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We discuss the facts, assumptions, and interpretations of New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon.
Searching for Seekers - Interpreting New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon
00:00-40:07
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Details
We discuss the facts, assumptions, and interpretations of New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon.
Comment
We discuss the facts, assumptions, and interpretations of New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon.
Listen to Searching for Seekers - Interpreting New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon by Cedric Fajardo MP3 song. Searching for Seekers - Interpreting New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon song from Cedric Fajardo is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 40:07. This high-quality MP3 track has 1058.4 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 15 Nov 2022. Stream and download Searching for Seekers - Interpreting New Testament Quotations in the Book of Mormon by Cedric Fajardo for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
Alright, welcome to the Searching for Seekers podcast, first ever episode. And today I am with my good friend, Eliza. Alan, introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Eliza. I'm just excited to be on this podcast today. Awesome, me too. So what is this podcast about? This is about using good sources, like the best books. You know that scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants that talks about finding stuff through the best books? Yeah, I love that scripture. So that's our goal. We're using good sources, the best sources, to help us understand the restored gospel better. That's awesome. I'm excited. Right. And so today we're going to talk about certain facts about the Book of Mormon that may raise some complex issues with our faith. It may have. It has for some people. But it's good that we know about the facts. And we'll also analyze what assumptions that we make to most correctly interpret the facts. Because it's important to distinguish, and we're going to do this a lot, between what the fact is and what we decide that fact means. So pay attention to that as we kind of read through some of these sources and talk about this issue. So I want to ask you about yourself a little bit. Okay. Are you a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. How long have you been a member of the Church? I was baptized when I was eight years old, so that was like 13 years ago. Very good. Pretty long time. Okay. And I doubt this is the case, but let's assume that there's some people in our very wide audience that aren't members of the Church of Jesus Christ. I'm sure there are, yeah. Can you explain to them a little bit about what the Book of Mormon is? Because obviously that's something that's unique to our faith. Like in one sentence, what is the Book of Mormon? What even is it? That is a really good question. I would just say that the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ. So the Bible is a testament of Jesus Christ and his teachings and ministry in Jerusalem. The Book of Mormon is Christ's teachings and ministry set in the ancient Americas. Very good. And why do we have the Book of Mormon? That is also a great question. The way I kind of like to think about it is when you have one source, you know, you have a lot of information about Jesus Christ. We have the Bible, which is a lot of information about Jesus Christ. But when you have two sources, you can compare them, they can complement each other and support each other, and you can understand more fully what you're supposed to, I guess, like gain from Christ's teaching and also understand about what he taught, what he was on earth. It's a lot more like concrete, I guess, when you have two sources. And so the Book of Mormon allows us to not only have that like comparison between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, but also allows us to understand some things that maybe were lost in like translation or over time with so many different, with the Bible passing through many, many different hands. Yeah. And that brings up a good point that the Book of Mormon is part of the restoration of the gospel. Without the restoration or without the Book of Mormon, there would be no restoration. And that's why missionaries, what are they always carrying? The Book of Mormon, not because we don't believe in the Bible, but that's the physical evidence that the gospel was restored and that there is new or restored truth on the earth. Eliza, do you believe the Book of Mormon is true? I do believe the Book of Mormon is true. That's awesome. But what do you mean when you say the Book of Mormon is true? Wow, I've actually never asked that before. I believe the Book of Mormon is true because I believe that the teachings are true, that they are from God. Yeah, I believe that the Book of Mormon was given to us by God and God's not going to give us something that's not true. Right. So what, this might be a weird question you might not have thought about before, but what might you be assuming about the book, the physical book, when you say that the Book of Mormon is true? I mean, there are a lot of assumptions I think that come with that. You assume that the translation's correct. You assume that your interpretation of the translation is correct. You assume a lot of things, I think. Yeah. I think you're right on about assuming the translation is correct. And by assuming the translation is correct, what does that mean? That's probably assuming, I think a lot of people, especially maybe people who haven't really studied a lot about the faith, they just kind of believe, they may assume that that means that the words came directly from the gold plates or that there's no mistakes in what was written. That once the first thing that was written down on the manuscript, that was it, and if it was changed, then something is not right there. Right? So those are a lot of little assumptions that we don't realize that we're making when we think about the Book of Mormon, but a lot of times we are making them. And like I said, that means if it's divine, then it has no flaws. It's perfectly historically accurate. Must be 100% original. Nothing can come from something else, because why would God do that if we already have all of the information here? Why would he repeat himself? That's interesting. So there's all these little assumptions that people make, I've made in the past, and I'm sure a lot of other people do. Next question. What assumptions might critics of the church or of the Book of Mormon make about the book? I mean, I think people make a lot of assumptions about the motives of the Book of Mormon, why do we have it. They make assumptions about its relationship to other sacred texts. Like why would we need the Book of Mormon if we already have this other sacred text? They can't coexist or support each other, but they have to be contradictory. When in reality that's probably not true, but I think people assume that two things can't be true at the same time. Right. No, that's a really good point. A lot of times two things can be true at the same time, at least I think. God can say something in the Bible and say something in the Book of Mormon. There's nowhere in Scripture that suggests that that can't be the case. Yeah, actually in Scripture it suggests it can be the case. You know, like we have the four Gospels that repeat each other. Right, that's very true. So why couldn't the Book of Mormon repeat what the four Gospels say? Exactly. That's a good point. I haven't thought about it like that, but it's exactly true. But a lot of people, especially critics of the church or of the Book, might assume that. And so it's good that we're talking about these little assumptions so that as we learn about the facts about the Book of Mormon translation, particularly how it relates to the New Testament, that we don't quickly jump to a conclusion. Because we might see one piece of information and quickly draw a conclusion, but what we should do is take a look at that piece of information, think about what are we assuming about that, and then create an interpretation that is most consistent with the rest of the information that we have. Because everyone is interpreting the facts, both members of the church and not, right? In their own way. So what I want to do right now to kind of introduce the specific issue that we're going to talk about, I want to read a couple verses from the Scriptures. Yeah, that's great. So we're going to start in Moroni chapter 7, and we're going to read verses 45 and 46. I want you to read that for me. You might recognize this. Okay, perfect. It says, And charity suffereth long in his kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked. Thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in truth. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail. Thank you. What a beautiful verse, right? So beautiful. So beautiful. And a lot of Latter-day Saints love that verse. Absolutely love that verse. A lot of missionaries will quote it a lot, and that, as they should, because it is such an amazing verse. And now we're going to read something that comes from the New Testament in the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 13. And we're going to kind of compare these two texts. And these are the first of the sources that we're going to look at today. This is one of the most basic sources you can get when talking about religion, because it is the scriptures. So this is starting out this journey of using the best books, the best sources. So this is 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4 through 8. Can you read that? Yeah. It says, Charity suffers long in his kind. Charity envies not, charity wanteth not itself, it is not buffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own. Is not easily provoked, thinks no evil. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth, but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail. Whether there be tongues, they shall cease. Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. Very good. Beautiful verses, right? Yeah, so beautiful. What do you notice about these two passages here? I mean, obviously they're really similar, not just in idea, but in almost exact language. There's a couple differences, but... Right. And I remember when I first realized that, I think I was on my mission, and I didn't realize that that verse, which I had so often read from the Book of Mormon and found great comfort in, it was also repeated almost word for word in the New Testament. I wasn't aware of that. And so at first that caused me to think a little bit. And both beautiful passages, but I can see how some people might have questions about that, right? Yeah. What questions do you think might someone have about that? That is actually so interesting, because to me it's like that in itself is more evidence of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. But if somebody were to look at it in a different light, I think if people don't believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that he wrote the Book of Mormon himself, then quoting other scripture would obviously be evidence of that. Or it would devalue the Book of Mormon by just the idea that it doesn't have original ideas, that everything contained in the Book of Mormon is already contained in the Bible. Why do we need that? Exactly. And, excuse me, and that is what a lot of people do assume about it. I think a lot of people, if we're quickly going to look at that, that there's a quotation in both that's the same. One person could look at that and say, well, it looks like one probably quoted the other. The Book of Mormon claims to have been written well before the New Testament was written, or at least most of it, parts of it overlap. But either way, in a totally different part of the world, without interaction between the two sides, except for Jesus visiting. And so someone might assume that there's a timeline inconsistency with the fact that in order for this to occur, that the Book of Mormon must have been written after the New Testament with the use of the New Testament, which would devalue the claims that Joseph Smith divinely translated the book, which means he's not a prophet, and then we go on and make all the rest of it up. It's all a fraud and everything like that, right? And so for a lot of Latter-day Saints, there's little issues like this that maybe don't start out being that much of an issue, but as they get more exposed to little inconsistencies that they originally assumed wouldn't happen, their initial assumptions of when they grew up in the church and grew up reading the Book of Mormon, then over time, that could cause them to lose parts of their testimony a little bit. Yeah, for sure. So, any other comments on that? Yeah, I... that's really interesting to me. I don't know if we're going to talk more about this idea of the Book of Mormon being quoted in the Bible. We'll talk a little bit more about it. A little bit more about it, okay, well then I won't share my thoughts. Save your wise comments. Yeah. But I do think it's very interesting and actually I thought I was the first person to ever realize this, but it turns out I wasn't and there's actually academic studies that have been done on this. Did you know that? People do academic studies about the Book of Mormon. Honestly, it's pretty amazing. I believe that. So, I went and did my research and I found an academic study. Again, we're trying to use all the best books. This was not written by a member of the church, but it was studied by this individual and they worked hard and put together a paper that contained some facts and some interpretations of facts. So, we're going to use this paper to look at the facts that were found about the Book of Mormon, look at his interpretation and kind of see if that matches up with our interpretation. And so, I just have some quotes from it. It's a very long study. I read most of it actually because it was interesting to me, but I chose a few quotations and I don't know if we'll read all of them, but we're going to look at a few of them. So, would you like to read this paragraph right here, letter A? Yeah, sure. Letter A, you said? Okay. This paper identifies 441 phrases that are seven words long or longer that are common to the Book of Mormon and the New Testament, but that are not found in the Old Testament. These phrases are proposed as candidate quotations of the New Testament by the Book of Mormon. This is important because the presence of any New Testament material in the Book of Mormon would seem to be inherently anachronistic and therefore potentially problematic for those who accept the Book of Mormon as a religious text. Very good. So, what is the fact there? What is the fact about the Book of Mormon that's in that quotation? There are 441 phrases that are seven words long or longer that are common to the Book of Mormon and the New Testament, but are not found in the Old Testament. Yeah. So, that's a fact. Yeah. That's not saying the Book of Mormon is true or false. No, you're a feudal. It's just there's 441 phrases that are similar to both. But he also interprets that a little bit and he says that would be potentially problematic for those who accept the Book of Mormon as a religious text. I think that's an assumption that he's making. I don't think that is a proven fact. Well, I mean, even the wording of his hypothesis, I guess you could say, therefore potentially problematic for those. That's not scientific language. You can't say, this could potentially be a problem maybe. That's not even statements. The fact that he can only say that means that he's not really proving anything. It's not a fact. Right. And there's that assumption that, oh, there are consistencies between the two books, therefore it's a problem. Yeah, true. But it doesn't have to be. Yeah, it's not inherently a problem. It's not inherently a problem, right? Okay, let's keep diving into this. I'll read the next one. It says, the pre-Christian era books in the Book of Mormon, so before through Nephi, contain 195 quotations from the New Testament. The presence of these quotations indicates that even the pre-Christian era portion of the Book of Mormon contains a large amount of Christian material. The very first book of the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi, contains 46 quotes from the New Testament, 22 of which are from Acts. So there's a few facts in there. That 1 Nephi contains 46 quotes from the New Testament, 22 of which are from Acts. And that the pre-Christian era in the Book of Mormon contains 195 quotations from the New Testament. Those are facts. And I think that's kind of interesting because that's before Jesus came. So it's not like Jesus came and told them these things that are also found in the New Testament and then it was before that, right? But there's also more interpretation that goes on in there. And I want to point that out just so that we're aware of what's fact and what's interpretation, right? And so he says that this indicates that the pre-Christian era in the Book of Mormon contains a large amount of Christian material. I think that's assuming a lot, assuming that the Book of Mormon is like the Bible in that before Jesus was on earth, that there was less Christian ideas. Whereas the Book of Mormon from the beginning says it's another testament of Jesus Christ. And I think that to be internally consistent, it should have quote unquote Christian material throughout. Yeah, well, and I mean, that's like saying the Old Testament can't contain anything Christian because it was before Christ. Like, yeah, the Old Testament is all about Jesus Christ. So if you're saying the things about Jesus Christ that existed before Jesus Christ can't be true, then you're just saying that the entire Old Testament is not true. Right. So that would be pretty strange. I agree. Okay, I went and I fished out another assumption that was made in this paper. Would you like to read it? It's a letter. Yeah, sure. It says, quote, the logic of the Book of Mormon, therefore, it was the authors of the New Testament who unwittingly quoted the pre-Christian era of the Book of Mormon 198 times. Whoa, that's kind of... Yeah, what do you think about that? It's a little intense. I mean, it's just a kind of like a fallacy, rhetoric fallacy, like a little manipulative to readers. Yeah, exactly. And so he uses that fact that there is that 198 quotations in the pre-Christian era to craft this sentence where it mixes that fact with his interpretation. That's fine that he interprets it that way. Yeah. That's, you know, that everyone, every person has an interpretation of the facts, but we just need to be careful about combining those together. Well, and stating our interpretation as fact, like... Exactly. Yeah. True. Because he did that for sure. Especially like when you're trying to be a reputable source. Exactly. And I like this next one. It's kind of long, but it kind of expounds on what he said in that last one. So he says, since the King James Version of the Bible was first published in 1611, many new ancient New Testament manuscripts have been found, and much has been done to produce a critical text of the Bible that's believed to be much closer to the original text than the King James Version. Whenever the Book of Mormon follows the King James Version rather than the critical text, it highlights a potential problem. For example, this study shows that there are four verses in the Book of Mormon that quote from Mark 16, verses 15 through 18. But Mark 16, 9 through 20, sometimes called the longer ending of Mark, does not appear in the earliest Greek manuscripts, and is now believed to have been added sometime in the early second century. Scholars have also noted that many other textual variants in the New Testament, and in several cases the study shows that the Book of Mormon follows the King James Version as opposed to the modern critical text. In order to explain this phenomenon using the logic of the Book of Mormon, the original authors of the New Testament must not have been sufficiently inspired to include the longer version of Luke or other textual variants including the Book of Mormon, but the later copyists were inspired to make the additions or changes. This rather awkward explanation is not likely to satisfy even the proponents of the Book of Mormon as an inspired and historically accurate text. That's pretty interesting, actually. It is pretty interesting. That's something I never thought about before, that in some cases there might be more accurate translations than the King James Version, and then we can compare the Book of Mormon to the King James or the original. But also it's kind of funny because he's like, in a way, disproving what he's saying, because he's saying that the Book of Mormon is less similar to the actual Bible. I mean, he's like, his whole entire paper is about like, the Book of Mormon is similar to the Bible, therefore it's not true, but like, as the Book of Mormon becomes less similar, he also uses that to say that it makes it less true. And I think his point here is that, therefore, it must have just been copied from the King James. Yeah, no, and it is very interesting. I just thought it was like, the average reader would be pretty convincing, I'm sure. And so that's why we're doing this, because it's good that we know this, because that is a fact, that the Book of Mormon might be closer to the King James than the original text in some occasions. That might be, that is a fact there. But we don't have to make the assumption that it's an awkward, we have to awkwardly explain it away. He uses that word in there, and he makes the assumption that it's not going to satisfy any believer in the Book of Mormon, that explanation of it. And he makes the assumption that, oh, the original authors in the Testament must not have been sufficiently inspired to make it. And so all these are ways of interpreting that fact, right? And we're going to talk a little bit later about other ways we can interpret these facts from a more faith-based perspective. And so that's kind of what I wanted to go over from that study. But really we want to just think slowly about all these things. We want to take them apart a little bit, I think we're doing a good job of that. Looking at our assumptions, looking at the facts, and the interpretation of the facts. So we've looked at some scriptures, we've looked at a scientific study, or an academic study about the Book of Mormon. What about the original historical record of what happened during the translation of the Book of Mormon? Why don't we look at that? That could be insightful to the process. I agree. Source number one. I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him. He sitting with his face buried in the hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us. When acting as a scribe, your father would dictate to me hour after hour. And when returning after meals or after interruptions, he would at once begin where he had left off without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him. He sitting with his face buried in the hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us. When acting as a scribe, your father would dictate to me hour after hour. And when returning after meals or after interruptions, he would at once begin where he had left off without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. So this source here talks about Emma Smith acting as a scribe when he was translating the Book of Mormon. And the earlier assumption was that he must have just been copying from the King James Version. What is this primary source? What does that add to this conversation? I think just the picture that it paints, he's not reading the Bible when he's translating, he's reading from a seer shown in a hat dictating to Emma Smith. And there's no mention of a Bible he's using or anything. It's just that situation described. And he's just picking up right where he left off, wherever. So that's pretty impressive if he was... He's quoting the Bible. He must have memorized the whole Bible to include little quotes in there. And another source directly from Emma Smith's secondary writing about what she said, she wrote, when he came to proper names he could not pronounce or long words, he spelled them out. And while I was writing them, if I had made any mistake in spelling, he would stop me and correct my spelling. Although it was impossible for him to see I was writing them down at the time. A particular memory remained with Emma throughout her life. One time when he was translating, he stopped suddenly, pale as a sheet, and said, Emma, did Jerusalem have walls around it? When I answered yes, he replied, oh, I was afraid I'd been deceived. Because the Book of Mormon talks about walls in Jerusalem. And so I think that shows that maybe he wasn't the most biblically literate person in the world. Yeah. Which is interesting if he was copying these intricate quotes, weaving them into the Book of Mormon. Or even he was surprised that it mentioned something. He was scared that it was wrong. So obviously he wasn't coming up with these ideas or else why would he question his own ideas? True. And in the first notes, this is from JosephSmithPapers.org, it says, though the original manuscript contains some spelling corrections, there are also many misspelled words throughout the manuscripts. And when in these quotes that are supposedly copied from the New Testament, there's a lot of misspelled words and phrases that probably wouldn't have been misspelled if you were copying it straight from the text. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So it's indicating that it was spoken by him who didn't have any text with him and copied down by voice. Yeah, true, true, true. So I think that's interesting. But we can think about the assumptions that we might be making about this. Just because there's no Bible present doesn't mean it didn't quote the Bible. Maybe he did have certain phrases memorized in his head. Maybe it was unintentional quoting. Maybe that was his interpretation of these words that he's translating from a foreign language. And since he was familiar with the Bible to some extent, maybe it came out with those kinds of words. So there's different interpretations that we can draw from these facts. True, and assumptions we are making. Right. Just the way people make it. And so we're going to wrap up a little bit with what some of the modern LDS scholars are saying about this. These are, they do a good job. This is from Book of Mormon Central, posted July 19th, 2019, about why do New Testament words and phrases show up in the Book of Mormon? So they did a very good study on this. And they separate their article into two sections, the no and the why. And I think that's their, what are the facts and what are the interpretation? How can we interpret these facts? And so we're not going to read a lot of this, but I want to point out a few of the interpretations that Book of Mormon Central offers for us. And actually it's interesting because they say, Book of Mormon Central says that there's 450 phrases or passages, or sorry, 700 passages from the New Testament in the Book of Mormon. While the other source said 400 something. Anyways, but here are some of the possible interpretations to these facts that we've talked about. You want to read that first one? Yes. The Resurrected Jesus as the source of some of these similarities. And so it goes into more detail, but basically it talks about that Jesus came to the Americas and in 3 Nephi 26, it says, even a hundredth part of the things that Jesus did truly teach unto the people could not be recorded. And so it is possible that Jesus comes and gives these teachings to the Nephi apostles that like the Sermon on the Mount that he gave to the Nephites is very similar to what he's going to teach the apostles or what he taught the apostles in the old world. So that could easily have led to these phrases that keep showing up. Yeah. I mean, you're quoting the same person. But that's not the only interpretation. There's also interpretations that these similarities are due to a common ancient source. And this again goes into more detail, but basically it says that they had these brass plates, they had Hebrew literature, Jewish literature. And so even though maybe some of these quotes didn't directly come from the old Testament, they had these phrases, these ways of writing that they were influenced by both cultures. True. And the people who wrote the Book of Mormon came originally from Jerusalem. So it makes sense culturally and source wise that they would be similar. Right. And there's a third one. Yeah. Revelations to the Nephite prophets as the source of the similarity. And so obviously in any Christian beliefs that God gives revelation to people, maybe not in the same way Latter-day Saints do, but God is the ultimate source of the scripture. And so if God wants to inspire one group of people, why can't he teach the same things through revelation? Why can't he inspire other people to write the same thing? Yeah, that is, I mean, it makes sense. Right. So that's a consistent way to interpret these facts. Going on, it says Mormon and Moroni are the sources of similarity. If you're familiar with the Book of Mormon, you know that the majority of the Book of Mormon was really written by one man, Mormon, who lived well after Christ came to the Americas, well after the New Testament was written. He lived around 400 AD. And so he wrote the majority of the Book of Mormon. And on occasions he quoted certain prophets. But even though he was quoting these prophets, he still had literary license to edit or to modify. So he edited what he modified from this. And maybe to make it more consistent, coherent, he used some of these phrases and some of these words to modify the explanations that these prophets were giving. And because a lot of this is just coming from Mormons' interpretation. Yeah, yeah, that's actually, I never thought about that before. Yeah. So I thought that was really interesting and it makes a lot of sense as well, logically. And then the last one that is suggested here is that the translation process could be the source of similarity. And there's one that's really interesting. That here it talks about how in Joseph Smith's time, so many phrases from the Bible were very, they were much more common in everyday talk than it is now. Because most people, if they had a book, the one book they would have would be the Bible. And so that was the main source of literature that many people had would be the Bible. And so, and especially being, living in the second great awakening, there's a lot of talk and a lot of conversation about the Bible. And so Joseph Smith is taking this foreign language and putting it into something that we need to understand or his people in his day needed to understand. And so as he's translating, there's no reason why the translation could not have been given to him in a way that would be consistent with what these people understand. These phrases that are just normal, they're not necessarily quotations of the New Testament, but normal phrases that everyone knows. Yeah, no, that's kind of makes sense. And the comparison was given about like Shakespeare, like so many words that we use come from Shakespeare. And that doesn't mean that anyone who uses certain phrases or words are quoting, plagiarizing Shakespeare. They're just using phrases that now have become integral parts of our language. That's interesting. So coming full circle, coming back to kind of the original question about this, we've looked at several good sources, I think, from even different opposing sides. We've looked at scripture, we've looked at academic sources. We've looked at interpretations from LDS scholars. We've even looked at primary sources from those who observed the translation process. And so just to end this little segment, I want to look one more time at what do we know? What is it that we really know? And then we're going to figure out what is our interpretation of that. And so what are the facts? And this is kind of the list that I came up with. What do we know from all this? One, the Book of Mormon and the New Testament share a lot of quotations. That's a fact. The Book of Mormon and the Bible both claim to be the word of God from the same source. It was God. That's a fact. The Book of Mormon claims to have been written mostly before and without any context from the New Testament world. That's a fact. There's no record of a Bible during the translation process. That's a fact. And 93% of the Book of Mormon is completely original material, meaning that only 7% of the total 500 plus pages of the Book of Mormon is quotations of anything. So then what are the interpretations of these facts? I think there's two main interpretations. One, the Book of Mormon was just copied from the New Testament, proving that it's chronologically inconsistent and it's a fraud and the church is false. That's one way to interpret it. But what do you think, Eliza? How can we look at these facts and come to a faith-based interpretation? I really like the article that we just read with all the different ideas that maybe the similarities are indicative of the fact that they are both from God. Maybe they're indicative of the fact that they're both teachings of Jesus Christ. Maybe it actually gives more credibility to the Book of Mormon because truth isn't meant to be new, right? It's supposed to be universal. And it's kind of an assumption I make, I guess, when I think about things like this is that if God is telling multiple people something, he would probably tell them the same thing. And so that could be a faith-based interpretation. Thanks. Perfectly well stated. And I agree. Both books were inspired by the same source, God. He gave similar instruction to his people in different parts of the world. And when they're both translating to our modern language, it results in that very similar language is used. And I think, like you were saying, these connections do not weaken the divine claims to the Book of Mormon. Just to finish off, I remember on my mission, I remember really trying to teach a certain investigator about the importance of reading the Book of Mormon. And we were over at her house, and we decided to just read a chapter. We read 1 Nephi 11, because that's where she was at in her reading. And so after reading 1 Nephi 11, it talks about this vision that Nephi has, it talks about Jesus, it talks about him being lifted up on the cross, sacrificing himself for the world. And as we finished that chapter, the Spirit was strong in the room. It was tangible, it was present. And she was commenting, wow, that was an amazing, what I read was amazing. I felt the truth of that. And that was a cool experience by itself. But a few minutes later, right after we finished reading, her brother-in-law, who lived in the house right behind them on the same property, entered into the living room. And he is a devout member of another church, and he was not a huge fan, supporter of that we were visiting this lady. And so he goes on, and he starts to say some of the things that we talked about today. The Book of Mormon's a fraud, that it'll just lead people astray. And before we could say anything, this lady said, hold up, stop. What I just read was true. And I know it's true. It talks about Jesus Christ. And you can't tell me that it's not true, because I just read it. When you sit down and you read this book, then we can have this conversation. Wow, that's super cool. And he was just quiet. And I think that's the answer. I think we need to read it. And what you said at the very beginning is super important, that you believe in the Book of Mormon because of its teachings. And what it teaches is true. And maybe there's quotations that match up with the New Testament, but we don't have to assume that that means the teachings are not true. The only way to know is if we learn of those teachings and live those teachings. And so that's why I believe in the Book of Mormon. I think all people should. And I think it's good that we look at these facts and we interpret these facts. And that can only strengthen our testimony, our knowledge, when we take the time to think slowly about it and not just jump to conclusions. So that about wraps up this episode of the Searching for Secrets podcast. First episode. And I really enjoyed this time talking about the Book of Mormon. And I hope you did too. I hope you learned a couple new things. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I hope you've thought slowly about these issues. And I don't know if there's any last thing that you want to add before we wrap up. I think you said it really well. I think the most important, I guess, factor in determining if something is important or true or not is if it brings us closer to our Savior. And if it's good, it's of God. And so I think as we take that, we can navigate whatever different sources we have in our life. Thanks so much for listening to our podcast. Stay tuned for the next episode. All right, bye. Bye-bye.
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