There are a lot of things that now bother me about The Book of Mormon and someday I hope to write about all of those things. Perhaps 3 Nephi Chapters 8 through 10 will be at the top of my list. Along with 1 Nephi 4, Alma 14-15, and Helaman 7-11. Maybe I’ll call it “Bad Parts in The Book of Mormon” or something like that.

But for today, I’d like to share something that at the moment feels to me like the biggest problem with The Book of Mormon. It seems obvious in hindsight, but it recently occurred to me and made an impression on my mind in a way that it never had before.

The biggest problem with the Book of Mormon is the lack of evidence that confirms its historical authenticity to any degree of consensus amongst non-Mormon scholars. Instead, the consensus, whether explicit or implied, seems to be that it is not historically authentic, that it is not an English translation of an ancient manuscript. Otherwise, they would be much more interested…wouldn’t they?

I’ve come to realize that there is no shortage of affirmative evidence when you’re trying to show that a thing is what it is – it’s when you’re trying to show that a thing is something it’s not that you run into trouble.  

I’ve heard of historical artifacts (including manuscripts) deemed authentic by experts that were later shown to be fake, but I’ve never heard of the opposite, though I acknowledge it may exist. But how common are false negatives in historical authentication? In other words, how often are artifacts that are deemed fake by experts later shown to actually be authentic?  Isn’t it true that everything about a genuine artifact attests to its authenticity, or at least does not detract from it, because, after all, it’s authentic?

It’s almost as if the church believes that the world’s scholars don’t know how to tell if an English translation of over five hundred pages pages of material from the ancient world really is authentic or not, and even if they did know then they can’t be trusted to be properly interested or to tell the truth about it.  It’s kind of insulting to scholars if you really think about it. As if scholars wouldn’t be thrilled with such an important discovery.

With or without the gold plates (which are another important subject for another day), the so called translation of the material, the content of The Book of Mormon, counts as a sort of historical artifact in and of itself and as such it opens itself to the same methods of scholarly inquiry and assessment as any other ancient text, which the church welcomes when it creates possibilities to validate their religious teachings, and which the church fights against when it does not.

When the heat of evidence and inquiry gets too hot for the historicity of The Book of Mormon, the Mormon faithful almost always flip to the book’s spiritual truth and value, which they say can only be spiritually ascertained, but even if this is true the historicity problem does not go away. It’s a tactical flip of the coin, but no matter how great one side of the coin is you’re still stuck with the other side whether you want to talk about it or not.