In Matt 5-7, we find the sermon that is often called "the Sermon on the Mount. " This sermon is reproduced, with some changes,
by the then-resurrected, glorified Christ when, after his resurrection,
preached to his people in the New World (somewhere in ancient Mesoamerica) at a
temple in a land called "Bountiful"; thus it is often labelled “The Sermon at the Temple” (3 Nephi 12-14).
In Matt 6:13, Christ provides a
doxology (emphasis added):
And
lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; For thine is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever, Amen.
This is paralleled in 3 Nephi 13:13:
For
thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
Some critics, perhaps most notably
Stan Larson, have charged that this is strong evidence of a 19th
century origin for the Book of Mormon. The reason? Some early manuscripts of
Matthew lack this doxology. Many modern translations (e.g. the NRSV) lack the
doxology. The argument goes that Joseph Smith pilfered, rather ignorantly in
this case, from the KJV, and the Book of Mormon retains this error.
There have been many responses to
this alleged “error.” In his book, Illuminating the Sermon at the Temple and Sermon on the Mount (online here), John W. Welch provides a
number of arguments that Jesus did utter a doxology. Consider the following:
First, it would have been highly irregular at the time of Jesus to end a
Jewish prayer without some words in praise of God. In Palestinian practice, it
was completely unthinkable that a prayer would end with the word “temptation.”
In Judaism, prayers are often concluded with a “seal,” a sentence of praise
freely formulated by the man who was praying (on this, see Jeremias’ book, The Prayers of Jesus).
Secondly, at a temple setting, that of the Sermon in 3 Nephi 12-14, it
is all the more unlikely that a prayer at the temple would end without some
form of doxology. This may be a factor in explaining why Luke 11 does not
contain a doxology, while the Lord’s Prayer at Bountiful does. In prayers at a
temple, the people did not end a prayer with just “Amen.” The benediction at
the temple on the Day of Atonement ended with the phrase, “Praised be the name
of His glorious kingdom forever and eternally!”
Thirdly, the doxology in the KJV and the Sermon at the Temple seems to
have followed a traditional form, reflected in 1 Chronicles 29:10-13, as is
widely observed. The Nephites may have known such phraseology from their
Israelite traditions, for it appears in an important blessing spoken by King
David, and the Nephite record contained certain historical records of the Jews
(see 1 Nephi 5:12). According to Chronicles, David’s blessing reads: “Wherefore
David blessed the Lord before all the congregation: and David said, Blessed be
thou Lord God of Israel out father forever and ever. Thine, O Lord, is
the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and
the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine if
the kingdom” (1 Chron 29:10-11, emphasis added).
Fourthly, although
a minority, several early texts in Greek, Syriac, and Coptic include doxologies
at the end of the Lord ’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13.
What is also interesting is the Didache, an
early Christian document that has been variously dated (most scholars argue
that it was written about 100 C.E.; one leading Didache scholar, Aaron Milavec,
in his The Didache: Faith, Hope, and Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50-70 C.E. places it before the inscripturation of the Gospel
of Matthew) contains the doxology in his rendition of the Lord’s Prayer
(Didache 8:2), showing that the doxology in the Sermon at the Mount was known
in Christian antiquity; it was not a much later development.
Overall, these considerations show that the
argument of Larson et al. does not hold water vis-à-vis the Sermon on the Mount
and Sermon at the Temple in Matthew and the Book of Mormon.