The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ

The Bible expects that people will claim to speak for God, and it never asks you to accept every claim that comes with a moving experience. It gives you tests you can apply in the open.

When Paul preached in Berea, the people there “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11), and Luke calls them “more noble” for checking even an apostle against the Scriptures they already had. John writes, “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Paul says, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Moses gives the hardest case. If a prophet gives a sign “and the sign or the wonder come to pass,” but then says, “Let us go after other gods,” Israel must not listen, “for the LORD your God proveth you” (Deuteronomy 13:1-3). Even a real sign does not make a message true. The message is judged by whether it keeps God’s people with the God they already know.

Other people can see and check each of these tests, because they look at the Scriptures already given and at the content of the new message.

Moroni 10:4 and Doctrine and Covenants 9:8 describe a different test. In the second, the Lord tells Oliver Cowdery to “study it out in your mind,” then ask, “and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.”

Prayer belongs in any search for truth, and the Bible does speak of the Spirit’s witness. It never makes a feeling the referee, though, because sincere people in many faiths pray with real intent and describe answers that confirm things that cannot all be true. Members of churches that also trace their origins to Joseph Smith, but disagree with the Church about who should have led after him, describe the same kind of witness. A test that confirms conflicting answers cannot tell you which one is right. Jeremiah’s warning applies to everyone, including the writers of this page: “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9).

In the Bible, people pray and test together, and a witness of the Spirit agrees with what God has already said in public.

Paul gave one test more weight than any other: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). Here “gospel” means the message about who Jesus is and how he saves, which Paul summarized as Christ’s death for our sins, his burial, and his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).

Paul includes himself, the other apostles, and “an angel from heaven” along with rival teachers. The messenger’s credentials settle nothing; the content decides.

The Book of Mormon came to Joseph Smith through an angel. Joseph Smith-History tells how a messenger named Moroni, “sent from the presence of God,” appeared to him in 1823 and told him of a book “written upon gold plates,” and said that “the fulness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it” (Joseph Smith-History 1:33-34). That is the very case Paul names, and his instruction for it is to compare the message with the gospel already preached. Being an angel neither condemns the messenger nor clears him.

The Book of Mormon agrees that the Bible is a fair standard. Mormon tells his readers to “lay hold upon the gospel of Christ, which shall be set before you, not only in this record but also in the record which shall come unto the Gentiles from the Jews,” and adds, “this is written for the intent that ye may believe that” (Mormon 7:8-9). Since the book presents itself as agreeing with the Bible, you can fairly ask whether it does.

On many points the Book of Mormon does agree with the Bible, and its teaching about God is one of them. Amulek tells Zeezrom there is not more than one God (Alma 11:28-29). Moroni writes that God is “unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity” (Moroni 8:18). Nephi speaks of “the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, which is one God, without end” (2 Nephi 31:21).

The book does not come alone, though. Its introduction says that those who gain a witness of it “will also come to know by the same power … that Joseph Smith is His revelator and prophet in these last days,” and Joseph Smith called it “the keystone of our religion.” To receive it as scripture is to receive Joseph Smith’s later revelations and teaching. Those later teachings include that faithful men and women may become gods: “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end” (Doctrine and Covenants 132:20). They include Joseph Smith’s teaching, in his 1844 King Follett sermon, that God “was once as one of us.”

Those teachings differ from the Bible, which says of God, “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me” (Isaiah 43:10), and from the Book of Mormon’s own words about an unchangeable God. Galatians 1:8 applies here. The Book of Mormon contains good and true things. What Galatians asks is whether the message the book was given to establish is the gospel the apostles preached. Those teachings are examined in God was once a man and families can be together forever through temple sealing.