Having these specific details would have been useful for people who lived where and when Jesus did. With these details they could have recognized Jesus clearly and thus accepted him more easily when they saw that his life matched prophecies beforehand. Yet as they are portrayed in the Bible, the Israelites in the Near East from the time of Lehi to Jesus' birth had almost none of this same information about the messiah to come.

What those Israelites expected was quite different from what Jesus was. From prophecies in the Old Testament they expected a king descended from King David. God would work through this king to restore Israel to the prosperity and peace that the Israelites remembered had characterized David's reign. The establishment of this kingdom would usher in God's reign on earth. Jeremiah, a contemporary of Lehi, provided a good representation of the messianic expectation in Israel at the time Lehi's group left Israel for the New World when he declared, "Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD [is] OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS" (Jer. 23:5-6).

Jesus' contemporaries in the Near East encountered Jesus as a mortal: a teacher of righteousness and the kingdom of God, a critic of the religious status quo, and a worker of miracles. Even those who were closest to him did not understand his identity or role before his death, for he did not explain them clearly. His life did not match the Old Testament's messiah prophecies about a king who would usher in a reign of peace. Jesus called himself "the Son of Man"—a cryptic title even now after nineteen hundred years of biblical scholarship. His contemporaries were not looking for someone who would atone for humankind's sins or who would make resurrection possible. Only after his resurrection did most of them begin to realize how extraordinary he was and how the events of his life fit into the salvation of humankind.

During his lifetime his followers knew of no god other than the God of Israel, the god who sent Jesus into the world. The New Testament never refers to Jesus as Father. Instead Jesus describes the Israelites' god as his father. Jesus refers to the temple as "my father's house," to "my Father ... your God," and to this god as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (John 2:6; 8:54; Mark 12:26). The New Testament has no record of Jesus describing himself as the Israelites' god. Paul said that there was no other god but one (1 Cor. 8:4) and this god was the Father (Philip. 1:2; Philem. 3; Kirkland 1986, 83-85). After Jesus' death and resurrection, early Christians began to believe that he had cosmic significance, ineluding premortal creative activity, a monumental role in making salvation possible, and post-resurrection glory and exaltation.

It was a surprise to those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah that he died on a cross and did not radically improve the world they lived in. Donald Juel explained, "No one expected the Messiah to suffer for sins ... [or] rise from the dead, because he was not expected to die." Rather than being a feature of his mission, his dying seemed to have cut his mission short. Those who believed that Jesus was the Messiah had to "understand how such things could be, and it led them into the scriptures with a specific agenda." Almost all Old Testament scriptures that seemed to match details in the life of Jesus were discovered by believers after the fact; they were not part of anyone's prior expectation (Juel 1988,13, 26, 29, 60)

After the fact, believers tried to find Old Testament scripture to relate to unexpected aspects of Jesus' life. Paul said (without noting specific scriptures) that "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4, emphasis added). The account in Acts portrays Peter as saying (citing only one general messianic scripture): "all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days" (Acts 3:24). Similarly, after his resurrection Christ told the Nephites: "all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have testified of me" (3 Ne. 20:24). Lehi, Jacob, Abinadi, and Helaman also taught that almost all of God's prophets had testified about Christ.

The Book of Mormon explained why its people's knowledge was so different from the knowledge of the people in Israel as recorded in the Bible as we have it today. Nephi learned from an angel that the Israelites' scripture "containeth many of the prophecies of the holy prophets; and it is a record like unto the engravings which are on the plates of brass [the scripture Lehi's family brought out of Jerusalem in 600 B.C.E.], save there are not so many." Even though the scripture the Jews had did not contain as much information as the brass plates did, "it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord." After Jesus' apostles shared the book with the Gentiles, a "great and abominable church" was formed which took "away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away. And all this have they done that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord, that they might blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the children of men. ... There are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God" (1 Ne. 13:23-27). According to the Book of Mormon then, we should not be skeptical because of its extensive, specific details about Christ and the Christian gospel long before Christ's birth—instead we should be skeptical of the Bible because it does not have similar details.

Joseph Smith taught that "many important points touching the salvation of man, had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled." He attributed the Bible's errors to "ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests ..." (Smith et al. 1978,1:245; J. F. Smith 1973, 327). So according to Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, the Bible's teachings about Jesus would be more like the Book of Mormon's teachings if the Bible had not been altered by careless or malicious people.

From the brass plates Nephi learned that "the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, yieldeth himself, according to the words of the angel, as a man, into the hands of wicked men, to be lifted up, according to the words of Zenock, and to be crucified, according to the words of Neum, and to be buried in a sepulchre, according to the words of Zenos" (1 Ne. 19:10, emphasis added). Amulek preached that Alma, relying on the words of Zenos and Zenock, "has proved unto you ... that the word is in Christ unto salvation" (Alma 34:6-7; see also 3 Ne. 10:16). Nephi son of Helaman claims that Zenos, Zenock, and Ezias as well as Isaiah and Jeremiah refer to redemption through Christ (Hel. 8:19-20). Therefore, Book of Mormon people learned about Christ largely through the prophecies of Zenos, Zenock, Neum, and Ezias, Israelite prophets mentioned only in the Book of Mormon. Additional information came through personal visions and revelations to people such as Lehi, Nephi, Jacob, and Samuel (1 Ne. 1,10-13; 2 Ne. 10:3; Hel. 13-15).

Some people—including committed RLDS and LDS Mormons, and scholars without a bias for or against Mormonism—have suggested alternative explanations for why the knowledge of Book of Mormon people had differed significantly from the knowledge of their Jewish contemporaries in the Near East. They hold that the Book of Mormon was not a record written by Near Eastern emigrants in the Western Hemisphere from 600 B.C.E. to 400 C.E. but rather was authored by Joseph Smith. They argue that the Book of Mormon reflects his limited grasp of specifics about Israelite life and life in the Americas at that time and also reflects the ideas, customs, and texts that were available to someone living in the eastern United States in the nineteenth century. For these people, explicitly detailed Christian prophecies and concepts are anachronisms that mar the book's credibility as an ancient document.

For example, Mark Thomas notes that the concept of infinite sins being remitted only through the atonement of an infinite being in Alma 34 had its origin with Anselm of Canterbury in the twelfth century C.E. Therefore it was anachronistic for Amulek in 74 B.C.E. to use the concept (Thomas 1983, 22; Ostler 1987, 82). Dan Vogel (in this compilation) and Brent Lee Metcalfe (1983) have shown that this theory was hotly debated in New England in Joseph Smith's time using the same terminology that the Book of Mormon uses. Those who consider this anachronistic do not suggest that Smith was conversant with Anselm's theory as Anselm himself wrote it. Rather they indicate that since ideas deriving from or resembling Anselm's were in use in Smith's religious surroundings. Smith is the more likely author of them in their Book of Mormon setting than Amulek is, because logically Amulek should not have been exposed to them.

Hugh Nibley has presented a theory which allows for and explains the presence of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon text. He maintains that "any prophet is free to contribute anything to the written record that will make the message clear and intelligible. ... [I]nspired men in every age ... translate, abridge, expand, explain, and update the writing of their predecessors" (1988, 132, 134). Following Nibley's lead, Blake Ostler has proposed that the Book of Mormon is a combination of authentically ancient material and expansions of that material by Smith, who drew from eighteen hundred years of Christian thought and tradition. For example. Ostler says it is unlikely that actual Nephite preachers spoke matter-of-factly about original sin and human depravity as the Book of Mormon portrays them doing, for "there simply is no pre- exilic interpretation of the fall of Adam." As portrayed in the Bible, Israelites before Jesus' time had no notion of being in a fallen state from which they needed saving (Ostler 1987,81-82).

This approach, an attempt to find a middle ground between those who reject the book as history because of what they see as anachronisms and those who would accept it as history, has been criticized by people in both groups. Robert L. Millet objected: "to ascribe to Joseph Smith the theology of the Book of Mormon is to give him more credit than is due, and likewise to call into question the historicity of the record and its ancient contents. For Joseph Smith to utilize the English language with which he was familiar in recording the translation is one thing; to create the theology (or to place the theology into the mouths of Benjamin or Alma or Moroni) is quite another. The latter situation would be tantamount to deceit and misrepresentation: it would be to claim that the doctrines and principles are of ancient date (which the record itself declares), when, in fact, they would be a fabrication of a nineteenth-century man" (1987, 67). In contrast Brent Metcalfe (1987) felt that Ostler did not go far enough; he said Ostler suspended his scholarship and accepted as ancient too many things that should have been questioned.

Stephen D. Ricks, countering claims that Christian prophecies and theology in the Book of Mormon are anachronistic, responded, "To accept only those elements of the Book of Mormon ... that accord with what is already known is to refuse it any primary evidentiary value." He asked, "Is it so unreasonable to envision a 'Church of Anticipation' of a Messiah in the pre-Christian era?" In other words, just because parallels have not been found yet for pre-Christian-era Christianity does not mean they do not exist (1990, 138, 139). Furthermore Stephen E. Robinson wrote that even if parallels are never found because none exist, that would not affect the Book of Mormon's credibility. He accused scholars of adopting "the practice of accepting Book of Mormon evidence for Nephite belief and practice only if a similar belief or practice can be found in pre-exilic Israelite sources. ... The possibility that Nephite culture was to any degree idiosyncratic is totally ignored." He said that it is not unreasonable to believe that the Book of Mormon is a record of a unique culture which, through revelation accepted only by it, held sophisticated Christian beliefs in a pre-Christian era (1989, 396).