18) II Nephi 5:16: And I, Nephi, did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things; for they were not to be found upon the land, wherefore, it could not be built like unto Solomon’s temple. But the manner of the construction was like unto the temple of Solomon; and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine.
Half a dozen men build a temple like unto Solomon! Respect!
19) II Nephi 10:10: But behold, this land, said God, shall be a land of thine inheritance, and the Gentiles shall be blessed upon the land.
God favours one country over the others! What does blessed mean? This doesn't sound much like a God. The Book of Mormon assumes the Bible theme of a God playing the old game of fascists and favourites.
20) Mosiah 10:20: And it came to pass that we did drive them again out of our land; and we slew them with a great slaughter, even so many that we did not number them.
Silly hyperbole and tautology!
21) Alma 18:43: And it came to pass that his servants took him and carried him in unto his wife, and laid him upon a bed; and he lay as if he were dead for the space of two days and two nights; and his wife, and his sons, and his daughters mourned over him, after the manner of the Lamanites, greatly lamenting his loss.
Biblical plagiarism! Laid low as if dead is a terrible cliché!
22) Alma 47:30: And the army which pursued after them returned, having pursued after them in vain; and thus Amalickiah, by his fraud, gained the hearts of the people.
‘Pursue after’ is a rotten tautology!
23) III Nephi 10:4: O ye people of these great cities which have fallen, who are descendants of Jacob, yea, who are of the house of Israel, how oft have I gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and have nourished you.
Repetition: in close verses the hen gathers her chickens four times!
24) III Nephi 17:15: And when he had said these words, he himself also knelt upon the earth; and behold he prayed unto the Father, and the things which he prayed cannot be written, and the multitude did bear record who heard him.
How convenient that Jesus’ prayer wasn’t recorded!
25) Mormon 2:14: And they did not come unto Jesus with broken hearts and contrite spirits, but they did curse God, and wish to die. Nevertheless they would struggle with the sword for their lives.
As close as Joseph Smith comes to humour. esias, edit of original board post 15th June 2015 ‘We Can Prove the Book of Mormon is Not True’
God’s mysterious masterstrokes flourish unworthy works of weak writing. The Book of Mormon is a terse, turgid, tangled collection of nineteenth-century assumptions, plagiarised unashamedly, plagued with anachronisms, lack of perspective, but prettified in seventeenth-century English to make you wonder where in their magic underwear Mormons keep their peep-stones of literary criticism. esias, ‘Hi, I'm Elohim: The Trouble With God’
The Book of Mormon is not a book of history. The Book of Mormon is a book about the future. David Bednar, Mormon apostle, 2021
The first mark of a cult that is ever true is extra Biblical revelation – they pay lip service to the Bible. Dr David Breese, author Know the Marks of Cults
The Book of Mormon is the Rube Goldberg literary product of a small group of financially desperate men. Each man attempted to imitate the writing style of the King James Bible and borrowed liberally from favorite books and sermons, including the Bible, View of the Hebrews, and The Late War.
The forerunner to the Book of Mormon was Manuscript Found, a book written by Solomon Spalding, a Dartmouth College graduate and veteran of the American Revolutionary War. Spalding submitted his manuscript to a Pittsburgh print shop for publication. Witnesses described the book as a Biblical-style fiction that traced the origin of Native Americans to migrations from the Middle East. Impoverished and unable to pay the printing costs, Spalding died with his manuscript unpublished. Sidney Rigdon, a tanner who supplied leather bookbindings to the shop, acquired the manuscript and modified it to reflect his religious views. Though Rigdon had suffered a childhood brain trauma that plagued him throughout his life, he was shrewd and intelligent and became a well-known Reformed Baptist Preacher, referred to by his peers as a ‘walking Bible’. Driven by the voices in his head and by envy of his famous mentor (Alexander Campbell), Rigdon modified the Spalding document to reflect his religious views. He then teamed with Joseph Smith junior, a man who Rigdon believed could bring the Book of Mormon to light and secure the funds needed for its publication.
Smith was a convicted con artist who carried out his seer stone treasure-hunting cons in upstate New York and Eastern Pennsylvania. To bring the Book of Mormon to the attention of the public and to increase sales, Smith created a miraculous story of the book’s origins and leaked word that he possessed golden plates of great value. To raise funds for printing, he targeted a gullible farmer named Martin Harris as his mark, and flattered Harris into serving as his scribe. Separated from Smith by a curtain, Harris recorded Smith’s dictation. Once convinced that the manuscript would sell, Harris mortgaged his farm to pay for its printing. In the course of the con, however, Harris’ wife Lucy stole the first 116 pages to test Smith’s powers as a seer. Her act precipitated a hurried replacement and reorganization of the text. Rigdon worked in Ohio with Parley Pratt, his crafty and disingenuous protégé, to fabricate replacement text and to deliver it to Smith in New York. Pratt, a tin peddler, knew the route between New York and Ohio well. Smith dictated text received from Rigdon to his distant cousin Oliver Cowdery – a pious pamphlet peddler – who, like Pratt, also worked the route between New York and Ohio. Both Smith and Cowdery added inserts to the text, and The Book of Mormon version 2.0 was born. Just three months after its publication, Smith and Rigdon continued their collaboration – this time on the King James Bible, restoring to it ‘plain and precious things’, including elements of Royal Arch freemasonry. The Inspired Version of the Bible and The Book of Mormon laid the foundation for a restoration of primitive Christianity and gathering of the faithful to a New Jerusalem in America. Within a year of publication of the Book of Mormon, hundreds of impoverished converts had gathered in Ohio, drawn by promises of ‘a land of milk and honey’ and an ‘endowment from on high’ – modern revelation penned by Sidney Rigdon and delivered by Joseph Smith. Craig C, board post 18th June 2015, ‘It Was a Collaboration’
All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the elect have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so ‘slow’, so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle – keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.
The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel – half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern – which was about every sentence or two – he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as ‘exceeding sore’, ‘and it came to pass’ etc. and made things satisfactory again. ‘And it came to pass’ was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet. Mark Twain, Roughing It pp.58-59
The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable – it is ‘smouched’ from the New Testament and no credit given. ibid.
There is no archaeological proof of the Book of Mormon. You can look all you want. And there’s been a lot of speculation about it. There’ve been books written by Mormon scholars saying that ‘this event took place here’ or ‘this event took place here’. But that’s entirely speculative. There is absolutely no archaeological evidence that you can tie directly to events that took place. Professor David Johnson, cited Mike London, July 1997
No place in the New World whatsoever … Just doesn’t seem to fit anything … It seems misplaced … It doesn’t seem like a translation to me … And the terminologies and the language used and the methods of explaining and putting things down are 19th century literary concepts and cultural experiences one would expect Joseph Smith and his colleagues would experience. And for that reason I call it transliteration, and I’d rather not call it a translation after the 7th chapter … I would have to look for the place of the Book of Mormon events to have taken place in the Old World. It just doesn’t seem to fit anything … in my discipline in anthropology. Professor Ray Matheny, Sunstone Symposium August 1984, ‘Book of Mormon Archaeology’
An interesting fact of history … is that when Smith was a young boy, he went through an excruciating surgery on his leg that caused him to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. We are left to believe that Smith … was able to escape from them with this physical handicap, all while carrying the plates …
Gold weighs 1,204 pounds per cubic foot, so … if the plates were made of gold (as the Angel Moroni claimed them to be), they would have weighed 200 pounds. This becomes problematic since no one believes that it is physically possible to carry such a weight for any considerable distance, much less be able to run away from thieves bent on stealing the plates …