November 16 – Listening to Moses v. Joseph Smith. Acts 3:22-23; “For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.”
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In the Mormon quote for today, we find that Nephi is “paraphrasing” the Apostle Peter in 570 BC…I would ask a Mormon how this could possibly happen and still be called inspired?
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1 Nephi 22:20; “And the Lord will surely prepare a way for his people, unto the fulfilling of the words of Moses, which he spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that all those who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people”
This is only paradoxical if you believe that scripture is made up by men. If that were true then it would be hard to explain how two people, separated by time and place, could come up with similar ideas and even similar phrasing. But where does scripture come from? Men of God inspired by the Holy Ghost. Can the Holy Ghost not inspire Nephi in one place and time and put similar ideas in the mind of Peter in another place and time? In fact, since holy scripture is inspired by God, one would expect frequent similarity of ideas and even of expression. You have presented yet one more powerful evidence that The Book of Mormon is what I know it to be, inspired holy scripture, tesifying of Christ as the God of the whole world.
Yes, Wayne God’s Word is inspired by the Holy Spirit. The huge difference between the Book of Mormon and the Bible is that one’s actually the Word of God, while the other isn’t. The Bible comes from men who were inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, while the Book of Mormon comes from mortal men inspired by their own imaginations.
It’s doesn’t take a lot of inspiration to plagiarize something that has already been written, or tweak it here and there to sound like it could have come from the same source as the original piece of work. And that’s exactly what Smith did. He took events from the Bible, changed things up a bit and used the language from the KJV so that people would believe him when he said it was a “inspired” and “another testament” of Jesus Christ.
It’s a sham and is no more inspired that a book of fairy tales.- Melissa Grimes
You attribute some amazing work to a barely literate farm boy. It seems to me that it takes a greater leap of faith to attribute all of that hard work and research to Joseph Smith than it does to believe his report of the direct intervention of God and angels into his life, leading to and following upon his translation of The Book of Mormon.
I have read many many books by many many authors of varying skill and ability, but never have I found any of those books to be the unending source of inspiration and infallible guide to living that I find in the Holy Bible and The Book of Mormon. They are of a kindred spirit and demonstrate the power of Christ as their ultimate Author.
It always amazes me how Mormons can revere Smith as this great prophet, and yet think he was dumb as a box of rocks at the same time. The truth is he was very intelligent and knew exactly what he was doing. What he lacked in “book smarts” he made up for in other areas such as charisma and manipulation.
Joseph Smith was very intelligent, but he was very unschooled and barely literate, especially at the time that he translated The Book of Mormon. Basic education, let alone the kind of literary skills that you would attribute to him, was more than his family could provide. The creation of such a book by such an unschooled very young man was well beyond his capacity. The only explanation for it is the one that he gave, that it is holy scripture, inspired by God and brought forward under God’s direction and help.
It wasn’t “beyond his capacity”. All he needed was a few good friends and a very active imagination to help him tell his tale of people who lived in the Americas long ago.
You don’t think he wrote the Book of Mormon all on his own do you? He had help, lots of help and this help didn’t come from the Holy Spirit.
If he didn’t want credit for writing the book why did he list himself as the author of the book in the first edition?
Actually, Joseph had very little help, and those he did have to help him as scribes (his own writing was very “unlettered”) as he translated did not have a whole lot more education than he did. You make an interesting point about being listed as “author” in the first edition. Surely if Joseph Smith were as clever at trying to deceive everyone as you allege, he would have caught that obvious “error”. Turns out, the copyright laws treated authorships and translations differently, with more protection for authorships.