On Mormonism - Part 2

On The Book of Mormon - Part 2

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Mormonism claims that the Book of Mormon is a true and accurate historical account of a group of Israelite refugees who were brought to the Americas in the seventh century B.C. by God and who became the progenitors of the Indian nations found on the North and South American continents. In fact, the Mormon Church claims that the Book of Mormon is the most accurate book in existence today, even more accurate than the Bible. 

So let’s examine this claim. Is the Book of Mormon accurate? Can it stand up to the same scrutiny with which we examined the Bible in part one of this series? Does it exhibit historical, geographic, scientific, and prophetic accuracy?

The answer is a resounding no!

Let’s start with its historicity. The Book of Mormon claims that it is a factual history of the origins of human civilization in the Americas. According to its teachings, God appeared to a man named Levi in the last years of the Israelite nation just prior to the Babylonian captivity (1 Nephi 1:4). Levi was instructed to build a boat and sail with his family to a place God would show them. After their journey across the oceans, they landed in the area of Central America where they eventually flourished and became two great civilizations, the Nephites and Lamanites (from Levi’s two sons). The Nephites were of a fairer complexion and were great scholars and builders. The Lamanites were rebellious, and as a result God cursed them with a darkened skin. Over the succeeding centuries there were many wars between these two great civilizations until Christ appeared in A.D. 34 ushering in a period of peace accompanied by a great conversion to Christianity. This peace did not last long, though, and about A.D. 400 a great battle was fought between the two civilizations at the hill Cumorah in New York state that resulted in the death of all of the Nephites. A lone survivor, Moroni, wrote a record of this history on golden plates that were buried there and which were later revealed to Joseph Smith by Moroni, now an angel. Joseph Smith then translated these plates through the use of a magic stone into the Book of Mormon. He claimed that the plates were written in Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics, the language used by the Nephites, and after their translation they were taken to heaven.

Now if this somewhat condensed overview of the Book of Mormon is historically accurate, we should find significant evidence of these two great civilizations on the American continents. The problem is that we do not. In fact, we cannot verify a single event in the Book of Mormon historically or culturally at all. The problem is not that there is not a lot of evidence rather the problem is that there is no evidence at all to back up the claims of the Book of Mormon.

Let’s look at a couple of these historical problems. The first is that the Mormon Church claims that the hill Cumorah in New York is the historical site of the last great battle between the Nephites and Lamanites, and that this battle took place around the year A.D. 400. If that were the case, then we should find evidence at Cumorah of this battle in which it is said hundreds of thousands of men were killed. We should find arrowheads, swords, body armor, chariot wheels, mass graves and bones, the carnage of a battle all over that place – but we do not. All excavations at the site have turned up zero evidence of such a battle – and since the Mormon Church owns that site it is unlikely further excavations will take place since it would be embarrassing to find nothing there. Furthermore, we should not only find archaeological evidence of this battle, but the stories of the Nephites and Lamanites would be found in the oral histories of the American Indian tribes that later inhabited this region. When we examine all of the oral and tribal histories of the American Indians, there is no hint that any of the events of the Book of Mormon ever happened.

A second major problem is that Joseph Smith claimed that the Book of Mormon was written in Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics. This is an unknown language. No archaeologist has ever heard of such a language, and there have been no inscriptions found anywhere in the Americas of such a language. Early copies of the Book of Mormon include pictures of Aztec and Mayan ruins hinting that these were the ruins of the great cities talked about in the Book of Mormon, but modern research has proven conclusively that these cities were built after the so-called events of A.D. 400. The bottom line is that there is no evidence that this language ever existed.

And to add further to this complication, if indeed the Book of Mormon is history, then it is unlikely that Levi and his descendants would have written in any language other than Hebrew. In fact, there is no evidence that there was any Egyptian influence on the Israelite spoken language and written language at all. Egyptian is a pictographic language whereas Hebrew is phonetic – two very different writing systems. 

A third major problem is that the Book of Mormon claims that the Nephites had great libraries and wrote on metal plates. Joseph Smith himself claimed at that written records given to him by Moroni were written on golden plates. Well if this is true, then where are all of these written records? We have dug up thousands of clay tablets throughout the Middle East in the languages of the Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, and many other long dead civilizations – but we have as of yet to find a single metal plate anywhere in the Americas with writing on it. The reason for this is simple – the civilizations in the Americas did not write anything on metal, and in fact did not use metal at all except in very isolated instances and usages.

This leads us to a fourth major problem with the Book of Mormon, and that is its claim that the civilizations that descended from Levi used metal in the form of swords, spears, chariots, and armor. This is really problematic as there is no evidence anywhere in existence that the Indians of the Americas used metal for weaponry. We cannot find a single sword, spear, chariot wheel, or piece of armor anywhere in the Americans’ prior to the arrival of the Europeans. In fact, all of the archaeological evidences show us that the Indian civilizations used stone knives and stone arrowheads, of which we have found many examples. If metal were so widely used, we would have found evidences all over the place of its use – we do not. The Book of Mormon also claims an extensive coinage system in use in the Americas. Again, we have not found one single coin anywhere in the Americas prior to the Europeans even though we have found thousands in the Middle East.

We could cite dozens of other historical inaccuracies in the Book of Mormon, but I think we have made our point. When it comes to the historical test – the Book of Mormon fails miserably.

Put succinctly the Book of Mormon talks about a language that does not exist, using writing we cannot find, giving us a history that cannot be verified, of a people we cannot identify as ever having existed, using a material culture (weapons, coins, cities) that have never been found. Nothing in the Book of Mormon has any historical evidence of ever having been true.

(to be continued in Part 3)