(Salt Lake City Tribune, Nov. 22, 1903.)
Editor Tribune:—According to the newspaper reports, Elder B. H. Roberts, in his Tabernacle address Sunday, November 8th, threw out a sweeping challenge to the world to show that the Book of Mormon is not of divine origin and authority.
Since Elder Roberts, on the occasion above referred to, confined his attention mainly to the writings of the alleged Prophet Nephi, we will do the same. Now the following are some of the difficulties Elder Roberts will have to explain before he can make any headway toward setting aside the intelligent belief of the American people generally that the Book of Mormon in general and the books of Nephi in particular are fictitious books:
THE "PROPHET" NEPHI.
1. The alleged Prophet Nephi claims to have lived and written between 500 and 600 B.C. For he tells us in chapter 1 and 10 of the first book that his father was living in Jerusalem in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, which reign began not far from 600 B.C. This professed prophet Nephi pretends to give a summary of the records made by his father Lehi, about that date, and also "an account of my proceedings in my days." Now the first difficulty for Elder Roberts to remove is this: How could a writer, claiming to live at that time, make repeated quotations from the writings of Christ's Apostles, who were not born until nearly 600 years after the time when Nephi wrote? Yet this pretended prophet Nephi quotes passage after passage from the writings of Christ's apostles Matthew and John and Paul, and also from the writings of the evangelist Luke, and from the words of the Apostle Peter, which Christian writers were born about the beginning of the Christian era. Just take two or three examples of Nephi's quotations, made at least 500 years before the writers were born from whom he quotes: In I Nephi 10:8, we read these words, so familiar to English Bible readers: "Yea, even he should go forth and cry in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight; for there standeth one among you whom ye know not; and he is mightier than I, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose." This is a direct quotation from the gospel of John 1:26-7, and also from Matthew 3:1.
On the same page in Nephi are several quotations from the writings of Paul, in the 11th of Romans, about the olive tree, and the "branches broken off," with others "grafted in." In I Nephi iii:20 we find the expression, "which have been spoken by the mouth of all the holy prophets * * * since the world began." These are the words of Peter as recorded by Luke in Acts iii:21. The above is an illustration of the way in which this alleged Prophet Nephi quotes from the writers of the New Testament. This is fraud No. 1, exposing the false claims of Nephi, who pretends to write between 500 and 600 years B.C. and yet quotes from the New Testament writers who were not born until over 500 years later. The Old Testament prophets were genuine. They did, by the help of God, foretell many important future events. But none of them pretended to be able, either by the help of God, or their own agility, to quote passage after passage from writings that did not exist, and from authors that had not been born. It remained for the favorite prophet of Elder B. H. Roberts, the robust and agile Nephi, to perform this feat, beyond the reach of God's genuine prophets.
QUOTES FROM SHAKESPEARE.
2. This alleged Prophet Nephi, pretending to write between 500 and 600 B.C., actually quotes from Shakespeare! This beats the genuine prophets of the Old Testament even worse than before, and shows that, on a prophetic long jump, this elastic Nephi could easily take the cake. In II Nephi i:14, he is writing down the words of his father Lehi, and represents him as saying, "hear the words of a trembling parent, whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent gave, from whence no traveler can return."
Every reader of Shakespeare will recognize the last phrase as taken, in substance, from a sentence in Hamlet's soliloquy. This great Prophet Nephi (writing, be it remembered, between 500 and 600 B.C.) had probably loaned his copy of Shakespeare to a neighbor and attempted to quote from memory, getting about as near the original as the average Mormon prophet generally does, for example, when attempting to quote the scriptures from memory. Here is fraud No. 2 perpetrated by this pretended prophet Nephi, from which Elder Roberts must vindicate his hero, or else leave us to conclude, as facts seem to show, that the writer of these books of Nephi was quite a modern deceiver.
3. This brings us to another serious difficulty which we ask Elder Roberts to elucidate before we can accept his theory that Nephi was a prophet of God, and that the book of Mormon is a divine revelation. This alleged Prophet Nephi, professing to write between 500 and 600 B.C., quotes many long passages from a book which did not come into existence until the seventeenth century of the Christian era. We refer to the King James English version of the Bible, which was first published in 1611 A. D. Now, perhaps Elder Roberts can tell us how this fellow Nephi, pretending to write in the sixth century before Christ, could quote hundreds of passages, about three hundred, from the New Testament alone, and whole chapters from our English version of the Bible, which did not come into existence for more than 2000 years after he wrote!