The Book of Mormon vs. the Bible

Last chapter I asked you to do a hard thing: to put the Bible on the table and test it, and to trust the result. It passed. The text wasn’t rewritten on its way to you, and the world it describes keeps turning up in the ground. So now we have a measuring stick both of us accept — a book your own Article of Faith calls the word of God, in the very King James edition your Church hands you.

There’s only one honest thing to do with a measuring stick, and that’s to measure something. So let me measure the book your Church places at the very center of everything.

I don’t say “center” for effect. Your prophets do. President Ezra Taft Benson built a whole General Conference address around one image:

I want you to hear how much that concedes to a test like this one. The keystone is the stone you can’t afford to have be wrong. If the Bible is the standard — and your Church says it is — then the fair question is simply this: does the keystone agree with the standard it claims to uphold? Let’s hold them up side by side and look.

Where was Jesus born?

Start with something small and checkable, because small things are where a book’s carefulness shows. The Old Testament names the town where the Messiah would be born, centuries in advance:

The Bible says Bethlehem. It says it in Micah’s prophecy and it says it again the day it came true — Matthew 2:1Matthew 2:1 (KJV) — Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, opens with Jesus “born in Bethlehem of Judaea.” The Book of Mormon, giving the very same prophecy, says he would be born “at Jerusalem.”

Now, I promised to be fair, and here I have to be. Faithful Latter-day Saint scholars have an answer, and it deserves to be on the table beside the problem. They point out that Alma doesn’t say Jesus would be born in the city of Jerusalem; he says “at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers.” Bethlehem sits only about five miles from Jerusalem, and it’s true that ancient writers sometimes named a region by its principal city. Amarna-era letters, they note, refer to a broader “land of Jerusalem.” So the defense is: Alma was speaking of a district, and Bethlehem lay inside it.

I’ll let you weigh that yourself — that’s the whole point of this letter. I’d only ask you to notice two things. First, the defense works by making the prophecy less precise than the Bible’s, which named the town outright. And second, ask yourself which reading you’d have reached on your own, before anyone needed to reconcile it. I’m not going to hang the keystone on this verse. I raise it because it’s the kind of seam that made me start looking harder — and because what I found when I looked harder is not what I expected. Hold that thought.

Saved by grace — after all we can do?

Here’s a heavier one, and I want to handle it carefully, because this is a place where it would be easy to overclaim, and I won’t. Paul writes:

Paul says grace, not of works, lest anyone boast — the same note he strikes in Romans 4:5Romans 4:5 (KJV) — But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness., where God “justifieth the ungodly” and counts a man’s faith, not his labor, for righteousness. The Book of Mormon says grace too — but adds three words: “after all we can do.” Moroni 10:32 has a similar shape, promising that “if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness… then is his grace sufficient for you.”

I’m not going to tell you those verses can’t be reconciled. Careful readers argue over what “after all we can do” modifies, and I’d be cheating you if I pretended the case was closed in one paragraph. So I’m not closing it here. I only want you to feel the tension honestly — Paul putting grace before works to rule boasting out, your keystone putting grace after “all we can do” — and to carry the question with you. This is the hinge of the whole gospel, and it deserves a whole chapter. Chapter 8 is that chapter. Let me keep my promise and wait.

The part that surprised me most

I expected to find the Book of Mormon disagreeing with the Bible. What I did not expect — and I mean this plainly — is how often, on the very biggest question, your own book quietly sides with the Bible against the doctrine you were later taught.

The doctrine I mean is the one that says God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three separate Gods, and that God himself was once a man who progressed to become God. Hold that beside what the Book of Mormon actually says about God.

Abinadi, on trial for his life, insists the Father and the Son are “one God.” Mosiah 15:1–5 is worth reading slowly, but the phrase is unmistakable: “they are one God, yea, the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth.” When the lawyer Zeezrom presses Amulek — “Is there more than one God?” — the answer in Alma 11:26–29 is a single word: “No.” Nephi ends his account of the doctrine of Christ by naming Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as “one God, without end. Amen” (2 Nephi 31:21). And Mormon, writing to his son, describes a God who could not be more unlike a man who climbed to godhood:

Read those four passages as if you’d never been handed a conclusion about them. One God. Not more than one. Unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity. That is not the language of a God who was once a man and became divine, and it is not three separate Gods. It is much closer to what the Bible has said all along — and it is coming out of your keystone.

I want to be careful not to overplay this. The Book of Mormon isn’t a systematic theology, and you can find phrases people press in other directions. But the plain weight of it, on the nature of God, leans toward the Bible.

The question that leaves us with

So here’s where the measuring leaves us, and I’ll say it as gently as I can, because I don’t think it’s a small thing for you. Your Church calls the Book of Mormon the keystone — the stone that can’t be wrong without the arch coming down. And on the deepest question there is, the keystone teaches one unchangeable God.

Which raises a question I couldn’t put down once I saw it: if the keystone teaches one unchangeable God, where did the other doctrine come from? Not from the Bible. Not from the Book of Mormon. It came from somewhere later. That “somewhere” is the whole subject of the next chapter — and it’s where this letter turns from your scriptures to their history.

Your friend, Brock