Where are the Apostles today?

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I seem to have been inundated with Mormon apologists on Twitter recently and one thing I’ve seen them often ask is “Where are the Apostles today?”

I always answer “In Heaven, praying for us!”

The Argument

The argument the Mormon Apologist is trying to make is that the modern Church doesn’t have Apostles, but the LDS Church does because Jesus came to Joseph Smith and restored the Church, including the office of Apostle.

The Problem

There’s a line of argumentation which I don’t see other people using in response to this:

  1. James the Great was martyred in AD 44, yet he wasn’t replaced.
  2. Years later the Apostles gathered for the Council of Jerusalem, yet James wasn’t replaced.
  3. The Apostles then die one-by-one, with the John departing in AD ~100, yet James still wasn’t replaced!

If the Mormon narrative is true, the Apostles have FIFTY years to ordain new Apostles and thereby prevent their authority from being lost from the earth… yet not a single one of them thought to do it…. Why?! Why didn’t one of their disciples like Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp point out the disastrous state in which the Apostles were going to leave the world?

Jesus prayed like a Muslim?

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And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying,
“My FATHER…”
– Matthew 26:39

Are Muslims *really* allowed to pray like this?

“There is NONE in the heavens and the earth but that he comes to the Most Merciful as a SLAVE…”
Qur’an 19:93–95

Jesus also prayed looking towards Heaven:

“When Jesus had spoken these words, HE LIFTED UP HIS EYES TO HEAVEN and said, ‘FATHER, the hour has come; glorify YOUR SON that the Son may glorify you.’”

The Book of Abraham

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I’ve just had a few short exchanges with Mormons on Twitter and was asked about how I view Mormonism. Personally, I find even the Mormon sources themselves a source of incredulity as well as the complete absence of archeological evidence for its claims. However, the real issue for me is the Book of Abraham. How can one look into this and still conclude that Joseph Smith was a prophet?

What about Ibn Abbas on the distortion of the scriptures?

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There’s a quotation from Ibn Abbas I’ve seen passed around in an attempt to say that he thought the Torah and the Injil were corrupted. However, the tafsir for 3:78 which speaks about by Ibn Kathir says the following:

Al-Bukhari reported that Ibn `Abbas said that the Ayah means they alter and add although none among Allah’s creation can remove the Words of Allah from His Books, they alter and distort their apparent meanings. Wahb bin Munabbih said, “The Tawrah and the Injil remain as Allah revealed them, and no letter in them was removed. However, the people misguide others by addition and false interpretation, relying on books that they wrote themselves.

Perfect Preservation

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There’s a question I ask whenever I meet a Muslim who claims that the Qur’an has been perfectly preserved by Allah…

If the Qur’an was always perfectly preserved, then why were perfectly preserved Qur’ans burned?

If the Qur’an had been perfectly memorized, why does the hadith describe its compilation as it does? If the Qur’an was already committed to memory then the production of a manuscript would have been the easiest thing in the world – just assemble a few who had memorized it, put them in separate houses with a scribe for a few days. Then just confirm that the texts are identical and the job is done! But this isn’t what we see in the hadith… we see the hunting for scraps, collections with a different number of chapters, memories of missing chapters, …

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