Archaeology and the Book of Mormon

[Samof94]

How do Mormons explain the fact the archaeological records doesn’t resemble their ideas of what Joseph Smith said?

[vitoNova]

They just wanted to bang multiple wives.

And created a cult religion out of thin air to justify it.

So the minute details are irrelevant.  

Fun factoid of the day:  I actually attended a Mormon mass at Fort Leonard Wood, Misery one time.  It was wild.   As someone who grew up Catholic, I was surprised how "laid back" it was.  It was just random people selected from the audience going up to the podium and talking.

I expected a preacher man delivering fire and brimstone.  That was not the case.    

[Хahar 🤔]

While the Book of Mormon was during Joseph Smith's lifetime generally considered to be a history of the Indians (whether real or fanciful) and sometimes marketed as such, it is worth noting that at no point does the Book of Mormon itself make this claim. While the book draws from an existing tradition that held that the Indians were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, it does not itself equate its Lamanites with any latter-day ethnic group. Consequently, while nineteenth-century Mormons may have believed that all Indians were heirs of the Lamanites, the untenability of that position has led to a shift in educated Mormon belief.

It is now held that the Lamanites were but one progenitor of some modern-day Native Americans, and that the events of the Book of Mormon, rather than taking place on the scale of a whole continent, were confined to a small portion of the Americas, perhaps in Central America. This is what is known as the limited geography model.

It is worth recalling also that the Book of Mormon purports to be a translation from the original Reformed Egyptian into the English of the King James Version, since that language would have been most comprehensible to readers of the 1830s. Seeming anachronisms like the presence of horses or steel can be explained as translation conventions. Thus, a reference to the horses of the Nephites does not necessarily mean that they domesticated Equus caballus, but merely that they used an animal in the same role as that which nineteenth-century Americans assigned their horses.

Much of the work in Book of Mormon apologetics in the later part of the twentieth century was carried out under the auspices of the FARMS organization at Brigham Young University. Generally speaking, the purpose of Book of Mormon apologetics is not to present the book as a work of history, but merely to place its narrative in the realm of what may be believed as an act of faith. That this work has mostly been carried out in the last half-century is not just because of the influence of modern archaeology, but also because of the increasing importance of the Book of Mormon within Mormon culture. For the first century or more of Mormonism, Mormons valued the Book of Mormon primarily because it served as proof of Joseph Smith's prophethood rather than for its contents. Their religious vocabulary continued to be construed in Biblical terms. Mormon emphasis on the Book of Mormon is a relatively recent phenomenon, perhaps having to do with the general decline in Biblical literacy among non-Mormons. The Book of Mormon now serves just as well for evangelistic purposes as the Bible to an audience that is familiar with neither.

[LabourJersey]

For the first century or more of Mormonism, Mormons valued the Book of Mormon primarily because it served as proof of Joseph Smith's prophethood rather than for its contents. Their religious vocabulary continued to be construed in Biblical terms. Mormon emphasis on the Book of Mormon is a relatively recent phenomenon, perhaps having to do with the general decline in Biblical literacy among non-Mormons. The Book of Mormon now serves just as well for evangelistic purposes as the Bible to an audience that is familiar with neither.

Can I please have a citation on this? I'm not refuting this, but I've read histories regarding Mormons and religions and everything I've gathered pretty clearly says that Mormons viewed the Book of Mormon as equal to the Bible in importance. And many viewed that the book of Joseph Smith's revelations "Doctrine and Covenants" was also nearly as important. I find it really difficult to believe the primacy of the Book of Mormon is somewhat recent (especially since Mormonism was founded pretty recently!)

[Хahar 🤔]

For the first century or more of Mormonism, Mormons valued the Book of Mormon primarily because it served as proof of Joseph Smith's prophethood rather than for its contents. Their religious vocabulary continued to be construed in Biblical terms. Mormon emphasis on the Book of Mormon is a relatively recent phenomenon, perhaps having to do with the general decline in Biblical literacy among non-Mormons. The Book of Mormon now serves just as well for evangelistic purposes as the Bible to an audience that is familiar with neither.

Can I please have a citation on this? I'm not refuting this, but I've read histories regarding Mormons and religions and everything I've gathered pretty clearly says that Mormons viewed the Book of Mormon as equal to the Bible in importance. And many viewed that the book of Joseph Smith's revelations "Doctrine and Covenants" was also nearly as important. I find it really difficult to believe the primacy of the Book of Mormon is somewhat recent (especially since Mormonism was founded pretty recently!)

Absolutely! Here are some selections from the eighth chapter of The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction by Terryl Givens, which deals primarily with this subject:

If the Book of Mormon is a verifiably true revelation from God, the logic runs, then Joseph Smith, its translator and promulgator, must be God's appointed prophet. If that is the case, it justifies Smith's claim to have the authority to restore the priesthood and the church described in the New Testament but subsequently lost through apostasy. Within the Mormon faith, then, the Book of Mormon has operated upon the souls of its adherents primarily by virtue of its status as a sign, an indicator, a signifier rather than the signified. In this capacity as a pointer to meaning outside itself, the Book of Mormon is one of a panoply of heavenly portents that signaled the commencement of a new Christian dispensation.

A mere two years after the Book of Mormon's publication, Smith delivered a stinging revelation describing the church as "under condemnation" for treating lightly that "new covenant," i.e., the Book of Mormon. If the church began to adopt a more appreciative attitude toward its special scripture, there is little in the historical record to confirm it.

Yet when the Illinois Latter-day Saints find themselves surrounded with spiritual wickedness and threatened with physical destruction, follow their prophet on a lengthy exodus, at the end of which they discover a promised land, wherein they will soon rear temples and become a mighty people, it is not to the Book of Mormon but to the Bible that they look for a scriptural precedent for their own unfolding cultural narrative. Pioneers referred to themselves as a modern-day Israel, being led across the plains by a modern Moses (Smith's successor, Brigham Young). And that identification has been thorough and continuous to the present day. True enough, Utah would eventually found her Lehi and her Bountiful, but it is the Jordan River, not the Sidon, that waters the valley, and it was the Camp of Israel, not the Clans of Lehi, that moved across the plains. Old Testament names and places occur some fifteen to twenty times on Utah maps. Book of Mormon sources are confined to three prophets, one city, and a honeybee.

In the modern era, it would be as late as the 1970s before the church institutionalized the study of the Book of Mormon as part of its Sunday School curriculum. The church school, Brigham Young University, had been requiring its students to study it for only about a decade.

Whether the Book of Mormon was "equal to the Bible in importance" depends on how you define importance. It is true that the Book of Mormon and the Bible have always been held to be equally scriptural, and in that sense they are equally important, but that says nothing about how people have traditionally engaged with those two texts. It may be noted that there is little of doctrinal significance in the Book of Mormon; most of the theological innovations of Mormonism come from revelations announced by Joseph Smith. Those revelations are codified in Doctrine and Covenants, which is equal in scriptural status to the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Exaltation, the restoration of the priesthood, celestial marriage, plural marriage: to the best of my knowledge, none of these are mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Aside from belief in the Book of Mormon itself (which, obviously, does not require any engagement with the book's contents), the doctrines that make Mormonism distinctive simply do not come from the Book of Mormon.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've lately become interested in the theory that the pseudoarcheological and pseudoegyptological elements of Mormonism were introduced a decade or two into the religion's existence to obscure its actual origins in the less "serious" tradition of rural Yankee cunning-folk practices. It's not exactly shocking if you're at all familiar with how prevalent practices like dowsing, scrying, and so forth really were in places like rural Western New York in the early nineteenth century. What I think is funny about this is that by current religious-studies standards Mormonism is less obviously bullsh**t if it's placed in this framework rather than in what would have been seen as a "higher" esoteric tradition at the time.

[Хahar 🤔]

I've lately become interested in the theory that the pseudoarcheological and pseudoegyptological elements of Mormonism were introduced a decade or two into the religion's existence to obscure its actual origins in the less "serious" tradition of rural Yankee cunning-folk practices. It's not exactly shocking if you're at all familiar with how prevalent practices like dowsing, scrying, and so forth really were in places like rural Western New York in the early nineteenth century. What I think is funny about this is that by current religious-studies standards Mormonism is less obviously bullsh**t if it's placed in this framework rather than in what would have been seen as a "higher" esoteric tradition at the time.

I haven't seen this theory expounded in these terms before, but I understand the idea: the papyri that were the basis for the Book of Abraham were purchased after the church had gathered at Kirtland. The problem here is that the Book of Mormon purports to be a translation from the Reformed Egyptian, and its publication took place before the formation of any Mormon church. Martin Harris's visit to New York to see Charles Anthon and Anthon's alleged verification of Joseph Smith's writings were a powerful affirmation of Smith's prophethood to many early converts. That meeting took place in 1828, the year after Smith announced that he had taken the plates and two years before the Book of Mormon was published. I'm not sure how you get around that.

[Mr. Smith]

How do Mormons explain the fact the archaeological records doesn’t resemble their ideas of what Joseph Smith said?

9th Article of Faith, right there.

"We believe all that God has revealed, all that he will now reveal, and all that he will yet reveal, many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God."

[Samof94]

How do Mormons explain the fact the archaeological records doesn’t resemble their ideas of what Joseph Smith said?

9th Article of Faith, right there.

"We believe all that God has revealed, all that he will now reveal, and all that he will yet reveal, many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God."

They often claim Mesoamerica yet it looks nothing like the Book of Mormon.