Well, I was on the Mormon church's website a lot this week, and I talked to several Mormon missionaries online. I told them I had two questions for them, and they seemed eager to answer before I mentioned what the questions were. They were
1. On Joseph Smith's joining of a Methodist church
2. The Book of Abraham demonstrable fraud
These were the responses I got.
Two of them immediately transferred me to another missionary after hearing the questions
One of them stated that the Spirit gave him a witness that the Book of Abraham is scripture
One of them stated that I had ulterior motives for asking these questions.
One of them asked me to pray to the Spirit about the truth of Mormonism. When I told him that if I felt anything, I felt the Spirit telling me that it was false, he accused me of having ulterior motives
One of them was very polite and courteous, but could only appeal to his testimony.
None of them had ever actually heard of these before. The courteous one in particular seemed a bit disturbed at first by these facts. Perhaps some seeds of doubt were planted.
So, yeah, basically I'm walking away with the feeling that these people cannot answer these arguments.
Let's not argue via weblink. Supply a summary of each and then a link
Originally posted by Rogue
Let's not argue via weblink. Supply a summary of each and then a link
In response to the two questions you have in your post, I will post the following Summary responses and supporting links.
1. Joseph Smith never joined the Methodist Church nor any church except the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Before he received the first vision he attended many of the church meetings in the area and was leaning toward the Methodist church. He joined their probationary class (evidently a testing ground for the Methodists to see if those on probation would pass the test of becoming real members) but later renounced the Methodist church and all other religions based on the revelation he received from the Father and Son. In that revelation he was told to join none of them. This information is corroborated by a non-member by the name of Pomeroy Tucker who was an aprentice at the Palmyra Register newspaper around 1820. Pomeroy claimed to have knowledge of the Smith family and lived in Palmyra during the same time Joseph Smith was making his claims. To view the account of Pomeroy Tucker and and the link where this information is found, see
Historical or Hysterical— Anti-Mormons and Documentary Sources
2. The Book of Abraham originates from some mummies and Papyrus scrolls that were discovered in Egypt near the city of Thebes. The discoverer willed the ownership of these mummies to his nephew, Michael Chandler, before his death. Mr Chandler had the mummies and scrolls brought to the US and sought out a person to interpret the scrolls. He heard of Joseph Smith and later sold the mummies and ancient documents to members of the church. After Josephs death Jay Todd in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism Vol 3 tells what happened to the mummies and ancient documents in the following :
"After Joseph Smith's death, the Egyptian artifacts were held principally by his mother, and then by Emma Smith after Lucy's death on May 14, 1856. On May 25, 1856, Emma sold "four Egyptian mummies with the records with them" to Mr. Abel Combs (Improvement Era, Jan. 1968, pp. 12-16). (Pioneers brought one fragment west.) Combs then sold two mummies with some papyri, which were sent to the St. Louis Museum (1856); they ended up in the Chicago Museum (1863), where they apparently burned in 1871. The fate of Combs's two other mummies and papyri is unknown, but some papyri remained, for in 1918 Mrs. Alice Heusser of Brooklyn, a daughter of Combs's housekeeper, approached the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) with papyri once owned by Joseph Smith. In 1947 MMA acquired papyri from her widower. In May 1966 Aziz S. Atiya of the University of Utah saw eleven Heusser fragments at MMA. He informed Church leaders, and on November 27, 1967, the Church acquired the fragments; one of them is Facsimile No. 1."
Critics of the church claim that those documents that surfaced in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art are the entire source of the Book of Abraham. But as noted above, there were other sources that have been lost. Also the descriptions of the documents that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Abraham do not match the description of what was found in the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art. Modern scholars have interpeted the writings on those documents found in the MMA and have concluded that they are not what is written in the Book of Abraham. Thus the claim of fraud by critics. But because not all the documents were necessarily of Abraham and because the description of the the documents do not match and the fact that there are still lost portions of the documents, there is no way to prove that the MMA documents were what Joseph Smith used as the source of the Book of Abraham. The source of this information can be found at the this link
Questions About the Book of Abraham:
Clumsy Fraud or Sacred Scripture?
