So as part of this larger series (1, 2, 3, 4) I started a while back on this blog about what I see as scholarly principles, I was thinking of eventually getting to the question of the Book of Mormon’s historicity.

Often when dealing with religious history, there is a (debated) school of thought that scholars should bracket out supernatural truth claims. But as often noted, the Book of Mormon isn’t wholly transcendent: Smith claimed it came from a a physical object that a handful of people claimed to have seen and touched, and Smith said it was the source of a translation claiming to be about ancient history in the Americas.

Both such claims (plates and historical record) are intrusions from the purely transcendent in the physical world, and both of these intrusions do allow for historical examination.

Old texts, even translations, are found all the time, and get determined to be either authentic[1], or forgeries. Some are still still debated. I can’t think of anything as long as the Book of Mormon, and the text also adds several other highly unusual elements: angels and the original record supernaturally disappearing.

Here I would like to propose a thought experiment of what one might think either who’s outside the Mormon faith or how we might view a similar hypothetical claim made elsewhere.

If a person had a claim of getting a record of a lost civilization in another place and the record had disappeared and only we had the translation, I’m guessing we’d all want to know what the experts said about the existence of that claimed lost civilization.

As it stands, only experts within the faith accept the claim, and not many even within the faith. About 20 years ago, multiple anthropology grad students in my ward at BYU informed me that the vast consensus among BYU’s Mesoamericanists was the BoM absolutely did not take place in Mesoamerica.

I found that a little disconcerting since I still believed in BoM historicity, and said to the guy, “What? Where do they think it happened?” and he said, “They don’t know but are certain it’s not in Mesoamerica. They find John Sorenson wholly unconvincing.”

And though other places have been proposed as the Book of Mormon site, none by any scholars with any expertise in those proposed places.

I’m guessing if we heard that was the dominant opinion even within the hypothetical religion at the religion’s university, we’d assume that evidence for the civilization was severely lacking.

I’m guessing that if the record claimed to be from a pre-exilic Jewish people and if the person who claimed to translate the record was completely immersed in a biblical culture (like Joseph Smith was) then we wouldn’t find claims to Hebraisms in his English translation very convincing of the texts authenticity if the translation was absolutely chuck full of biblical quotations and allusions like the Book of Mormon is.

That is, if a defender of that hypothetical text were to say, “it’s authentic because of having things that matched the biblical world,” I think we would say, “clearly the text borrowed heavily from the Bible, but that’s not the issue at hand. The question is, is there evidence that the civilization it described existed? Is there any evidence of pre-exilic Jews having sailed/moved to and established a large civilization in the place the translator said they did?”

I’m guessing that claims of the text’s complexity, or the translator’s ignorance, or the speed by which the translator produced the text wouldn’t matter to us much either. “That’s all fine and good,” I think we’d say, “but is there any evidence that the civilization the text describes actually existed?”

Again I think we would find the lack of experts claiming that the civilization existed to suggest a problem with the translation’s claim that it did.

Now of course, John Sorenson, who died a few years ago, did have a PhD in the topic [oops, not a PhD on Mesoamerica, but Mark Wright does]. But I think we’d find a situation similar to Sorenson’s problematic in the hypothetical situation I proposed: one of very few experts even within the faith and employed by the religion. Sorenson did indeed have expertise, but I think we’d be concerned about the method he used if applied to the hypothetical situation: basically, “we know by faith and religious commitment that the text happened. So let’s figure out where?”

As a number of critics of Sorenson have pointed out for decades, this is not the kind of open-minded approach that scholars ought to have. As many have noted, starting from the proposition of “x must be true because of my religious beliefs,” is a problematic starting point. A more scholarly approach would have been to be open to the possibility that the text was not historical, which Sorenson does not entertain. I’m guessing that we wouldn’t find such “scholarship” from a scholar who took that approach in the hypothetical situation very convincing.

And I would argue that such an approach did indeed lead Sorenson and others who followed him to very problematic claims. I suppose it was Sorenson who proposed (or at least popularized) the claim that the Nephites arrived in a land full of other people and simply called all the others Lamanites.

This brings up a kind of apologia which I would call massively twisting the text. The Nephites make no such claim and make it pretty clear that even centuries later, the Lamanites claimed they had a shared heritage with then Nephites. Sometime between 187 to 160 BC, around 400 years after the Lehi landed, Zeniff reports in Mosiah 10:12-16 that that Lamanites said they came from Jerusalem. I’m aware of no situation like the one Sorenson proposed: a text claiming a group arriving in a new place with no mention of people already being there even when lots were, and claiming that all the others were really their apostate brethren, and claiming that the others claimed they WERE their apostate brethren.

No text does that, and I can’t imagine why one would other than it being a product of someone trying to force the text he believed religiously into “somewhere.” If the hypothetical scholar engaged in such forcing of the text in the scenarios I proposed, such claims would not elicit much confidence.

And having dabbled a little bit in some anthropological/archeological claims, my understanding is that the Nephite civilization that the Book of Mormon describes would leave behind a significant archeological record. Getting some basics from David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, he points out that it’s pretty clear in the archeological record when a new people move into an area. The Nephites came from a very different place and engaged in much more extensive building than the civilizations that Anthony describes. Yet Anthony found tons about the groups he studies, and we have a very significant archeological record in the Americas at the proposed time of the Nephites. But no Nephites.

Even if a group gets wiped out like what the book says the Lamanites do to the Nephites, the wiped-out culture leaves a ton behind, including the groups in Anthony’s book (called collectively “Old Europe.”) Same with the destroyed Harappans and Minoans who left behind a very rich archeology including a lot of writing we cannot read.

If the Nephites existed for so long and at the extent described, we’d have evidence.

The fact that the Book of Mormon instead matches claims contemporary to Joseph Smith about ancient Native history that was overturned long ago, would seem an indication of the Book of Mormon fitting Smith’s worldview, rather than the actual history we now know.

And this seems worth pointing out. And yes, one can make adjustments to one’s beliefs.

[1] Authentic in the sense that it’s deemed a translation of an older text dating to the first millennium CE. It’s not believed to actually be writings of Enoch. In other words it’s an actual translation of an older document.