The Book of Mormon continues to slice a deep divide between the people who treasure it and the people who can’t believe any smart human would fall for such a persistent hoax.

Add in church members who learned the book’s stories as children, but later stumbled across challenges to its claims.

Tad Callister addresses the doubters in his book, The Case for the Book of Mormon. Church members may remember his face framed by the conference-center pulpit and its background foliage. But we’re dealing with Callister’s pre-GA self — he was a lawyer — as he lays out his case here.

I like to imagine him working late into the night in his wood-paneled office, or gesturing towards Exhibit A as he faces the jury. I once heard him say, on a podcast, that this book germinated in him for years, so I’ll just add that I can also see him laying awake on his pillow, thinking and re-thinking his bullet points as he waits for sleep to overtake him, telling himself that he really needs to write the whole thing down, just pull out the legal pad and jot a few nnnoottee . . . sssss . . . ZZZZZ.

By now, we know he finally got around to it. Judging from his Table of Contents, those legal pad jottings included:

— Critics’ Arguments and Responses to Them
— Additional Evidences
— Gaining a Personal Testimony of the Book of Mormon

And more. You see there how he made the leap from lawyer back to General Authority.

The cast of characters here include names familiar to church members, like Sidney Rigdon and about half-dozen Whitmers; excommunicated and aggrieved members; widows hanging on to the late husbands’ manuscripts; presidents of neighboring colleges, all of either accusing Joseph Smith of fraud or dispassionately examining the evidence.

He looks closely at the Three Witnesses, and the multiple times they were pulled aside, interviewed by the curious and the scholarly and asked, You really sticking by your story?

Using his powers of reason in the lawyerly chapters, Callister then reminds readers that reason can only take you so far. Don’t dismiss impression, intuition, inspiration.

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