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| Humboldt, 1814 |
As always, we offer this peer review in the spirit of understanding and improvement, not in any effort to persuade. And in the spirit of charity, we recognize the author is an awesome fellow Latter-day Saint, sincere, smart, careful, etc. We hope this review helps improve his work going forward.
In the pursuit of clarity, we point out some useful facts to be considered by everyone interested in the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon.
My bias: to be clear, I believe Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery told the truth about what they experienced and learned about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon. Among other things, that means Joseph translated the plates by means of the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates, and the hill Cumorah/Ramah is in western New York.
Note: I updated this post to provide specific quotations and links.
I consider SITH (the stone-in-the-hat theory) and M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory), both of which are heavily and repeatedly promoted by the Interpreter, to be specific repudiations of what Joseph and Oliver claimed. Promoters of M2C and SITH claim that Joseph and Oliver deliberately misled everyone about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon.
Which is fine. People can believe whatever they want.
Naturally, and as expected, this Interpreter article continues the tradition of promoting M2C. But M2C (and SITH) advocates should not mislead their readers by omitting relevant information. Hence my suggestions here.
Original in blue, my comments in red, other quotations in green.
[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present the preface from a book entitled Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms. It is presented in serialized form in this volume of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.]
We'll offer peer reviews of the installments as time allows.
Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms
Preface
Preface
When the Book of Mormon came off the press on 27 March 1830, it opened itself to textual scrutiny. Was evidence of the amazing world of the Book of Mormon—with highways, written language, cement buildings, towers, temples, elephants, and kingdoms—observable in what the 1830 reader knew about the ancient American world?
This rhetorical question is awkward grammatically, but it also ignores the reality that these attributes of ancient America were well known in 1830 regarding Central America, but they were unknown at the time in North America.
For many, it wasn’t.
Many even in our day may be unaware of these attributes of ancient America, but more relevant, many in our day are apparently unaware that these attributes were already well known even in 1830. (Humboldt discussed this in his 1814 book referenced below.*)
The prevailing prejudice in nineteenth-century America was that Amerindian peoples were rude savages, so the historical and cultural assumptions evident in the Book of Mormon seemed too fantastic.
The generality of this sentence makes it both true and false, depending on which "Amerindian peoples" the author refers to. The sophisticated civilizations in Central and South America were well known in 1830, but the peoples in North America were considered "rude savages," so in that sense the sentence is accurate.
Obvious anachronisms abounded. In 1830, everybody knew there were no swords or cement buildings in ancient America, and the ancient inhabitants certainly did not know how to read and write.
Again, this was true for North America (which corroborates the New York Cumorah) but not for Central and South America, where ancient ruins of stone and cement, as well as manuscripts of writing, were well known well before 1830.
In 1841 John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan1 and, suddenly, some presumed “facts” about the ancient Americas changed.2
This is a fictitious straw man argument, at least regarding Central and South America. Now we've gone from the ignorance of "many" to "presumed 'facts'" that were not presumed at all.
The Spanish described their discoveries when they first arrived in the Americas. Here's just one example from Hernán Cortés (1519–1521). In his Letters from Mexico (Cartas de Relación), Cortés described Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital (modern Mexico City): “The city is as large as Seville or Córdoba… The streets are very wide and straight… There are many temples and towers, all very beautiful.”
Note 2 refers to Juan Galindo's 1831 book. That implies nothing was known prior to 1830.
However, Stephens himself referred to the work of Humboldt, which motivated Stephens do embark on his expedition in the first place ("roused our curiosity"):
The first new light thrown upon this subject as regards Mexico was by the great Humboldt, who visited that country at a time when, by the jealous policy of the government, it was almost as much closed against strangers as China is now. No man could have better deserved such fortune. At that time the monuments of the country were not a leading object of research ; but Humboldt collected from various sources information and drawings, particularly of Mitla, or the Vale of — the Dead; Xoxichaleo, a mountain hewed down and. terraced, and called the Hill of Flowers; and the great pyramid or Temple of Cholula he visited himself, of all which his own eloquent account is within reach of the reader.
[These plates are shown at the end of this post.]
Unfortunately, of the great cities beyond the Vale of Mexico, buried in forests, ruined, desolate, and without a name, Humboldt never heard, or, at least, he never visited them. It is but lately that accounts of their existence reached Europe and our own country. These accounts, however vague and unsatisfactory, had roused our curiosity; though I ought perhaps to say that both Mr. C. and I were somewhat skeptical, and when we arrived at Copan, it was with the hope, rather than the expectation, of finding wonders.
https://archive.org/details/incidentsoftrave11841step/page/98/mode/2up?q=Humboldt
Notice that Stephens assumed Humboldt's work "is within the reach of the reader." Any LDS scholar writing about Stephens and Catherwood owes it to readers to explain this.
Furthermore, Humboldt's 2-volume set titled Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, published in 1811, was on sale in the Palmyra book store that Joseph visited weekly (although Researches is not listed).
Volume 1 discusses the geography, including the isthmus of Tehuantepec:
"The isthmus of Tehuantepec, to the S. E. of the port of Vera Cruz, is the point of New Spain in which the continent is narrowest."
https://archive.org/details/b32887036_0001/page/14/mode/2up?q=Tehuantepec
Volume 2 mentions ruins, calendars, Aztec manuscripts, and monuments, and explains that the Olmecs were more ancient than the Toltecs.
"The only ancient monuments in the Mexican valley, which from their size or their masses can strike the eyes of a European, are the remains of the two pyramids of San Juan de Teotihuacan, situated to the north-east of the lake of Tezcueo, consecrated to the sun and moon, which the Indians called Tonatiuh Ytzaqual, house of the sun, and Metzli Ytzaqual, house of the moon.... The nations whom the Spaniards found settled in New Spain attributed the pyramids of Teotihuacan to the Toultec nation ;* consequently their construction goes as far back as the eighth or ninth century ; for the kingdom of Tolula, lasted from 667 to 1031."
* Siguenza, however, in his manuscript notes, believes them to be the work of the Olmec nation, which dwelt round the Sierra de Tlascala, called Matlacueje. If this hypothesis, of which we are unacquainted with the historical foundations, be true, these monuments would be still more ancient. For the Olmecs belong to the first nations mentioned in the Aztec chronology as existing in New Spain.. It is even pretended that the Olmecs are the only nation of which the migration took place, not from the north and north-west (Mongol Asia ?) but from the east (Europe ?).
https://archive.org/details/b32887036_0002/page/40/mode/2up
Humboldt famously met with President Thomas Jefferson in 1804 and showed him a map of North America, including the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
All of this was well known before 1828, even in Palmyra, New York.
Humboldt’s accounts of Mesoamerican ruins were included in his Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810–1813) or its English translation Researches, concerning the institutions & monuments of the ancient inhabitants of America, with descriptions and views of some of the most striking scenes in the Cordilleras! (1814).
The French volume contained dozens of illustrated plates similar to those later created by Catherwood. The English volume contained fewer, apparently because of the cost of printing, but still had some of the monuments and hieroglyphics from Central America. I included some of these at the end of this post.
Catherwood’s engravings in the Incidents of Travel books (including Palenque’s temples) continue the tradition of illustrating antiquities that Humboldt employed in Vues des Cordillères (with 69 plates).
Back to the Interpreter article:
This record of their expedition offered detailed descriptions and illustrations of forty-four sites and showed that at least some ancient Amerindians were sophisticated, contrary to popular opinion. [Page viii]
Again, vague "popular opinion" could be anything one imagines, but the existence of sophisticated ancient cites in Central America was not only well-known, but prompted Stephens' own expedition in the first place.
We've discussed these articles in detail elsewhere (e.g., The Lost City of Zarahemla, 2nd edition), but the 1842 articles are obviously speculative and say nothing to contradict the fact that Cumorah'Ramah is in New York, as was also stated in the Times and Seasons.
As expeditions, archaeological discoveries, and the field of anthropology progressed, more became known about the ancient Americas and her peoples.
This is axiomatic in every field of research.
Slowly, what were previously judged as anachronisms in the Book of Mormon became evidences, supported by what was learned about the past—the book was right about cement buildings, towers, kingdoms, and many other things.
These were anachronisms for North America, and maybe a few for Central or South America, but most of these things were known before the Stephens book was published. That's why the argument doesn't work for Central and South America, and why it is another evidence that corroborates the Cumorah (New York)-centric settings.
In May 2005 the Library of Congress hosted a symposium on “The Worlds of Joseph Smith,”4 timed to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of Joseph’s birth.
I discussed the symposium here:
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2021/06/the-worlds-of-joseph-smith-updated.html
here:
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2024/04/joseph-smith-conference-2005.html
here:
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2019/06/does-book-of-mormon-matter.html
and here:
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2015/02/peer-review-of-farms-review-222-2010.html
I had recently completed a master’s degree in anthropology at Brigham Young University, chaired by Professor John E. Clark. He was asked to speak at the symposium and took me on as a research associate. Part of his focus was to demonstrate that the list of anachronisms claimed for the Book of Mormon in 1830 was dwindling as more of the past was revealed. I went to work reading and annotating everything I could find, published between 1830 and 1900, that criticized the Book of Mormon. My task was to identify every criticism that could be tested archaeologically. Matthew Roper already had a handle on all of this material and graceously [sic] opened his trove of research to me.
This is all useful in the sense of understanding the intellectual ancestry of M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory). It is also useful to see how confirmation bias operates psychologically.
Research continued after the Library of Congress symposium in preparation for the 2005 FAIR Conference. Professor Clark invited Matt and me to work with him and present at the conference together.5 That was an exciting time for me, and I felt I was the proverbial mule at the Kentucky Derby—I had no place being there, but I enjoyed the company it let me keep.6
Of course, Matt’s research in this area began long before the 2005 FAIR Conference and has continued in the twenty years since. His meticulous work has yielded a bounty of correlations, gleaned from both the dustiest books and the latest scientific research. It is that bounty that he shares in this book.
We'll see what is in the rest of the book. However, in the past, Matt's "correlations" have involved a combination of (i) retranslating the text (the so-called Sorenson translation) to substitute words that Joseph did not use (e.g., horses are tapirs, towers are Mayan pyramids, the "narrow strip of mountainous wilderness," etc.), (ii) finding "correlations" common to most, if not all, human civilizations, (iii) rejecting the teachings of the prophets about Cumorah (e.g., President Cowdery's declaration that the New York Cumorah/Ramah is a fact), (iv) ignoring the actual experts on Mesoamerica who find zero correlations between Mesoamerican culture and the Book of Mormon, and (v) attenuated speculation based on tenuous interpretation of the text (e.g., only one "neck of land" in the entire text, albeit described by different terms).
Matt would be the first to tell you that the real and intended purpose of the Book of Mormon is to convince the world that Jesus is the Christ.
The first to tell us is the Title Page, but every believer accepts this as axiomatic.
While the work presented in this book substantiates historical, geographical, and cultural claims of the Book of Mormon, the author [Page ix]is, in fact, converted to the truth of the Book of Mormon by the power of the Holy Ghost.
Great!
May 2025
In the beginning of the conquest of America, the attention of Europe was chiefly directed toward the gigantic constructions of Couzco, the high roads carried along the centre of the Cordilleras, the pyramids with steps, and the worship and symbolical writings of the Mexicans.
But then he noted that
The ardour, with which America had been the object of investigation, diminished from the beginning of the seventeenth century....Some distinguished writers, more struck with the contrasts than the harmony
of nature, have described the whole of America as a marshy country, unfavourable to the increase of animals, and newly inhabited by hordes as savage as the people of the South Sea. In the historical researches respecting the Americans, candid examination had given place to absolute scepticism.
This appears to be the era that the Interpreter article refers to. But Humboldt went on to explain that this era had already passed when he published his book in 1814.
Since the end of the last century, a happy revolution has taken place in the manner of examining the civilization of nations, and the causes which impede or favour its progress.... my own recent investigations on the natives of America appear at an epocha, in which we no longer deem unworthy of attention whatever is not conformable to that style, of which the Greeks have left such inimitable models.
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