basilII wrote:There are still some major differences between the Exodus narrative and the history portrayed in the Book of Mormon.
1) Egypt and Canaan are real identifiable places. Zarahemla and the Land of Nephi are not. The Jewish people were a real ethnic group in antiquity. The Nephites and Lamanites were not.
2) As has already been pointed out, the Biblical texts grew out of oral traditions and we shouldn’t expect them to be history in the sense we use that term today. They are mainly about God’s relationship with his chosen people. Not all Christians are/were Biblical literalist. And that would include many of the more traditional faiths as well. The Book of Mormon was supposedly preserved intact from antiquity, that is its major selling point with regard to the messy transmission of the Bible. Prophets like Mormon had the actual written records of his ancestors like Nephi and Alma to edit. So there is less wiggle room for vagueness when it comes to historical accuracy.
3) Sometime in early first millennium B.C. the Israelite people became an identifiable national group. The tradition they maintained about their origins was linked back to bondage in Egypt and as foreign occupiers in Canaan, something that seems strange to claim if it had no historical foundations at all. Like the history of the Trojan War recorded in the Iliad, the specifics may not be historically accurate, but something happened to give rise to the legends. Perhaps a much smaller group left Egypt and founded a dynasty in Palestine, or the release from Egyptian bondage refers to freeing Palestine from Egyptian political influence. With the Nephite/Lamanite civilizations, there is no continuity with a clearly identifiable ethnic group, currently or historically.
4) Within a few centuries of when the Exodus event was supposed to have occurred, we began to have in the Biblical record many identifiable historical events and peoples. The major historical concerns are primarily with the early narratives of Genesis, Exodus, and Joshua, which is when presumably oral transmission of tradition was occurring. After that we get, in broad outlines, a reasonable historical record considering the standards of the time. With the Book of Mormon, once the scene moves away from the Old World, we have no unambiguously and historically identifiable events or peoples at any stage of the narrative.
If one was going to bet one’s salvation on either one of the texts, then I would go for the Bible. Yes, there some historical accounts are probably not accurate when taken literally. But there are a lot of historical accounts that are generally accurate and that describe real people, real places, and real events. There were kings of Israel and Judah. Babylon and Assyria were real empires. Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus were real places. Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Peter and Paul were real people. With the Book of Mormon, none of it appears to be real history with verifiable places, peoples, or events. So both texts contain historical inaccuracies, it just that with the Book of Mormon it is all inaccuracies.
Excellent, thoughtful response.