“WERE THERE REALLY GOLD PLATES AND MINISTERING ANGELS, OR WAS there just Joseph Smith seated at a table with his face in a hat dictating to a scribe a fictional account of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas?”
Resolving that problem haunts loyal Mormons. The blunt questioner quoted was Brigham D. Madsen, a liberal Mormon and onetime history teacher at Brigham Young University who left for a distinguished academic career at the University of Utah. Madsen loved the Book of Mormon. He thought the Saints should treasure it for its lessons and let its history go.
Book of Mormon apologists have a much tougher job than apologists for the Bible. Not a single person, place, or event unique to Joseph Smith’s “gold Bible” has ever been proven to exist. Biblical apologists considering the difficulties in the Old Testament accounts of Jericho may have to explain problems in dating or chronology—but at least there indisputably is a very real Jericho, and it is very old.
(Though Mormon writers consider the term “apologist” to be pejorative, this book uses it in its dictionary sense—as one who provides a case for the defense: for example, Plato’s Apology or Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Many orthodox Christian seminaries offer courses, often required, in philosophical and practical Christian apologetics. The word does not mean that the faith has anything for which it should “apologize.”)
Mormon apologists build what they call “plausibilities” as explanations to satisfy the faithful. At bottom, commitment is a matter of faith, not a matter of rational propositions. John L. Sorenson has written that he does not “undertake to ‘test’ the Book of Mormon for its truthfulness” because, despite interesting parallels shown through Mesoamerican archaeology, “no number of them would unequivocally establish the book as an authentic pre-Columbian document, nor would failure to find parallels disprove it. Conclusive results can never be obtained by that procedure.”
For years the Smithsonian Institution in Washington has received occasional queries about using the Book of Mormon as a guide to archaeological expeditions. Since 1951 the institution’s response has been a slightly testy form letter saying there is “no connection” between the archaeology of the New World and the Book of Mormon; the Smithsonian has never used the book as a scientific guide.
That letter was a sore point for Mormons. In 1993 Sorenson, a retired BYU anthropology professor and one of the church’s leading apologists for ancient scripture, wrote a point-by-point response to the Smithsonian for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), an apologetic organization for the church now integrated with BYU’s Maxwell Institute. He drafted a proposed statement for the Smithsonian, carefully separating the Book of Mormon from the current assumptions of most secular Mesoamerican archaeology, and suggesting that, “since the book is primarily religious in nature, concern with it does not normally or appropriately fall within the Institution’s mission, any more than the Bible or the Koran.”
The Smithsonian did not quite bite. But the Smithsonian is, after all, dependent on Congress for funds, and there are LDS congressmen and senators. FARMS people met with a Smithsonian representative, and as of March 1998 this circumspect statement became the Institution’s brief answer to Book of Mormon archaeological questions:
Your recent inquiry concerning the Smithsonian Institution’s alleged use of the Book of Mormon as a scientific guide has been received in the Office of Communications. The Book of Mormon is a religious document and not a scientific guide. The Smithsonian Institution has never used it in archaeological research and any information that you have received to the contrary is incorrect.
“Ancient scripture” in Mormon usage includes the Book of Mormon, parts of the Pearl of Great Price, and Joseph Smith’s own Bible translation, as well as the Old and New Testaments. The Pearl of Great Price is a selection of materials accorded scriptural status by the LDS Church (but not the Community of Christ) that were largely produced by Joseph Smith during his Kirtland period and first published as a unit in 1851, seven years after his death.
The Book of Mormon was controversial from the outset. The contemporary Protestant leader Alexander Campbell, in an oft-quoted phrase of 1831, characterized it as gathering “every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years.” From the beginning to this day, the reaction of Book of Mormon readers has been divided between those committed to it as ancient literature and those who consider it a product of the nineteenth century.
The older polemical traditions split on two sides of a simple prophet/ fraud dichotomy: either Joseph Smith was everything he claimed to be, a true prophet entrusted with a new scripture from authentic ancient golden plates, or he was a charismatic fraud. Some participants in current discussion, however, would like to carve a middle path. These include respectful and sympathetic non-Mormons who recognize the moral and spiritual values in the Book of Mormon as well as liberal Mormons who value their heritage, with its disciplined lifestyle and communal bonding. The former group has included such scholars as the brilliant literary critic Harold Bloom; the sociologist of religion whose projected growth figures understandably delight the LDS, Rodney Stark; and the scholars of the history of religion Martin Marty and Jan Shipps. The latter group encompasses many excommunicated Mormons who still identify as Mormon, as well as some thoughtful Saints who are carefully circumspect in what they say and write but regard the Book of Mormon as most likely of nineteenth-century origin.
Some friendly non-Mormons celebrate Joseph Smith as a highly creative religious original. Bloom, for example, loathed C. S. Lewis, the twentieth century’s most influential traditional Christian apologist. Bloom rated Lewis’s Mere Christianity as “one of my least favorite books” precisely because Lewis “shrewdly associates the Christian surrender of the self with not seeking literary originality.” On the other hand, Bloom admired Smith because he was “an extraordinary religious genius” in his creative imagination, the “greatest and most authentic of American prophets, seers, and revelators.”
Marty, rejecting the prophet/fraud dichotomy, thought the important thing was to “seek to understand” Smith’s message rather than to debate its literal historicity. He advocated an approach that would move “from primitive to secondary naiveté or from belief before criticism to belief through criticism and interpretation.” Shipps was interested not in whether the Book of Mormon is literal history but in how Smith, Brigham Young, and the Mormon people have developed for themselves a usable, sacred myth, and how that myth functions to bind the Mormon communal memory.
Stark, speaking to the 1998 Mormon History Association convention, likened Smith’s inspirational originality to the musical genius of Mozart and Gershwin, both of whom said they simply wrote down the music they heard coming to them. Stark also compared Smith and his Book to Muhammad and the revelation of the Quran. Both seemed to be relaying scriptural dictations. Both had strong family support, resulting in a sort of holy family that was central to the movement.
Stark thought Mormonism may be the first important new world religion to arise since Islam appeared in the seventh century a.d., providing interesting phenomena for sociologists to observe. Islamic and Mormon beginnings shared three characteristics in common, according to Stark: (1) a general culture of revelations in the surrounding culture so that the recipient of the new movement’s revelation must have had previous intense contact with another person or persons who also received visions or revelations; (2) the new movement leader had the support of an intense primary group, typically the family; (3) the founding network was intense but open to building contacts with others.
For Stark the divine acts through history with human agents, and application of a social science model do not necessarily imply hostility to the supernatural. Stark thought that ideology plays almost no role in the beginnings of conversion, which occurs almost entirely through human networking. As he saw it, questions of literal historicity are not central to the Mormon religion.
The Community of Christ leadership is open to a flexible account of the Book of Mormon, though the opinions of the rank-and-file membership vary across the spectrum. “I believe this subject must be approached with intellectual honesty,” wrote William D. Russell in a 1982 Sunstone article when he was president of the Mormon History Association.
Russell’s article analyzed the problems of historical and literary anachronism in the Book of Mormon; it did not deal with archaeological difficulties. Russell, a historian at the Community of Christ’s Graceland College, concluded, “Perhaps what Stanley Kimball calls ‘an exciting, readable adventure story’ can come much more alive for us if we read it as a writing of Joseph Smith, from which we can grow spiritually.” As some suggest, “the objective of the Christian faith is not assent to propositions but Christian discipleship. If that be the case, then the Book of Mormon is important for us not in giving us events to affirm as historically accurate but rather in helping us become better disciples of the One for whom the book claims to be a ‘second witness.’”
LDS Church authorities do not consider this revisionist solution acceptable. And it has not escaped their notice that the LDS Church is growing rapidly while the Community of Christ is faltering. For ordinary Mormons, strong belief demands are a positive aspect of the church. As President Gordon B. Hinckley observed, people like a church that stands for something, a church that knows what it believes.
From its beginnings, the church has declared it essential that the Book of Mormon be accepted as it presents itself, as historical fact, not inspired fiction. Apostle Orson Pratt, in his 1851 Works, wrote, “The Book of Mormon claims to be a divinely inspired record…. This book must be either true or false…. If false, it is one of the most cunning, wicked, bold, deep-laid impositions ever palmed upon the world, calculated to deceive and ruin millions who will sincerely receive it as the word of God…. If true, no one can possibly be saved and reject it; if false, no one can possibly be saved and receive it.”
Current loyalist scholars express the same idea. BYU Professor Louis Midgley maintained, “To reduce the Book of Mormon to mere myth weakens, if not destroys, the possibility of it witnessing to the truth about divine things. A fictional Book of Mormon fabricated by Joseph Smith, even when his inventiveness, genius, or ‘inspiration’ is celebrated, does not witness to Jesus Christ but to human folly. A true Book of Mormon is a powerful witness; a fictional one is hardly worth reading and pondering.” As President Hinckley told PBS-TV in 2007, “It’s either true or false. If it’s false, we’re engaged in a great fraud. If it’s true, it’s the most important thing in the world.”
Within the loyal Mormon community, there is a moderate intellectual group that believes the Book of Mormon does have ancient roots but, as part of the process of revelation properly understood, is expressed through nineteenth-century thought processes. Blake Ostler developed this view in a 1987 Dialogue essay presented in 1995 at Brigham Young University and widely discussed among BYU religion faculty and seminary and institute personnel. Applying source, motif, and form critical analysis—some of the standard tools of “higher criticism” in biblical studies—Ostler saw the “Book of Mormon as an ancient text mediated through the mind of Joseph Smith…. The prophet is an active participant in revelation, conceptualizing and verbalizing God’s message in a framework of thought meaningful to the people.” Smith’s “revelatory experiences naturally assumed the world view arising from his culture.” At the same time, Ostler believed the book has ancient elements that cannot be explained by the nineteenth century.
The foundational truths of the Mormon Church begin with the validity of Smith’s visions. Possible explanations include the hoax theory frequently adopted by anti-Mormon opponents, as well as by some en route to becoming ex-Mormon, such as Fawn Brodie in No Man Knows My History. In the twentieth century some scholars introduced the notion of abnormal psychology. Lawrence Foster was one historian who suggested this interpretation. In this view, Smith really believed his visions from the outset, or came to believe them in the process of delivering the Book of Mormon. Other writers, not wanting to consider Smith’s mind diseased, call him a mystic. Visions, after all, are a subjective experience. With this perspective, the question of truth content is sidestepped.
Perhaps the most delicate matter, to faithful Mormons, is interpreting Smith’s activities in magic and the occult during the 1820s. Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, published in 1987 while he was still a BYU professor and holder of a temple recommend, created a stir. Here was an emerging prophet deeply involved with mystic amulets, divining rods, incantations, magic seer stones, and related rituals. The research was not sensationalized, nor was it lurid; it was, moreover, painstakingly documented. Quinn attempted to place his research in a sympathetic context: folk religion, practiced outside the “establishment” culture, was widespread at the time.
On the other hand, though the Smith family’s activities were not unusual for people living on the margins of society, Emma’s father had opposed their marriage because he regarded Joseph’s money-digging as a disreputable way of avoiding doing real work for a living. It was also the cause of Joseph’s being hauled into the Bainbridge court in 1826. Magic, mysticism, the occult, widespread vision experiences, revelations, and other manifestations of religious excitement raise uncomfortable questions about the context from which the Book of Mormon arose.
Quinn himself, in spite of his 1993 excommunication, continued to maintain that he believed in the ancient golden plates and the First Vision. But his thorough research, republished in an expanded version in 1998, detailed an immersion in folk magic and occult beliefs that inevitably cast a long shadow over how Mormons understand the context of their church’s beginnings, as well as the development of its sacred temple rituals.
Apologists from the earliest times to the present day have stressed Smith’s lack of education as proof that he was not the author of the Book of Mormon. How could a simple farm boy have written such a complex literary work as the Book of Mormon, and so quickly, dictating while he looked into his hat? Lucy Mack Smith laid the groundwork for this defense in her 1853 family biography, saying that he was thoughtful but less bookish than her other children; Emma Hale Smith at the end of her life reminisced that Joseph was not capable of writing a literate letter, let alone composing so complex a work as the Book of Mormon.
A current expression of the same idea came from Richard Bushman: “How did these 584 pages of text come to issue from the mind of an untaught, indolent ignoramus, notable only for his money-digging episodes?” Yet some of Smith’s contemporaries believed he had a startlingly unique knowledge of divine things. Pious Islamic tradition similarly maintains that Muhammad was not literate, and the Quran is also highly complex.
Joseph Smith’s limited formal education must be understood in the context of his place and time and of what is known of his personality and abilities. His father had been a schoolteacher. Quinn documented the extensive number of books and periodicals available at the time in the libraries and bookshops of Palmyra and nearby towns. Lucy Mack Smith, in her family biography, detailed Joseph’s extensive boyish knowledge and interest in Indian lore. The language he used in his account of the First Vision was the expression of a youth deeply immersed in biblical vernacular. His later activities revealed a lively intellectual curiosity as well as a documented use of books and a profound interest in learning. Still, whether divine inspiration or the product of rare human creativity, there remains something of mystery in the genesis of a work such as the Book of Mormon.
Every copy of the Book of Mormon is printed with the Testimony of the Three Witnesses and of the Eight Witnesses. Like everything else in early Mormonism, the witnesses are controversial. What is not ambiguous is that, to the end of their lives, none of them disavowed their written testimonies even though most broke with Smith’s church. That very apostasy has been used as a debating point in favor of their witness by the Book’s defenders. Three of them—David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris—were the primary witnesses to whom Smith’s angel appeared. Jan Shipps interpreted the written testimonial as a spiritual formula, given to Joseph Smith by revelation.
Each of the Three Witnesses later left the church. At the time of their testimony, Smith had promised the men that with prayer and faith they would see the plates. They strolled in the woods together and prayed a long time. Nothing happened. Disturbed by his failure to receive a vision, Harris asked to withdraw and pray alone. With Smith present, Cowdery and Whitmer then received their visions. Smith went after Harris, the two men prayed together, and Harris was rewarded with his vision too. All three signed a testimonial that had been written by Smith.
Harris’s testimony is the most problematic. He was a somewhat unstable person, prone to visions and mystical experiences. He once reportedly saw Jesus Christ in the form of a deer as he walked alongside and conversed with him for two or three miles. In a number of later statements, Harris explained that he saw the plates with his “spiritual eye” or “eye of faith” rather than his naked eyes. Conflicting reports assert that he and the other witnesses never saw the bare engraved plates, only something covered with a cloth.
Witnesses to the same statement sometimes reported it differently. An 1838 letter written by Stephen Burnett to Lyman E. Johnson reported that Harris said publicly that none of the witnesses had literally seen the plates with their physical eyes. A letter written by Warren Parrish supported Burnett’s interpretation. But one written by George A. Smith describing the same speech emphasized only that Harris witnessed to the truth of the Book of Mormon.
Not many statements exist on the Eight Witnesses. Three were Smith family members; two died fairly early; the other three apostasized. Two of the apostate witnesses were rebaptized later.
Anachronisms, both literary and archaeological, raise questions about Book of Mormon authenticity to even the most casual reader. Christ coming to minister in the New World is a matter of faith; there seems little prospect that the claim could be flatly proven or disproved. More jarring is the Christian testimony of Old Testament characters such as Adam, Abraham, Noah, Enoch, and others.
Another area of difficulty is the relation of the Book of Mormon to the Bible. Nearly one-third of Isaiah is quoted in the Book of Mormon, with some changes unique to the Mormon scripture and the 1769 edition of the King James Bible that Joseph Smith used. Initially Mormons hoped the Dead Sea Scroll translations would support the biblical text as it appears in the Book of Mormon. That did not happen. The differences are unique to the Book of Mormon, while the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that the Old Testament we have today is surprisingly faithful to manuscripts that are some 2,200 years old.
The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount turn up among the Nephites. Twentieth-century scholarship has revealed errors appearing in the Book of Mormon that are unique to the Bible version that Joseph Smith used. In 1986 Stan Larson, then working in the LDS Church’s translation department, and holder of a Ph.D. in New Testament studies from the University of Birmingham, England, collated the best texts he could find for the Sermon on the Mount and compared them with III Nephi. He criticized Smith’s usage of the text, concluding that the errors unique to the 1769 King James Bible proved the text was not a genuine translation from golden plates but a paraphrase produced in the nineteenth century. Larson was forced to resign.
Non-Mormon scholars point to historical anachronisms in ancient culture as depicted in the Book of Mormon. Some critics say the stress on individual moral responsibility and conversion in mass revivalist meetings conducted by Nephi and other Book of Mormon prophets bears a suspicious resemblance to the exhortations to repentance by evangelists at camp meetings in nineteenth-century upstate New York. Others see a relationship between nineteenth-century market capitalism and Smith’s Book of Mormon characters who “were exceedingly industrious, and they did buy and sell and traffic one with another, that they might get gain” (Ether 10:22). Some of the development, according to these critics, sounds much like nineteenth-century urbanization: “And it came to pass that there were many cities built anew, and there were many old cities repaired. And there were many highways cast up, and many roads made, which led from city to city, and from land to land, and from place to place” (III Nephi 6:7–8).
Mormons are sensitive about the fact that virtually no significant non-Mormon scholars take the Book of Mormon seriously as ancient literature. Despite the fact that millions have been inspired by it, “literary scholars studiously ignore” the Book of Mormon, even as a classic of popular American literature, lamented the late Eugene England, founding editor of Dialogue and a BYU English professor. Few non-Mormon scholars other than historians have actually read it.
Because of this, and because few Mormons are fully credentialed in scriptural studies, ancient languages, and related critical studies, Mormon thinking in these areas takes place almost entirely within its own enclosed world. When Mormons step outside that enclosure, they tread on thin ice. The Hebraicist David Wright applied the principles of higher criticism he learned during his doctoral work at U.C. Berkeley to Book of Mormon studies and felt that BYU students and Church Educational System teachers should at least be aware of those tools. He continued as a productive scholar—but at Brandeis, not BYU, from which he was dismissed. As a result of those tools, Wright concluded that the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century work, and BYU correctly interpreted that as opposition to the doctrinal stand of the LDS Church.
During much of the twentieth century more apologetic energy was focused on archaeology than on any other area of Book of Mormon studies. Much of this was aimed at attempting to locate a plausible geography for the Book of Mormon stories. At first, Joseph Smith and the nineteenth-century Saints generally assumed that the sacred history had taken place in upstate New York, around the vicinity of Hill Cumorah where Smith found the plates.
The Saints’ interest in Mesoamerica as a possible setting was first tickled by John Lloyd Stephens’s 1841 best-seller, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, with its awe-inspiring descriptions of ancient Mayan ruins. Passages were excerpted in Nauvoo’s Times and Seasons in 1842 with an unsigned editorial wondering whether some of the ruins could have been the Mormon scriptural Zarahemla. It is not clear whether Smith was the editorialist.
Mayan cultural characteristics have obvious attractions for Mormon interests. The Mayans were literate and sophisticated; they built great cities; they even built pyramids that seem at a glance to resemble the pyramids of Egypt. One key problem for all Mormons attempting to relate Mayan cities and culture to the Nephites, however, is that Mayan civilization is dated 200 or more years after the destruction of the Nephites.
The Book of Mormon describes the Hebraic migration to the Americas by the Jaredites at the time of Babel, perhaps around 2250 b.c., and by the Nephites, around 600 b.c. A great civilization arose, and crafts and cities developed. They were a Semitic people, but their written language was something the prophet called “reformed Egyptian.” Then around a.d. 400 at Hill Cumorah came the great final battle between the Nephites and the Lamanites, resulting in the death of perhaps 230,000 Nephites and the end of Nephite civilization. The Lamanites remained. Most Mormons believe the American Indians are Lamanite descendants.
Mormon interest in Mesoamerica increased in the twentieth century. The first scholarly work tying that area to the Book of Mormon was the work of an RLDS researcher, Louis E. Hills. Retired Yale anthropologist Michael D. Coe credited Hill’s books published in 1917 and 1919 with labeling the “narrow neck of land” in the Book of Mormon geography as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, placing Zarahemla (present-day Guatemala and Belize) to the east and Bountiful to the west. If so, then there must have been two Hill Cumorahs: one in Mesoamerica, where the great battle took place; another thousands of miles away in upstate New York, where the exiled Moroni buried the golden plates he eventually gave to Joseph Smith. The theorists offer no explanation of how or why the sacred metal tablets would have been transported from Mexico to the Palmyra area.
The most common Mesoamerican setting is the one proposed by Sorenson, using the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a strip of land 500 or 600 miles long. Such a site is large enough to have supported a population of several million by a.d. 400, and possibly a highly developed culture, agriculture, and commerce. Its geography could coincide with a number of Book of Mormon descriptions. One key problem is its directionality. To account for the Book of Mormon locale, one must tilt the map sixty degrees. Otherwise, the land northward is westward and the land southward is eastward. Most ancient peoples had a clear concept of north and accounted for direction by the rising and setting of the sun.
The LDS Church has wisely refrained from officially committing itself to a specific Book of Mormon geographic location in spite of its insistence that the book describes literal historic events. According to Joseph Fielding Smith, a major LDS doctrinal authority and later president of the church: “It is the personal opinion of the writer that the Lord does not intend that the Book of Mormon, at least at the present time, shall be proved true by any archaeological findings. The day may come when such will be the case, but not now. The Book of Mormon is itself a witness of the truth, and the promise has been given most solemnly that any person who will read it with a prayerful heart may receive the abiding testimony of its truth.”
But when a church is founded on events that took place in real history and claims its sacred book records that history, the quest for supportive evidence remains. FARMS publications concentrate on Mesoamerica research, and travel agencies in Salt Lake City have brochures for tours to Book of Mormon lands, that is, to southern Mexico and northern Central America. Coe, possibly the country’s most distinguished specialist in Mesoamerican anthropology, observed that “in hundreds of motels scattered across the western United States the Gentile archaeologist can find a paperback Book of Mormon lavishly illustrated with the paintings of Arnold Friberg depicting such scenes as Samuel the Lamanite prophesying on top of what looks like the Temple of the Tigers in Chichen Itza, Yucatan.”
Meanwhile, many rank-and-file Mormons still believe that the great battle of Hill Cumorah was fought near Palmyra, just as Joseph Smith thought. “The first time you walk on the grounds you know something big happened here,” said career army major Bruce Marshall, who visited the 1998 Hill Cumorah pageant with his family. “You can feel it, like visiting Gettysburg. The Book of Mormon had to be sealed. It had to be sealed by blood. I believe the battle did take place here. It’s just something I feel.”
Marshall and others like him have had support in high places. The late Apostle Bruce R. McConkie (with typical Mormon interconnectedness, Joseph Fielding Smith’s son-in-law) was a firm believer in one Cumorah, the hill in upstate New York. In his Mormon Doctrine, a widely used reference work since its first appearance more than forty years ago, McConkie wrote, “Both the Nephite and Jaredite civilizations fought their final great wars of extinction at and near the Hill Cumorah (or Ramah as the Jaredites termed it), which hill is located between Palmyra and Manchester in the western part of the state of New York.” Influential Apostles James Talmage and LeGrand Richards were also supporters of the traditional New York Cumorah.
In spite of the more scholarly FARMS industry, new books continue to be written building the case for the traditional upstate New York location for the Jaredite and Nephite epic. One example was the 1998 Return to Cumorah, written in the tradition of amateur Mormon lay scholarship by Duane R. Aston, a retired California physics professor. His narrow neck of land was at Niagara Falls. Aston’s analysis is geographic; he explained the thin archaeological evidence by writing that it is the way of the Lord “that our testimony of the Book of Mormon remain a matter of faith, and not based upon external proofs found from archaeology.”
The father of LDS Mesoamerican research was another Mormon amateur, Thomas Stuart Ferguson, a California lawyer who in 1946 “rolled up his sleeves, threw a shovel over his shoulder, and marched into the remote jungles of southern Mexico” to “shut the mouths of the critics” who said evidence to prove the Book of Mormon did not exist. Ferguson was tireless; over the years he made twenty-four trips to Central America, raised money, and helped establish the New World Archaeological Foundation, which brought in non-Mormon experts as well as Mormons. The young John Sorenson turned his first shovel on a Ferguson expedition.
Ferguson published frequently over the years; his first book, Cumorah—Where? (1947), was initially banned from Deseret stores because he proposed a Mexican hill as the site of the great Nephite battle rather than Smith’s hill in upstate New York. His last book was The Messiah in Ancient America (1987, coauthored with Bruce W. Warren). Publicly the book printed a testimonial to Ferguson’s faith in the Book of Mormon. Privately, although Ferguson continued to attend ward meetings and to socialize as a Mormon, after a lifetime committed to proving the historicity of the Mormon scripture he had concluded that the book was a piece of fiction. The ex-Mormon polemicists Jerald and Sandra Tanner received seven letters from Ferguson expressing his disillusionment with the Book of Mormon. For Ferguson the final straw was insurmountable difficulties in Smith’s later translation of another Mormon scripture, the Book of Abraham.
Since 1979 much Book of Mormon research has been funneled through FARMS, which publishes two semiannual journals, the Journal of the Book of Mormon Studies and the FARMS Review, as well as books, occasional papers, and reprints. FARMS research includes history, language, and various aspects of ancient culture as well as archaeology and literary analysis of scriptures. Such efforts have become increasingly sophisticated and aggressive.
Archaeology, and not only matters of geography, remains an interest. The Book of Mormon presents major historical anachronisms, that is, cultural and physical evidence dropped into the wrong period of history. Though Joseph Smith would not have known it, certain historical details do not appear to fit into the ancient Jaredite-Nephite time frame. Utilitarian use of the wheel, for example, was unknown in pre-Columbian America. The horse came to the New World with the Spanish conquest, as did most domesticated animals. There is no archaeological evidence for plants such as wheat or for metallurgy involving the smelting and casting of the type of steel swords used in Book of Mormon warfare. Sorenson attempted to explain certain of these anachronisms as arising from the difficulties any translator has in finding word equivalents. Some of the explanations might be reasonable: silk, for example, could be a silk-like fabric other than actual silk. Other explanations stretch thin: for example, explaining the horse as some kind of a deer.
Stephen Williams, a Harvard anthropology professor, treated the Book of Mormon dismissively in a chapter of his 1991 book Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. He claimed to analyze the nineteenth-century “nonsense” in his field. Coe was a rare secular scholar in being well acquainted with the Book of Mormon as well as with Mormon history and scholarship. Writing in a 1973 Dialogue article, he said, “The bare facts of the matter are that nothing, absolutely nothing, has ever shown up in any New World excavation which would suggest to a dispassionate observer that the Book of Mormon, as claimed by Joseph Smith, is a historical document relating to the history of early migrants to our hemisphere.”
In the 2007 PBS-TV documentary “The Mormons,” Coe said that Mormons spent fifty years in Mesoamerica seeking archaeological corroboration for Book of Mormon history. “They’ve excavated all kinds of sites and, unfortunately, they’ve never found anything that would back it up.” Coe, who described himself as “totally irreligious,” thought that Smith, “like shamans everywhere, started out faking it” but came to believe his writings were actual revelations from God and “transformed something that I think was clearly made up into something that was absolutely convincing.”
One key missing link is any evidence that Hebrews ever migrated to pre-Columbian America. The usual explanation by anthropologists is that Asian peoples probably migrated over the Bering Strait many thousands of years ago. Recent archaeological digs have revealed evidence of much earlier migrations, possibly from Europe and Asia, and by sea. Nothing, at least so far, links these finds to the Hebrews or to migrations within the Book of Mormon time frame.
A stone with a supposedly ancient Hebrew inscription discovered in Bat Creek, Tennessee, in 1889 is sometimes cited as support of pre-Columbian cultural contact with the ancient Near East. Originally the inscription was thought to have been Cherokee, but in 1970 the Brandeis Semitic language scholar Cyrus Gordon identified the letters as a paleo-Hebrew inscription of the first or second century a.d.
An amateur Mormon Hebraicist, J. Huston McCulloch (an economics professor at Ohio State University), energetically pursued the Bat Creek case. But on technical grounds, Gordon’s findings were disputed by two scholars in Near Eastern studies, Frank M. Cross of Harvard (retired) and P. Kyle McCarter Jr. of Johns Hopkins. McCarter also suggested that there is evidence of fraudulent contamination of the find by the original discoverer in 1889. A McCulloch-McCarter exchange was published by the Biblical Archaeology Review in 1993 and reprinted by FARMS with a carefully neutral introduction by FARMS writer Stephen D. Ricks.
In recent years literary analysis of the Book of Mormon has been edging toward center stage, both as general study of the sacred book and for apologetic purposes. In a 1997 FARMS title, Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins, only three of the sixteen essays deal with archaeology and geography. This book, written for a faithful Mormon audience, acknowledged the arguments advanced by liberal critics, including ex-Mormons such as David P. Wright and others who wrote for the 1993 Signature book edited by Brent Lee Metcalfe, New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology.
Emphasis is currently being placed on studies that attempt to show that the Book of Mormon had many writers rather than just one (that is, Joseph Smith). The work includes wordprint analysis, which aims to show that different patterns of word usage prove different authors. Another approach is the study of chiasmus by John W. Welch, a BYU law professor and leader with FARMS and BYU Studies. Chiasmus is the use of parallel phrases repeated with some reversals, seen frequently in the Bible. Welch argued that these complexities imply ancient authorship. The extensive scholarship of the late Hugh Nibley of BYU over the years emphasized parallels between the Book of Mormon and ancient Near Eastern culture and language. The aim of Nibley’s work was to provide evidence for Book of Mormon cultural materials that were not known in Joseph Smith’s time. His extensive scholarship included study of the Book of Mormon in relation to ancient names, geographic detail, and military, social, and political institutions. Book of Mormon defenders have continued work on these lines.
Terryl L. Givens, a Mormon and literature professor at the University of Richmond, provided a faith-affirming survey of these discussions in a 2002 book from the prestigious Oxford University Press: By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion. Givens analyzed the various challenges from Mormon liberals, which he took more seriously than external attacks from Evangelical polemicists. He acknowledged there are unanswered problems in archeology but featured the FARMS arguments about elements within the text that show links to the ancient Mideast.
In the early twenty-first century, debate focused on genetics as two Mormon scholars, writing for the liberal Signature Books, asserted that DNA evidence undermines the Book of Mormon. Thomas W. Murphy, anthropology chairman at Edmonds Community College in Washington State, assessed the lack of DNA linkage between Hebrews and Native Americans in the anthology American Apocrypha (2002). He concluded that the Book of Mormon is scripture but not history and was a nineteenth century creation of Joseph Smith. Simon G. Southerton of Australia, a molecular botany researcher formerly with the University of Queensland, followed up in Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (2004). A church disciplinary council suspended proceedings against Murphy without disfellowshipping or excommunicating him, though Murphy by his own choice no longer attends church or holds a temple recommend. Southerton was excommunicated in 2005 on grounds of an “inappropriate relationship” while he was separated from his wife (the couple later reconciled), though he contended his DNA research was the real reason.
These and other writings provoked a blizzard of technical answers from BYU’s Maxwell Institute and counter-retorts from Murphy and Southerton. Book of Mormon defenders essentially argued that evidence of genetic heritage dissolved because the Israelite settlements were small and in a relatively isolated area, not hemisphere-wide. Murphy responded in Dialogue that the theory of a limited Central American context for the Book of Mormon does not overcome the genetic problem, nor does it fit what the Book itself records. Southerton noted on his publisher’s Web site that all the LDS prophets from Joseph Smith onward have held the same belief as the 1981 introduction to the Book of Mormon, which states that migrating Israelites were “the principal ancestors of the American Indians.”
One of the most delicate situations that FARMS and Book of Mormon defenders ever faced was the 1985 publication of B. H. Roberts’s Studies of the Book of Mormon by the University of Illinois Press. Roberts, a General Authority who died in 1933, has been a legendary figure in the church; a bright gadfly intellectual and individualist in a church that values conformity; and one of the church’s most valiant writers and speakers in defense of the Book of Mormon.
In the early 1920s, at the request of the First Presidency, Roberts undertook a study of the Book of Mormon with the intention of developing a well-reasoned apologetic to explain difficulties in the book. Among the problems he pondered were the important linguistic difficulties (“no vestige of either Hebrew or Egyptian appears in the language of the American Indians”) and the historical anachronisms (the horse, wheat, steel swords, and so forth).
Then Roberts also undertook a study comparing the Book of Mormon with Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, a work by a clergyman in Poultney, Vermont, on the Israelite origin of the Indians, published in 1823 and 1825. The book was successful, as multiple early editions attest. It drew on some ideas that were commonplace at the time. Oliver Cowdery, Smith’s scribe and one of the Three Witnesses for the Book of Mormon, had lived in Poultney until 1825; his stepmother and three half-sisters had been members of Ethan Smith’s church. It is probably safe to assume that Joseph Smith was familiar with the book.
Roberts’s study had included an eighteen-page typescript showing parallels between View of the Hebrews and the structure and content of the Nephite story in the Book of Mormon. Some copies of the parallel list circulated privately after Roberts’s death, but Roberts himself had withheld some of his materials from the General Authorities. Publication came decades later after his family donated Roberts’s manuscripts to the University of Utah. Sterling McMurrin, a philosophy scholar at the University of Utah who had written a biographical chapter for the study, later charged that there was an unsuccessful effort to have the University of Illinois Press suppress publication of the study.
Regarding the historicity of the Book of Mormon, Roberts had written:
In the light of this evidence, there can be no doubt as to the possession of a vividly strong, creative imagination by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, an imagination, it could with reason be urged, which, given the suggestions that are to be found in the “common knowledge” of accepted American antiquities of the times, supplemented by such a work as Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, would make it possible for him to create a book such as the Book of Mormon is.
Roberts could not be dismissed as an outsider or an anti-Mormon, so FARMS went into high gear: Roberts must have been playing devil’s advocate; he had continued to testify to the truth of the Book of Mormon right up to his death; McMurrin and Brigham Madsen (who edited the volume) had misrepresented Roberts’s final views about the historicity of Mormon scriptures. BYU Studies and FARMS churned out responses. McMurrin and Madsen suggested a public panel discussion with their critics, who declined to appear. In 1996, many years after it had been available through Jerald and Sandra Tanner, and more than a decade after the University of Illinois published Roberts’s study, Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews was published in a BYU edition.
Most Mormons are either unaware of these scholarly finds or unperturbed by them. To them the final decision is one of faith, of accepting the church’s authority, of committing one’s life to a book one chooses to accept as sacred scripture. As the FARMS Review editor Daniel C. Peterson has written, in words substantially repeated by every Mormon child in his first ward testimony and by every General Authority at the end of each General Conference talk: “Most importantly, the evidence of the Spirit is available to those who seek it. I, for one, have received the witness of the Spirit, and I bear testimony that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, and that the gospel is true.”
These testimonies are paraphrases of Moroni 10:3–5, a cherished passage that exhorts readers to ask God “if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.”