Anit mormon pdf download

Gutjahr shows how Smith's influential book launched one of the fastest growing new religions on the planet, and has featured in everything from comic books and action figures to feature-length films and an award-winning Broadway musical.

Finally, in exploring what Martin Marty refers to as the Book of Mormon's "revelatory appeal," Givens highlights the Book's role as the engine behind what may become the next world religion. Grabbe Lester L. Author : Lester L. These critical readings explore the history of ancient Israel, from the Late Bronze Age to the Persian period, as it relates to the Bible.

Selected by one of the world's leading scholars of biblical history, the texts are drawn from a range of highly respected international scholars, and from a variety of historical and religious perspectives, presenting the key voices of the debate in one convenient volume. Divided into five sections - each featuring an introduction by Lester Grabbe - the volume first covers general methodological principles, before following the chronology of Israel's earliest history; including two sections on specific cases studies the reforms of Josiah and the wall of Nehemiah.

A final chapter summarizes many of the historical principles that emerge in the course of studying Israelite history, and an annotated bibliography points researchers towards further readings and engagements with these key themes.

May Wayne N. Author : Wayne N. Lists and rates online resources of interest to Mormons, including Web sites, e-mail lists, and discussion groups that focus on church news, missionary opportunities, educational resources, and family history and genealogy tools. Dialogue Dialogue Using arguments found in a recent anti-Mormon critique by Luke Wilson as a foundation, this article analyzes issues of the difficulties of reconstructing ancient geographies, problems with the discontinuity of Mesoamerican toponyms, the historical development of the idea of a Limited Geography Model, and difficulties of textual and artifactual interpretation when trying to relate the Book of Mormon to archaeological remains.

Most anti-Mormon attacks on the authenticity of the Book of Mormon suffer from several severe logical flaws. The authors are inadequately informed about Latter-day Saint history, doc- trine, and scripture; they have not read the text of the Book of Mormon carefully; they distort both what the text of the Book of Mormon says and the variety of Latter-day Saint interpretations of the text; they attempt to make all Latter-day Saint scholars responsible for the private opinions of some Latter-day Saint authors or General Authorities; and they frequently argue solely from the authority of selected authors or scholars, rather than providing evidence, analysis, and argumentation to support their case.

They seldom advance the discussion by dealing with current Latter-day Saint thinking on the matter, being content instead to rely on an ad nauseam repetition of anti-Mormon arguments, many of which have been around—and have had adequate Latter-day Saint responses—for over a century. Unfortunately, Mr. Wilson does not seem to have borne this important principle in mind while writing his article.

Although this article will address the main issues that Wilson raises, the general discussion is rel- evant to many anti-Mormon criticisms. Geographical Issues The Problem of Reconstructing Ancient Geographies Wilson first strives to discredit the Book of Mormon by unfavorably comparing the present state of knowledge about ancient Nephite sites with the state of knowledge about biblical sites.

He provides no evidence or analysis to indicate why this dubious assumption should be accepted. In fact, quite the opposite is true. There are several notable examples where precise reconstruction of archaic geographies has proven difficult if not impossible. The Bible itself is a case in point. For example, modern sites for only 55 per cent of the place names mentioned in the Bible have been identified2 —and this from the most carefully 1 Luke P.

Hereafter references to this article are given in parentheses in the text by page number and column letter: i. Rainey, 2d ed. Philadelphia: Westminster, , For example, where is Mt. There are over twenty candidates. Again, there are many different theories. Furthermore, the fact that there is widespread agreement on many questions of geography is simply an indication that scholarly consensus has been achieved but not necessarily that the consensus is correct.

The reconstruction of ancient western Anatolian geography also faces problems. Kamal S. He provides a brief survey of the theories, with references, on —66; Graham I. Los Angeles: Ridgefield, ; Graham I. New York: Thames and Hudson, , Gurney in The Hittites, 4th ed. New York: Penguin, In fact, comparing the current state of geographical knowl- edge of the Book of Mormon and the Bible is a false analogy.

As Professor Aharoni tells us: In the final analysis the most certain identifications [of biblical place names] are still those dependent upon preservation of the ancient name, albeit with careful examination of written sources and archaeo- logical data.

Out of the approximately place names mentioned in the Bible only about have been identified with any degree of certainty, i. Of these are based upon preservation of the name, viz. Only 72 places 15 per cent of the over-all total have been identified in situations where the ancient name is not to be found somewhere in the vicinity, of which only about half carry a degree of certainty, the remainder being more or less conjectural.

But in fact those 36 are identifiable largely because it is possible to triangulate their relationship to known sites, moving from the known to the unknown. It is only because there are numerous biblical sites known with certainty through the continuity of place names that these other 36 sites can be located.

The situation in ancient Mesopotamia is precisely the same. New York: Oxford, , References to the various theories are found on pages — Others can be put in the general vicinity of some known place, but the vast majority remain only vaguely situated at best. In addition, the biblical toponyms of the Holy Land exhibit linguistic continuity between the three related Semitic languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. There is no reason to assume that Maya languages, for instance, and Nephite languages were linguistically related.

This further disrupts the continuity of toponyms in the New World. As an example of shifts in the names of cities based on conquest and linguistic changes, we need look no further than Jerusalem. From the Canaanite u-ru-sa-lim14 derived the Hebrew Yerushalem or Yerushalayim.

The city was also fre- quently called the City of David, and Zion, giving four common names for Jerusalem in the Old Testament alone. However, following the Roman conquest in A. Klostermann, Das Onomastikon der biblischer Ortsnamen Berlin: n. See Hendricus J.

Following the Muslim conquests, how- ever, the city was called Aliya from the Roman Aelia , Bayt al- Maqdis, or al-Quds, as it still is by Palestinians today. If Christianity had been exterminated rather than becoming the dominant religion of the Roman empire, what linguistic evidence would we have that al-Quds of today was the ancient Jerusalem? Major conquests and cultural or ideological changes could result in the complete transformation of place names. The Greeks renamed all of the major Egyptian cities with Greek names.

Although some of these names represent translations of Egyptian names, in almost no cases is there a phonetic relationship. Classical Greek Byzantium became Constantinople in the fourth century A.

The imperial capital district in the region of modern Baghdad has been known successively as Kish Sumerian, early third millennium B.

We can see just this phenomenon in the Book of Mormon, where the Jaredite hill Ramah is later called the hill Cumorah by the Nephites Ether ; Mormon Where continuity of place names, references to biblical to- ponyms in nonbiblical sources, and detailed geographical de- scriptions such as those of Eusebius and later Christian, Jewish, and Muslim pilgrims are lacking, attempts to re-create ancient geographies are often plagued with precisely the problems facing western Anatolian geography, with alternative models locating the 16 The various names for Egyptian sites can be found in the ap- propriate sections and index of John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt New York: Facts on File, New York: Thames and Hudson, , 10— Should we be surprised to find that this is precisely the problem facing the geographer of the Book of Mormon?

A serious problem facing Book of Mormon geography is the severe discontinuity of Mesoamerican toponyms between the Pre-Classic before c.

These and many other Mesoamerican sites bear only Spanish names, dating from no earlier than the sixteenth century. On the other hand, we occa- sionally learn from historical sources of Mesoamerican to- ponyms that we cannot precisely correlate with modern sites. For example, the original site of the seventeenth-century Itza Maya town of Tayasal is still disputed between Lake Yaxha and Lake Peten, despite the existence of much Spanish colonial eth- nohistorical information on this location.

Most of the indigenous toponymic material for Mesoamerica comes from four languages: Aztec Nahuatl , Mixtec, Zapotec, and various dialects of Maya.

For each of these languages, the vast majority of toponyms were recorded only in the sixteenth century, over a thousand years after the Book of Mormon period. I would like to thank John Sorenson for providing me with this reference. Whereas several thousand inscriptions exist from Classic Mesoamerica A. All surviving inscriptional toponyms from Book of Mormon times are therefore basically symbolic rather than phonetic, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to know how they were pro- nounced.

The result is that of the hundreds, if not thousands of Pre- Classic Mesoamerican sites, only a handful can be associated with Pre-Classic Mesoamerican names. Of these, most are iden- tified by symbolic glyph names rather than phonetic names. Perhaps ten can be matched with actual places known to- day. A Zapotec speaker would pronounce the glyph for the place-name of the same site differently than a Mixtec, and both would be different 21 John S.

Indeed, there is a dispute as to whether the glyphs symbolize the city-name proper, the ruling dynasty of the city, or the patron god of the city. Chinese writing can even be read, understood, and pronounced in Korean or Japanese. Barring further discoveries, we will therefore never learn from inscriptional evidence how the names of Mesoamerican cities were pronounced in Book of Mormon times.

The reconstruction of Book of Mormon geography thus faces several difficulties not found in biblical geography. These items allow historians to create a map grid based both on names and distances between sites for key biblical to- ponyms. As noted above, a more accurate comparison to Book of Mormon geography is that for Bronze Age western Anatolia, where similar problems of reconstruction exist. Having falsely asserted—without any evidence or analy- sis—that the question of the precise location of Book of Mormon geography should be an easy matter to resolve, Wilson next goes on to misrepresent the history of the debate in the Latter-day Saint community concerning Book of Mormon geog- raphy.

Provo, UT: F. I will be quoting from the revised edition. John E. Is it any wonder that knowledgeable Latter-day Saints do not take such endeavors seriously and frequently find anti-Mormon writings patheti- cally amusing?

This is in distinction to microgeography, the iden- tification of specific Book of Mormon toponyms with New World archaeo- logical sites. George Q. Nor are we acquainted with any of the Twelve Apostles who would undertake such a task. The reason is, that without further information they are not prepared even to suggest. Ludlow, ed. New York: Macmillan, , The original manuscript has been edited by Dean C.

Jessee, The Papers of Joseph Smith, 2 vols. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, , — It is interesting to note that this identification contradicts a statement in the Book of Mormon itself. In other words, the Book of Mormon explicitly states that the records hidden in the Mesoamerican Cumorah were not the plates of the Book of Mormon, but were the other records of the Nephites.

The Book of Mormon itself provides no name for the hill in which the golden plates found by Joseph Smith were buried. This issue poses an interesting dilemma for critics of the Book of Mormon. In addition, IJMS provides those who submit manuscripts for publication with useful, timely feedback by making the review process constructive. To submit a manuscript or review, including book reviews please email them for consideration in the first instance to submissions ijmsonline.

New York: Oxford University Press, Mason attends to the ways in which southern honour, characterized by a communal estimation of the individual and often deployed to protect or avenge the virtuous female, provided justification for illicit actions against Mormon missionaries. In his thematic treatment, which primarily relies on newspapers and periodicals, Mason provides two case studies of anti—Mormon vio- lence—the murder of Joseph Standing and the Cane Creek Massacre —explores the ecumenical, bipartisan, and national nature of attacks on polygamy, outlines three overlapping southern approaches to its eradication—vigilantism, evangelism, and legislative reform—and quantifies and qualifies southern anti—Mormon aggression.

Though focused on anti—Mormonism and its violent aspects, Mason also describes how Utah Mormons constructed an oppositional identity in relation to southern hostilities and suggests that the LDS emphasis on difference contributed to the violence. While he provides a rather focused account, Mason is not simply filling a gap in the historiograph- ical record. He uses southern anti—Mormonism to address some of the larger issues facing post—bellum American society, including questions about the limits of religious toleration, the process of national healing and reunion, and the politics of domesticity.

Mason argues that polygamy propelled southern anti— Mormonism. In two of his most illuminating chapters, he traces the emergence of a national bipartisan anti—polygamy movement, most evident in the widespread support of Reynolds v.

At times Mason attends to Mormon responses to anti—Mormon violence and this subject receives extended treatment in the penulti- mate chapter. LDS speakers used the memorial services of Elders John Gibbs and William Berry to reinforce their identity as a persecuted people with ties to suffering saints of the primitive church and forbear- ers of the immediate past. In describing how Utah Mormons positioned themselves within a tradition of religious persecution, Mason utilizes the scholarship of D.

Michael Quinn, R. Laurence Moore, and Jan Shipps. See also D. Mormons pinned the violence on the southern press, local anti—Mormons, and a bigoted Protestant leadership.