. . .

Evidences and Consequences

What do these myriad facts and observations add up to? They constitute a strong case that the Book of Mormon is an ancient Mesoamerican record, an authentic old book. This conclusion harbors multiple ironies, two worth touching on in closing. First, if the book is an ancient Mesoamerican record, most past arguments for and against it have been wrongheaded. Second, if the book is authentic history, most biographies of Joseph Smith are deficient.

Consider the book. For the first 120 years of debate, until 1950, assumptions made by both sides were self-defeating. Critics assumed the book could be, and should be, read as American fantasy and that its moorings could be recovered in early New York and in Joseph Smith’s biography. If the book is a Mesoamerican record, however, it cannot be nineteenth-century fiction. The cultural worlds of ancient Mesoamerica and early New York are far enough apart that it ought to be simple to discover from which one the book came. The cultures described in the Book of Mormon fit much better in Mesoamerica than in New York for any century.

For their part, Mormons have traditionally assumed that the book pertained to all peoples in the New World. But if the book describes only four groups from Middle America, it is not a blanket history of all the Americas. Arguments raised by critics through the years demonstrated the insufficiency of the Book of Mormon as universal history and helped Mormon scholars realize they had been misreading the book and overgeneralizing its claims. The book is a regional rather than a continental record.

Now consider Joseph Smith. Friends and foes have used the book to take his measure. The view of the Book of Mormon as hoax distorts Joseph Smith beyond recognition and creates an impossible paradox, as follows.

Early arguments—made at a time when the Book of Mormon remained virtually unread—were greatly flawed by insisting on trumped-up slanders that dismissed Joseph Smith as a lazy liar with a host of even more serious flaws. These ad hominem arguments left Joseph without sufficient skills to have written any book, let alone the Book of Mormon. Once the book’s complexity became public knowledge, however, it became logically impossible for detractors to derive the book from Joseph Smith. The second round of argumentation imagined intelligent co-conspirators and a plagiarized text. This raised the book’s authorial I.Q. but countered obvious facts that eventually leaked out and undermined the argument. In the third and current round of reassessments, critical historians who returned Joseph Smith to his environment have identified over two hundred books from which Joseph could have cribbed an idea or two. This would make the Book of Mormon something of a doctoral dissertation written by a slick, very well-read operator with photographic recall—but without the footnotes. Joseph has gone from being a fool to a genius or perhaps even more than that. Ironically, it is Joseph’s critics, not his supporters, who have lately been according him phenomenal powers in their attempts to explain the Book of Mormon through his biography. Although an improvement over base slanders, this swing in opinion lacks credibility or logic, and it does nothing to resolve the Book of Mormon problem.

As Truman Madsen points out, a genius could no more have written the Book of Mormon than could a fool:

How could any genius or set of geniuses in the nineteenth century concoct a book that is filled with stunning details, now confirmable, of the ancient cultures it claims to represent? By the use of Occam’s razor and David Hume’s rule that one only credits a “miraculous” explanation if alternatives are more miraculous, the simplest and least miraculous explanation is Joseph Smith’s: he translated an ancient record.

This is where archaeology intersects theology and history. The basic question to be resolved is this: What needs to be explained about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon? The most remarkable things about the book are not the intricate plots, myriad characters, rich settings, or textual consistencies. Ordinary novelists and movie-makers create elaborate fantasy worlds every year. The Book of Mormon separates itself from all fantasy and fiction in its predictions about the past. Accurate predictions of a then unknown past beg explanation. Emerging facts from archaeology, as shown, confirm a trend of unusual and specific details in the book that could not have been known in any book or language in 1829.

The continuing challenge is to explain how these facts made their way into the Book of Mormon. The two most likely answers are that they either had to be conveyed to Joseph Smith through supernatural means, or he had to guess each one individually and sequentially at virtually impossible odds. Thus, explanations of the book will need to admit God or the Devil into the equation, or grant supranatural clairvoyance or abilities to Joseph Smith.

Latter-day Saints typically do not turn to extraordinary human abilities in explaining Joseph’s role in bringing forth the book, because they see God as doing most of the work, with Joseph Smith as His human conveyance. That Mormons are currently running a distant second to Joseph’s critics in praising his human abilities should give both parties pause. Accepting that Joseph translated a book beyond his and our comprehension is the beginning of wisdom. To understand Joseph Smith, all must take his limitations seriously.

As I see it, Joseph Smith did not write the Book of Mormon, it cannot be understood through recourse to his biography, and his biography cannot be recovered by studying the book. The scientific trend of archaeological evidence of its historic facticity indicates that the Book of Mormon is what Joseph Smith claimed it was—an ancient book. It follows that no amount of scrutiny of the book will ever betray Joseph’s mind or heart because it is not mirrored in the text. It further follows that Joseph was neither a fool nor a genius, an imposter nor a liar. He was an honest man who told the truth about the book. The Book of Mormon is part of Joseph Smith’s story but not the window to his soul. It vouchsafes his claim to prophetic status, not to literary genius. The book was a product of his activity and obedience, not of his imagination.