Latter-day Saints frequently encourage Christians to read the Book of Mormon, declaring that the book is another testament of Jesus and fully compatible with the Bible. And on its surface, the Book of Mormon seems relatively harmless. Very few of the more distinctive teachings of Mormonism are explicitly taught on its pages.

And yet the Book of Mormon subtly distorts and undermines the Christian faith.

I find two analogies helpful:

The Trojan Horse

Greek mythology famously recounts the Greeks’ use of a clever stratagem to breach the defenses of the City of Troy. They built a wooden horse as a present and hid Greek soldiers inside of it. Once the horse was let into the City, the soldiers emerged and overwhelmed the City from within.

The Retrovirus

Another analogous situation exists in nature, where retroviruses like HIV hide malicious genetic code in a package that seems inviting. But once our cells invite them in, they hijack our cells’ machinery to reproduce endlessly, ultimately overwhelming the host. Ironically, retroviruses are often too effective at reproducing themselves and end up killing their host.

In many ways, the Book of Mormon operates in a fashion similar to a Trojan horse or a retrovirus. It appears harmless enough that it slips past your defenses. And yet hidden inside are teachings that will overwhelm your spiritual defenses and leave you ensnared in falsehood.

In the rest of this post, I will focus on one example of this: How the Book of Mormon undermines a Christian’s confidence in the Bible and instead lifts itself and the LDS Church up.

The Book of Mormon, on its surface, presents itself as a companion to the Bible. It lulls you into accepting it by asking why you would reject MORE truth from God. Indeed, the Book of Mormon even quotes scripture (albeit taken far out of context) to support the idea that it is just offering another part of learning “line upon line” and “precept upon precept” from God (Isaiah 28:10). Why would you look a gift horse in the mouth?

And yet, once you accept the Book of Mormon as holy writ, the text repeatedly undermines one’s confidence in the Bible.

At some points, this message is explicit. 1 Nephi 13 speaks of the Bible as missing “many plain and precious things” that were “taken out of the book.” Because these things are missing, “an exceedingly great many do stumble” and “Satan hath great power over them” (1 Nephi 13:26–29).

At other points, this message is more subtle. For instance, it warns that anyone who relies only on the Bible is “built upon a sandy foundation” and ready to fall (2 Nephi 28:28).

But one example stands out to me in particular because it undermines the whole foundation of trust in the Bible and at the same time also undermines the foundations of Mormonism.

The “Other Sheep” and the Collapse of Apostolic Trust

When Jesus allegedly appears to the Nephites in 3 Nephi 15, he teaches them that they were the “other sheep” that he had spoken to his disciples about (3 Nephi 15:21; cf. John 10:16).

This teaching is already problematic in and of itself. When Jesus speaks of “other sheep” in John 10, there is no indication that he is speaking of scattered groups of Israelites like the Nephites or the lost tribes of Israel (John 10:16). Instead, in context, Jesus is speaking of the future spread of the Gospel to the Samaritans and the Gentiles. Specifically, Jesus is speaking of sheep that would have been seen as outside of the “fold” or sheep pen and would have been seen as outsiders. In John’s Gospel, Jesus has already spoken to the Samaritans and declared that they would be brought into the fold of God (John 4:21–42). Just a few chapters later when Greeks come to worship at the festival in Jerusalem, Jesus declares that when he is lifted up on the cross, he “will draw all people” to himself, again signifying the inclusion of those considered outsiders (John 12:20–32).

While it’s true that John 10 does not make these points explicitly, this is an interpretation that is wholly consistent with the message of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. The Apostles of the New Testament understood that this expansion of the Gospel message to the Gentiles was one of the most radical things that Jesus came to accomplish: Paul describes Christ as having “destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile “to reconcile both of them to God through the cross” (Ephesians 2:14, 16). And he emphasizes that Jew and Gentile are now “fellow citizens with God’s people” (Ephesians 2:19).

Meanwhile, Jesus’s apostles give no hint that Jesus went and preached to lost branches of the House of Israel. They mention nothing of the sort. Instead, they fulfill Jesus’s commission to take the gospel to the “ends of the earth” that he gave them when he ascended to heaven (Acts 1:8).

But in 3 Nephi 15–16, “Jesus” declares that the apostles had misunderstood his teaching because of their “stiffneckedness and unbelief.” Jesus explains that he was commanded not to correct the Apostles’ error and that it was “because of their iniquity” that they didn’t know of the Nephites (3 Nephi 15:18–19). Jesus then tells the Nephites that they need to write this down so that if the Apostles don’t ask about the Nephites, this information will be restored in the latter day (3 Nephi 16:4).

This story introduces several deeply dangerous teachings that undermine Biblical confidence.

• The Apostles did not receive vital information from Jesus because of their “stiffneckedness and unbelief” and “iniquity” (3 Nephi 15:18–20).
• This “stiffneckedness and unbelief” and “iniquity” persisted even after Jesus’s death and resurrection, when he promised that the apostles would receive knowledge of “all truth” through the Holy Spirit (John 16:13).
  • What makes this claim especially troubling is that it places this failure after Jesus’s resurrection and after his promise that the Holy Spirit would guide the apostles into all truth.” During Jesus’s ministry, they often misunderstood Jesus’s teachings, but Jesus promised that after he rose and ascended, the Holy Ghost would guide and enlighten these Apostles.
• God does not correct the Apostles when they write errors into scripture.
• God does not give this knowledge because they didn’t ask for it (3 Nephi 16:4), even though this was not just a minor detail, but information that would be vital for Christians to know.
• Rather than intervene to inform the Apostles of these truths, God instead had others write it down for it to be revealed 1,000s of years later (3 Nephi 16:4–5).
• God let the scriptures become corrupted for centuries so that a believer relying on them alone would go astray (cf. 1 Nephi 13:26–29).

These are really pernicious teachings. If you believe them, then how can you have confidence in anything the Bible teaches? How can you have confidence that the Apostles were not mistaken in their doctrines because of their bias, lack of faith, or failure to ask? How can you trust that God has given us what we need to know to be saved when he hid important knowledge from Christians for more than a thousand years? These teachings introduce not just faliability but systematic unrealiability regarding the Bible. Someone who is trapped in this snare will not be able to trust what God has revealed.

I am not arguing here that the apostles were never confused, nor that John 10 settles every question by itself. The issue is whether Jesus withheld essential truth from his appointed witnesses because of their unbelief, and whether God allowed centuries of doctrinal confusion to persist as a result.

This kind of doubt deprives people of confidence and leaves them as “children tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14).

For Latter-day Saints, the answer is to look to the living Prophet and living Apostles for guidance and stability.

But just as a retrovirus ultimately destroys its host and, in the process itself, these teachings from the Book of Mormon also fatally undermine confidence in LDS leaders and the foundations of the LDS Church.

To see this, look at progressive Latter-day Saints speculating about how if Church leaders just put aside their biases and hardheartedness, God would give them a revelation expanding the priesthood to women or marriage to LGBTQ+ individuals. Look also at how quickly more conservative members were, using the same theological logic, to accuse LDS leaders of stiffneckedness for encouraging the COVID-19 vaccine.

If the Apostles could have been persistently wrong about who the “other sheep” were–blinded by cultural bias and unwilling to ask God–then why would anyone assume that LDS apostles today are any less blinded, biased, or unwilling to ask?

The Book of Mormon’s teachings, therefore, lead to members who are constantly seeking and waiting for the next big reveal while at the same time doubting whether any particular doctrine is truly fixed and set in stone. It invites perpetual doubt—both about the Bible and about current leaders—while offering no stable place to stand.”

The good news is that the message of the Gospel is fixed and steady rather than provisional and unstable. It has been that way from the time of Jesus to the present day. The way of salvation has not changed. The timeless truths that Jesus and his Apostles taught have not changed. We can rely fully on the efficacy and sufficiency of God’s word. If we carefully study God’s word, it will keep us safe from even subtle forms of deception like what the Book of Mormon offers.