grace of Christ, Latter-day Saints believe there are certain things that must be done in order for divine grace and mercy to be activated in the lives of individual followers of Christ. We must come unto him—accept him as Lord and Savior, have faith on his name, repent of sin, be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and strive to keep God's commandments to the end of our days. Eternal life, known also as salvation or exaltation, comes to those who believe and seek to remain true to the gospel covenant. Christ is "the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him." (Heb. 5:9.) One Book of Mormon prophet thus observed,["[Christ] shall come into the world to redeem his people; and he shall take upon him the transgressions of those who believe on his name; and these are they that shall have eternal life, and salvation cometh to none else. Therefore the wicked remain as though there had been no redemption made, except it be the loosing of the bands of death; for behold, the day cometh that all shall rise from the dead and stand before God, and be judged according to their works." (Book of Mormon, Alma 11:40-41.) Eternal life is endless life, but it is also life with and like God. It is God's life. It is the highest form of salvation.

ALL MAY BE SAVED

Latter-day Saints believe that all men and women have the capacity to be saved. "We believe," Joseph Smith wrote in 1842, "that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel." (Pearl of Great Price, A of F 1:3.) Stated another way, no one who comes to earth is outside the reach of Christ's power to save, no soul beyond the pale of mercy and grace. "God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." (Acts 10:34-35.) Latter-day Saints do not believe in predestination. They do not believe that men and women are chosen or elected unconditionally to salvation or reprobation.

In Joseph Smith's day the great debate was between the Presbyterians and the Methodists. The Presbyterians subscribed to the tenets of Calvinism. They believed in such principles as the unconditional election of individuals to eternal life, limited atonement (only the elect are saved through Christ's atonement), the irresistibility of grace (no one chosen for salvation can resist the call to the same), and the perseverance of saints (one cannot fall from grace). The Methodists believed that men and women had a say in whether or not they would be saved, that there was a method, a system by which people could develop spiritually, that our works and labors in this life were necessary. They believed that a person could be in God's grace today and fall from it tomorrow, repent and be restored to that grace thereafter, and so on. For Joseph the Prophet, the two positions were extreme; truth took a road between them both.<#>5 Early on in his life, Joseph seemed to oppose the doctrine of predestination; this may explain why he seemed somewhat partial to the Methodists.

In regard to the individual responsibility men and women have to accept the doctrine of Christ, Latter-day Saints believe that the highest rewards hereafter and the greatest happiness here are reserved for those who come unto Christ and accept his gospel. Though they acknowledge the decency of men and women of goodwill everywhere, the effort of many outside the Christian faith to make a positive difference in the world, and the nobility and refined character of so many who adopt other religious views, still the Latter-day Saints hold to the position that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of all men and women. His message and redemptive labors are infinite in scope and meant to be accepted by all. He will one day return in glory to the earth, assume responsibility for the purification of this planet, and reign as King of kings and Lord of lords.

1 Teachings, pp. 59-60.

2 Gospel Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1971), p. 395.

3 Ibid., pp. 398-99.

4 See D&C 19:15-20; Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 3:205-6.

5 See Teachings, pp. 338-39.




(Robert L. Millet, The Mormon Faith: Understanding Restored Christianity [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1998], 53 - 54.)