Interview with Tom Hobson Part 1

Unprepared to engage Mormon missionaries when they knock on your door?

Perhaps the Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers and understanding what God is talking about. for the LDS for 43 years. I first met them on a youth group trip from St. Louis to Oregon, the same fateful trip on which I met my wife in Oregon. On the way there, I met the LDS in Ogden and then again in Salt Lake on the way back.

My heart went out to them. I had a burden from God. I began to feel like God was calling me, I thought, to serve as a Protestant pastor in Mormon territory somewhere. This was before I even went to seminary.

God never worked it out. God never opened the door for me to serve as a Protestant pastor. So I retired. The last thing I did was spending four years teaching Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Bible at a Christian college that was following the old Harvard classical model. And when it got done, my wife and I volunteered for two months to help start a Christian coffee house down in Mount Pleasant, Utah.

While I was there, I was blogging. And when I got done and came back, a pastor colleague of mine said, why don't you take your blogs and put them together into a book? And I was a little nervous about that, but it turns out that this must have been what God had in mind all along, why he put that burden on my heart for the LDS. Now, you say that you were pastoring. What state were you in at the time you were pastoring?

God has a sense of humor. He often sends me where the Mormons have given up and left town. So I was 15 years in Iowa, a couple years in Missouri, a couple years in Illinois. I'm in an Illinois suburb of St. Louis. Well, certainly those states have a lot of Mormon history, no doubt.

I mean, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Nauvoo, Illinois, and Missouri. I mean, this is kind of where there's still a lot of restoration movement churches that kind of attach themselves to that state as well. It's fascinating. God never did bring you out here, but yet you had this desire to reach the Mormon people. I'm always intrigued by that when someone doesn't live out west or maybe even around the state of Utah, and yet they still have a strong desire to want to reach the Mormon people. I think that's great.

Let me ask you this. Having written a few books myself, authors usually have a reason when they want a book to be written or a certain type of book to be written. What compelled you to write this book, and what audience do you hope to reach with it? Well, this book is a collection of everything I would want to say to a Latter-day Saint or anyone who wants to become a Latter-day Saint. I've tried my best to limit myself to facts that Temple, LDS, and I would both recognize to be true. I've tried my best not to trash Joseph Smith or to trash his claims, I've tried to be gentle, so much so that when my publisher first got the book, they almost dropped it because they thought it was pro-Mormon, and I had to convince them it was not before we could go on with the project. But basically, it's designed to be a book that is safe to give or loan to LDS people we care about. And the price is low enough to order in quantity, you know, to use as an evangelistic tool.

I hope to reach some LDS folks directly, but most of the time I realize it's probably going to be outreach through the hands of Christians who have a burden for LDS that they love. Where can a person find this book? I would direct people to the book website, and boy, the name is a godsend. HistoricalJoseph.org.

What are the chances that you would get that name before someone else did? HistoricalJoseph.org. On the home page, there are five links where the book can be ordered, including Utah Lighthouse, UTLM.

The lowest price to get it at is through the the company website. All HarperCollins, Christian, Zondervan, and Thomas Nelson books can be gotten through a site called ChurchSource.com. ChurchSource.com, and my book can be gotten there as well. Plus on the website, there is also a Mormonism blog where a whole lot of stuff that didn't go into the book is posted. The title, The Historical Jesus and the Historical Joseph Smith. Of course, a Latter-day Saint looking at that title might be puzzled, and they might say, well, what do you mean to tell us about Jesus?

Why the name of Jesus is in our church's name? Obviously, we know something about Jesus. So a Mormon might argue that they already believe in Jesus, so why address the subject of Jesus in your book? The answer is that as people arrive at the conclusion that Joseph Smith is not worthy of their trust, we have seen huge numbers of LDS who lose their faith in Joseph who end up throwing out Jesus also. So that's why strategically, from the very beginning, I set my mind to spend almost half the book establishing why is Jesus worthy of our trust before I gently change the subject to whether Joseph is worthy, and try to apply the same standards to both, the same methodology to both. In fact, I was teaching about the historical Jesus at my local church, and as I was doing so, I thought, man, someone had to do, apply these same criteria to Joseph Smith, and you know, what do we know for a fact about him? My approach in the book is that you don't have to have religious faith to use the Bible or even Mormon sources to find undeniable facts.

You have a subsection in chapter one, and it asks this question. It's how can we know the facts? What means should be used for us as well as Latter-day Saints when it comes to recognizing facts we should believe? And in that section, you list what is called, quoting, the criteria of authenticity.

Explain for our listeners the points that you include on page three of your book. The criteria of authenticity are not intended to be telling us what we can and can't believe about Jesus. They're simply the means by which we can identify those particular facts that are undeniable. You know, theology is theology, but facts on the ground, like what did Jesus do precisely?

What exactly did he say? There are some criteria to where even you don't have to have religious faith to know, yes, Jesus really said this, yes, he really did this. So the five criteria, and you know everyone's got a different list, but the list that I use has five on it. Number one, we look for multiple sources.

The more sources that document the item in question, the better, especially if they are independent and not carbon copying each other. Number two, do they tell us unflattering truth? You know, like Jesus chooses a traitor to be one of his top 12 followers, who would make that up? Number three, we look for information that makes Jesus stand out from his Jewish heritage and, if possible, also from the early church.

If he stands out from both of them, so much the better. Number four, we look for information that fits with what we've already accepted as true about Jesus. And then number five, information that explains why Jesus gets killed. For example, the fact that he goes around acting and talking like he's God, that'll do it. So if you have all five of those, man, usually this is what I call historical bedrock.

But if you don't have all five, that's okay. And you know, there are parts of our Gospels that I have to take on faith because they don't have this kind of evidence behind them, but because they come to us through Gospels that do have historical bedrock, then I say I'm willing to trust the Bible and I trust everything the Gospels say about Jesus because of the historical bedrock that I already am standing on. Now one of the sad things that I find in talking to ex-Mormons who have drifted off into agnosticism or even atheism is it seems like the claims that they usually all made while they were members of the LDS Church really mean nothing to them anymore, which makes me wonder, did they ever own those claims for the Jesus they claim to believe in? Now I know at this point we can argue that their view of Jesus certainly has some differences than what we would call the New Testament view of Jesus, but it seems like all of a sudden you're going to get rid of all religious faith just because you came to know that Mormonism wasn't true? Do you find that just to be as odd as I find it?

I find it believable. To me it's not the direction I would go, but then again I haven't walked in their shoes, I haven't lived the life they've lived. They seem to have trusted Joseph so much that if Joseph isn't true, Jesus can't be true would be how they appear to be thinking, and that's what I want to avoid. I want, if I'm going to be messing with their belief in Jesus, I'd rather back off about Joseph if there were really such a choice. Put it this way, I would rather them be on board with Jesus no matter where the the hunt for Joseph turns out.

I see what you're saying. I often bring up the fact that our associate Aaron Shafawaloff has a great question that he likes to ask Latter-day Saints in the course of a conversation, and that is, when you come to find out that the Mormon Church isn't true, are you going to abandon your faith in Jesus? And that usually puts the Mormon on the spot, because at this point in their life they would never think they would do something like that. But yet we have certainly found through experience that that does happen too often, that if Joseph Smith didn't prove to be the true prophet that they assumed that he was, then obviously the Jesus he talked about can't be the one that they were always led to believe he was.

And you can just see how the dominoes start falling at that point, which is just so tragic. That's why I start with Jesus first. I have found that sometimes talking about Joseph Smith and going after his credibility or lack of credibility can sometimes hinder the conversation because of the loyalty that so many Latter-day Saints have for him. That's why I try and be as gentle as I can when we finally get around to Joseph. I must also say at least about Jesus, I'm not trying to prove the Christian Jesus versus the Mormon Jesus, I'm just trying to establish that Jesus, whoever he is, is the biblical Jesus is worthy of our trust. And I think that's a good strategy because, as I mentioned earlier, certainly there are going to be differences in their view of Jesus, but let's save that for another conversation.

Let's kind of move into that conversation. Well Tom, tomorrow we're going to continue looking at what you have in your book. It's titled The Historical Jesus and the Historical Joseph Smith.

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