One would answer and say, “Well,
of course, you just read that the Roman Catholic Church took away the plain and
precious things out of the scriptures when they came from the mouths of the
Twelve Apostles. Of course it’s the Catholic Church because they took away the
plain and precious things out of the scriptures and that’s what Nephi told us.”
No, the wresting of the scriptures occurred before there was such a church as
the Roman Catholic Church. The tearing of the scriptures, the false
interpretations of the scriptures, the taking away of the plain and precious
principles of the Gospel had already been done before the Roman Catholic Church
came into existence. The Gnostics, the Judaizers, and even Judaism itself had
so corrupted the scriptures beforehand get things tied down before everything’s
changed.” We should be grateful to the Roman Catholic Church to have received
the Bible in as sound a condition as it is heads had to copy all the different
scriptures, the marginal references were put in here and there and they often
made errors in copying, but the intentional corrupting of the materials of the
gospel scriptures was not done by the Roman Catholic Church. It was done a long
time before the Roman Catholic Church came into existence. (Reed C. Durham,
Jr., “The Great and Abominable Church,” Salt Lake Institute of Religion,
February 18, 1966], p. 5)