What Beshears argues
Kyle Beshears reads 2 Nephi 25:23 as saying grace saves despite human effort. His objection comes from what follows. He argues that the combination of a law that cannot save, life in Christ through faith, and a law that serves until Christ arrives sounds like Pauline theology in the mouth of a man presented as living centuries before Paul. He takes that as evidence of nineteenth-century Protestant composition. The resemblance is in the 1830 printing. Beshears’s essay · 1830 Book of Mormon, p. 105
Where the passages agree and differ
In Galatians 2:19–21, Paul describes himself as dead to the law and living by faith in the Son of God. In 2 Nephi 25:25, Nephi says the law has become dead to his people and that they are made alive in Christ through faith. The subject of dead changes, but the passages share the same cluster of ideas. Galatians 2:19–21 · 2 Nephi 25:23–27
Galatians 3 presents the law as a guardian until Christ. Paul is writing after Christ’s coming and disputing pressure on Gentiles to live as Jews. Nephi speaks before that coming within the narrative. His people already trust in Christ and keep the law because God commands it until its fulfillment. Both give the law a purpose tied to Christ. Nephi uses that idea to explain why his community still observes it. Galatians 2:11–16 · Galatians 3:19–25 · 2 Nephi 25:24–27
What would date the teaching?
The law-and-grace distinction predates Protestantism. Augustine used Galatians 3 to explain how the law exposes the need for grace and how grace makes fulfillment possible. That puts this broad idea in pre-Reformation Christian theology. Augustine still wrote after Paul, so his argument gives us no evidence that Israelites held Nephi’s view before Christ. To identify a specifically nineteenth-century theology, look for a narrower feature that distinguishes it from Paul and his earlier readers. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, ch. 34
Latter-day Saints read Nephi as a prophet who learned about Christ by revelation. Jacob similarly says his people kept the law because it pointed them toward Christ. This explains the claim the Book of Mormon makes about itself. On that reading, the English rendering could use familiar biblical language for earlier ideas. The Church’s translation essay describes the production of the English text, but it does not identify the source of this particular wording. Without the underlying text to compare, the English resemblance leaves that question open. Jacob 4:4–6 · Book of Mormon Translation
The similarity gives a historical critic something specific to explain. Different contexts also leave room for deliberate adaptation, so they cannot rule out borrowing. The strongest response is to ask what evidence can distinguish a modern author adapting Paul’s argument from a modern English rendering using Paul-like language to express earlier ideas.