Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast. I'm your host,

Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. Recently, I released an episode that showed the best

way to defend the martyrdom argument for Christ's resurrection. I show that the

disciples willingness to suffer and even die for belief in Christ's resurrection

is evidence they were sincere. They weren't frauds who lied about the

resurrection. They may have hallucinated or been sincerely mistaken, but the

original witnesses of the resurrection were not frauds. I also talked in the

video about how skeptics will say that if Christians believe the apostles were

sincere, then they should also believe Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism,

was sincere because he also endured violence, suffering, and he died while in

custody of the authorities in a shootout at a local jail. At this point,

Mormons will jump in and say, see if you believe the apostles claims about the

resurrection, then why not believe the claims of the 11 witnesses of Joseph Smith and

the golden plates that he allegedly translated to tell the story that's in the

book of Mormon. Now, I briefly alluded in the episode that the cases aren't

parallel. Smith took risks, but he also stood to gain rewards from his behavior,

such as the dozens of spiritual wives he had, some of whom were only 14 years old,

or the power he attained as a Mormon leader. He even became mayor of a town in Illinois

and incited a riot that led to the destruction of a printing press that had

criticized Smith for things like his spiritual wives. This led to his arrest

and the shootout where Smith died in a Carthage jail in 1844. So I thought

...