DR. ROBERT M. BOWMAN JR. Summary
While Mormons are adamant about their belief in Jesus, those who leave Mormonism often lose this faith. In fact, many ex-Mormons move toward atheism or agnosticism and abandon any trust in Jesus. This is a shame because it was men—LDS leaders—and not Jesus who let them down. The overwhelming evidence for a historical Jesus who is the risen Savior can be offered as a message of hope.
Introduction
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims to be centered on Jesus Christ. Mormons are fond of pointing out that His name is in the name of their church. They also refer to the Book of Mormon as a scripture about Christ that presents a Christ-centered faith: “And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ” (2 Nephi 25:26). From a faithful LDS perspective, Mormonism offers a more robust knowledge of Jesus Christ than can be found in traditional Christianity or than can be gleaned from the Bible alone.
On the other hand, many Mormons eventually recognize that the Latter-day “prophets” and additional scriptures of their religion are not reliable or trustworthy sources of Christian belief. When this happens, these now-former Mormons typically become unsure of everything they have believed about Jesus Christ. They often wonder if they can continue to have faith in Christ at all.
Those who are transitioning out of Mormonism, or who have already left it, need to know the truth about Jesus Christ. They need to find reliable information about Him that will not crumble upon examination like LDS stories about Jesus visiting the Nephites or appearing to Joseph Smith. The Christ-centered approach is simply a way to talk to former and transitioning Mormons about who Jesus Christ really is.
“Who Do You Say That I Am?”
Just as Jesus asked His disciples who they believed He was (Matthew 16:15), we should ask others what they believe about Jesus. It’s always a good idea to ask questions first to get an accurate gauge on their beliefs. Don’t assume you know what they think or be in a rush to tell them what you believe. Rather, listen and hear their point of view (Proverbs 18:13; James 1:19).
If they express ideas about Jesus that are erroneous, be gentle and conversational rather than harsh and condemning (Proverbs 15:1; 2 Timothy 2:25; James 1:19-20; 1 Peter 3:15). False prophets and teachers must be identified and exposed as such (Matthew 7:15-23; 2 Peter 2:1; 1 John 4:1-6), but those who have been following those false teachers are best persuaded by truth spoken in love (Ephesians 4:15).
An alarming number of former Mormons are becoming skeptical about Jesus. They may be unsure what is true about Christ. Perhaps they still think He died on the cross and rose from the dead, but beyond those basic truths, they don’t know what to believe. All too often they have doubts about Jesus’s death and resurrection. They may think of Jesus as, at best, a great teacher and example. At worst, they may have accepted the fringe atheist propaganda that Jesus never existed, which is a popular view also among many who have abandoned traditional Christianity for atheism. If a former Mormon confidently advocates this “Jesus mythicist” position, frankly, it will be very difficult to persuade him or her to rethink that view. Nevertheless, Christians should be prepared to counter this extreme position to help prevent those who are on the fence from falling off it.
“If Christ Has Not Been Raised”
The central fact about Jesus Christ is the resurrection. The apostle Paul wrote, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). To put the matter in the simplest terms: If Christ did not rise from the dead, Christianity is false; if Christ did rise from the dead, Christianity is true and ought to be embraced. From a practical point of view, then, find out early in the conversation whether your friend believes that Jesus rose from the dead. If the answer is no, try to find out why they don’t; if they do, build on that all-important common ground when turning to other questions about Jesus.
People who express uncertainty or skepticism about Jesus’s resurrection offer various reasons for questioning its truth. Most of the objections challenge the sources, the facts, or the possibility of the resurrection.
Doubts About the Sources
Once Mormons have lost faith in some of the sources of teaching about Jesus that they have accepted within the LDS religion, they commonly lose faith or, at the very least, doubt all sources, including the Bible. Evangelical Christians often want to respond to these doubts by asserting the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible as the written Word of God. That is the right way to view Scripture because it is the way Jesus viewed Scripture (Matthew 5:17-18; Mark 7:13; 12:24; John 10:35).1
Mormons, though, have been taught to view the Bible with some suspicion, and that suspicion becomes greatly magnified once they begin doubting Mormonism. If we base our use of the Bible on its being inspired, those with doubts will be distracted from the issue of the person of Christ by the myriad of criticisms made against the Bible.
To avoid getting sidetracked, reframe the issue. Invite them to view the New Testament—especially the Gospels—as historical documents. Now the issue is not whether the Gospels are totally without error but whether they are good historical sources about Jesus. The case for accepting them as such can be summed up in two simple points:
1. The Gospels are biographies. A biography is a book intended to tell the story of a real person’s life. Luke’s preface (Luke 1:1-4) states explicitly that the Gospel of Luke is meant to tell the truth about Jesus based on eyewitness testimonies. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the Gospels are biographies in the style of ancient Greco-Roman writings.2 Like those writings, the Gospels are narratives about one individual, focusing on the most important events of His life. Thus, even if there are questions about details, the Gospels are not myths or fables.
2. The Gospels are the earliest biographical sources. All biblical scholars, even those who are liberal and secular, agree that the New Testament Gospels were written in the first century, roughly 25 to 75 years after Jesus’s death.3 No alternative sources date that early.
In short, the Gospels are simply the best sources of historical information available about Jesus. Nothing else even comes close. We can explain confidently to former Mormons that, while the Book of Mormon has no historical support, the Gospels are just what they claim to be: ancient biographies about Jesus written by authors living close enough to the time of Jesus to have had access to eyewitness accounts of His life, teachings, death, and resurrection.
Doubts About the Facts
Many people haven’t thought seriously about what did happen if they deny that Jesus rose from the dead. They may simply dismiss the resurrection as a later legend without wrestling with the question of how this legend supposedly originated. We can help people understand the issue better by asking them to think about how the Christian movement itself got started. What led a group of Jews in the first century to begin proclaiming that a man named Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead? Let’s consider how skeptics typically respond to this question.
1. Did the story of Jesus’s resurrection originate later? Skeptics often claim that the resurrection was a later fiction, legend, or myth devised by Christians many years after Jesus’s death. However, the earliest references to Jesus’s resurrection come not in the Gospels but in Paul’s letters, including 1 Thessalonians, which scholars date to AD 50-51. That’s less than 20 years after Jesus died (probably in AD 33). That’s too short a time for Jesus to be a wholly mythical figure.
2. Did Jesus not really die on the cross? Some non-Christians claim that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross at all. The many variations on this claim all say that someone made up the story of Jesus dying on the cross. The main problem with this claim is that crucifixion was such a shameful, humiliating form of death that no one would have chosen to invent the story of their religious founder dying in that way. As Paul admitted: “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23).
3. Was Jesus not a real person? As mentioned earlier, some skeptics have gone so far as to claim that Jesus never existed but was a later fiction invented on the basis of earlier myths. Frankly, the majority of historians—religious or nonreligious—do not take this claim seriously. Whereas only Mormons consider Lehi, Nephi, and the other Book of Mormon characters to be historical personages, the only people who deny the historical existence of Jesus are a few atheists. The four Gospels, Acts, and 1 Timothy all refer to Jesus’s execution by the order of Pontius Pilate, a historical figure who ruled Judea as its governor from AD 26 to 36 (Matthew 27; Mark 15; Luke 3:1; 23; John 18–19; Acts 3:13; 4:27; 13:28; 1 Timothy 6:13). The Roman historian Tacitus confirmed that Christ “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus” (Annals 15.44).4 Were this evidence about anyone other than Jesus, even the most hardened skeptic would agree that it was proof enough.
Doubts About the Possibility
Most skeptics disbelieve in Jesus’s resurrection simply because, if it happened, it would be a miracle. In the Western world today, skepticism about the miraculous or supernatural continues to grow. It is rather understandable that former Mormons, upon realizing that Joseph Smith’s fantastic claims to supernatural visitations and gifts were fraudulent, would become cynical about such claims in general, even the resurrection. We can make the following four points in response to such skepticism.
1. One case of fraud does not prove that all other claims are fraudulent. For example, the fact that some insurance claims are fraudulent does not mean that all of them are. The fact that Joseph Smith lied about seeing the risen Jesus in 1820 does not mean that Paul and the other apostles lied about seeing the risen Jesus in the first century.
2. Miracle claims should be evaluated by the evidence. We should assume neither that all miracle stories are true nor that they are all false, but should instead evaluate these stories based on the evidence.
3. General skepticism about miracles is a modern, Western, culturally narrow way of thinking. Most people in most societies throughout history have believed in some kind of supernatural dimension to the world. It is only in the past three centuries or so, and only in nations of Western cultural origins, that disbelief in the miraculous has been an issue at all. This fact doesn’t prove that the supernatural exists, but it suggests that one should be cautious in dogmatically assuming that miracles are impossible.
4. If God exists, miracles like the resurrection are possible. Of course, many skeptics, including many former Mormons, also doubt the existence of God. Here’s one way of addressing this problem: Ask if they would agree to say, at least for now, that God’s existence is possible but not certain. If so, there should be a willingness to take an objective look at the evidence for the resurrection.
Note that the goal in making any of these four points is to encourage skeptics to consider the evidence. Once they agree to do so, it is possible to move ahead on the assumption that God’s existence, and therefore the miraculous, is at least possible.
“My Lord and My God”
If your former- or transitioning-Mormon friend believes that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, this point of agreement is common ground for discussing what else we should believe about Christ. If the individual no longer trusts the LDS Church’s prophets and extrabiblical scriptures, where will they look for the truth about Jesus, and what will they find there?
We have already pointed out that the New Testament writings, most notably the Gospels and the epistles of Paul, are our earliest and best sources of information about Jesus. Once a person comes to the realization that the Mormon sources are not reliable while also recognizing that Jesus did rise from the dead, the natural place to look for further understanding of Jesus is the New Testament. After all, the New Testament writers were Christians because they were convinced that what Jesus said was true. Therefore, we should be able to find in the New Testament writings at least some fairly reliable information about who Jesus was and what He taught.
If the skeptic believes that Jesus rose from the dead and is ready to hear what else the New Testament says, we can begin addressing more directly the question of who Jesus is and how He is related to God. A helpful approach is to begin with the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels, and from there move out to the rest of the New Testament to show what it consistently teaches about Jesus.
The Gospel of Mark reports what Jesus said when He was asked what the greatest commandment was:
Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31).
Jesus’s answer here is quite consistent with the fact that He was a Jewish teacher. The commandment He identified as the most important (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) is known in Judaism as the Shema (the Hebrew word translated “hear”). It was at the time (and still is today) the central confession or “creed” of the Jewish faith. The commandment epitomizes their belief that the Lord, who created the world and everything in it, is uniquely God. While ancient Judaism recognized the existence of many supernatural beings (and occasionally even called them “gods”), they recognized only one God as the Creator and Ruler of all things. This belief in one God is the consistent position of the New Testament writings (1 Corinthians 8:4; 1 Timothy 2:5; James 2:19).
What was surprising, even jarring, is what Jesus said about Himself. Without explicitly saying “I am God”—a statement that would no doubt have been misunderstood as claiming to be the Father—Jesus made numerous statements that placed Him on God’s level. He forgave people’s sins (Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12) and claimed that He would be the Judge on the Day of Judgment (Matthew 25:31; Mark 12:36). He claimed that He would be present with His disciples wherever they went in all the nations (Matthew 18:20; 28:20). He invited His apostles to pray to Him about anything (John 14:14). After His resurrection, Jesus accepted worship from the disciples (Matthew 28:17) and accepted Thomas’s affirmation that Jesus was “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28).
Several of the New Testament writings likewise affirm that Jesus Christ was God in ways that clearly indicated Jesus had the same divine status as the Father (Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8-12; 2 Peter 1:1). John tells us that Christ, before He became a human being, had always been God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The apostles taught that the preexistent Christ, the divine Son, was the One through whom all created things came into existence (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2). Thus, creation itself, which the Old Testament credited solely to God, is now understood to have been the work of both the Father and the Son.
Paul interpreted the confession of the Shema to include both the Father and Jesus Christ in the one divine Creator of Jewish monotheism: “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6).
In other places Paul expanded the monotheistic confession to include explicitly the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4-6; Ephesians 4:4-6). Jesus had revealed the existence of this third person, the Holy Spirit (John 14:26; 16:13-14). The very act of Christian baptism as instituted by Christ is a profession of faith in the three divine persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), without denying the monotheistic faith that Jesus affirmed.
Conclusion
As Mormons read and study the New Testament freed from Mormon presuppositions and doctrinal baggage, seeking in its pages the truth about Jesus, they will have a better appreciation of its teachings. They will grow in the grace and knowledge of the true Jesus and glorify Him (2 Peter 3:14-18).
Dr. Robert M. Bowman Jr. (Rockford, Michigan) is the executive director of the Institute for Religious Research (IRR.org) in Cedar Springs, Michigan. He holds MA and PhD degrees in biblical studies and has lectured frequently at universities and seminaries throughout the United States. Rob is the author of a dozen books, including the co-author of Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (with J. Ed Komoszewski; Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2007).