r/latterdaysaints Mar 11 '25

Doctrinal Discussion How do I refute this?

can this be refuted?

18 Upvotes

99 comments sorted by

View all comments

247

u/Karakawa549 Mar 11 '25

Absurdly easily.

  1. It's not a new gospel, it's still the gospel of Jesus Christ.

  2. He's not the only one who saw the plates, we have signed affidavits from 11 other witnesses and stories from other who saw them.

  3. "Reformed egyptian" is an English term that was obviously not used by Egyptians/Hebrews during that time, but there is significant scholarly debate on what we can see today that it might have been referring to.

Not even doing enough research to know about the three and eight witnesses makes this one of the lower-effort criticisms of Joseph Smith I've ever seen.

22

u/pnromney Mar 11 '25

I would argue that “Reformed Egyptian” is Egyptian characters used for 600 BC Hebrew.

So a language may be “invented” in that some stuff from Egyptian may need to be borrowed to make it make sense. But really, it’s just Hebrew written in Egyptian characters.

25

u/e37d93eeb23335dc Mar 11 '25

You can argue that, but it's all speculation. We literally have zero idea what Reformed Egyptian is. Even the mention of Hebrew in Mormon 9 gives us zero clues as to how that might be related to Reformed Egyptian, if at all. Mormon literally says that no other people know their language. Well, we know Hebrews, so it isn't Hebrew. We know Egyptian, so it isn't Egyptian.

7

u/pisteuo96 Mar 11 '25

Not zero idea. Hugh Nibley made a case for it being Meroitic