[Aztlan] Mormons, Mayans and Mystery

[Michael Carrasco]

Could some one explain the mystery here. I don't mean to offend, but the only mystery it seems to me is the incredible way people choose to put their faith in fantasy rather than building a picture from empirical reality. If the story is already known to be true, and the facts have to fit the story, then why even bother with research? How much time will have to be wasted debating a non-issue. Michael Coe and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano have both written about these debates and throughly refuted claims made in the Book of Mormon in the context of Mesoamerica. 

The desire to confirm fantasy through reality will always end badly for true believers. The last 2000 years of western history makes this abundantly clear, and yet...

Best,
Michael

Mario Cabrejos <casal at infotex.com.pe> wrote: 
Mormons, Mayans and Mystery
The Book of Mormon's version of history continues to be challenged - and
championed - by skeptics and faithful
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune
11/17/2007
http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_7483717

LDS biologist Trent Stephens thinks he may have triggered the change in the
Book of Mormon's introduction that became public last week.

Stephens' efforts came after a lifetime of hearing Mormon leaders and
members talk in glowing terms about the link between American Indians and
the Book of Mormon's small band of Israelites who sailed from Jerusalem to
establish a civilization in the Americas. After centuries of warring among
themselves, the book says, the last ones standing were known as
"Lamanites."

To the LDS faithful, Lamanites were real people with a real history.

Every Mormon prophet since the church's founding in 1830 has taught that
Indians descended from Lamanites. The perceived link explains the church's
initial outreach to Indians in the northeast and later in Utah. It is why
the church created an Indian Placement Program, urging members in the 1950s
to care for those they saw as part of their religious family. Mormon
missionaries working in Central and South America have always told
potential converts the Book of Mormon is their ancestors' story.

Sometime in the past decade, Stephens learned about DNA evidence
suggesting American Indian origins were in Siberia, not the Middle East.
It was no crisis of faith for Stephens, a former Mormon bishop and Idaho
State University professor. He found lots of ways to explain the discrepancy.

Besides, Book of Mormon text makes no claims about lineage. The book's
1981 introduction was the only text that said "Lamanites were the principal
ancestors of American Indians," and that could be changed.

On March 23, 2004, Stephens told his LDS stake president in Pocatello that
critics were using DNA evidence against the book, pointing to the
introduction's wording. The leader recognized the problem and took it to
the LDS Area Authorities, who took it to the LDS Missionary Committee in
Salt Lake City.

Sometime last year, LDS authorities instructed Doubleday, which published
the only unofficial version of the Book of Mormon, to change its
introduction to read: "Lamanites were among the ancestors of the American
Indians."

The move didn't satisfy critics, such as Simon Southerton, a former Mormon
excommunicated for the arguments in his book, Losing a Lost Tribe: DNA,
Native Americans and the Mormon Church.

"The change raises more pressing questions for those seeking the truth. If
science was right all along about the dominant Siberian ancestry of
American Indians, are they also right about the timing of their entry?"
Southerton wrote in an e-mail from his home in Australia. "There is
abundant evidence, some now coming from the DNA research, that their
Siberian ancestors arrived over 12,000 years ago. How does such a date fit
with other LDS beliefs?"

DNA is not the only challenge to the Book of Mormon's version of history.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith said the book was written in "Reformed
Egyptian," which he claimed to translate from the writings on gold pates he
unearthed in Upstate New York. Non-Mormon scholars have never heard of such
a language and wonder why Jews would use the language of their oppressors
rather than Hebrew to record their sacred history.

The book mentions metals, elephants, horse-drawn chariots, wheat, and
barley - all of which had yet to be discovered in Meso or South America
during the scripture's time period, 2200 B.C. to 400 A.D. Critics see no
sign of Book of Mormon kings, no palaces or tombs, no mention of important
names from the scripture, no site of the book's final battle that included
thousands, if not millions of soldiers.

Non-Mormon archaeologists take the whole thing "as a complete fantasy, that
this is a big waste of time," said Michael Coe, an emeritus professor of
Mesoamerican studies at Yale, in last spring's PBS documentary "The
Mormons."

"Nothing can ever come out of it because it's just impossible that this
could have happened, because we know what happened to these people. We can
read their writings: They're not in reformed Egyptian; they're in Maya."

Mormon scholars at Brigham Young University's Neal A. Maxwell Institute for
Religious Scholarship and at FAIR (The Foundation for Apologetic
Information & Research), though, think they have an answer for every
critique. They've spent decades collecting relevant pieces of
archaeological, geographical and linguistic evidence to prove it.

Finding correspondence: For the past 55 years, John Sorenson has inhaled
every detail of Book of Mormon life and history. It was Sorenson who first
proposed that the scripture's action likely took place in Guatemala and
southern Mexico, rather than encompassing both North and South America.
This idea, known as the limited geography thesis, better explained the
book's description of a "narrow neck of land" and the Land Northward and
Southward, and helped solve some of the earlier archaeological challenges
and is now the consensus view.

Sorenson, 83, retired from BYU's anthropology department about 21 years ago
but still comes every day to the school's Museum of Peoples and Cultures.
He is completing what he says will be his final work, tentatively titled,
The Mormon Codex.

"The intent will be to show that only a Mesoamerican native from about
fourth century A.D. would have known enough to write what's in the Book of
Mormon," Sorenson said. "I have hundreds of correspondences between the
[Mormon] text and archaeology. I will put down the most persuasive, cogent
ones of those with the aim to demonstrate that it was written by an
eyewitness in Mesoamerica."

Metals were used much earlier than most archaeologists believe, for
example, and 50 purported horse bones have been found, some of which may be
old enough to fit the scripture's time frame, he said.

Then there's the question of naming.

"We are dealing with the names, horse, cattle, goat, and sheep, but that's
in English," Sorenson said. "There are a variety of animals native to the
Americas that could qualify as bearing those names."

To find clues, Sorenson has poured over Mesoamerican scholarship and
matched it with Old World findings, suggesting a connection between the
two.

Sorenson belongs to a renegade group of anthropologists known as
"diffusionists," who believe numerous voyages carried people and animals to
the New World. Last year, he collaborated with Carl L. Johannessen, a non-
Mormon geographer at the University of Oregon on a paper, "Biological
Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages." In it, they cited 99
plant species that appeared in both the old and new worlds before the
Spaniards' arrival.

Such views are scorned by most conventional archaeologists, Sorenson said,
but it doesn't deter him.

"I don't have time to wait for it all to become clearer to everyone else,"
he said. "I need to publish everything I've learned."

On the ground: While Sorenson and the Maxwell Institute are careful about
declaring a certain site to correspond directly to a Book of Mormon city or
story, Joseph L. Allen is more confident.

Allen, a retired teacher in the LDS Church Educational System with a
doctorate in Mayan studies, has been leading Book of Mormon tours for 40
years. He has taken more than 200 trips to Guatemala and southern Mexico
with groups eager to walk where scriptures say important episodes happened.

More than 80 percent of the book's action takes place between the Land of
Nephi and Zarahemla, which are described as being about 30 days of travel
apart, or some 250 miles, he said. "It is a small area."

Allen believes the book's final battle took place in Veracruz, Mexico, not
in New York where Smith said he found the plates. He sees many connections
between the Mayan civilization and Nephites and Lamanites. He sees the myth
of Quetzequatl, the white god who appeared in the Americas, as a possible
link to the Book of Mormon tale of Jesus Christ appearing in the New World
after his resurrection.

"We've learned more in last 30 years about the history and geography of the
Book of Mormon than in previous 170 years," Allen said. "The best days of
this research are still ahead of us."

Despite such enthusiasm, Allen knows it is not archaeology that persuades
readers to believe in the scripture's authenticity - it is faith.

"When all is said and done," he said, "it's a spiritual book."

That's why Stephens, the Idaho biologist, works so hard to explain the lack
of DNA evidence for Lamanites.

He sees a parallel between the Mormon text and the Bible.

Biblical writers viewed themselves as the stars on God's center stage, a
favored people. To everyone else at the time, the Hebrew prophets and
people were little more than a footnote in the epic histories playing out
around them.

Though some biblical names, places and episodes have been identified by
archaeologists, scientists have not found any hard evidence that the Exodus
of Israelites from Egypt even took place.

The same could be true of the Book of Mormon, said Stephens, co-author with
Jeff Meldrum of Who are the Children of Lehi: Lamanite Identity, DNA and
Native American Origins, is due out later this year.

"It tells the story of a small group of people among a lot of other groups
who were largely unaware of this tiny colony," he said. "How small would a
subpopulation have to be before it would be completely missed?"

On top of that, Stephens doesn't believe every group arrived via the Bering
Strait.

"To think that over a 30,000 year history, every hominid came in one single
migration over a few year period is ridiculous," he said. "There's an
arrogant naiveté about how accessible the Americas were before Columbus."

Mormons, too, have their own arrogance, he said.

The revised wording in the Book of Mormon's introduction "should cause
members to rethink their perspective on Native American traditions,"
Stephens said." I do think it will change people's minds, but it will take
it a long time."

---

* PEGGY FLETCHER STACK can be reached at pstack at sltrib.com or 801-257-8725.
Send comments about this story to religioneditor at sltrib.com.
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