Mormonism and the historical case for Christianity

I should make some clarifications about what I mean when I say that the New Testament has a substantial amount of historical verification that the Book of Mormon lacks. I do not mean to say that it isn’t logically possible that there should have been all those things happening in the Americas for which all of the circumstantial evidence is somehow lost. (Though the DNA disconnect between Jews and Native Americans is a problem I haven’t even discussed). It is also perfectly possible that in spite of the evidence that the authors of the NT were familiar with the details of governments in certain cities and had detailed knowledge of first-century sailing ships from that area, nevertheless the miracles they reported did not take place and that Christianity is false.

It isn’t just that the NT mentions places like Corinth and Malta. It’s the fact that archaeological evidence shows that Luke had detailed knowledge of exactly what kind of governmental systems each of these places had. And these places changed their governmental systems as time went on. This is pretty strong evidence to me that Luke was in pretty close contact with the major parties involved in the missionary journeys. Who would know, for example, the Maltese were headed up by a “First Man.” That is the point of the F. F. Bruce quotation quoted by Riss:

One of the most remarkable tokens of his accuracy is his sure familiarity with the proper titles of all the notable persons who are mentioned in his pages. This was by no means such an easy feat in his days as it is in ours, when it is so simple to consult convenient books of reference. The accuracy of Luke's use of the various titles in the Roman Empire has been compared to the easy and confident way in which an Oxford man in ordinary conversation will refer to the Heads of Oxford colleges by their proper titles--the Provost of Oriel, the Master of Balliol, the Rector of Exeter, the President of Magdalen, and so on. A non-Oxonian like the present writer never feels quite at home with the multiplicity of these Oxford titles. But Luke had a further difficulty in that the titles sometimes did not remain the same for any great length of time; a province might pass from senatorial government to administration by a direct representative of the emperor, and would then be governed no longer by a proconsul but by an imperial legate (legatus pro proetore).

Now, this kind of correct detail is of course compatible with nothing out of the ordinary happening, but it does undermine the idea that the Book of Acts is the product of extensive legendary development, which is what you would expect if the whole thing were made up. For this reason a late date for Acts seems out of the question. We are left wondering, if Christianity is not true and none of these things really happened, then what did? And none of the extant theories (theft theory, hallucination theory, wrong tomb theory, evil twin theory, etc.) is satisfactory enough even for all the skeptics to agree on what might have happened, much less to persuade believers. Now it may be rational for some persons to maintain their skepticism about these accounts based on some version of the Humean principle (something like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence).

With the Book of Mormon, I seem to come pretty easily to the conclusion that the whold darn thing was made up, not even that it was something built on a factual foundation but embellished. There is a positive historical case to me made here, even if that case is overcome, in some minds, by a stronger reason to reject it.