In the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith’s New World prophets routinely predict future events with striking specificity. Their enlightenment level seems conspicuously heightened compared to their biblical counterparts. A clear example is King Benjamin’s sermon in Mosiah 3, which delivers near-perfect details about Jesus Christ — including his name, his mother Mary, his ministry, his suffering, and even his atoning blood. Nor is Benjamin alone; earlier Nephite prophets such as Nephi, Jacob, and Abinadi all provide remarkably detailed previews of Christ’s mortal mission.

By contrast, the Old-World prophets of the Hebrew Bible rarely receive or transmit such precision. Isaiah, often heralded as the “Messianic prophet,” speaks in poetic types and shadows rather than names and dates. The Hebrew Bible contains no direct reference to Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, or baptism by name. At best, interpreters point to veiled prophecies later retrofitted by Christians (e.g., Isaiah 7:14’s “young woman/virgin,” or Malachi’s “messenger” later applied to John the Baptist).

This raises a critical question: why would God, if consistent, grant detailed foresight to Nephite prophets in 124 B.C. (and earlier), while withholding the same clarity from Old World prophets whose words would shape Jewish expectation and Christian apologetics for centuries? Would it not have been immeasurably helpful for ancient Israel to hear the revealed name “Jesus Christ” centuries before Bethlehem? Such knowledge might have altered the trajectory of Jewish reception and the entire course of Middle Eastern history.

The more plausible explanation is not divine strategy but Joseph Smith’s authorship. A young man in upstate New York, well-versed in Sunday sermons and popular Protestant preaching, would find it easy to back-project the details of Jesus’s life into the mouths of supposed pre-Christian prophets. The Book of Mormon’s foreknowledge looks less like authentic prophecy and more like an anachronistic insertion of 19th-century Christian vocabulary into an ancient setting — a sanctimonious youth predicting with uncanny accuracy only because he already knew the story.