Historical Criticisms of the Book of Mormon. Yeah, we are all generally familiar with most of the issues brought up in this essay. This was written by a guy named Edward Firmage. His story is a lot like everyone else’s. He was assigned to teach GD, he was excited and got super into it as an academic and a big Nibley fan. After a closer look, he was out. Firmage goes on to list several issues that are resolved if one assumes the BOM is a 19th century work.
- The Egypt problem. The book of Mormon is written in “the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.” The plates of brass, apparently, are in Egyptian as well. There are several problems related to this issue. One being that it assumes there even was a canon of scripture existed in the 6th century BC. The other is that how would Lehi’s family have gotten the scripture translated from Hebrew to Egyptian, and why?
Firmage gives an interesting explanation to this problem by assuming Joseph wrote it. So, Anthon proclaimed the characters to be Egyptian. Now whether that is accurate nor not, Martin Harris said it was and Joseph found it very useful. Firmage points out that at both of the starting points for the translation of the BOM (Mosiah being the first after the 116 pages were lost, and 1 Ne. as the later translated but supposed start of the record), the BOM gives its language provenance. The Egyptian connection then might have been born by an off-the-cuff comment by Anthon. - The prophecies and order of translation. Early parts of the BOM translation (Mosiah through Alma 16) don’t mention anything about Jesus coming to America. The beginning of the record (i.e. the last thing to be “translated”) is chock full of Jesus prophecies. One would think that in Mosiah through Alma, people would reference the wonderful prophecies about Jesus. Firmage also brings up the interesting aspect of 1 and 2 Nephi being prophetic in nature rather than historical, as one would expect. He feels like this is best explained by the notion that by the time Joseph got around to writing 1 and 2 Ne. he had already written the end and could better reference that to the beginning. Firmage does address the small vs large plates of Nephi issue by bringing up the fact that when the BOM talks about handing plates down through generations it never mentions a separate set of more prophetic plates. Although, all my life I assumed that there were lots of different plates being passed around and that there was a lot of stuff that could be included in the word “plates.” Firmage views Words of Mormon as a clumsy attempt to knit the two together and I do agree with that. Whole institute classes periods are devoted to explaining the convoluted way the small plates fit in.
The other example Firmage gives for weird stuff being better explained by a 19th century work is the fact that the restoration of a church that had lost it’s authority is never mentioned. Lots is mentioned about a great and abominable church, but nothing really about a whole new church restoration. The marvelous work and Josephs calling in the book of Mormon is generally related to his translating and gathering Israel. Now, gathering Israel could be taken to mean building a church, but if that were the case the BOM could have been a lot more specific, as it was about a lot of other stuff. Firmage suggests that the idea to found a church may have come about in the very last stages of the translation, as he was prophesying about himself. At that point thought, it would have been hard to put stuff about a church in.
He also brings up the issue of Moroni where a lot of it reads like a church handbook,
But what most of us will probably know is that much of Moroni reads like a laundry list of 19th century theological talking points. This was also Alexander Campbell’s issue. Firmage goes on to discuss some of these talking points like infant baptism etc.
