Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Possibly the largest, most comprehensive study debunking critical claims of the Book of Mormon has just been published. And I think it's going to change the way you view the Book of Mormon as an ancient text, because ever since the 1800s, people have been claiming that the Book of Mormon contains historical inaccuracies. Things like horses in the Americas where there shouldn't have been, or steel barley cement. So one researcher set out to document every single one of these critical claims since 1830 compared to what we know about archaeology now.
And the result is staggering. Welcome to Informed Saints, where we study hard and we always bring our receipts. I'm Jasmine, this is Neil and Stephen, and today we're going to be talking about this new groundbreaking research that is blowing away centuries of criticisms on the Book of Mormon. And it is all about anachronisms. So, Neil, what is an anachronism?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so anachronism is just this big fancy word that basically means something that is in the wrong time and the wrong place. Right? So really obvious, like, sort of dead on. Examples where, like, everyone knows that would be anachronistic are like George Washington in an automobile anachronism. Right.
You know those, like, really cool America shirts, or maybe you don't think they're really cool. I don't know where, like, where you have like one of the founding fathers, like with a blazing machine gun and, and a jet or whatever. Right? Like, those are anachronistic T shirts and nobody cares because, well, it's a T shirt. Right. They're just fun.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Donald Trump writing a velociraptor.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Yeah, like, just like my favorite one. So, so those, like, those are the, the. When you take things from different time periods, different places that don't go together and you put them together, that's. It becomes anachronistic. Right?
And so like I said, for like a fun T shirt, nobody cares for something that claims to be historical.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Or so, like, if there was a document from George Washington describing a velociraptor and machine gun, and we would question if that was a legitimate.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: The authenticity of that document would be suspect to say the least. Right? So, yeah, when you're talking about something that's purporting to be historical or is presented as historical, anachronisms are kind of seen as a problem and can be fatal. Can be fatal to the authenticity of that text. Right?
And so that's why critics like to bring up and compile these big, long lists of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, because they Believe.
And understandably so. I mean, to be fair, they believe that these are telltale signs that the Book of Mormon is basically a forgery, an 1830s forgery.
[00:02:34] Speaker C: Right.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: So that's kind of what they are and why critics talk about them.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Okay. And this, this study is like over 200 pages long. It's great. It's. This book here was published by the Interpreter foundation, and this is like essentially a volume of their journal. But it is massive as far as how detailed and comprehensive it documents.
[00:02:54] Speaker C: And it comes with pictures.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Yeah, every single charts. Anachronism. And obviously we. This is such a huge topic, we're not going to cover all of it in this episode, but we may cover some of these in different episodes. Like, I know horses is a big one. People have problems with steel swords.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: Yeah, Wave and steel sword man. Come on, cover.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: We'll cover some individual ones or maybe some group ones, like weapons together or something like that. In separate episodes. We're just going to kind of talk about, like, the big picture that this study presents here today. So.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: And I don't want to go too far before actually, like, showing what these results are and then let's, like, talk about how cool they are and what it actually means for the Book of Mormon, because it kind of blew me away when I first looked at this. So the researcher here is Matt Roper. Matt Roper is a scholar of the Book of Mormon and he documented every single criticism of the Book of Mormon. I don't remember exactly how many there were.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Well, he. What he did is he went through over a thousand publications, critical publications on the Book of Mormon, and documented like. I think it's 226.
If I.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Yes, if I'm remembering 226.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: 226 claimed anachronisms in those 1,000 publications.
And he specifically, there are some other anachronisms out there that can't necessarily be tested or verified through archaeology. And so he specifically focused in on ones that could be.
That could be tested with archaeological data. Right.
And so that's what he. That, that's the, the, the end list he came up with was 226 of them.
And he puts up these really helpful charts. He starts with, we've got a chart here that shows the state of the evidence upon Joseph's martyrdom. Basically in between 1830 and 1844, there were 102. There were only 102 of the claimed anachronisms were made in publications dated between that time period and 93 of them indeed appeared to be Legitimate anachronisms at that point.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: The Book of Mormon probably looked pretty silly back then to a lot of people.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: It did.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: And we have this great account from David Whitmer. He's being interviewed. I forget the guy's name, but we can throw him up here on the screen.
And David Whitmer tells the guy, when we were instructed to bear testimony of the Book of Mormon, we were worried about it because at the time we thought this book would look silly to people. It's historical claims about people dwelling in large cities. But according to David Whitmer's account, they were assured by the Lord that the time would come when the Book of Mormon would be vindicated. Right.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: So even contemporaries have this idea of like, oh, a little sus, as the kids would say, Right.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: I mean this red list here, I mean, I can't read the text.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Big scary red list. Look at that.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: You know, things like steel. It's things like look at fortifications.
[00:05:40] Speaker C: Armies, cities, horses.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Right. Goats. I mean all kinds of animals. Yeah. Large armies.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: The name Nephi, the name Moroni.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Millions of deaths. Yeah. Various names, all kinds of things that people just thought seemed ridiculous. Right.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: In Asian America.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: And granted, you know, at that point in time it, they did look ridiculous. There are a few things here that have been confirmed by 1844, largely thanks to John Lloyd Stevens going down to Mesoamerica and kind of being the first one to really introduce Central American archaeology.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: What year was that?
[00:06:18] Speaker B: 1842. Well, that's what, that's when it was published.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: And so that really was like the first time Ancient American civilizations were kind of coming to the forefront about like what even was here in the 19th century.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: So we have, there's an interesting history on like the archaeology of the Americas. Right. So white European settlers and colonists come here. They're only immediate, at least in North America. Their only really immediate sort of frame of reference for Native American cultures are either the stereotypical savage in his teepee. Right. That's a predominant view. Or in like the Ohio River Valley you find like these mounds that they're finding. Oh, these mounds. And the whole mound builder myth comes out of this. So, but, but that's not indicate indicative in their minds of like large scale civilization. There's still the sense of like. And sadly there's a big heap and dope dose of racism going into this. Right. Like oh, these dark skinned savages couldn't have possibly had advanced civilizations like we have back in Europe in the old country. Right. So that's kind of the immediate Frame of reference. It's a different story if you're living in Mexico or South America. Right. But in North America, where this book comes forth, that's what people are thinking, actually. Thomas Jefferson, of all people, was super interested in, like, Native American antiquities. And he actually went on some excavations on some mounds and things like that. But, yeah, it's a slow burning process until John Lloyd Stevens kind of blows the lid open on all this. He goes down there in the 1830s with Frederick Catherwood. He does these absolutely beautiful.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: Artistic renderings.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: The Catherwood images are phenomenal.
[00:07:44] Speaker C: Yeah, these are great. And it gets published in, like, 1840 in New York.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: And these are the first images of, like, Mayan pyramids.
[00:07:50] Speaker C: Yes. And the temples and all that stuff. And it's like Harry Potter for Americans in the 1840s. It goes through several editions. It's being sold out, flying off the bookshelves. Joseph Smith gets a copy in 1842 or 1841. John Bernheisel gifts him a copy. Wilford Woodruff brings it to him, and we have a letter from Joseph Smith saying, hey, man, thanks so much. This is great. And it supports the Book of Mormon. Yeah, I've published an article. We can throw in the show notes on the reception history of Book of Mormon claims in Joseph Smith's lifetime. Like polemical arguments along these lines of what are people arguing about? And what are apologists saying? And 1842. 40 42. I call it the watershed of Stevens and Catholic because this now we have what appears to be amazing evidence of the Book of Mormon. And yes, it gets this idea of addressing these questions of anachronisms and things like that.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: And Matt Roper actually even has a paper in the Interpreter that was published separate from this book a few years earlier, where he actually goes through the Latter Day Saint reaction to Stephen and Catherwood and kind of goes like, okay, why? Why would they have been so excited about. And documents various things that John Lloyd Stevens is reporting about what he's finding that align with things in the Book of Mormon. Right.
And so, yeah, that really is kind of this watershed moment. An interesting book. Not a Latter Day Saint book, but Jungle of Stone. I forget the name of the author, but it's called Jungle of Stone is just kind of the history and the story of their journey down there and everything. And it's a really fascinating read.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: And so that's a watershed moment. And so all of a sudden, I'm sure the Latter Day Saints are really excited about the possibilities, but at the Time. There's still a lot that's unconfirmed.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: There's still a lot that's unconfirmed. And one more thing about Latter Day Saints being excited about this. That story that Stephen was talking about with David Whitmer, he specifically talks about the discovery of these civilizations in Central America as being like confirmation of. Oh, okay, like we were worried about this, but the Lord promised us that the evidence would come and here it is. Right. So he specifically, even David Whitmer saw this as fulfillment of the Lord's promise that he would vindicate the Book of Mormon. But yes, there's still a lot.
As of 1844, 91% of the alleged anachronisms remain unconfirmed. Look like definitely anachronisms, right? But fast forward to today, to this, to Matt Roper's study here and those 1966 through 2025-24. You know, he cut, he, he's doing the research and it gets published in 2025. But you know, you've got to stop the research in order to get it published at some point, right? So the list of alleged anachronisms has gone up. It's up to 226.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: But look at that chart.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: The status of those anachronisms according to current archaeological Data is very different.
70, basically 77%, 76.99 if you really want to be picky.
Basically 77% are now actually verified as being authentic items to pre Columbian America.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: That's insane.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: Or the Old World.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Or the Old World. We should clarify. Some of these anachronisms are alleged for the Old World, but have now been verified in the archaeology of the Old World.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Let's go back again to the original 1831, just so I can see the comparison. Okay, so originally, 1830, okay, just red. Red. Like there's very little like your teacher.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: Taking the red pencil to your homework, right? Like big scary red.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: And fast forward to today.
And that is just staggering. That is an insane amount of growth for things that were not confirmed before and now are. I mean, and this is the massive list of green things that now we know through archaeolog in some way has been attested.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: And, and I think in addition to the green, it's important to note there's three colors on the chart, right? There's this blue section that's 13.72, almost 14%. Basically, those are items that aren't confirmed definitively for like the Book of Mormon time. But the data has, is trending is how Matt likes to say it. The data is trending towards confirmation. And what he means by that, or to give just a really brief example of something that's kind of trending, is for a long time, metallurgy was thought to not be attested in, in Central America until 900 AD, several hundred years after Book of Mormon times. Well, over the last few decades, increasingly, research has shown that, no, there are. There were actually people in Central America practicing metallurgy earlier and earlier and earlier. And I think now about the date is 600 A.D.
still later than Book of Mormon times, but within about 180 years of when Moroni buries the plates. And there's other lines of evidence, things like linguistics and stuff like that, that suggests that maybe there was knowledge of metallurgy. There's a few little finds, like, I think there was like gold dust found at teotihuacan from like 200 BC or something like that. And so there's like, there's like a few little things here and there that suggest, oh, maybe there was metallurgical knowledge earlier than thought. And so that's trending. It's not confirmed. We're not saying it's not an anachronism, but we're saying, hey, keep an eye on this.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: Basically, the, the horses is another example that Matt Roper brings up. And I know we're going to do a whole episode about horses, so we won't get into the nitty gritty details here. But Matt Roper does point out that in Joseph Smith's lifetime, the criticism was not horses during Book of Mormon times. It's horses period before the European conquest and colonization. Right. So the criticism is no horses existed on the Western hemisphere American continent before the Spanish brought them, period.
Well, we now know that's not true. We know that there are Pleistocene and Holocene arrowhorse, you know, horse bones and remains. Okay, so now the criticism is, well, okay, there were pre Columbian horses, but they're too early.
So you see how the window is shifting now.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:53] Speaker C: And now it's a question of can we get the Goldilocks right there in the middle, Just right where it's pre Columbian, but within Book of Mormon lifetimes. And that's where we see a trending, trending towards confirmation with the most recent excavations by Miller.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Right, Right, Yeah, yeah, Wade Miller.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: So this is just to say you have to track, and I'm glad Matt did this, you have to track what were the specific criticisms and when are they being made? Because you can be imprecise and we don't want to be imprecise we need to say in the 1830s and 40s, it was this claim. The data has changed now it's shifted to this claim. Now the data's shifting it to this claim. Right. And so if you're not careful, you're going to be repe. Outdated information that has been refuted even by orders of magnitudes of decades. Just saying. Saying there were no horses in ancient America is just not true.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Right?
[00:14:42] Speaker C: There were ancient horses. Were they Book of Mormon times? That's the outstanding question.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: We're still trying to. That that's indeterminate, but it's trending. Right. And it is important to. That is an important point to make because Matt Roper's big list, the 226 that he is, he's documenting claims, the specific claims that critics make.
And so in some cases, like, like one of the things is horse traditions. Okay. Some critics said, well, the Native Americans have no traditions of having horses. Well, that's actually like, that doesn't actually have direct bearing on the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon doesn't like say.
[00:15:19] Speaker C: Oh, independent of whatever tradition. Yeah, that's its own thing.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Yeah, that's its own thing. And so even if that weren't confirmed, that doesn't really prove anything for or against the Book of Mormon necessarily. But it is a criticism that was made and he points out that that one actually is false. There are Native American traditions that they had the horse. Now where those traditions came from, whether they really had the horse or something else. Right, that's something. That's an open question that actually there have been studies recently trying to kind of figure out what that. Where those maybe came from and how those maybe relate to the actual data and history of the horse in Americas. But, but the fact is they do have traditions. And so that's a checked off anachronism.
[00:15:57] Speaker C: Look, we're playing their game. We're playing the games that the critics set up, which was we make X claim about the Book of Mormon, it being false and silly for these reasons. Okay, you're studying the rules of the game. So when you see this big scary red chart, that's because this is what the critics were claiming. And now when it's green, it's proportionate to the amount of actually claims are responding.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Does that make sense? Right. So yeah.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: So some people might say, well, you guys are nitpicking or you're cherry picking or whatever. Well, no, we are trying to be comprehensive because these are the rules of the games that you guys set up by criticizing this Book the other fun example, there's these facetious or unserious claims of anachronisms from the 1830s.
The Book of Mormon mentions, like gunpowder and muskets, and that's totally dumb. And steamboats like, okay, this guy clearly never read the book. Right. But hey, that's a claim that, that some critics were making, right? So kudos to Matt for being comprehensive and following the critics by their own game. So even the little silly things, we still are tracking those, right?
[00:16:52] Speaker B: And so, yeah, 100%.
And the other implication of that particular fact is this is not wedded to a particular geography for the Book of Mormon. And so some people might go through this list and be like, okay, well, yeah, you have this, but it's not in Mesoamerica. Okay, now you're getting to the point where you're, you're critiquing a particular Book of Mormon geography, and that's. Look, that's fair game. I'm not saying that's. But, but you're not, you're not critiquing this particular work on its own terms. Right. And Matt acknowledges this in the introduction. This isn't, this isn't wedded to a particular geography. In fact, conversations I had with Matt, I don't know if he'll do it or he wants someone else to do it, but it would be a very interesting exercise to say, okay, if you set the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica, how many of these anachronisms are still valid vs are resolved? If you put it in South America, same question. Put it in North America, same question. And look, that could be a really valuable exercise for the Book of Mormon geography debates. Which one of these geographies better resolves the most anachronisms?
[00:17:55] Speaker A: But just off the top of your head, I mean, I imagine that all of those models have their strengths and weaknesses, have an organisms that other strengths.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: I mean, if you're talking about like the barley, that's a North American, like, you can check that one off, like.
[00:18:10] Speaker C: The big horned rams or whatever, potentially sheep or goats or whatever.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: And in fact, a lot of the fauna, the animals, the large quadruped animals that can pass for things like sheep or cows or whatever, their historical range fits a little better if you're putting it in North America. North America, right.
[00:18:29] Speaker C: But metallurgy would work better for South America.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Metallurgy is great if you're going to South America. The only one we can't check off there is iron. They don't have a lot of iron working, but copper, gold, Silver metallurgy, well into Book of Mormon times, even Jaredite times, if I'm remembering correctly.
But for a lot of the other big things, civilization level things, warfare, that kind of stuff, Mesoamerica is really where kind of dominates. Yeah, kind of dominates that sort of thing.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: His chapter on like cultural anachronisms or historical anachronisms, that was really astonishing to me to see. That's where so much of the verification comes now, with new data. And it's predominantly coming from Central America.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:12] Speaker C: So he lists, you know, fortifications, cities, widespread civilizations, road networks or highway networks, you know, lawyers and judges, these things that in Joseph Smith's day are being criticized for Stevens and Catherwood kind of pushes the boulder down the hill. And now we're here 200 years later, just about. And the, the archaeological profile is looking a lot better in Mesoamerica for these specific things than perhaps in North America.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, and so again, this is something he acknowledges in his introduction that it's not bound by a particular geography at this point, it's just, and it's on the critics own terms. So critics will say things like in pre Columbian America, like Stephen was talking about with horses or whatever. And so if the criticism is this wasn't there in pre Columbian America, you check it off. If it's there in pre Columbian America, if they're more precise and they say in Book of Mormon times or whatever, right. Then okay, now you know, Book of Mormon times. And so there's more work to be done to flesh out particular details like that. But this is kind of here's the state of the evidence sort of thing.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: One thing that has radicalized me was all this lidar stuff coming to light that has been mind blowing. So Neil and I, we, we've quoted these numbers before in some of our published works together. But this was maybe 10 years ago. Now the LIDAR stuff from like 5 years ago is I kind of bearing fangs on this.
The amount of archaeological work that has been done in the Americas and specifically Mesoamerica. Right. We have cited Mesoamerican experts, have put it in the low single digits. Right. In terms of like the actual percentage of sites that we've identified, located, excavated, studied the assemblage of what we've discovered. Right.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Excavated is like if we've done trench, any digging at all. Right. Not like did we dig up the whole city, but yeah, if we, if we like dug there once at some point in the last 60 years or whatever.
[00:21:02] Speaker C: Yeah. So the lidar is like I said putting fangs on this by showing how much more there is undiscovered. And I'm not using this as like a Book of Mormon of the gaps kind of argument. Right. But rather just to say on the blue part, partially confirmed.
Like, fellas, I'm telling you out there, we have not excavated everything there is to know about ancient America. Right. We have not found all the sites. We have not found all the sources. We've not analyzed all the sources and all the data that we have. Right. There is still. And I've had conversations with Mesoamerican experts who have told me they expect in our lifetime to find certain confirmation for certain things. Metallurgy is one of them in Mesoamerica. Right. Like, it seems to be training that way. So this is just to say we'll get to this later. Right. But taking a deep breath and having some patience for the blue section there, or even the red section.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Even the red section. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Some epistemic humility for what we know and what we don't know about the ancient world, because our knowledge is getting overturned all the time.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Well, and that's. Honestly, that's what this overall trend should tell you, right, is.
Yeah. In 1830, there were things that people thought were utterly ridiculous about the text that weren't, that are actually pretty good. In fact, I would consider it like the highways like Stephen was talking about. I actually think it's pretty good evidence that we actually have massive highway networks in ancient America in Book of Mormon times, to be specific on that one.
And people just thought that was absurd. Right.
Cement is another fun one. And I mean, we could do a whole episode on cement, because that one really drills in, like.
Well, depending on what geography you accept. But it. It aligns really, really well. If you. If you follow a Mesoamerican geography, you.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: Might say it cements the case for Book Mormon. Sorry, I'm gonna have bad puns any chance I get.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: It's. It's really. It's really concrete evidence.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: Yeah, there you go.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: There you go. But I mean, some of it is really. Has become. Some of these things that have been alleged anachronism at some point have actually become really compelling evidence for the Book of Mormon. And so, you know, have patience. Like, yes, there are some.
There are. Let's see, a total of 21 unconfirmed on this list now. And there's. There's probably. Again, this was the most comprehensive study that's ever been done. But, you know, there's probably always someone will want to Throw up something else. Right. But there is, there's good reason to be patient with some of these things.
[00:23:25] Speaker C: And well, and I'm looking at some of these unconfirmed ones here, and I'm just thinking like, okay, so some of these are names, for example.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: So for example, Timothy.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Timothy Jonas Kim.
[00:23:36] Speaker C: So these are names. That's a whole other episode. The Book of Mormon on a Gnosticon. But these are names that some critics have said we don't have evidence for these names. Right, okay, fine. Yes. In our current state of our epigraphic knowledge of the ancient Americas, we don't have attestation to, for these names. Right.
But look, like with Timothy, for example, right, that's, that's Jonas. Those are Old world names. So are we talking in the New World or the Old World? It just takes one inscription and we overturn that. You know what I mean? So some of these, like, like they're getting so granular, right, That, I don't know, it seems like you're setting yourself up for defeat because. Or metal plates in the New World is one of them. Specifically in the New World. Metal plates. Right. Like, I know there have been some forgeries trying to make metal plates in the New Worlds, but like, look, it takes one more dig at Dot Wakan or whatever, right, to find a little cache of metal plates and stuff. So you're kind of setting yourself up for failure if you're going to get this granular and demanding attestation for these specific things in the Book of Mormon.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: And yeah, I mean, yeah, we could have a discussion like how many of these things are actually things that we should expect to find. And then there's. There's a whole nother conversation about other ways to address or deal with.
[00:24:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Anachronisms beyond just being like literally finding the item in the dirt.
Things like loan shifting and, you know, translation, the fact that translation can introduce an acronym.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: Can we take a few minutes to talk about those? I mean, and distinguish how Matt Roper approaches that as opposed to his other.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: I mean, I think, yeah, we absolutely can because Matt, for the most part is not using those approaches. This is, this is meant to say, okay, what can we confirm is actually historically, archaeologically attested? Now, I did say, for the most part, caveat. There are a few instances where Matt is accepting a loan shift as confirming it. But like on some of these, like, like, can we get a picari or a peccary on the screen while you're looking that up?
[00:25:31] Speaker C: Let me explain real quick what loan shifting is for listeners who may not be familiar with. So another name for loan shifting is semantic expansion or semantic transfer.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Extension, Extension, whatever.
[00:25:44] Speaker C: Basically, it's when the meaning of a word changes where it used to refer to one thing, it can now expand to refer to other things that resemble the thing that it originally was meant to describe.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Does that make sense? And resemble is.
Is a little bit of a black box because it's not resembles to you or me. It resembles to the culture that has decided the word that are using the word.
[00:26:08] Speaker C: Exactly. So you and I might think that thing doesn't look anything like that other thing. That doesn't matter. Right? It's not.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: It's in some ways it's a heroinly subjective exercise. It's people speaking the language have a word for a thing. They see another thing that does not look similar or familiar to them. They use the familiar word to describe the unfamiliar thing.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: My favorite example is hippopotamus. Like the Greeks encountering this massive animal for the first time, and they're like, well, it's got four legs and it's in the water, so it's a river horse. Hippopotamus means river horse. And yet hippos look nothing like horses to our own sensibilities.
[00:26:40] Speaker C: We do it today all the time, both earnestly and unironically. Right. My favorite is on the Internet, people refer to raccoons as trash pandas. Right. Like, and they're kind of doing. As a joke, but like, that's. That's what you're doing.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: It's a long shift.
[00:26:52] Speaker C: We do it earnestly. Guinea pigs. Right.
Buffalo is another one. We go down the list. The point is, that's one potential way, as we're pulling up a picture of a peccary here, to account for anachronisms is to posit the idea that the Nephites came to the new World, they encountered animals that were unfamiliar to them, and so they gave it a word or a name from an animal that was familiar. Look at that little critter right there and tell me that does not look like a pig. Well, like a swine.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And not only. Don't tell me that it doesn't look like. Like, would you not call that a pig if you saw it?
[00:27:26] Speaker A: If you just saw it and say, what is that? Like, oh, some kind of hog.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: And.
And in fact, it is called a pig by people all the time, routinely. I think, I think the. In Brazil. What's. What's the Portuguese word for pig? I'm pretty sure in Brazil they call them like porcos or something like that.
In fact, the, the, the scientific fan.
[00:27:46] Speaker C: Look at this. Yeah. Medium sized pig, like undulates with a long flexible snout.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: And, and I'm pretty sure like the, the, the, the scientific order or family that they're in is like, it's the hog family, the pig family.
So anyway, Matt, Matt puts a few of these like loan shifts in there. But what he does, they're not speculative loan shifts where we're like speculating maybe the Nephites could have called it this. They're loan shifts that are historically attested.
[00:28:16] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Right. And so it's, it's basically, you can't say it's not historical for talking about pigs when we have historical sources from like the Spanish chroniclers that are doing this, that are, that are saying, oh, there are these pigs in the New World. Right. Or swine in the New World.
And so if you have historical sources calling them these things, then he, he counts that as fulfilled. Now whether you are willing to.
[00:28:38] Speaker C: Here's the range. This is great. There's the range of where these critters are found.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: So this one and this one works if you're south of Mesoamerica or Mesoamerican maybe even, I guess part of that gets up into the little bit of southeast southeastern United States maybe. Is that Texas actually.
[00:28:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: But anyway, and historical ranges are another. A whole nother conversation because they could have, they could have had a wider range in the past.
But I think that only like, it's a grand total of like nine things or something that he does with loan shifting.
[00:29:11] Speaker C: It's mostly animals.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: So if you're not willing to count those, that doesn't dramatically change the picture here.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Then you mentioned translation stuff.
[00:29:18] Speaker C: We should take a minute to explain.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: How in the Bible, in the King James version of the Bible it mentions things like candles, but it probably should have been translated as like lamps or lampstands because candles are a bit anachronistic for ancient Israel. That is a translation anachronism doesn't mean that they didn't have lamps in ancient.
[00:29:34] Speaker C: Israel or even steel. The King James Bible sometimes translates the Hebrew nahushta or nahash bronze. Bronze as steel. Yeah, Copper, bronze. They translate steel. So yes, that's another way that anachronisms can be introduced into a text. And I'm going to read a statement here real quick.
These ancient texts written in languages that are not modern English, if you're going to translate that into modern English, by the way, just by virtue of doing a translation, you're making it an Anachronistic text. Yeah, because you're having your people speak English and.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: Right. And, and there are like Bible translation committees and things like that have, have said like, yeah, like we try. Oh, you're gonna.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: Okay, I've got a go ahead. Yes, go ahead with the Bible. Right. This happens routinely where you will have words for things that. How are you going to. And should you translate it quote literally, which will obscure the intended meaning of it? Or do you translate it more idiomatically or paraphrasically in order to conceptually communicate, translate what is trying to be said. And there are whole debates among Bible translators how to do this. This gets back to the age old question. If you are translating the Bible for Eskimos in Alaska and they talk about the sands of Jerusalem, how do you conceptually render that? Right.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Or a common one is actually Lamb of God.
[00:30:53] Speaker C: Lamb of God.
And some of these like cultures that don't have land cultures. It's like the seal of God or something. Okay, so here is a statement from the committee of the new Revised Standard Version, updated edition that just came out like two years ago.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Nrsv U E U E. It's so long.
[00:31:10] Speaker C: It's very long. By the way, the NRSV is not some, you know, crank, weird apologist fundamentalist Bible. It is the like standard academic, ecumenical Bible that scholars and people from all faith traditions can cite and use it as widely accepted as a standard Bible translation in academia. Academic side all the time. Here's what they say. Deciphering the meanings of the Bible's ancient language involves a host of efforts. The study of the languages themselves, the comparative study of cognate languages from the ancient near east and the Greco Roman world, the disciplines of philology and linguistics, and the historical study of the social, cultural and economic contexts in which the Bible was written. The NRSV took special care not to use terms in ways that are historically or theologically anachronistic. Though as in every translation, anachronism is unavoidable.
Did you hear that? This is top shelf. Biblical scholars, academic scholars of the Bible saying anachronism is unavoidable in any translation of an ancient text. So our friend Brant Gardner has written on this extensively. He attributes many of the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon to translators. Anachronisms that happen routinely where the translator, by virtue of what he's doing, has to introduce anachronistic language into his translation to make it conceptually grounded for the reader. And so he argues, for example, that horses or steel could Be Joseph Smith's anachronism as the translator. Okay, Right. So that's another category that we could look at, we could dip into. Matt doesn't really do it so much here in his work, but that's. That is in the realm of like we're playing in the ball field with this idea of also translators anachronisms to perhaps account for some of this.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Yeah, and, and yeah, and Matt's clear in the, in the introduction, there may be ways to resolve some of these things that are currently unresolved. Still, his whole point is we're going to take an inventory. A state of the art with the archeology. Right. And so he's. Other than those few exceptions where, like I said, they're kind of historically based anachronisms rather than speculative anachronism or historically based loan shifts.
[00:33:19] Speaker C: Excuse me.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Other than those few exceptions, he's saying what does the. Well, those aren't really exceptions. If you say what does the historical and archeological data say about what was here? Right.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Of the list of anachronisms that are still unconfirmed. That is a small list. It is increasingly granular. You could say you're setting yourself up for failure by putting your hat on that increasingly shrinking list. But on the other hand, if I saw a historical document claimed to be written by George Washington and yet it had an iPhone in it, I would still consider that historically suspect. Isn't the presence of even one anachronism proof that the whole thing is false?
[00:33:58] Speaker C: No.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: Well, let me.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: Actually, not necessarily. Please go ahead.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: If it was an anachronism like that, an iPhone, an automobile, you know, something that if it's, if it's something we can definitively say, yes, that's an anachronism, then yeah, it would do it in. But we don't have. There's nothing like that in the book.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: There are no iPhones in the book.
[00:34:22] Speaker C: There's no steam engines.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: No steam engines and gunpowder and all of that stuff. Right. It's like a lot of like with animals. Like, no one's saying horses didn't exist in 600 BC or whatever. The question is, did they like, did they exist in a particular geographical or.
[00:34:36] Speaker C: With metallurgy, silver and gold. It's an anachronism in the Book of Mormon. No, it's not. Those things are as old as the earth itself. The use of those.
[00:34:44] Speaker B: The use of those people wonder about. And, and so like there's. So there's nothing in there that it's like, okay, that definitively did not exist before 400 AD. Like it's, was that in accessible to people living in ancient America in whatever geography you want to go by is ancient Israel or in ancient is in the early part of the Book of Mormon.
And that's a totally different ball game than something that we know definitively did not exist.
Other aspects to it though, I mean we've kind of covered a lot of these points. The fact that the Book of Mormon is a translation means that really like, and I once had someone, I was talking about this on another channel and someone in the comments comes in is like, that's not legitimate. Because like we know like, yeah, candles in the KJV is an anachronism. But if, like, if that was in the original manuscript, we would know it definitely is an anachronism.
[00:35:36] Speaker C: We don't have the original manuscript.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: That's the point is we don't have, we don't have the gold plates, we don't have the reformed Egyptian. We can't, we can't have Egyptian scholars like Stephen here scrutinize the text and say what, what did that really say?
We only have an English translation.
And so the presence of an anachronism in an English translation cannot actually be proof that it is not a translation. Because as Stephen already just talked about, translation can introduce anachronism.
Even the most scrupulous of translations can nonetheless introduce anachronisms. I mean, to add to all those reasons why, you know, the whole one anachronism thing just is not, does not actually apply here is as we talked about things like loan shifting or semantic extension, these kind of cultural cross cultural contacts that could have introduced unusual word usage that might look anachronistic to us. But if we, if we could actually be there and understand, you know, what it meant, you know, what chariot meant to a Nephite or whatever, we would be like, oh, maybe, maybe it's not anachronistic after all. I mean early American archaeologists used the word chariot for items that came out of the ground, but they were little wheeled figurines. They're not.
But that's a word usage that is unusual to us. But they're applying it to ancient American artifacts now. It doesn't, I don't think that's what chariots in the Book of Mormon are because that doesn't work with the context.
[00:37:04] Speaker C: But it shows the problem that we're identifying here with semantic extension and applying a familiar word to something new or even just by natural process of how language works. You just broaden the scope of what this word can mean to different items or objects. Right.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: And the other thing, which brings us back to the very premise, the very purpose of Matt's work. The other thing is just like the fact that we haven't dug everything out of the dirt yet, that we see this ongoing trend. If you said in 1830 that one anachronism does it in, and you chose as your one anachronism that there aren't large civilizations, and you're like that. That fact alone does the Book of Mormon. Well, Stevens and Catherwoods come along and they're gonna. They're gonna blow your whole argument to bits. Right.
And so again, because we don't. There's. There's not a smoking gun anachronism in the text, we can't ever really know for sure.
And look, I get it if you don't want to.
Like we saying we can't know for sure isn't the same as saying like, that it will be resolved or whatever. But, like, we can't ever really know for sure if.
If a given anachronism is just something that hasn't been found yet, or if it's. It's legitimately an anachronism.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Is there anything on that list of unconfirmed things still that you would say are implausible to find?
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Well, let me look at the list.
[00:38:31] Speaker C: Okay. Yeah, let's go through.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so asses traditions or donkey traditions? That's like what we were talking about with horse traditions. So no, Native Americans have traditions of having donkeys. Okay.
[00:38:41] Speaker C: Okay, so what that does.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: That doesn't do anything for us.
[00:38:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: Okay. Steel swords in the new world. Okay, that one. And. And steel swords explicitly in the new world are only mentioned in Aether, which is really early, which you could argue is. Makes it even more problematic because I mentioned we're getting closer with.
With metallurgy, but not Jaredite times. Right.
[00:39:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: I mean, that one could be hard.
You know, I don't know if we'll ever find steel swords for Jaredite times. What is interesting is we do have tons and tons of iron that goes back to Jaredite times. And we have iron working, not smelting, but iron working going on.
Could someone with maybe knowledge of old world metallurgical techniques have come along and made a few steel swords for military captains or something once, and that could be just a hard item to find in the archaeological record because it was so rare. I mean, they would have known where to find iron. We know that much. Right. They would have had access to it.
[00:39:44] Speaker C: What about heliocentric astronomy is interesting to me. So that's from our Book of Helaman. When we have.
I think it's when Mormon is kind of rhapsodizing at the end of the Gadianton Robbers, Right.
Where he says, where we know it is, it is the Earth that moves around the sun or whatever.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: To modern audience. You assume he's describing a heliocentric.
[00:40:04] Speaker C: A heliocentric astronomy. Right. So this is like the. Of kind Copernican revolution that we attribute to these guys in Europe and the, you know, early modern Europe.
So that one's interesting because those sorts of anachronisms are. They're both harder to like, sort of verify, but they're also harder to like, kind of falsify because you have to basically say at no point in the history of any humans who ever had brains did anybody ever think about heliocentrism until Copernicus. Right. Like, like, how could you possibly verify that or falsify that? That literally nobody before Copernicus and these other smart guys in Europe came around, nobody considered that the Earth was moving around the sun. That seems like a stretch to me, both in terms of, like, saying this is for sure anachronism and to like to verify that. Right. I suppose we could perhaps find some codex or something. I know that the Maya and the Aztec were super into astronomy. They could predict eclipses and things. Like they had a sophisticated calendar.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:56] Speaker C: Maybe one of them at some point thought, maybe we're moving around the sun. Right.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: I assume there's also a possibility that we could learn more about ancient American culture that would maybe give us a clue into. Maybe Hillman's talking about something else entirely.
[00:41:07] Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. Exactly. And that's exactly right.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: In fact, there was a paper in BYU Studies a few years ago that argued. I can't remember exactly what the nature of the argument was, but it did argue that he's talking about something else and not really about actual.
[00:41:20] Speaker C: So that's an interesting one. Same with like. I'll just use one more example, then. I'll let Neil pick one. Synagogues in the New World. Right. So they mentioned having synagogues. Like the Zoramites have synagogues, for example. That's where they put the rami emptom.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: You know, associate that with like a very Jewish place.
[00:41:34] Speaker C: Yes. A specifically Jewish, like, specific place where Jews go to worship today.
And it has a certain, like, aesthetic and an architectural kind of thing. You know what I mean? Like everybody in their brain kind of picture a synagogue and what it looks like, for the most part, like, okay, if a bunch of Zoramites get together and they call their place a synagogue, or rather Mormon calls it a synagogue, I should be more precise.
Right. Like, then, then the anachronism. Isn't that like. Like, isn't it. The anachronism is Mormon's usage, per se, of describing it. It's just a building where people go to gather, to worship. A place of worship.
[00:42:06] Speaker B: Well, so that would be an example of like, just a semantic extension or a loan shift. Right.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: So, yes, you call a place of worship. You could call it a synagogue, you can call it a church, you can call it a mosque. All of those are going to be like, kind of modern conceptions of describing ancient place of worship.
[00:42:19] Speaker B: I mean, the Book of Mormon includes synagogues, churches and temples. And those are clearly all like, English translations to talk.
Different kinds of communal gatherings, by the way.
[00:42:28] Speaker C: Gatherings, by the way, church and synagogue come down to the same idea. A gathering is, like, slightly different when.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: It comes to the kind of worship you do.
[00:42:34] Speaker C: Right, right. But, you know, should we expect to one day excavate, you know, down in Central America or maybe even Ohio or whatever, like a big building with a Star of David on it or whatever? Probably not. No, I don't think that's. People think synagogues, and they're thinking, oh, we Mormons expect us to find that they have, you know what we think.
Exactly. Well, yeah, I don't think that's.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: And you have to keep in mind that, like, what that is is something that historically and culturally developed within a particular setting and context.
But some of these other ones, like, specific Book of Mormon cities being identified, like, again, that's like. You're getting really granular here.
No, we haven't found.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Here's Zarahemla.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: A city that has, like, an inscriptional text that confirms its name is Zarahemla. We haven't found any.
A city with inscriptional texts that confirm its name was Nephi. We actually do. I mean, obviously there's not universal agreement on particular Book of Mormon geography, but in my opinion, we have some pretty good candidates for some of these cities that have a. An archaeological history.
[00:43:39] Speaker A: And in some cases, we don't know what these cultures call themselves.
[00:43:43] Speaker C: Right.
[00:43:43] Speaker A: Yeah, we haven't even discovered the names, but we have.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: They have an archaeological history and sequence that. That is pretty consistent with, like, the development, the growth and. And then destruction of the city in. In Book of Mormon and things like that. But, you know, that's the kind of thing. Like, maybe, like, I would be ecstatic if we ever found something like that.
[00:44:02] Speaker C: It'd be great.
[00:44:02] Speaker B: Yeah. But I don't think it's the end all be all to say we haven't found that. Right. Like, there's. There are cities in the Bible that we haven't specifically found. There are, there are all kinds of. I've talked about the Amarna letters where it talks about Jerusalem, and then archaeologists go dig in Jerusalem and during the period of Amarna, they couldn't find anything.
And that's actually a common problem with a lot of the cities mentioned in the Amarna letters is they don't have archaeology for those specific cities.
Is it a problem that these cities named in the Amarna letters aren't archaeologically attested at the right time?
Well, only if you doubt the authenticity of the Amarna letters, which nobody does. Right. And so this is a problem real texts can have sometimes is the cities they identify can't be found archaeologically.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: So basically, like this entire list is, there's no iPhones on this list. There's not a single thing that is like, okay, this never can happen in the archaeological record, or we wouldn't find some other cultural way to conceptualize this. And maybe you'd consider that mental gymnastics. But as we've demonstrated, like, this is actually what real academic historians and biblical scholars do when dealing with ancient texts when they encounter issues like this. Like, they'll consider different cultural ways to kind of make sense of these, these words and these objects.
[00:45:16] Speaker B: I mean, I would say the closest you're coming to an iPhone is either the steel swords or like the silver money. Right. Because those are, those are dependent on technological advancements, I guess. There's also metal plates, anything that's dealing with metallurgy. Those are potentially like, theoretically technological advancements that might be out of time or place. But again, the question is, will future archaeology actually uncover silver money or silver metallurgy and iron metallurgy in Book of Mormon times? It could. I mean, that's entirely possible.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: This is not the first time this kind of a study has happened, though this certainly is the most recent comprehensive study. Can you tell us about John Clark?
[00:46:00] Speaker B: So Matt Roper's own work here actually begins with John Clark in the early 2000s, because he was, he was assisting John Clark on a sort of preliminary version of this in 2005. I think it was in May 2005, but I might have the month off, off the top of my head. There was a conference in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress.
Where John Clark, who is a very reputable Mesoamerican archaeologist, by the way, one of the most influential of the late 20th and early 21st century in terms of like, pre classic.
Early pre classic Olmec culture and things like that.
He did this. He did. He presented a paper at that conference, and he presented preliminarily some results that he and Matt Roper and Wade Ardern, another. Another one of his research assistants had compiled. And at that point, I'm pretty sure if I have my. If I'm remembering correctly, they just sampled like, three publications from the 19th century.
And in sampling those three publications, they identified 60 criticisms that could be tested archaeologically.
[00:47:11] Speaker C: And.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: And then they said, okay, as of 2004, because he presented in 2005, but they're doing the research earlier, you know. And so as of 2004, how many of these are still anachronisms? What's the status, the status of the evidence and the charts that he had? And these charts have circulated pretty widely.
He had these charts that show these 60 items.
And just like with Matt Roper's as of 1842, when Stephen Catherwood's first reaches them. Right. Most of the boxes are red, most of the things are unconfirmed. But as of 2005 or 2004, you see a whole bunch of green, and then he uses yellow for his. For his trending rather than. Rather than blue. But you see a lot of green and a lot of yellow.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Even that is remarkable.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:04] Speaker A: To just look at.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: And his. At that. At that point, they had 35 out of 60 confirmed. So 58% confirmed, it says there, another 17% undetermined. So that's like 75% total with better evidence than in the 19th century, basically.
And so this is. Matt Roper was involved in this, and this is kind of the foundation that he builds on and expands here. And like I said, Matt goes through like over a thousand publications, and he goes through publications published as recently as the early 2000s and. And updates this. And I do find it kind of remarkable that even from 2005, the percentages improve as we get this more comprehensive data set and this up and update.
[00:48:46] Speaker C: It from what, 58 to 79%? Basically?
[00:48:49] Speaker B: 58 to 77.
[00:48:50] Speaker C: 20%?
[00:48:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah. 20% improvement on confirmed items.
If you combine confirmed and undetermined or trending, you have 75% in John Clark study, 91% in Matt Roper's study with better evidence.
[00:49:08] Speaker A: I think what's so remarkable about this is, like, not only to see the progress over time, but the fact that as the as time passes, the list of criticisms grows and yet the Book of Mormon outpaces it, and the list of criticism gets more granular and more specific and more nitpicky and yet the Book of Mormon continues to outpace it. So do church leadership know about this research?
[00:49:33] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it's actually kind of funny.
Recently.
Recently sustained, or I guess we didn't really sustain them recently called First Presidency member D. Todd Christofferson actually once brought up Matt Roper's research because this has been this was a long time ago, but Matt's been doing this ongoing for several years. The the publication in 2025 is like the culmination of, like I said, like 20 years of research. He started under under John Clark. But he mentioned Matt Roper's research in a BYU Idaho devotional shout out to the BYU Idaho peeps out there in 2013. And it's called the Prophet Joseph Smith.
Yeah, the Prophet Joseph Smith. And he talks about it's under the section Be Patient.
He talks about how Matt Roper, in a fair Mormon blog, so shout out to Fair as well, writes about a criticism repeated many times over the years about the mention of steel in the Book of Mormon. In 1884, one critic wrote Laban's steel sword. Laban's sword, or Laban's sword was steel when it was a notorious fact. A notorious fact. Not just a fact, a notorious fact that the Israelites knew nothing of steel for hundreds of years afterwards.
Who but as ignorant a person as Rigdon, they this person was apparently subscribing to the Spalding Rigdon theory. Ignorant a person as Rigdon would have perpetuated all these blunders.
More recently, Thomas O' Day in 1957 stated, Every commenter on the Book of Mormon has pointed out that many cultural and historical anachronisms, such as the steel sword of Laban in 600 B.C.
and so elder Christofferson at the time, not President Christopherson yet said, we had no answer to these criticisms at the time. But as often happens in these matters, and the charts we talked about shows you just how often it happens. New discoveries in later years shed new light. Roper reports it is increasingly apparent that the practice of hardening iron through deliberate carburization, quenching and tempering was well known to the ancient world from which Nephite came. It seems evident, notes one recent authority, that by the beginning of the 10th century BC blacksmiths were intentionally stealing iron and I'm going to stop Right there and mention a study I read. It was like a 2015 study where they actually sampled 60 items from the early Iron Age and 57 of them turned out to be steel. They had been carburized into steel. 57 out of 60 and but, but it gets masked because archaeologists will often just say we found an iron object and they won't bother to get it tested to see was it carburized into steel.
So most iron objects actually are probably carburized into steel. You just don't, you don't get that explained. But in 1987, the Ensign reported and it was also reported in many like August archaeological venues as well. It wasn't just but for church members, the ensign is a familiar reference point. Reported that archaeologists had unearthed a long steel sword near Jericho dated to the late seventh century B.C. probably to the reign of King Josiah, who died shortly before Lehi began to prophesy. This sword is now on display in the Jerusalem's Israel Museum. The museum's explanatory sign reads in part this sword is made of iron hardened into steel and attesting to substantial metallurgical know how.
Elder Christopherson now, where answers are incomplete or lacking together altogether, patient study and patient waiting for new information and discoveries to unfold will often be rewarded with understanding.
And so yeah, church leaders have noted this and have basically counseled be patient with, with the data. Answers may come in time. And that's like, that's a gospel principle really, right?
[00:53:20] Speaker A: That the Lord's timing.
[00:53:22] Speaker B: We have, we have questions and we study our scriptures and we study and we seek answers. But we have to be patient. And sometimes it takes time before answers come. And that's true in academia in the study of the ancient world as well.
I do actually want to share a quote from John Clark as well from his earlier study because I think it's relevant to a lot of what we've talked about, the idea of one anachronism doing things in and stuff like that. This is what a professional archaeologist actually thinks about that kind of problem. He says many items mentioned in the Book of Mormon have not been and may never be verified through archaeology, but many have been. Verification is a one way street. In this instance, positive and negative evidence do not count. The same as anyone tested for serious medical conditions knows, given current means of verification, positive items are here to stay. But negative items may prove to be positive ones in hiding.
This is the same point Elder Kristofferson is making, right? Missing evidence focuses further research but lacks compelling logical force in arguments because it represents the absence of information rather than secure evidence.
[00:54:34] Speaker C: There's an old saw about this, right? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: Right?
[00:54:39] Speaker C: It's said so often it's a cliche at this point.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: Well, I think it's so exciting how the Book of Mormon is clearly getting better with age. And for those who want to learn more, you can read this volume number 65 at the interpreter Foundation Online for free. Or you can buy the print copy of this and it's entitled Anachronisms Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms. Remember that you can believe boldly and still study hard and we'll see you next time.
[00:55:08] Speaker B: Sam.
