On a Catholic apologetics page, Mormonism and it's [sic] Mythology, we read the following question that is supposedly unanswerable for any Mormon:
I am sorry, but this has got to be one of the dumbest arguments ever raised! Wayne L. Cowdery, Howard Davis, and Donald Scales were three authors of an anti-Mormon book released in the late 1970s; they were not the three witnesses of the gold plates and the angel Moroni! They were all born in the 20th century, well after the publication of the Book of Mormon and the time of Joseph Smith (d. 1844).
The actual three witnesses were Oliver Cowdery (d.1850), Martin Harris (d. 1875), and David Whitmer (d. 1888). For a scholarly discussion of the Three and Eight Witnesses, see Richard L. Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981).
For a review of the second edition of Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?, see Matthew P. Roper, The Mythical "Manuscript Found"
We also get this bald assertion posed as a question:
Why did Smith's three main witnesses, Cowdrey, Davis and Scales write the book, "Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? (Vision House Publishers, 1977)? Why did they leave the Mormon Church, even though they claimed to have seen Smith’s tablets?
I am sorry, but this has got to be one of the dumbest arguments ever raised! Wayne L. Cowdery, Howard Davis, and Donald Scales were three authors of an anti-Mormon book released in the late 1970s; they were not the three witnesses of the gold plates and the angel Moroni! They were all born in the 20th century, well after the publication of the Book of Mormon and the time of Joseph Smith (d. 1844).
The actual three witnesses were Oliver Cowdery (d.1850), Martin Harris (d. 1875), and David Whitmer (d. 1888). For a scholarly discussion of the Three and Eight Witnesses, see Richard L. Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981).
For a review of the second edition of Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?, see Matthew P. Roper, The Mythical "Manuscript Found"
We also get this bald assertion posed as a question:
How can there have been a great apostasy when the Church Fathers taught Catholic Doctrine?Not even close; the early Church Fathers did not believe in the Immaculate Conception and even charged Mary with personal sin; furthermore, in spite of the abuse of Epiphanius, no one in the early Church held to the Bodily Assumption of Mary as a doctrine of the Christian Faith, nor did the earliest Christian Fathers hold to a view of the veneration of images that would be dogmatised in 787 at the Second Council of Nicea--in fact, they held the opposing view. When one actually reads the patristic literature, and not "snippets" one finds in the works of Jurgens, one will realise that Church History is not a friend to Roman Catholicism; such is one of the reasons why Newman had to come up with the development hypothesis.
