Articles on Mormonism

By Everett Shropshire and John W. Morehead

In June of this year, we were in southern California teaching a seminar on witnessing to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormons). Afterward, a young man gave us some material he downloaded from the Internet. It came from a site defending Mormonism, maintained by a man named Kerry Shirts. The most objectionable part of this material was an attack on the reliability of the Bible's preservation through the centuries: "The Bible, Unfortunately, Has Not Been Perfectly Preserved Through the Centuries" at <http://www.cyberhighway.net/~shirtail/scriptur.htm>

At the outset, we note that it is curious why Mormons attack the Bible. The LDS church even gives free Bibles away through expensive TV advertising. In fact the eighth of the LDS "Articles of Faith" states: "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly..." Perhaps Shirts is trying to prove that the founder of the LDS church, Joseph Smith, Jr., was right when he claimed that "there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book."[1]

We decided it was important enough to respond to the data presented by Mr. Shirts, because his site made what appeared to be a convincing case for the unreliability of God's Word. Mormons and others might read this material and conclude that they could not believe the Bible. What follows is a refutation of those arguments.

First, in general, our observation was that the quotations used by Mr. Shirts were either taken out of context, exaggerated, or they misrepresented the views of the authors he cited. In every instance we were able to check, his research was faulty. Here is our response to his presentation. Shirts' propositions are indented and numbered, and in each case our response follows. Shirts' words appear exactly as we found them on the Internet. The only changes we have made are corrections to mistakes in his use of quotation marks in order to avoid confusion, and explanatory notes which we placed in brackets [ ].

1) Raymond Brown in his nifty book Responses to 101 Questions on the Bible notes that the Gospels, the first 4 books of the New Testament were: "edited and *RESHAPED* by an evangelist in the last third of the first century in order to address the spiritual needs of Christian readers he envisaged." (p. 58, my emphasis). In other words, the Gospels are ***NOT PERFECT***, nor are they original, but have been REWRITTEN to match an already preconceived end."

Our response: Here, the author's meaning has clearly been twisted. Brown was not saying that the Gospels were all rewritten by a single person, but that the original authors used some previously-existing material in the creation of the first Gospels. Shirts made it sound like someone tampered with the original text. While this idea might be consistent with LDS thinking, but it was not what Brown wrote.

2) James H. Charlesworth's fine article "From the Philopedia of Jesus to the Misopedia of the Acts of Thomas" in By Study and Also By Faith: Essays in Honor of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 1, notes that "Jesus' philopedia was SO ALTERED by some second-century Christian groups that it became misopedia. JESUS' OWN TEACHINGS WERE SOMETIMES CHANGED OR EVEN ABANDONED BY THOSE WHO CALLED HIM LORD." (p. 46, my emphasis). This clearly and obviously refutes Dirks silly wishes concerning the Bible, and confirms Joseph Smith and the Mormon view of the Bible in many ways.

Our response: If this is supposed to be a non-LDS source, as Shirts implied (He wrote, "Consider the NON-LDS aspects of the Bible, from some of the finest Bible scholars in the world."), it is curious that it comes from a work honoring Hugh Nibley, who is a long-time professor at Mormon-owned Brigham Young University. That aside, the title of the article indicates that the author was commenting on a book called the Acts of Thomas which was never regarded as being inspired by orthodox Christians. In fact, Eusebius classed it as being heretical.[2] This can hardly be used to cast aspersions on the text of the New Testament!

3) Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration notes that "a group of correctors working at Caesarea entered a large number of alterations into the text of both Old and New Testaments." (p. 46).

Our response: First, please note that the title of Dr. Metzger's book is The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. If the text were irretrievably lost, it could not have been restored, as Metzger indicates in his title.

And again, Shirts has taken the author out of context. He makes it sound as though these "correctors" changed the Bible. However, Metzger is discussing only one manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus. The context of the quotation is significant because the partial quotation given by Shirts leaves the reader with the impression that a group of scribes working at Caesarea made a number of changes in the text of the Old and New Testaments. And once more, how would we know alterations had been made unless we had the unaltered text?

4) [Quoting Metzger] "The whole of Matthew's Gospel as far as xxv, 6 is lost, as well as the leaves which originally contained John 6:50-58, 52, and 2 Cor. 4:13-xii, 6." (p. 46).

Our response: Here, again, Metzger is referring to only one manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, not the entire Bible!

5) [Quoting Metzger] "Unfortunately the beauty of the original writing has been spoiled by a later corrector..." (p. 47).

Our response: At the risk of being redundant, here, Metzger is referring to only one manuscript, Codex Vaticanus. And, as above, how would we know the "beauty of the original writing" unless we knew what it was?

6) [Quoting Metzger] "All known witnesses of the New Testament are to a greater or less extent mixed texts, and even the earliest manuscripts are not free from egregious errors..." (p. 246)

Our response: The task of textual criticism is to take the various manuscripts and use them to reconstruct the original text. Even though New Testament manuscripts contain scribal errors, it is not impossible to recover the original, which Dr. Metzger's title indicates. The next sentence after Shirts' citation reads, "Although in very many cases the textual critic is able to ascertain without residual doubt which reading must have stood in the original."[3]

7) Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee, Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism, notes that "There are places where the original text is not so certain..." (p. 16).

Our response: Here is another citation taken out of context. Fee was writing about minor variations. One of his examples was "whether the original text says that Jesus 'did not wish' to go about in Galilee or 'did not have the authority' to do so. But textual criticism is the methodology by which we can determine the original text with a high degree of confidence. What Shirts does not tell us is that Dr. Fee, in the preceding paragraph said that textual criticism "provides one with confidence that for the most part the text...truly represents what the biblical author actually wrote."[4]

8) [Quoting Epp] WITHOUT EXCEPTION, "all of the oldest Greek MSS had been corrupted by interpolation..." (p. 149).

Our response: This quotation was from Epp, and it, too was out of context. The author's point was that a man by the name of J. J. Wettstein in the 18^th century subscribed to a view called latinization. According to this view, "all the oldest Greek MSS [manuscripts] had been corrupted by interpolation from Latin MSS; consequently, [Wettstein] said, the textual critic must move several centuries beyond the oldest Greek MSS to more recent ones if a pure text is to be found." But this view was never commonly held among biblical scholars. In fact, Epp said that Wettstein pushed "further than anyone else the theory of the latinization of the oldest Greek MSS of the NT [New Testament]."[5] In other words, this was not the view of Dr. Epp, but that of an eighteenth century extremist. The words, "WITHOUT EXCEPTION" are not from Dr. Epp, but are Shirts' own invention.

9) [Quoting Fee] "The great fault of contemporary NT textual criticism is that IT CANNOT offer us TOTAL CERTAINTY as to the ORIGINAL NT text." (p. 189, my emphasis).

Our response: In this citation, Shirts again seems to be quoting the author, when the author was actually quoting the views of another person, with whom he does not agree at all! Here, Fee is actually quoting Wilbur Pickering. Fee says Pickering's work, "suffers throughout from misrepresentations of scholarly research, the use of rhetoric in the place of argument, and an apparent lack of first-hand acquaintance with many of the primary data."[6]

10) [Quoting Fee] Even after scribal errors have been eliminated, "there remains a text of outstanding (though not absolute) purity." (p. 128).

Our response: In his final misuse of Fee's work, Shirts seems to be quoting the author who seems to be commenting on the entirety of the New Testament. The truth is that Fee was quoting Günther Zuntz who was actually writing about one New Testament papyrus manuscript, designated "P⁴⁶." Even so, this papyrus is recognized for its "outstanding purity" by Zuntz![7]

11) [Quoting Bart D. Ehrman from The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture] "scribes occassionally [sic] altered the words of their sacred texts to make them more patently orthodox and to prevent their misuse by Christians who espoused aberrant views." (p. xi).

12) [Quoting Ehrman] "there scribes corrupted their texts for theological reasons..." (p. xii).

Our response: Dr. Ehrman also wrote, ".scribes sometimes changed their scriptural texts to say what they were already known to mean" (emphasis in the original). [8]

13) [Quoting Ehrman] Scripture was changed to refute antiDocetic tendencies in early Christian circles (p. 217).

Our response: Note that this is not a quotation from Dr. Ehrman. His point was that certain manuscripts were altered for this purpose, not that all of them were. In reality, scribal errors are easily identified by textual scholars, and the errors affect a small part of the whole of New Testament manuscripts.

14) Stanley R. Maveety, "The Glossary in the Rheims New Testament of 1582", in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 61, 1962, "Tyndale was guilty of DELIBERATELY ***MISTRANSLATING*** the Bible in order to conform to Luther [sic] doctrine..." (p. 566).

15) [Paraphrasing Maveety] The Protestants were guilty of adding words to the scriptures [sic] in order to condemn Catholic doctrines (p. 572)

Our response: In this article, the author is commenting on William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible. This translation was first printed in 1525. But no translation is infallible. Tyndale's was the first English version of the Bible based on the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, but it is not inspired. In order for Shirts to make his case, he would have to prove major corruption of the Greek and Hebrew texts. Of course, all the evidence is against him.

This points out a common mistake made by Mormons. The Mormon argument is that the Bible has been translated so many times through history, and over this period of time many accidental and purposeful errors, additions and omissions have crept into the biblical text, to the point where it is unreliable. Thus, Mormons make an important qualification in accepting the Bible as a revelation from God ("as far as it is translated correctly"). They assume changes or errors in translations constitute changes or errors in the Bible. In fact the manuscripts upon which Bibles are based, the original, inspired revelation in the original languages, has not changed. Christians do not claim our translations are inspired, only that the original manuscripts were.

16) [Paraphrasing] Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticsm [sic] of the Hebrew Bible, The Masoretes had preserved a text in the Hebrew Bible, which had already been corrupted! (p. 9, 28ff).

17) [Paraphrasing Tov] Samaritans added their own theological biases to the scriptures [sic] (p. 19).

18) [Paraphrasing Tov] words were added that change the meaning of biblical passages (pp. 57, 63, 65, 60).

19) [Paraphrasing Tov] Theological concepts of God were ADDED to the scriptures (p. 127f).

20) [Paraphrasing Tov] There is a LARGE SCALE differences [sic] between the manuscript witnesses, not minor mere variations (p. 177).

21) [Paraphrasing Tov] Scribes took the liberty of changing the manuscripts as they felt suited to (p. 189)

22) [Paraphrasing Tov] Scribes deliberately altered the contents of the manuscripts and scriptures [sic] (pp. 258, 262, 306, 269, 290)

23) [Paraphrasing Tov] EVERY CHAPTER in the Bible has CHANGES! (p. 293f)

Our response: Shirts produced eight quotations from Tov's book. They were all similar, so we will restrict our comments to a more general nature.

In looking at the first four citations (numbers 16-19 above), it would appear that Tov believed that "many plain and precious things" from the Old Testament were taken away. However, in the beginning of the book, the author said, "It should be remembered that the number of differences between the various editions is very small. Moreover, all of them concern minimal, even minute details of the text, and most affect the meaning of the text in only a very limited way."[9]

In the fifth and eighth citations (numbers 20 and 23 above), please note that Shirts is not quoting, but offering his own paraphrase of the author. Further, in citation number five (number 20 above), "not mere minor variations" is Shirts' own invention, not Dr. Tov's. In fact, this is a gross distortion of the author's point. Tov is not commenting on the text of the Bible itself, but on the textual witnesses. Tov explains that these witnesses are manuscripts "in Hebrew and other languages from the Middle Ages and ancient times as well as fragments of leather and papyrus scrolls two thousand years old or more. These sources shed light on and witness to the biblical text, hence their name, 'textual witnesses.'"[10]

In the eighth citation (number 23 above), Shirts is again not quoting Tov. Here is the actual quotation: "In almost every chapter of the Bible scholars are confronted with a large number of different readings, in both major and minor details" (emphasis added). Note two things. Tov uses the qualifier "almost" which Shirts takes away. Further, Tov is discussing variant readings, not "changes." Shirts misses the point of Dr. Tov's book entirely: Textual criticism is the scientific art of comparing variant readings in order to determine the original reading!

24) James A. Sanders article "Understanding the Development of the Biblical Text" in The Dead Sea Scrolls After Forty Years, says that we ought to start acknowledging the differences in the Bible and quit pretending there are none, and that we ought to realize that there have been differences from the very start of the Bible! (p. 71).

25) Emanuel Tov, "The Corrections in the Biblical Texts" in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of Research, says there have been many different systems of scribal intervention and changing of the scripture! (pp. 300ff).

Our response: To respond specifically would be redundant. Simply put, here, Shirts does not quote the authors, but summarizes them in his own unique fashion. He has exaggerated the importance of variant readings, and often fudges important details to try to make his non-existent case.

26) P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., Textual Criticism: Recovering the Text of the Hebrew Bible, "parablepsis...frequently resulted in an EXTENSIVE loss of material..." (p. 40ff).

Our response: McCarter defines parablepsis as "when a scribe overlooked part of his text. This happened when his eye skipped from the sequence of letters he was copying to an identical or similar sequence farther on in the text."[11] But then the author shows how the original wording, missing from the Masoretic Text is recovered using the Septuagint! If we simply think for a moment, how could we know any material was omitted unless we had the "missing" text? In other words, the text is all there, it just exists in different manuscripts.

27) Ronald S. Hendel, "When the Sons of God Cavorted With the Daughters of Men", in Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows how men have deliberately changed and tampered with the scripture [sic] text, altering its historical as well as theological ideas (pp. 170fff)

Our response: On the page Shirts cited, the author is explaining a variant reading of Deuteronomy 32:8. The Masoretic Text reads, "the sons of Israel," while the Septuagint reads "the Sons of God." Hendel frankly states, "Apparently, somewhere along the line in the transmission of the rabbinic Bible, someone felt the need to clean up the text by literally rewriting it and substituting 'sons of Israel' for the original 'Sons of God'..."[12] But we pose the question: Is this a substantive change? Does it affect Christian belief or practice? More importantly, however, the original reading was never lost. Hendel then stated, "Now that we have established the correct text of Deuteronomy 32:8..."[13]

28) Frank Moore Cross, "The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible," "Ibid." notes how "the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible has been confused and obscured by an assumption, or rather a dogma, that the Hebrew text was unchanged and unchanging." (p. 143).

Our response: Modern biblical scholars no longer accept the notion of an absolutely unchanging Hebrew text. However, that fact does not mean that anything has been taken out of the Bible! James White warns us that we must never substitute the pursuit of certainty to detract us from the pursuit of truth.

29) Leon Vaganay/Christian Bernard-Amphoux, An Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, "corrections were made boldly, things were added and things omitted..." (p. 57, 80, 81 - scribes felt free to modify texts to fit their own views of the scriptures [sic]!)

Our response: Shirts cites this book in a final attempt to prove that the Bible is unreliable. However, immediately after the quotation, the author gives examples of what he means: "So they change the spelling of proper names ( kapernao¨m [kapernaoum] replaces kafarnao¨m, [kapharnaoum]); or they alter the dialectical forms of verbs (the Hellenistic endings of Ðlqan [elthan], eÁpan [eipan] are

replaced by classical ones: Ðlqon [elthon], eÁpon [eipon])."[14] This hardly supports the view that substantive changes have been made in the Bible!

Further, as we noted above, how would we know any changes had been made at all unless we had the original text with which to compare it?

Shirts concludes by saying, "Now there are at least 12 major witnesses as to the corruptions in the Bible." He has attempted to portray the Bible as a hodge-podge of competing texts which are incomplete, unreliable and inauthentic. We have shown that his research is seriously flawed. In fact, what Mr. Shirts has done is not really research at all. He has simply assembled strings of out-of-context quotations, many of which are blatant misrepresentations of the author's views. What we have evaluated of his work appears to have been carelessly done. While we cannot accuse him of deliberate distortions, what he has produced are distortions none the less.

As a matter of fact, this entire approach is surely self-defeating. If Mormons claim that the Book of Mormon is a second testimony to Jesus Christ, and that the Bible is another (and one presumes the first witness), how is the case for Jesus Christ buttressed by attacking the first witness (the Bible)? Mormon apologists frequently list various biblical passages which they believe are contradictions. This method of attacking biblical reliability is also used by atheists and other skeptics. If the Bible truly were as unreliable as the Mormons (and atheists) say why should we reach the conclusion that the message of the Latter-day Saints is to be preferred over agnosticism or atheism? If the Mormons were correct at this point that the Bible is indeed unreliable, then the conclusion must be that we should jettison it and biblical faith along with it. Their apologetic strategy does not lead to Joseph Smith and an alleged Restoration of the one true church. It leads to atheism. Thus, the Mormon apologetic of attacking the Bible is in the final analysis self-defeating. In the interests of consistency, the Mormons should join with evangelicals in arguing for the Bible's reliability. They must then attempt other apologetic methods in explaining the contradictions between biblical teaching and that of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price.

In any event, while it is generally acknowledged that there are errors in biblical manuscripts, scholars of textual criticism know where they are and can, with confidence, reconstruct, with a high degree of accuracy, the original texts. There are about 150,000 New Testament variants, but only about fifty have any significance at all. Of those fifty, "no doctrine of the Christian faith or any moral commandment is affected..."[15]

Yet even with the scribal errors removed, the case for Mormonism is not improved. Whether one corrects the biblical manuscripts to remove scribal errors, or leaves the affected passages with the errors in place, they do not in any way teach or support Mormonism's unique theology of multiple deities, God as an exalted man, human deification or salvation by works.

This is our refutation of some of Mr. Shirts' Internet material. However, there is a positive case to present as well. What follows is a more accurate view of the preservation of the Bible.

As a point in fact, after applying standard scholarly tests for reliability to the New Testament documents, the same standards one would apply to any ancient document, the New Testament demonstrates itself to be historically reliable. Yet religious and philosophical prejudices often color the interpretation of the evidence. As A. N. Sherwin-White, the noted Roman historian stated, "It is astonishing that while Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of the Gospel narratives, starting from no less promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn"[16] (emphasis added).

In summarizing the evidence for the historicity of Jesus, New Testament scholar R. T. France further describes the impact of bias in interpretation when he stated:

All this, and much more, comes to us from the gospels as a compelling portrait of a real man in the real world of first-century Palestine, and yet one who so far transcended his environment that his followers soon learned to see him as more than a man. It is a portrait which we have, in strictly historical terms, no reason to doubt; it is the philosophical and theological implications which cause many to question whether things can really have been as the gospels present them. But we have seen above sufficient reason to be confident that the gospels not only claim to be presenting fact rather than fiction, but also, where they can be checked, carry conviction as the work of responsible and well-informed writers. The basic divide among interpreters of the gospels is not between those who are or are not open to the results of historical investigation so much as between those whose philosophical/theological viewpoint allows them to accept the testimony of the gospels, together with the factuality of the records in which it is enshrined, and those for whom no amount of historical testimony could be allowed to substantiate what is antecedently labeled as a 'mythical' account of events.[17]

It is important to note that some New Testament manuscripts date to within a generation of the time of they were originally composed. Further, there are over 24,000 New Testament manuscripts and fragments. This kind of manuscript attestation would make it virtually impossible for major revisions to be made to the text without detection.

The reliability of the Old Testament is just as good. Generally, the Masoretic Text (MT) is considered the most reliable of the Old Testament manuscripts. Critics have often challenged the MT because it can scarcely be dated before the ninth century ad. However, in the late 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. They are dated before the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70. These ancient scrolls contained at least portions of almost every Old Testament book. The remarkable thing was that even though they were as much as 1000 years older than the best Old Testament manuscripts available at the time, they contained no substantial changes in the biblical texts.

The vast majority of biblical scholars (including those who do not come from an evangelical Christian viewpoint) agree that the text of Scripture has been wonderfully preserved thorough the centuries. Here is a sampling of scholarly views of this preservation process, taken in context.

ü F. F. Bruce, Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester said this: "The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice."[18]

ü The Christian historical scholar Phillip Schaff said that none of the variant readings changed "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages..."[19]

ü Biblical scholar Norman Geisler wrote that "only about one-eighth of all the variants had any weight...only about one-sixtieth rise above 'trivialities'....Mathematically this would compute to a text that is 98.33 percent pure."[20]

ü Further, Dr. Geisler said that "there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that the Bibles we read are extremely close to the original, inspired manuscripts that the prophets and apostles wrote. The

evidence is seen in the accuracy of the copies that we have. Such reliability helps support our claim that the Bible is valuable as a historical account as well as a revelation from God."[21]

ü New Testament scholar Benjamin Warfield wrote of the New Testament that "even the most corrupt form in which it has ever appeared, to use the oft-quoted words of Richard Bentley, 'the real text of the sacred writers is completely exact...'"[22]

ü Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer wrote, "The system of spiritual truth contained n the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament is not in the slightest altered or compromised by any of the variant readings....It is very evident that the vast majority of them are so inconsequential as to leave the meaning of each clause doctrinally unaffected."[23]

We could go on and on. For more, see Josh McDowell's book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Vol. 1. For an accurate view of the reliability of the Bible and its preservation, see Ron Rhodes' "Manuscript Support for the Bible's Reliability" at <http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/Manuscript.html>. For a an in-depth study, the reader may wish to begin with F. F. Bruce's classic book, The Canon of Scripture (InterVarsity Press).

Yet as good as scholarly witness is, the testimony that counts most of all is the testimony of God Himself. Here is what He has said about the preservation and continuing accuracy of His Word:

"The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever." Isaiah 40:8

"Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." Matthew 24:35

If His Word was corrupted, if the truth has been lost for centuries, waiting for a latter-day "saint" to restore it, then God lied. He promised us that His Word is true, and that it will endure. Joseph Smith, Jr. was wrong. No "plain" or "precious" truth has ever been taken out of the Bible. Intellectual honesty demands that we conclude that for all its detractors, religious and irreligious, the Bible has been preserved with great precision. None of God's truth has ever been lost due to human error, zealous editing or maliciousness.