Transcription
So I took an anthropology class in high school, and we were discussing the settlement of the United States. And, um, we learned that there was a lot of speculation going on at the time about where the Native Americans came from. And my teacher kind of scoped the room and asked, uh, for a show of hands, how many Mormons we have in the room? And my aunt went up. Um, I was the only one. But she said, "Well, amidst all this confusion, comes along this guy, Joseph Smith, and guess what? He's got this book that an angel gave him, and it just has all of the answers that tells where the Native Americans came from." And her arms went up, an exclamation I'll never forget. And she said, "How convenient!"
And I didn't think much of it. I was 17, but it stuck with me. And as I went through life and had more experiences and reflected on her statement, I thought about Joseph Smith. And I thought, "There's just nothing convenient about his life. There's not a lot of convenience in religion, and there's nothing convenient about this."
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I believe that the Lord God created the universe. I believe that he sent his only son to die, die for my sins. And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America. I am a Mormon. And a Mormon, trust me, the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our testimony. Just as the arch crumbles if the keystone is removed, removed, so does all the church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. The enemies of the church understand this clearly. The book itself goes to great pains to insist on its own authenticity and historicity, the actual authorship by Nephi and subsequent prophets. I think that if the Book of Mormon is fiction, then Moroni was a fictitious character. If Moroni was a fictitious character, then he never appeared to Joseph Smith. If he never appeared to Joseph Smith, then the entire edifice of the church just collapses.
Mormonism makes specific historical truth claims. There is the claim that Joseph Smith literally went out in the woods to pray in 1820, and God and Jesus came and told him all the churches were wrong. God tells him that there is a book of scripture hid in the ground that's going to become the Book of Mormon. That claims to be the story of two migrations from the Old World to the New, where there were battles involving millions of people. One would expect there to be evidence of this civilization, yet we find nothing. The Book of Mormon clearly wants to be read as a historical text, not just as a novel, not as a fable. It wants to be read as a history. That's the way Joseph Smith understood it. That's the way that most members of the church and church leaders have understood it.
To, uh, say that Joseph Smith just made this up, just sat there and read it off when he's, you know, 24 years old, uh, with no learning to speak of, I do not think, as a historian, you can say Joseph Smith could have written that book. There are sections in there that Joseph Smith could not have made up. There's something historical about it.
I made it my goal to read virtually every attack on the Book of Mormon that was in print, vir- everything that's been written to to denigrate or diminish belief in the Book of Mormon since 1830. I have never found anything that, to my mind, poses a serious threat, uh, or a serious challenge to the the fundamental assertions about its authenticity given by Joseph Smith. And contrary to what is often the popular opinion, I think there is an abundant wealth of evidence that substantiates its historical claims.
There are a lot of people whose very allegiance to the church has been based primarily upon their acceptance of the Book of Mormon as a literal translation of an ancient record. That's bedrock for them. And when they discover evidence to the contrary, it can be anywhere from unsettling to catastrophic for them.
There's a statement that Elder Jeffrey R. Holland made a few years ago, uh, in General Conference. He said, "If you're going to leave the Mormon Church, you have to crawl under, over, or around the Book of Mormon." And if they leave this church, they must do so by crawling over or under or around the Book of Mormon to make their exit. For me, it would be hard for a statement to be less accurate, uh, than than that description that Elder Holland gave. Um, I oriented my entire life around the Book of Mormon. I have never had a desire to lose my faith in the Book of Mormon. If anything, I had every desire to to believe in the Book of Mormon and hold tight to it. I would say my testimony in the Book of Mormon died by a thousand cuts. It was the Book of Mormon that killed my faith in the Book of Mormon.
Let me explain. I had been taught that when Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, that he had the plates in the room. What I discovered was that he had had a hat with the stone that he put in the hat, and that that the plates weren't even in the room, really.
Now, when I put the seer stones into the hat, the ancient letters light up and change to English, which I can then read to you. Wow. Wow. I'm seeing the light. Why were the plates created and written on and preserved and kept for Joseph Smith if he's not even going to use them? It made no sense to me.
He never claimed to be an empty vessel through which God just dictated things. Joseph Smith never claimed that that's the way the revelation worked. I don't like the word translation. It's clearly a channeling of some sort, inspired by the gold plates. He always went back and revised his revelations. He even revised the language of the Book of Mormon. There's a kind of implicit recognition there that the language that he was using to try and communicate what he was receiving through revelation was never adequate. He was always frustrated with the inadequacy of language. Translation is always a creative process in which the translator is a part of it. And so I think this speaks to something deep within Mormon theology that we are co-participants with God.
Then I found out that, uh, many of the animals and plants and technologies mentioned in the Book of Mormon, uh, didn't exist in the Americas during the time the Book of Mormon took place. There were no horses in pre-Columbian America. There was no steel in pre-Columbian America. It's not a historical book.
I'm always reminded that as a Greek student, uh, learning the word hippopotamus, of course, meant horse of the river. So the Romans called a hippopotamus a horse. That was their name for it. So one could imagine, right, modern skeptics who didn't know much about antiquity saying, "Well, the Romans obviously invented this because there aren't any river horses in in Egypt." You, you use names and terminology that are part of the the resources available to you. So I don't know what horses in the Book of Mormon were. Were they llamas? Were they the horses that are now extinct? But, but the, all of the, all of the questions about silk or scimitars or steel fall into the same kind of category. They're, they're just not really, really serious issues.
While he was serving in the United States Senate, my father, Bob Bennett, wrote a book. It was called "Leap of Faith: Confronting the Origins of the Book of Mormon." And later, President Henry B. Eyring would call it "the greatest defense of the Book of Mormon ever written." His defense of the Book of Mormon, which is really doubt, I don't know if who's ever been a better one or if there will be a better one. My father gave an extemporaneous fireside of about the Book of Mormon, and the message of that fireside was, "Somebody wrote it. The Book of Mormon exists. That means somebody wrote it. Somebody created it before 1829. You have to explain who wrote it. It's here. It's physical. It cannot be waved away."
Because there are things in the Book of Mormon that can't be easily explained away. There's an ancient burial site that's mentioned in First Nephi called Nahom, that wasn't known when the book was published, and yet has since been discovered exactly where the Book of Mormon said it would be. There's a form of Hebrew poetry called chiasmus that's all throughout the Book of Mormon, but that poetical style had not been discovered during the time of Joseph Smith. The most impressive chiasmatic structure in the Book of Mormon is the powerfully Christ-centered chiasm in Alma 36. The chance that it was produced by accident is 0.018%. There are ancient names, ancient Egyptian and Hebrew names, all throughout the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith couldn't possibly have known, and yet they're there.
It's clear to me that the Book of Mormon isn't just a plagiarized document. I think that's overly simplistic. It's overly reductionistic. It doesn't take into account the inner complexity of the book. Uh, does it have borrowings from the King James Bible and possibly from other ideas and sources? Sure. This, this can, this can be part of Joseph Smith's mind as a translator, but it is a unique and and complex and rather stunning work. Even the most critical scholars of of Joseph Smith and his work all admit they can't figure out how he did it, how he produced such complex, sophisticated midrashic books of scripture that that actually comment and clarify the Bible in in ways that are so complex, it would be difficult for today's scholars to reproduce the same thing. For Joseph Smith to have written the Book of Mormon would be like some country kid with a banjo who could pluck out a few bars of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on his banjo being able to write a complete symphony in chorus with all kinds of intricate, uh, themes and integrated ideas.
It might be that we can come up with kind of concrete, tangible, scientific evidence, you know, that proves the historicity of the Book of Mormon. I think in some ways that would take away from from some of the, uh, the, the power of faith. So that leaves us with, what is the Book of Mormon at the end of the day? I think it's exactly what the church states it to be. It's another testament of Jesus Christ. The strongest testimony of the Book of Mormon is the fact that so many people are inspired to live the best lives that they can from interactions with its pages. Like, it's hard, it's hard to write a book, period. It's super hard to write a book that's popular. It's almost impossible to write a book that's popular for a couple hundred years. But most importantly, it's super-duper hard to write a book that inspires people to be and do good things. Not everybody who reads it is going to be converted, but so many will tell you that that was a turning point for them.
I've interviewed a lot of people over the years who were converts, and I can ask them three questions and have a pretty good idea of what the answers are to numbers one and two. Number one is, "Did you read it from cover to cover?" Well, no. Number two is, "So, what do you remember about what you read?" Well, there were a lot of wars. Number three is, "What was the experience of reading it?" Well, let me tell you. And that's where the narrative can go in all of these directions that have a common theme: that was something happened as a result of my encounter with that book that was not in that book.
I see the Book of Mormon as a divine access point. It's a tangible miracle that connects us to God. Rather than looking at scripture as the infallible word of God, as a manual that perfectly defines morality and divinity, instead, a more sophisticated way of looking at it is scripture is that it's a springboard. That every revelation passes through imperfect human vessels, and those vessels' voices are there in the book. And so, rather than looking at it as a manual, if it's a springboard to enlightenment, where readers on the one hand will take very carefully the words that these inspired authors are writing, but on the second hand, realizing that it's not a perfect record, that there are mistakes in it, and that they are free, therefore, to sift through and identify by those and make insights from their own critical reading. That's a profound way of reading scripture that I think the Book of Mormon is is practically begging its readers to adopt.
I'm not concerned about historicity. I'm concerned about how God communicates with me through this particular text. And I think that the text is unique, um, in sort of facilitating that kind of communication. It's either a work of of genius, of untutored genius, it's hard to match anywhere, uh, or it's, it's inspired. I'm not convinced, uh, of the Book of Mormon's importance as a vehicle for revelations about Christ because I'm convinced about its historicity. It has been, for me, uh, ground zero for my exposure to Christ, and on that score, there's not much room for doubt.