Keep in mind that the missionaries want you to have a feeling about the Book of Mormon after reading it. They’ll tell you that you’ll receive the witness of the Holy Ghost in the form of a “burning in the bosom.” This feeling is for them the real “proof” that the Book of Mormon is inspired Scripture.

They’ll assure you that if you read their text in a spirit of prayerful inquiry, you too will receive the testimony of the Holy Ghost. That testimony supposedly will convince you beyond doubt that the Book of Mormon is exactly what they claim it to be.

In these “latter days,” there are few people who haven’t been visited at least once by Mormon missionaries. At some point in your doorstep dialogue, these earnest young men will ask you to accept a copy of the Book of Mormon, read it, and pray about it, asking the Lord to “send the Holy Ghost to witness that it is true.” Then, very solemnly, they’ll “testify” to you that they know the Book of Mormon is true, that it’s God’s inspired word, and that it contains the “fullness of the everlasting gospel.”

But think about it. How often have you felt strongly about something or someone, only to learn your feelings were misguided? Feelings can’t be a yardstick in matters like this.

When you tell the missionaries you don’t need to pray about the Book of Mormon, they’ll think you’re afraid to learn the truth. Admittedly, you’ll seem like a cad if you simply refuse. You need to provide them with an explanation for refusing.

Jesus Visited America?

Let’s take a closer look at the text the missionaries offer. At first glance the Book of Mormon appears to be biblical in heft and style. It’s couched in “King James” English, and it features color renderings of Mormon scenes made to look like Bible illustrations.

The introduction tells you that the “Book of Mormon is a volume of holy scripture comparable to the Bible. It is a record of God’s dealings with the ancient inhabitants of the Americas, and contains, as does the Bible, the fullness of the everlasting gospel.” There it is again—the “fullness of the everlasting gospel.” Naturally, you ask yourself just what that phrase means.

Mormons teach that, after Jesus ascended into heaven, the apostles taught the true doctrines of Christ and administered his sacred ordinances (roughly the equivalent of Catholic sacraments). After the death of the apostles, their successors continued the work of the gospel, but with rapidly declining success. Within a few generations, the great apostasy foretold in the Bible had destroyed Christ’s Church (contrary to Jesus’ own promise in Matthew 16:18). Consequently, the keys of authority of the holy priesthood were withdrawn from the earth, and no man any longer had authorization to act in God’s name.

From that time onward there were no valid baptisms, no laying on of hands for the receipt of the Holy Ghost, no blessings of any kind, and no administration of sacred ordinances. Confusions and heretical doctrines increased and led to the plethora of Christian sects seen today.

Mormons claim that to restore the true Church and true gospel to the earth, in 1820 God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith in a grove of trees near his home. They told him that all professing Christians on the face of the earth were abominable and corrupt and that the true Church, having died out completely shortly after it began, was to be restored by Smith.

Mormons run into no small difficulty in reconciling the “great apostasy” theory with Christ’s promise in Matthew 16:18: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.”

How could it be that Christ would promise that his Church wouldn’t be overcome if he knew full well a great apostasy would make short shrift of it in a matter of decades? Was Christ lying? Obviously not. Was he mistaken? No. Christ’s divinity precluded such things.

What are we left with then? Could it be that Mormons are mistaken in their interpretation of such a crucial passage? This is the only tenable conclusion. If there were no great apostasy, then there could have been no need for a restoration of religious authority on the earth. There would be no “restored gospel,” and the entire premise of the Mormon church would be undercut.

The fact is that the only church with an unbroken historical line to apostolic days is the Catholic Church. And as even non-Catholic historians admit, early Church writers such as Ignatius of Antioch, Eusebius, Clement of Rome, and Polycarp, had no conception of Mormon doctrine, and they knew nothing of a “great apostasy.”

Nowhere in their writings can one find references to Christians embracing any of the peculiarly Mormon doctrines, such as polytheism, polygamy, celestial marriage, and temple ceremonies. If the Church of the apostolic age was the prototype of today’s Mormon church, it must have had all these beliefs and practices. But why is there no evidence of them in the early centuries, before the alleged apostasy began?

Church History Is Catholic

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.

The Book of Mormon itself suffers the same fate when it comes to its own historical support. In a word, it hasn’t got any.

The Book of Mormon describes a vast pre-Columbian culture that supposedly existed for centuries in North and South America. It goes into amazingly specific detail describing the civilizations erected by the “Nephites” and “Lamanites,” who were Jews that fled Palestine in three installments, built massive cities in the New World, farmed the land, produced works of art, and fought large-scale wars that culminated in the utter destruction of the Nephites in A.D. 421. The Latter-day Saints revere the Book of Mormon as the divinely inspired record of those people and of Christ’s appearance to them shortly after his crucifixion in Jerusalem.

The awkward part for the Mormon church is the total lack of historical and archaeological evidence to support the Book of Mormon. For example, after the cataclysmic last battle fought between the Nephites and Lamanites, hundreds of thousands of men and beasts had allegedly perished, and the ground would have been strewn with weapons and armor. It should be easy to locate and retrieve copious evidence of such a battle. After all, the Bible tells of similar battles that took place long before A.D. 421 but that have been documented by archaeology.

Yet no scientist, Mormon or otherwise, has been able to find anything to substantiate that such a great battle took place.

“Lifting” from the King James Bible

There are other problems with the Book of Mormon. For example, critics of Mormonism have shown convincing proof that the Book of Mormon is a synthesis of earlier works (written by other men), of the vivid imaginings of Joseph Smith, and of plagiarisms from the King James Bible.

The only Bible that Joseph Smith relied on was the King James Version. This translation was based on a good but imperfect set of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible.

Scholars now know that this Textus Receptus contained errors, which means the King James Version contains errors. The problem for Mormons is that these exact same errors show up in the Book of Mormon.

It seems reasonable to assume that if Smith was a prophet of God and was translating the Book of Mormon under divine inspiration, he would have known about the errors found in the King James Version, and would have corrected them for when passages from the King James Version appeared in the Book of Mormon. But the errors went in.

The “Fullness” of the Gospel?

According to a standard Mormon theological work, Doctrines of Salvation, one finds this definition: “By fullness of the gospel is meant all the ordinances and principles that pertain to the exaltation of the celestial kingdom” (vol. 1, p. 160).

But if the Book of Mormon contains all the ordinances and principles that pertain to the gospel, why don’t Mormonism’s esoteric doctrines show up in it? The doctrine that God is nothing more than an “exalted man with a body of flesh and bones” appears nowhere in the Book of Mormon. Nor does the doctrine of Jesus Christ being the “spirit brother” of Lucifer. Nor do the doctrines that men can become gods and that God the Father has a god above him, who has a god above him, ad infinitum.

The Book of Mormon Is Anti-Mormon

These heterodox teachings, and many others like them, appear nowhere in the Book of Mormon. In fact, pivotal Mormon doctrines are flatly refuted by the Book of Mormon.

For instance, the most pointed refutation of the Mormon doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are actually three separate gods is found in Alma 11:28-31: “Now Zeezrom said: ‘Is there more than one God?’ and [Amulek] answered, ‘No.’ And Zeezrom said unto him again, ‘How knowest thou these things?’ And he said: ‘An angel hath made them known unto me.’”

The Bottom Line

The Book of Mormon fails on three main counts. First, it utterly lacks historical or archaeological support, and there is overwhelming empirical evidence that refutes it. Second, the Book of Mormon contains none of the key Mormon doctrines. This is important because the Latter-day Saints make such a point about it containing the “fullness of the everlasting gospel.” Third, the Book of Mormon abounds in textual errors, factual errors, and outright plagiarisms from other works.

If you’re asked by Mormon missionaries to point out examples of such errors, here are two you can use.

We read that Jesus “shall be born of Mary at Jerusalem, which is in the land of our forefathers” (Alma 7:10). But Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem (Matt. 2:1).

If you mention this to a Mormon missionary, he might say that Jerusalem and Bethlehem are only a few miles apart and that Alma could have been referring to the general area around Jerusalem. But Bethany is even closer to Jerusalem than is Bethlehem, yet the Gospels make frequent reference to Bethany as a separate town.

Another problem: Scientists have demonstrated that honey bees were first brought to the New World by Spanish explorers in the fifteenth century, but the Book of Mormon, in Ether 2:3, claims they were introduced around 2000 B.C.

The problem was that Joseph Smith wasn’t a naturalist; he didn’t know anything about bees and where and when they might be found. He saw bees in America and threw them in the Book of Mormon as a little local color. He didn’t realize he’d get stung by them.

Tell the Mormon missionaries: “Look, it is foolish to pray about things you know are not God’s will. It would be wrong of me to pray about whether adultery is right, when the Bible clearly says it is not. Similarly, it would be wrong of me to pray about the Book of Mormon when one can so easily demonstrate that it is not the word of God.”

NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials

presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.

Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004

IMPRIMATUR: In accord with 1983 CIC 827

permission to publish this work is hereby granted.

+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004