The fact that Joseph Smith roamed about in upstate New York as a young man searching for the lost treasures of Captain Kidd should have been enough to warn people that he was a few fries short of a happy meal. But his later claims to have received a set of Golden Plates from the Angel Moroni spared him from being seen merely as a quack. Instead, they ensured that he will go down in history as both a fraud and a heretic.
The Golden Plates of the Angel Moroni supposedly disappeared into heaven never to be seen again after Smith transcribed The Book of Mormon. This is but one of the evidentiary problems faced by the Latter-day Saints (LDS). The dearth of archeological evidence supporting the claims of Mormonism is also disturbing given that the events described in the book allegedly took place as late as the fifth century A.D.
That many of my LDS readers place The Book of Mormon in the same category with the Bible is odd, to say the least. While archeology has failed to substantiate The Book of Mormon, the veracity of the Bible – both the Old and New Testaments – has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years.
Sometimes the discoveries confirming the Bible have been general, such as the evidence suggesting that the world did, in fact, have a single language at one time. Another example is the relatively recent evidence that the Hittites really did exist. Those who said for years that no such people ever existed must now contend with concrete evidence found in modern-day Turkey.
More specific examples include discoveries confirming passages in Samuel which say that after his death Saul’s armor was put in the temple of a Canaanite fertility goddess. Passages in Chronicles say his head was put in the temple of a Philistine corn god. Since the Canaanites and Philistines were enemies, critics of the Bible thought that it was an error to place their temples in close proximity. Now that excavations have placed these two temples side-by-side, the critics have been silenced.
Aside from the wealth of archeological evidence that sets the Bible apart from The Book of Mormon, there is another issue of confirmation by prophecy. The predictions in Psalms – that the hands and feet of Jesus would be pierced, that his bones would be out of joint and that lots would be cast for his garments – are amazing. Zechariah also speaks of the piercing of Jesus in a way that clearly foretells his crucifixion.
Prophecies concerning Jesus’ crucifixion are all the more amazing when one considers that the Roman method of execution had not yet been invented when these passages were written. People were simply stoned to death in Old Testament times. Isaiah 53 alone foretells a dozen amazing details of the crucifixion of Christ. (For further reading see Norman Geisler. Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999).
When I was younger, atheists tried to convince me that certain passages from the writings of Nostradamus surpassed the Bible in terms of predictive credibility. For example, the following passage by Nostradamus was said to be a reference to Adolf Hitler: “…Beasts mad with hunger will swim across rivers. Most of the army will be against the Lower Danube [Hister sera]. The great one shall be dragged in an iron cage when the child brother [de Germaine] will observe nothing.”
Years later, I learned that Nostradamus’ predictions were meaningless. Hister was a place, not a person like Hitler. De Germaine represented “near relative,” not the nation of Germany. It seems that the hunger to minimize the uniqueness of the Bible is eternally strong, but the evidence is eternally lacking.
As it stands, the Bible I read as a child stands alone as a document that has the support of prophets looking into the future and archeologists looking into the past. The Book of Mormon has neither.
I wish I could classify the fraud of The Book of Mormon as the thing that bothers me the most about Joseph Smith. But, unfortunately, it is not. And, unfortunately, an enumeration of my other problems with Joseph Smith will have to wait until next week’s column.
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Mike S. Adams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on October 30, 1964. While a student at Clear Lake High School in Houston, TX, his team won the state 5A soccer championship. Mike Adams graduated from C.L.H.S. in 1983 with a 1.8 GPA. Mike Adams was ranked 734 among a class of 740, largely as a result of flunking English all four years of high school. After obtaining an Associate's degree in psychology from San Jacinto College, Mike Adams moved on to Mississippi State University where he joined the Sigma Chi Fraternity. While living in the fraternity house, his GPA rose to 3.4, allowing him to finish his B.A., and then to pursue a Master's in Psychology. In 1990, Mike Adams turned down a chance to pursue a PhD in psychology from the University of Georgia, opting instead to remain at Mississippi State to study Sociology/Criminology. This decision was made entirely on the basis of his reluctance to quit his night job as member of a musical duo. Playing music in bars and at fraternity parties and weddings financed his education. Mike Adams also played for free beer.
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Upon getting his doctorate in 1993, Adams, then an atheist and a Democrat, was hired by UNC-Wilmington to teach in the criminal justice program. A few years later, Adams abandoned his atheism and also became a Republican. He also nearly abandoned teaching when he took a one-year leave of absence to study law at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998. After returning to teach at UNC-Wilmington, Adams won the Faculty Member of the Year award (issued by the Office of the Dean of Students) for the second time in 2000.
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After his involvement in a well publicized free speech controversy in the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Adams became a vocal critic of the diversity movement in academia. After making appearances on shows like Hannity and Colmes, the O'Reilly Factor, and Scarborough Country, Adams was asked to write a column for Townhall.com.
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Today Mike Adams enjoys the privilege of expressing himself both as a teacher and a writer. Mike Adams is also an avid hunter and reader of classic literature. Mike Adams published his first book, Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel, in 2004. His second book, Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus, was published in 2008.
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