The Book of Mormon and the Birth of Jesus Christ

How important that we each receive a personal testimony of the Divine origin of the Book of Mormon! Without that spiritual witness, we might be deceived by shallow criticisms. The following is taken from one of my pages of “Book of Mormon Examined.”

Christ in the Book of Mormon (and where he was born)

Why does it refer to the birth of Christ at Jerusalem?

“And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.” (Alma 7:10)

. . . Those were the words of the prophet Alma, as he taught the Nephites, in about 83 B.C., on the American continent. Those people had been separated from their homeland in Israel for five centuries, surely ignorant of geographic details like the names of smaller towns around Jerusalem. They were thousands of miles away.

We could compare their situation to ours, should we travel across the world and visit people who knew nothing about small towns in our homeland. Why would we use the name of a small town to tell them about where we came from, if there is a large city near that town and the foreigners we were talking with knew of that large city?

So why does that verse in Alma mention “Jerusalem” as the place where Jesus would be born? The Nephites probably had almost no knowledge of the smaller towns around Jerusalem, for they had been separated from that city for centuries and for thousands of miles. They knew the name “Jerusalem,” which is relatively close to Bethlehem, so that is the location-name used. How simple!