The book of mormon makes no claim as to geography. Nobody can point to "Zarahemla" on a map. Joseph Smith was almost certainly thinking of the regions he lived in as the basis for book of mormon geography (north america). You just need to read the story of "Zelph" [1] where he picked up a bone and went on a rant about how it was actually a Lamanite warrior named Zelph that lived there.
The main reason the North/Central America geography were abandoned is because significant archaeologic evidence surfaced describing pretty much everything about the native american population that lived there for 1000s of years (spoilers, no correlation with the BoM story). That's why in roughly the 50->80s the church started pivoting to pointing to south america as the geography of the book of mormon.
The church has spent a lot of time burying stories like "Zelph" because of how bad they make JS look.
> But for a long time people claimed no body even lived there.
Show me one reputable person that has claimed there were no ancient inhabitants of south america.
Yeah, you’re definitely right that the book makes no geographical claims.
My original comment was mostly in jest considering most members believe it took place in South America.
And yeah, I apologize I didn’t mean literally nobody. I’ll have to see if I can find anything related online, but in high school I was given an anti-Mormon book that had a section talking about how there was no evidence of major cities and there was never as large a population anywhere in Central or South America as large as is claimed in the Book of Mormon.
There are a couple of things here to prop up your comment:
* The BOM mentions multiple disconnected societies that go way way back and over simplified them with the label Jaredites.
* That over simplification of the Jaredites is present at the beginning of the Bible’s Genesis too when Able was cast out and went to one of two neighboring cities. That indicates others outside the faith existed in the locality of the faith but were largely ignored, perhaps a perspective thing. These weren’t meant to be history books.
* The BOM itself is a self described radically abridged work. The book describes at one point a small library worth of religious texts, social history, and likely a variety of secular things that people find more practical day to day. These works were lost during a social collapse. The BOM is a tiny portable collection of religious works taken and compiled by a guy named Mormon and carried by his son Moroni. The word portable there is debatable because the book was made of gold and gold is ridiculously heavy, but nonetheless the book describes being hand carried some distance.
Yeah, I believe the theory that other people were present.
But I will add a few comments for anyone not familiar with the Book of Mormon who is reading this.
- The goal of the Book is to persuade the reader that Jesus is the Christ, the savior of the world. To that end, the authors make a point to say that they are going to leave out a lot of things they could have added so as to focus only on those things that would be of the greatest spiritual worth to us today. Given that, the only real way to know if it is true is to read it, ponder in your heart the message it contains, and then to ask God if it is true. There is a promise in the introduction that if you will do that sincerely, you will know it’s true by the power of the Holy Ghost. I believe in Jesus Christ and in the Book of Mormon because I have followed that exact process.
- Any discussion here about archeological/literary evidence is at best interesting. Even if the Book of Mormon provided incredibly detailed maps of exactly where each city was located, that would not be reason to believe.
- In looking for evidence, you can find lots of things on both sides that seem to either prove it or disprove it. I fundamentally believe this was by design so that the only way we could know would be to read it and sincerely pray. This is different from saying you should believe it because “trust me bro”. You can know 100% independent of anyone else. I just believe God in his wisdom designed the Book so that the reader would want and need an experience with God before they could fully move on from it.
- Once you believe, I have found the incredible amount of supporting evidence for the book to be encouraging, even if it’s not what the foundation of my belief is built on
- One of the reasons pinpointing exactly where the Book Of Mormon took place is so difficult is because the last writer in the book, Moroni, wandered around for newly 40 years. So it’s hard to know exactly how much ground he covered.
- I find it really interesting that it seems the best archeological evidence comes from Lehi’s journey out of Jerusalem (Nahom, valley near the Red Sea, land bountiful) rather than in the Americas
To your last point departing anywhere from the western coast of Africa directly into the Atlantic Ocean if not for directed navigation you will eventually drift into northern Brazil provided you survive storms, do not sail during hurricane season, and have sufficient supplies to survive the voyage. Drifting from Africa to Brazil could take several months. So, this is certainly not a journey for a raft, though I vaguely recall somebody tried that experiment with a raft.
It was pretty specific that the pages were themselves gold sheets with the writings being tiny engravings. If that were true the most logic reason would be high tactility. As the most tactile substance known it can be hammered to within 6 atoms thick before tearing, though it also means gold warps and bends with low effort. When hammered thin enough it can resemble a fabric and with modern equipment can be thinned into a fully transparent electrostatic film.
No. Believing in a religious text because of some archeological evidence would be like doing math through prayer.
But I do find it at least a bit ironic that one of the critiques of the book I have seen most commonly has been "If there were so many people, where were all the cities?"
Every time I see news about cities discovered in south america I look to see if the dates line up with the Nephite/Lamanite civilizations of the Book of Mormon (roughly 600 BC to 400 AD). This is the closest yet that I've seen. I'm eager to see what they discover in the coming years about their culture and government. Will we find traces of their Judge-based government? Signs that they worshiped Christ and practiced Jewish rituals? It will be interesting to watch this investigation unfold.
to me it seems notable that the conversation turns into comparisons of early Western things.. because of course, it is very unlikely that people on this forum have very much reference of any kind to these very recent science facts. "Pre-columbian art" has been a stable of artistic and intellectual circles for long time.. it is easier to look at one stone figure and wonder