Critics in Mormon Church Express Doubts on the Book

The Book of Mormon, the scriptural cornerstone of the Mormon Church, has always had outside critics who scoffed at the supposed ancient sacred history of the Americas obtained from an angel by church founder Joseph Smith in 1827.

Now, skeptical studies have been surfacing increasingly from within the church.

The research challenges to the credibility of the Book of Mormon are prompting church officials to downplay the significance of the findings.

The church says the Book of Mormon was dictated to two scribes by Smith, who said he used special “seeing” devices to translate golden plates inscribed in “reformed Egyptian characters.” Associates of Smith testified to seeing the allegedly long-buried plates, but Smith said they were taken back by an angel after his work was completed.

Translation Challenged

Non-members and defectors from the Mormon movement have long maintained that the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, is not a translation of an ancient record because it reflects the culture, religious ideas and writings prevalent in early 19th-Century America. Therefore, they say, the book was written by Smith himself, despite the fact he was only in his early 20s.

Suggestions that Smith borrowed from other sources in dictating the Book of Mormon emerged recently from a church worker with a doctorate in New Testament studies and from a once-famous Mormon theologian whose written doubts of 60 years ago are about to be published.

The first case concerns a sermon that, according to the Book of Mormon, the resurrected Jesus delivered somewhere in the New World in AD 34. It could not have come from the “translation” of an independent source because it is so similar to the Sermon on the Mount in the King James Version of the Bible, said Stan Larson, a New Testament scholar who worked for the church’s translations department for most of the last 10 years.

In a paper Larson recently submitted to an evangelical journal and circulated among friends, he contends that the Book of Mormon “blindly follows” the Gospel of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount since it repeats mistaken translations that occur in the King James Version available in Joseph Smith’s day.

Critic Resigns Church Job

Larson said he resigned his church job two weeks ago when faced with the prospect of suspension from duties over the article, which officials believed was derogatory. Larson’s supervisor, Eb Davis, emphasized that Larson was not suspended and that the discussion was over Larson’s personal problems in his home church. Larson said he was previously questioned by his local bishop in West Jordan, Utah, about his paper and his views of church doctrine.

A member of the church’s Correlation Committee, which examines the doctrinal content of church writings, later sought to question Larson, but Larson declined, saying that he needed time to look for another job. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in England last year.

“I went into New Testament textual studies hoping that when I compared Greek and Syriac manuscripts with the Book of Mormon that I would find support for the Book of Mormon and be able to show its antiquity,” Larson said. “I hoped to find support for the church, but I haven’t, to be honest.”

Larson’s article says that the King James Version used words in a dozen places in the Sermon on the Mount that are variations or additions to what has since been found in the preponderance of the oldest and best manuscripts.

The resurrected Jesus giving the sermon in the Americas, for instance, adds to the Lord’s Prayer the concluding lines: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.” That is in the King James Version of Matthew, but the discovery of many more manuscripts in the last 470 years has shown that it was not part of the Sermon on the Mount appearing in the oldest versions of Matthew.

Theologian’s Doubts

The second controversy concerns historian B. H. Roberts (1857-1933), the Mormon Church’s principal theological defender early this century whose late-in-life doubts will be published Nov. 7 as “Studies of the Book of Mormon” by the University of Illinois Press.

The studies reveal a figure whose dogmatic assertions of earlier years “had been replaced by pained and troubled doubts about the Book of Mormon, which he challenged his colleagues in the hierarchy to help resolve,” said Brigham D. Madsen, the new book’s editor and professor emeritus of history at the University of Utah.

Roberts was troubled by, among other things, the Book of Mormon’s anachronistic descriptions of domestic animals, iron and steel, silk, wheat and wheeled vehicles in the Americas. Historians say all these things did not exist in this hemisphere until well after the period that the Book of Mormon purports to describe.

Roberts apparently never expressed his doubts publicly, but he wrote a letter to the church’s First Presidency in the 1920s indicating that he came upon an “embarrassing” theory about the Book of Mormon because of remarkable similarities between it and Ethan Smith’s “View of the Hebrews,” published in 1823 and 1825 and probably available to Smith before the production of the Book of Mormon.

Parallels Observed

Ethan Smith was a New England minister who had a church in Vermont town where Oliver Cowdery, Joseph Smith’s final scribe, lived until 1825. The late Fawn Brodie, a UCLA historian with Mormon roots, was among a number of authors who observed that the parallel features in the two books could not be “mere coincidence” even though Brodie conceded that “it may never be proved that Joseph saw ‘View of the Hebrews’ before writing the Book of Mormon.”

Roberts said the cumulative force of the many similarities in Mormon scripture to “View of the Hebrews” made them “so serious a menace to Joseph Smith’s story of the Book of Mormon’s origin.”

Roberts said further: “The material in Ethan Smith’s book is of a character and quantity to make a ground plan for the Book of Mormon.”

He summarized 26 points of similarity, including the insistence by both books that the American Indians originated in Israel and the presumption that this supposedly unified race occupied all of the American continents.

“Can such numerous and startling points of resemblance and suggestive contact be merely coincidence?” Roberts asked.

Possibility Noted

He said it was “possible” for Smith to have created the Book of Mormon. “There can be no doubt as to the possession of a vividly strong, creative imagination by Joseph Smith, the Prophet. . . . “

Roberts also said he found that some portions of the Book of Mormon showed signs of being produced by “a young and undeveloped, but piously inclined mind. The evidence I sorrowfully submit, points to Joseph Smith as their creator.”

Although a small part of Roberts’ unpublished doubts were discussed in academic circles in the post-World War II period, Roberts “was a seriously neglected figure in the Mormon Church,” according to Sterling M. McMurrin, whose essay on Roberts appears in the new book.

McMurrin said that Roberts’ biographer, Truman G. Madsen, wrote an article in 1979 claiming that Roberts was only playing the role of “devil’s advocate” in raising questions in his unpublished study. In Madsen’s authorized biography of B. H. Roberts published in 1980, McMurrin said Madsen “devoted comparatively little attention to Roberts’ views on the Book of Mormon, referring only to publications that had appeared prior to 1910.” Roberts’ most skeptical work was not mentioned.

Authenticity Defended

In defense of the Book of Mormon’s authenticity, the head of a research group at the church-run Brigham Young University asserted that neither the Larson paper nor the Roberts’ book contain unanswerable problems.

The rebuttals have come from John W. Welch, who is president of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. A former Los Angeles attorney, Welch also teaches law at BYU.

Regarding the similar sermons in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Book of Mormon, Welch asked generally, “The question is not just what did Matthew write, but what did Jesus say? The two need not necessarily always be exactly the same.”

Welch said even if the earlier texts of Matthew do not include the concluding lines to the Lord’s Prayer, that does not mean Jesus himself did not say them or something like them.

Welch also contended that “most of Larson’s points are not new,” noting that a deceased Mormon scholar, Sidney B. Sperry, discussed the biblical and Book of Mormon parallels.

Larson, on the other hand, noted that Sperry said Joseph Smith “may have used the King James Version” for both the sermon in the Americas and when quoting from the prophet Isaiah.

‘Exactly the Same’

Larson said about half of the Isaiah verses quoted in the Book of Mormon “are exactly the same” as the King James Version.

An official statement on Larson’s article from the Salt Lake City church headquarters denied that Smith “slavishly paralleled the Bible.”

But the statement said that besides translations of the Book of Mormon plates there would have been an interplay with “the prophet’s own knowledge of certain biblical language.” Thus, “the prophet translated certain things from ancient records, reworded some biblical verses and received Scripture by a process of revelation.”

Larson said he believed the church response to his article represented a new, “looser view” of Joseph Smith’s method of translating the Book of Mormon.

“I’m not sure Brother Sperry would have agreed with that,” he said.

70-Page Rebuttal

In responding to the upcoming publication of B. H. Roberts’ doubts about the Book of Mormon, Welch said in a 70-page draft rebuttal mailed to The Times that those who suggest the church figure lost faith “have a hard time accounting for Roberts’ almost obsessive religious use of the Book of Mormon up to his dying day.”

Welch also said it can be shown that Ethan Smith’s “View of the Hebrews” differs far more from the Book of Mormon than it resembles it, “making it hard to believe that Joseph Smith relied on (“View of the Hebrews”) to any significant extent.”

Roberts’ objection to the Book of Mormon’s implications that all the natives of the Americas were descended from the Israelites may have been answered by BYU anthropologist John L. Sorenson in the Mormon magazine Ensign last year. Sorenson suggested that the peoples described in the Book of Mormon lived in a limited region of the Americas rather than everywhere on the continent.

The theory nevertheless is at odds with Joseph Smith’s unqualified “revelation” that “the Indians were literal descendants of Abraham,” the Jewish patriarch of the Old Testament.