Bill Pratt | July 30, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1, we reviewed Grant Palmer’s conclusions about the true origins of the Book of Mormon. There are three more foundational experiences of Mormonism that Palmer analyzes: the first vision, the angel Moroni, and priesthood restoration. Again, if you would like to read more about these experiences, pick up Palmer’s [...]
Bill Pratt | July 25, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Fourth generation Mormon Grant Palmer collected a mountain of historical scholarship on the origins of Mormonism and wrote a book about it in 2002: An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins. Palmer’s goal was to communicate to Mormon laypeople the progress that had been made over the previous 30 years toward an [...]
Darrell | July 23, 2012
I recently had a conversation with a Christian on Facebook regarding some of the passages in the Bible that refer to Mary. During the conversation, I referred to Mary as The Mother of God (Theotokos). This brought a rather stern reaction from him. He stated, “Mary isn’t the Mother of God. God is not born [...]
Bill Pratt | July 20, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In this final post in the series, we will review apologist Rob Bowman’s final thoughts on Joseph Smith’s golden plates. Bowman writes: Whereas the resurrection of Jesus and his appearances were obviously miraculous, supernatural occurrences, there is nothing supernatural or miraculous about a set of metal plates with engravings on them. [...]
Bill Pratt | July 18, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 2, we continued looking at Rob Bowman’s online exposition of how the witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection and the witnesses of Joseph Smith’s golden plates compare to each other. In part 3, we will compare the lives of the witnesses after their experiences of either the resurrection or the viewing of [...]
Bill Pratt | July 14, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1, we started looking at Rob Bowman’s online exposition of how the witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection and the witnesses of Joseph Smith’s golden plates compare to each other. We pick up where we left off. Bowman next looks at the “contrast between the makeup of the collection of publicly [...]
Bill Pratt | July 13, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Mormons believe that their founder Joseph Smith was shown the location of some golden plates by an angel. These plates, which were allegedly engraved in a language called Reformed Egyptian, were then translated by Smith into the Book of Mormon. What is interesting about these golden plates is that they are [...]
Bill Pratt | July 11, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt A common complaint about the reliability of the letters and books contained in the New Testament is that we don’t know, for sure, who wrote all of these documents. In particular, the four Gospels are singled out as being anonymous since there is nothing in the text of the four Gospels [...]
Bill Pratt | July 10, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Regular readers of the blog know that I often write blog post series with multiple parts that I publish in sequence. The reason I do this is because I want to keep the length of each post down to around 500 or so words. This makes each post easy to read [...]
Bill Pratt | July 9, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you are a Christian who is waiting for the day when most historical scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, affirm that the evidence does indeed indicate that Jesus was resurrected, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting until the Second Coming, when there will be no doubt. Why is that? If, as we [...]
