(1) He was a bishop who came to Rome to buy a second realm to be bishop of and was excommunicated on the spot for simony.

(2) He was the son of a bishop who had sex with a woman out of wedlock and was excommunicated, came to Rome to buy back his fellowship but they wouldn’t take his money.

(3) He was a priest who came to Rome, made a large donation for no apparent reason, taught for a few years before becoming heretical, was finally thrown out with a FULL REFUND!

Obviously the excommunication story is a lie. The Catholics couldn’t admit a church existed before theirs, so they made these stories up.

Thanks for the reference to Christian History and Biography. I’ll definitely look into it.

I’ll keep my comments short here. Our comments have veered so far off of course that I think a new post is in order. Please reference my new post.

Paragraph 1. Disqualified. Irrelevant. Doesn’t follow rules of experiment. Most of paragraph 2 disqualified as well. See my new post for the rest of my comments.

Here’s the problem with your “so and so was a sinner, so how can what he wrote be in the Bible” argument. First of all the Bible says that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. “A just man falls seven times a day.” God is merciful, but he is just. We deserve separation from God because of our sin. God offers us the free gift of salvation through his son Jesus Christ. My point, the only perfect person in the Bible is Jesus, the qualifed Savior, everyone else is a sinner some worse than others but sin is sin. So if we excluded anyone who sinned from being a person whose writings appear in the Bible, there would be no Bible. So how do we determine which sinners writings get to be called scripture and another sinners do not? Look at the quality and consistancy of the writing. Which is God breathed and which is not. Look at the evidence regarding the claims made. Joseph Smith believed, as many of his era did, the theory that the American indians were Hebrews. The evidence is that it isn’t true. End of story.

The Song of Solomon. How do you want to interpret it, metaphorically or literally. Metaphorically, it’s a story of Christ’s love for the Church. Literally it’s a picture of the marrage bond. It talks about the beauty of sex. It’s not offensive or degrading. There are no salacious jokes in the Song of Solomon. The language is not lewd, vulgar or obscene. It’s about a relationship. God shows us that sex is good. Our culture, as those before, have trashed it. Here’s a headline: God Endorses Sex! Subheadline: Enjoy it in the confines of marrage.

The Book of Psalms is simply outstanding. David struggled with sin, but he loved God. It is said that David was a man after the heart of God. David’s sin is not condoned, it’s exposed and he pays the price for it. The appearance of the psalms in the OT does not excuse David’s sin. So there are two classes of people, as far as I am concerned. One struggles with sin but is not a charlatan. The other is a charlatan, a deceiver and a fraud. Different kind of heart. The good behavior does not excuse the bad behavior. For the record, about a third of the psalms are left anonymous. About half are written by David.

Is there any place in the Bible where God commands someone to practice plural marrage for any reasons including being able to head on into a place called the celestial kingdom? The pattern for manogamy is set in Genesis: 2:24 it’s the clinging to one wife/one flesh verse. Most Israelites were monogamous see Exodus 10:17; 21:5, Leviticus 18:8, 16:20; 20:10; Numbers 5:12; Deuterronomy 5:21. It was never considered a stanard practice, where as 19th Mormons did. By example, just about every OT story that has polygamy is a story of tragedy, punishment, or suffering as a direct result of the practice. Abraham didn’t practice polygamy because God told him. He did it because of his wife’s urging….Sarah couldn’t bear a child, no offspring, inheritance problems etc. In the NT, when talking about the qualifications of an overseer in the Church, it says that he must be the husband of one wife. It can’t get any clearer than that.

First of all, I’d love to get a copy of that chart. It sounds quite interesting. Is it available online?

Once again, you take a shotgun approach to this lds doctrine of early christian apostasy. Maybe you can’t hit the bird your aiming at, but you’re bound and determined to bring down a few birds in the flock.

It seems you can’t confront the issue head on, so you try to side-track the discussion to make it on the validity of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. At least you’ve given me some future post ideas. I had considered responding to your various accusations with “click here to talk about……” but I’ll save that for another time.

I feel we are at an impasse on this topic. You are advocating a position that there was no apostasy, and that all the various catholic and protestant religions got it right, while I am advocating there was an apostasy, and they didn’t. We can keep arguing this point, but I can see we’re both firmly entrenched in our ideas, and neither person is going to convince the other. I’ll try to address some of these sidetracking topics.

I do take a few exceptions to things you said. When did I say “I bear my testimony….”? That was never part of this conversation, and for you to bring it into the conversation is a cheap shot.

You say I argue “equivalences.” That is an improper characterization. I am not attacking the bible, but rather attacking your “double standard.” Every 9th grade geometry student learns how to defeat an argument by counter examples. For example, if a person makes the statement, “all birds fly”, a counter example is “ostriches and penguins don’t fly.” Counter examples are a way to prove the falsity of the first statement.

So, if I can find counter-examples of your arguments, that is a perfectly valid technique to weaken your arguments. You try to minimizing my counter-examples by calling them “equivalences”. However, it is actually called “counter-examples”, and is a perfectly legitimate tactic that many people use in deductive reasoning.

I note you had no response to any of my arguments, but instead side-track the issue. So, let’s try an experiment. Let’s pretend that I perfectly agree with you now. I am going to make this easy, and not address all the points you referenced above. That means:

1. Joseph is a fraud because of polygamy.
2. The Book of Mormon is not scripture and is a fraud because Joseph was a fraud and sinning adulterer/polygamist.

Ok, now please defend these two propositions: (1) Why is Song of Solomon part of the Bible? Solomon was a polygamist. The Book talks nothing about Christ, Jehovah, repentance, faith, etc. It is a nice erotic treatise, but what value is it to the Bible?

(2) Why is the book of Psalms in the Bible? David was an adulterer, murderer, and polygamist, and we can’t accept having sinners writing Bible scripture.

Please remember that I completely agree with you about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. I am now a former mormon. So please defend these propositions without referencing (1) Joseph or Brigham, (2) the mormon church (3) apostasy. However you are free to discuss:

(1) Why is polygamy ok in the Old Testament?
(2) Why do we accept scripture from these 2 particular individuals in particular?

You can use other “equivalences”, “counter-examples,” etc. Any technique is valid, but you must only reference the Bible, and/or catholic/protestant/jewish ideas. All mormon ideas are off-limits. Let me hear you defend these 2 books of scripture. You may feel free to assume that I am now an atheist/agnostic at this point. (You may even want to address this to Brother Zelph, who actually is leaning toward agnosticism at this point, if you want even more realism on this experiment.)

The whole point of course, is that the early Church battled out and finally defined what was orthodox doctrine. The major players were not dumbells; neither those who were declared heretics or those who prevailed as the orthodox(ies). This is all well documented. To call this process “apostasy” is to seriously misread the facts of history.

A word about apostolic authority. Anyone can come on the scene and declare themselves a prophet or apostle. When they do, people need to apply a decision making process to determine if indeed this person is an apostle or prophet of God. Interpreting subjective feelings as a proof of God’s endorsement is not only an unreliable test but it is fool hearty. “Spiritual” feelings can be created and often times are the result of a person desiring something to be true. I remember a few years back, people going to this auto parts store in a city in California to see the image of the Virgin Mary in the ceramic tiles in the floor of the men’s bathroom. It was beyond curiosity. The desire to believe (something) is powerful and creates its own reality.

“I don’t try to defend the sins of characters in the Bible by pointing out Joseph Smith’s sins.”

That is a good point.

When we look at the Christian Church history, in the first 300 years, there are countless books written about it. No one tries to hide it . It’s there for all to see. Try “Early Christian Doctrines” by J.N.D. Kelly; “The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600)” by Jaroslav Pelikan; “The Patterrn of Christian Truth”: A Study in the Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church.

There is no end, over the centuries, of “prophets” attempting to recycle old heresy that was rejected by the early Church. This Mormon belief that what they believe is what the first apostles believed is, quite frankly, nonsense. Again, anyone out there, show me apostles teaching that god was a man, man can become a god, you have to have plural wives to get to a place called the celestial kingdom, apostles practicing masonic temple rituals, a reestablished priesthood (Hebrews is talking about Christ the final and only priest of this dispensation), apostles using magic rocks and putting it in a hat, stuffing your face in the hat to translate……whatever.

I can’t find any of this any where. So when Mormons talk about an apostasy, they have a high bar to climb over.