I just read a blog post entitled “An atheist’s response to the first 31 pages of The Book of Mormon”, which is quite a coincidence, since I (an atheist) just read The Book of Mormon myself. I won’t link to the aforementioned post–feel free to Google it if you’re so inclined. But it appears that this other anonymous atheist and I had strikingly different experiences.

I’m not an expert on Christian theology or the Bible, and I certainly don’t believe in much of either, but I do have a passing familiarity with them. As such, I found the comparison between the Bible and the Book of Mormon to be an interesting case. I’ll provide some of my first impressions, as a contrast to this other atheist’s response to the text. Although I read the entire Book of Mormon, I’ll try to limit my remarks to items that I found in the first 31 pages, in an attempt to make an equal comparison.

The first thing that struck me was how frequently Nephi, living in 600 BCE, referred to his people as “Jews.” A crucial aspect of this story involves its setting just before the exile of the kingdom of Judah into Babylon. But the term “Jew” wasn’t coined until after the Israelites returned from captivity under the reign of the Persians. And yet, the term “Jew” is used constantly.

Knowing a bit about Mormon apologetics, I’m sure some would like to explain this away by appealing to Joseph Smith’s imperfect translation skills. Perhaps Nephi used a word like “Israelite,” and Joseph Smith translated it as “Jew.” But there are clues in the text that would argue against this explanation. For example, in 1 Nephi 15:17 (on page 31, as it happens), Nephi refers to “…the Jews, or… the House of Israel.” Clearly Nephi was familiar with both terms, when only one would have been invented at the time of his writing.

Another item that struck me, right from the first page, was Nephi’s description of his father’s primary language as Egyptian. It’s hard to understand why someone who was born and raised in Jerusalem “in all his days” would have known Egyptian at all. The fact that Egyptian is given as his primary language (“the language of my father”), and is such a deep part of his culture that his children write their diaries in Egyptian, is very puzzling. Later, another document is stolen and taken with them on their trans-oceanic voyage. This document seems to have been written in Hebrew, but it is taken, in part, “that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers.” So is the language (always singular) of their fathers Egyptian or Hebrew? I’d bet on Hebrew, but the text seems to disagree.

One of the strangest things about the first 31 pages of the Book of Mormon is their portrayal of the Messiah. If you read the Old Testament, there aren’t nearly as many Messianic prophecies as people tend to think. There are plenty of prophecies of the reuniting of the 12 Tribes of Israel, but the idea of a singular figure that would carry this out doesn’t show up that much in the actual text. And when it does, the Messiah is predicted to be a second David, a great king who would throw off the chains of the oppressors, and make Israel a mighty nation again. Not for nothing did most Jews laugh at the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. Someone who died for our sins but left the Romans in charge was about as far off the Messianic mark as you could get.

Christians often believe that predictions of Jesus were thick on the ground in the Old Testament, and have a hard time understanding why the Jews didn’t recognize him when he came. But most of the scriptures we think of as Messianic prophecies are out-of-context statements that were misinterpreted after the fact specifically to apply to Jesus.

This being the case, some Christians may not question the Book of Mormon’s description of Jesus. But if you read the Old Testament and 1 Nephi back-to-back, 1 Nephi’s Messianic prophecies are wildly out of place. The Old Testament contains a few scant clues that (even if read the way Christians traditionally understand them) are so vague that they could only be understood in hindsight. Meanwhile, Nephi is receiving incredibly specific prophecies that could only apply to Jesus. The Jewish conqueror-Messiah of the Old Testament is nowhere to be found in 1 Nephi. In his place is a Jesus precisely described, right down to the time and place of his birth, his name, his mother’s name, and a description of John the Baptist. It also specifically refers to this Messiah as God, which would never have occurred to any Old Testament prophet. If anything like this had appeared in the Old Testament, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would have questioned Jesus’ divine identity.

On a related subject, 1 Nephi contains a lot of confused ideas about God’s relationship with the gentiles. Without getting too deep into this subject, the Old Testament and New Testament have vastly different understandings of who God was and what he thought of the Gentiles. Evidence of both of these stances appear in the Book of Mormon, but on the whole, the understanding of God’s plan for the Gentiles would have been much more at home in 100 CE than 600 BCE.

Another confusing aspect of 1 Nephi, and the Book of Mormon at large, is the relationship between Lehi and his descendants with the Law of Moses. God commands Nephi to return to Jerusalem to get a record of the writings of Moses, which eventually involves his commission of a particularly grizzly murder. The purpose of this quest, given in 1 Nephi 4:15, is for Lehi’s descendants to have a record of the Law of Moses, and live by it until the coming of Christ. However, upon a cursory analysis of the text, I could find very little evidence that these people even knew what the Law of Moses was, let alone that they lived it. There are a few mentions of the Sabbath, but all seem to be lip service, without any practical application. None of the other holidays or festivals that play such an important role in Jewish life are ever mentioned in the Book of Mormon. There are no ritual impurities, and no cleansing rituals, outside of anachronistic mentions of baptism. The very idea of “uncleanness” seems to exclusively refer to sin, which is out of line with the Mosaic understanding of the subject. No cities of refuge are set up in America, there is no mention of keeping kosher, or any clarification of dietary restrictions that would inevitably be necessary when moving to another hemisphere. Circumcision is only mentioned in reference to having been abolished after Jesus came. And while there are a few mentions of animal sacrifice, none of them (obviously) takes place at the temple in Jerusalem, and none of them are performed by Levites. In fact, the moment Lehi and his (non-Levite) family leave Jerusalem, they immediately set up altars and sacrifice animals in the wilderness, which would have scandalized a family of Israelites raised in the Deuteronomistic Mosaic tradition.

A related anomaly is 1 Nephi 5:11, which refers to the brass plate records as the “Five Books of Moses”. The Pentateuch didn’t reach its final form until well after the exile, and the idea that they were all written personally by Moses is a much more modern idea still. Referring to anything as the “Five Books of Moses” just wouldn’t have made sense in 600 BCE.

Glancing over the highlights and marginal notes I left in the first 31 pages of the Book of Mormon, there are so many other oddities that it would be ponderous to give an exhaustive list. There are unusual linguistic features, including structures that seem to be natively English, and Greek phrases copied from the New Testament that (to the best of my understanding) wouldn’t make sense in an Egyptian document from a non-Hellenized civilization. There are anachronistic understandings of “Satan” and “The Devil” (used interchangeably) that don’t seem to fit the time they’re from. And there is a pattern of prophecy that is highly unusual, consisting of uncharacteristically specific predictions from the time of Nephi to the time of Joseph Smith (with a level of precision and lack of poetic ambiguousness that doesn’t match any other prophecy I can think of), followed by absolute silence about anything that’s happened since the early 19th Century, which would have been most useful to the stated audience of the book.

There isn’t much said about the atheist who wrote the original response to the first few pages of 1 Nephi. It seems to have been someone who knew “Miss Mormon.” If that is the case, I think I understand some of where the author is coming from. If I had been challenged to read the Book of Mormon by a Mormon friend, I’d probably respond with a statement of support from a place of (attempted) understanding. And some of what this atheist said is understandable. The way many Christians understand the Bible can be as misinformed as much of the Book of Mormon. As such, perhaps some of them could find something in that book that strengthens their faith.

However, as someone who doesn’t literally believe in either book, saying that one isn’t any crazier than the other isn’t a ringing endorsement. And while the Book of Mormon may strengthen the faith of someone with a lay understanding of Biblical history and theology, that’s a long way from saying that it is convincing as a historical document, or as an argument for the existence of Jesus or Yahweh. Whatever this atheist was trying to communicate with “Miss Mormon,” or her audience at large, the most telling part of the response is that it was not written by a convert or an investigator. It was written by someone who said something nice, and remains an atheist.