We saw in the first article in this series, “Mormons and the Old Testament Canon,” that the LDS Church accepts the same books in the Old Testament that are in the Jewish canon of Scripture and in the Protestant Old Testament. Their main criticism is that the canon is supposedly incomplete because it is missing a number of “lost books.” I debunked that claim in my second article. However, Latter-day Saints also express concerns about the completeness and reliability of the Old Testament text. Given that the books in the Old Testament are scripture, how accurate is the text we have for those books?
Our concern here is to understand the traditional, standard Mormon view on the subject. As we shall see, the LDS view is complex and to a great extent seemingly ambiguous. Consequently, we will have to delay critically responding to the LDS view until later in this series. Our focus in this article is on a general description and understanding of the Mormon position. As I hope you will agree after reaching the end of this article, there is significant value in the effort.
I begin by quoting again from Joseph Fielding Smith:
We are all aware that there are errors in the Bible due to faulty translations and ignorance on the part of translators; but the hand of the Lord has been over this volume of scripture nevertheless, and it is remarkable that it has come down to us in the excellent condition in which we find it. Guided by the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Spirit of the Lord, it is not difficult for one to discern the errors in the Bible.[1]
The “Excellent” Condition of the Biblical Text
The LDS Church’s criticisms of the text of the Bible need to be balanced by its acknowledgment that overall the Bible has come down to us in what Joseph Fielding Smith called “excellent condition.” Continue reading
Amazon’s ranking of book reviews may be a mystery to many readers. I know it was for me. Take, for example, its ranking of “top reviews” of the infamous book Pigs in the Parlor, which teaches that every Christian has at least one demon from which he or she needs to be “delivered.”
We saw in 
This article is the first in a projected series on Mormonism and the Old Testament. Throughout this year (2026), the LDS Church’s official curriculum Come, Follow Me takes members through the Old Testament.
In 2024, I began research on Alma 5:3–62, a speech that the Book of Mormon attributes to a first-century BC Israelite prophet in the Americas named Alma. This research investigates proposed evidence for and against the speech's antiquity. I’m pleased to announce a series of four new papers resulting from this research. Two of the papers respond to arguments for the ancient origin of the speech. The other two papers present evidence for its modern origin. You can find all four papers in the 
My paper, "From the Shema to the Homoousios: The Jewish Roots and New Testament Origins of the Nicene Creed," has now been uploaded to 
This is a follow-up to my previous post, “
There is practically a cottage industry online of quote mining secondary sources to criticize the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. These quotations usually omit salient elements of those sources that would make them useless to the anti-Trinitarian polemicists. An example I recently discovered was the use of the early twentieth-century author William Ralph Inge to support the charge that the Nicene Creed represented a Platonist distortion of Christianity. Carlos Xavier, a Biblical Unitarian apologist, provides a good example of this usage:
As I noted in my previous post on the 2025 Ligonier/Lifeway