![]() Indeed, if this isn’t a case for Ockham’s Razor, I can’t imagine what would be. It’s both very clear and entirely sufficient to justify his idea of a “limited geography” there’s absolutely no need to invoke mysterious additional factors to account for it, or to suggest nefarious plots to escape scientific scrutiny. John Sorenson laid all of this out in the opening pages of his 1985 Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. Plainly, then, the narrative of the Book of Mormon can’t include or cover all of North, Central, and South America, and the question then becomes “What fairly limited area within North, Central, and/or South America was the setting for the stories of the Nephite, Lamanites, and Jaredites?” While people who are not paying attention might idly imagine that the Book of Mormon describes a geographical space extending from the Aleutian Islands in the northwest and Hudson’s Bay in the northeast down to Tierra del Fuego in the south, the distances described in the book don’t permit any such thing. Quite simply, they’re never very large in any direction. Instead, it was the distances mentioned in the text itself. What impelled John Sorenson to constructed a “limited” geography for the Book of Mormon wasn’t a desire to escape the prying eyes of as-yet unborn genetic anthropologists. Hills died in 1925, but he had apparently introduced a map of his geographical model back in 1917 - when Francis Crick was just one year old and James Watson’s birth was still eleven years off in the future. Hills who may have been the first person to have published anything like a limited Mesoamerican geographical model for the Book of Mormon based on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. But this is sheer uninformed (and arguably defamatory) silliness.Īnd, anyway, as a certain hyperzealous and quite unpleasant “Heartlander” is wont to point out with an animus that makes sense only to him, it was a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints by the name of L. Some continue to insist that John Sorenson’s “limited geographical model” or “limited Tehuantepec model” was devised in a desperate bid to so shrink the Lehite and Jaredites demographically and geographically that they would be invisible to the analysis of Amerindian DNA and impervious to genetic research. ![]() Sorenson’s An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (1985) were paradigm-transforming for me. Palmer’s In Search of Cumorah: New Evidences for the Book of Mormon from Ancient Mexico ( 1981) and, even more so, John L. So, as I said in my previous blog entry “The Book of Mormon, Mesoamerica, and Me,” David A. After all, the final battle was fought at the Hill Cumorah in upstate New York, and that’s where the mortal Moroni buried the plates and where, under the resurrected Moroni’s direction, Joseph Smith recovered them.īut I, at least, hadn’t really thought much about any of this. And so, I think, did most Latter-day Saints back then. ![]() Now, I still had some sort of vague sense that the Americas were all involved, largely if not altogether in their entirety. All that was needed was the quickest glance at a map of the Americas, right? Equally obvious were the land northward and the land southward. When Church members heard mention of the Book of Mormon’s narrow neck of land, they thought - certainly I thought - of the Isthmus of Panama. For most of us, though, it was rather vague. I don’t think that I ever heard anybody advocate an Upper Great Lakes geographical model. And it serves to illustrate my contention that, during my childhood and youth, Latter-day Saints - and certainly the Latter-day Saints that I knew - typically understood phrases like lands of the Book of Mormon to refer primarily to Latin America (and, specifically, Central America or Mesoamerica). The sadly necessary Neville-Neville Land blog posted a useful entry the other day on “Photos of Mesoamerican sites in the 1963–1981 missionary edition of the Book of Mormon.” That’s the edition with which I pretty much grew up and came to adulthood (if, indeed, I ever have come to adulthood). Book of Mormon lands? (Image from Utto at the English-language Wikipedia)
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