1nephi
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The Book of Mormon begins with a man named Nephi writing eleven years before the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon. In Hebrew? No, Nephi writes in Egyptian, which is remarkable because the Jews thought they left all that behind with the Exodus.
Nephi describes a vision that his father had in the first year of the reign of king Zedekiah, king of Judah, after which his father went around as a prophet declaring that Jerusalem would be destroyed and its inhabitants carried away captive. Well, that wasn't too much of a stretch, because just prior to that vision in March 597 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar had already captured Jerusalem and took eighteen year-old king Jeconiah into captivity after a reign of only three months and ten days. And Nebbie installed Zedekiah as king over Jerusalem.
"...in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed."
That is not the tenor of Jeremiah's prophesies during the reign of Judah's final king. The destruction was inevitable, it was Jeremiah's task to explain to the people why it was going to happen, not to try and prevent it. And it was not going to be permanent, only a temporary setback to correct the people's ways. God had Jeremiah buy some land nearby as a sign that the housing market would recover. It was not the sins of the people that brought "judgment" from Nebuchadnezzar in the form of the second seige, but the revolt of the puppet-king Zedekiah against his status as a puppet that did so.
"...he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of the Messiah, and also the redemption of the world.
Number one, the Messianic hope arose among the Jews only during the Babylonian exile after the line of David had been removed from power. If Lehi was prophesying that another Davidic king (the Messiah) would arise, it made no sense to do so while the legitimate Davidic king, Jeconiah, remained in captivity, and the Davidic king Zedekiah was still in actual power, even if he was hamstrung by Nebuchadnezzar. In fact, it was downright treasonous. A messianic dream made no sense in the time that Lehi is alleged by Nephi to be dreaming it.
Number two, every Messianic passage in the Old Testament is associated with a Jewish military victory over oppressors, be they Assyrians, or Babylonians, or (in Daniel) the Greeks. Jesus was expected to lead a revolt over the Romans. The "redemption of the world", seen in, for example, Isaiah's imagery of a changed natural order where predators and prey are at peace, is always associated with the supremacy of the Mosaic Law, imposed by a militarily supreme united kingdom of Israel. The Gentiles are seen in this newly "redeemed" world to observe new moons and sabbaths and come to Zion to offer animal sacrifices for sin.
One of the things that makes the Book of Mormon such a chore to read is that the author (Joseph Smith Jr.) violates one of the cardinal rules of writing, which is never overuse a good phrase, even if it lends a faux Early Modern English patina to your work. There are only twenty-four verses in 1 Nephi 2, and eleven of them begin with "it came to pass".
2:1 For behold, it came to pass that the Lord spake unto my father, yea, even in a dream...
2:2 And it came to pass that the Lord commanded my father, even in a dream, that he should take his family and depart into the wilderness.
2:3 And it came to pass that he was obedient unto the word of the Lord, wherefore he did as the Lord commanded him.
2:4 And it came to pass that he departed into the wilderness...
And how is it we are supposed to "behold" another man's dream? We aren't, but behold is used in King James Version a lot, so Joseph Smith threw in a bunch of beholds too. Often two or three verses are used to convey the same information. Honestly, if this was in my editor's slush pile I'd kick it back with a polite rejection letter.
So Lehi takes his family down to Saudi Arabia, and they camp near the banks of a river that continually runs into the Red Sea. This river is reached after three days of attaining the Gulf of Aqaba. Traveling on foot with a family and livestock, you can make at best 15 miles per day. This river therefore, which was named the River Laman after one of Lehi's sons, must be within fifty miles of the twin cities of Eilat, Israel and Aqaba, Jordan.
So scarce is water in this hot, arid region that Eilat relies on desalination. Even the valley where Eilat and Aqaba lie, the chief population center of this region, is a wadi, a dry gulch that only carries water on the very rare occasion that it rains, and only for a matter of days, if not hours. A river that continually ran into the Red Sea, so near the ancient trade routes between east and west, would have been a prize, a true gem, and the site of a great city. There's nothing in history, outside of the book of Mormon, that says such a river ever existed. And a look at Google Earth shows that there's no valley.
The whole journey is a test by God to see if people believed that Lehi, his prophet, really could tell the future. Because that's all a prophet is in the book of Mormon, not a social reformer, not a commentator on the current zeitgeist and one who tries to get people to see the inevitable consequences of their actions, but just somebody who was given a dream by God of the future. And the crux of the test is to believe, beforehand, that a man with no credentials, from the fringe of society, is chosen by God, with no other sign than the very destruction that he's predicting as punishment for not believing in it.
The people of Jerusalem did not believe the city would be destroyed. They tried to kill Lehi for even saying it would be, so they are cursed. God would punish them by destroying Jerusalem. Lehi's sons Laman and Lemuel also did not believe that Jerusalem would be destroyed, they were cursed by God, and this curse would take the form of dark skin for their descendants. Sam and Nephi believed that Jerusalem would be destroyed, so they would be blessed with white skin and a land flowing with milk and honey prepared just for them, far over the sea.
The third chapter of 1 Nephi maintains the 50% rate of occurances of the phrase "it came to pass".
In this chapter, Lehi has a dream that God said he wanted Lehi's sons to go back to Jerusalem and fetch some brass plates that contain the genealogy of Lehi's longfather of old and the history of the Israelites up to the time of Jeremiah.
When they got to the house of the owner of the plates, Laban, the son of Lehi named Laman tried asking him for the plates, but that didn't work. Laban got pissed, and threw Laman out. He returned to his brothers, said, "Welp, that didn't work" and started packing his mule for the ride back to his father.
But Nephi insisted they carry out the letter of the commandment of God in Lehi's dream. So they needed to buy the plates from Laban. They went back to Saudi Arabia, got all their gold, silver, and jewels, brought them back to Laban, and offered to exchange this treasure for his brass plates. Now Laban valued his plates very much because they contained the Law of Moses, including the Ten Commandments, one of which is "Thou shalt not steal". But sometimes the temptation was very great, and he had to break this commandment, and this was one of those times. He called his men, and chased the sons of Lehi out of his house, forcing them to leave behind all their money.
The loss of the family fortune really made Laman angry. He was wroth at Nephi and Sam, as well as wroth with his father for making them do this stupid thing. So he took out his anger on both Nephi and Sam by whipping them with a rod. But an angel appeared to Laman and made him stop the punishment, and told them to go back and get the brass plates. This was a mission from God.
So they go back to Jerusalem, and when it was night, Nephi crept into the city by himself. And as he draws near to the house of Laban, he finds Laban staggering around drunk, but well-armed:
And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel.
Steel. In 600 BCE. Never mind that steel wasn't produced anywhere until about 250 BCE.
And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban
Nephi doesn't want to kill the man, but the Holy Spirit forces him to do it. In the New Testament St. Paul says, "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. But here in the Book of Mormon, the fruit of the Spirit is also murder. When I raised this issue with actual Mormons, they defended the passage by pointing to another commandment of God in 1 Kings to slay all the Amalekites. Two wrongs make a right, I suppose. Nixon once said, "If the President of the United States does something, that means it's not illegal." The Book of Mormon is taking a similar stand. If the Holy Spirit makes you do something, that means it is not a sin.
Nephi justifies the murder to himself: I also thought that they could not keep the commandments of the Lord according to the law of Moses, save they should have the law. And I also knew that the law was engraven upon the plates of brass.
Now God had set Lehi apart from the rest of the Jews to avoid the coming destruction, because, like Noah, he was a righteous and blameless man. What was righteousness before the coming of Christ? Obedience to the Law. That means, logically, that Lehi either had his own copy of the Law of Moses on a scroll like everyone else, or he knew the Law by heart and could write a new scroll. But no, God has him send his son to kill Laban and steal the plates of brass with the Law of Moses, because otherwise they could not "keep the commandments of the Lord", two of which are, ironically, Thou Shalt Not Steal, and Thou Shalt Not Kill.
After this, all Nephi has to do is put on Laban's clothes, and sword, and alter his voice to get Laban's servant (who was trusted to guard to the vault) to move the brass plates out of the vault and deliver them to his brethren.
And he, supposing that I spake of the brethren of the church, and that I was truly that Laban whom I had slain, wherefore he did follow me.
Gotcha, Mr. Smith! In the entire Old Testament, the word "church" never appears. There is no church until Jesus Christ establishes it in Matthew 16. The Book of Mormon has been edited over 4000 times since the death of Joseph Smith. Someday they will get around to fixing this boo-boo as well.
In chapter five the sons of Lehi return to him with the brass plates, which stops his wife from murmuring against her own husband. Lehi examines the plates:
And he beheld that they did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents
Unfortunately for Joseph Smith, he failed to realize that the Jewish scribe Ezra had not yet compiled the Pentateuch into the form we know today from the source documents, and even well after the Exile they used the singular form the "book of Moses" or the "law of Moses", as we read here:
Nehemiah 13:1 On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of God for ever
Indeed, the Torah is a single scroll with 304,805 Hebrew characters, all of which must be a perfect copy of the 304,805 characters from an earlier scroll. An just as Muslims are obligated to make the Hajj once in their lifetime, so each male Jew is obligated either to write a Torah scroll, or cause one to be written. It is in the preservation and study of those 304,805 letters that causes the Jewish people to retain their identity and preserve themselves as the world's oldest continuously extant tribe. So it is not possible that Lehi needed to send his sons to kill a moron like Laban and steal brass plates to get what he should already have had and known.
Chapter six is very short. Basically, Nephi stops telling his story long enough to say that he's not going to copy the genealogy that was on the plates in the book of Nephi, because what would be the point? The genealogy is right there on the plates for anybody to see, and besides, a paper genealogy would be pleasing to men, but not God.
This is really Joseph Smith explaining why he didn't list hundreds of names from Adam to Lehi that could be bounced against real genealogies in the hands of Jews that Smith had no access to. It's impossible to disprove something that you can't examine. Same thing goes for the golden plates that the entire Book of Mormon was alleged to have been written on.
In chapter seven Lehi sends his sons to fetch Ishmael and his family and bring them down to the wilderness to escape the fall of Jerusalem. But on the way back, Laman, Lemuel, two of the daughters of Ishmael, and two sons of Ishmael, and all their families, rebelled against Nephi and Sam, and against Ishmael, his wife, and three other daughters of his. They all wanted to go back to Jerusalem. And I don't see what the big deal is, since Lehi keeps sending all them to Jerusalem anyway, and they spend more time in Jerusalem than in the Lemuel Valley where the tent of Lehi is.
Nephi tried reasoning with them, and brought to their remembrance the angel, and the escape from Laban, etc, but they ignored all that and bound Nephi's hands and feet with rope and left him in the desert to be devoured by animals. But God caused the rope to be loosened from his limbs and Nephi caught up with them again. They tried to tie him up once more, but one of the rebellious daughters of Ishmael, and her mother, and her brother had a change of heart and sided with Nephi, so they settled the dispute and returned to the tent of Lehi.
Lehi: Behold, I have dreamed a dream; or, in other words, I have seen a vision.
Again we are asked to behold another man's interior experience.
Lehi has a dream that there's this white fruit on a tree by a river, and his wife and Sam and Nephi walk on the side of the river where the tree is, but Laman and Lemuel walk on the other side of the river and won't eat the fruit. And Lehi tells this dream to his family, never realizing that he's creating the very division in his family's unity he foresaw by telling it.
And he goes on to say there's a rod of iron that forms a sure path to the tree, and there's a multitude of people who either find that rod of iron and make their way to the tree, or get lost and end up in a big white building on the other side where the chief occupation is to wear fine clothing and laugh at the fools who are eating from the tree.
Behold, this vision is fulfilled before your eyes this day. For the eaters of the fruit are beleivers of the Book of Mormon, and the people in the big white building are those who scoff at the Book of Mormon. (By the way, Mormon temples are big white buildings, and Mormon elders go around as sharp-dressed young men, but never mind!) It's not like we have any reason to scoff at the Book of Mormon.
1 Nephi 9:2 ...the plates upon which I make a full account of my people I have given the name of Nephi; wherefore, they are called the plates of Nephi, after mine own name; and these plates also are called the plates of Nephi.
Yes, it really says that.
Christians scour the Old Testament looking for Psalms or prophesies that could be construed to be predicting the coming of Jesus Christ, if you squint your eyes and move the book around a little bit and keep an open mind. Mormons don't have to do that, since their book was written in 1830, and 1 Nephi chapter 10 has a whole onslaught of Messianic prophesies that are not only far more specific and precise than anything in Micah or Isaiah, they often borrow directly from the language of authors such as St. John or St. Paul. Their Greek idioms carry over perfectly in the Reformed Egyptian.
Nephi predicts the coming of John the Baptist, and even predicts what John the Baptist will say: "One mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose."
Compare to John 1:26-27 "There standeth one among you, whom ye know not ... whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose."
And after he had baptized the Messiah with water, he should behold and bear record that he had baptized the Lamb of God, who should take away the sins of the world.
Compare to John 1:29 Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.
Not content to copy all of John's stuff, Joseph Smith starts digging into the Pauline letters too, starting with a paraphrase of Romans chapter 11:
....after the Gentiles had received the fulness of the Gospel, the natural branches of the olive-tree, or the remnants of the house of Israel, should be grafted in, or come to the knowledge of the true Messiah, their Lord and their Redeemer.
He even goes so far as to attribute Paul's theory of Original Sin to Lehi:
Wherefore, all mankind were in a lost and in a fallen state, and ever would be save they should rely on this Redeemer.
And so on. Bear in mind that to this day, Jews do not have a theology of fallen mankind. The Fall of Man is a purely Christian invention to rationalize the role of the Savior, and could hardly have been cooked up in 600 BCE like the Book of Mormon would have us believe. That's what makes the BoM so boring to read. You've read it all before. It's pure plagiarism. But show this evidence to the true believers, and they simply say that God caused human authors to convey his word into writing, and it is the same word no matter who was the actual person taking the dictation. So that's a dry hole for critics, as far as ever convincing LDS members goes.
Therefore Mormons adhere, by logical necessity, not only to the theory that Moses wrote the Torah (not multiple authors compiled after the Exile by Ezra), but the theory that Scripture is fully God's word, dictated to a human scribe, without any human contamination at all. That is going to come back and bite Mormons on the ass as we shall see very soon, because the 1830 version of the BoM, presumably the one that was taken directly from God's golden plates, differs substantially from the current revision. So having made my point, as I proceed I shall not stop every ten or fifteen verses to point out yet more text ripped off intact and entire from the King James Bible.
Now Nephi himself is shown all the things his father has seen, simply because he believes his father has seen them just like he said.
"...in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white."
In the eastern Mediterranean world, drenched in sun, the people are a nice Ovaltine brown, just like me. No doubt Mary was a pretty girl (fourteen years old when she gave birth to Jesus), but she had dark hair and she was certainly not white. The Book of Mormon is a racist document and I will call it to task for that every time I see it.
And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God...
This is the first time we find an alteration from the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon, which omits "Son of" and just says: ...the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God
And that suits Roman Catholics just fine! But when the original document goes on to say, "Behold, the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father!" that's where the Book of Mormon slips into the heresy of modalism, confusing the Person of the Son with the Person of the Father. If Mormons convert to Catholicism they are required to be re-baptized using the trinitarian formula where Lutheran converts would not.
The vision continues, and Nephi sees the land of America, and so many cities built there by his seed that he could not count them. No one has ever found archaological evidence of a single Nephite city in the Western Hemisphere. Lots of Mayan cities, sure.
In the original 1830 BoM the name of the Messiah was revealed to Nephi in chapter twelve: Jesus Christ. Later editors discovered that this contradicted 2 Nephi 10:3 where it says, ...it must needs be expedient that Christ -- for in the last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name -- should come among the Jews... And even that is wrong, the man's name was Yeshua bar Yoseph (Joshua son of Joseph), or Hellenized: Jesus of Nazareth. "Christ" is a title that means annointed one.
Nephi also sees in his vision that the descendants of his brothers will become unbelievers, and transform into a "dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations." That is Joseph Smith's opinion of Native Americans. But he's not done, there was yet one more great prejudice in the 19th Century that had to seep into Smith's book, and that was anti-Catholicism.
And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it.
Then Nephi goes on to see a vision of the American colonists, and they were of the proper background, of course:
And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles, and they did prosper and obtain the land for their inheritance; and I beheld that they were white, and exceedingly fair and beautiful, like unto my people before they were slain.
Nephi sees a vision of the Revolutionary War, and attribute the victory in that war to God, even though it violated Romans 13:1-4 which says submit to the king.
And I beheld that their mother Gentiles were gathered together upon the waters, and upon the land also, to battle against them...the Gentiles that had gone out of captivity were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations.
Now we are come to the crucial verse, and the one I focused on when I was visisted by Mormons.
...thou seest the formation of a great and abominable church, which is most abominable above all other churches; for behold, they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away.
Since I was, at the time, Catholic, I was offended that "we" had taken away "plain and most precious" parts from the gospel, and I demanded to know what, exactly, these plain and precious parts of the gospel are present in the Mormon gospel that are not present in the gospel according to Rome. And this was the answer:
In the gospel of Rome, any baptized Christian may perform baptism on another person who seeks to convert, although this is normally performed in the Church by deacons or priests.
In the gospel of Mormonism, only members of the He Man Woman Haters Club who have been given these certain keys are authorized to perform baptisms.
That is the plain and precious part of the gospel that was taken away by that naughty mean old Satanic Catholic Church: We have a less restrictive sacrament of initiation. Of course, look what happened when we opened that door, all sorts of dark people are Catholics, while Mormons are mostly just white and exceedingly fair, and beautiful.
...that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men shall be filled by those who digged it, unto their utter destruction, saith the Lamb of God; not the destruction of the soul, save it be the casting of it into that hell which hath no end.
In 600 BCE, none of the Jews believed in the existence of a "soul" as it is currently understood, which is a human identity existing apart from a body or bound to it. That comes from the Greek idea of the psyche that infiltrated Jewish thought around 200 BCE and was taken up especially by the Pharisees, who in turn influenced Jesus. When the Old Testament speaks of souls it means only lives.
Thus when God says in Leviticus the penalty for breaking the Sabbath is death, he says it this way: "And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people." This passage, then, remains an anachronism which cannot be explained away, and one wonders if Joseph Smith even read the Old Testament very carefully. If he did, he would not so casually retroject 1st Century C.E. ideas across a span of six centuries.
Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations; and she is the whore of all the earth.
Here we go with some George W. Bush style, black and white, "Yer either with me or with 'Qaeda." I'm Taoist, I belong to neither the church of the Lamb of God nor the church of the devil, the Book of Mormon notwithstanding.
Most of chapter fifteen is a self-serving Joseph Smith, writing as Nephi, patiently explaining to his older brothers about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is really a natural branch of Israelites, but they will forget that until the end times, then they will remember it again, and they will be grafted back in to the Israel of God along with the righteous gentiles. But for the ones who don't believe, "there is a place prepared, yea, even that awful hell of which I have spoken, and the devil is the preparator of it".
So the devil is the preparator of hell, not the preparatee. This directly contradicts Jesus who says, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." And besides, the Jews did not have a theology of an eternal hell in 600 BCE, which makes sense because neither did they have a theology of any kind of afterlife. The idea of hell stems directly from the Greek Tartarus, a vast torture chamber where the gods punished the shades of mortals for their misdeeds.
Lehi was advised in a dream from God to leave the valley of Lemuel. In the morning a ball was delivered by angels outside of Lehi's tent very much like a compass, with a needle that pointed which way they should go. Sometimes this ball, literally a deus ex machina, would show them how to find the top of a mountain in this treeless wasteland where otherwise they were too stupid to find themselves, and from the top of the mountain they could see where the food animals were to shoot.
Now there's one thing God hates even more than murdering people and stealing their brass plates, and that's murmuring. Murmur, murmur, murmer. And as the going got rough in the desert, even Lehi started to murmur. Here God was trying to do the whole Noah thing and Exodus thing all over again, and this was the rag-tag crew he had to work with. You got to imagine he was wondering if it was a good idea after all.
When old man Ishmael died his daughters began to murmur, and they were by now wives of Lemuel and Laman, the older wicked brothers of faithful Nephi.
Laman said unto Lemuel and also unto the sons of Ishmael: Behold, let us slay our father, and also our brother Nephi, who has taken it upon him to be our ruler and our teacher, who are his elder brethren.
Never mind that it was Laman and Lemuel who came to Nephi to ask what the vision of their father meant. Now they're telling themselves that their father Lehi has been lying to them all along, and there is no voice of God, just him trying to pull a fast one. So the voice of God comes to Laman and Lemuel and nips that plan in the bud right there.
After wandering for eight years in the desert of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, eating nothing but raw game, they came to a land they called Bountiful with much fruit and honey, which somehow was not already occupied by Bedoin nomads. And they saw the Indian Ocean.
Now the Lord bypassed Lehi and started working directly with Nephi, commanding him to build a ship, just like when he told Noah to do it. But he couldn't get his brothers Lemuel and Laman to do their share of the work. They didn't believe he was clever enough to build an ark, and they thought it was another damn fool idealistic crusade like this whole journey had been from the gitgo. They worked themselves up into a lather and pitched forth to seize Nephi, but Nephi said he had the power of God in his hands, and anyone who touched him would be smote by God.
And it came to pass that I stretched forth my hand unto my brethren, and they did not wither before me; but the Lord did shake them, even according to the word which he had spoken.
So Nephi had sufficiently cowed his labor force into working for him to complete the ship.
Now I, Nephi, did not work the timbers after the manner which was learned by men, neither did I build the ship after the manner of men; but I did build it after the manner which the Lord had shown unto me; wherefore, it was not after the manner of men.
Check!
In the eight years Lehi and his clan had been in the wilderness, Lehi had begotten two more sons, Jacob and Joseph. But now it was time to get in the ship and go to America.
After they were underway, most of the passengers started to party hearty, and Nephi cautioned them, saying they were making a lot of noise and having too much fun and God might'nt, you know, like it. And once again, his slow-witted brothers got upset at being lectured to by their little brother so they bound him up with rope.
Then the "compass" stopped working. Joseph Smith screwed up here, with a lack of attention to detail. When he first introduced the device, it was just a "ball" with spindles. Now he has Nephi calling it a compass. But compasses weren't invented for another 1,800 years. This would be like reading Exodus with Moses complaining getting lost in the desert for forty years "Because my damn GPS quit on me".
Anyway, the ship drifted off course into a region of storms, and only when she was about to go to Davey Jones' Locker did Lemuel and Laman unbind Nephi and let him captain the ship again.
When they get to America, they find cows and oxen and and goats and asses and horses. And those last two are another "oopsie" because asses and horses went extinct in North America about 10,000 years ago (before they were domesticated they were food animals only, hunted to extinction here) and were only re-introduced by the European explorers in the great Age of Discovery.
Nephi is commanded by God to make his own set of brass plates, and he admits there might be mistakes, but that's okay, because the other Sacred Scriptures have mistakes too.
Nevertheless, I do not write anything upon plates save it be that I think it be sacred. And now, if I do err, even did they err of old...
Joseph Smith told his brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct book on Earth (this was in 1829, before the CoJCoLDS redacted it 4,000 times). That means it's more correct than the Sacred Scriptures, even!
Now Joseph Smith invents three prophets, Zenock, Neum, and Zenos, and claims that they prophesied the coming of Christ, even giving details such as his scourging and mocking by the Romans. But none of these prophets appear in the Old Testament.
This being the early to mid-1800s, a time when the Nativist anti-Jew, anti-Catholic "Know Nothing" movement was in force, Joseph Smith justifies the persecution of Jews because they crucified Christ:
And as for those who are at Jerusalem, saith the prophet, they shall be scourged by all people, because they crucify the God of Israel, and turn their hearts aside, rejecting signs and wonders, and the power and glory of the God of Israel.
Well first of all, it was the Romans who crucified Christ, but Jews only stoned people. Second, the High Priest Caiaphas said of Jesus, "His blood be upon our heads, and that of our descendants." Doesn't the blood of Christ cleanse all sin? Not for Jews, apparently.
Chapter 20 of 1 Nephi is lifted almost word-for-word from Isaiah 48, with the addition of the concept of baptism. I will cover Isaiah when I get to that part of the Old Testament. Chapter 21 of 1 Nephi, likewise, covers Isaiah 49. In Chapter 22 Joseph Smith not only copies the words of Malachi word-for-word (he wasn't even born yet in 600 BCE), he really drops the ball when he quotes St. Peter's paraphrase of Deuteronomy.
1 Nephi 22:20: "The words of Moses, which he spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that all those who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people"
This clearly follows Peter's version in the upper room on Pentecost Day:
Acts 3:23 For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.
But Nephi, six hundred years before Peter was even born, only had access to the Book of Moses:
Deuteronomy 18:18-19 I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.
