Leap of Faith: Confronting the Origins of the Book of Mormon

Apparently, Sen. Bob Bennett has written a “faithful” book with the title above. In a Salt Lake Tribune article about the book (http://www.sltrib.com/features/ci_13359481), I found the following passage fascinating:

Too few Mormons really understand their bedrock book, Bennett says, and many use it merely as a “theological version of Bartlett’s,” a source of quotes for church talks.

It contains, he says, far more than the quick summary Bennett used as a missionary in Scotland in the 1950s, which went like this: “It’s a story of the descendants of Lehi, who split into two groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The bad guys win.”

“You get into the book,” Bennett says, “and that’s not what it says at all.”

Some church members have told Bennett they are uncomfortable to learn there are unresolved “problems” with The Book of Mormon.

For instance, he doesn’t have an answer for why Moroni, the last author of the book and the angel who purportedly showed the plates to Smith, would use words about charity that are almost identical to those uttered by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament.

Bennett calls it “a golden nugget of forgery evidence.”

“They [his own critics] say, ‘One of our own should not be pointing these things out in case the critics have missed them,’ ” Bennett says.

But Bennett says, to remain credible, he had to put even the unanswerable arguments into his book.

“If you’re not upfront with what is really there [in The Book of Mormon], then [if] some teenager or young missionary discovers something you haven’t told them, that is going to shake their faith.”

Richard Bushman read it and praised it, and I thought it was worth mentioning here even though I haven’t read it.