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Chapter 21: "Second Verse Same as the First"

 

Chapter Summary:

The Messiah will be a light to the Gentiles and will free the prisoners--Israel will be gathered with power in the last days--Kings will be their nursing fathers--Compare Isaiah 49. About 588–570 B.C.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This chapter follows the same pattern as the previous chapter. Just as the previous chapter copied and pasted Isaiah 48, this chapter copies the very next chapter, Isaiah 49.

 

In my analysis of the previous chapter I pointed out the problematic fact (for Mormons) that historians date all chapters after Isaiah 39 after Nephi had stolen the brass plates from Laban and fled Jerusalem. This means that the Book of Mormon contains chapters from the bible which were written after Nephi and his family left and should not be on the brass plates, and by extension should not be in the Book of Mormon if it is to be taken seriously as a historical document.

 

The content of the chapter itself is a repeating prophecy that, although it may seem as though god has abandoned the Jews, god will remember them and settle all scores in their favor. There is some imagery used to draw the reader to assume that Christ is talking: "I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands."

 

It is common for Christians to read into verses from the bible, and in particular the book of Isaiah, prophecies which they claim point to Jesus. The problem which they have yet to fully address is that the writers of the New Testament had access to the Old Testament and, much like how Joseph Smith could have retrofitted prophecy into the Book of Mormon, so too the New Testament writers could have forced Old Testament passages to confirm Jesus was the messiah after the fact. Too bad Jewish scholars wholly disagree with Christians on this point and regularly accuse Christians of working backwards to confirm their own biases.

 

To me this is all beside the point. Suppose the book of Isaiah could be shown to contain passages which clearly predict aspects of the life of Jesus. Would this be anything other than an argument from ignorance for the supernatural?

 

An accurate prediction by itself offers no explanation as to how the prediction was made. Maybe it was a coincidence. After all, how many people over the centuries have claimed to be messiahs or to otherwise fulfill of some prophecy? Is it unlikely that of the billions of people who have existed that at least some of them would appear to have some aspects in common with prophecy? Would the chances of such a coincidence go up if people had a vested interest in a given prophecy being fulfilled?

 

In science, predictions are made all the time, but they are worthless unless they offer a verifiable mechanism to explain how the prediction was made. Take Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. One of the most revolutionary and scientifically controversial points of his theory was that it challenged the nature of the universe. At the time the prevailing theory claimed that the universe was static and unmoving. The theory of relativity claimed that the universe was expanding.

 

To illustrate the accuracy of the theory of relativity, Einstein used the theory to predict the exact time and place of a solar eclipse. This feat had never been successfully done before and would have made Einstein appear to be something of a sorcerer in a more primitive age. And it worked! Einstein's theory allowed him to make an accurate, testable, useful prediction. The same cannot be said of Christians' biased reading of millennia old prophecies.

 

Frankly, I'm getting rather tired of all this copying and pasting from the bible. Nephi seems to overvalue the book of Isaiah--a book which is as confusing to read as it boring. Perhaps this is Joseph's intention: to bore the reader with long vague prophecies so they forget their retrofitted nature and the fact that Nephi had limited writing space, yet thought it necessary to copy and paste whole chapters from a book which would also be accessible to the intended futuristic readers.

 

This all smacks of lazy undergraduate plagiarism. Why write something original when it is much easier to pad a body of work with someone else's writings? And who better to quote-mine than the most obscure and confusing writer in the most widely read holy book ever written?

 

In the end, this chapter has the same problems and is just as skippable as the previous chapter. It is just another retrofitted prophecy inserted to evoke a sense of "ah-ha!" in already-believing Christian readers. Pulling direct quotes from the bible allows the Book of Mormon to borrow the bible's authority (which is none), and to appear as though the books were written by equally-inspired prophets (which depends on one's definition of the word "inspired").

 

This is one of the reasons why, as a missionary for the Mormon Church, I and other missionaries with me would focus our proselytizing efforts on people who shared common ground in a belief in Jesus. It is much easier to get people to take a single step further into irrationality than it is to start from scratch and try to make the story of Jesus and Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon seem the least bit plausible.

 

After all, is Mormonism really that much crazier a belief system than traditional Christianity? Perhaps, depending on who is asked, but they are equally unsupported by testable, verifiable evidence. Christianity and Mormonism are to be believed by the same process of faith and warm fuzzy feelings, which is to say, for no good reason. 

 

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