A common argument between Christians and LDSs is over the topic of modern-day prophets and continuing revelation. What many Christians will say is something like, “Jesus was the greatest and last prophet, so we shouldn’t think that there are prophets in our day.” Sometimes it may be more along the lines of, “Jesus said that John the Baptist was the last prophet, so we shouldn’t think that there are still prophets in our day.”

If you’re a Christian who makes this argument, stop it. The conclusion that there are no modern-day prophets and no continuing revelation may be true, but this is a bad argument, and one that LDSs can easily dismantle. Quite simply, even after Jesus’s death, there are people who are called prophets. For one thing, we would generally agree that those who received revelation from God so as to produce the New Testament can be considered “prophets”. Would we really want to say that the Twelve Apostles were not prophets? For another, the NT identifies several people as prophets (Acts 13:1, Acts 15:32, Acts 21:10, Acts 21:19, 1 Cor. 12:28, 1 Cor. 14, etc.), and while we might say that some of these people could simply be what we call “preachers” today (if we take the idea of “prophesying” as being mostly “proclaiming” or “setting forth God’s Word”), some of these clearly were performing miracles and were accurately predicting the future and/or were receiving revelation from God as to how to understand or react to a situation, so would qualify as “prophets” like what most people think of when using the term (somebody like Moses or Elijah).

Even with all the above being true, and the NT giving many examples of there being people we would call “prophets” in the first century, it does not follow that that means that there will be prophets still in our day. Further, there is a statement from Jesus Himself that seems to indicate that the prophets will cease in the first century:

I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

(Matt 23:34–36)

“This generation” was talking to the Jews living in that day. Jesus said, just days before His crucifixion, that they would be sent prophets, so this obviously could be added to the list above, of NT passages that give a basis for thinking there can be and even must be prophets after Jesus’s death. However, Jesus also says that these prophets will be persecuted and even killed by the Jews of that day, with judgment coming down on them in A.D. 70, with the destruction of Jerusalem.

We have every reason in the world to accept that there were prophets that continued after Jesus’s death, but little Biblical reason to think that the prophets continued after the end of the first century. Finally, even if someone might argue that prophets continued after that time, and/or that prophets still exist in our day, it does not follow that Joseph Smith was one of those prophets, much less that the current LDS president is a true prophet. We can still apply the Biblical tests of a true vs a false prophet, and when we do that, we see that JS fails the test, and since the claimed Mormon prophets since him have all attested that he is a true prophet, that in itself is evidence that they themselves have no discernment and thus are likewise not true prophets.

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