Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: zappala@larisa.usc.edu (Daniel Zappala) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: re: The Book of Mormon Message-ID: Date: 21 Aug 90 02:42:28 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 38 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu >In article cms@dragon.uucp writes: > The Book of Mormon has more than 25,000 words quoted from the King James >Bible. The Mormons say that Nephi must have brought the Hebrew Bible with him >and this accounts for the quotations from the Old Testament. It stretches >the >limits of credulity to believe that the translations of the inscribed plates >came out in King James English without variation more than 1000 years before >the 1611 Authorized Version was written. ------ After reading the discussions above concerning quotations of the Bible in the Book of Mormon, I found it interesting that people seem to accept quotations of the Old Testament in the Bible itself as a claim to its authenticity, while quotations of the Old Testament in the Book of Mormon lead to suspicion. Is the Bible supposed to be a self-contained Scripture, remaining unviolated and unreproduced anywhere? Don't we quote it today in a variety of our writings? If you fled Jerusalem in 600 B.C., wouldn't you bring with you copies of your culture's scriptures if they existed? As to their similarity to King James English, the last line of the posting quoted above seems to state that the plates the BofM was translated from contained King James English in 600 B.C. What I think the poster meant to point out is that when the BofM was translated in the 1830s, the *result* was a wording remarkably similar to the King James version of the Bible. I don't find this to stretch credibility, because if the BofM and the Bible had the same sources, the translations had better match! In fact, the similarity is also in line with the LDS claim that God's message to us is singular throughout time. Anyway, don't take my words too authoritatively, because I'm not a member of the LDS church, just an inquisitor... Daniel Zappala