I remember very distinctly learning in school that the Native Americans immigrated to the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Strait land bridge. How is that possible, I wondered, when the Book of Mormon says that they came here on Nephi’s ship? That and many other apparent contradictions between the Book of Mormon and Mesoamerican history have been resolved in my mind since I read John Sorenson’s magnum opus, Mormon’s Codex.
While I’ve maintained my faith in the Book of Mormon over the years these contradictions have given me pause in thinking about it as a historical document. For example, I remember learning that the ancient Americans had no writing system, which makes getting a book from them very unlikely. It has also been publicized fairly widely that Native Americans don’t share any DNA with Jews, making the Book of Mormon’s claim that they are descended from Israelites dubious.
Sorenson, who has spent his entire career studying ancient Mesoamerica in relation to the Book of Mormon, resolves all of these issues in Mormon’s Codex and makes a very convincing case that the Book of Mormon is exactly what it claims to be: an ancient historical and scriptural record written in Central America.
To resolve the issue of the Native American’s origin, Sorenson focuses on the presence of hookworm in ancient America. The parasite originated in the Old World and is vulnerable to cold temperatures, meaning that it would have been eradicated from a human population during a long trip close to the Arctic Circle. The only way it could have been transported to the New World is on a ship. This and other pieces of evidence point to some limited contact between the ancient New and Old Worlds, including evidence of multiple transoceanic voyages. It certainly plausible that one of those voyages could have included Nephi and his family.
Additionally, Sorenson describes how ancient Americans kept written records — totally contradicting what one of my school teachers taught me — and that those records contained accounts of contemporary events, annals of ancient times, histories of whole societies, histories of individuals, descriptions of battles, victories and defeats, genealogies, political and migration histories, and everything from creations myths to prophecies about the future. Anyone who has read the Book of Mormon will recognize that it contains much of the same things, making it fit in very nicely with what an ancient American scribe would have written.
On the subject of DNA, Sorenson accepts that most of the ancient Mesoamericans descended from immigrants across the Bering Strait, that the Jaredites and Lehites arrived in a land already inhabited and incorporated these people into their societies, but he cautions the reader not to put too much stock in DNA studies that have been done so far. Almost all of them have studied modern self-identified “Indians” and not ancient Mesoamericans, so they offer limited conclusions. “With present information,” he says, “we do not know enough about the actual genetics of Mesoamerica’s early inhabitants to allow general statements to be made as to whether transoceanic voyagers may or may not have entered into the hemispheric gene pool.”
One of the most compelling sections of Sorenson’s book, though, is the section in which he narrates all that is currently known about the history, cultural developments, and social interactions of the ancient people of Central America, and describes how it all corresponds to what is described in the Book of Mormon. His analysis is so detailed as to identify likely sites for the city of Zarahemla, the land of Nephi, and the Hill Cumorah. Reading Book of Mormon history in this context makes the events, societies, and individuals that it recounts seem all the more real. It also makes the book’s historical claims all the more plausible.
Even though I’ve always believed in the Book of Mormon, I've been uncomfortable when people justify their belief in the Book of Mormon by saying that Joseph Smith couldn't have written it himself because of his lack of education. After all, there is no telling what a person of superior genius is capable of. But after reading Mormon’s Codex and learning about the thousands of correspondences between the Book of Mormon and ancient Mesoamerica, only a few of which I have been able to mention here, I can confidently say that Joseph Smith could not have written it — nor could any other nineteenth century author, for that matter. The only explanation for it is that it is what it claims to be. And more importantly, since it is what it claims to be, it has the power to change our lives, if we let it.
No comments:
Post a Comment