The corruption explanation (the Latter-day Saint view)

Sources

• Articles of Faith 1:8 and 1 Nephi 13:28, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (opens in a new tab)

Objections & responses

Latter-day Saints don’t claim the Bible was corrupted beyond recovery, only that plain and precious things were lost before the earliest manuscripts. Preservation of what survives doesn’t show nothing was removed.

This is the precise LDS position, and it is the one to engage. The reply is that the loss would have to predate every manuscript, version, and patristic quotation, and that the specifically LDS doctrines allegedly removed are absent from all early Christian literature, including sources hostile to the mainstream, which is what one would expect if they were never there. The Joseph Smith Translation’s changes have no manuscript support of any kind. Corrupted compared to what earlier standard is answered by the Book of Mormon and the JST, which are nineteenth-century texts whose claim to reflect the original is what needs demonstrating; using them as the standard assumes the conclusion.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• The claim that “plain and precious things” were removed from the Bible has no manuscript support: the New Testament text is well preserved, and the Joseph Smith Translation’s changes match no known copy.