Denver Snuffer’s Criticisms of Christianity: A Consolidated Catalogue with Validity Assessments
Drawn from the eight-lecture “Addresses to the Christians” series (2017–2019) and the eight academic assessments published at Renaissance Ministries, August 2026
Introduction and Method
Across eight lectures delivered to Christian audiences on the occasion of the Protestant Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Denver Snuffer Jr. mounted a sustained critique of historic Christianity — its churches, its text, its creeds, its clergy, its doctrines, and its readiness for the last days — as the ground for commending a new restoration through Joseph Smith, continued in Snuffer’s own movement. This document consolidates every substantive criticism of Christianity delivered across the series into a single catalogue and assesses the validity of each. The assessments draw on the eight lecture-by-lecture essays previously published, which measured each claim against (1) the documented historical record and (2) the text of Scripture (KJV). Here the same findings are reorganized by criticism rather than by lecture, so that the whole indictment can be seen at once and weighed point by point.
A note on fairness governs everything below. Snuffer’s criticisms are not uniformly wrong. Several name real corruptions, real abuses, and real neglects that Christian historiography itself acknowledges — and where a criticism is valid or partially valid, that is stated plainly. The recurring pattern, however, is this: a documented kernel is inflated into a universal; a contested minority thesis is presented as settled fact; a proof-text is read against its own syntax; or an argument is deployed that, applied consistently, would condemn the apostolic church or the critic’s own movement. Each entry below states the criticism as delivered, identifies where it appears in the series, and renders a validity verdict with the controlling evidence.
PART ONE: CRITICISMS OF THE CHURCH’S CONDITION AND AUTHORITY
1. All Christian churches today are corrupt
The criticism. Every Christian church has become corrupt; they love money, financial security, and buildings more than the poor, the needy, the sick, and the afflicted; the institutions claiming to be God’s church are all polluted by the cares of the world; the religion of Jesus Christ is “hardly practiced anywhere on earth.” (Lectures 1, 3, 5)
Validity: Invalid as a universal; valid as a warning about real tendencies. As a proposition about the interior loves of every congregation on earth, the claim is unverifiable in principle — no man can audit the hearts of hundreds of millions of believers across every continent. More decisively, it stands in direct tension with Christ’s own preservation promises: “upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18); “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20); “unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end” (Ephesians 3:21). The Bible’s own model of ecclesial corruption — the seven letters of Revelation 2–3 — names real corruption, demands repentance, threatens removal of candlesticks, and yet even in Sardis, the deadest church of the seven, Christ finds “a few names… which have not defiled their garments” (Revelation 3:4). The one biblical precedent for a total-apostasy claim is Elijah’s, and God Himself corrects it: “I have left me seven thousand in Israel” (1 Kings 19:18). Scripture knows corrupt churches; after Pentecost it does not know a wholly corrupted church. Source-critically, the universal indictment is not a conclusion from evidence but a restatement of the Restoration’s founding premise — the First Vision report that all creeds were corrupt (Joseph Smith–History 1:19) and the polemic of 2 Nephi 28. The valid kernel — that churches genuinely do drift toward mammon, property, and institutional self-preservation, and that Scripture warns of exactly this — deserves full acknowledgment; every reformer from the prophets to Wesley has said it. But the kernel indicts tendencies within the church; it does not unchurch the church. And Snuffer’s own lectures supply the counterexamples: St. Francis, ministered to by angels inside the Catholicism the thesis declares wholly corrupt, and Mother Teresa, offered by Snuffer himself as evidence that Catholic holiness exists (Lectures 7–8). The witness contradicts his own indictment.
2. A total apostasy occurred; change to the religion proves God abandoned it
The criticism. Christianity changed over its first two centuries; since God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, change to His religion signals that God was no longer in charge; an apostasia — rebellion — took place; the original faith was lost and has never been restored. (Lectures 1, 2, 4)
Validity: Invalid in its logic; partially valid in its data. The data are real: Christianity did change in form, practice, and emphasis across its early centuries, and the New Testament itself predicts defection and corruption within the church (Acts 20:29–30; 2 Timothy 4:3–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:3). But the argument’s engine — unchanging God, therefore unchanging religious forms — is broken by the very book that declares God unchanging: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). The constancy of God’s character does not entail the constancy of administration; the same canon records God changing covenant administration at Sinai and again in Christ (Hebrews 8:13). Further, the total-apostasy reading takes the corruption predictions as exhaustive and the preservation promises (Matthew 16:18; 28:20; Ephesians 3:21) as void — a selection the texts themselves do not authorize. And the lexical claim that apostasia implies a sudden, deliberate rebellion contradicts Snuffer’s own narrative of gradual transformation across generations of converts. The valid observation — real corruption entered early and cost the church much — is the shared testimony of all Christian historiography. The invalid conclusion is that the candlestick went out everywhere and God’s promise failed.
3. Only a preacher directly sent by God should be heeded; existing churches lack authority
The criticism. Romans 10:14–15 (“how shall they preach, except they be sent?”) establishes that a valid preacher must be sent; Paul was sent “not of men, neither by man”; since Christ is unchanging, the same direct divine sending is required now; therefore no existing minister has authority, and the only preacher to heed is one who plainly declares God has sent him — as Joseph Smith declared, and as Snuffer declares. (Lecture 1; commission claims repeated in Lectures 2, 3)
Validity: Invalid at four points of the biblical record. First, Romans 10 argues the necessity of proclamation for saving faith; it is not a treatise on commissioning mechanics, and it nowhere restricts valid sending to unmediated divine appearance. Second, the New Testament documents mediated sending as valid sending: the Spirit’s call to Barnabas and Saul executed through the fasting, praying congregation at Antioch (Acts 13:2–4); elders ordained “in every church” (Acts 14:23) and “in every city” (Titus 1:5); Timothy’s gift “with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery” (1 Timothy 4:14) and his charge to “commit thou to faithful men” (2 Timothy 2:2). If only unmediated sending validated a preacher, the pastoral epistles’ entire machinery of ordained succession would be invalid on its face — and Paul treats his own extraordinary call as exceptional, “as of one born out of due time” (1 Corinthians 15:8), not as the template. Third, and most important: the biblical test of a claimed messenger is content, not claimed commission. Self-declaration is precisely what Scripture instructs hearers to test: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits” (1 John 4:1); “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel… let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8); the Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11); a prophet whose sign even comes to pass is rejected if he leads after other gods (Deuteronomy 13:1–3); “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15–20). The boldness and cost of a commission claim establish nothing: “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?… and then will I profess unto them, I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22–23). Fourth, applied consistently, “heed the man who plainly declares God sent him” would have required the first-century hearer to heed every claimant the apostles condemned. The criticism inverts the scriptural order: it adjudicates the doctrine by the vision claim, where the Bible adjudicates the vision claim by the doctrine.
4. Christianity was broken at Constantine and has never been fixed
The criticism. When Constantine made Christianity the state religion, it was compromised, not improved; silk robes and gold headpieces replaced the crown of thorns; imperial rank replaced servanthood; Christianity was utterly broken and remains so — the Reformation included. (Lectures 3, 7, 8)
Validity: Partially valid as evaluation; factually flawed in mechanism; invalid as a totality. The evaluative judgment — that establishment compromised the church — is a respectable position held across Christian traditions from the Anabaptists to Wesley to Kierkegaard, and the contrast between Christ’s servant-poverty (Luke 2:7; John 13:4–15; Philippians 2:5–8) and imperial pomp is a legitimate application of Matthew 20:25–28. Snuffer’s Wesley quotation (Sermon 89 on the decline of the gifts after Constantine) is genuine. The factual frame, however, repeatedly fails: Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion (he legalized and favored it; establishment came under Theodosius, 380, four decades after Constantine’s death); the bishops at Nicaea were not put “under house arrest” until they agreed (unattested in any source; the record shows imperial summons, transport, hospitality, confessor attendees, weeks of open dispute, and coercion only after the decision, in the exile of Arius and two bishops); and pre-Constantinian “Christians killing Christians” is anachronistic — before 313 the church had no coercive power and was itself the persecuted party; the first execution of a Christian for heresy at Christian instigation is Priscillian (385). Where Snuffer places the violence after Constantine, he matches the record; where before, he does not. And the totality claim (“utterly broken, never fixed”) fails on the same preservation texts and living counterexamples as criticism 1 — including the counterexamples Snuffer himself supplies. The Wesley gloss also overreaches its source: Wesley lamented the loss of the extraordinary gifts through spiritual decay; he lived and died a churchman who taught the church’s continuity, and conscripting his continuationist lament into a total-apostasy admission attributes to him a thesis he expressly did not hold.
5. Nicaea invented the Trinity by vote, and got God wrong
The criticism. The Council of Nicaea, convened by a theologically indifferent emperor, adopted Athanasius’s homoousios over Eusebius’s homoiousios by mere vote, claiming no revelation, and thereby gave birth to the Trinity — which became the false litmus test of orthodoxy. The Gospels present the Father and Son as separate beings; nothing in the New Testament makes them the same personage; the Old Testament begins with plural gods (Elohim; “let us make man”); Paul allowed “gods many and lords many.” The council got it wrong. (Lecture 2; echoed in Lecture 7)
Validity: Invalid on the history and on a category error in the theology. Historically, nearly every load-bearing detail is wrong: the Nicene dispute was the Arian question (is the Son a creature?), not homoousios versus homoiousios — the latter formula belongs to the post-Nicene controversies of the 350s; Eusebius of Caesarea was not the champion of an opposing formula (he subscribed to homoousios); Athanasius attended only as a deacon in Alexander’s retinue and became the creed’s defender afterward; and the Trinity was not born at Nicaea — trinitas is in Tertullian (c. 213), trias in Theophilus of Antioch (c. 180), and triadic baptismal confession is commanded in Matthew 28:19 and attested in the Didache and Justin Martyr, generations before the council. Constantine’s initial indifference is the one documented kernel (his preserved letter calls the dispute a trifling question). Theologically, the argument commits a category error: every text Snuffer marshals to prove the Father and Son are distinct persons — the baptismal voice, the Transfiguration, John 17 — is affirmed by, indeed constitutive of, Trinitarian doctrine, which confesses one divine essence in three distinct persons. The doctrine that Father and Son are one personage is modalism (Sabellianism), which the same tradition that produced Nicaea condemned as heresy a century earlier. Demonstrating personal distinction refutes Sabellius, not Athanasius. On the question Nicaea actually decided — the Son’s nature — the Johannine texts run against Snuffer: “the Word was God” (John 1:1); “I and my Father are one,” provoking “thou, being a man, makest thyself God” (John 10:30, 33); “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58); Thomas’s “My Lord and my God” received without correction (John 20:28). The plural-gods exegesis fails on grammar and context: Elohim denoting the God of Israel governs singular verbs (bara, “created,” Genesis 1:1 — singular), framed by “The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4) and Isaiah’s explicit denials (“before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me,” Isaiah 43:10); and 1 Corinthians 8:5–6 is quoted against its own argument, whose premise is “there is none other God but one” (8:4) and whose sixth verse places the Father and the Lord Jesus jointly on the one-God side of the ledger.
6. Orthodoxy and heresy are merely the victors’ labels; unity was coerced, not persuaded
The criticism. Original Christianity had no orthodoxy or heresy; the terms were adopted once the proto-orthodox sensed victory; dissenters were excommunicated, then killed, their scriptures burned; unity was manufactured by coercion, and true Christian unity can only come by persuasion around a minimal doctrine. (Lectures 1, 2, 7)
Validity: Mixed — the persuasion principle is soundly biblical; the historical frame is substantially wrong. The constructive half deserves full credit: persuaded rather than coerced unity is the apostolic method (“we persuade men,” 2 Corinthians 5:11; “in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves,” 2 Timothy 2:24–25; “neither as being lords over God’s heritage,” 1 Peter 5:3), and Snuffer’s insistence that doctrinal killing was a nonsense never to be repeated is common ground. The historical half fails at two points. First, the no-early-orthodoxy claim is the Walter Bauer thesis (1934), substantially qualified by subsequent scholarship: the regula fidei — the summary of apostolic teaching — is attested in near-identical substance in Irenaeus (c. 180), Tertullian (c. 200), and Origen (c. 230), across provinces from Gaul to Egypt, generations before Nicaea; and creedal formulae are embedded in the New Testament itself (1 Corinthians 15:3–4; Romans 10:9; Philippians 2:6–11; 1 Timothy 3:16). The vocabulary of exclusion is not a late invention but apostolic: “heresies” among the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:20); “a man that is an heretick… reject” (Titus 3:10); “damnable heresies” (2 Peter 2:1); doctrinal exclusion practiced in the first generation (1 Timothy 1:19–20; 2 John 10; Revelation 2). Irenaeus could only write Against Heresies because a rule already existed to measure heresy against. Second, the killing chronology is anachronistic for the pre-Nicene period (see criticism 4). The false dilemma should also be named: the choice is not only coercion or doctrinal minimalism — voluntary, non-coercive adherence to substantial confessions is a third, well-populated category throughout Christian history.
7. Professional, paid clergy is a corruption of original Christianity
The criticism. The apostolic church had no buildings and no compensated ministers; funds went only to the poor; today’s professional clergy divert tithes from the poor; clergy hostility across denominations exists because ministers have a financial stake in their denomination’s survival; polls show the majority of Christian ministers do not even have faith — they have a career they cannot abandon. (Lectures 1, 2, 8)
Validity: Invalid as history and doctrine; partially valid as a warning. The building claim is accurate (house churches until the third century; the earliest known dedicated structure is Dura-Europos, c. 235–241), and the poor-relief claim is accurate as far as it goes (Acts 2:44–45; 4:34–35). But the no-compensation claim is contradicted by explicit apostolic teaching: “the labourer is worthy of his hire” — Christ’s own rule for those He sent (Luke 10:7); “even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14); “let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things” (Galatians 6:6); “let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine” (1 Timothy 5:17–18); Paul receiving Philippian support and calling it “a sacrifice acceptable, wellpleasing to God” (Philippians 4:18). Paul’s tentmaking was a waiver of the right at Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:12, 15) — and a waiver presupposes the right, which Paul expressly attributes to the Lord’s own ordinance. The apostolic practice was both/and — poor relief and ministerial support — not Snuffer’s either/or. The financial-stake motive claim attributes interior motives to entire professions, which is unverifiable in principle and contrary to the biblical caution against judging hearts (1 Corinthians 4:5); against it stands the documented fact that modern ecumenical rapprochement has been led almost entirely by salaried clergy. The majority-of-ministers-lack-faith claim is unsupported by any documented survey: real studies find substantial minorities of doubting clergy in particular liberal-Protestant and European bodies, but no polling sustains a majority claim across the world’s evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, and global-South ministry. The valid kernel — careerism and hireling ministry are real spiritual hazards (John 10:12–13), money exerts corrupting pressure on institutions, and unpaid ministry is a legitimate voluntary discipline in Paul’s own pattern — stands; the historical and statistical universals built on it do not.
8. The tithe has been redefined to fund institutions instead of the poor
The criticism. The true tithe is one-tenth of what remains after all of one’s needs are met, and gathered funds should go to the poor among the givers, not to institutional overhead. (Lecture 1)
Validity: Invalid as biblical definition; legitimate as a voluntary practice. No biblical text defines the tithe as a tenth of surplus. The Mosaic tithe is levied on gross increase at its source (Leviticus 27:30, 32; Deuteronomy 14:22), and the accompanying principle is firstfruits — the opposite of a remainder principle: “Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase” (Proverbs 3:9). The New Testament does not legislate the tithe for the church at all; its giving texts command purposeful, cheerful, proportionate generosity (2 Corinthians 9:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). The surplus definition derives from a Restoration-internal reading of Doctrine and Covenants 119:4. The critique of institutional spending that starves the poor is a fair prophetic challenge any church should hear (Isaiah 58; James 1:27); the redefinition offered in its place is neither the Mosaic tithe nor a New Testament ordinance.
9. Forty thousand denominations prove Christianity’s failure
The criticism. Christianity has fractured into some 40,000 denominations, division upon division, demonstrating that the Reformation’s fruit is chaos and that no existing body carries the original unity. (Lectures 1, 8)
Validity: Partially valid; the number misleads. The figure derives from the World Christian Encyclopedia, which counts organizational jurisdictions per country — a single communion operating in a hundred nations is counted dozens of times, and independent congregations are counted singly. Grouped by doctrinal family, the count collapses to a small number of traditions, most of which share the ecumenical creeds. As a count of distinct theologies, “40,000” is not accurate; as a count of organizations by country, it is defensible — and Snuffer deploys it in the former sense. The underlying criticism — that Christian division is real, scandalous, and contrary to Christ’s prayer “that they all may be one” (John 17:21) and Paul’s plea against party spirit (1 Corinthians 1:10–13) — is valid and should sting. But fragmentation as an argument for a new claimant proves too much: the Restoration movement itself fractured within Joseph Smith’s own generation and has continued fracturing since (the LDS, RLDS/Community of Christ, and dozens of successors — Snuffer’s own fellowship being a further division), so by its own logic the argument condemns the remedy it commends.
10. The Reformation never attempted to restore original Christianity
The criticism. The Reformers could not even imagine non-institutional Christianity; their aim was merely to reform a corrupt institution into something marginally better; a return to the original form “was not even attempted” before Joseph Smith in 1820. (Lectures 2, 3)
Validity: Invalid — falsified externally and internally. The Radical Reformation, beginning with the Swiss Brethren in Zurich in 1525, explicitly pursued restitutio — restoration of primitive Christianity — as its program: believers’ baptism, voluntary congregations, separation from the state, discipline on the New Testament model, and in the Hutterite case community of goods on the pattern of Acts 2 and 4. Sixteenth-century writers themselves distinguished reformatio from restitutio. Later movements (English Separatism, the Baptists, the nineteenth-century Restoration movements) likewise made primitive-church restoration their stated aim. One may argue those attempts failed; the claim that no attempt occurred before 1820 is historically false. The falsification is also internal to Snuffer’s own lectures: he approvingly quotes Menno Simons and names him “one of the Reformation fathers” — and Menno is precisely a leader of the Restitution wing whose defining program was recovery of the primitive church. The lecture cites, as a Reformation father, the standing counterexample to its own claim.
11. Institutional Christianity as such is Babylon
The criticism. Every institution, by reason of being institutional — subject to laws, taxes, rules — is part of the great conglomerate reaching back to Babylon’s head of gold; Christ’s work must now be done independent of institutional control. (Lecture 5)
Validity: Invalid as ontology; valid as prudence. The by-reason-of-being-institutional premise, applied consistently, condemns the apostolic assembly it appeals to: the New Testament church appointed elders in every church and city (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5), addressed offices (Philippians 1:1, “with the bishops and deacons”), legislated qualifications (1 Timothy 3), and issued binding trans-local decisions through a council (Acts 15:22–29, “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us”) — while subsisting under Roman law and taxation without the apostles treating legal existence as Babylonian contamination (“pay ye tribute also,” Romans 13:6). Justin Martyr’s description of second-century worship — cited by Snuffer for informal house meetings — itself attests a presiding officer, an ordered liturgy, a fixed day, and centralized handling of funds. The prudential kernel — institutions accrete worldly entanglements, and the entanglement warnings are real (2 Timothy 2:4) — is sound and historically well-documented. The universal ontological claim exceeds it, and it is self-referentially unstable: a movement with fellowships, tithing practices, conferences, a publishing program, and a scripture committee is an institution by any working definition.
12. Christians who demand their authority be respected are antichrist
The criticism. Christ came as a servant and invited rather than compelled; those who demand that their authority be respected are antichrist, opposing the glory of Christ’s example. (Lecture 2)
Validity: The content is half right; the label is misused. The servant-leadership teaching is soundly biblical (Matthew 20:25–28; John 13:13–15; 1 Peter 5:3), and Scripture condemns authority-demanding under its own heads (Diotrephes, “who loveth to have the preeminence,” 3 John 9; the chief seats of Matthew 23:6–12). But “antichrist” is defined by the only biblical writer who uses the term, and he defines it by christological denial — “he is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22; 4:3; 2 John 7) — not by the demanding of deference. The label substitutes a rhetorical for the biblical sense. The criticism also sits uneasily beside Snuffer’s own claim that his fellowship “can trace an authority to baptize” — a claimed exclusive ordinance authority being precisely the kind of claim the principle, as formulated, would submit to its own test.
13. Christianity lacks meditative and contemplative power; lost truths fled East
The criticism. Truths broken away from Christian awareness departed into the East and were retained by Hindus and Buddhists; Christianity lacks the meditative power found in those traditions; one cannot fully understand Jesus without putting on Eastern eyes. (Lecture 7)
Validity: Invalid as history; the milder counsel is unobjectionable. The dispersal chronology is untenable: Hinduism’s Vedic stratum (second millennium BC) and Buddhism (fifth century BC) predate Christianity and cannot have received anything that “left Christian awareness.” The deficiency claim is falsified by Christianity’s own contemplative libraries: the desert fathers, the hesychast tradition and the Philokalia, lectio divina, The Cloud of Unknowing, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, and the continuous Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer. A defensible statement — that much of Western Protestant practice has neglected its own contemplative inheritance — is a common and fair observation; “Christianity lacks it” is not. The narrower principle, that truth is to be owned wherever found, has genuine biblical footing (Paul quoting pagan poets, Acts 17:28; the law written on Gentile hearts, Romans 2:14–15) and a patristic pedigree (Justin’s logos spermatikos); as hermeneutical counsel it stands — on those texts, not on Ephesians 1:10, whose “gathering together in one all things in Christ” names the cosmos summed up under Christ’s headship by God’s act, not a comparative-religion recovery project.
14. The Christian who rejects the Book of Mormon is no more Christian than the Jews who crucified the Lord
The criticism. The Jews rejected Jesus because their religion did not adequately encompass the truth about Him; the Christian who refuses to take the Book of Mormon seriously is no different — preferring a false, partial tradition to a living Redeemer. (Lecture 6)
Validity: Invalid — the anathema inverts the Bible’s own tests. The parallel condemns the hearer only if the Book of Mormon is in fact God’s message — the very conclusion under commendation; the argument assumes what it must prove, and in this conditional form it is available to every claimant equally (identical anathemas are pronounced by rival movements over their own books; a test that condemns whoever declines any claimant is no test). More decisively, Scripture places the duty of testing on the hearer and the burden of proof on the new claimant — and commends the careful tester: the Bereans were “more noble” precisely because they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11); “prove all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21); “believe not every spirit” (1 John 4:1). The canonical anathema runs against the bringer of another gospel (Galatians 1:8–9), not against the cautious hearer. And the New Testament’s stated criteria of Christian standing are christological confession and its fruits (Romans 10:9; 1 John 4:2; 1 Corinthians 12:3) — nowhere the reception of any post-apostolic text. The comparison of a Berean-minded Christian to Christ’s crucifiers is without warrant on the Bible’s own canon of judgment.
PART TWO: CRITICISMS OF THE BIBLE — TEXT, CANON, AND TRANSMISSION
15. The New Testament text was corrupted by the winning party
The criticism. Second- and third-century doctrinal struggles altered the scriptures (per Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture); the voice at Christ’s baptism originally said “Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee” (Psalm 2:7) and was changed to defeat adoptionism — “the editors missed one” in Hebrews 5:5; the text deserves great skepticism. (Lectures 2, 6)
Validity: Invalid in its specifics; the general phenomenon is real but proves the opposite. Ehrman’s monograph is genuine, and theologically motivated scribal variants exist — that much is valid. The showcase example collapses under checking. The Psalm 2:7 baptismal variant exists in the manuscript tradition of Luke 3:22 only (a Western reading of Codex Bezae and some fathers); the majority of text critics and all standard critical editions judge the ordinary reading original. Lecture 6 escalates the claim to Matthew 3:17 — a variant existing in no known witness whatsoever — and cites the Hebrews quotation to “the seventh chapter of Proverbs,” a plain citation error for Psalm 2:7. The “editors missed one” mechanism presupposes a central editorial authority conducting a coordinated purge — contradicted by the wholly decentralized manuscript transmission of the period (thousands of copies, no recall authority), contradicted by the survival of the Bezae reading itself, and in tension with Snuffer’s own claim that early Christianity had no central control. Most tellingly, the allegedly suppressed proof-text was never suppressed: Psalm 2:7’s application to Christ stands openly at Acts 13:33, Hebrews 1:5, and Hebrews 5:5 in every Bible. And the deep logic runs against the skeptical conclusion: the variants are identifiable precisely because the abundant, geographically dispersed manuscript tradition preserves competing readings for comparison. The doctrinally significant variants are a small, catalogued set, none of which — on the testimony of the standard critical editions — removes or establishes any doctrine otherwise absent from the undisputed text. The Bible’s “muddled” abundance is not its weakness but its verification apparatus.
16. There was no New Testament in original Christianity; the canon came late, from a heretic’s idea
The criticism. Original Christianity used and cited only the Old Testament; the idea of compiling a New Testament originated with the second-century heretic Marcion; the canon was not settled until the fourth century, by which time many writings had been altered. (Lecture 2)
Validity: One accurate element; two inaccurate ones. Accurate: Marcion (c. 140) produced the first known fixed collection resembling a canon, and the formal settlement of the 27-book boundary belongs to the fourth century (Athanasius’s festal letter, 367; Hippo, 393; Carthage, 397). Inaccurate: that only the Old Testament was used or cited — the New Testament itself contradicts this, Peter classing Paul’s epistles with “the other scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15–16) and 1 Timothy 5:18 citing the saying of Luke 10:7 as “scripture”; and the sub-apostolic writers (Clement c. 96, Ignatius c. 107, Polycarp c. 110) quote gospel material and Pauline epistles as authoritative a generation before Marcion, with the four-gospel collection defended as settled by Irenaeus (c. 180). The accurate statement is that the canon’s boundary was settled late; the claim that the books were absent or unused in original Christianity is contradicted by the sources, including two canonical texts. The alteration element carries the finding of criticism 15. And the late-recognition datum cuts the other way from the use Snuffer makes of it: a canon recognized gradually by distributed, multi-generational usage across hundreds of independent congregations is a triangulated canon — the strongest kind — where a canon delivered whole by one angel to one man is a single unverifiable declaration.
17. Sola scriptura fails: Latin-only Bibles, damned illiterates, and Luther’s translation
The criticism. In 1517 the Bible existed in authorized form only in Latin; Luther translated it from Latin into German; if scripture alone defines the faith, fifteen centuries of illiterate Christians were incapable of salvation; the Bible was first translated into English only about 470 years ago. (Lectures 1, 2, 3)
Validity: Invalid on nearly every factual particular; the doctrine attacked is misdescribed. The Latin-only claim was true of England under the Constitutions of Oxford (1408) but false of Christendom: at least eighteen printed German Bible editions preceded Luther’s 1522 New Testament (from the Mentelin Bible, 1466), alongside printed Italian (1471), French, Dutch, and Czech (by 1488) Bibles, most circulating with ecclesiastical toleration. Luther translated not from Latin but from Erasmus’s Greek and the Hebrew — bypassing the Vulgate was the distinguishing mark of his work. Vernacular translation did not begin with Luther: Wycliffe’s complete English Bible circulated from 1382, and the “first English translation c. 1547” claim is wrong on its own terms (Wycliffe 1382; Tyndale 1526; Coverdale 1535; Great Bible 1539). The illiteracy inference misconstrues the doctrine: sola scriptura asserts that Scripture is the supreme norm of doctrine — no pope, council, or tradition may bind the conscience contrary to it — not that private literacy is a condition of salvation; the Reformers’ own practice (vernacular catechisms, preaching, liturgy) presupposed that the illiterate receive the word by hearing (Romans 10:17).
18. The Old Testament was corrupted by the Deuteronomists and rebuilt from ruins
The criticism. Pre-exilic reformers (“the Deuteronomists”) suppressed the older, richer religion; the books “discovered when the ruins of the temple were being rummaged through by Ezra” were used to rebuild a lost Old Testament, more Deuteronomist than the original; the prophet Zenos — preserved in the Book of Mormon — was deliberately excised because his Christology was too blunt to reform, while poetic Isaiah survived. (Lectures 4, 5, 6, invoking Margaret Barker)
Validity: Invalid in its narrative machinery; the scholarly category is real but contested. The Deuteronomist concept is genuine critical scholarship (Noth, 1943, and successors) — that much is fairly cited, and Margaret Barker is a real scholar whose temple-theology reconstruction exists. But her thesis is an influential, contested hypothesis, not a demonstration, and Snuffer presents it as settled. The discovered-book narrative is factually wrong on date, agent, and occasion: the finding of “the book of the law in the house of the LORD” during temple repairs belongs to Hilkiah in the eighteenth year of Josiah (2 Kings 22:8), c. 622 BC — before the exile, not during the post-exilic reconstruction, and not by Ezra; the lost-and-rebuilt-canon element conflates that account with the apocryphal legend of 2 Esdras 14 (Ezra re-dictating the scriptures by inspiration), which is a legend, not a datum. The canonical Ezra brings and reads the law (Nehemiah 8); he does not excavate it. The Zenos excision claim is unfalsifiable by construction: Zenos is attested nowhere outside the Book of Mormon — not at Qumran, not in the versions, the Apocrypha, Josephus, or rabbinic literature. Lost prophets are a real biblical category (Jasher, Nathan, Gad, Iddo are cited by canonical books), but those lost works left canonical citations as their trace; Zenos’s existence has no trace outside the record whose authenticity is the question. The supporting motive-history also fails: the corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53, alleged to have saved Isaiah from the editors, is characteristic of medieval Jewish exegesis (Rashi), postdating the alleged editorial moment by a millennium, while the principal ancient Jewish rendering (Targum Jonathan) applies the servant to Messiah.
19. The Bible is gapped: the Emmaus discourse was never recorded
The criticism. Luke, an otherwise exhaustive biographer, records “not one word” of what Christ said when He opened the scriptures on the Emmaus road — a glaring hole in the record, which the Book of Mormon’s account of Christ expounding all things to the Nephites supplies. (Lecture 6)
Validity: Invalid — the gap is stated smaller than claimed and filled within the New Testament itself. Luke twice states the exposition’s content in summary: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27) — corpus, method, and theme all given — and the repetition to the eleven states the thesis: “thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” (24:44–46). What is missing is the passage-by-passage detail, not “one word.” And the canon then supplies the detail: the apostolic preaching of Acts is the messianic exposition of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms — Peter on Psalms 16 and 110 (Acts 2), Philip on Isaiah 53 (Acts 8:32–35), Paul “opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered” (Acts 17:2–3, the same verb Luke uses at Emmaus), and the summary “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). By the canon’s own economy the Emmaus content is not lost; it is distributed. The proposed backfill, meanwhile, rests on the hermeneutical circle assessed at criticism 21.
20. The Bible’s transmission is inferior to the Book of Mormon’s
The criticism. The Bible came down through copies of copies, demonstrably altered; the Book of Mormon came through a singular guarded transmission, survives in its original and printer’s manuscripts, and its famous “changes” are punctuation and format; it is therefore, by an order of magnitude, the more faithfully preserved and reliable witness of Christ. (Lecture 6)
Validity: Invalid — the comparison equivocates between two different transmission segments. The Book of Mormon’s print-era data are accurately reported (roughly 28 percent of the original manuscript survives after the cornerstone water damage; the printer’s manuscript is essentially complete; the tabulated changes are overwhelmingly punctuation, grammar, and format — all per Royal Skousen’s critical-text scholarship). But that documented segment spans about 190 years, and it is compared against the Bible’s nineteen centuries of manuscript transmission — like is not compared with like. The segment of the Book of Mormon’s claimed transmission that corresponds to the Bible’s manuscript centuries — the thousand-year line of record-keepers, the abridgment, the plates, the translation — is precisely the segment with no surviving witnesses: the plates are not extant and the source texts cannot be collated. “Singular transmission” means, evidentially, a transmission that cannot be checked; the Bible’s abundance of witnesses across regions and centuries is the very property that makes verification (and Ehrman’s own discipline) possible. The argument converts unverifiability into evidence of fidelity — the inverse of the evidentiary situation. The accurate narrow statement — the Book of Mormon’s English printed text has an unusually short, well-documented history — is true and proves nothing about the disputed stage.
21. The latest scripture interprets all earlier scripture — so the Bible must be read through the Book of Mormon
The criticism. The first principle of hermeneutics (per Walter Martin himself) is that the old is interpreted in light of the new; the Book of Mormon, coming forth in 1830, is the latest; therefore the consistent Christian must interpret both Testaments by it. Its own prophecy answers the objector: “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible… wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word?” (Lecture 5)
Validity: Invalid — an equivocation and a circle. The principle as held by Martin and the tradition is canonical, not chronological: the New Testament interprets the Old because it is received as the inspired apostolic witness to the fulfillment — its lateness is incidental to its warrant. Made purely temporal, the principle proves far too much: the Qur’an, Swedenborg, and Science and Health would each in turn govern all that preceded them, the Book of Mormon included — a consequence Snuffer would not accept, which exposes the suppressed premise: that the Book of Mormon is inspired scripture of canonical standing. That is the conclusion the argument exists to establish; assuming it in the hermeneutical step is a petitio principii. The Bible’s own instruction runs the other direction — the later claimant is tested by the earlier deposit: “to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20); Galatians 1:8; Acts 17:11. And 2 Nephi 29’s rebuke answers the psychological objection (“we have enough”) while leaving the criterial question — how a claimant is tested — exactly where Scripture puts it: on conformity of content. God’s continuing speech is affirmed on all sides; every claimant to embody it is measured against the faith once delivered (Jude 3).
PART THREE: CRITICISMS OF REFORMATION AND HISTORIC DOCTRINE
22. “Grace alone” was not original Christianity
The criticism. Original Christianity required baptism for salvation; therefore the Lutheran principle of grace alone was not original Christianity. (Lecture 2)
Validity: Invalid — the doctrine attacked is misdescribed. The baptismal catena Snuffer cites is accurate and genuinely establishes baptism’s commanded place (Matthew 3:15; Romans 6:3–5; Galatians 3:27; 1 Peter 3:21). But sola gratia opposes salvation by human merit, not the necessity of baptism — and Luther taught baptismal regeneration emphatically (Small Catechism IV: baptism “works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation”); the Augsburg Confession, Article IX, states baptism is necessary to salvation, and the Lutherans condemned the Anabaptists on precisely that point. The argument refutes a position Lutheranism does not hold. (Two narrative slips travel with it: Saul was not “renamed Paul” at conversion — the double name appears years later, Acts 13:9 — and 1 Peter 3:21 carries its own qualifier, with Luke 23:43 recording salvation pronounced on the unbaptized thief.)
23. “Faith alone” was not original Christianity
The criticism. The original Christians believed in progressing in godliness (Romans 6; 2 Peter 1:4–10); therefore faith alone was not original Christianity. (Lecture 2)
Validity: Invalid for the same reason. Both passages are accurately quoted and genuinely teach that saving faith issues in transformed life. But sola fide concerns the ground of justification — the sinner accounted righteous through faith apart from the merit of works (Romans 3:28; 4:5; Ephesians 2:8–9) — not a denial of sanctification. The Lutheran confessions teach that faith necessarily produces good works and condemn antinomianism by name (Augsburg VI, XX); Luther’s preface to Romans calls faith “a living, busy, active, mighty thing” that cannot exist without works following. Snuffer’s proof-texts and the Reformers’ proof-texts are the same texts read the same way. The genuine historic dispute — whether works are the fruit of justification or part of its ground — is not the dispute the lecture describes.
24. The cross was not where Christ paid for our sins; the atonement occurred in Gethsemane
The criticism. Many men suffered scourging and crucifixion under Rome; Christ’s own reflection on His suffering (an 1829 revelation, D&C 19) mentions only Gethsemane; therefore “His death on the cross was not where He paid the price for our sins” — He suffered for sins in the garden and died on the cross merely as testimony. A companion vision describes the garden suffering as waves of torment — perpetrators’ pains and victims’ resentments in mirrored pairs — which so weakened Him that crucifixion could take His life. (Lecture 3)
Validity: Invalid — contradicted by the New Testament’s explicit and repeated statements. That Christ’s suffering included Gethsemane is biblically secure (Luke 22:44; Matthew 26:38; Hebrews 5:7). But the cross-exclusive conclusion is contradicted by the New Testament’s uniform location of sin-bearing in the death on the tree: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); “having made peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20); “nailing it to his cross” (Colossians 2:14); “being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13); “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10); “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3); “It is finished” spoken on the cross (John 19:30); Paul resolving to know “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” and glorying “in the cross” (1 Corinthians 2:2; Galatians 6:14). The many-died-similarly premise addresses only the physical mode of death; the cross’s atoning uniqueness lies in the identity and office of the One dying (2 Corinthians 5:21), not the intensity of the pain, so the premise never reaches the biblical claim. Even D&C 19 does not state that the suffering occurred only in Gethsemane — the exclusion is Snuffer’s inference from silence. The weakness-unto-death mechanism contradicts the stated voluntariness of Christ’s death: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18); and the victim-resentment-conquest framework predicates of the sinless One (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22) a resentment requiring conquest that Scripture nowhere attributes to Him — Luke 23:34 presents forgiveness as His disposition, not a hard-won acquisition. Notably, Snuffer’s own Lecture 4 contradicts Lecture 3, affirming that the death itself was “the actual sacrifice to which everything else pointed” — the series argues against itself, and the Lecture 4 formulation is the biblical one.
25. The cry of dereliction is universally misunderstood
The criticism. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” was not a lamentation; Christ was not forsaken; He was reciting the first line of Psalm 22, invoking the whole psalm of vindication as a declaration of purpose. (Lecture 3)
Validity: A defensible reading asserted with unwarranted exclusivity. The incipit interpretation — citing a psalm’s first line to invoke the whole — is a recognized, seriously defended reading, and Snuffer presents it competently; Psalm 22’s crucifixion correspondences are real and taken up by the evangelists themselves (22:7–8, 16, 18). But the traditional reading — a real dereliction borne by the sin-bearer (“he hath made him to be sin for us,” 2 Corinthians 5:21) — is likewise textually grounded and held across the classical commentators, compatible with John 16:32 as judicial forsakenness distinct from ontological abandonment. Both readings converge on the psalm’s triumphant ending. The criticism’s error is not its option but its verdict: “misunderstood… not a lamentation” delivered as settled fact, where the evidence compels no such exclusivity.
26. Salvation is based on Christ’s personal visitation, which the churches wrongly denounce
The criticism. “The testimony of Jesus” is His testimony to you — His personal manifestation confirming your salvation; this was once the expected, normal Christian experience; “Christian salvation is based upon the testimony of Jesus to you of your salvation”; the denominations now denounce the very experience that saves. (Lecture 7)
Validity: The promise is biblical; the basis-claim inverts the New Testament’s stated economy. That Christ manifests Himself to the faithful is affirmed as promise — “he that loveth me… I will love him, and will manifest myself to him… we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:21, 23) — and instanced (Stephen, Paul, John on Patmos); churches that categorically denounce all such experience are poorer for it, and the subjective reading of “the testimony of Jesus” in Revelation 19:10 is a live exegetical option. But the proposition that salvation is based upon a personal visitation stands against three explicit texts: the beatitude reserved precisely for faith without sight — “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29); Peter’s description of the normal Christian condition — “whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice,” receiving salvation in that unseeing believing (1 Peter 1:8–9); and the stated organ of assurance — “the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16; 1 John 5:13). The New Testament’s stated basis of salvation is grace through faith confessing the risen Lord (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 10:9); a christophany is a promise and possibility within that economy, not its basis. The doctrine makes the exceptional instance the criterial norm — and quietly disinherits the blessed multitude of John 20:29.
27. Christian judgment-theology is wrong: God evaluates by noblest aspiration
The criticism. Aspirations can be perfect while conduct is reprehensible; God takes into account the perfection of one’s hope and evaluates a person by their most noble aspirations. (Lecture 3)
Validity: Half of the biblical picture presented as the whole. Consistent elements: God regards the heart (1 Samuel 16:7); “if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath” (2 Corinthians 8:12); the Father’s compassion on frame and frailty (Psalm 103:13–14). But the uniform biblical statement is judgment “according to their works” (Revelation 20:12–13; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 2:6; Matthew 16:27), and Christ’s own warning targets precisely the substitution of profession and aspiration for doing: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord… but he that doeth the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21; James 1:22). As encouragement toward the ideal it is pastoral; as doctrine it states the merciful half and omits the half the texts state most often.
28. Sacrifice is the necessary condition of faith (against comfortable Christianity)
The criticism. It is the order of heaven that faith is proven by the sacrifice of what one holds dearest; the rich young ruler declined the proof and forfeited walking with Christ; comfortable, cost-free Christianity is not the faith. (Lectures 3, 8)
Validity: Substantially valid, with a doctrinal precision. The governing principle — faith demonstrated and perfected in sacrificial obedience — is biblically consistent (Hebrews 11:8, 17; James 2:21–22; Luke 14:33; Philippians 3:7–8), and the critique of cost-free Christianity is a needed word to every age. The stronger formulation — sacrifice as the necessary condition of faith, the order of heaven — is the signature doctrine of the sixth Lecture on Faith (1835), a Restoration source; the biblical texts support sacrifice as faith’s fruit and proof, which is adjacent to but not identical with the necessary-condition doctrine. This is among Snuffer’s most valid criticisms in spirit; its doctrinal machinery exceeds its texts.
PART FOUR: CRITICISMS OF CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY AND KINGDOM UNDERSTANDING
29. The kingdom was never established; Christianity is a step, not an end
The criticism. Christ did not establish Daniel’s stone kingdom; He left the image’s influences intact; “Thy kingdom come” petitions a future kingdom; the stone did not happen in Christ’s time and He knew it; Christianity is a way-station awaiting the real restitution. (Lecture 4)
Validity: Half right — the not-yet is secure; the denial of the already is contradicted by Daniel’s own prophecy. The future consummation is biblically certain, and Matthew 6:10 does look to an unrealized state. But Daniel 2:44 states that “in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” — locating the kingdom’s establishment within the era of the final (iron) kingdom, which on Snuffer’s own identification is Rome, the era of Christ’s advent. And the New Testament asserts the kingdom’s inaugurated presence in direct terms: “if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you” (Matthew 12:28); “the kingdom of God is within [among] you” (Luke 17:21); the Father “hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13); “a kingdom which cannot be moved” already received (Hebrews 12:28). The mainstream synthesis — inaugurated at the first advent, consummated at the second — accounts for both sets of texts; Snuffer’s either/or accounts for one set and contradicts the other, including the in-the-days-of-these-kings clause of the very prophecy his argument is built on.
30. Christians misread the “other sheep,” Zion, and the coming restitution
The criticism. The Jerusalem disciples wrongly supposed “other sheep” (John 10:16) meant the Gentiles; Christ meant scattered Israel, personally visited (per 3 Nephi 15–16). The prophecies name two capitals — Jerusalem and a New-World Zion with its own temple — which Christendom fails to see. Acts 3’s “times of restitution” has already begun through a sent messenger, dated even by the heavens (the age of Aquarius beginning c. the 1840s), and the churches are asleep to it. (Lectures 3, 4, 5)
Validity: Invalid on each exegetical point. Other sheep: the Johannine corpus supplies its own resolution — Christ would die “not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:51–52), and the apostolic writings present the one-fold consummation as the union of Jew and Gentile in “one new man… one body” (Ephesians 2:14–16), fulfilled in the Gentile ingathering of Acts 10–15; the Book of Mormon reading requires that fulfillment to be a misunderstanding, against texts it does not engage. Two capitals: the proof-text’s own Hebrew parallelism identifies the two names as one place — “out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3; Micah 4:2), with Zion expressly equated with the city of David (2 Samuel 5:7; Psalm 76:2); and the Bible’s New Jerusalem descends from God out of heaven (Revelation 3:12; 21:2) — it is not built by a religious body in advance; the built-in-America doctrine is Restoration scripture (Ether 13; D&C 57, 84) presented on biblical footing it does not have. The sun-never-sets rationale is a modern imperial idiom, not a prophetic datum. Restitution begun: Acts 3:19–21’s own syntax defeats the application — heaven must receive Christ “until the times of restitution of all things,” placing the sending of Christ at the restitution as His personal return, not before it through intermediaries. The star-clock: the precession astronomy is accurate, but the “gospel in the stars” thesis is a nineteenth-century speculative construct without ancient attestation; no ancient source calls a pole-star change “a new heaven”; constellation boundaries are modern conventions (formalized 1930), published Aquarius-onset estimates range across a millennium, and selecting the boundary that yields the 1840s — and thereby Joseph Smith — is a constructed alignment. Scripture itself forbids deriving religious guidance from the astral order (Deuteronomy 4:19; Isaiah 47:13–14). The valid substrate — that Christians should live awake to prophecy and expectant of Christ’s return — is common ground; the specific timetable and its beneficiary are not in the texts.
31. Christ’s milieu — and by extension the Christian inheritance — was already corrupted and truncated
The criticism. Second-temple Judaism was disconnected from pre-Babylonian religion, with hardly any connection to Abraham; the blood of Israel was gone; even Moses delivered a diminished second-choice religion after a greater one was refused; Christ came as a restorer of the more ancient original — a restoration still unfinished; Christianity inherited the truncation. (Lecture 4)
Validity: Partially valid; overstated at every load-bearing point, with Restoration sources supplying the distinctive machinery. Valid: the returned community was dominated by Judah, Benjamin, and Levi; the leadership of Christ’s day was corrupt by His own indictment (Matthew 23; Mark 7:6–13); and the law’s lesser, preparatory character is Paul’s own teaching (“the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,” Galatians 3:24; Hebrews 7:19; 10:1). Overstated: “hardly any connection to Abraham” — the period’s Judaism was saturated with Abraham (John 8:33; Matthew 3:9; Romans 4); “the blood of Israel is gone” — against Anna “of the tribe of Aser” (Luke 2:36), “our twelve tribes, instantly serving God” (Acts 26:7), and “the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” (James 1:1); the greater-religion-withdrawn-at-Sinai mechanism — against the plain statement that the second tablets bore “the words that were in the first tables” (Exodus 34:1; Deuteronomy 10:2, 4), the diminished-dispensation doctrine deriving from the Joseph Smith revision and D&C 84; and restorer-Abraham (recovering the first fathers’ religion) — attested in no biblical text (Joshua 24:2 runs the other way: the fathers “served other gods,” and Abraham was called out), its source being Abraham 1 in the Pearl of Great Price. Christ as restorer has a genuine Pauline foothold (the gospel “preached before unto Abraham,” Galatians 3:8) — but the New Testament equally insists on genuine newness (“a new covenant,” Hebrews 8:8–13; “new wine into new bottles”); the biblical category is fulfillment — continuity of promise with newness of administration (Matthew 5:17) — not antiquarian repetition.
32. God’s religion has never been fully restored; a new dispensation, new prophets, and new scripture are required
The criticism. The governing thesis of the whole series: the original faith was lost by degrees, never recovered by the Reformation, and awaits — indeed has begun to receive — restoration through Joseph Smith and his successors, with new scripture (the Book of Mormon and continuing revelation) as the ensign to which all Christians must rally. (All lectures; explicit in 2, 5, 8)
Validity: Invalid as demonstrated; the premises do not survive their own evidence. This is the conclusion into which every prior criticism feeds, and it inherits their defects. The universal-corruption premise fails against the preservation promises and its own counterexamples (criticisms 1, 4). The commission argument fails against the New Testament’s mediated sendings and content-tests (criticism 3). The corrupted-text and corrupted-canon premises fail on the manuscript evidence and the canon’s own history (criticisms 15–16, 18). The hermeneutical warrant for the new scripture is circular (criticism 21). The deferred-kingdom and begun-restitution readings are contradicted by their own proof-texts (criticisms 29–30). What remains, on the Bible’s terms, is exactly what remained at the beginning: God’s continuing speech and works are affirmed (Hebrews 1:1–2 names the Son as the culminating mode; the gifts continue, 1 Corinthians 12–14); and every claimant to canon-bearing authority is tested by conformity to the faith once delivered (Jude 3), under the anathema that binds even angels (Galatians 1:8), by hearers whom Scripture commends for testing (Acts 17:11). Evidence that God still acts is not evidence that any particular claimant speaks for Him; miracles continuing and canon continuing are separate claims, and the series persistently treats evidence for the first as evidence for the second.
PART FIVE: THE PATTERN OF THE WHOLE
Surveying the thirty-two criticisms together, four structural findings emerge.
First, the valid core is real, and it is Christianity’s own self-criticism. Where Snuffer is right, he is right in the company of the prophets, the Anabaptists, Wesley, Kierkegaard, and every honest churchman: churches drift toward money, property, and self-preservation; establishment corrupted much; the medieval church’s abuses were real and are acknowledged by Catholic historiography itself; denominational division is a scandal against John 17; careerist ministry is a spiritual hazard Christ Himself named (the hireling, John 10:12–13); cost-free Christianity is not the faith of Hebrews 11; the contemplative inheritance is neglected in much of the West; and Christ, not affiliation, is the criterion of authentic discipleship — the parables of the virgins, the wedding garment, and the Samaritan, which Snuffer expounds soundly and movingly. None of these valid criticisms is new, and none requires a new revelator; each is the Bible criticizing the church from within, which is the Bible doing what it has always done.
Second, the characteristic method is the inflation of a kernel into a universal. Real corruption becomes total corruption; a real minority of doubting clergy becomes “the majority of ministers”; a real jurisdictional count becomes 40,000 theologies; a real neglect of contemplation becomes “Christianity lacks it”; a real Luke-only textual variant becomes a purged Gospel record (and, by Lecture 6, a variant in Matthew that exists in no manuscript on earth); a flagged inference about the magi becomes “according to the New Testament record.” The inflation is not incidental — the universal is required, because only a total failure of the church licenses a wholly new commission. The kernel indicts; only the inflation unchurches.
Third, the load-bearing arguments repeatedly fail against their own proof-texts, and the series repeatedly contradicts itself. Daniel 2:44 establishes the kingdom “in the days of these kings” against the deferral thesis built on Daniel 2. Isaiah 2:3’s parallelism locates Zion in Jerusalem against the two-capitals reading built on Isaiah 2. Hebrews declares the modes of God’s speaking changed in the same breath that declares Christ unchanging. Exodus 34:1 puts the first words on the second tablets against the diminished-law doctrine. Galatians 2’s fellowship verses refute the apostolic-disunity thesis quoted from Galatians 2. And internally: Lecture 4 locates the atonement in the death that Lecture 3 relocated to the garden; the lecture claiming no Reformer sought restoration cites Menno Simons as a Reformation father; St. Francis receives angels inside the church declared wholly corrupt; and Lecture 8’s claim that Brigham Young invented plural marriage is unintelligible beside Lectures 1–2, which ground Joseph Smith’s death in the Nauvoo Expositor’s exposure of that very practice during Smith’s life. A case that must argue against its own citations and its own installments is announcing the verdict on itself.
Fourth, the distinctive doctrines ride on unidentified Restoration sources presented as biblical. Across the early lectures, Moses 8 was read as Genesis; 3 Nephi 11 was read three times as “the doctrine of Christ” without attribution; D&C 101 was presented as “what the Lord has said”; the Enoch city, the restorer-Abraham, the withdrawn greater law, the temple-blood foot-washing, primeval baptism, and the built New Jerusalem all entered as though on biblical footing while resting on Moses, Abraham, Ether, and the Doctrine and Covenants. To a biblically literate audience this is the decisive datum: the criticisms of Christianity presented as arising from the Bible in fact arise from the alternative canon the criticisms exist to commend — the conclusion smuggled into the premises. The later lectures attribute more honestly, which is recorded to their credit; the argumentative structure does not change.
Conclusion
The final tally, then, is not a blanket dismissal. Snuffer’s indictment contains true counts — counts the church should plead to and repent of, because her own Scriptures charge her with them. But every count that is true is a count the Bible itself brings, requiring no new prophet to bring it; and every count that would require a new prophet — total apostasy, lost authority, corrupted text, deferred kingdom, relocated atonement, new canon — fails on the evidence: inverted proof-texts, misdescribed doctrines, anachronistic history, contested theses presented as settled, unverifiable claims presented as fact, and arguments that condemn the apostolic church, the critic’s own movement, or the critic’s own earlier lectures when applied consistently. The Christian answer to the valid criticisms is the one Scripture always prescribes — “repent, and do the first works” (Revelation 2:5) — carried out within the church whose gates hell has not prevailed against. The Christian answer to the invalid ones is the Berean’s: search the scriptures daily, whether those things are so — and having searched these, record that they are not.
“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” — Isaiah 8:20
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:21
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38