Category: Mormon Apologists
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Did Early Christians Perform Baptism for the Dead?
Circular Arguments, Plagiarism, and Dubious Extrapolation: The Patristic Evidence for Baptism for the Dead and its Misuse by LDS Apologists and General Authorities. By Ronald V. Huggins, Th.D. There is evidence that some form of baptism of or for the dead was practiced by three early Christian heresies: the Marcionites, the Cerinthians, and the Montanists.…
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Lorenzo Snow’s Couplet: “As man now is, God once was; As God now is, man may be”: “No Functioning Place in Present-Day Mormon Doctrine?” A Response to Richard Mouw
By Ronald V. Huggins Reprinted with permission of the author from Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49/3 (Sept. 2006) pages 549–68. Ronald Huggins is Associate Professor of New Testament and Greek at Midwest Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. “Man may become as God himself!Let those who disagree howl as they may!” Robert…
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Playing FAIR?
An Evaluation of Joseph Smith’s “Rocky Mountain Prophecy” By Johnny Stephenson Condensed and used by permission from: https://mormonitemusings.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/playing-f-a-i-r/ I often come across this scenario on Mormon Facebook Pages and other sites as I browse the internet: Self-proclaimed Mormon “apologists” using material from FAIR (Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research) to “prove” that critics of Mormonism…
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Chiasmus and the Book of Mormon
By Sandra Tanner Some LDS writers are trying to establish the historicity of the Book of Mormon by maintaining that it contains a poetic style, sometimes used in the Bible, called chiasmus. They also point out that this style was not identified as chiasmus until after the time of Joseph Smith. Thus, they reason, his…
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Trademark Lawsuit (archive page)
This page archives information about a trademark lawsuit that the Utah Lighthouse Ministry had to file in 2005.
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Hugh Nibley’s Footnotes
By Ronald V. HugginsTh.D., Associate Professor of Theological & Historical Studies, Salt Lake Theological Seminary In her book Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith (2005), Martha Beck describes an encounter she had with a scholarly looking person in a supermarket who accuses her famous father, the quintessential LDS apologist…
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Mormon FARMS
Many of our readers may be puzzled by the title of this article. When speaking of FARMS we are not referring to places where people cultivate the soil or milk cows, but rather to an organization known as the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies.
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The Book of Mormon: Inspired Scripture or a Work of Fiction?
By Jerald and Sandra Tanner The battle began in the year 1830 when the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon. Smith proclaimed that an angel had revealed that the ancient inhabitants of the New World had written a religious history on gold plates and that God had given him the power to…
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The Book of Mormon: Ancient or Modern
By Jerald and Sandra Tanner Joseph Smith claimed that in 1823 an angel appeared to him and stated that gold plates were buried in a hill near his home. The angel explained that the plates contained “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent,” and that they also contained “the fullness of the everlasting…
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Solving the Mystery of the Joseph Smith Papyri
By Jerald and Sandra Tanner A book analyzing Joseph Smith’s translation of the “Book of Abraham” has caused a real stir in Utah. It is written by Charles M. Larson and is entitled, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look At The Joseph Smith Papyri. We understand that before the book was offered…