The Bible and the Book of Mormon

Sitting between bookends atop a filing cabinet a few feet from my office is an assembly of books, all with the same title and content but each one rendered in a different language. “Le Livre de Mormon.” “Das Buch Mormon.” “El Libro de Mormón.” There are several in non-Latin scripts. Chinese in simplified characters. Russian in its Cyrillic. Japanese with its blend of ancient and modern alphabets. A few are in languages most people haven’t heard of. Quechua. Chamorro. Fante. The Book of Mormon-- translated fully or partly into more than a hundred languages and with 150 million copies in print to date - may be the most readily identifiable factor that sets members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christians.

In the 181 years since it was first published, the Book of Mormon has been praised and parodied, vaunted and vilified. To some it is an enigma. To others heresy. To those who have embraced it, it is a powerful, life-changing force -- literally new scripture - that brings people to Jesus Christ.

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