I agree with you about the New Testament: it does stir the heart. However, I also find that the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon stir the heart as well.
Smith claims he had plates. Well, those would be interesting... but they can’t be seen. . . . Imagine if the apostles proclaimed Jesus had risen from the dead, but were shown a dead body, and they said, “that? O, that’s Jesus’ twin brother who was struck down for not believing.” That’s what Smith’s story is like.
I think your analogy is flawed. The apostles proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead, yes. But they were not shown a dead body; they saw the risen Christ. However, most of those who were converted afterwards did not actually see the risen Lord themselves. The converts had to accept and believe the apostles' testimonies of the event. Anyone asking to see the body of the risen Lord would be told he had ascended into heaven.
Joseph Smith testified that he had the plates. He showed them to others, who testified that he had the plates. Anyone asking to see the plates today is told that they were taken back to heaven.
Look, I believe in the Resurrection, as do most Christians. Yet I did not witness the Resurrection myself. I daresay that none of us has ever seen a man rise again after having been truly dead for a couple of days. Science and experience tell us that such an event is impossible. Those who claim to have seen the resurrected Christ 2000 years ago are long gone; we cannot cross-examine them.
My atheist friends say that the apostles' testimony of the Resurrection are ridiculous. What would you say to convince them?
In other words, how do you know that the testimony of the disciples and apostles regarding the Resurrection is true?
“However, most of those who were converted afterwards did not actually see the risen Lord themselves.”
Actually over 5,000 saw the Risen Christ prior to His ascension.
How many saw Smiths’ plates?
So, what is the proof of Christianity‘s founding event, the Resurrection of Jesus? Hereafter is an abbreviated, paraphrased discussion as taught by Dr. Scott, a most anointed teacher of God’s Gospel through the unfolding of Bible verses.
To address this issue of Christianity’s fundamental truth we must first establish a few facts that we can agree upon. There is substantial historical evidence for these following points, so lets first establish them as points of agreement; the following facts are far easier to prove than the resurrection itself.
1. Jesus lived. None Christian historians from His lifetime write of him: Tacitus and Josephus.
2. Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities under the accusation of the Jewish leaders … not the Jewish people, most of them had no idea of this event at the time of the execution.
3. Jesus was considered dead. The Jewish leaders were so convinced He was dead they demanded that Pilate place a seal on the tomb and a guard in the garden of the tomb! The Romans were convinced He was dead when they pushed a spear into His side and blood and water came out, so they didn’t waste the effort to mallet His legs to have Him died more quickly.
4. Jesus was buried in a known, accessible tomb of Joseph, a man actually on the Jewish Sanhedrin.
5. He was preached raised by the disciples who had followed Him but fled when He was arrested and tired.
6. The Jewish leaders had more reason to produce the body and prove the preaching false than we could have today, and their world was much smaller and less populated (a body could not be easily hid for days nor could it be moved easily).
7. The disciples were persecuted for preaching this resurrection message.
8. The tomb was empty.
If we can agree on these facts, a further discussion can occur, and should occur because such an event would be the central fact of Human History! Why? Because He made a few crucial assertions prior to the crucifixion and resurrection. He thought He was perfect before God; He seated all authority in Himself; He placed Himself at the center of the religious universe; He talked of eternity and Heaven as one from the inside; He proclaimed He would die a ransom, for the whole world had something wrong with it that only His death could remedy; He proclaimed that if killed, He would raise Himself from the grave, in a specific number of days!
Jesus came out of that tomb. So, did the disciples steal the body; did the Jewish Leaders steal the body; did the Romans steal the body; was the resurrection empty tomb and subsequent sightings of Him merely hallucination; did the women go to the wrong tomb; did He appear to be dead then resuscitate in the cool of the tomb; did the disciples lie about seeing Him after the crucifixion; or, were the disciples telling the truth as they knew it?
We can debate all the possibilities, but the explanation comes down to one of two possibilities: either the disciples were lying or they were telling the truth as they knew it to be.
Here is why we may be psychologically certain that the disciples were telling the truth as they knew it: there were cataclysmic changes in the Apostles following the resurrection and Pentecost; there are indirect evidences of the story consistency; the disciples paid an astonishing price to continue sharing the truth as they believed it; and St. Aquinas’ explanation, they died alone and could have recanted and lived without the fact being known to other disciples … not one shred of evidence has surfaced in the last two thousand years of hard looking critics that even one disciple/Apostle recanted. There is no way these men were lying! They were telling what they had witnessed and experienced.
The substance/power which raised placed Him in the womb of Mary, the power that raised Him from the grave is the power which comes to dwell within the professing faither in Jesus Christ according to His promise to you. The scriptures teach that ‘believing God is counted for righteousness’ … the ABCs of faith is to act upon belief sustained by the confidence that He will not break His promises. Faith (Greek word ’pisteuo’) is an action word which allows the indwelling Holy Spirit of God to transform the faither.
>> However, I also find that the Old Testament ... stir[s] the heart as well. <<
Please don’t misread me; I said *portions* of the Old Testament don’t exactly stir the heart *without* the New Testament to fulfill them. I do have the New Testament. (I’m sure that Jews, knowing these more deeply from a personal angle get these in their own right.) But, then again, I still find portions less than stirring, such as the geneaologies. And certainly certain prophecies against long-vanished kingdoms require considerable inside knowledge to “get.”
>> But they were not shown a dead body; they saw the risen Christ. <<
They also saw the empty tomb...
>> However, most of those who were converted afterwards did not actually see the risen Lord themselves. The converts had to accept and believe the apostles’ testimonies of the event. <<
But the witnesses were credible: they pointed to OT passages which foretold such things; they made falsifiable claims which weren’t falsified; they performed miracles. Smith’s stories aren’t corroborated.
>> Joseph Smith testified that he had the plates. He showed them to others, who testified that he had the plates. Anyone asking to see the plates today is told that they were taken back to heaven. <<
Hardly the same as the miracles at Pentecost, the blackening of the sky, the destruction of the Holy Altar, the empty tomb. And again: there WAS an empty tomb. The question could be asked: if the body was not raised into Heaven, where is it? But in the instance of the plates, who is to say that they ever existed in the first place?
>> Joseph Smith testified that he had the plates. He showed them to others, who testified that he had the plates. <<
But hadn’t the Three Witnesses already staked their entire lives on Smith, before he showed them the plates? And didn’t all three abandon Smith’s religion, eventually? And weren’t all three denied access to the plates until after the plates had allegedly departed from the Earth, so that their witness would HAVE to be inherently mystical? Quite far from being the sort of sold witness of the apostles, this is part of what I referred to as inciting children to giggle.
So whose testimony do we have? Joe Smith, a convicted spiritualist con man, Martin Harris, who had been denounced as “overbalanced by marvellousness,” “fanaticism” and “seeing spooks,” and Whitmer, who seemed to change his story about the corporeality of what he saw. If Smith and the three witnesses were ever needed to provide an alibi for an alleged murderer, only Cowdery seems like the type the defense lawyer would put on the stand.
As for the eight witnesses, all were members of the Whitmer and Smith families, who saw the plates only after Smith had very publicly proclaimed no-one else would ever see them again, were they not? And whereas the Apostles were killed for their refusal to depart from Christianity (except John), not one witness outside of Smith’s own family remained Mormon. That seems unlikely behavior if they truly believed what they saw, even if they didn’t refute their assertions.
I can scarcely imagine a less credible story, even if the claims weren’t so fantastic. Even if what Smith beheld weren’t miraculous and seemingly bizarre, I wouldn’t believe his story if what he claimed was as ordinary as a title to an old car. And this is why I ask, what evidence is there of the truth of Mormonism?