Christopher Hitchens argues that the Book of Mormon's Isaiah chapters are derived from View of the Hebrews.

Date
2007
Type
Book
Source
Christopher Hitchens
Critic
Non-LDS
Hearsay
Direct
Reference

Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York, NY: Hachette Book, 2007), 164

Scribe/Publisher
Hachette Book
People
Christopher Hitchens, Ethan Smith, Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith, Jr.
Audience
Reading Public
Transcription

Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have been fraudulent because the work of deception would have been too much for one poor and illiterate man. They have on their side two useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a language that is somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider: However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of earlier books and stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken directly from the Old Testament. These words can mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three hundred and fifty "names" in the book, more than one hundred come straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as makes no difference.

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