As I understand it the Book of Mormon already existed as a piece of very bad fiction before Joseph Smith decided to baptize it into his new religion of Mormonism. It wasn't written by Mormon believers. Joseph Smith was an experienced con man who had a visit from a fallen angel named Moroni who told him Christianity was false, much as many of you here are doing, and concocted a whole religion out of total fiction, some nonexistent golden plates on top of this bogus oiece of writing and made good the adage that there's a sucker born every minute. Your attempt to make a comparison with the history of Christianity comes from your own prejudice. Four separate accounts of the gospel were written that agree with each other on all major points and they read like history, not fiction..
The disciples had no motivation whatever. Their Mesiah had died and they were poised to just disappear from the scene. It took a supernatural act from heaven to restore their faith in Jesus and then they wrote down their accounts simply and honestly.
It takes deviousness and cleverness to write fiction especially for the purpose of deceiving people. They were ready to give up their Messiah so they had no motive, and the cleverness it would take to get all the parts together in a believable wa just doesn't describe their characters. I'm watching PaulK try to make use of this kind of deviousness and cleverness on the part of modern scholars to turn the true accounts of prophecy in the book of Daniel into a fiction. His interpretation of the prophecies reduces them to a ridiculous triviality that no scribe would have bothered to write down, prophecies pointing to unknown people as "messiah" although the entire history of the OT points to the one Messiah the Prince who saves His people from their sins. The book of Daniel is glorious true prophecy of real events of transcendent importance but he's reducing it all to something even a local tribe would ignore.
All the "scholars" can accomplish is mangling historical contexts, making Daniel into a liar every time he says where he was when a certain vision came to him, removing him from the context of his service to the various kings of Babylon and Medea and Persia. You can't fictionalize reality without making a mess of it unless you are a novelistic genius and have decades to work on it.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.