This article is part of a series on Contradictions between the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Click on the link to access a brief overview of the series.  

The Book of Mormon contains a lengthy account of an angel telling Nephi about the Bible having had “many parts” deliberately removed, because of which the Lord was inspiring a new scripture that would contain the full gospel (1 Nephi 13:20–42). “The Book,” the angel says, “is a record of the Jews, which contains the covenants of the Lord which he hath made unto the House of Israel; and it also containeth many of the prophesies of the holy prophets” (13:23). This description clearly refers to what we call the Old Testament. Originally, this Book “contained the fulness of the Gospel of the Lamb, of whom the twelve apostles bare record; and they bare record according to the truth which is in the Lamb of God” (13:24). The point the Book of Mormon is making here is that the twelve apostles also left a record of their testimonies to the gospel, which would be what we call the New Testament.

Unfortunately, according to the same passage in 1 Nephi, sometime after these things went out from the Jews to the Gentiles, a “great and abominable church” formed that “have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb, many parts which are plain and most precious; and also, many covenants of the Lord have they taken away” (13:26). Here Nephi is being told that a Gentile-dominated church, later called “the mother of harlots” (13:34), took away important parts of both the New and the Old Testaments. The standard LDS interpretation of this passage is that it describes “the removal of texts or portions of texts from biblical records” as well as “the corruption of texts through translation and transmission.”¹ Robert Matthews, a leading LDS scholar on the Bible, comments:

As we read the words of the angel, we discover that the world never has had a complete Bible, for it was massively—even cataclysmically—corrupted before it was distributed. Of course, in addition to the major willful corruption of the Bible in the early Christian era, the manuscripts have also continued to suffer the gradual and relatively mild changes, due to errors of hand and eye, that the scholars talk about. Thus there have been two processes at work: (1) a major, sudden, and deliberate editorial corruption of the text and (2) a gradual promulgation of variants that has occurred as a natural consequence of copying and translation.²

In particular, Mormons commonly interpret the passage as explaining why the name of Jesus Christ and explicit details about him are not found in the Old Testament. “Surely the most plain and precious of all truths lost from the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, are the clear and unequivocal declarations of the mission of Jesus Christ.”³ Ironically, this claim exposes another possible contradiction between the Book of Mormon and the Bible: The books of the Book of Mormon dated prior to the coming of Christ refer explicitly to Jesus Christ by name and provide a countdown of the exact number of years left before his coming. By contrast, 1 Peter 1:10–12 indicates that the pre-Christian prophets did not know who the Messiah would be or when he would come.

After describing the severe consequences of this wicked church’s decimation of the Bible, the angel informs Nephi that additional records from his “seed” would augment the Bible and, after being hidden, would be made known and brought together with the Bible to give the Gentiles the gospel with the “plain and precious” truths that had been removed from the Bible (13:35–42). Of course, these records from Nephi’s descendants would become what we know as the Book of Mormon. Thus, this passage is of critical importance because it lays out the rationale for the Book of Mormon’s existence and publication through Joseph Smith. One LDS curriculum manual puts it this way:

The Book of Mormon is another witness for the truths taught in the Bible. It also restores ‘plain and precious’ truths that have been lost from the Bible through errors in translation or “taken away” in attempts to “pervert the right ways of the Lord” (see 1 Nephi 13:24–27, 38–41).⁴

The New Testament flatly contradicts the claim that any substantial parts of the Old Testament had been or ever would be removed. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets:
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
For verily I say unto you,
Till heaven and earth pass,
one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law,
till all be fulfilled (Matthew 5:17–18 KJV).

It is worth noting that Christ’s statement here is revised in the Book of Mormon’s account of him preaching the Sermon to the Nephites:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. 
I am not come to destroy but to fulfil:
for verily I say unto you,
one jot nor one tittle hath not passed away from the law, 
but in me it hath all been fulfilled. (3 Nephi 12:17–18)

Notice that the Book of Mormon removes the words “till heaven and earth pass” and changes the future-tense assurance “shall in no wise pass” to a past-tense statement, “hath not passed away.” In so doing, the Book of Mormon removes the idea that the law and the prophets (i.e., the Old Testament) would never pass away “till heaven and earth pass.” Ironically, it is the Book of Mormon that removes a “plain and precious” truth from Christ’s most famous sermon in the New Testament. It does so to be consistent with the claim that many parts were removed from the Old Testament after the era of the apostles.

Note well that we are not nitpicking some incidental “mistake” in the Book of Mormon. Rather, we are observing a clear contradiction between the Book of Mormon and the New Testament that is of signal importance to the supposed reason for the Book of Mormon’s appearance in modern times.