Click here for the reading schedule for 2024 to see today’s reading, with links to the text. To see my past posts on today’s reading or anything else, see the right-hand margin or click here.

In Alma 18, v22 says in part, “Now Ammon being wise, yet harmless….” Are we just supposed to believe it is a coincidence that this mirrors Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 10:16, “…be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves“? How did Alma (or Mormon or whoever we’re supposed to believe wrote this part of the BOM) manage to reference a saying by Jesus over a hundred years before He ever said it, and to apply it to Ammon?

Similarly, in v32, Ammon says of God, “he aknows all the thoughts and bintents of the heart“, which of course is the same as Hebrews 4:12, which says, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

There’s no OT saying (or proverb or anything) that Mormons can point to as a common reference point, to try to say that “this wasn’t Alma quoting the yet-future teaching of Jesus / the yet-future letter to the Hebrews, but rather that Alma and Jesus / the writer of Hebrews were both referencing the same part of the OT”. Some of the similarities between the BOM and the NT could be dismissed or minimized like that, but not these.

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