Speaking on the change from "Benjamin" to "Mosiah" in Mosiah 21:28 (and, although the author seems unaware of such, Ether 4:1), Harry L. Ropp, a Protestant critic of the Church, wrote the following which is representative of the "all-or-nothing" fundamentalist approach to Scripture and then transposing such onto the Latter-day Saint understanding thereof:
If we lay the blame on Mormon, we are in a similar dilemma because Mormon may have made other mistakes we have no way of detecting. Either horn of this dilemma is less than adequate to sustain the Mormon view of revelation. (Harry L. Ropp, The Mormon Papers: Are the Mormon Scriptures Reliable? [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1977], 44)
There are many problems with such, not the least is that Latter-day Saints do not hold such an approach to Scripture; indeed, we believe there are “mistakes of men” in the Scriptures, including the Book of Mormon. We can “get around” this problem as it is not a tenet of our faith that all our scriptures is inerrant, nor do we believe any book or even all the books combined to be formally sufficient. Ropp is reading his flavour of Sola Scriptura back into the “Mormon” view he is critiquing. For a fuller discussion, see:
Another problem is that, if Ropp were consistent (I know, I know—Evangelical Protestants like Ropp et al., never are . . . ) we must cast serious doubt upon the Bible itself. John Tvedtnes discussed a biblical parallel to Mosiah 21:28/Ether 4:1 in his paper The Mistakes of Men: Can the Scriptures Be Error-Free?
We read in 1 Kings 14:31-15:5 that Abijam (also called Abijah, as in the parallel passage in 2 Chronicles 12:16) became king of Judah after the death of his father Rehoboam and that, despite his sins, the Lord preserved his kingship for the sake of his ancestor David. Then, in 1 Kings 15:6-7, we read,
And there was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam all the days of his life. Now the rest of the acts of Abijam, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? And there was war between Abijam and Jeroboam.
The name Rehoboam is anachronistic, since he was dead and the passage was intended to describe events in the days of his son Abijam. The error is actually corrected in a few Hebrew manuscripts and in the Peshitta (Christian Aramaic) version to read, “And there was war between Abijah the son of Rehoboam.” The parallel passage in 2 Chronicles 13:2 reads, “And there was war between Abijah and Jeroboam.”
For a book-length discussion of such changes and contradictions between 1-2 Chronicles and parallel narratives found elsewhere in the Old Testament, see:
Isaac Kalimi, The Reshaping of Ancient Israelite History in Chronicles (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005)
Indeed, the issue raised by Tvedtnes and those by Kalimi are more devastating to biblical inerrancy and the Protestant view of Scripture than the Benjamin/Mosiah issue in the Book of Mormon. Such is not to denigrate the reliability and/or inspiration of the Biblical texts; instead, it is to show that the “all-or-nothing” approach to Scripture is fallacious to the nth degree.
