jskains wrote:Doesn't trying to convert Mormons to your flavor of Christianity using flaws in the historical accuracy of the Book of Mormon/Book of Abraham present a problem?
Many events in the Bible have come under severe scrutiny over the years, especially with no evidence of a slave uprising in Egypt or a flee into a desert for 40 years, or even settling afterwards. Battles and wars in cities that may have not even existed at the time and all sorts of other flaws.
Isn't that creating new converts into your faith with a dangerous disposition to eventually flee when an Atheist, for example, attacks the Bible itself using the same tactics??
JMS
Perhaps, as an Evangelical approaches scripture, it could be the same result.
Catholics and main-line Protestants (Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians) do not approach scripture in the same way as Evangelicals or Mormons.
A gospel is not a psalm, a psalm is not an apocalypse, a poetic books is not a history, a history is not a fable, a genealogy is not a wisdom. In other words, we understand that not everything is to be interpreted literally, or even understood in the same way, one genre to another. Bible History is with a view to Salvation, that is, God's work among His people. The Bible authors were not professional writers or historians. The Old Testament writers convey Salvation History, in a context of human history. The details of human history are not given importance.
At any rate, the culture, language, religious rites, etc. described in the Old Testament exist, to this day. The Book of Mormon lacks a cultural context. The anachronisms are just a sign of this. Mormonism also pulls God out of human history. Humans not worthy of God, God works around humans, instead of in and through us. This removes God from human history, which is how Mormons view all scripture. The only way to reconcile the Book of Mormon to the Bible is to remove the Bible from its humanness, to put it in the same existence as the Book of Mormon.
A convert from Mormonsim to Christianity has to learn how to understand the Bible without referencing it to the Book of Mormon, and other Mormon scripture. Converts from Evangelical and Mormon backgrounds have to learn the four senses of scripture. The literal sense, using exegesis, and the three spiritual senses, allegory, moral and anagogy.
The Letter speaks of deeds
Allegory to faith
The Moral how to act
Anagogy our destiny
All that being said, the greatest problem the Book of Mormon has on a historical point, is the supposed authors claiming to be in the act of writing scripture for a future generation and/or people. It puts the Book of Mormon into the need of historical accuracy that doesn't exist in the Bible. The authors of the Bible make no indication they considered their writings important enough to be scripture. They were important to the people, the communities, from where they themselves existed. It was only over a length of time that the descending communities compiled older writings and oral stories into a compilation of sacred texts.
The Book of Mormon lacks this growth, and claims to be scripture from before the moment the words were written down. Makes it more difficult to give allowance for historical error, as the stories are supposedly real-time,not an outgrowth from a community of believers who had shared and compiled stories over a length of time. One expects to find differences in historical fact in such a case. The Book of Mormon doesn't have this "luxury".
Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction -Pope Benedict XVI