Justified True Belief

(P1) A document claiming to be a divinely translated record of a real ancient civilization must, on examination, actually correspond to the historical world it claims to describe. Its content must be consistent with the archaeological, biological, genetic, linguistic, and textual evidence of the period and place it claims as its source. + This premise is not a hostile imposition. It is the standard the Bible itself applies, the standard any reasonable person applies to historical documents in any other context, and the standard the Book of Mormon explicitly claims to satisfy. (1) Genuine scripture must be true, including in its historical claims. - 2 Timothy 3:16 declares that all Scripture is God-breathed. A book that misrepresents the historical world it describes is not God-breathed; it is the product of human imagination or invention. - Throughout the Bible, the truth claims are grounded in real, testable history. Pharaohs, kings, cities, empires, and events named in the Old and New Testaments are repeatedly attested by independent Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman sources. The Bible's claims about real history can be checked, and they hold up across an extensive external record. - Truth in historical detail is not optional for genuine scripture. A document that systematically misdescribes the world it claims as its setting fails the test it sets for itself. (2) The standard the Book of Mormon claims for itself. - The Book of Mormon's own subtitle is "Another Testament of Jesus Christ." It presents itself not as inspirational fiction or religious allegory but as a literal historical record of real peoples in the real Americas. - Joseph Smith declared the Book of Mormon "the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion" (History of the Church 4:461). - LDS scripture itself ratifies the claim. Doctrine and Covenants 17:6 (a book of revelations dictated by Joseph Smith and accepted by the LDS Church as scripture alongside the Bible and the Book of Mormon) records the risen Christ saying of the Book of Mormon: "it is true." - This means the historicity question is not a peripheral concern. If the Book of Mormon describes a world that did not exist, it cannot be what it claims to be, and the religion built on it loses its central textual foundation. (3) The Book of Mormon's historical claims are specific and testable. - Specific place: the pre-Columbian Americas (the lands before European contact in 1492). - Specific peoples: the Jaredites (a civilization said to have migrated from the tower of Babel, roughly 2200 BC), and the Nephites and Lamanites (descended from the family of Lehi, said to have left Jerusalem around 600 BC, with their civilization ending around AD 421). - Specific civilization features: large cities, written records on metal plates in "Reformed Egyptian," kings and judges, coined money, steel weapons, horses and chariots, Old World livestock and grains, populations numbering in the millions, armies of hundreds of thousands. - These are not vague spiritual claims. They are concrete historical claims that can be tested against the archaeological, biological, genetic, linguistic, and textual record. They invite exactly the kind of examination this argument provides.

(P2) The content of the Book of Mormon systematically contradicts the archaeological, biological, genetic, linguistic, and textual evidence of pre-Columbian America, while at the same time reproducing 17th-century English translation choices and reflecting the specific religious, political, and cultural concerns of early 19th-century rural New York. + This is not a single difficulty. It is a convergence of independent lines of evidence, each of which on its own would be problematic, and which together form a coherent picture: the Book of Mormon is a 19th-century work in 17th-century English vocabulary, claiming to describe a world it does not match. (1) The archaeological and biological problem: items the Book of Mormon claims existed in ancient America but did not. The Book of Mormon describes ancient American civilizations using a long list of Old World plants, animals, and technologies that did not exist in the pre-Columbian Americas. The list is consistent across the text, frequent in the narrative, and central to the actions described. - Horses: 1 Nephi 18:25, Enos 1:21, Alma 18:9–10. Pre-Columbian horses (Equus) became extinct in the Americas around 10,000 BC. The Spanish reintroduced horses in the 1500s AD. There is no archaeological, genetic, or paleontological evidence of horses in the Americas during the Book of Mormon period. - Chariots: Alma 18:9–12, Alma 20:6, 3 Nephi 3:22. Pre-Columbian Americans did not develop wheeled vehicles. Some small wheeled toys have been found, but no chariots, no carts, no wagons, and no roads built for wheeled traffic. They had no draft animals to pull them. - Cattle, oxen, cows, sheep, goats, swine: Enos 1:21, 1 Nephi 18:25, 3 Nephi 7:8. None of these Old World domesticated animals existed in pre-Columbian America. They were introduced by Europeans after 1492. - Wheat and barley: Mosiah 9:9. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican agriculture was based on corn (maize), beans, and squash. Wheat and barley are Old World crops, introduced after Columbus. They leave behind pollen and seed remains in the archaeological record. No pre-Columbian wheat or barley remains have been found in the Americas. - Steel swords and iron weapons: Ether 7:9, 1 Nephi 4:9 (Laban's "fine steel" sword), 2 Nephi 5:15, Jarom 1:8. Pre-Columbian Americans worked gold, silver, and copper, but had no steel or iron weapons. The metallurgical capabilities described in the Book of Mormon do not appear in any pre-Columbian American archaeological context. - Silk: 1 Nephi 13:7–8, Alma 1:29, Alma 4:6, Ether 9:17, Ether 10:24. There is no evidence of silk production in pre-Columbian America. - Elephants: Ether 9:19. The Book of Ether places elephants in the Jaredite period (roughly 2200–600 BC). Mammoths and mastodons went extinct in the Americas around 10,000 BC, several thousand years before the Jaredite period began. These are not minor decorative details. They are pervasive features of how the text portrays Nephite, Lamanite, and Jaredite civilization. They do not match the actual ancient American world. (2) The KJV problem: 17th-century English translation choices preserved in supposedly ancient text. This is perhaps the single most decisive piece of evidence. The Book of Mormon contains entire chapters of the King James Version of the Bible (1611) reproduced verbatim, including the chapter and verse divisions that did not exist in any ancient manuscript. Major examples include: - 1 Nephi 20–21 = Isaiah 48–49 - 2 Nephi 7–8 = Isaiah 50–51 - 2 Nephi 12–24 = Isaiah 2–14 - Mosiah 14 = Isaiah 53 - 3 Nephi 22 = Isaiah 54 - 3 Nephi 12–14 = Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) Smith claimed to be translating ancient Hebrew records on brass plates buried in pre-Columbian America. Yet the surface of the text frequently reproduces a 17th-century English translation of the Hebrew Bible, paragraph by paragraph. The smoking gun, however, is more specific than this. The KJV translators marked certain words in italics to indicate words that were not present in the original Hebrew but had been added in English for readability. These italicized words exist in no Hebrew manuscript in the world. They were created by the 1611 KJV translators. They are present in the Book of Mormon. For example, Isaiah 9:1 in the KJV contains the italicized word "such"; 2 Nephi 19:1 in the Book of Mormon preserves it. Similar preserved italics appear across the Isaiah passages and the Sermon on the Mount. Take the Isaiah 9:1 example slowly. The KJV translators of 1611, working from the Masoretic Hebrew text (the standard Hebrew Bible preserved and transmitted by Jewish scribes called the Masoretes through the medieval period), encountered a sentence that did not flow naturally in English without an inserted word. They added "such" and marked it in italics specifically to alert readers that the word was an English insertion not present in the Hebrew. The word does not appear in the Hebrew. It does not appear in the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation). It does not appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls' Isaiah scroll, which predates the Common Era by roughly two centuries. It exists nowhere in any ancient manuscript of Isaiah anywhere in the world. It was created by the 1611 KJV translation committee. 2 Nephi 19:1 reproduces it. Joseph Smith was supposedly translating from brass plates that Lehi's family carried from Jerusalem around 600 BC, which would have contained Hebrew Isaiah, not English insertions made by 17th-century translators. The presence of this single word in the Book of Mormon is, on its own, sufficient to establish that the text was produced from a printed KJV Bible rather than from any genuine ancient Hebrew source. The same pattern repeats across dozens of italicized words preserved in the Book of Mormon's Isaiah and Sermon on the Mount passages. If Joseph Smith had been translating from genuine ancient brass plates, he would have been translating from Hebrew. The Hebrew text would not have included these specifically-English words. Their presence in supposedly ancient American scripture is direct evidence that Smith was working from a printed KJV Bible, not an ancient source. The Book of Mormon also reproduces KJV translation errors. The KJV renders the Hebrew word tannim (which actually refers to jackals or sea creatures depending on context) as "dragons," based on a 1611 misunderstanding. 2 Nephi 8:9 preserves the same mistake: "Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?" Modern translations correct the error. The Book of Mormon perpetuates it. A translation from genuine ancient Hebrew would not preserve specifically 17th-century English mistakes. (3) The genetic problem: Native Americans are not descended from ancient Israelites. The Book of Mormon's central historical claim is that Native Americans descend from Lehi's family, who left Jerusalem around 600 BC. Joseph Smith taught this explicitly. The introduction to the Book of Mormon, from its 1981 publication until 2007, identified the Lamanites as "the principal ancestors of the American Indians." DNA evidence has now established beyond reasonable scientific doubt that Native Americans descend overwhelmingly from Asian populations who crossed the Bering land bridge (the strip of land that connected Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age) thousands of years before the supposed arrival of Lehi. The relevant haplogroups (genetic markers passed from parent to child, which can be traced across thousands of years) found in pre-Columbian Native American DNA are predominantly A, B, C, D, and X, all of Asian origin. Hebrew and Middle Eastern haplogroups are not found in pre-Columbian Native American populations. Recent advances in ancient DNA technology have made this conclusion stronger, not weaker. Geneticists can now sequence DNA directly from pre-Columbian human remains, sampling the populations who lived during the supposed Lehite period rather than only their modern descendants. The Reich Laboratory at Harvard Medical School maintains the Allen Ancient DNA Resource, the largest database of ancient human genomes assembled to date, including substantial samples of pre-Columbian American populations. The result has been consistent: the genetic ancestry of pre-Columbian Native Americans traces to Asian populations who crossed Beringia (an older name for the same Bering land bridge) thousands of years before the supposed arrival of Lehi, with no detectable Middle Eastern component in the relevant time window. The defense that Hebrew DNA was diluted by mixing with later populations is foreclosed by the direct sampling of the earlier populations themselves: there is nothing there to be diluted. In response to this evidence, the LDS Church quietly changed the introduction to the Book of Mormon in 2007. The phrase "the principal ancestors of the American Indians" was changed to "among the ancestors of the American Indians." This is a remarkable retreat. The original claim was central to nearly two centuries of LDS teaching about Native Americans and the gathering of Israel. The revised claim is essentially unfalsifiable: any small group could in theory have been "among" the ancestors and left no trace. The LDS Church's own 2014 Gospel Topics Essay "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" (one of a series of officially endorsed essays the LDS Church published on its own website to address sensitive historical and doctrinal questions) acknowledges the DNA challenge and offers various explanations (small founder population, genetic bottleneck, Asian DNA from earlier migrations swamping later Hebrew arrivals), but does not produce evidence of any actual Hebrew genetic contribution to Native American populations. The absence is total. (4) The 19th-century fingerprint: the religious, political, and cultural concerns of Smith's New York environment, written into a supposedly ancient text. Beyond failing to match ancient American reality, the Book of Mormon positively matches the religious controversies, vocabulary, and concerns of early 19th-century New York. The fit is precise. - The anti-Masonic panic. The Book of Mormon contains extensive material on "Gadianton robbers" and "secret combinations": secret societies bound by secret oaths, with secret signs and handshakes, who infiltrate government and murder to protect their secrets. This is described in language nearly identical to anti-Masonic literature of the 1820s. In 1826, William Morgan in western New York was kidnapped and murdered after announcing he would publish a book exposing Masonic secrets. The case became a national sensation, sparked the Anti-Masonic Party (1828–1838), and saturated the press in Joseph Smith's region during the exact years he was producing the Book of Mormon. Smith's father and brother had been Masons. The Gadianton material reads as a thinly fictionalized version of contemporary anti-Masonic discourse, rendered into ancient-sounding language. - The infant baptism debate. Moroni 8 contains an extended denunciation of infant baptism as "an awful wickedness." This was a major theological controversy in 1820s American Protestantism, dividing Calvinist denominations (which practiced infant baptism) from Baptists and others (which rejected it). It is hard to explain why a 4th-century AD American prophet, writing to his son in the dying days of Nephite civilization, would devote significant text to a controversy that fits Joseph Smith's revivalist environment so precisely. - Republican vs. monarchical government. Mosiah 29 contains a remarkable speech by King Mosiah explaining why kings are dangerous, recommending a transition to a system of "judges" elected by the voice of the people, and warning against the corruption of unrighteous kings. The argument and vocabulary fit Jacksonian-era American republican thought far better than any reconstructed ancient Mesoamerican political theory. - Calvinist-Arminian salvation debates. The Book of Mormon engages directly with theological controversies between Calvinist predestination (the view that God sovereignly chooses who will be saved before they are born) and Arminian free will (the view that human beings freely choose to accept or reject God's offer of salvation) that were central to American Protestantism in the 1820s. The exact theological vocabulary of these debates appears in the mouths of characters supposedly living in 600 BC or AD 30. A document genuinely written between 600 BC and AD 421 in the Americas should not match the fine-grained controversies of 1820s upstate New York. The Book of Mormon does, repeatedly and specifically. (5) The View of the Hebrews problem: a Vermont book published seven years before the Book of Mormon argued Native Americans descended from ancient Israelites. In 1823, seven years before the Book of Mormon was published, a Congregationalist minister named Ethan Smith (no known relation to Joseph) published View of the Hebrews in Poultney, Vermont. The book argued that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Ethan Smith was the pastor in Poultney, Vermont, where the Cowdery family lived during the years View of the Hebrews was being written and published. Oliver Cowdery was Joseph Smith's primary scribe for the Book of Mormon translation, present at the dictation of the surviving manuscript. The parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon are extensive. Both posit Israelite origin for Native Americans. Both describe ancient American civilizations divided between civilized and savage branches. Both describe lost records preserved by the civilized branch. Both invoke the same biblical prophecies about restoring Israel. Both anticipate a latter-day gathering of the lost tribes. In the early 1920s, the LDS general authority B.H. Roberts (a member of the First Council of the Seventy, one of the highest governing bodies of the LDS Church, and the official church historian for much of his career) was asked by the LDS First Presidency to evaluate critical questions about the Book of Mormon. His private manuscript study, "Studies of the Book of Mormon," examined the parallels with View of the Hebrews in detail. Roberts framed the parallels as a serious challenge that critics could press, concluding that on a literary basis alone "it would seem that a case might be made out" that the Book of Mormon was derived from View of the Hebrews. Roberts remained a believing Latter-day Saint and never publicly repudiated his testimony, but he treated the parallels as an apologetic problem requiring a serious answer his church had not yet provided. The manuscript stayed in family hands and was finally published in 1985 by University of Illinois Press, decades after his death. The fact that an LDS general authority privately concluded the parallels were striking enough to require a serious answer is not a fringe critic's view. It is internal LDS testimony to the seriousness of the question. (6) The structural absence of eyewitness markers. The companion argument on the historical reliability of the Gospels (• CE / NT Criticism: The Gospels: Real History) identifies eight marks of authentic eyewitness testimony to real events: accurate locations and rulers, correct customs and culture, undesigned coincidences between independent accounts, unnecessary details, unexplained allusions, reconcilable variation, consistent supporting personalities, and a unified portrait of the central figure. These are the same criteria historians and courts apply to any document claiming to record real events. Applied to the Book of Mormon, the result is striking. The text not only fails these tests; in several cases, it cannot even be tested by them. - Locations and rulers. The Gospels name dozens of cities, regions, rulers, and officials, of which a great many are independently confirmed by archaeology, inscriptions, or non-Christian historians (Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod Antipas, Lysanias of Abilene, the Pool of Bethesda, the Pool of Siloam, Solomon's Porch, and many more). The Book of Mormon names hundreds of cities, kings, and rulers across a thousand years of supposed history, and not a single one has ever been independently confirmed. No inscription names any Nephite king. No archaeological site has been identified as any Nephite city. No external source mentions any person, place, or event in the Book of Mormon's narrative. - Customs and culture. The Gospels accurately portray the dual high priesthood, the Galilean accent prejudice (the way Galilean Jews were mocked by Judeans for their distinctive northern pronunciation, as when Peter is recognized in the courtyard during Jesus's trial), Sabbath legal disputes, the Feast of Tabernacles water ceremony, the Roman quaternion at executions (the four-soldier squad assigned to crucifixions, mentioned in John 19:23), and the statistical distribution of Jewish names, all confirmed by Josephus, the Talmud, ossuary inscriptions (carvings on first-century Jewish bone-boxes used for second burial), and Roman law. The Book of Mormon portrays no culture that any independent source confirms. Its Nephite legal procedures, religious practices, naming conventions, and political structures match no documented ancient American or ancient Near Eastern culture. - Undesigned coincidences. Undesigned coincidences require multiple independent accounts whose details interlock unintentionally. The Gospels produce these because they are four independent documents reporting on shared events. The Book of Mormon, dictated by one man over a few months, has no second independent account to interlock with. The category cannot be tested at all, and the structural reason for that absence is itself revealing: the text has no external corroboration because there is no external tradition. - Unnecessary details. The Gospels' unnecessary details (the cushion in the stern, the seamless tunic, the 153 fish, "the tenth hour") connect to externally confirmable realities (Roman crucifixion practice, Galilean climate, ossuary statistics, the geography of "going down" to Capernaum). The Book of Mormon contains details, but none of them connect to anything outside the text. The "details" of Nephite armies, cities, and battles do not interlock with archaeology, geography, or any independent record. - Unexplained allusions. The Gospels' unexplained allusions (Boanerges, the Aramaic nickname Jesus gives to James and John in Mark 3:17 with no explanation of why; the tower of Siloam mentioned in Luke 13:4 as if every reader knew which tower; the dispute about purification in John 3:25 mentioned without elaboration; the offhand "as the Scripture said" in John 7:38 with no specified Scripture quoted) show authors recording memories without crafting explanations for distant readers. The Book of Mormon shows the opposite pattern: it carefully explains 19th-century theological controversies (infant baptism, republican government, Calvinist-Arminian salvation debates) in language designed to be intelligible to its actual 1820s audience. The text reads as written *for* the 19th century, not preserved *from* an ancient context that would naturally produce dangling cultural references. - Reconcilable variation. This category requires multiple independent accounts of the same events to vary in incidentals while agreeing on substance. The Book of Mormon is a single text from a single dictation. There is no second account to vary from. The category cannot be applied. - Unified supporting personalities. The Gospels show Peter, Mary, Martha, and Thomas appearing across multiple independent documents with consistent personalities, even when each Gospel tells different stories. The Book of Mormon's characters appear only within its own pages. There is no external portrait of Nephi, Alma, or Mormon to compare to. The unity of personality test cannot be run. - The unmistakable central figure. The Gospels portray a Jesus whose distinctive personality (witty, sarcastic against hypocrisy, compassionate, given to object lessons, lonely, embedded in first-century Galilean culture) shines through four independent accounts. The Book of Mormon's Jesus, when he visits the Americas in 3 Nephi, speaks in King James English and delivers a near-verbatim recitation of the Sermon on the Mount drawn from the 1611 KJV translation, including the italicized words the KJV translators added. He is not recognizably the same culturally embedded first-century Jewish teacher of the Gospels; he is a King James Jesus, speaking the English of Joseph Smith's printed Bible. The unified-figure test therefore fails not in the direction of producing a different but consistent character, but in the direction of revealing the 19th-century English source of the portrayal. The pattern is consistent across all eight categories. Where the test can be applied, the Book of Mormon fails it. Where the test cannot be applied, the structural reason is the absence of independent corroborating tradition. The same methodology that confirms the Gospels as authentic eyewitness testimony to real events disconfirms the Book of Mormon as a translation of authentic ancient records. (7) The scope of this argument. This argument addresses the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon's content. The fraudulent credentialing of Joseph Smith himself (the 1826 court proceeding, the seer-stone translation method, the JST Genesis 50:33 fabrication) is treated in the companion argument on Fraudulent Prophetic Claims. The failure of his other claimed translation (the Egyptian papyri) is treated in Fraudulent Book of Abraham. The witness testimony to the gold plates is treated in Lack of Credible Witnesses. The positive case for the Gospels' historical reliability, applied as a methodological contrast in section (6) above, is developed in • CE / NT Criticism: The Gospels: Real History. Each compounds the case made here. The reader who works through them all sees a single coherent pattern: the credentials, the content, the predictions, the witnesses, and the parallel translations all fail under examination, and they fail in the same direction.

(C) Therefore, the Book of Mormon is not a translation of an authentic ancient record. It is a 19th-century work of religious fiction, written in 17th-century English vocabulary, claiming to describe an ancient American world that the archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and textual record demonstrates did not exist. + (1) The pattern is clear and converges from independent directions. - Archaeology: No horses, chariots, cattle, oxen, sheep, goats, swine, wheat, barley, silk, steel, iron, or elephants in pre-Columbian America. No cities, no inscriptions, no metal plates, no writing system identifiable as "Reformed Egyptian," no archaeological footprint of a civilization the text describes as numbering in the millions. - Biology and agriculture: The plants and animals described are Old World species. The food crops described are Old World crops. The livestock economy described did not exist. - Genetics: No Hebrew or Middle Eastern haplogroups in pre-Columbian Native American DNA. The LDS Church's 2007 introduction change is a tacit concession to this evidence. - Linguistics: No "Reformed Egyptian" attested anywhere. No Semitic or Egyptian linguistic substrate in indigenous American languages. - Textual analysis: Specifically-17th-century English translation choices (italicized KJV additions, KJV translation errors) appear in supposedly ancient text. KJV chapter and verse divisions, which did not exist in ancient manuscripts, are reproduced in the Book of Mormon. - Historical context: The religious, political, and cultural concerns of 1820s upstate New York (anti-Masonry, infant baptism, republican government, Calvinist-Arminian debates) appear in the mouths of characters who supposedly lived between 600 BC and AD 421 in the ancient Americas. - Methodological comparison: Applied to the same eight criteria that confirm the Gospels as authentic eyewitness testimony (locations, customs, undesigned coincidences, unnecessary details, unexplained allusions, reconcilable variation, unified personalities, and a culturally embedded central figure), the Book of Mormon either fails the tests or cannot be tested by them at all. The same standard, applied evenhandedly, produces opposite results for the two texts. Each of these lines of evidence is independently damaging. Together, they form a single converging case that no serious historical inquiry can dismiss. (2) The Book of Mormon describes a world that did not exist. Real ancient civilizations leave footprints. Egypt left pyramids, hieroglyphics, mummified rulers, and a still-decipherable language. Greece left ruins, art, philosophy, and a continuous literary tradition. Rome left roads and coinage across a documented empire. The Book of Mormon's Nephites supposedly numbered in the millions, fielded armies of hundreds of thousands, built cities, struck coins, and wrote in "Reformed Egyptian" for nearly a thousand years. They left no archaeological footprint, no genetic trace, no linguistic substrate, and not a single attested example of their writing system. They are invisible to every method historians use to find ancient civilizations, while the much smaller and less technologically advanced cultures around them (Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, and others) are well documented. (3) The burden of proof has shifted. The normal default is to evaluate religious texts charitably. But that default is voided when the text is making explicit, falsifiable historical claims that the entire body of evidence contradicts. Those who wish to maintain the Book of Mormon's historical authenticity now bear the burden of explaining: - why no horses, chariots, steel weapons, wheat, or barley appear in the pre-Columbian archaeological record despite playing central roles in the text; - why no Hebrew DNA appears in pre-Columbian Native American populations despite the text's claim that they descend from Lehi's family; - why a supposedly ancient text contains specifically 17th-century English translation choices (KJV italicized additions and KJV translation errors); - why a 4th-century AD American prophet would care about 19th-century controversies over infant baptism, republican government, and Masonic conspiracies; - why an LDS general authority (B.H. Roberts), with full access to LDS archives, privately concluded that the View of the Hebrews parallels were striking enough to require a serious answer; - why the Book of Mormon fails the same eight tests of authentic eyewitness testimony that the Gospels pass with overwhelming density, when both texts are evaluated by identical methodology; - and why the LDS Church changed its own scripture's introduction in 2007 in response to DNA evidence. A short answer to one of these would not be enough. A serious response would have to explain all of them, and explain them without resorting to a defense so flexible that no possible evidence could ever count against the Book of Mormon's historical authenticity. No such answer has been forthcoming, because the underlying problem is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up. It is what the evidence actually shows. See also: • Mormonism: Fraudulent Prophetic Claims • Mormonism: Fraudulent Book of Abraham • Mormonism: Lack of Credible Witnesses • Mormonism: Failed Prophecies • Mormonism: Fraudulent Isaiah 29 Claim • CE / NT Criticism: The Gospels: Real History