If they landed in Chile, this all makes sense. The long desert between Chile and Peru was the first migration. From Lake Titicaca up to Northern Peru the second. Up into Ecuador, the third. And the voyages up into Central America and Mexico. With some lost at sea ending up in Polynesia.

I had to read your response to John, on June 9, 3 times – which shows how slow I am.
Permit me to paraphrase a bit. Were you saying that God provided people according to their needs in order that they might believe the message of the BofM?

MH

I saw that mormonheritic.org was shut down soon after my response to you. I hope I didn’t offend anyone. I’m new at this form of communication.

MH (32): I think the Malay theory represents precisely the same exercise as the Tehuantepec theory. Because the Book of Mormon is not related to ancient history, all modernist attempts to understand it as actual ancient history are the same. When you insert totally alien information, such as 21st century understandings of the ancient Maya (or Malayans for that matter), you are creating something completely new. You have divorced the text from its actual context and are looking at it through an unrelated lense. The result is an original reading, but also a distorted reading. This is not necessarily a bad exercise, but it is not necessarily a useful exercise.

FireTag, some people probably think I boast about my posts. I thought my Malay post blew up pretty big, but this one on leaving the church is probably going to eclipse Malay. John, did you check out Malay? Do you think it has better/worse/similar possibilities than S America, Great Lakes or Meso?

Did I really write “boasted”? (embarrassment icon) I meant “posted”, of course.

I was particularly referring to the concept of “sacred fiction” as Jan Schipps coined the term. Others have placed varying emphases on how much of the term should be sacred and how much fiction — with theories (that MH has boasted about on this board) ranging up to outright hoax.

Firetag (27): We don’t usually apply the word “fiction” to scripture. By using the term fiction, I think you’re equating scripture with historicity, even though most history is not considered scripture, and little of the scriptures relate to actual historical events. The four arbitrarily canonized gospels of the New Testament do not remotely describe the life of the historical Jesus. They are almost entirely “fiction,” if you want to use that term. For me, scripture is not history and history is not scripture. For me, scripture is not history and history is not scripture, and I think we regularly treat the Book of Mormon differently from other works of scripture when we focus exclusively on the issue of its historicity.

You’re very right that take on the Book of Mormon includes the perspective that it is a 19th-century document that does not describe actual historical events. That conclusion has been demonstrated to my satisfaction and I don’t need to review the evidence at length here. If you have the opposite conclusion, then we can amicably disagree; the last thing I want to do is attack your faith.

As far as the contemporary Dartmouth faculty goes, I think they would have produced a book that had a significantly more sophisticated understanding of the Bible and Judaism. But I think that they would have still produced a book that was replete with anachronisms (albeit different anachronisms than those in our Book of Mormon), because it essentially impossible for people to take themselves completely outside of their own context and put themselves utterly within a different context. Regardless of their scientific capacity, I do doubt that the early 19th century faculty of Dartmouth would have produced a book as inspired and inspiring as the Book of Mormon has proved itself to be.

I will also point out that there is also growing evidence that David was a historical character, and may date to the 10th or 11th century, according to William Dever of the University of Arizona. Now this may merely shift your timeline from the Bible back from the 5th century to the 10th century BC, I have also found some interesting archealogy pertaining to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (possibly the topic for a future post.) So, I don’t know that we can firmly establish the Bible is a creation of 5th century BC writers, any more than we can say the BoM is the work of the 19th century.

I’ve taken awhile to respond to your comment because the discussions going on at Saint’s Herald have been more urgent, but I’d like to respond now if I can.

I think you can say that the Book of Mormon’s content lies in the 19th Century only once you have resolved the historicity issue. The model we’ve built for study of the Bible focuses on a period of time in the Mid East because we can CONFIDENTLY say that earlier times surface there only as fragments of oral traditions reinterpreted in later eras.

While it is tempting to apply a similar model to study the Book of Mormon, I think that would be highly premature. I would rather call the Book a scientific anomaly, the existence of which provokes my interest as a scientist as much as a believer in the RLDS/CofChrist tradition.

I will readily admit that the best theories of a historical setting for the Nephites and Jaredites (IMO, MesoAmerica) do not well explain what we know about the BofM. And there are certainly numerous “19th Century contents” in the Book that would be inexplicable under NORMAL historical processes (i.e., in which we assume God isn’t involved in directing all of history in the first place!). But that really tests the Book against a straw man — what the Book readily asserts that it is NOT!

Instead the Book asserts that God is a whisper away, inspiring with an eye to the future as well as to the problems of the present. If you need Wesleyism in the 19th Century so people will listen to the message written in the 4th Century, God can arrange that. If you need treasure hunting in the 19th Century or tales of lost tribes to spark interest in a new religious movement, God can arrange that, and so on. The assertions about Meso may be wrong — that gets settled by what gets found in Meso — but they are internally consistent as a theory explaining events in the 19th Century.

A SCIENTIFIC treatment of the Book as a 19th Century work of fiction must also subject itself to potential falsification — it doesn’t get to simply default to “what else could it be” because it would stop being a scientific treatment in that case.

For example, if the Book of Mormon is 19th Century fiction produced by human knowledge available at that time, at minimum scientific experts of the time should have been capable of producing it so that it APPEARS TO BE FICTION.

I hate to deminish 19th Century scientists and writers, but IMO the entire Dartmouth faculty wouldn’t have produced anything like the Book of Mormon if they had been working openly to do so. The science has changed too much over the past two centuries, in ways highly educated writers of the 19th Century would never imagine science could become involved — geology, military science, oceanography (just to name some areas in my own professional background) and many other disciplines — for the fiction produced by the faculty to hold up.

The criticism here by Orson Scott Card is particularly relevant, because he’s one of the acknowledged world-class experts (with the Hugos to prove it) in faking realistic fiction about another culture.

So what I think we have is something with two possible theories (at least), neither of which explain the phenomena very well. That’s why I say it’s still an anomaly.

I think that the disadvantage of this theory is that you have to reject all scientific thought in general to believe that this happened. (You can just as easily argue successfully that the world is flat as you can argue a great sea existed in South America just 2,000 years ago.)

The one advantage this theory has is that the text itself describes sweeping changes in the areas of land and sea, so as fantastic as it seems, it may be less of a modernist misreading of the text as written than the various (and equally fantastic) Tehauntepec theories.

Upcoming Presentations
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Salt Lake Jordan North Stake

4000 West about 3900 South, Salt Lake City, Utah

7:00 PM, June 28th, George Potter: Lehi’s Trail

Driving directions: from I-15 or I-215. take the 3500 So Exit west to 4000 west. Turn Left (south). The Church is about 4 blocks south. It is called the light house church because of the steeple. It is located on the west side of the street.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Parkland, Calgary Stake Center

14540 Parkland Blvd S.E. Calgary

7:00 PM, July 4, George Potter: Lehi’s Trail

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Garland, Utah Stake Center

140 West Factory, Garland, Utah 84312.

7:00 PM, July 12, George Potter: Peru-The Land of the Book of Mormon

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I’d really like to attend the Garland presentation, but it is quite far away from me. I’ve heard a similar one to his “Lehi’s trail” and it was excellent. He is also giving away a free DVD about Peru with any purchase, so I may take him up on that. Here’s a couple other interesting things from his newsletter.

Featured article: “A Language with Semitic Roots in the Americas,” by George Potter
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Click Here For: A Language with Semitic Roots in the Americas

Oman Tours with George Potter
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you want to see the real land of Bountiful, consider taking a once-in-a-lifetime tour to Nephi’s Harbor with Book of Mormon explorer George Potter. With George’s research shifting to Peru, this might be the last time he takes a group to Salalah, Oman to see Nephi’s Harbor, the Land Bountiful, the place where the Jaredites left for the Americas, and many other significant Book of Mormon and Bible sites. The trip is planned through Oman Tours and is scheduled for 19-25 September 2009.

http://www.2s2.com/chapmanresearch/elephant.html

I particularly found the elephant pipe, the drawings of the Michigan mound builders, and the Precolumbian entries interesting.

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf068/sf068b07.htm

I can’t tell about this site. The data is old and I would wonder about its validity but the claims are interesting.

I’d be interested in the data on the Gate of the Sun info you posted. Do you know if it is online?

I think Sorenson has done some outstanding work in the BoM geography realm. Of course Sorenson has his own problems as well. Most alternative geographers note that Sorenson’s narrow neck of land is not narrow at all, he takes great liberty with directions of north-south, and east-west to make his theory fit, his swords are made out of wood and obsidian, rather than steel (the BoM says the steel swords rusted, wood and obsidian don’t rust), he doesn’t have elephants, silks or other things mentioned, etc.

I’m not here to say Malay is perfect, but it fixes all the above problems with Sorenson, and the DNA, while not confirmed, seems a better match than Native American DNA, the customs fit in well with Nibley’s observations that the BoM peoples acted in an “Oriental” manner, there are elephants, silks, steel swords, chariots, etc. Now I’m not an earthquake expert, so I don’t know if it has siesmic activity. Somebody on my blog posted an idea from a PhD that the lost island of Atlantis may be in the South China Sea, near Malay. Perhaps there is some scientific evidence for siesmic activity–I have no idea because I haven’t studied it that deeply yet. But it seems to me that earthquakes are all over the world. I keep hearing that Salt Lake City lies on an earthquake fault, but there hasn’t been a major earthquake in over 100 years, despite claims that it is “2nd to San Andreas”. I also lived in NH, and heard that it lies on a fault “2nd to San Andreas”. They can’t both be correct. Suffice it to say, I think earthquakes happen everywhere, and are highly unpredictable.

Clark,

Thanks for the info–I haven’t heard of that before. It seems to me that Bolivia would be part of the Amazon River, so I doubt that Kocherhans and Priddis would support that location because they appear to claim it to be under water (I did an eyeball test, so I could be wrong.) If it wasn’t under water, then that seems to put another nail in their coffin. It sounds very interesting–do you have a source for this?

I’m not sure whether Malay would have the seismic activity to support the earthquake claims in the BoM either. Meldrum’s theory supports that as well with the New Madrid faultline. In 1811 and 1812 there were four earthquakes in the 7.8 to 8.1 range with epicenters in southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas. These were strong enough to change the course of the Mississippi River and were felt as far away as Boston and New York. I believe the South American theory brings this line of thought into play in the Amazon narrowing to a river. I may be mistaken about that though.

PRO
The “Gate of the Sun” at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, is a (1) temple site that (2) matches the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, (3) has symbols appropriate for our understanding of temples, and (4) has a tank similar to a baptismal font. It dates to between 500 and 600 BC, about right for Nephi’s temple, and is in the “land southward”
An apocryphal story claims Pres. Kimball said this site was a Nephite temple, but have never tracked down the source.

Curloms and Cumoms as Llamas and Alpacas?

The west coast location, large stone buildings, and others are also good fits.

CONS
No “narrow neck of land,” No “river Sidon” flowing N-S, an abundance of timber, and a lack of evidence of major culture during the BoM time period.

Yes, I’m well aware of the fact that meso is also equatorial and lacks the climate that would render distinct seasons. Even so, the meso seems to be more like the BoM lands than those of the Malay theory principally due to geography but both are equatorial. Meldrum’s theory is in a more temperate climate and the geography fits as the chrological events take place. I understand and acknowledge your concerns about the technology of the Hopewell peoples. More than likely, the whole truth will not be known until all is revealed at Christ’s coming. Meldrum’s methods may not be as scientific as most would like to see but to me they seem a better fit.

And unlike FARMS, I am not ready to totally disregard the Zelph incident merely because it was not written in Joseph’s own hand when it was taken from the accounts of more than one witness from Zion’s Camp.

BTW, I wasn’t arguing in favor of the mesoamerican theory earlier. I was merely stating I thought it showed more merit than the Malay theory due to geography.

I never said the cement was the same as today, but we have found plenty of ancient building materials of all kinds , even wood.