The Bible lost plain and precious truths

Read the passage closely, because it says more than “the Bible has errors.” The angel tells Nephi that when the book first went out “from the Jews in purity,” it “contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord” (1 Nephi 13:24-25). Then, after it went out “by the hand of the twelve apostles,” a church formed that took away “from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord” (13:26). It did this on purpose, “that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord” (13:27). Only “after these plain and precious things were taken away” did the book go “forth unto all the nations of the Gentiles” (13:29).

That gives four details you can check: the change was large (“many parts”), deliberate, early, and made before the book spread among the nations. A removal like that would leave evidence, because the New Testament books spread quickly, in many places and several languages, and were quoted by Christian writers from the second century on. Copyists erred; that much is agreed. Whether the surviving evidence shows an early, deliberate removal of doctrine is the thing to check.

The New Testament survives in more manuscripts than any other ancient book. Scholars at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster have catalogued thousands of Greek manuscripts, and there are thousands more in early Latin, Syriac, and Coptic translations. Some are very early. A fragment of John’s Gospel known as P52 dates to the second century. A papyrus called P75, copied in the early third century, preserves large parts of Luke and John. Codex Sinaiticus, from the fourth century, is the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.

Because these copies were made in different places by different hands, comparing them shows where a change entered. The great majority of variants are spelling, word order, and slips of the pen. The few larger ones are known and discussed in the footnotes of ordinary Bibles, and the best-known of them, the three passages named above, are additions that crept into later copies. 1 Nephi 13 describes the opposite: material taken out. Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman’s standard handbook on the subject treats the task as recovering the earliest text from this evidence. Ehrman, who does not share Christian faith, has written widely about the variants, and he has said that no essential Christian belief depends on a disputed reading.

In 1 Nephi 13:40, the angel says the latter-day records “shall make known the plain and precious things which have been taken away,” and he names them: “that the Lamb of God is the Son of the Eternal Father, and the Savior of the world; and that all men must come unto him, or they cannot be saved.” The introduction to the Book of Mormon says it “contains the fulness of the everlasting gospel.”

When the risen Jesus teaches in 3 Nephi, he states his doctrine: that the Father “commandeth all men, everywhere, to repent and believe in me. And whoso believeth in me, and is baptized, the same shall be saved” (3 Nephi 11:32-33), and that the Father will visit the believer “with fire and with the Holy Ghost” (11:35).

Now set that beside the Bible you already have. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). Paul delivered “first of all” that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). None of what the Book of Mormon names as plain and precious is missing from these pages.

If plain and precious truths were removed from the Bible and restored in the Book of Mormon, you would expect the Book of Mormon to contain the teachings that most set the Church apart. It does not teach that God was once a man, that faithful people may become gods, that there are three degrees of glory, or that marriages sealed in a temple last into eternity. According to the Church’s own essay Becoming Like God, those teachings came later, in revelations and sermons from 1832 to 1844, now found in the Doctrine and Covenants and in Joseph Smith’s King Follett sermon.

On the nature of God, the Book of Mormon stands close to the Bible. It says that God is “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” (Moroni 8:18), and when Zeezrom asks, “Is there more than one God?” Amulek answers, “No” (Alma 11:28-29).

You may answer that the Restoration came “line upon line,” and that later revelation added what the Book of Mormon did not. That is how the Church understands it. But then those teachings cannot rest on the claim that they were lost from the Bible, because neither the manuscripts nor the Book of Mormon contains them. They rest on later revelation alone, and whether that revelation came from God is a different question, taken up in God was once a man.

The eighth Article of Faith names a real concern. Translation errors are found by going back to the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and comparing. That is what modern translators do, and it is why their footnotes mark the passages above. The King James translators did their work well with the manuscripts they had, and where earlier manuscripts have since come to light, the differences are known and printed.

Jesus himself read Scriptures that had been copied by hand for centuries, and he treated them as trustworthy. On the road to Emmaus, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). He said that “the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35), and he promised, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35).

The Joseph Smith Translation cannot be checked that way. The Church presents its changes as inspired revision, not as readings recovered from ancient manuscripts, so they cannot serve as evidence that the manuscripts lost something. They stand or fall with Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling, which is the subject of the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ.