[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or claim commonly lobbed against us on X.]
After a few complicated subjects in this ongoing series, I’m doing myself a favor by dealing with a simple and, frankly, silly objection. I mentioned this one before in another post, but it was brought up just a week ago be someone who insisted that it invalidated the Book of Mormon, so…
In the Book of Alma within the Book of Mormon, a prophet named Alma gives a prophecy of the coming Messiah:
And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God. (Alma 7:10)
And the objection:
“Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem! This proves the Book of Mormon is false!”
That complaint has been around literally since the Book of Mormon was published, and the main response has been right there too, but every generation thinks it’s “discovered” it anew.
Yes, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Everybody knows that. Joseph Smith knew that. This is somehow proof that he made it all up? Do you think someone who was “clever” enough on his own to:
- resume dictating after a break without having anything read back to him,
- keep complex genealogies straight in his head without notes,
- use subtle naming conventions that show an entire political subtext unmentioned in the main text,
- insert complex chiastic structures into the text that weren’t noticed for more than a century,
…would forget where Jesus was born? Oopsie!
The age-old response:
The speaker, Alma, is part of (and speaking to) a colony of Hebrew descendants located literally on the other side of the globe from Israel, speaking a full 500 years after his ancestors had left the Middle East. He and his people knew the name “Jerusalem” from their sacred history… but would anyone have been at all enlightened if Alma had name-checked a tiny village 5-7 miles from Jerusalem (depending on if you measure the roads or as the crow flies), a literal suburb of Jerusalem?
(When I was a missionary in Japan, I would tell those who asked that I was from Toronto, even though my home was about two hours outside it, because it wouldn’t do anyone any good to tell them I was from Kingston, Ontario, and then have to explain where that was in relation to places they had heard of.)
However, thanks to more evidence from Israel, the response gets even better:
Archeologists have found out that in addition to being a city, Jerusalem was a “land” which encompassed other surrounding cities (the best modern analogy would be a “county”); the Amarna letters speak of “a city of the land of Jerusalem, Bet-Ninib,” which is modern Beth-Horon — about twice as far away from the city of Jerusalem (in the other direction) as Bethlehem.
In other words, saying that Jesus was born in the “land” of Jerusalem is absolutely correct.
(Relatedly, this objection shows why debating Mormon-ish things can be so frustrating — because anti-Mormons never let an objection die, no matter how many times it’s been refuted.)