Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Volume 1 of 2)

by B. H. Roberts

If this duplicate, pretended revelation had been brought out among the benighted people of China or India, or some other heathen country who were without these Bible teachings, it would not have been such a complete "give away." But, with a great flourish of trumpets, to give to the Christian people of this country a weak and poor copy of the revelation and the gospel whose bright and radiant original had been in their possession for hundreds of years, seems to me so absurd, and so transparent as a deceiving scheme, I do not wonder that the overwhelming majority of intelligent people utterly reject it. And just because this book, while so loftily pretending to be a new and divine revelation, reveals absolutely nothing which the people did not have before in much better form, how can we avoid concluding that it is a counterfeit book? I will attend presently to the specimens of new truth which Elder Roberts finds in it.

2. There are at least twelve persons, worthy and reliable so far as I can discover, who testify that the substance of this Book of Mormon, with all its queer names of places and persons, its strange history, its battles and slaughters, its continual imitation of Bible phraseology, they had heard read several years prior to the publication of this book, from a religious romance. It was in this romance that the Nephites and Lamanites originated, and also the pretended ancient books of Nephi, Alma, Mosiah, Mormon and the rest. I can find no-proof whatever that the above peoples and books ever existed except in the imagination of the writer of the religious romance. And I have never been able to see why the testimony of the above twelve witnesses, who had nothing to gain by their testimony, should be arbitrarily brushed aside, and the testimony of the eleven interested witnesses, who declare that they saw and "hefted" the plates, should be gulped down at one swallow. Even if they did see the plates, that proves absolutely nothing essential to the case. They were all ignorant men, and knew nothing about what was written on the plates. Other men saw the famous Kinderhook plates, but what of it?

3. The Book of Mormon, though sealed up and hidden away about 400 A.D., is filled up, from beginning to end, with the phraseology of our English Bible. Not only that, it contains hundreds upon hundreds of the exact phrases and sentences, and about twenty whole chapters from our English Bible which was not published for about twelve hundred years after the Book was hidden away. In my former article, I intended to state that there are in the Book of Mormon about 300 quotations from the New Testament, and I am obliged to Elder Roberts for interpreting my meaning in that way, for I did not intend to say that the two books of Nephi contain so many quotations.

A VITAL POINT.

Now we come to a vital point. I asked Elder Roberts to explain how the above quotations could possibly have been made if the Book of Mormon is honest in its claim of being an ancient book. And here is his explanation:

"Because Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by means of the inspiration of God and the aid of Urim and Thummim, it is generally supposed that this translation occasioned the prophet no mental or spiritual effort, that it was purely mechanical; in fact, that the instrument did all and the prophet nothing, than which a greater mistake could not be made. * * * Now when the prophet perceived from the Nephite records that Isaiah was being quoted, or when the Savior was represented as giving instructions in doctrine and moral precepts of the same general character as those given in Judea, Joseph Smith undoubtedly turned to those parts of the Bible where he found a translation, substantially correct, of those things which were referred to in the Nephite records, and adopted so much of that translation as expressed the truths common to both records."

Now, it seems to me that the above defense and explanation of Elder Roberts are fatal to his position and that of the defenders of the book generally, that it is a thoroughly accurate translation of the Nephite plates, "by means of the inspiration of God and the aid of Urim and Thummim." And it seems fatal for two reasons:

First—This defense places Mr. Roberts in opposition to his own witnesses. For two of the famous "three witnesses" wholly differ from Mr. Roberts as to the method of translating the plates, and point out that Joseph Smith had nothing whatever to do except simply to read the English sentences as they appeared in translation. Martin Harris says:

"By aid of the seer stone, sentences would appear and were read by the prophet and written by Martin, and when finished, he would say 'written,' and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear and another appear in its place; but if not correctly written it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates."

Here is the testimony also of David Whitmer, another of the three witnesses. After stating that Joseph put the seer stone into a hat, he says: "A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the translation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it were correct, then it would disappear and another character with the interpretation would appear."