Dr. John E. Clark’s presentation on archaeology and the Book of Mormon, the subject of a recent post here, has been taken to task by one of our critics for claiming that ancient civilization in Mesoamerica was not well known when the Book of Mormon came out. Clark stated that the Book of Mormon picture of advanced, literate civilizations in the ancient Americas was “laughable” when it was published. In more precise terms, LDS scholars have frequently pointed out that these things were not commonly known then. The claim is not that nobody knew about it, but that this was not common knowledge. This claim, according to one of our vocal anonymous critics, is “just ludicrous.” In comments to my recent post, he explains:
This statement by John E. Clark, quoted by Jeff in his update, is just ludicrous:
The [Book of Mormon’s] description of ancient peoples differs greatly from the notions of rude savages held by nineteenth-century Americans. The book’s claim of city-societies was laughable at the time, but no one is laughing now.
That’s idiotic. In the 1820s, everyone and their uncle knew the basic stories of Pizarro and the “city-society” of the Incas, and Cortez and the “city-society” of the Aztecs; they knew about pyramids and other ruins around Mexico City—they knew that Montezuma ruled over a great city—they knew about the big burial mounds studded with strangely worked artifacts in the northeast U.S., etc.
Everyone and his uncle knew this, we are told. But that’s not evident in the reception such claims met in the early days of the Book of Mormon. The behavior of early Latter-day Saints and their critics strongly reinforces Dr. Clark’s observation and reminds us of the dangers of hindsight in evaluating the Book of Mormon.
Our critic goes on to explain that pyramids, writing, civilization, building with cement, and so forth in ancient America were widely promulgated in an extremely popular work, Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s Conquest of New Spain. So those claims in the Book of Mormon would have been obvious and easy for Joseph to concoct. Likewise, other critics called my attention to the works of German scholar Alexander von Humboldt who described scenes of ancient civilization in Mesoamerica long before the Book of Mormon came out. Joseph surely was aware of the abundant information about ancient civilization in the America’s, they say. Nothing impressive in writing about that. Yawn.
So if everybody and their uncle knew about Bernal Diaz’s Conquest of New Spain, I imagine we would find thousands of references to it in pre-1830 works. But a search on Google Books for pre-1830 works with the string “Conquest and New Spain” and either “Bernal” or “Diaz” yields only 5 or 6 works that appear to mention Diaz. A search for “Bernal Diaz” and “Conquest of Mexico” yields 8 works, including his own. Many more make mention of Bernal Diaz, of course. And yes, many publications had mentioned Cortez and Montezuma. But the issue is not so much what was on paper tucked in a library or university somewhere, but what was in the minds of Americans in 1830. In those early days, Diaz, von Humboldt, and Ethan Smith (who mentions and misquotes von Humboldt) were not cited as evidence for the obviousness or even plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, just as they were not cited by critics of the Book of Mormon. This all was a much later innovation of our critics.
If early Latter-day Saint leaders were con-men and knew of the works of von Humboldt, Diaz, etc., then why not call attention to the corroborating evidence in these works? Why not arrange for a third-party to come back from a remote library with a new treasure of Book of Mormon evidence and proclaim that new data had been found in support? Oh, because everyone and their uncle already knew all about that and it would have been no help?
In fact, it appears that the Book of Mormon claims said to be so obvious today were the subject of great controversy in the early days. Latter-day Saints were under fire for those claims, and faith was required to accept them until wonderful, evidence-based relief came around 1840. This relief resulted in bold new defenses for the Book of Mormon and bold new claims of evidence — at last! — for the authenticity and plausibility of that Book. This evidence did not come from any of the sources Joseph has been said, with modern anti-Mormon hindsight, to have obviously and necessarily plagiarized. It did not come by pointing to the works of von Humbold, Bernal Diaz, or Ethan Smith, sources which could have been used to buttress Book of Mormon claims, if only Latter-day Saints known of those sources. The relief came in 1841 when John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, an account of their travels in Central America that mentioned notable ruins they saw there. Was this already common knowledge? For the typical American, it was Stephens, not von Humboldt or others before 1830, who opened up the vision of Mesoamerica as a place where great ancient civilizations once existed. Stephens’ biographer gave us an important insight into the impact of Stephens’ work:
The acceptance of an “Indian civilization” demanded, to an American living in 1839 [when the first edition of Stephens appeared in England], an entire reorientation, for to him, an Indian was one of those barbaric, tepee dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged…. Nor did one ever think of calling the other [e.g., Mesoamerican] indigenous inhabitants of the continent “civilized.” In the universally accepted opinion [of that day], they were like their North American counterparts — savages.” (Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen, Maya Explorer: The Life of John Lloyd Stephens, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948, p. 75, as cited by John L. Sorenson, “How Could Joseph Smith Write So Accurately about Ancient American Civilization?“)
An 1848 editorial comment from the Church exults about the significance of Stephens’ work and reminds us that this was news to the Mormons and to the world:
Stephens’s late discoveries in Central America of Egyptian hieroglyphics, great numbers of which he has given in his drawings, and published in his able book of that curious region, and the still later discovery of many thousands of mummies in the caverns of Mexico, similar to those of Ancient Egypt, are evidences so pointed, that Ancient America must have been peopled from the highly civilized nations of Asia, that the learned are at last convinced of the fact. The unlearned, however, have got the start of the learned in this instance, for they found it out about nineteen years ago through the medium of the Book of Mormon. The Latter-Day Saints Millennial Star. Volume X, p. 343.
After Stephens’ book became well known and as educated people became more aware of the extensive civilization of ancient Mesoamerica, there was still little recognition outside the Church that such findings might shed favorable light on the Book of Mormon. Critics still condemned it as utterly implausible. An intriguing exception in the reaction of journalists outside the Church to the Book of Mormon comes from The New Yorker, edited by Horace Greeley. On Dec. 12, 1840, there was an article in which a writer under the name of Josephine, believed to be the daughter of General Charles Sanford, a New York lawyer and military figure (according to Donald Q. Cannon, “In the Press: Early Newspaper Reports on the Initial Publication of the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2007, pp. 4-15, see footnote 51). This was later reprinted in the Iowa Territorial Gazette, Feb. 3, 1841. After a fair-minded description of the Book of Mormon, Josephine refers to recent discoveries about Mesoamerica, apparently referencing the work of Stephens:
If on comparison it appears that these characters are similar to those recently discovered on those ruins in Central America, which have attracted so much attention lately, and which are decidedly of Egyptian architecture, it will make a very strong point for Smith. It will tend to prove that the plates are genuine, even if it does not establish the truth of his inspiration, or the fidelity of his translation. . . .
Josephine and The New Yorker do not seem to be aware that knowledge of ancient hieroglyphic-like writing in ancient Mesoamerican civilizations was common knowledge before publication of the Book of Mormon, and seem to view the knowledge brought by Stephens’ works as something that is novel.
Matthew Roper describes how Stephens’ book was received (“John Bernhisel’s Gift to a Prophet: Incidents of Travel in Central America and the Book of Mormon,” Interpreter, 2016):
It was widely praised in the American press for their interesting description of pre-Columbian ruins and their excellent illustrations, which pointed to a level of civilization in the region previously unanticipated by most Americans. The two men returned to northern Yucatan in 1841 for a second expedition, described in another publication, Incidents of Travels in Yucatan, published in 1843.7 In 1844, Catherwood published his own work, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, which included twenty-five hand-colored lithographs interspersed with his commentary.8
The books were enthusiastically received by American readers, including Latter-day Saints. Even before they were able to read the book, missionaries were citing reports of the travelers’ lectures in New York City as evidence for and to refute criticism of the Book of Mormon. Parley P. Pratt reprinted one report from the New York Express in the September 1840 Millennial Star. The article reported Stephens and Catherwood’s descriptions of numerous statues, monuments and obelisks “wholly covered with hieroglyphics and inscriptions” at the sites of Quirigua and Palenque.9 In November, 1840 Erastus Snow chided an anonymous critic who had insisted that there was no evidence of pre Columbian writing: “Here is a specimen of your consummate ignorance of American Antiquities. … Nearly all the principal papers of this country have of late published the results of the researches of Messrs. Stephens and Catherwood, in Central America. On the river Montagua, Monuments and Statues in abundance were found, many of which are covered with writings, and yet you say these are no proofs that the science of writing was ever known here. The system of Logic by which you arrive at your conclusion must be peculiar to yourself.”10 The June 15, 1841, issue of the Times and Seasons reprinted another article from the New York Weekly Herald reporting the substance of the travelers’ lectures. The Nauvoo editor who introduced the article thought the report “proved beyond controversy that, on this vast continent, once flourished a mighty people, skilled in the arts and sciences.”11
In a letter to Joseph Smith in September 1841, John E. Page explained a “new course of argument” that he had adopted and found useful:
I have great access to the people in a new course of argument which I have adopted and that is this — I have lately availed myself of the purchase of Stevens [Stephens] and Catherwoods travels in Guatemala or central America in which those gentlemen have exhibited by seventy plates the antiquities of that count[r]y which when compared with The Book of Mormon so completely proves the truth and divinity of the Book of Mormon there is not a gentile dog left to stir a tongue in an attempt to put down the collateral testimony which those records afford me in proof of the Book of Mormon — Next or second argument is the fulfilment of the Prophetical sayings which are in the Book of Mormon itself.12
The response of Joseph Smith and others in the Church shows that the early Mormon leaders were anxious to point to evidence in support of Book of Mormon claims. This 1841 book looks like their first big break. The Church then began publishing a series of articles talking about the great support they now had from this important work. Evidence mattered. It was wanted. It was boldly discussed.
If Joseph had known of a map that could support the plausibility of Lehi’s trail, surely that would have been discussed as soon as possible. No need to suffer criticism and persecution for a decade when a high-end European map could be found somewhere with a treasure like “Nehem” on it. Ditto for books about ancient civilization, temples, etc. If they had been part of Mormon knowledge, they would have been touted. If they had been part of common knowledge, the popular attacks on the Book of Mormon would have been of a much different flavor. As John Clark said, the broad ideas of ancient writing and civilization in the ancient Americas were laughable — not to everyone, of course, but to the real people that the Saints interacted with and who loudly mocked the Book of Mormon.
Information about the novelty of Stephens’ publications comes from scholarship around Stephens’ own experience. Stephens was a lawyer who, prior to pursuing his law studies, had four years of education at Columbia College in New York City. Through his successful publications about his travels in the late 1830s, he was among a handful of elites who had traveled the world and had a personal network including scholars of Europe and North America. In a biography of Stephens, Peter Harris, “Cities of Stone: Stephens & Catherwood in Yucatan, 1839-1842 — Co-Incidents of Travel in Yucatan,” Photoarts Journal (Summer 2006), http://www.photoarts.com/harris/z.html (initial page), we read the following in the introduction:
In 1839 a young American lawyer, fresh from his astonishingly successful publication of two books of travel, secured an appointment as charge d’affaires to the Republic of Central America. His official task was to locate the seat of government of that civil-war-torn country (then a confederation of states that are today the independent countries of Central America) and conclude a trade agreement with it. His real reason for this journey, however, was to explore the jungles of Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula for the remnants of a once-great civilization whose existence was only hinted at in the literature of the period.
In 1841 John Lloyd Stephens published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, bringing to the world for the first time a reliable account of the Xculoc, Palace of the Figurespre-Columbian ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula and northern Central America, ruins of a civilization we know today as the Maya. The existence of the fabulous cities of Palenque, Copan, and Uxmal was finally, unequivocally confirmed. The romantic image of ancient stone cities mouldering beneath the thick tropical rain-forest captivated the public’s imagination, and the two volumes, illustrated with Frederick Catherwood’s phenomenally accurate engravings, caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Scarcely three months after the publication of Central America Stephens and Catherwood organized a second trip to Yucatan to continue their explorations, which had been cut short at Uxmal by Catherwood’s illness. The results of this expedition were published in 1843 as Incidents of Travel in Yucatan.
These books were the first accurate and reliable descriptions of the Maya ruins of southern Mexico and northern Central America to be published. (emphasis mine)
But with all of his connections and access to information, how much about Mesoamerica had been obvious and well known to him for years prior to his travels there? Was he just rehashing and publicizing what was already well known? On page 4 of Harris (http://www.photoarts.com/harris/0025.html), we read the following:
Exactly when and where Stephens’ interest became piqued by the antiquities of Yucatan and Central America is uncertain. While he was in London he may have heard of the reports of Juan Galindo, the English-born governor of the state of Peten, Guatemala, whose notices concerning the ruins of Palenque and Copan were published in London and Paris between 1831 and 1836. Earlier, an edited version of Antonio del Rio’s report to the governor of Guatemala had appeared in London in 1822, with illustrations by Frederick Waldeck. In its appendix, entitled Teatro Critico Americano, one Dr. Pablo Felix Cabrera, of Guatemala, purports to prove that the ruins are Egyptian in origin. In 1834, the two volume Antiquites Americaines had been published in Paris, which also attempted to show that the ancient monuments of the New World were not indigenous, but rather the products of the civilizations of Egypt and India. The European ethnocentricity that dismissed the inhabitants of the Americas as “men just emerging from barbarity” insisted that if there had been an “advanced” civilization in the New World, it had been brought over by the Egyptians, the “Hindoos,” the lost tribes of Israel, or survivors from Atlantis.
In 1838 Jean Frederick Comte de Waldeck published Voyage Pittoresque et Archaeologique dans le Province d’Yucatan. At the age of 68 Waldeck, under the sponsorship of the Mexican government, had spent two years living in the ruins at Palenque, where he took a teenage Maya bride. He returned to Paris in 1838 to publish Voyage Pittoresque, his first work. Waldeck’s magnum opus was not published until 1866 (he lived to be 106 years old) and he is today dismissed as an eccentric whose “ideas are so absurd as to preclude any intelligent discussion of them.” Although F. L. Hawks (whom Stephens had met in London) and John Russell Bartlett each claim to have called his attention to the reports of ruined stone cities in Yucatan and Central America, their conflicting accounts agree that it was this 1838 work, with 22 of Waldeck’s inaccurate and romanticized drawings of Maya sculpture and architecture, that was the final spur to Stephens.
John Russell Bartlett, a New York merchant, bookseller, and ardent “antiquarian,” was later librarian for John Carter Brown’s collection of books on the Americas and chief of the U.S.-Mexican Border Comission of 1854. He was a founder, in 1842, of the American Antiquarian Society (Stephens and Catherwood were charter members) and was active in the circle of American intellectuals who were the forerunners of the anthropologists and ethnologists of today. In an autobiographical memoir prepared for his family Bartlett wrote, “…I claim to have first suggested these [explorations in Central America and Yucatan] to Mr. S.”
Hawks, too, in his obituary of Stephens in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, claimed, “In repeated conversations with the present writer, the attention of Mr. Stephens was called to the ruins of Guatemala and Yucatan, as represented in the works of Del Rio and Waldeck.” From the accounts of Hawks and Bartlett and the date of publication of Waldeck’s Voyage Pittoresque (1838) we may assume that Stephens’ plan to explore the ruins did not crystallize until the latter half of 1838 or the early part of 1839.
“Fortunately for him,” Bartlett continues, “Mr. Frederick Catherwood, a distinguished architect and draughtsman who had spent much time in Egypt and the Holy Land, and with whom he was on intimate terms, was then in New York. Mr. Catherwood had great enthusiasm in every thing (sic) appertaining to architecture, and was an ardent lover of the picturesque, and of archaeological research. Mr. Stephens made him a favorable offer to accompany him to Central America, which offer he at once accepted.”
The existence of advanced ancient civilizations in the Americas with great cities worthy of exploration did not seem to be well known to Stephens until long after the Book of Mormon was published. Can we expect those on the frontier without the benefits of advanced education and world travel to have fared better?
Added insight into the state of knowledge prior to Stephens’ popular book comes from an 1841 review of Stephens’ work found in The North American Review, Vol. 53, 1841, published by James Monroe and Company, Boston, available online through the Making of America section of the Cornell University Library.
The review begins on page 479 of the publication. Near the beginning of the review, on page 480, we have this comment regarding the ancient Mesoamericans and “the riddle of their history”:
The recent discoveries in Central America have attracted a new attention to these questions. The time for constructing a theory is not yet. The materials are still too scanty. But they are accumulating in great richness; and to no part of the world does the historical inquirer look with a more intense interest, than to that country, lately as little thought of as if it did not exist, now known to be so fruitful in marvels.
Now look at page 489:
It would be all but incredible, if it were not now shown to be certainly true, that in the wilds of Central America are found vast architectural piles, with complicated decorations chiseled in hard stone, which, different as is their style, might without extravagance be called worthy of the best eras of European art. The “vast buildings or terraces, and pyramidal structures, grand and in good preservation, richly ornamented,” struck Mr. Stephens on his first approach, as “in picturesque effect almost equal to the ruins of Thebes.”
Stephens is quoted on page 490 as he describes the experience of looking out over one of the ancient cities:
There is no rudeness or barbarity in the design or proportions; on the contrary, the whole wears an air of architectural symmetry and grandeur; and as the stranger ascends the steps and casts a bewildered eye along its open and desolate doors, it is hard to believe that he sees before him the work of a race in whose epitaph, as written by historians, they are called ignorant of art, and said to have perished in the rudeness of savage life.
Stephens is challenging the day’s common knowledge of Native Americans, showing that the architectural evidence points to an ancient people who were not rude savages or barbarians.
Also see page 491 and page 492, where we read an amusing illustration of the ignorance of the day. The reviewer quotes a passage from a competitor’s journal that argues for the ignorance of learned men and the British public by pointing out how some allegedly new discoveries were previously documented by others (“. . . we can adduce an extraordinary instance of the ignorance prevailing among literary and scientific men in general, of the immense sources of information from which they have been excluded by the voluminous pedantry employed upon the subject. . . . This circumstance is alone sufficient to show that the subject is, unlike Egyptian antiquities, comparatively new to the reading British public.”), but the reviewer then points out that this is in fact a serious error and that Stephens’ report of Copan appears to be the first – all of which only strengthens the case for the lack of widespread knowledge about Mesoamerica in that era, even among the learned.
As for the works of von Humboldt and their role in early LDS circles, nearby libraries available to Joseph Smith did not carry his works in time to be of any help to him. Regarding other LDS people and their use of or non-use of von Humboldt’s works, Henry Stebbins of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in a footnote added to a Feb. 1894 lecture in Independence, Missouri (available online at http://sidneyrigdon.com/1901Stb1.htm), said:
Some years after giving these lectures I learned that a brief synopsis of Humboldt’s works was translated into English and published in London by a lady named Helen Maria Williams, and in seeking among encyclopedias and antiquarian books for proofs I found mention of it on page 265 of Priest’s work, 1835 edition, which mention I had not seen before, not having read the book beyond the deluge traditions. But no date was given of its issue, and all search for it proved unavailing. And among all the authors only one or two even mentioned her work. At most it only proved that it was published by or before 1835 (or 1833), while the Book of Mormon was copyrighted in 1829. However, in 1898 Elder Heman C. Smith found a copy of her work in England and brought it to Lamoni, for the Church Library. The date of its publication is not given on its title-page; but on page 33 is given date of 1813 in Paris, which probably means something relating to its issuing in French, for the English issue was from London, whatever may have been the year. After a personal search of twenty-five years in city book-stores for antique works, this is the first copy I have seen. Other elders in the church have likewise searched, but have given no account of this work, which shows how very little it could have been known in America during these seventy years. There is no probability that it was known to Joseph Smith, or to other supposed authors of the Book of Mormon.
I dug into the von Humboldt issue in more detail a few years ago and published my findings as “Alexander von Humboldt and the Book of Mormon: What Could Joseph Smith Have Gleaned?” at JeffLindsay.com. The idea that Joseph or his vast team of imagined technical advisors drew upon von Humboldt’s works is simply implausible.
Everyone and his uncle today knows about ancient civilizations in the Americas. But projecting that situation into an assessment of common knowledge in 1830 results in an over-confident blunder that is belied by the words and actions of early Mormons and their critics, as well as John Lloyd Stephens himself. Yes, some people knew, but in general, what Dr. Clark said is fair. The Book of Mormon came under fire in its first decade or so for its description of literate ancient civilizations in the New World. And like so many other early “problems” with that text, what was once a weakness has become a strength.
Related resources:
- “What Could Joseph Smith Have Known about Mesoamerica?” by J. Lindsay
- “Joseph Smith, John Lloyd Stephens, and the Times and Seasons” by David C. Handy
- “‘War of Words and Tumult of Opinions’: The Battle for Joseph Smith’s Words in Book of Mormon Geography” by Neal Rappleye (Interpreter, 2014)
Update, Feb. 20, 2017:
A discussion of popular knowledge of Mesoamerica prior to the publications of Stephens and Catherwood is given by Matthew Roper in “Joseph Smith, Central American Ruins, and the Book of Mormon” in Approaching Antiquity: Joseph Smith and the Ancient World, ed. by L.H. Blumell, M.J. Grey, and A.H. Hedges (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 2015), pp. 141-162. Roper recognizes, of course, that here were some earlier scholarly works discussing Mesoamerican ruins, but they tended to be very expensive and were not known to the general public (pp. 145-151). For example, the significant nine-volume work of Lord Kingsborough published in 1831, perhaps the first to provide extensive illustrations of Pelenque in Chiapas, Mexico, apparently lacked a single copy in the United States by 1837, according to a complaint raised by William Prescott in 1839 as he was working on a history of the Conquest of Mexico (letter to Manuel Najera in Mexico, as cited by Roper, 145). Roper provides further details:
In his review of this period [before the publication of Stephens and Catherwood], another historian writes:
Despite the increased scholarly interest in ancient Mesoamerica, the works of von Humboldt, Del Rio, Dupaix, and Waldeck had remained relatively unknown to North Americans in the 1820s and 1830s. Berthould’s 1822 repackaging of the Del Rio expedition, for example, had failed to find a general audience even in London, while the enormous cost of Humboldt’s, King’s, Baredere’s, and Waldeck’s works effectively prohibited their purchase by more than a handful of wealthy European antiquarians. Produced in multi-volume editions with hand-colored lithographs, the works often commanded prices of several hundred dollars per volume–resulting not only in their limited circulation but also in some cases the financial ruin of their publishers.
In 1840, an American reviewer of Dupaix and Castenada’s work on Mitla and Palenque observed, “Here is a work, exceedingly interesting, as is evident from a mere perusal of the title page, to every American, and yet we think it possible that there are more persons in the United States, who have visited some of the monuments described in it, than there are who possess the work describing them. Only one copy, as far as we are informed, has reached this country. To us, therefore, this is a sealed book.” Unlike previous works, which were rare and expensive, Incidents in Travel gave life to a picture of Central America previously unavailable to most American readers. The travelers’ account of their experiences was interesting, and Stephens’s prose was easy to read. The value of the work was also greatly enhanced by Catherwood’s skills as a determined and observant artist. As Brian Fagan observes, “One cannot fail to be impressed by Catherwood’s extraordinary artistic achievements under these terrible conditions. His drawings are vivid and accurate, dramatic and sensitive, bringing the ruins of Palenque to life in their dense setting of sprawling vegetation.” This allowed the men to describe and explain their experiences in a way that prose alone could not do. For early readers of the Book of Mormon Catherwood’S drawings provided, for the first time, a conceivable real-world picture of what Nephite cities and monuments could have looked like….
The works of Stephens and Catherwood also provided Latter-day Saints with an effective rebuttal to a common reason for dismissing the Book of Mormon. That book tells of a people who had a sophisticated pre-Columbian culture, were literate, skilled in art (see Helaman 12:2), built temples (see 2 Nephi 5:16; Mosiah 1:18; Alma 16:13; 26:29; 3 Nephi 11:1), palaces (see Mosiah 11:9; Alma 22:2), and many large and populous cities (see Mosiah 27.6; Ether 13:5). This ran counter to one image of native American people that was common in the early nineteenth century. John Lloyd Stephens’s biographer notes, “The acceptance of an ‘Indian civilization’ demanded, to an American living in 1839, an entire reorientation, for him an Indian was one of those barbaric, half-naked tepee-dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged. A rude, subhuman people who hunted with the stealth of animals, they were artisans of buffalo robes, arrowheads, spears, and little else. Nor did one think of calling the other indigenous inhabitants of the continent ‘civilized.'” In opposition to this negative but popular view of the of native Americans, some writers, such as Etþan Smith, asserted that American “Indians” were remnants of the lost ten tribes of the house of Israel. Josiah Priest suggested a dazzling variety of transoceanic influences upon historic American Indian culture and history, including “not only Asiatic nations, very soon after the flood, but . . . also, all along the different eras of time, different races of men, as Polynesians, Malays, Australasians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Israelites, Tartars, Scandinavians, Danes, Norwegians, Welch, and Scotch.” Writers differed as to whether American Indian groups were actually descended from civilized migrants or whether cultural remains represented those of an unrelated people which had become extinct, but often drew support for their respective theories from the remains of past ruins which, they argued, evidenced the previous existence of a higher culture and civilization. These writings did not dispel, however, the skepticism of many other Americans who were either unaware of such arguments or found them unpersuasive.
Spanish conquistadors such as Hernan Cortes and Bernal Diaz del Castillo expressed admiration for many Aztec achievements. Descriptions of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and the Inca were available to those Americans who had the resources and inclination to read about them. For many, however, these accounts “were either unknown or considered works of unbridled imagination.” This skepticism was exemplified by William Robertson, an influential historian of the time. According to Robertson, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru were more sophisticated than the majority of American Indians, yet, in comparison with the peoples of the Old World, “neither the Mexicans nor Peruvians [were] entitled to rank with those nations which merit the term of civilized.” In October 1840, months before Incidents of Travel was published, the editor of the North American Review expressed a similar perspective. Spanish accounts suggesting sophistication and culture were highly exaggerated, the editor wrote, and could not to be taken at face value as evidence of high civilization. More than two centuries after conquest, scant archaeological evidence could be identified that would support the idea of a complex Central American culture. Scholars had not found “any remains of Mexican art.” No ruins could be found to exist “corresponding with the extravagant descriptions given by the early historians.” The reviewer continued:
All the Mexican constructions, existing at the period of the conquest, have long ago disappeared, with the exception of two or three ruins, which teach us nothing respecting the state of the arts at that period. Two centuries after the Spanish conquest, and perhaps a small part of this period, were found sufficient to sweep away all the works of the original inhabitants of the country. If the temples, and houses, and fortification, and walls of stone, described by the early historians, had corresponded at all to the magnificent accounts given by them, such a destruction would have been impossible. A much longer time would be necessary in any country to cause the disappearance of even wooden structures.
The reviewer faulted the historian Clavigero for crediting the descriptions by Cortes and Diaz of great buildings and lofty towers found in the Aztec capital, which the conquistadores said far excelled similar structures in Europe, since “not one stone remains upon another, to testify the existence of one of these palaces, temples, or houses. Two short centuries have swept them away, as completely as the Indian cabins, which during their existence, were reared and occupied upon the Ohio and Mississippi.” The learned writer concluded, “It is much easier for us to believe that there is gross exaggeration in these descriptions, than that such constructions were reared by Mexican savages, and that they have all disappeared without leaving a vestige of their existence.”
Many critics of the Book of Mormon shared this perception and rejected it, at least in part, on the basis of its description of Jaredite and Lehite cultural achievements. Missionary Parley P. Pratt described an 1831 encounter in which an Illinois minister dismissed the Book of Mormon for its apparent lack of archaeological evidence. “He said there were no antiquities in America, no ruined cities, buildings, monuments, inscriptions, mounds, or fortifications, to show the existence of such a people as the Book of Mormon described.” “According to [the Book of] Mormon,” wrote a British critic in 1839, “these native Americans could read, and write,” but “when that country first became known to Europeans, the inhabitants knew no more about letters than a four-legged animal knows the rules of logic; and not a scrap of writing was to be found.” There was not, asserted another critic in 1840, “even so much as a shadow or proof, that the sciences of reading and writing [and other evidences of advanced culture mentioned in the Book of Mormon] were ever known here.”
In later years David Whitmer remembered that the Book of Mormon, when it first came forth, conflicted with contemporary perceptions of native American culture. “When they were first commanded to testify of these things they demurred and told the Lord the people would not believe them for the book concerning which they were to bear record told of a people who were educated and refined, dwelling in large cities; whereas all that was then known of the early inhabitants of this country was the filthy, lazy, degraded and ignorant savages that were roaming over the land.”
Sorenson (ibid., p. 489) offers further insight on the prevailing state of common knowledge about ancient Native Americans when the Book of Mormon emerged:
The generally low level of public information and chaotic jumble of “fact” on “pre-Indian” settlers of America that prevailed in Joseph Smith’s day is illustrated by Josiah Priest, American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West… (Albany: Hoffman and White, 1833). In this credulous mishmash of opinions and excerpts from many books, mainly about eastern North America, he believes that “not only Asiatic nations, very soon after the flood,” but also “Polynesians, Malays, Australasians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Israelites, Tartars, Scandinavians, Danes, Norwegians, Welch, and Scotch, have colonized different parts of the continent” (p. iv). “All the principles of the stoic school of the Greeks are found in the practice of the American savages” (p. 386). Priest cites Humboldt in curious ways. Page 246 reproduces a drawing of the Aztec calendar stone from him, and he is the cited source for Priest’s supposition that Quetzalcoatl, far from being identified with Jesus Christ, was a Buddhist or Brahman missionary from India (p. 206), yet contradictorily, he also thinks that this “white and bearded man” came from some island in the Pacific “on the northeast of Asia” whose inhabitants were more civilized than the Chinese (p. 208). Clavigero is the source for his notion that the Aztecs came from the China coast by sea near the Bering Strait, then on to Mexico (p. 272). Christian symbolism arrived via Asiatic Nestorian Christians who crossed to America in Mongol ships. The ten tribes reached America by ships via Norway, having amalgamated with the Scythians (=Tartars), hence the “Jewish” parallels evident among the Indians.
Incidentally, Dr. Samuel L. Mitchell, no doubt the same person who was seen by Martin Harris, is one of the “antiquarians” whose opinions are summarized regarding the origin of the Indians; in Mitchell’s view they included Malay, Tartar, and Scandinavian transoceanic voyagers. Also, see a piece in the Portsmouth Journal (New Hampshire) for 1 November 1834, that reported, obviously on the basis of some urban newspaper, the vague information that expeditions into Mexican back country in 1786, 1805, and 1807 had produced drawings and detailed descriptions of ancient monuments; however, these had remained in the portfolios of the Mexican Museum until 1828, when “M. Abbebaradere, a French savant,” became possessor of them. He planned to publish them in Paris. The discoveries included “ancient idols of granite,… pyramids, subterranean sepulchres,… colossal bas-reliefs sculptured in granite or modeled in stucco, zodiacs, hieroglyphics differing from those of Egypt,” and so on. But no such publication was ever issued, nor was there any equivalent volume until Stephens’s. Clavigero’s volume on Mexico appeared in an English edition in 1817 in Philadelphia, but it was mainly a description of the Aztecs that gave little ancient historical information. Humboldt’s English edition of Vues des cordilleras [Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique] came out in London in 1814, but neither could it have informed Smith about more than snatches of fact on Mesoamerican civilization. The 1833 volume by Priest, who had vastly better library resources and scholarly skills than Smith, does not cite either Clavigero or Humboldt.
For additional discussion on what Joseph Smith could have fabricated based on publications available before 1830, see also Michael Griffith’s page, “The Book of Mormon–Ancient Or Modern? Could Joseph Smith Have Written The Nephite Record?” For details on what Joseph could have derived from Alexander von Humboldt, see my new page, “The Book of Mormon and the Writings of Alexander von Humboldt.”
The issue of written language also merits consideration. The Book of Mormon describes people who kept and cherished written records, who recorded their history, who had priests and prophets and books of scripture and prophecy, and who used written language in their commerce. None of this was characteristic of the Native Americans in Joseph’s area. Today we all know that Mesoamericans had written language anciently, but this was not common knowledge in Joseph Smith’s day. In fact, it was only in recent decades that this became understood and accepted by most scholars. It is one more area that Joseph could not have fabricated. To propose that ancient Native Americans had culture so advanced as to have a major tradition of written records was utterly without foundation–something likely to be mocked by the world of 1830. But once again, time has vindicated Joseph Smith.
Regarding the development of scholarly appreciation of written language in ancient Mesoamerica, consider the work of Linda Schele, as given in her obituary in the New York Times, April 22, 1998, by Robert Thomas, Jr., excerpts of which follow:
Linda Schele, a one-time studio art teacher who made a fateful vacation visit to Mexico that turned her life upside down and helped revolutionize Mayan scholarship, died on Saturday at a hospital near her home in Austin, Texas. She was 55 and widely known for her pioneering work in decoding inscriptions on Mayan monuments. . . .
Dr. Schele (SHE-lee) was more or less contentedly teaching studio art at the University of South Alabama in Mobile when her husband, a Cincinnati-trained architect who had long been fascinated with pre-Columbian architecture, suggested that the couple spend their 1970 Christmas vacation visiting Mayan ruins in Mexico. . . .
As the travelers began their tour, they were persuaded to make a slight detour from their itinerary to spend a couple of hours visiting the ruins at the obscure Mayan city of Palenque.
When they got there, Dr. Schele was so taken with the beauty of the site and so enthralled by the scholars she encountered there that the two-hour visit stretched to 12 days. By the time she got back to Mobile she had a new life’s work.
She remained at South Alabama until she had obtained a doctorate in Latin American studies from the University of Texas and become a professor of art there, in 1981, but Dr. Schele spent virtually every spare moment at Palenque and other Mayan sites.
Although the Mayans, who flourished from about A.D. 200 to 900, had long been recognized for their scientific work in devising a calendar based on advanced astronomical observations, they had been largely dismissed by scholars as sort of idiot savants, an illiterate nation of idle and indolent stargazers who devoted all their considerable mathematical and intellectual resources simply to marking time.
They were also seen as a blissfully peaceful people, whose fabled cities lacked even rudimentary fortifications.
As for the abundant carvings and glyphs on the countless monuments among the ruins, scholars had assumed these were variously religious symbols or arcane notations denoting the movement of planets.
The view had persisted even though a 16th-century Spanish priest had done important, though long-ignored, work suggesting that the glyphs constituted an actual language and though a spate of recent work, derided by established scholars, had even worked out the syntax of the language, in which individual glyphs represented syllables of complex words.
It was at a meeting of scholars at Palenque in 1973 that Dr. Schele emerged as a leader of a revisionist school of Mayan scholarship. When it was suggested that she and a young Calgary University student at the meeting, Peter Matthews, try to translate the inscriptions on the monuments at Palenque, it took the pair only three hours to discover that the inscriptions provided an incredibly detailed history of the Palenque dynasty.
Over the next dozen years, Dr. Schele and others deciphered and interpreted inscriptions throughout the Mayan realm, but it was not until 1986, when Dr. Schele helped organize an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, that the world learned the full implications of the work: Far from being an ethereal peaceful people, the Mayans were a warring nation who tortured and sometimes sacrificed their captives, whose nobles engaged in blood-letting rituals to placate their gods….
Again, let me emphasize that it was only in recent decades that scholars recognized the existence and significance of written records among ancient Native Americans, and systems of writing were only found in Book of Mormon lands, Mesoamerica. Was Joseph Smith just incredibly lucky that what looked like a silly blunder in 1830 would be validated in our day?
Update, Feb. 21, 2017
David Whitmer’s statement should be carefully considered, along with the other statements of early Latter-day Saints who faced trouble in defending the Book of Mormon before the arrival of Stephens’ publication. Whitmer in an 1883 interview with James H. Hart, said, “When we [the Three Witnesses] were first told to publish our statement, we felt sure that the people would not believe it, for the Book told of a people who were refined and dwelt in large cities; but the Lord told us that He would make it known to the people, and people should discover evidence of the truth of what is written in the Book.” (Interview with James H. Hart, Richmond, Missouri, August 21, 1883; see Lyndon W. Cook, David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness (Orem, UT: Grandin Book Company, 1991), 76, as cited by Stoddard). These men would have been glad to have some evidence to buttress the plausibility of the book their lives and reputations were tied to. For them, it would take a decade before that relief came. To argue that the idea of advanced ancient civilizations in the Americas was well known to typical Americans does not fit their experience, nor does it fit the witness of Stephens and those who reviewed his work. This was a paradigm shift for the state of common knowledge in the States.
In Stephens’ own volume 2, he wrote about his previous studies in seeking knowledge about the ancient Americas and describes the lack of widely available information. Beginning on page 295, he reviews the history of exploration at Palenque. When the first official report, after being locked up by Guatemalan authorities for decades, finally was published in London in 1822, “instead of electrifying the public mind, either from want of interest in the subject, distrust, or some other cause, so little notice was taken of it” that an 1831 announcement of another exploration of Palenque in the Literary Gazette in London described that later exploration as if it were a completely new discovery (Stephens, vol. 2, p. 296). He describes other manuscripts as well that were neglected or ignored. So yes, there were people who knew something of the state of Mesoamerica, but this was not common knowledge in any sense of the word, especially in the U.S., until Stephens’ work swept the nation and created broad awareness.
Update, Feb. 23, 2017
Another perspective on the state of common knowledge, as experienced by Latter-day Saints taking the Book of Mormon to the world, comes from George Q. Cannon, as discussed by Matthew Roper in “John Bernhisel’s Gift to a Prophet“:
George Q. Cannon, beginning at age sixteen, worked in the office of the Times and Seasons under the tutelage of John Taylor from April 1843 until early 1846. He would have become intimately familiar with the business of the printing office and the content of what was published and discussed there. In 1853, as a missionary in Hawaii, on reading from Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, he reflected in his journal, “What mighty works the ancients have left in those countries, exciting the wonder and admiration of all travelers and who read the account of their travels. These things are unanswerable arguments in favor of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.” Writing for the Western Standard in 1857, Cannon explained the significance of Central America in his understanding of Book of Mormon events.
The Book of Mormon pointed out with remarkable definiteness, years before the discovery of ruins in Central America, the situation of cities built and occupied by the ancient dwellers of this continent. Explorations made subsequent to the printing and extensive circulation of this Book, revealed the fact that ruins occupying the precise situation of these ancient cities, did really exist. Prior to their discovery the nonexistence of ruins of cities such as the Book of Mormon described, had been plausibly urged as an argument against its authenticity. If, said the objector, such an enlightened and highly advanced people ever occupied this continent–if they built cities and temples of such magnitude as stated by the Book of Mormon, where are the ruins? The discoveries of Stephens and Catherwood in the country declared by the Book of Mormon to be the principal residence of one of the colonies that were led to this land, overthrow the objections of those who were determined to view the Book as a forgery. [See George Q. Cannon, “Buried Cities of the West,” Millennial Star 19/2 (10 January, 1857), as cited by Roper.]
Based on what he and his LDS peers experienced, the Book of Mormon had faced plausible criticism based on the “non-existence” of corresponding ruins, according to the common knowledge of the day. The idea that Joseph was drawing upon common knowledge or any less common scholarly works of his day would not become a common anti-Mormon argument until many decades later.
Note also that Cannon and other LDS writers felt especially impressed by the location of the ruins, being in a place that seemed to throw exciting new light on the geography of the Book of Mormon, a topic discussed in my post of Feb. 22.
Further, don’t forget that the most basic aspect of the Book of Mormon was that it was a record engraved upon metal plates from an ancient people who brought sacred writings on metal plates with them from the Old World. Stephens strengthened the case for some kind of ancient writing in the Americas, but even with that, the concept of writing on metal plates was ridiculed for decades to follow.
As with many issues, some critics today try to allege that writing on metal was well known, and that the many evidences of ancient writing on metal plates discovered after Joseph Smith’s day do not count as Book of Mormon evidence since Joseph could easily have gotten that idea from elsewhere. But in terms of what was common knowledge and scholarly knowledge in 1830, this tale of scripture written on gold plates can only be described as laughable. Educated critics of the day saw precious little plausibility in Joseph’s tale of writing on precious metal. The learned Reverend M. T. Lamb in “The Golden Bible, or, The Book of Mormon: Is It From God?” (New York: Ward and Drummond, 1887), p. 11, comes to this forceful conclusion:
But after a very careful study of the book, a conscientious and painstaking examination of all the evidence he has been able to gather both for and against it, the author of these pages has been forced to reject every one of the above claims. He is compelled to believe that no such people as are described in the Book of Mormon ever lived upon this continent; that no such records were ever engraved upon golden plates, or any other plates, in the early ages; that no such men as Mormon or Moroni or any other of the prophets or kings or wise men mentioned in the book, ever existed in this country; that Jesus Christ never appeared upon this continent in person, or had a people here before its discovery by Columbus. In short, that no such civilization, Christian or otherwise, as is described in the Book of Mormon had an existence upon either North or South America.
No such records were ever engraved upon plates of gold or other metals. He doesn’t seem to be hinting that the basic idea of records on metal plates was well known and plausible, albeit a pious fraud in Joseph’s case. No, the very concept of such props is absolutely rejected — almost as if it were too funny for words.
Stuart Martin, writing in 1920, says that no one pointed out to young Joseph that gold would corrode if left buried so long, ridiculing the concept of preserving a text on buried gold plates. (Mystery of Mormonism, printed by Kessinger Publishing, 2003, p. 27). Bad metallurgy, Mr. Martin.
In 1857, the critic John Hyde, Jr. specifically argued that the idea of ancient Hebrews writing on metal plates was implausible. In Mormonism: Its Leaders and Designs (New York: W.P. Fetridge, 1857, pp. 217-218), we read this:
The plates. We must remember that it is a Hebrew youth, who “has lived at Jerusalem all his days,” until he leaves for “the wilderness.” . . . The writing materials then in use, and it was only very few who could use them, would be those such a youth would be familiar with. Now the Jews did not use plates of brass at that time. Their writing materials were
1. Tablets smeared with wax.
2. Linen rubbed with a kind of gum.
3. Tanned leather and vellum.
4. Parchment (invented by Attalus of Pergamos).
5. Papyrus. (M. Sturat, O. Test. Can.)
All the writings of the Jews long anterior and subsequent to Zedekiah were in rolls. (Isa., xxxiv. 4; Jer. xxxvi. 25; Ezek., iii 9, 10l Ps. xl. 7; Zech. v. 1, etc., etc.) These rolls were chiefly parchment and papyrus. . . . The use of this material superseded the stones filled with lead (Job), Hesiods leaden tables, Solon’s wooden planks, the wax tables, so clumsy and easily erased. This material rolled up could be bound with flax and sealed. . . . The Jews used this material. The Egyptians, whose language Nephi gives his father, used this material. Contradiction and inconsistency are stamped on any other assertion. This is another strong proof of imposture.
Jabs about the plates continue:
The genealogies were kept by public registrars and were written in Hebrew on rolls of papyrus and parchment, not on plates, nor in the Egyptian language. They were very extensive, embracing all members of the family, and were sacredly preserved. . . . This mass of names, embracing from Joseph, son of Jacob, down to Lehi, even though they had been, as pretended, engraved on brass plates, would have formed an immense volume and a great weight. (p. 219)
To have told one of those old Levites, specifically punctilious and even superstitious, that some one had copied their law in the language of the Egyptians (idolaters and enemies) in the first place, and had it durably engraved on brass, when they were handling so delicately these papyrus rolls, would have called it an infamous imposture. Every wise man will imitate the skepticism of that Levite. (p. 220)
All this vast mass of matter, it is pretended, was on these singular brass plates: the Pentateuch, history, prophecies, and of course the Psalms, for was not David a prophet? Add to all this the genealogies of their families ever since Abraham! One man could never have carried it all. (p. 221-222)
Michael Ash also cites LaRoy Sunderland’a pamphlet, Mormonism Exposed and Refuted (Piercy & Reed Printers, New York, 1838), for these two quotes:
The book of Mormon purports to have been originally engraved on brass plates…. How could brass be written on? (p. 44)
This book speaks… of the Jewish Scriptures, having been kept by Jews on plates of brass, six hundred years before Christ. The Jews never kept any of their records on plates of brass. (p. 46)
Today one of the oldest extra-biblical Hebrew writings we have happens to be engraved on a thin silver scroll, and there are numerous other examples of ancient writing on metal plates in the Old World. So much for a preposterous idea. (See “The Blessing of the Silver Scrolls” by Stephen Caesar, 2010, at BiblicalArchaeology.org. Also see “Bible Texts on Silver Amulets Dated to First Temple Period,” Haaretz.com, Sept. 19, 2004; and “Ketef Hinnom,” Wikipedia.org. While the dating and interpretation have been challenged by Nadav Na’aman, “A New Appraisal of the Silver Amulets from Ketef Hinnom,” Israel Exploration Journal 61/2 (2011): 184–195, that work was in turn rebutted by Shmuel Ahituv, “A Rejoinder to Nadav Naaman’s ‘A New Appraisal of the Silver Amulets from Ketef Hinnom,’” Israel Exploration Journal 62/2 (2012): 223–232.)
In spite of the documentation I provided above on this post about the long struggle it took for Mayan hieroglyphs to be recognized as written language that could be used to convey written history, critics seem to think that written language among the ancients must have been well known because a few old but not widely known sources refer to “hieroglyphics” in Central America. But in addition to the lack of common knowledge about ancient hieroglyphics in Central America, whether those hieroglyphics were actually a written language that could convey history was frequently disputed even into the 20th century. Indeed, the leading and highly influential expert on the Mayans in the 1950s, J. Eric S. Thompson, strongly resisted the possibility of those hieroglyphs being part of a written language and argued that they were “sublime” and “anagogical” expressions of cosmic numerology and time keeping, not written history. See Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology since the Fifteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 152, no. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 1-68; see particularly page 4.
Another useful reference on the topic of Book of Mormon claims regarding ancient written records is The Book of Mormon and Other Hidden Books Out of Darkness Unto Light by John A. Tvedtnes (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 2000).
Jeff, one of the problems here is our different starting positions. You begin with the belief that the Book of Mormon is ancient, I (and the entire non-Mormon world, and a growing part of the Mormon world) with the assumption that it is modern.
Here's one way that matters. If for some reason that Johnny Literalist were committed to the belief that Macbeth must be an originally ancient text, and that Shakespeare's role was merely to sit down in 1605 to divinely channel the work of some ancient storyteller, and I showed this person the evidence that much of the play seems to be derived from much later sources like Holinshed, writing in the late 1500s, then what would Johnny do? I can predict several avenues of defense. Maybe, Johnny would say, God had given Holinshed partial access to the same ancient truths to which he gave Shakespeare a fuller access. That would explain why the similarities between the two are not exact. Maybe too Johnny would say, Well, you haven't demonstrated that Shakespeare ever read Holinshed. Books back then were copied out by hand and were very expensive. People of Shakespeare's means could not afford books, etc.
How do the Holinshed parallels look to someone operating from the default assumption that Macbeth was written by Shakespeare? That evidence is no longer something to be explained away; the presence of elements of Holinshed in Shakespeare is itself evidence that Holinshed was a source.
Ditto for the presence of Nahom in the Book of Mormon. The fact that "Nehem" is on maps of Arabia circulating in the early U.S., and that it's in roughly the spot the BoM says it should be is itself evidence evidence that such a map was a source for the Book of Mormon. Among ordinary scholars, for someone to go on and on requesting evidence that Joseph ever saw such a map, as if the presence of Nahom in the BoM were not itself such evidence, would get old pretty quick.
The way secular scholarship approaches the BoM is to say, Wow, this is interesting—how could this have been produced in 1829? and then make an honest effort to answer that question, without, of course recourse to the supernatural. This would entail asking other questions, such as Did Joseph compose this alone, or in collaboration with others? Where might its general themes and specific details have come from—outside sources? creative imagination? What sources might he have used? What general cultural resources might he and his possible collaborators have at their disposal?
Thus far, when we look at these questions, we don't find one single thing that seems impossible for Joseph and his possible collaborators to have written on their own, using contemporary sources and the ordinary operations of the human imagination. Nothing.
You apologists keep telling us you have this or that "direct hit," in the form of some textual element that could not possibly have been composed by Joseph and his possible collaborators working on their own have, and we just keep chuckling. Alma 36? Idiotic. If it's a chiasmus at all, it's not a tight, poetically beautiful creation but a loose, baggy artifact of critical ingenuity. Early modern English? Again, idiotic—it's an artifact of sloppy methodology. Stubbs' Hebraisms? The result of cherry picking from dozens of languages in the Uto-Aztecan language family to find cognates in three or four Middle Eastern languages—to any secular linguist, a joke.
This kind of thing generates only laughter in secular academia.
The pity is there's no reason to do this. There's no reason for Mormons not to acknowledge the truth about the BoM. Yes, I know the prophets have long, long held that if the book is not ancient the whole religion falls apart, but those are just the words of men. The Church has changed its position on many former orthodoxies, and the Church still stands; it can change its position on this one, too.
— OK
Jeff,
There are a few problems with your story here. First, most of your citations are referring to people not knowing that the ancient inhabitants of the Americas had a system of writing based on pictographs like the Egyptians. Second is that even I, as a child, heard tale of lost cities of gold in the Americas—a legend that was surely known to all early Americans. Third, a cursory search of Google Books is not research. I myself performed a cursory search and found a book, published in 1837, called Peter Parley’s Universal History on the Basis of Geography written by John B Russel. Admittedly, the publication date is post-publication for the BoM, but one has to assume that most of what was included in this generic history was based on the common knowledge of history at the time—it wasn’t a ground breaking scholarly publication meant to prove anything to anyone. It was meant as a source of information for families trying to study history (it includes questions for discussion at the end of each section). I found some interesting points in it:
1) It referred to the isthmus of Darien as a “narrow strip of land.”
2) It claimed that South America was populated by “Ancient Carthagenians” (interestingly, Carthage existed during the 7th-3rd centuries BC.
3) It mentioned the main driving force for exploration of Mexico by Spaniards was the legend of El Dorado—a city of gold.
Some direct quotes for you from the book (emphasis mine):
When America was first discovered, the city of Mexico was even more splendid than it is now. It had stately temples and houses, which were profusely ornamented with gold and its inhabitants were more civilized than any other natives of America (451)
It has been affirmed that Cortez and his soldiers killed four millions of the Mexicans in completing the conquest of the country. . . (452)
A few years after the conquest of Mexico by Cortez, the Spaniards invaded the vast empire of Peru, in South America. . . Peru contained many magnificent cities (453)
In the course of time, the Peruvian empire was divided into several provinces (454)
Check it out here:
https://archive.org/stream/peterparleysuni00parlgoog#page/n473/mode/2up
OK–fixed it for you. . .
and the Church still stands; it will change its position on this one, too.
As Joseph Smith Sr. was employed for a time as a school teacher, one has to assume he had at least a rudimetary knowledge of the history of the Americas, which he likely passed on to his son.
Thanks, Anon 12:15.
As the LDS Church now is, the Church of Christ once was:
As the Church of Christ is, the LDS Church may be.
— OK
@OK, have you looked at Skousen's 2016 book Grammatical Variation? No, you haven't. Skousen hardly argues apologetically. His position since at least 2006 is that the language of the Book of Mormon — vocabulary and grammar — matches earlier usage that often isn't biblical. What he does in this latest book is catalog the grammatical editing the book has undergone, at times discussing English usage that is out of the ordinary. Many matches are found primarily or exclusively before the year 1700. That's the way it is, descriptively. Rarely, there is no match, and Skousen notes it. Sometimes there are solid matches with 18c usage. Again noted, in both Grammatical Variation? and in Analysis of Textual Variants.
So, I ask you, what motivates you to assert what you do about the language of the text when you have considered only a small portion of the evidence? An honest critic would study it deeply first, then broadcast an opinion. Language usage, as you know, is exceedingly complex, and the question of whether the BofM is a pseudo-biblical effort is open to scrutiny, for someone who is willing to take the time to make an honest, balanced assessment. That person is apparently not you. What you are doing here is seeking to make points based on evidence that is inherently weaker than the English usage of the text.
Mormanity –
Sleight of hand. Your quotes regarding Stephenson are not referencing The Americas, but Central America. Your assertion is faulty logic. It is like saying no one knew about the Aztecs before the discovery of Machu Picchu. You are correct (something I did not take the time to clarify before) that when Montejo conquered the Mayans, their civilizations was already in centuries of decay. Nonetheless they still had advance cultural systems that Landa attempted to eradicate, ergo, was not common knowledge in JS's time. Much like the Rosetta stone, Mayan writing was only recently deciphered
To that point, the lack of common knowledge as to detail regarding those civilizations is agreed to by the critics. That is exactly why they say JS got some many things wrong, such as the wheel.
Be it special pleading (you can only see the evidence if you have faith) or moving the goal posts (limited geography model, etc) it is all due to confirmation bias.
Jeff,
You make a great argument – but I'm still not convinced….mostly because Anonymous used the words "idiotic" and "ludicrous" to make his point. He said that "In the 1820s, everyone and their uncle knew…" about the ancient mesoamerica stuff. One wouldn't use such strong language like idiotic and ludicrous unless they had same very clear, concise, indisputable evidence for their argument. So you just wait…he will come here and present that and it will be very damning to your claims here. Let's hope he does it soon. Here comes some great evidence about the sources of that knowledge in the 1820's!
The main problem with proof of BoM evidence is everyone puts their own sway on it even including the secular intellectual.
The facts really are that several great civilizations once ruled and dominated different parts of the Americas. Beyond that fact there is too much conjecture. Even such things as deciphering the Mayan language correctly can be and are disputed. C-14 dates are debateable as is whether the ancients used steel or not. Population numbers also are debateable from every standpoint. We can all argue our own personal positions til were blue in the face but the truth is no one can prove anyone else wrong. Just as BoM proponents decipher evidence one way, critics decipher it the opposite. What is to be proven by all this? I personally think both the secular intellectual and the majority of BoM believers models are all wrong and I can argue my point all the day and night long and never get anywhere. What we all really need to do is look at actual provable facts and leave the train car loads of conjecture out of it.
You may want to check out John W Parker's history & geography published in 1837. It has a lot to say about what was known about the history of the Americas around Joseph's time.
So, no one really wants to engage with the actual intent of Jeff's post. The issue at hand "was the information about the advanced civilizations in Central America well known in Joseph's day? The critics have said yep but failed to produce any references. Jeff has produced his.
Glenn
I've tried to engage but my posts keep getting deleted for some reason. Refer to the Parker history above.
When America was first discovered, the city of Mexico was even more splendid than it is now. It had stately temples and houses, which were profusely ornamented with gold, and its inhabitants were more civilized than any other natives of America. (451)
It has been confirmed that Cortez and his soldiers killed four millions of the Mexicans in completing the conquest of the country. (452)
A few years after the conquest of Mexico, by Cortez, the Spaniards invaded the vast empire of Peru, in South America. . . Peru contained many magnificent cities (453)
I was reminded when I first read Jeff’s post, of the legend I heard as a child of El Dorado and the lost cities of gold (7 cities to be exact, known as Cibola). This was a legend prevalent in the time of the Spanish conquistadores, and if it lasted until my day, it was likely common knowledge in Joseph’s. Also to note, most of the quotes you have provided above, Jeff, are regarding knowledge of new world writing, not knowledge of population.
URL for Parker's history:
https://archive.org/stream/peterparleysuni00parlgoog#page/n472/mode/2up
Keep in mind it was published only 7 years after the Book of Mormon. It's not likely that much changed in the history books about the Spanish conquest in those 7 years.
Sorry for the multiple posts but this seems to be working. I must have been over the posting limit for characters in my other posts. Here's what my original post opened with:
Keep in mind that this primmer was meant for schools and families to learn about geography and history. It contains discussion questions after each section. It likely didn’t include any groundbreaking research or thoughts about history. It likely was a recital of what was known about history pre 1837.
If those passionate about bom historicity on either side want some interesting reading go to http://Www.caractors.org
Another publication, this one from 1820, that mentions the great societies of Mexico:
https://archive.org/stream/historicalgeogra00gord#page/12/mode/2up
I'm not insinuating that this book was in wide circulation in the US, merely that the knowledge of the great societies of the Incas and the Aztecs was known and in print circulation in more than one publication. This information seems to have been common knowledge. I will keep looking for more publications that mention it.
On a side note, archive.org is an amazing resource for scanned historical documents. What a time we live in!
Title: Historical letters, including a brief but general view of the history of the world, civil, military and religious, from the earliest times to the year of Our Lord 1820.
Published originally in a newspaper in Richmond, VA, then compiled and published as a book apparently with the hope of it being "a school book."
https://archive.org/stream/historicallette00colvgoog#page/n302/mode/2up
In South America the Spaniards own Terra-Firma, Peru, Chile, and Paraguay. Of these provinces the history of Peru is most engaging.
It was the domain of a race of magnificent princes entitled Incas. The people were wealthy, industrious, and considerably advanced in the arts of civilization: In this respect, they were thought to have exceeded the Mexicans, who were tolerably polished.
Glenn Thigpen –
So, you do not really want to engage with the actual intent of Jeff's post. The issue at hand is if the existence of advanced civilizations in the Americas was well known in Joseph's day? The critics have produced their links, Jeff has resorted only to a sleight of hand ruse confusing Central America for the Americas.
Thanks, Anon.@10:24 , for the interesting link to the 1820 Irish publication of Reverend James Bentley Gordon (https://archive.org/stream/historicalgeogra00gord#page/12/mode/2up), a book that appears to have had almost no impact on American thought in Joseph Smith's day. Before 1831, his name is mentioned 7 times (Google Books search set to the time range of 1700 to the end of 1830), mostly in books about Ireland. None of those books also mention Mexico or New Spain.
The weakness of Bentley's influence on popular thought is aggravated when we consider Joseph and his location. Like the potentially useful maps with the word "Nehem" on them, publications in Europe did not naturally come floating down the Erie Canal to Palmyra and almost certainly did not enter the very remote information vacuum of Harmony township where it appears there simply was no library or bookstore in the area.
Ah, but you must protest that your point was not that Bentley influenced Joseph, but that Bentley shows that Mexican ruins and civilization were known. But if so, why not concur with me in recognizing that this was known by some, with von Humboldt, etc., already cited as examples? The fact that Bentley has also read von Humboldt or other European sources on this issue is interesting. Slightly less interesting is for your 1821 find, where Mexico and von Humboldt are mentioned on a couple of pages deep in the volume, though it was a Washington, DC publication and perhaps easier to imagine reaching Joseph and his peers. But neither changes anything regarding the argument I have presented. The point is that, yes, some things were known and published by a few people, but this does not change the landscape of the day in which Book of Mormon claims regarding ancient civilizations and ancient literacy were actually laughable, as Clark reported. It does not challenge the widely recognized face that a big paradigm shift in views about ancient America occurred — to the surprise and joy of the Saints — around 1840 thanks to John Lloyd Stephens. He and his biographer are witnesses, as are many others, to the lack of basic knowledge that supposedly "everyone and his uncle" had when Joseph published the Book of Mormon.
This so-called common knowledge of ancient civilizations would have been very useful to Mormon defenders in 1830, 1831, 1832, etc., but was not known to them or many of their critics until the Mormons learned of Stephens' book and were able — at last — to point to significant evidence in their favor. The evidence was far more than just the existence of ancient civilization. It showed support for some specific details in the Book of Mormon that were not found in your sources or other writings before Stephens, as detailed in the Matthew Roper reference. But even Stephens does not provide support for the two main civilizations of the Book of Mormon, the Jaredites and Nephite/Lamanites in possible parallel both geographically and chronologically with the Olmecs and Mayans et al. That important aspect relevant to Book of Mormon issues would require many more decades.
This so-called common knowledge of ancient civilizations would have been very useful to Mormon defenders in 1830, 1831, 1832, etc. … The evidence was far more than just the existence of ancient civilization. It showed support for some specific details in the Book of Mormon"
Sigghh, if this was true, Mormanity would not be pointing to NHM/Bountiful as the strongest evidence for the BoM. The critics were empowered when details of ancient American civilizations became common knowledge. No horses, metal, swords, wheels, no ancient city civilization in New York, populations dynamics, etc, all resulting in the apologist, not the critics, re-imagining the original claims.
"a book that appears to have had almost no impact on American thought in Joseph Smith's day."
Did you read all of my post?
"I'm not insinuating that this book was in wide circulation in the US, merely that the knowledge of the great societies of the Incas and the Aztecs was known and in print circulation in more than one publication. This information seems to have been common knowledge."
You also say:
"Slightly less interesting is for your 1821 find, where Mexico and von Humboldt are mentioned on a couple of pages deep in the volume, though it was a Washington, DC publication and perhaps easier to imagine reaching Joseph and his peers."
The reason that they are mentioned "deep in the volume" is because it was a series of letters compiled into a book. Look at the title "a brief but general view of the history of the world." The author was attempting to cover the entire history of the world. The majority of the volume dealt with European history, which most Americans were more concened with as compared to American history. The fact that this description appears at all in a "general view of the history of the world" is proof that it was common knowledge. It also establishes a chain of custody concerning the knowledge of Ancient American civilizations and their level of sophistication between 1820 and the 1837 primmer–no new information was presented in that primmer. Remember that both of these publications were meant to be used in school for children. Just because the Big Bang is in a textbook, doesn't mean it isn't common knowledge–it is a strong indicator that it is, common knowledge. It was in the ether.
Also, as further proof that Joseph wasn't the only one thinking these things, consider this description of a tumulus in Virginia from 1822:
About one eight of a mile distant on the same plain, in a northeasterly, are three smaller tumuli of similar construction; and several other small ones in the neighborhood. Near the three alluded to, on the most level part of this plain, are evident traces of ancient fortifications. The remains of two circular entrenchments of unequal size, but each several rods in diameter, and communicating with each other by a narrow pass, or gateway, are to be seen, and also a causeway leading from the large-t towards the hills on the east, with many other appearances of a similar nature, all exhibiting marks of a race of men more civilized than any of the tribes found in this section of the country when first visited by Europeans.
https://archive.org/stream/collectionshisto00farme#page/n93/mode/2up
Before we get too deep into the weeds here, people, it might help to take a step back and consider the current state of "Ancient Book of Mormon Studies" as a (supposedly) scholarly discipline concerning a (supposedly) ancient text.
Do Ancient BoM Studies scholars have any pre-1830 copy of this ancient text in its original language?
No. Not a scrap.
Do these scholars know what language the BoM was originally written in?
No. They have a name for that language, "Reformed Egyptian," but no idea what it actually consists of. No vocabulary, no grammar, no orthography, nothing.
Do they know where the major events described in the BoM took place?
No. Maybe upstate New York. Maybe the American Heartland. Maybe Mesoamerica. Maybe the entire Western Hemisphere.
You get the idea.
Now try to imagine the real academic discipline of biblical studies in a similarly pitiful state.
Try to imagine biblical studies proceeding solely on the basis of a single modern translation, say, the KJV. Try to imagine biblical scholarship without the Dead Sea scrolls, the Masoretic Text, or any other pre-modern manuscript material—in fact, without any example at all of Hebrew. Imagine biblical scholars in the position of knowing, or rather, thinking they know, that there was some ancient, now lost language called "Hebrew," and then proceeding to engage in detailed "scholarship" with absolutely no knowledge of what "Hebrew" really is—with no knowledge of the actual vocabulary, grammar, and orthography of Hebrew, without even knowing what Hebrew letters looked like.
Are you laughing at these "scholars" yet?
Now try to imagine these scholars earnestly debating the location of a city that their modern (maybe-) translated text calls "Jerusalem." Imagine these scholars doing this with absolutely no archaeological evidence for Jerusalem, and only the vaguest of geographical clues from their modern (maybe-) translated text. Imagine the debate proceeding something like this:
Scholar One: "Where shall we find the ruins of Jerusalem? In the hills west of the River Jordan!"
Scholar Two: "No, no—the evidence clearly indicates it was somewhere near present-day Kazakhstan!"
Scholar Three: "Balderdash! According to my ingenious analysis of the text of the BoM, Jerusalem was somewhere in present-day Tanzania!"
Scholar One: "Well, my friends, I guess the important thing is that we all agree Jerusalem was real. Someday it will all be revealed to us."
This is pretty much where the pseudo-discipline of "Ancient Book of Mormon Studies" is right now on the question of where to find Zarahemla.
I hope this little exercise helps clarify why, to the entire non-Mormon world, in fact even to the Maxwell Institute and BYU, "Ancient Book of Mormon Studies" (aka LDS apologetics) is such a joke.
Eventually, even the most faithful of Mormons will look back on the output of FAIR and Mormanity the way that Catholics today look back on arguments about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
— OK
Nice article. Thank you. Note that the cite to the Donald Q. Cannon article should be to Vol. 16, No. 2 (not No. 1).
Also, Jeff, if you're interested in some actual scholarly work on the question of early Americans' fascination with ancient America, you might want to read Eric Wertheimer's Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876, which, according to the blurb, "demonstrates that early American culture took great interest in South American civilizations, especially the Incas and Aztecs."
At the very least you might want to read some of the work of two of the most popular U.S. poets, Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau, whose work frequently references Indian origins and ancient American civilizations.
— OK
Circa 1600 common European knowledge of the conquests came from the imagination of Theodor De Bry. His engravings show cylindrical pyramid made of brick for the Aztecs and European styled castles for the Incas. So a century before the time period Mormanity is requesting, we can establish common knowledge of city civilizations in the Americas. I took the bait and did his homework for him.
Remember that Clark's claim is:
"The hypothesis of human authorship demands that truth claims in the Book of Mormon be judged by what was believed, known, or knowable in Joseph's backyard in the 1820s. The book's description of ancient peoples differs greatly from the notions of rude savages held by nineteenth-century Americans. The book's claim of city-societies was laughable at the time, but no one is laughing now."
I've proven here that the "claim of city-societies" is not only not laughable at the time, but was well known. The fact that they are mentioned in multiple documents published on different continents is proof of that. The quotes from the text " Historical letters, including a brief but general view of the history of the world" proves a chain of custody of the knowledge of advanced Acient American societies between 1820 and 1837. What was presented in the 1837 primmer wasn't new information. Clarks claim is ludicrous and he should be embarrased to have presented it in front of an audience.
Interesting description of a tumulus in Virginia from 1822:
About one eight of a mile distant on the same plain, in a northeasterly, are three smaller tumuli of similar construction; and several other small ones in the neighborhood. Near the three alluded to, on the most level part of this plain, are evident traces of ancient fortifications. The remains of two circular entrenchments of unequal size, but each several rods in diameter, and communicating with each other by a narrow pass, or gateway, are to be seen, and also a causeway leading from the large-t towards the hills on the east, with many other appearances of a similar nature, all exhibiting marks of a race of men more civilized than any of the tribes found in this section of the country when first visited by Europeans.
Joseph wasn't the only one thinking these things and this is another proof that his thoughts about advanced native American societies were not "laughable at the time."
https://archive.org/stream/collectionshisto00farme#page/n93/mode/2up
@anon 9:57. Let's continue to step back – but I think you are missing something, or perhaps I am so let's clear it up. But before I step back like you, do you mind stating in one or two short sentences what you think Jeff's argument is?
Jeremy, Jeff's argument is that John Clark had good reasin to claim that the Book of Mormon's "The book's claim of city-societies was laughable at the time."
And Jeff, you are wrong to defend Clark as you do, because he is simply wrong.
I'm looking right now at a digital copy of an early American book that mentions "city-societies," Aztec civilization, etc. in a way that refutes Clark's argument. Not only that, but this book was written and published right under Joseph's nose, practically, just a few years before Joseph produced the BoM!
Here are a couple of typical passage from this book:
The Taultecs appeared in New Spain in the seventh, and the Aztecs in the twelfth centuries … [they] constructed cities, highways, dikes, canals, and immense pyramids….
These [Native American] works have evinced great wars, a good degree of civilization, and great skill in fortification. And articles dug from old mounds in and near those fortified places, clearly evince that their authors possessed no small degree of refinement in the knowledge of the mechanic arts….
So, this book was published in the 1820s. It totally refutes the notion that "The acceptance of an 'Indian civilization' demanded, to an American living in 1839 [when the first edition of Stephens appeared in England], an entire reorientation, for to him, an Indian was one of those barbaric, tepee dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged…. Nor did one ever think of calling the other [e.g., Mesoamerican] indigenous inhabitants of the continent 'civilized.'"
No one would ever think to call the Mesoamericans civilized? The book I'm looking at right now calls them civilized over and over and over—at least a dozen times before I stopped counting.
The weirdest thing is not just that this book was published just a few years before the BoM, or that it was published practically in Joseph's backyard, or that it was very likely known to at least one person in Joseph's inner circle, or even that it gives the lie to Clark's badly reasoned apologetics.
The truly weird thing is that Clark made his claims even though he himself must surely have known about the very book that refutes them.
— OK
Do you have a link to said book? I'd like to have a gander.
It's view of the Hebrews… he is not sly. He might as well state it since it's obvious to anyone
Mazel, are you Anon 9:57?
Jeremy –
”do you mind stating in one or two short sentences what you think Jeff's argument is?”
Sigghh …. It is pretty obvious. Ideas of “city-societies” in pre-Columbian Americas, were fringe ideas only. Mormanity is dismissing all books as fringe ideas, not common knowledge. It does not matter, because the burden of proof is on Mormanity. Mormanity could not provide proof, because he is in the wrong. He resorted to sleight of hand, with one book’s reference to Central America and then deliberately mistook it for the Americas. Also, following Mormanity’s example, the critics could dismiss his reference as not common knowledge, but a fringe idea.
In the case of establishing what was common knowledge, secondary sources synthesizing the time may be necessary. The de Bry engravings are presented by secondary sources as being how most European’s obtain their ideas of the conquests. Mormanity cannot dismiss them with more lame arguments, such as the super majority of people were illiterate, etc.
What is fascinating is the great lengths Mormanity is going to. He is trying to argue, that in 1830 there was greater evidence for the BoM hypothesis than in 1820. He was been proven wrong, but even he was right, so what. It does not change the fact that Mormanity concedes the BoM hypothesis was been debunked today by unfortunately confessing that the NHM/Bountiful evidence is the strongest evidence he has been able to hunt down.
Again, the existence of a book somewhere does not correlate to influence on the state of common knowledge. Using Google Books to see how often "View of the Hebrews" was mentioned prior to 1840 shows 3 works that mention it, according to my search. Three. This was not a book that influenced public knowledge in a profound way. The reaction of the public to the surprises revealed in Stephens' work and the reaction of critics to the Book of Mormon in its early decades clearly demonstrate that ancient civilization in the Americas was not part of anything approaching common knowledge, though it was known among some. Even reports that people encountered were often dismissed as exaggerations and "fake news." It was Stephens' work that opened the minds of many to the rich possibilities of ancient civilizations. It would still take over a century for the idea of ancient LITERATE civilizations keeping historical records to become accepted by scholars. That's just as important to this conversation as the issues of temples, roads, cement, etc. Lucky for Joseph, no?
I'm not sure I can take you seriously about anything after this statement:
"Again, the existence of a book somewhere does not correlate to influence on the state of common knowledge. Using Google Books to see how often "View of the Hebrews" was mentioned prior to 1840 shows 3 works that mention it"
Do you always trying to prove things by arguing a point you just said was invalid?
Again, vague assertions of surprise to a single work about a specific area does not “clearly demonstrate” common knowledge about another area. Insisting it does over and over does not make it so.
Also, again, no one has asserted that a book somewhere “influenced” the state of common knowledge. What has been asserted is that multiple items (books, engravings, attitudes – all distilled by historians) reflect the state of common knowledge. Again, no one is arguing that details of ancient city-societies were common knowledge.
In fact, critics agree with you on this one with. Apologist were initially excited about pre-Columbian discoveries. The critics agree with you. However, the hopes were dashed, something Hugh Nibley was probably the first major voice to recognize. Nibley began the process of gradually inoculating the common knowledge of Mormon’s. Now with the concession that NHM/Bountiful is the strongest evidence, all hope has been abandon with regards to pre-Columbian discoveries. Apolgoist no longer hope what was discovered in Central America, would be discovered in New York.
Again, after 187 years, theories of wandering Israelites, Romans, Atlanteans are laughable compare to 187 years ago.
To me everyone is arguing past each other. It seems obvious to me that
1. There were ideas in 19th/18th century America, including around JS environment, that there were great ancient civilizations that were destroyed. Mound builders around northeast US was of particular interest(Theories include lost 10 tribes, Egyptians, Australians, Siberians, Phonecians, etc..) However, these views were not universally accepted, and the BOM received some criticism at that time for its mention of large cities, etc..
2. It seems that JS and company did not have any idea of particular evidence of sites or tribes in Central America or South America based on their excitement of Stephens book, and their heavy use of it afterwards as evidence of the validity of the BOM.
Clark's claim isn't that the church or JS knew. His claim is:
"The hypothesis of human authorship demands that truth claims in the Book of Mormon be judged by what was believed, known, or knowable in Joseph's backyard in the 1820s. The book's description of ancient peoples differs greatly from the notions of rude savages held by nineteenth-century Americans. The book's claim of city-societies was laughable at the time, but no one is laughing now."
A non-believer would argue that the fact that a book was written about great ancient American civilizations is proof, in-and-of-itself, that people were aware that there were great ancient American civilizations. As "View of the Hebrews" demonstrates, the concept of the BoM wasn't a novel one. . .
Anon 8:29: Yes. Anon 6:57: Links can be found here. And Anon 6:52: Yes.
— OK
Anon 10:30 writes, It seems that JS and company did not have any idea of particular evidence of sites or tribes in Central America or South America based on their excitement of Stephens book, and their heavy use of it afterwards as evidence of the validity of the BOM.
Not necessarily. There are at least two reasons why there might have been "excitement" about Stephens' book: either (1) because it was introducing people to something they didn't know before, or (2) because it was adding to or clarifying knowledge they already had.
For a modern example of (2), consider the excitement generated now and then by new books about Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.
What JS and his collaborators had in 1830 was a vague popular understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. What Stephens provided was an opportunity to say, "See? "See! Our popular knowledge has now been validated by the intellectual elite!"
It would be as if someone today were to point to In Sacred Loneliness and say, "See! This proves Zane Grey was divinely inspired when he included Mormon polygamy in Riders of the Purple Sage! Nobody in his circle knew about that stuff back then, but now Todd Compton has confirmed the truth of Grey's divine inspiration!"
It's all so silly. The fact is that Zane Grey, along with everyone else and their uncle, knew about Mormon polygamy—just as Joseph Smith knew about the great Mesoamerican ruins. He didn't know a lot about it; he certainly didn't know the details, but he knew enough to have written the vague references in the Book of Mormon.
— OK
Jeff, consider the possibiity that what your post describes is something like the academic validation of existing popular knowledge. Consider that there has to be “stuff everyone and their uncle knows about” before there can be “the academic validation of all that stuff.” In Joseph’s time, the bare facts of Aztec and Inca civilization were widely known, because the amazing accounts of Pizarro and Cortez had permeated the popular understanding of New World history. This is not in the least incompatible with the idea that a subsequent researcher might come along and validate, add to, or refine that popular knowledge, nor that LDS apologists would welcome that book and use it as a prop in their arguments.
I see nothing in your post that is not consistent with the idea that Stephens was publishing in an environment of a general popular knowledge of Precolumbian Mesoamerican civilization. You’ve given examples of LDS apologists spinning the evidence that way, but if you separate the non-LDS evidence from the from the spin you’ll see
Have you thought much about how popular knowledge circulates in a culture, and about how it is affected by more elite forms of knowledge? I doubt it.
And statements like this make no sense to me at all:
If Joseph had known of a map that could support the plausibility of Lehi's trail, surely that would have been discussed as soon as possible. No need to suffer criticism and persecution for a decade when a high-end European map could be found somewhere with a treasure like "Nehem" on it.
Um, no—just the opposite! Joseph’s knowledge of such a map would be more likely to undercut the Book of Mormon’s antiquity than to support it. That’s why apologists like you keep downplaying the possibility of Joseph seeing such a map. Why would 19th-century apologists argue that Joseph did know of such a map? Why would they do the opposite of today’s apologists? You’re trying to have it both ways.
— OK
Also, Jeff, I got a good chuckle out of John Sorenson’s title, “How Could Joseph Smith Have Written So Accurately about Ancient American Civilization?”
The fact is, Smith didn’t write very accurately about ancient American civilization. He said that those civilizations were built by the descendants of expatriate Israelites, and (as even the Church now acknowledges) that is false. The civilizations were built by Olmecs, Aztecs, etc.
So how in the world was Smith “accurate”? Sheesh.
Anyway, here are some things I trust we both can agree on so far:
(1) There are ruins proving the existence of Mesoamerican hieroglyphics.
(2) Ethan Smith wrote about these ruins and, in View of the Hebrews, suggested they might be descended from Egyptian writing. (E.g., “Whence could have been derived the knowledge of the accurate hieroglyphical paintings … unless they had learned them from people to whom the knowledge of hieroglyphics had been transmitted from Egypt, its original source?”)
(3) As it turns out, the Mesoamerican hieroglyphics have nothing whatsoever to do with Egyptian.
Your argument is that Joseph got some stuff right about Mesoamerican civilization that he could not have gotten right using only his own knowledge — he could only have gotten it right by translating a genuinely ancient book.
So, how can this argument work if the stuff Smith allegely got right, he actually got wrong?
Let’s break it down. To recap: The argument is that (1) Joseph got certain ancient Mesoamerican stuff right, and (2) he could not have gotten that stuff right by relying on his own knowledge, but only by translating a genuinely ancient book.
In this exchange we’ve been arguing about (2). I’ve been saying Joseph could easily have known about the bare facts of Mesoamerican civilization because they were common knowledge (or in any event he could have learned them from View of the Hebrews). You’ve been trying to show that this stuff was not common knowledge.
But even if you’re right about (2), you’re still wrong about (1).
Even if you’re right about (2), you and your fellow apologists still have to explain this: Why do the Book of Mormon and its early apologists get some aspects of Precolumbian Mesoamerica right and others wrong?
What they get right are temples, towers, hieroglyphics, etc. — but all of this is in View of the Hebrews.
Among the things they get wrong are ethnicity (Mesoamerican civilizations are demonstrably not Israelite) and hieroglyphics (Mesoamerican hieroglyphics are not related to Egyptian).
So, gee, how do we account for the distribution of hits and misses here? What seems obvious to me is that both the hits and the misses are right there in View of the Hebrews. If in fact the great Mesoamerican edifices were built by non-Israelite Olmecs and Aztecs, and if in fact the Book of Mormon were a truthful ancient record, the BoM would not be telling us those edifices were built by expatriate Israelites.
What Ethan gets right, Joseph gets right. What Ethan gets wrong, Joseph also gets wrong.
How very odd!
— OK
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Here’s another way to think about this, Jeff. According to the most current of the ever-evolving beliefs of the Church and its apologists, the Nephites/Lamanites comprised just a small percentage of ancient Native Americans. Clearly, then, they were not the builders of the great pyramids, towers, and other edifices under discussion here; those were clearly the achievements of large, dominant civilizations, not some minority so small that its DNA would quickly disappear from the gene pool. Big, dominant civilizations do not typically allow minority groups to build monumental pyramids and the like in their midst!
So, the fact that large Mesoamerican civilizations existed is something the BoM gets right. However, according to the Church itself, these great Mesoamerican civilizations and cities were not Nephite/Lamanite civilizations and cities — and that’s a fact the BoM gets wrong.
So, if the great Mesoamerican civilizations and cities were not Nephite/Lamanite, why are we discussing them at all? I’m sorry, Jeff, but LDS apologetics these days is just totally screwball, six ways from Sunday. It’s just pitiful. It’s an embarrassment.
And as I keep saying, there’s really no need for these embarrassing mental gymnastics. There’s no need whatsoever to keep denying the truth about the Book of Mormon: it’s a 19th-century book that uses fiction to articulate a new religious vision integrating America into the Christian sacred story. This alone is a remarkable enough achievement to found a church on. And yes, I know that Church officials keep saying otherwise — I know they keep saying that absolutely everything depends on the historicity of the BoM — but those are just the words of men.
Consider the possibility that today’s leadership is just as mistakenly mired in literalism as Young was mistakenly mired in racism, and that their literalism is no more to be relied upon than previous leaders' assertions about the necessity of polygamy, Adam-God-ism, and all the rest. It’s not that the Church is wrong but that, once again, the leaders are wrong.
After all, there’s no reason to think today’s leaders are any less prone to human error than Brigham was.
— OK
Sigh. In Jeff's update we read that
(1) "it was only in recent decades that scholars recognized the existence and significance of written records among ancient Native Americans"
and
(2) "systems of writing were only found in Book of Mormon lands, Mesoamerica."
The first of these claims is false and the second is problematic:
(1) In View of the Hebrews we find the following, which nineteen decades ago, in 1825, "recognized the existence and significance of written records among ancient Native Americans":
Israel brought into this new continent a considerate degree of civilization; and the better part of them long laboured to maintain it. But others fell into the hunting and consequent savage state; whose barbarous hordes invaded their more civilized brethren, and eventually annihilated most ofthem, and all in these northern regions! Their hieroglyphical records, paintings and knowledge of the solar year, (let it be repeated and remembered) agree to nothing that could have descended from the barbarous hordes of the northeast of Europe, and north of Asia; but they well agree with the ancient improvements and state of Israel.
So here we have Ethan Smith indicating that ancient Mesoamerican written records exist, and that those records argue against the Asiatic theory and for the Israelite theory of Native Americans. This is not something we find "only in recent decades"; it's something we find right under Joseph Smith's nose.
(2) Jeff, are you so sure the Book of Mormon lands were really in Mesoamerica? The Church itself wisely takes no position on this issue. You might want to be careful not to rush in where the Church fears to tread.
— OK
As for your Feb. 21 update, Jeff, why should anyone take seriously the statement of someone made more than half a century after the fact — especially when it is directly contradicted by the evidence? In addition to Ethan Smith and Humboldt, there are allusions to ancient Indian civilizations, temples, hieroglyphics, etc. in Adair, Boudinot, and Clavigero (in the context of Israelite native ancestry, no less) as well as the popular poetry of Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, and William Cullen Bryant.
You keep arguing that ignorance of Mesoamerican civilization made the Book of Mormon hard to believe, when in fact the exact opposite was more likely true: people's vague general knowledge of such civilization helped make the book ring true to them.
— OK
Regarding Joseph and the speculative dream map, I said:
"If Joseph had known of a map that could support the plausibility of Lehi's trail, surely that would have been discussed as soon as possible. No need to suffer criticism and persecution for a decade when a high-end European map could be found somewhere with a treasure like "Nehem" on it."
OK objects:
Um, no—just the opposite! Joseph’s knowledge of such a map would be more likely to undercut the Book of Mormon’s antiquity than to support it. That’s why apologists like you keep downplaying the possibility of Joseph seeing such a map. Why would 19th-century apologists argue that Joseph did know of such a map? Why would they do the opposite of today’s apologists? You’re trying to have it both ways.
I'm quite confused about where you are coming from. I'm not suggesting that Joseph would want people to know that he was aware of a map of Arabia BEFORE the translation was done. Of course not. But once the Book of Mormon was out, if a relevant map were known to exist, the smart thing to do would be to have someone trot it out and point to the corroborating evidence it provides. When a Latter-day Saint finally did encounter one of the rare old Nehem-mentioning maps, it was indeed cited right away in official LDS publication and hailed as an interesting piece of evidence that might be related to Lehi's trail, but that was 1978. There's no hint that any Mormon saw such a map before Dr. Ross T. Christensen of BYU reported his find.
OK, why would a fabricator want to use an intricate detail like the name Nehem from a map? Indeed, why use anything from a map? Clearly, it would be to make the tale more plausible, to "add local color" as some articulate critics now insist, etc. But these benefits are lost if nobody has ever heard of Nehem. If the map used details that nobody ever heard of, what good would that do? If local color and evidence of plausibility had been added from a map, the obvious path forward would then be to have someone come forward and say, "Hey, look, here is evidence of plausibility on this rare map I just found! There actually is place name like Nahom in a plausible place. Wow!"
Now of course, you don't want Joseph stepping up to the podium and saying, "Here's a map I swiped from the local library right before I began translating the gold plates. Hey, look at this cool evidence. Nehem, right there on the map! Honest, I never noticed it until today." Mormons were taking heat for the alleged silliness of the Arabian trek, just as they were taking heat for claims of ancient literate peoples in the Americas, so such a map with apparent evidence would have been of great interest, just as it was in 1878. But it may be that no LDS person noticed that on one of the few Nehem maps before then, for such maps are indeed rare, expensive, and were mostly in Europe.
Your puzzling argument that Joseph would not want people to know about poentially corroborating evidence on an old map of Arabia is further undermined by what happened when Joseph encountered View of the Hebrews in the 1840s (this was after he and other members of the Church had realized that there was impressive evidence of ancient civilizations in the Americas, and members apparently began paying much more attention to what was in print on such matters). See Times and Seasons, June 1, 1842, where Joseph quoted View of the Hebrews in support of the Book of Mormon. Surely, certainly, if that had been a source for Joseph Smith, he would not have mentioned it.
Unlike the rare European Nehem-related maps of Arabia that he almost certainly had no access to, an American book was something he could and eventually did encounter, though as I mentioned, citation analysis in Google Books shows it was definitely not an influential and widely known book before 1840. And in fact, no anti-Mormon critic speculated that it was a potential source until 1902. If anything, Joseph had helped increase awareness of a very obscure book. If he had plagiarized from it, surely he would have gone out of his way to cover up any discussion of that book. But to cite it as evidence for the Book of Mormon is a clear indication that he wasn't trying to cover anything up regarding that source.
Once again, OK, the issue we are discussing is not whether anybody know of ancient civilization and writing in the Americas, but whether such things were common knowledge — or, as you put it, "In the 1820s, everyone and their uncle knew the basic stories of Pizarro and the 'city-society' of the Incas, and Cortez and the 'city-society' of the Aztecs; they knew about pyramids and other ruins around Mexico City…." I don't dispute that some educated people knew of this and that even some American authors had written on this topic, including Ethan Smith. But substantial evidence shows that these things were not common knowledge, and that a great many people and their numerous uncles were rather surprised when John Lloyd Stephens revealed his finds from Central America. Citing the existence of some books of articles does not refute what we can see from many sources about the state of common knowledge in the 1820s and beyond about the ancient Americas.
Jeff writes, I'm quite confused about where you are coming from. I'm not suggesting that Joseph would want people to know that he was aware of a map of Arabia BEFORE the translation was done. Of course not. But once the Book of Mormon was out, if a relevant map were known to exist, the smart thing to do would be to have someone trot it out and point to the corroborating evidence it provides.
I don’t get it, Jeff. How could Joseph show people an old Arabian map in 1831 without arousing suspicion that he’d had access to one in 1829? The only people he would impress would be those non-skeptical enough to have been taken in by the Book of Mormon in the first place. But they're not the skeptics Joseph needed to impress.
The skeptics would simply say to Joseph, "Well, we don't believe that you first encountered this map yesterday. We think you saw a copy before writing the book."
What's Joseph going to say at that point? "No, I swear I didn't! I swear on my pinkie finger!"
And how could the Arabian map being displayed by Joseph in 1831 settle the question either way? It couldn't. The significance of the map would depend wholly on whether one trusted Joseph's word.
Jeff also writes, There's no hint that any Mormon saw such a map before Dr. Ross T. Christensen of BYU reported his find.
Actually, there is such a hint: it's the mention of Nahom in the Book of Mormon itself. For secular-minded scholars, the details of Lehi's journey, scant as they are, are themselves the evidence that Joseph or a collaborator saw such a map.
Part of the problem here, as almost always in these discussions, is the difference between those who start from the orthodox LDS position of faith in the BoM's ancientness, and those who start from the secular position and, as with all secular scholarship, require natural explanations. (And Joseph’s access to an Arabian map is the best secular explanation we have right now for some of the details of Lehi’s journey.)
Anyway, this explains why James Gee would publish all those Nehem maps: because to him and his fellow believers, they were evidence that corroborated Smith. We gentiles responded by saying "Thanks for digging up more source material that builds our case against the BoM!" The exact same thing is true of BYU's decision to publish an edition of View of the Hebrews.
To be continued…
— OK
Now, Jeff, for the sly deception in your analysis of the reception of Stephens' book.
The basic problem involves a confusion between, on the one hand, basic knowledge that is already widely known, and on the other hand new details that are not already widely known.
I'm arguing for the former; you're trying to refute me with evidence of the latter. See the problem?
Here's an example from your post of the kind of slippage I'm talking about, with the new details bolded:
Stephens's late discoveries in Central America of Egyptian hieroglyphics, great numbers of which he has given in his drawings, and published in his able book of that curious region, and the still later discovery of many thousands of mummies in the caverns of Mexico, similar to those of Ancient Egypt, are evidences so pointed, that Ancient America must have been peopled from the highly civilized nations of Asia, that the learned are at last convinced of the fact.
First, I'll be generous here and set aside the fact that this Church publication is 100 percent wrong about so much stuff, e.g., the hieroglyphics in question are not Egyptian. Let's just look at what, according to this Church publication, Stephens is introducing, supposedly for the first time, to his readership.
He is not introducing to his readers, for the first time, the fact that there were civilized people and cities and hieroglyphics in Precolumbian Mexico. He is only introducing two new details: the (supposed) Egyptian nature of those hieroglyphics, and the discovery of mummies.
In other words, all that is "news" in this quote, and all that (supposedly) adds to the case for the Book of Mormon, is the (supposed) Egyptian nature of the hieroglyphics, and the mummies. That's the news. The news is about new details concerning Mesoamerican civilization. Yet you are misleading us into thinking that the news here is the bare fact of Mesoamerican civilization itself.
Again, see the problem?
Think of it like this. Today, in America, pretty much everyone and their uncle knows about Martin Luther King. About the most basic facts of King's life and work there is nearly universal knowledge and agreement: that he existed in the first place, that he was African-American, that he was a minister, that he was a leader of the Civil Right Movement — everyone and their uncle knows this basic stuff.
But there are also many things about King that people don't know, and many questions about him on which people disagree: was he really a communist, as J. Edgar Hoover said, or was he a socialist, or what? Was he really a womanizer who cheated on his wife? I would guess that many ordinary people, while they and their uncles know the basics, don't know much about these questions, and of course most people know far less about any number of other details: King's role in the Albany Movement, the role of Police Chief Laurie Pritchett in securing King's release from jail, the specific brand of watch he wore, whatever. There's always something new to learn.
Suppose someone were to publish a new book on King today, and it introduced American readers to fascinating and significant details they didn't previously know. This book might generate the same kinds of responses as Stephens' book on Mesoamerica. Reviewers might well praise the book for enlightening readers on the details — for introducing readers to facts they had not previously known — and among those reviews a determined and unscrupulous scholar could probably pick out some snippets that made it appear as if, prior to the appearance of the book, ordinary people knew nothing of MLK at all.
Jeff, I know you're not unscrupulous, and I'm confident you'll be able to figure all this stuff out eventually.
To be continued…
— OK
Just a bit more, folks, and then I'm done. If what I've said thus far is not persuasive, I'm not sure what would be.
Of View of the Hebrews, Jeff writes, If he had plagiarized from it, surely he would have gone out of his way to cover up any discussion of that book.
Once again with the slippage…. I have never said that Joseph "plagiarized" from VoH. My argument is that it likely served as a source — quite a different thing. He didn't copy passages of VoH verbatim; rather, VoH planted certain ideas in his mind that his creative religious imagination then elaborated on, with additional influence from the Bible and possibly other sources as well. Joseph took Ethan's basic outline, personalized it by reducing the 10 Tribes to a single family, then peopled the outline with individual characters, etc.
This is all very typical of the writing of historical fiction. It's how "influence" works. Not at all the same thing as plagiarism.
Jeff also writes, But to cite it [VoH] as evidence for the Book of Mormon is a clear indication that he wasn't trying to cover anything up regarding that source.
So, Joseph cited Ethan's book. But what does that mean? It doesn't necessarily mean VoH was not a source for the BoM. It could mean that Joseph himself, in the grip of a rapturous enthusiasm that clouded his rational judgment, saw VoH as vindication of the BoM, and his self-regard was so great that he simply assumed everyone else would see the situation as he saw it. Or it might mean that Joseph saw VoH in much the same way apologists today see the Masonry and its rites: as the partially mistaken recognition of divine truths that Joseph/the Church got wholly right. If that's how he saw VoH, he'd have no more reason to cover it up (which he could not have done anyway) than the Church has for covering up Masonry.
To sum up your 7,000+ word post, Jeff: there's much less there than meets the eye. Sorry.
— OK
Mormanity says “substantial evidence shows that these things were not common knowledge”. If Mormanity had such a method for upsetting historical thought of what was and was not common knowledge in a place and time, he would be up for amateur historian of the year.
For example, if a historian wanted to ponder how ruggedly independently frontier Americans were, how would they go about falsifying the assertion? I forget her name, but one such professional historian did just that. She painstaking went through wills of the time to demonstrate what was and was not in them. Before the highways were built, many frontiers folk distilled their grain and corn to bad tasting fire water. The low quality whiskey was cheaper to transport than bulk crops. The financial value of a still was roughly the same as rifles. The wills had many rifles, but few stills, ergo the frontiers folk paid someone nearby to distill their crops. This and other items leads historians to suggest frontier Americans employed division of labor and were not as ruggedly independent as we use to imagine.
Did you notice, among many others, the quoted material above about how scholarly writers in 1840 were discounting allegations of high civilization in Ancient America? That should be prima facie evidence that this was simply not common knowledge then and especially not in 1830 and especially not among rural farm folk.
Spanish conquistadors such as Hernan Cortes and Bernal Diaz del Castillo expressed admiration for many Aztec achievements. Descriptions of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and the Inca were available to those Americans who had the resources and inclination to read about them. For many, however, these accounts "were either unknown or considered works of unbridled imagination." This skepticism was exemplified by William Robertson, an influential historian of the time. According to Robertson, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru were more sophisticated than the majority of American Indians, yet, in comparison with the peoples of the Old World, "neither the Mexicans nor Peruvians [were] entitled to rank with those nations which merit the term of civilized." In October 1840, months before Incidents of Travel was published, the editor of the North American Review expressed a similar perspective. Spanish accounts suggesting sophistication and culture were highly exaggerated, the editor wrote, and could not to be taken at face value as evidence of high civilization. More than two centuries after conquest, scant archaeological evidence could be identified that would support the idea of a complex Central American culture. Scholars had not found "any remains of Mexican art." No ruins could be found to exist "corresponding with the extravagant descriptions given by the early historians." The reviewer continued:
All the Mexican constructions, existing at the period of the conquest, have long ago disappeared, with the exception of two or three ruins, which teach us nothing respecting the state of the arts at that period. Two centuries after the Spanish conquest, and perhaps a small part of this period, were found sufficient to sweep away all the works of the original inhabitants of the country. If the temples, and houses, and fortification, and walls of stone, described by the early historians, had corresponded at all to the magnificent accounts given by them, such a destruction would have been impossible. A much longer time would be necessary in any country to cause the disappearance of even wooden structures.
The reviewer faulted the historian Clavigero for crediting the descriptions by Cortes and Diaz of great buildings and lofty towers found in the Aztec capital, which the conquistadores said far excelled similar structures in Europe, since "not one stone remains upon another, to testify the existence of one of these palaces, temples, or houses. Two short centuries have swept them away, as completely as the Indian cabins, which during their existence, were reared and occupied upon the Ohio and Mississippi." The learned writer concluded, "It is much easier for us to believe that there is gross exaggeration in these descriptions, than that such constructions were reared by Mexican savages, and that they have all disappeared without leaving a vestige of their existence."
These were elite, highly educated writers who dismissed rumors of advanced ancient civilization. If they doubted those concepts, were they common knowledge? And if common, why did Stephens' work create such a revolution in thinking and fervent interest? Why did Mormons get so excited if this was just another ho-hum twist on something well known?
Why did Mormons get so excited if this was just another ho-hum twist on something well known?
Let me try again, this time with an analogy.
Back in the day, for my generation at least, everyone and their uncle knew that Liberace was gay. We didn't know this because we had read about in peer-reviewed journals; it was just one of those things that was circulating at the time.
But even though this was well-known, people were still very much interested to learn the truth about Liberace's sexuality from more official sources of knowledge. Maybe that's because people like to have their beliefs officially validated, maybe too because people like to learn the details about matters they know only sparingly, e.g., that Liberace had AIDS, that the main reason he hung around with Betty White was to use her as a "beard," etc.
Make sense so far? Now suppose that in 1958 I wrote a work of fiction based on a handsome pianist named Lippimuccho who made TV appearances dressed in sequined suits, talked with a lisp, behaved with a stereotypically gay flamboyance, and was widely suspected of being gay. Scholars nowadays would no doubt suspect that Liberace was a source for the character. If a critic were to say "But wait—Liberace was closeted his entire life, so how could OK have used him as a source?" the scholars would rightly respond, "Closeted or not, everyone and their uncle knew Liberace was gay."
Suppose this critic then said, "If everyone knew Liberace was gay, why did everyone get so excited about the news reports that came out later, proving he was gay?" At this point, the scholars will quite justifiably start rolling their eyes and stop inviting this critic to their parties.
Anyway, what I hope to have illustrated here is the basic idea is that later interest and excitement about a topic does not entail an earlier total ignorance of the topic.
— OK
I think one important piece of evidence that up to now has been overlooked is the fact that for a time in his latter teen years, Joseph Smith was employed to seek as well as dig for ancient buried treasure. This, according to the church, was a common practice in Joseph's time and place. Were they looking for wampum? Valuable teepees? Certainly they weren't looking for anything buried by "an Indian [who] was one of those barbaric, tepee dwellers." Because no "one ever [thought] of calling the other [e.g., Mesoamerican] indigenous inhabitants of the continent 'civilized.' In the universally accepted opinion [of that day], they were like their North American counterparts — savages."
So what treasure were they seeking? What savage culture would have produced items valuable enough to go digging around in the ground for them?
Since you use a quote that mentions Palenque, I'll jump in and tell you about new evidence indicating that Palenque had a royal palace in use during 300-100 BC: http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/spring-2017/article/archaeologists-uncover-early-state-society-palace-in-mexico
And here I've dismissed Palenque for years as a possible BoM site. Never say never when it comes to Mesoamerican archaeology.
My favorite part of this discussion is how imaginative Mesoamerican proponents are. Jeff cites Sorenson's article, "How Could Joseph Smith Write So Accurately about Ancient American Civilization?" But Joseph Smith forgot to mention jungles, volcanoes, stone buildings (let alone massive stone pyramids), jade, jaguars, tapirs, or even Mayans.
Because nothing in the text of the Book of Mormon refers or even alludes to Central America, the Mesoamerican proponents invent new definitions for the plain language of the text in a futile effort to distract from what Joseph actually described, both in the text and in his own words: i.e., a North American setting.
As a non-Mormon who nevertheless appreciates the caliber of LDS scholarship in many ways, here's my big issue with the structure of the argument that 19th century knowledge of ancient America diverted from the Book of Mormon text where modern knowledge of ancient America converges. It seems to me that LDS scholars in this case want to have their cake and eat it too: on the one hand, Joseph is uneducated, but on the other, we are to evaluate the Book of Mormon's concordance with the 19th century's understanding of ancient America according to what scholars believed it to be.
Joseph wouldn't have had much of a clue what the academic understanding of ancient America was. The popular understanding would have understood ancient America on the model of the Old World ancient civilizations with which they were familiar from the Bible and elsewhere. The Book of Mormon largely reflects this, with Old World animals, old world crops, old world technology and so on. So insofar as the Book of Mormon has converted with contemporary knowledge of ancient American civilization, our knowledge of the latter has converged more and more with a popular understanding of ancient America in Joseph Smith's time and place.
I am curious to know what "the caliber of LDS Scholarship" actually means. Is it the striving for truth and the celebration of fact through true intricate research, or is it the celebration of cultural reinforcement through the writing of supposition, misrepresentation, and lies to support a veritable delusion? The whole crux of Mormonism hinges on the alleged honesty and integrity of one Joseph Smith, Jr., and every thesis and doctoral dissertation written and accepted by the Departments of Religion and Anthropology at BYU that asserts the true facts about Joseph Smithy, Jr.'s true history of lies, deceptions, and sexual perversions are rejected. It was Dallin Oaks and Boyd K. Packer who promoted the "lying for the Mormon lord" practice and stated, " true facts that are not faith-promoting should not be stated or written." This has been a policy at BYU since around 1970.
The scholarship of Kerry Muhlstein, Daniel Peterson. and their underlings at BYU's FARMS has been rejected by all non-Mormon universities and scholars. They are like the Jehovah's Witnesses who produced the New World Translation of the Bible. That translation is only accepted by the JWs as a real translation. Dr.'s John E. Clark and Daniel Peterson have shown their rears by trying to denigrate the statements of Yale's preeminent Mesoamerican anthropologist Dr. Michael Coe about the Book of Mormon having no Mesoamerican archaeology because it is totally fiction. No horses and no wheels in Mesoamerica 600 B.C.!!!
So, what exactly is LDS scholarship?!!