Mormonism Revisited – Program 3

By: Ed Decker; ©1984

The Book of Mormon is an important scripture for Mormons. Is there any archaeological evidence for the people and places mentioned in the Book of Mormon?

The Book of Mormon

Introduction

Tonight on The John Ankerberg Show we will compare the truth claims of Mormonism with the truth claims of Orthodox Christianity. The claims of each are different. Mormons believe there are many gods, Christians believe there is just one. Mormons believe men can become gods; Christians do not. Christians believe only the Bible is God’s Word. Mormons believe there are other books besides the Bible that are divinely inspired. Mormons believe Joseph Smith is a prophet of God. Christians deny this.

Tonight, we are revisiting Mormonism, as four years ago we interviewed Mormon representatives. A year later, we interviewed the great-great-granddaughter of Brigham Young who left the Mormon Church. For tonight’s program, we invited both Mormons and former Mormons to come and present their views. A formal letter was sent to the head of communications of the Mormon Church and a personal invitation was extended to Dr. Wilford Griggs and Dr. Hugh Nibley, two of the leading scholars in Mormonism. At first, Drs. Griggs and Nibley said they would come, but later they cancelled and declined our invitation to speak to you tonight. But via excerpts from the documentary film, The God Makers, you will hear Mormon leaders present their beliefs. You will also meet Mr. Ed Decker, a man who for 20 years was a Temple Mormon and whose son is currently a Mormon missionary. We will ask Mr. Decker why he changed his mind concerning Mormonism after 20 years. Both Mormons and Christians are hard working, highly respected people. Both are sincere and dedicated in the practice of their beliefs. Our purpose during this series is not to question anyone’s sincerity. Rather, we will attempt to examine the evidence for the religious truth claim being made for purposes of comparison and knowledge. Ultimately, only you can decide which position is true. We invite you to join us.

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Ankerberg: We are interviewing Mr. Ed Decker, who was a Mormon for 20 years, was married in the Temple in Los Angeles, and is sharing with us some of the experiences that he had. I would like to start off tonight with: “Is the Bible the sole authority for the Mormons?”

Decker: Well, as a Mormon, I believed that the Bible was the Word of God insofar as it was translated correctly.

Ankerberg: What does that mean?

Decker: Well, that means just what it said. We believed that many great and wonderful truths were taken away by the great and abominable church, and that what was left has been translated by so many different people in so many different ways that as one of the leaders said, “We don’t even know if we can count on the words of the Bible, either the Old or the New Testament, to be what the author really meant.”

Ankerberg: So, on one hand you affirmed it and on the other hand, you ripped out the basement for it.

Decker: Well, we tore out the foundation. We have to rely upon “new and better scripture.” We have the Book of Mormon, which is the word of God.

Ankerberg: This is also scripture.

Decker: That is scripture. And then the Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Covenants. Those four comprise the standard works of the Mormon Church.

Ankerberg: And those books are said by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to be what?

Decker: Well, Joseph Smith said that the Book of Mormon was the purest, the most perfect book in all the world. You see, God dictated it to him. He looked upon these golden plates with the Egyptian inscriptions on them that the angel Moroni led him to, and he translated those into the Book of Mormon. And he did it word by word. He put a seer stone in his hat, according to one of his scribes, and then he would stick his head in the hat and then he would see the words as they went across, sort of like a screen, like a word processor. And then it would stop if the scribe wrote it wrong. When it was done right, he would continue on.

Ankerberg: Which is actually an occult practice.

Decker: Well, he was heavily involved in the occult. His father was involved in water witching and they were involved in those kinds of things in that day.

Ankerberg: Which the Bible condemns. Let’s look at the evidence for the Book of Mormon. Every Mormon missionary says, “The evidence is there from archaeology, geography, and the history.” Let’s take a look at the evidence in this new documentary film, The God Makers. And we are just taking a segment of it concerning the evidence for the Book of Mormon.

[Excerpt from The God Makers]

Tanner: The Mormon Church has deliberately hidden the records of its early church leaders, of their early documents, their early publications from their members.

Narrator: Ron Prittis, business manager of the Seventh East Press, a newspaper published by young Mormons seeking reform in the church though exposing Mormon cover ups.

Prittis: Some of the items that have brought the most attention to the paper are items of church history, theology and some of the dishonesty on the part of some of the administrators in dealing with students.

Tanner: There are things in the church records, if they were open for public inspection, it would tarnish this beautiful image that the church puts out. The missionary comes to your door. “We have a beautiful story to tell you about families,” and they want to tell you what a glorious place this is to raise your children. The missionary isn’t part of the cover-up. He doesn’t know of this. He has been told that everything will check out; it’s all 100% true. He thinks the records are open. He doesn’t even realize he couldn’t go to Salt Lake and see these documents for himself.

Decker: Where in the Christian faith we find our scholars looking for earlier manuscripts, always refining, always going back to the earliest manuscripts to improve and validate the authenticity of the Holy Scripture, in Mormonism, it’s completely the opposite.

Tanner: The leaders have to go back and rework, rewrite, cover-up, change, delete, add all the way through all of their books—their histories, their scriptures. They suppress their diaries, because these things show the confusion and the man-made nature of the theology and the religion. The Book of Mormon claims to be an actual historical record translated from real plates that Joseph Smith unearthed in a hill in New York. Now, if this is a genuine history, one would assume you could study this just like you would study any historical book.

Narrator: Dr. Charles Crane, author, college professor, expert on Mormon archaeology:

Crane: As we look at the Book of Mormon, we find an entirely different story. Instead of being an actual record of actual fact, I have looked over maps, checked archaeological information and I still am left to wonder, where is the land of Zarahemla? Where is the Valley of Nimrod? Where are the Plains of Nephaha? I have been unable to find a record of even one city as mentioned in the Book of Mormon.

Tanner: We turn to the Book of Mormon and we have nothing. There is no Nephite language; there are no Nephite cities. There is not a map in any Book of Mormon. You can’t locate any site. There is no evidence for the book, and yet it is supposed to be a historical record.

Narrator: Dr. Richard Fales, author, lecturer, archaeologist:

Fales: We have never excavated one single artifact that even remotely relates to this alleged civilization that the Mormons claimed existed in the United States, Central America and in South America.

Narrator: No archaeological evidence has been found to authenticate the vast American empire described in the Book of Mormon and yet archaeology has been able to prove the existence of all great civilizations, including those of biblical times. For instance, these coins mentioned in the Bible, the shekel, the dram, the widow’s mite, have all been found in abundance.

Crane: What do we find when we look at the Book of Mormon? In Alma, the 11^th chapter, verses 5-19 is a listing of the coinage of the period of time that was used by these people. It lists the senine of gold, the seon of gold, the shum of gold. They had lesser coins: the shiblon, the shiblum, the leah. Need it be said at this point that not one of these coins has ever been found?

Goodman: Many people do not understand the Book of Mormon. This is a history of the people that inhabited the American continent, North, South and Central America, from about 500 BC until about 420 AD. And we have much evidence, of course, of people having lived there.

Crane: I am led to believe from my research that this is not an actual story, but is a fairy tale, much like Alice in Wonderland.

[Discussion around a table in an office]

1st participant: Decades of searching by Mormon archaeologists have failed to uncover one scrap of evidence regarding the people or the places or the events in the Book of Mormon.

2nd participant: And Mormon missionaries throughout the world are converting people to the Mormon Church by explaining to them that archaeology has proven the Book of Mormon to be true.

Crane: One of the Mormon Church’s standard works of scripture is called The Pearl of Great Price. In this is the Book of Abraham that Joseph Smith claimed was translated from some papyrus fragments that he purchased from an Egyptologist traveling through the area. By 1842, with no knowledge of the Egyptian language, he translated that into what is called the Book of Abraham. That manuscript disappeared until 1967. It has now resurfaced. Several famous Egyptologists have now looked at it, translated it, and have found that it doesn’t have anything to do with the time of Abraham at all.

Fales: Joseph Smith did not get right even one word in this whole translation. In fact, he took one little letter that looks like a backwards “e” and translated it into over 76 words with seven names.

Prittis: Well, there are certain things that are embarrassing to the church.

Crane: It never ceases to amaze me the number of intelligent people that are in the Mormon Church that still accept things that cannot be substantiated. They get so locked in that they are afraid to even take another look. We run into them many times where they have admitted that rather than sit down and study with us, they will accept what their church leaders tell them.

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Ankerberg: Ed, I am thinking about a Mormon that is watching tonight. Can you remember when you heard some of this evidence? How did you feel?

Decker: I had always been told that archaeology has proven the Book of Mormon to be true beyond any doubt, that archaeologists, non-Mormon archaeologists, had taken the Book of Mormon and actually used it as a guide to find cities in South and Meso-America. And yet as I tested that, I found out that was not true. There are 38 major cities mentioned in the Book of Mormon and not a single one of them has ever been discovered. We read stories in here of how huge lines of snakes herded the people and their flocks south and built fences around them, things that to a normal, intelligent person are absurd. In the 14^th chapter of the Book of Mosiah it quotes the Bible in a tremendous amount. It takes the 53^rd chapter of Isaiah and includes it in King James English—which is the way the Book of Mormon is written—the entire chapter, and says this is the Word of God. And yet there are….

Ankerberg: Word for word?

Decker: Word for word with 15 italics words and phrases as part of it. And I read that the italics words in the King James Bible were actually words that were added to the Scripture by the men doing the translation. They weren’t even Scripture. And here this comes, supposedly created 22 centuries earlier. I find the same italics words as I find in the King James Bible. Not even Scripture.

Ankerberg: You were telling me a little bit about what’s happening at Brigham Young University.

Decker: At Brigham Young University Dr. Ross Christiansen is the head of the Department of Archaeology there. He heads up BYU archaeology studies and the clubs and the groups and so forth. He is responding to some of these men in the church who have written books showing pictures of Christ standing in front of the temples that weren’t even built for 1,000 years after the Book of Mormon era and claiming those to be Book of Mormon-day temples. He said, “There is no archaeology for the Book of Mormon.” There is none.

Ankerberg: That’s what a BYU professor said?

Decker: That’s right. He is the top man in archaeology for the Mormon Church.

Ankerberg: Alright, now what do Mormons do when they hear that from their own man?

Decker: They say, “I don’t care. I don’t care what I hear. I don’t care what they say. I have a burning in my bosom and I know that the Mormon Church is true.”

Ankerberg: Alright and you taught those things and you had this burning in your bosom, which we are going to see in this next part of the film. Let’s take a look at that and then come back to this point right here.

[Excerpt from The God Maker]

Man’s Voice: I read in a Mormon publication an article by the current prophet of the church where he described his power as the president of the church. And in it he was saying that he was basically the liaison between man and God.

Grant: We believe that the most important prophet to us is the present prophet. So when he speaks as a prophet we believe that it is as though the Lord were speaking.

Decker: The finality of the Mormon theology is not based upon evaluation by scriptural evidence but based entirely upon a “burning in the bosom.” The Mormon scriptures tell you that’s what you must seek. When the Mormon missionaries come to your home, they will talk to you about the Book of Mormon, they will talk about the prophet Joseph Smith. And when they are done, they will ask you to pray about it and to seek that divine “burning in the bosom” that they have and that this will prove to you that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God and that the Book of Mormon is really scripture. So it becomes a subjective evaluation. Scripture is not to be tested.

Man’s Voice: They would encourage us then to read the Book of Mormon. Nothing in the Bible, but to read various sections in the Book of Mormon and to pray about it that we might know it was true.

Decker: When we discuss these things with Mormons, some will say, “I don’t care if every prophecy of Joseph Smith is proven wrong. I have a burning in my bosom that I know that the church is true.” I will say, “Have you tested him?” “I am not going to test him. I have that burning in my bosom.” It’s that total and complete trust in anything Mormon.

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Ankerberg: Ed, I want to ask you about this. I can remember when I had Lawrence Flake on our program, the man that helped train the Mormon missionaries, and President K. H. Christiansen, the president of a three stake area, and they said exactly that when we pointed out some of the errors in the Book of Mormon. They said, “Well, what you have to do is you have to take James 1 which says, ‘If any man lacks wisdom, let him ask of God.’” [Jas. 1:5] Now, they take that Scripture verse and then they say, “Listen, if you pray about it, what will happen is, God will give you a feeling in your heart that it is true.” And that sounds so good to so many people. It sounded good to you?

Decker: It’s the answer people are looking for. You know that God, through some divine way, is going to expose to them the truth. But that’s not what it says in James. It says, “If any man lacks wisdom….” [Jas. 1:5] What is wisdom? It is the application of knowledge. Joseph Smith prayed and he said that an “angel of light” appeared to him. Now, an “angel of light” is not what God is going to send you. In fact, if you take Bruce R. McConkie’s book, Mormon Doctrine, known to every Mormon that is listening, and you look under the subject called “Angel of Light,” it says just simply, “See Devil.”

Now, if you are relying upon that burning in your bosom, that divine illumination is described in another era. It is in the deification of Nimrod in the days of Babylon, the Babylonian Mysteries. The initiates would pray and ask the “divine one,” the deity, to make known to them that Nimrod was God and that it would be made known to them by the burning in their bosom. Now, that’s ridiculous. But I again believed it, because I wanted God to deal with me in that way. And what we are dealing with are conjuring up familiar spirits. We are calling out the demons.

There are angels out there of God, yes; but there are also demons who will manufacture,… it says that Satan himself in 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 will come as an “angel of light… and his ministers, ministers of righteousness whose end shall be according to their works.” These men, it says, “will call themselves the apostles of the Lord Christ.” But what does it say in the beginning? It says beware that you not be misled from the simplicity that is in Christ “as the serpent beguiled Eve with his subtlety.” [2 Cor. 11:3] What was his subtlety? “Ye shall become as God.” [Gen. 3:5] The same lie.

Ankerberg: Okay, so the first thing would be that the “wisdom” in James 1 is not extra-biblical revelation but it is the taking of the knowledge that God has already put into the Word of God and the applying of it in your circumstance.

Decker: That’s right. And it says, “Test a prophet.” [Deut. 18:20-22] It doesn’t say, “Pray about a burning in your bosom.”

Ankerberg: Because when the Mormon missionary gives you that one, then they go on and say, “Test to see whether or not you think God is man who has a body.”

Decker: That’s right.

Ankerberg: And they will take something that the Bible does not teach. Now, a Mormon on the phone told me, he said, “What you have to do is you have to realize ‘by their fruits ye shall know them.’ [Matt. 7:16] And look at the fruits of the Mormon Church. We have such rapid growth. Look at all the missionaries we’ve got out there.” What would you say to that?

Decker: Well, it is kind of interesting because I got hit with that one time. And, you know, I was a baby Christian and I was trying to learn the Word of God. And all I knew was that the best thing I could do was to read as much of it as possible. And a man who was a mission president said to me, “You’ve got to look at our fruits, by our fruits. A good tree will only be good fruit and a bad tree bad fruit. Look at our fruit. Look at our welfare program. Look at the buildings; look at our businesses that we own. Look at all our missionaries. Look at the fruits.”

And I said, “Brother, I want you to open up the Word of God to Hosea 10 and the Word of God will tell us.” The Word of God says, “Israel is an empty vine, he bringeth forth fruit unto himself according to the multitude of his fruit he hath increased the altars. According to the goodness of his land they have made goodly images. Their heart is divided, now shall they be found faulty: he shall break down their altars, he shall spoil their images.” Why? “Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have eaten the fruit of lies: because [and this is to the Mormons out there] because thou didst trust in thy way in the multitude in the strength of thy mighty men.” [Hosea 10:1-2, 13] That’s not the fruit that God is talking about at all.

Ankerberg: Also, in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” [Matt. 7:16] right around that it said, “Beware, there are going to be people that are going to come and say, ‘Didn’t we, Lord, prophesy in your name? Didn’t we do many good works in your name?’” And what did Jesus say? “Depart from me, I never knew you.” [Matt. 7:22-23] The fruits that He is talking about there not only has to be deeds, it also has to be agreement with the doctrine, the teaching that Jesus gives us, and the apostles.

Decker: That’s right. It doesn’t have anything to do with our zeal. It doesn’t have anything to do with that or intent. The prophets of Baal had zeal. And in Romans 10 it says that Paul, praying for the Jew, he said, “They have a zeal for God,” talking about the Jew, “but not according to knowledge.” [Rom. 10:2] What were they doing? They were leaning on their own righteousness, not the righteousness of God.

Ankerberg: What would you suggest to a person that says, “I am desperate; I don’t know what to do. I am confused.” Again, I have talked with some people this week that have said, “You know, I have looked at this and yet I don’t know what to do.” What would you advise them, because you have gone through this?

Decker: I would advise them to trust not in their leaders and I would tell anybody that. Test all men. Test all the teachers according to the Word of God. I would get in the Word of God. Spend 30 minutes a day in it. Start in the book of John. Get on your knees before God and say, “Oh, Holy One, I don’t know if I am even at the right altar, but, oh, God, if thou are the Lord God above all other gods, that God I pray to, reveal to me your truth in this Holy Word.”

Ankerberg: In fact, as a Temple Mormon, married in the Temple, you, the night before you actually invited Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, you said that to God to prove that you were going to be wrong. Didn’t you?

Decker: I got on my face before God that night and I said, “Oh, God, if I am about to defile your holy Melchizedek priesthood, if I am about to offend you by my standing against the leadership of this church and calling them of the devil, if I am about to do that, rather than me profane your holy priesthood, slay me this night.” I laid myself out at the altar of God and He quickened in me a Scripture in Galatians 1:6-8 and it says, Paul speaking, he said, “If I, Paul, or if any man preach any other gospel than that which we have given you, he is to be cursed; even if an angel from heaven comes and preaches any other word, he is to be accursed.” I said, “Praise God! Hallelujah!”

Ankerberg: So, there is hope?

Decker: There is hope, and there is victory and there is salvation.

Ankerberg: You can come with all those doubts and pray honestly and God will hear you.

Decker: He does and He will.

Ankerberg: And He will undertake for you.

Decker: Jesus says He stands at the door and knocks. [Rev. 3:20] You don’t have to beat the door down.

Ankerberg: Thanks so much for this and next week we are going to look at some more of the film and some of the dramatic stories that are happening inside of Mormonism.

Read Part 4