The timeline begins with “A.D. 00.” But there is no “A.D. 00.” The year after what we call “1 BC” was “AD 1.”<\/p>\n The next entry is “A.D. 32 Christ organizes his church.” The first problem with this is that three of the four gospels are completely silent about when Jesus organized his church. Only John presents what might be read as a ministry spanning the 30th to 33rd years of Jesus’ life, and even that is debatable. I realize that there is general consensus the the LDS Church that Jesus’ ministry went from his 30th to 33rd year, but it is worth pausing to realize that the actual evidence for this is very<\/em> slender. But, even if the 30-33 time span is completely correct, virtually no one thinks that, between the calculation of the calendar and the timing of Jesus’ birth, Jesus was actually 32 in AD 32. The arguments surrounding this issue are long and complicated and I’m not going to go into them here (go here<\/a> if you want more info). (Also, this is a picture of the Sermon on the Mount. Are they really suggesting that Jesus organized the church during the Sermon on the Mount?)\u00a0The next entry suffers from the same dating problems.<\/p>\n I’m going to cut to the chase and just point out that the label “the dark ages” is not something most historians look kindly upon, that the church and the empire were linked well before Constantine, that many people other than the reformers “change[d] the course of Christianity,” contrary to what your first grade teacher told you, the Pilgrims did not come here for “religious liberty” (I realize that that is part of our national origin myth, but they had all of the religious liberty that they wanted in the Netherlands, they were just ticked off that their kids were assimilating.), and I doubt you can spend five minutes thinking about Mormon history and still think that the Bill of Rights “secured” religious freedom. This infographic has all of the nuance, sophistication, and historical awareness that I would expect from an elementary school history poster that was ignored until the night before its due date.<\/p>\n What I find so disappointing about this infographic is that whoever wrote it and then pushed it out as an official church production picked a dozen fights where not a single one was necessary. It makes no difference whatsoever to the truth of the Restoration whether Jesus established his church in AD 28 or 32 or 39 or 46, and you could make (and LDS thinkers, and others, have made) reasonable arguments for several different dates. There is nothing to be gained by having an “official” church document come down on the side of AD 32. This is most emphatically not the hill we want to die on. It just becomes another stumbling block for the investigator who knows some history or the member who takes her first graduate-level history class.<\/p>\n I’m also going to quibble with the title a little: Are you saying that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and “Christianity” are two separate things? (How did that<\/em> ever get approved?)<\/p>\n I guess what makes me saddest about this infographic, though, is that its last line (“A.D. 1820 Joseph Smith is visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ”) is 100% true. Yet I doubt very many readers of the infographic will trust that statement, given how badly the creators botched virtually every other line.<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n On the other hand, we have this video:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mormonnewsroom.org\/media\/mormon-lds-church-timeline-christianity_Infographic.png\/orig\")
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