The KJV and Other Bibles: Mormons and the Old Testament #3

Posted on March 30, 2026 by robbowman

 

We continue our series on Mormons and the Old Testament by discussing the King James Version (KJV) in Mormonism.

The Standard LDS Position

Joseph Fielding Smith was the grandson of Hyrum Smith (Joseph Smith’s brother) and the tenth LDS Church president (1970–72). He made the following assertion: “The Church uses the King James Version of the Bible because it is the best version translated by the power of man.”[1] LDS curriculum manuals that are currently available on their official website quote from this statement with approval.[2]

Joseph Fielding Smith’s view of the KJV remains representative of the LDS Church’s position. In 1992, their “First Presidency,” their three top leaders, issued a statement that the KJV is the Church’s preferred English version:

While other Bible versions may be easier to read than the King James Version, in doctrinal matters latter-day revelation supports the King James Version in preference to other English translations. All of the Presidents of the Church, beginning with the Prophet Joseph Smith, have supported the King James Version by encouraging its continued use in the Church. In light of all the above, it is the English language Bible used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[3]

An article published in 2011 in the magazine Ensign reiterated that stance:

Today, English-speaking Church members use the Latter-day Saint edition of the King James Version of the Bible. Based on the doctrinal clarity of latter-day revelation given to the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Church has held to the King James Version as being doctrinally more accurate than recent versions.[4]

New Guidance about Other Versions

At the end of 2025, the LDS Church issued new guidance regarding the use of other versions of the Bible. This new guidance was a response to the increasing difficulties that members have in reading the KJV. Continue reading →

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Pigs in the Parlor: An Amazon Reviews Mystery

Posted on March 9, 2026 by robbowman

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.”

Pigs in the Parlor was first published 53 years ago (1973). It is still in print, having sold over 1.5 million copies. In fact, it currently ranks #6 in the Best Sellers in Pentecostal & Charismatic Christianity category on Amazon. A book by Kenneth Hagin, the father of the Word of Faith movement, is #1. Most of the top 100 books in the category appear to be problematic. A Pigs in the Parlor Study Guide and A Manual for Children’s Deliverance, by the same authors Frank and Ida Hammond, are also in the top 100.

As of today, Pigs in the Parlor has 7,465 ratings with an average of 4.8 out of 5. None of the other 100 books in the Pentecostal & Charismatic Christianity category has anywhere close to that many ratings. (Benny Hinn’s Good Morning, Holy Spirit, which I reviewed shortly after it came out, has 4,937 ratings.) It also has 1,146 reviews, meaning comments left by customers. Again, this is more reviews than any other book in the category (Hinn’s book has slightly fewer, currently 1,004 reviews).

Finding my review

In 2004, I wrote a scathing review of Pigs in the Parlor entitled “A classic of deliverance-ministry nonsense” and posted it on Amazon. At the bottom of the review, Amazon has an auto-generated statement that “179 people found this helpful.” Yet my review is extremely difficult to find. Continue reading →

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Lost Books? Mormons and the Old Testament #2

Posted on February 18, 2026 by robbowman

We saw in the first article in this series 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. Yet they deny the inspiration of one of those books (Song of Solomon) without dropping it from their scriptures, while they fault the Old Testament for lacking other books. We will explore this criticism about missing books here.

The Mormon Argument about “Lost Books”

The premise of the argument is that the Old Testament itself contains references to books not found in the Old Testament. The LDS Church’s own Bible Dictionary, in an entry on “Lost Books,” describes these books as “those documents that are mentioned in the Bible in such a way that it is evident they were considered authentic and valuable but that are not found in the Bible today. Sometimes called missing scripture, they consist of at least the following. . . .” The entry then lists eleven of these “lost books.”[1]

The statement that the books are “sometimes called missing scripture” is soon clarified to be the LDS Church’s own position. The entry thus goes on to assert that the Old Testament references to these books are “rather clear references to inspired writings other than our current Bible.” It further states that these references “attest to the fact that our present Bible does not contain all of the word of the Lord that He gave to His people in former times and remind us that the Bible, in its present form, is rather incomplete.”

The significance of this argument in the context of the LDS religion is that the supposedly missing scriptures of the Bible are precedent for the production of new scriptures, including other lost books, especially the Book of Mormon. As Kristian S. Heal and Zach Stevenson put it, “The canon had once been bigger, so why not again?”[2]

This argument has been part of Mormon apologetics going back to Joseph Smith himself, who commented on the “lost books” as early as 1833, just three years after publishing the Book of Mormon.[3] In 1842, Benjamin Winchester published a Synopsis of the Holy Scriptures that was a precursor to today’s LDS “Study Aids,” with a list of “books mentioned in the Bible that are not to be found among the sacred writings” that is very similar to the current entries on the topic.[4] The argument was repeated with virtually the same list of “missing scripture” by LDS apostle James Talmage in his popular books Articles of Faith[5] and Jesus the Christ.[6] The Encyclopedia of Mormonism cites some of the same references to support the claim that the Bible “testifies to its own incompleteness” because it “mentions sacred works that are no longer available.”[7] Likewise, LDS apologist Matthew Brown also claims, “The Bible itself provides clear evidence that it is not complete since it mentions scriptural texts that are now missing.”[8] Suffice it to say that this argument is standard fare in Mormon teaching.

What Would Count as “Lost Books of the Bible”?

Let’s be clear as to what the issue is here—and what it is not. First, everyone agrees that at least some of these books (more precisely, scrolls) are “lost” in the sense that they are not extant (i.e., no copies of them are available today). That is an entirely noncontroversial claim.

Continue reading →

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Mormons and the Old Testament Canon: Mormons and the Old Testament #1

Posted on February 1, 2026 by robbowman

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.[1] These articles offer an evangelical Christian perspective and response to the LDS use and interpretation of the Old Testament.

We begin by considering what the LDS Church teaches about the canon of the Old Testament. The term canon in Christian theology refers to the collection of writings properly included in the Bible or in one of its two major parts, the Old and New Testaments. As is well known, Mormonism accepts additional texts outside the Bible as scripture. In Mormon parlance, there are four collections of scriptural writings—the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price—and these are called the four “standard works.”

The LDS Church accepts within its standard works the same 39 books of the Old Testament as in the Protestant canon of the Old Testament. These same 39 books (arranged and sometimes even counted differently) are the books accepted in Judaism as the Bible since around the time of Jesus (i.e., the Hebrew Bible, also called the Tanak). Thus, in its online Guide to the Scriptures, the LDS Church’s official website states: “The Old Testament consists of the books of scripture used among the Jews of Palestine during the Lord’s mortal ministry.”[2] This same work in its entry on “Old Testament” lists those 39 books.

Curiously, the LDS Church accepts the Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs) as part of the Old Testament while denying its inspiration. Continue reading →

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A Deep Dive in Alma 5 as a Core Sample in the Book of Mormon

Posted on December 14, 2025 by robbowman

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 LDS/Mormonism section of my Academia.edu page. Here are the titles and brief descriptions of the papers:

The New Testament in Alma 5

As the title indicates, this paper examines the use of the New Testament (specifically from the KJV) in the speech. I uncover some three dozen allusions in this one passage. They come from the Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation, especially Matthew 3 and Revelation 19–22.

Alma 5 as a Nineteenth-Century Revivalist Sermon

The title pretty much tells all here as well. The paper documents over two dozen different expressions in the speech that derive distinctively from Protestant religious discourse.  Revivalist preachers made notable use of these expressions in the two Great Awakenings. The paper shows that this revivalist language appears throughout a speech that in form, substance, and purpose corresponds with standard revivalist preaching from that era.

Five Supposed Examples of Chiasmus in Alma 5

This paper looks at five passages in Alma 5 that LDS scholars have identified as chiasms. Chiasmus is a rhetorical form using reverse parallelism (A-B-B-A) characteristic of biblical literature. The Book of Mormon is extremely repetitive. For that reason, I argue that we should find short passages exhibiting simple chiasmus (perhaps just four lines in reverse parallelism). On the other hand, we should probably find few if any long, complex chiasms. This study of Alma 5 confirms that working hypothesis. In addition to being part of this project focused on Alma 5, this paper is part of a years-long research project on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

Egyptian “Ritual Embrace” Imagery for Atonement in the Book of Mormon

Mormon apologists beginning with Hugh Nibley have argued that the Hebrew term for atonement alludes to a ritual embrace in Egyptian religion. Furthermore, they argue that at least three Book of Mormon texts, including Alma 5:33, referring to the Lord putting his arms around the redeemed use this imagery as an expression of divine acceptance. In this paper, I refute Nibley’s argument for associating atonement with ritual embrace. I then show that the Book of Mormon imagery of the Lord embracing believers in his arms was a commonplace in early nineteenth-century English and American evangelical preaching and writing.

While not exhausting all possible perspectives on Alma 5, these four papers make a strong cumulative case for viewing the entire speech as a modern composition.

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From the Shema to the Homoousios: The Jewish Roots and New Testament Origins of the Nicene Creed

Posted on November 19, 2025 by robbowman

My paper, "From the Shema to the Homoousios: The Jewish Roots and New Testament Origins of the Nicene Creed," has now been uploaded to my page on Academia.edu. Critics of the Nicene Creed routinely characterize it as a Hellenized distortion of the Christian faith. Even N. T. Wright has complained about the fourth-century church "trying to make theological bricks without the biblical straw." Of course, anti-Trinitarian religions such as Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses use these criticisms as justification for denying the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation defended in the Creed.

In response, I argue in the paper that the Creed is thoroughly rooted in the Jewish religious soil of the Old Testament and that it originated from creedal or confessional elements of the New Testament. It is thus constructed from what Wright called "the biblical straw." The paper begins with the Shema (Deut. 6:4), the Jewish creed affirming one God, and concludes with a defense of the Nicene Creed's use of the word homoousios, meaning "same substance" or "same essence." A short version of this paper is being presented this afternoon at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Boston.

The picture shown here is of Deuteronomy 6:4-9. The last letters of the Hebrew words shema ("Hear") and echad ("one") were often written large, as here, to express the importance of the sentence, "Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH one."

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Philo on Abraham’s Three Visitors: Evidence of a Pagan Origin of the Trinity?

Posted on October 31, 2025 by robbowman

This is a follow-up to my previous post, “Unitarians, William Inge, and the Platonism in Christianity.” Unitarian apologist Carlos Xavier, in the same post in which he quoted Inge out of context, also manages to quote the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo out of context. Here is what Xavier says:

Philo, another influential pagan figure, himself described the 3 angelic visitors to Abraham of Genesis 18, “not as three persons but as one” (On Abraham 132) and calls them “God from God, light of light.” On Rewards and Punishments, 7.[1]

Xavier’s take on Philo is almost beyond parody. I will discuss both passages from Philo in turn.

Abraham’s Three Visitors: Philo, On Abraham 119–32

Philo interprets Genesis 18 allegorically to picture Abraham as receiving three visitors who, according to Philo, represent “the Father of the universe” properly called “I am that I am,” flanked by representations of his “creative power,” called “God,” and of his “royal power,” called “Lord” (On Abraham 121). Philo’s point here is that the titles God and Lord represent different facets of the Creator’s nature. The passage then presents, according to Philo, “a threefold appearance of one subject,” which is shown by the fact that the subject “speaks to them not as three persons, but as one” (131, 132). This allegorical interpretation of Genesis 18 is not even remotely trinitarian and has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of the doctrine of the Trinity. Continue reading →

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Unitarians, William Inge, and the Platonism in Christianity

Posted on October 27, 2025 by robbowman

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:

Thirdly, a strong argument can be made for the fact that the Nicene creed is in reality a Platonic creed. . . . William Inge, the famous professor of divinity, admitted that “Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology.” Dr. Inge added that if Christians read Plotinus, who worked to reconcile Platonism with Scripture, “they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realize the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces.” So that early Christianity “from its very beginning was formed by a confluence of Jewish and Hellenic religious ideas.”[1]

To the casual reader—and especially to the anti-Trinitarian reader predisposed to view the matter in this way—these quotations from Inge might seem to confirm the opinion that Platonism corrupted Christianity. Continue reading →

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The State of Theology Survey and Trouble with the Trinity

Posted on October 15, 2025 by robbowman

As I noted in my previous post on the 2025 Ligonier/Lifeway State of Theology Survey, the statement to which most evangelical church members strongly agreed was the one affirming the doctrine of the Trinity:

  1. There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that responses to two other statements of relevance to the Trinity were not as affirmative.

  1. Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.
  2. The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.

According to the Survey, 22 percent of evangelical church members strongly agreed, and an additional 12 percent somewhat agreed, with #7, while 31 percent strongly agreed and 21 percent somewhat agreed with #9. Taking into consideration those who said they were unsure, only 62 percent disagreed with #7 and 38 percent with #9. Previous versions of the Survey produced similar results.

The “correct” responses would be to disagree with both statements. Jesus was a great teacher, but he was much more than that—he was God the Son incarnate. It appears to be quite contradictory for 95 percent of evangelical church members to affirm “God the Son” as one of the three divine persons (#2) and for 34 percent of those same respondents to agree that Jesus was not God (#7). Likewise, affirming that God the Holy Spirit is one of “three persons” (#2) seems to be contradicted by agreeing that the Holy Spirit is a force rather than a “personal being,” as a slim majority (52 percent) did.

All of the comments I have seen about these results have attributed the discrepancies to theological confusion on the part of the respondents. Admittedly, this may be a factor or even the main factor. However, I don’t think we should exclude the possibility that the statements were worded in ambiguous or accidentally misleading ways. Continue reading →

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Modern Worldviews and the Deity of Christ: A New Series

Posted on October 14, 2025 by robbowman

Worldview Bulletin is an evangelical Christian newsletter available on Substack and by email with over 6,000 subscribers produced by Chris Reese covering philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and apologetics. I have been subscribing for several years. Basic subscriptions are free, but paid subscribers receive exclusive content along with access to the full archive of past articles. The newsletter is endorsed by John Lennox, Michael Licona, Sean McDowell, J. P. Moreland, and Lee Strobel. Recent authors include Paul Copan, Douglas Groothuis, Craig S. Keener, Kenneth Richard Samples, Melissa Cain Travis, and Donald T. Williams. (Have I convinced you to subscribe yet?)

In a few days, the Worldview Bulletin will begin publishing my new six-part series on “Modern Worldviews and the Deity of Christ.” (Maybe you can see what I did there.) Each article can be read in about five to eight minutes. This is largely new material not found in The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense, which I co-authored with Ed Komoszewski, although the series discusses six of the approaches to Christology we critique in that book. Here are the titles of my six articles:

  • Part 1: The Materialism of Skeptics and the Supernatural Deity of Christ
  • Part 2: The Mysticism of Progressive Christians and the Unique Deity of Christ
  • Part 3: The Polytheism of Mormonism and the Monotheistic Deity of Christ
  • Part 4: The Finite Theism of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Uncreated Deity of Christ
  • Part 5: The Secondhand Theism of Islam and the Misunderstood Deity of Christ
  • Part 6: The Rationalist Theism of Unitarianism and the Paradoxical Deity of Christ

Here is an excerpt from Part 3:

The difference between LDS theology and traditional Christian theology is not merely that Mormons view the three divine persons as three beings whereas the doctrine of the Trinity views them as one being. LDS theology is situated within an entirely different worldview in which God is not the absolute being to whom everything owes its very existence. Rather, “God” is a status that the three members of the Godhead attained (at different times and in different ways), that others (may have) attained before them, that at least one other being (heavenly Mother) and perhaps others have also attained, and that others—including us!—may attain after them. It is the world of space, time, and matter that is uncreated and truly eternal in its intrinsic nature; the Gods are simply the ultimate advanced beings in the world.

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