Perhaps They Used a Time Machine
Back in November, I noted some inaccuracies in The Music Man:
Factual error: Professor Harold Hill asks the mothers of River City about their sons, "Is he starting to memorize jokes from 'Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?'" While the film is set in 1912, the first issue of the pulp magazine, "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang," did not appear until 1919. "Whiz Bang" was a term coined by soldiers in World War I (commencing in 1914), which referred to a rocket that "whizzed" by and exploded with a "bang."
That was November. This is March. As Jennifer has noted, it is the Ides of March. That's as good a time as any to comment on the Shakespeare play Julius Caesar:
Shakespeare’s Rome as seen in Julius Caesar is rife with anachronism: clocks strike, speakers resort to public pulpits (a Puritan innovation) and senators speak of such things as hats and sleeves common to Elizabethan fashion but unknown in the toga-wearing days of the first century BC.
Two examples from the Book of Mormon, as identified by Dr. Gleason Archer and published by Josh McDowell and Don Stewart:
Alma 46:15 indicates that believers were called "Christians" back in 73 B.C. rather than at Antioch, as Acts 11:26 informs us. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have been labeled Christian so many decades before Christ was even born.
Helaman 12:25,26, allegedly written in 6 B.C., quotes John 5:29 as a prior written source, introducing it by the words, "We read!'It is difficult to see how a quotation could be cited from a written source not composed until eight or nine decades after 6 B.C.
A page at the Brigham Young University website refers to the Alma verse:
There are some sobering parallels between our times and these earlier groups of "true believers" in Christ who were "faithful" members of the Church, including the Three Nephites, and who had "gladly" taken upon themselves the name of Christ (see Alma 46:15). They were persecuted by the disbelievers and irreligionists of their time, but they did not retaliate because of their commitment to Christ and because of their humility (see 4 Ne. 1:2937). Theirs, too, was a time of polarities, for there was a "great division among the people" (4 Ne. 1:35).
Another source says that the term was applied by outsiders, and that the same thing happened in the Old World:
Mormon tells us that those who did not belong to the church termed those who did “Christians.” Mormon is our narrator here, and he apparently understands “Christian” in a favorable light, because he has that word in Moroni’s mighty prayer. However, Mormon is aware that this term was originally an “outsider” name for the members of the church.” It is quite probable that the members of the church did not have a specific name for themselves, other than Nephite, since that term would, for most of Nephtie history, designate both the religion and the political allegiance of the person so designated. For those who were politically “Nephite” but religiously opposed, they would need a different term by which they could make a distinction that was probably not made internally. Thus “Christian” would be applied from the outside. It is quite certain that the original application of this designation was derogatory, for the outsiders were precisely those who denied the Christ, and contended against a belief in the atoning Messiah.
This is quite similar to the situation for the early members of the “church” in the Old World. We hear that these disciples of Christ are first called “Christian” in the city of Antioch (Acts 11:26). Antioch would have had a similar problem of differentiation. There were Jews in Antioch, and the first “Christians” were also Jews. The need to separate the types of Jewishness would have been more important to the outsider than the insider. Inside the group, we know who we are, and need not have unique names for ourselves when we are with others in the group. This is very similar to the phenomenon known from several pre-modern peoples where their self-name translates to “the people.” Specific modifiers are needed for other groups, and since we humans tend to think our own group is the best, out-group names not infrequently have pejorative connotations.
The notion that the appellation of Christian was intended to be pejorative in the Book of Mormon instance may be deduced from the care with which Mormon explains the adoption of the name by the members of the church. The very fact that Mormon must take time to explain the adoption of the name suggests that it was not necessarily intended to be complimentary in the beginning.
The same source notes that Heleman 12 cites scripture, but says nothing more about the matter.
To be fair, I should note that my own scriptures have also been questioned. Here's an example:
One such example is that of Acts 5, where Luke writes of the Pharisee Gamaliel's speech (vv. 34-39). This speech would have taken place around AD 35-40, yet it refers to Theudas' revolt of AD 46-47 as a past event. Furthermore, Gamaliel is made to say that "Judas the Galilean" raised a revolt which followed that of Theudas - but Judas' revolt was in AD 6 or 7! We know these dates from Josephus, most notably, as well as from other records.
Here's part of the response:
In ancient literature, it was not uncommon or dishonest to arrange material topically within the framework of an otherwise or even ostensibly chronological arrangement. Unless a particular timeline is critical to the text’s meaning (e.g., Jesus died before he rose from the grave), there is frequently no overwhelming reason to insist that a particular chronological marker in the Gospel text was actually intended to convey chronology. We do similar things in English, though we often don’t notice it (e.g., “then” and “next” may indicate either chronological or logical progression)....
The question of comparing biblical texts to extrabiblical texts is a bit more complicated. For one thing, we need to remember that the extrabiblical literature suffers from the same type of transmissional morphing we find in Scripture, but that, because it was generally not regarded as sacred, this morphing is likely to have been more pronounced. Second, authors of extrabiblical material could easily make errors in their original texts. Third, many such authors were motivated to be less than accurate with the historical record (Josephus comes readily to mind). Correspondence between extrabiblical sources does not necessarily establish their accuracy. They could have relied on a common ultimate source, or one could have relied on the other, or they may have been made to conform to one another for any number of reasons (e.g., politics, etc.).
In other words, why did the questioner assume that Josephus was right? Continued:
Gamaliel may well have been referring to a now unknown Theudas. His audience may have known the reference but we, separated by millennia, may have no extant record of the person or event. With this particular example, there is the added complexity that Gamaliel is quoted as having said this, but he is not affirmed as having been accurate in his historical data. If Gamaliel said this but was wrong in his chronology, it would not impugn the truth of the text.
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While you're at it, take a look at this post also.