Landmark Baptists

A person I've talked to for years finally made known that he is a Landmark Baptist, which explains his hatred of infant baptism, Calvinism, Catholicism, the Reformation and being called a Protestant. Part of his "proof" of the Landmark Baptists ancient existence is piggy backing on the Waldensian movement, something Ellen G White did also. His source was a Landmark Baptist writer named David Cloud. Since his books are hard to find, I found his webpage, where in talks in part about the Waldensians and his "scholarly" research around Europe. Some of the hilarity of it is that 1)he could not communicate with the people he talked to that were Waldensians since he did not speak French or Italian, 2)he claims that the Waldensians have screwed up their own church history by claiming to be started by Peter Waldo, instead of going back to the times of the Apostles. Since the later claim was is incompatible with this absurd Baptist theological movement, it MUST be false (in his mind.)

Going back to the original Landmark Baptist I mention, he claims the Catholic Church "created" a rival Waldensian church. Whether he meant this in terms of fabricated in writing, or literally created a new church, does not really seem relevant since his own source David Cloud does not even believe this, since he goes to Waldensian communities believing them to be actual Waldensians, though they've become very liberal.

Furthermore, this person claimed the people of Piedmont had the Syriac bible in the middle ages, a claim for which evidence is lacking, to which he would probably say "because Catholics and Protestants destroyed it" to which I would say "then how can you claim it exist if there is no evidence at all?" (BTW, there were some Medieval books in Syriac and Hebrew in the Middle Ages--around the 10th, 11th, 12th century of parts of the New Testament, but they were done so by people of Jewish origin, either as a polemic against Christianity, or because they converted to Christianity). This claim of a Syriac Bible sounds similar to Joseph Smith's "golden plates" which do not exist, and was only "seen" by his friends. For the sake of argument I said, ok let's say the people of Piedmont did have the Syriac Bible, could the people of this region of Northwest Italy-France read it at all? Knowing the answer was almost certainly not, he responded they would memorize the Bible-- massive sections of it. This answer was hardly even related to the my question. Let's say they did memorize it, did they have translations of the Syriac? If so, in what language, and who made, when was it made, where is the manuscript? The claim about memorizing the Bible is absurd, its too big to be memorized, the only people capable of such a feat have a photographic memory which is very rare, and would not be expected of many people. It's also interesting the Jews tell similar tall tales of Bible memorization abilities by their sages. In any case, if the Bible's preservation was based on people memorizing it, then there is no hope since it would be relying on something worse than pen and paper, but people's recollection which is no where near as permanent as paper.

The Landmark Baptist movement makes 10000 of claim with little to no evidence, other than OTHER Landmark "scholars"--which themselves use little to no evidence, and blame this lack of evidence of their enemies--a common tactic in religious circles and conspiracy theorists in general.