This article first appeared in the Volume 23 /Number 4 issue of the Christian Research Journal. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org Part Two In our previous installment on how Latter-day Saints (LDS) ascertain doctrine, we examined the supremacy of the teachings of the living prophets over [...]

This article first appeared in the Volume 23 / Number 3 issue of the Christian Research Journal. For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org Part One A significant difficulty when witnessing to a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is to determine what [...]

Summary The Mormon organization FARMS is producing the most widely read and seemingly scholarly defenses of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith available in Mormonism today. The organization focuses primarily on a defense of the Book of Mormon as a historical document. Because its members are somewhat isolated from mainstream scholarship, many critics feel [...]

Summary The Mormon church offers four reasons for rejecting the historic Christian position that the 27 New Testament books are the final installment of divine revelation. It claims that some of Jesus’ teachings were never recorded because of their sacred nature and have been lost; that soon after the time of the apostles, apostates removed [...]

This is arguably the most important new book to appear on Mormonism in the past quarter century, since Fawn Brodie’s landmark biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History (1971). Quinn’s sub­ject is the evolution and function of the Mormon ecclesiastical and theocratic hierarchy during the lifetime of its founder Joseph Smith (1805-1844) and [...]

The saga of Mormonism began in 1820, when a young man named Joseph Smith, Jr., purportedly expe­rienced a spectacular vision. Two celestial personages appeared to him, claiming all existing churches were wrong, all their creeds were an abomination, and all their professors were corrupt.1 These beings made it clear to Joseph that he had been [...]

This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 27, number 3 (2004). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org SYNOPSIS Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, emerged on the scene in the early nineteenth century claiming that God had spoken to him, giving him a new [...]

This article first appeared in the News Watch column of the Christian Research Journal, volume 27, number 1 (2004). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org DNA evidence is offering a serious challenge to the Mormon claim that Native Americans are descended from Hebrew colonizers who came to [...]

Three hundred-eleven His­panic FBI agents won a class action suit against the agency on September 30. A central argument in the suit was that their careers were stymied by the religious bias against non-Mormons of ranking FBI officials who are Mormon (LDS). Charges of a “Mormon Mafia” in the FBI’s Los Angeles office have been [...]

This article first appeared in the Effective Evangelism column of the Christian Research Journal, volume 26, number 2 (2003). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org The woman on the phone was unhappy, and she made me aware of her displeasure in very clear terms. She had just [...]