Actually, that (impuning the truthfulness and intergrity of the bible) is exactly where the Mormons always go when trying to defend the Book of Mormon.
It is like an automatic reflex for them, which is what informs my opinion that Mormons, while they pay lip-service to the bible, really hate it and wish it would simply go away.
Paul (formerly LDS, now gratefully Catholic)
Exactly, Paul! And thanks so much for the informative, well-reasoned arguments and absolutely devastating sources you cite in support of your charge. Picture me prostrate before your erudition and social analysis of the Mormons!
The LDS Church has an institutionally mandated, four-year course of study for all adults who attend its Sunday School. One year is spent studying the Book of Mormon, one the Doctrine and Covenants in context of church history, one devoted exclusively to the Old Testament, and one spent entirely studying the New Testament. Then the cycle repeats. For the fractionally impaired, that’s half the time spent studying the Bible. I’ve attended these classes my entire adult life and in my own personal experience have never noticed that we spend any time “impuning the truthfulness and intergrity of the bible” (get that spell-checker working, will you?). But obviously I lack Paul’s ability to see the dark underbelly of the LDS hate machine. All I ever get out of our Bible study is a deepened appreciation of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice for my sins. I guess I need to pay better attention per Paul.
But Paul is nonetheless correct. There are, after all, more obvious examples to be given where Mormons “pay lip-service to the bible, (but) really hate it and wish it would simply go away.” Here are some:
At BYU’s Neal A.Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, there is housed the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART). Funded primarily by the tithes and offerings of LDS Church members, CPART is devoted to improving access to the written records of Judaism and Christianity through digitally imaging and creating electronic versions of important ancient religious texts.
Paul needs to alert the folks at the Vatican Aposolic Library about these nefarious Mormons who so hate the Bible. Those rubes at the library have actually allowed CPART Mormons access to its incomparable collection over 800 Syriac manuscripts which were gathered in the early eighteenth century under the pontificate of Clement XI. In 1999, Mar Bawai Soro, a bishop of the Assyrian Church of the East, approached BYU to be a partner in the project to make this Syriac collection more accessible both to scholars and to the religious communities who originally produced them. Scandalously, the Mormons agreed, because obviously this work will undercut the veracity of the Bible they so hate.
In another act of utter disdain for ancient religious texts like the Bible, The Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome was suckered by the CPART Mormons to allow for the digitizing and cataloguing of some of its collection, which included a small but valuable collection of Slavonic manuscripts. Old Church Slavonic is the liturgical language of the Russian and Eastern European Orthodox Christians.
The same thing was done for the Christian Arabic manuscripts at Notre Dame University-Louziae where digital preservations were made of ancient editions relating to Eastern Christianity and its history.
But the smoking gun that proves Mormon hatred of the Bible is the unparalelled work CPART has done in the digital preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course these despised records contain not only the records and teachings of a particular Jewish community, but also the Bible of that community. The significance of this part of the discovery cannot be overstated. When a scholar picks up a copy of the Hebrew Bible today, it is based on a text that was copied nearly a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls Community flourished. If we want to study our earliest manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible, we must turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the Mormons are preserving it!
What more evidence is needed to prove Mormon hatred of the Bible and anything that supports its truth claims? Can there be any lingering doubt?
