Following are more of the comments or questions we have received from readers:
Comment #1: “How can you claim the Book of Mormon written on sheathes of metal is a holy work and that Joseph Smith is a prophet who wrote it?
Response: First of all, Joseph Smith did not write any part, not even a single sentence or word of the Book of Mormon. He translated already written records that had been engraved anciently on metal plates that are said to have been made of gold according to the witnesses who saw and held them (Hyrum Smith, “Communications,” Times and Seasons, November 1839, p21; Martin Harris to H. B. Emerson, January 1871, in Saints’ Herald, April 1, 1876, p198; “A Visit to John Whitmer,” Deseret Evening News, April 12, 1875).
As for writing on gold plates, one such plate was found in Lambayeque, Peru, which is on the vast plains of Túcume, part of the Lambayeque Valley, the largest valley of the north coast of Peru, which has numerous man-made waterways and about 250 decaying and heavily eroded mud-brick pyramids.
The plate, measuring 4 by 8 inches, is said to have been found in a tomb—its eight symbols have not been identified or translated but they have been claimed to be similar to writing of ancient Cyprus (Hugo Cohen Gold collection, Central Reserve Bank, Lima, Peru).
In almost every large European museum there is a surprisingly large number of metal plates or tablets with writing engraved on them. Such writing on metal plates are found from Europe to Asia, from the Vatican Library and the Louvre to Seoul, there are hundreds of examples of messages engraved on metal.
As for Joseph Smith translating the gold plates he received at the hill Cumorah in western New York, consider:
1. An uneducated young man, in something like 65 working days, produced unaided more than 500 pages of history about an ancient people, with complex, flawlessly interwoven plot lines, elaborate cultural and technical detail, and amazing theological and spiritual richness;
2. This uneducated young man did this by dictating to a scribe while looking into a stone placed in the bottom of a hat and dictating with eyes closed, 77 long verses of spiritual allegory based on expert olive tree horticulture without ever having seen an olive tree or known an olive farmer;
3. Also, this uneducated young man included in his dictation ancient Hebrew idioms and sophisticated literary structures like chiasmus (a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses);
4. This uneducated young man was able to know a lot about the Middle East, including exquisite detail of the Arabian Peninsula, where Lehi and his family traveled. His writing includes things about that region of the Arabian Peninsula that were not known in the western world in his time;
5. How could this uneducated man know, that while Alma was a woman’s name in the U.S. during his lifetime, that it was a man’s name in ancient Hebrew during Lehi’s lifetime? In fact, that was not known until the 1960s when a non-LDS Jewish archaeologist uncovered a document with the name of Alma, the on of Judah.
6. How could Joseph Smith come up with roughly 200 original names in the Book of Mormon, most of them verifiably Semitic?
7. Why would the witnesses of the Book of Mormon and the gold plates never deny their witness, even when some of them became bitter toward Joseph Smith and left the church?
8. With so many people involved, could a hoax of this magnitude go uncovered?
Comment #2: “Why did Lehi not know his own genealogy? The ridiculous statement that Lehi did not know ‘the genealogy of his fathers’ till he had the plates from Laban in Nephi 6:2 is so unlikely in a situation of a grown man with grown children in Jewish tradition that it casts doubt on the rest of the Book of Mormon” Nathanial G..
Response: Lehi’s ancestors of the tribe of Manasseh were very likely refugees who had fled from the Northern Kingdom during or prior to the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians. As refugees, when they fled their homes, they probably did not have time to bring their possessions, including such records. What they passed on to their descendants that reached Lehi, was an oral tradition covering about ten centuries, but to later generations, oral histories often lacked the authenticity of written records. Lehi, a dedicated Hebrew must have accepted such comments, but upon receiving the records of Laban brought to him by his sons, it showed the oral tradition to be founded in fact.
In one moment he went from believing his line to knowing where he fit into the overall histories of the Hebrews. To a Hebrew, that would have been a celebratory moment and worthy of Nephi abridging his father’s recdord onto the plates. In this way, Lehi “knew that he was a descendant of Joseph” through Manasseh and could prove his important status as such (Alma 10:3’ 1 Nephi 6:2).
Comment #3: “The fact is that there is no historical or archaeological indication of any kind that the early Church was other than the Catholic Church. When dealing with Mormon missionaries, if you want to watch their sails go slack quickly, ask them to produce any historical proof to support their claim that in the early centuries the Church was Mormon. They can’t do it because there is no such evidence” Kent B.
Response: Perhaps you can produce support or evidence that the early Church was called Catholic—a word that has no reference to Jesus Christ in any way. In fact, the word catholic was and is derived from Late Latin “catholicus,” from the Greek adjective καθολικός (katholikos), meaning "universal") and comes from the Greek phrase καθόλου (katholou), meaning "on the whole", "according to the whole" or "in general,” and is a combination of the Greek words κατά meaning "about" and ὅλος meaning "whole.”
On the other hand, “Mormon” is not the name of the Church, which correctly is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Note that it is the Church of Jesus Christ, which is found in the Bible. Some uninformed people use the term “Mormon,” and others “LDS” for Latter-day Saints” for brevity, but neither are the correct name of the Church.
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