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
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 
What do most members of evangelical churches in America believe? As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the Ligonier/Lifeway 
"The trouble with this way of defining evangelical is that it creates both false positives and false negatives."
Jane Goodall (1934-2025), famed for her decades-long study of chimpanzees and for her advocacy of animal rights and environmentalism, passed away on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. Christians should have no trouble appreciating her legitimate and significant contributions to our knowledge about chimpanzees and other primates. Goodall observed that chimps made and used rudimentary tools (e.g., stripping a twig of leaves and using it to extract insects from a nest) and that they exhibited emotions and sociality. Gaining fuller and more accurate knowledge about the animal kingdom helps us to clarify what we have in common with animals and what makes us truly unique. At the same time, we may be saddened by the fact that Goodall promoted a mystical, more or less pantheistic conception of the world in which the divine is in all things, excluding the reality of a transcendent Creator with whom we need above all to have a loving relationship.