Most Damning Verse Contest: Questioning The Validity Of The Book Of Mormon!

by the Mormon Curtain

The "What is the worst story in the Book of Mormon?" thread got me going! I probably gave up on the validity of those stories before I even began to question the validity of the book itself.

But I've done a little reading in the meanwhile...and I think it would be fun to come up with a list of what we might call Sneaky Joe's Freudian Slips.

Rule for The Most Damning Verse Contest: assuming that modern scientific, anthropological, archaeological, linguistic, metallurgical, etc. knowledge is correct, which verse[s] in the BoM most damn the validity of the BoM for you and why?

Here's mine: 1 Nephi 1:2...for me the whole book falls completely apart right there: I have to award it the Worst Historical & Linguistic Verse!

Even 175 years ago any real Biblical scholar who was paying attention knew that in 600BC the people living in Palestine didn't refer to themselves as "Jews" (Yehudim) unless they were members of the Southern Kingdom Tribe of Judah (Yehudah ?????). The first usage of the term to designate Hebrews or Israelites in general is believed to have been in the Book of Esther, which takes place more than two hundred years AFTER Lehi's Promised Land Import and Export Co., Inc. uprooted themselves and departed Jerusalem.

The word "Jew" as we use it today (being applied to a group of Hebrews or Israelites, etc.) didn't exist until the end of the first millennium CE (per Wikipedia):

>>The most common view is that the Middle English word Jew is from the Old French giu, earlier juieu, from the Latin Iudaeus from the Greek ????????. The Latin simply means Judaean, from the land of Judaea. In the Old English the word is attested as early as 1000 [Current Era] in various forms, such as Iudeas, Gyu, Giu, Iuu, Iuw, Iew (the letter "J" did not commonly appear in use until the Late Middle Ages).

So was Smith "translating" "Reformed Egyptian" into Greek into Latin into English?!? It seems ludicrous! Of course Mormon apologists will (and have) claimed that Smith was just making things easier to understand for all us modern-day illiterates...but why then "translate" into ye olde 16th-century Court English of King James I? Why not Early 19th-century English?

Then there's that whole "Reformed Egyptian" crap...Smith claimed that he translated the book from Reformed Egyptian to Ye Olde Englishe. By putting his face into a hat and breathing his own fetid breath. He would have done better by moving to Paris, France and putting his nose into some scholarly books!

There are three problems with Smith's claim:

First, WHY would the ancient Hebrews, who had their own written language well before 1000 BCE, resort to using or developing some variation of Egyptian hieroglyphics? The Egyptians had already been considered the hereditary enemies of the Hebrews for over 1,000 years at the supposed time that the fictional Nephi begins his writing.

Why would any educated person living in Jerusalem in 600BCE resort to inventing an all-new completely unique writing system based on the language and hieroglyphs of an hereditary enemy? This just doesn't make sense!

Second, even if we override the unlikelihood of the first, Smith was in both the wrong place and the wrong time to be in any position to DECIPHER Egyptian of any sort, whether it was the three documented forms of REAL Egyptian hieroglyphs OR his "Jewish"-style "Reformed Egyptian".

Jean François Champollion (1790-1832) published three groundbreaking works on the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs: "Lettre à M. Dacier" (1822), "Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens" (1824), and "Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens ou Recherches sur les éléments premiers de cette écriture sacrée, sur leurs diverses combinaisons, et sur les rapports de ce système avec les autres méthodes graphiques égyptiennes" (1828).

Though these were published BEFORE Smith began "translating" his Book of Mormon, there are two facts that are problematic: 

1) they were written in French, a language Smith could neither speak or read; 

2) no English-language copies of Champollion's publications were available to Smith before the 1830 publication of his Book of Mormon. Therefore, Smith could not possibly have legitimately translated "Reformed" OR ANY OTHER kind of Egyptian texts.

Third, again overriding the unlikelihood of the first and second problems, how could Smith have "MOST CORRECT"-ly "translated" "Reformed Egyptian" in 1830 but made such demonstrably bad mistakes on his second foray into translating REAL Egyptian in 1842?

This demonstrates that even if texts on Egyptian hieroglyphs were available to Smith by 1842, he must have completely disregarded them.

The profoundly and ridiculously inaccurate Book of Abraham proves from an etymological, linguistic, and anthropological point of view that the Book of Mormon is merely a fraudulently presented fabrication of Joseph Smith, Junior, probably in partnership with as yet un-revealed  individuals.