As a Mormon, I believe that he did reveal himself to prophets on the American continent.
Fair enough.
I'm aware of Joseph Smith. Were there others? I don't know much more than the average joe when it comes to Mormonism. Is Brigham Young also considered a prophet?
I wasn't actually thinking of Joseph Smith, nor any of his successors, when I wrote my previous response. But yes, we consider Joseph Smith to have been a prophet, and Brigham Young, along with a line of others who have followed him, up to Thomas S. Monson who fills that role today.
The Book of Mormon, we believe, is primarily a record of a group of people who, led by a prophet, left Jerusalem around 600 BC, and traveled to the American continent; and of their descendants over the next thousand years; and that God spoke to these people through prophets. It was to those prophets,and the record preserved in the Book of Mormon, that I was referring.
And I do not accept it as a given that he didn't reveal himself to prophets in other parts of the world as well. Just because we do not have records of such revelations doesn't mean they didn't happen, or that the accounts of these revelations, passed along for many generations by word of mouth, didn't become so distorted along the way as to be no longer recognizable now.
That is likely. However, I believe most Christians would say they do believe such a scenario occurred.
I think you intended there to be a “not” in there somewhere in that last sentence.
I don't think there's anything in the official doctrines of my religion that say anything about whether there may have been other prophets, in other lands, than the ones of which we know. But it sounds like you agree with my own personal belief, that it is very likely that God spoke through prophets in other places, and that the teachings of those prophets are either lost to us now, or else distorted beyond recognition. We would certainly know nothing of the prophets mentioned in the Book of Mormon, if those records had not been preserved as they were, and brought forth by Joseph Smith.
Perhaps other records exist, buried and undiscovered, in parts of the world where it is widely assumed that God never revealed himself throuigh prophets, and which,if discovered and translated, would prove otherwise.
I suspect that Mohammed may have been a genuine prophet, and that his teachings now differ so badly from what I would recognize as truth only because of many generations of being handed down by word of mouth, and distorted in the manner inherent to this method, before they were finally written down. I suspect that anywhere any monotheistic religion is found in the world, that appears to be unconnected to the Abrahamic religions, that a genuine prophet may have been involved at the beginning, whose teachings have been badly distorted by the time we received any record of them.
