Lucifer's Lantern

In the past two months, I have blazed through two different Bart Ehrman books: How Jesus Became God , and Jesus Interrupted . Both give a thorough overview on the consensus of Biblical scholarship on the New Testament, its authors, and questions of its historicity. More than once, and to my surprise, Ehrman demonstrates logical fallacies employed by the broader Christian community in rejecting Mormonism, that could just as easily have been used to reject Christianity in the first centuries of its own development. Ehrman recognizes Mormonism as being on the fringes of Christian society, which comes as no surprise to me, as Ehrman did not grow up a Mormon or a member of the LDS church. But I did. I repeatedly took note that Ehrman, perhaps inadvertently, also provides commentary that runs counter to the LDS truth claims about their own holy text, the Book of Mormon: in the case of this essay, the grand apocalyptic vision of Nephi, son of Father Lehi, who was the Israelite patriarch said ...

Never has any passage of scripture come with more scrupulosity to the heart of man than Mosiah 3:19 has to me: For the natural man is an enemy to God , and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever… It’s a passage which seemed to enter with great shame into every feeling of my heart. I heard this passage mentioned and quoted again and again - it appears in General Conference addresses a total of 347 times, over half of which occurring in my lifetime (according to the LDS General Conference Corpus ). It’s a passage that implies a divine curse on not just one people group, not on one continent, but on the whole of the human species - an original sin, as it were. Mosiah 3:19 would have you believe that you and I are God’s personal enemies, because we are the posterity of Adam and Eve. Depending on how you read LDS theology, I either did or didn’t have a choice here, a subject too dense to get into just yet; and either way, an omniscient God supposedly laid the groundw...

In Part 1 of this essay miniseries, I laid out how, if we are to believe that the curse of Laman wasn’t not related to skin color - as was the assumption for most of the history of the LDS church - that there is zero evidence for any of it. In other words, all of the "curse" can be explained naturalistically with no divine intervention and therefore no cause for the Nephites to assign one to them. LDS scripture, however, does not stop at describing a Lamanite “curse.” It describes two other divine generational judgments: a “curse of Ham,” and a “curse of Cain.” Here’s the scriptural precedent for both other curses:

The Book of Mormon seems obsessed about the concept of tradition – the teachings and ideals handed down from one generation to another. In the Bible, the concept only emerges in the Hellenistic period, where the Jewish world was preoccupied with recouping and guarding their beliefs from the surrounding Greco-Roman supremacy. It’s interesting that the later Gentile gospels of Luke and John don’t talk about tradition at all, while Matthew and Mark (the two Judaising Gospels) bring it up to assert that Jesus had the “right ideas” about what Judaism should look like. The primary focus for the term “tradition” is in reference to the culture war occurring between the Messianic Israelites in America known as “ Nephites, ” their apostate brethren, and the disenfranchised Lamanites. This seems to be distinct from the “ curse ” divinely appointed by God to those who abandon the Nephite civilization – it isn’t proclaimed to those secular Nephites who merely did not participate in the true ch...

Christians often ask, “Without God’s word, how can you know right from wrong?” The assumption is that the Bible is the ultimate moral guide. But if you actually read what the Bible says, the picture of morality it presents is brutal. Many of the things God commands or condones are the very things most people today see as evil. Slavery “If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself… And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges… and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.” Exodus 21:2–6 “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids… And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you… they shall be y...