The Book of Mormon 9/18

I noticed some anachronisms while reading the BOM I thought I'd mention. I think anachronisms are one of the strongest evidences against the BOM.

There are several references to synagogues in the new promised land. Keep in mind that Lehi and his people left the land of Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile. Synagogues were an innovation of post-exilic Judaism, so Lehi's people shouldn't have known about them. Yet Alma 16:13 says, "And Alma and Amulek went forth preaching repentance to the people in their temples, and in their sanctuaries, and also in their synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews." Joseph Smith would've known about them, but not Lehi's descendants.

Alma 46:13-15 says all the true believers in Christ who belonged to the church of God were called "Christians" by those who did not belong to the church. That is either an interesting coincidence or it is an anachronism. It's only an accident of history that Christians were called Christians, since according to Acts 11:26, "the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch," presumably by nonbelievers. But it's curious that these people in Alma were being called Christians even before Christ came.

Alma 47:7 makes reference to somebody named "Antipas," which is a Greek name. The Greeks didn't influence the Jews until well after the Babylonian exile.

3 Nephi 2:12 talks about the Lamanites fighting for "their rights, and the privileges of their church and of their worship, and their freedom and their liberty." That sounded like a very American thing to say. At the very least, you'd think the author had been influenced by certain enlightenment ideals.

In 3 Nephi 9:18, Jesus calls himself the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." Alpha and omega would've meant a lot to a Greek speaking audience since they are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, but I don't know what they would've meant to ancient Hebrews who would not have known Greek. The only thing I could figure is maybe the gold plates had the first and last letters of the reformed Egyptian they were written in. Maybe they were translated as alpha and omega since that would've been more familiar to the readers than the 'a' and the 'z.' If so, then reformed Egyptian would have to have been a phonetic script quite unlike Egyptian.

In 3 Nephi 27:3ff, Jesus' disciples asked Jesus what they should call the Church. That struck me as anachronistic since people didn't seem to worry about naming churches until the protestant reformation. Even "Catholic Church" wasn't a proper name so much as a description. "Catholic" means "universal." Of course the issue of naming churches would've made perfectly good sense to somebody like Joseph Smith who was familiar with the Methodist church and the Presbyterian church, but I don't know if it would've made much sense to the disciples of Jesus who were founding the only church there was!

In 2 Nephi 24:29,31, it refers to the land of Israel as "Palestina." Although "Palestine" is derived from the word for "Philistine," the land of Israel was never called "Palestine" until after the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century. The Romans are the ones who gave it that name. I was curious why the BOM would say "Palestina" instead of "Palestine." According to Wikipedia, the Latin word for Palestine is Palaestina.

I already mentioned the horses, elephants, steel, and all that. Even Ether 7:9 mentions steel swords. The interesting thing about that is that Ether is a record of the Jaradites who migrated to America after the tower of Babel incident, thousands of years before Lehi and his family. They had all died off long before Lehi got to America, but they left their records.

Part 10