Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today we are going to be debunking some common myths people have about the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica. And so we've brought on with us a Mesoamerican scholar today. Welcome to Informed Saints. My name is Jasmine Rapley. We've got Stephen and Neil, and today we've got Mark Christiansen. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: So you are a professor of history at Brigham Young University, but you specialize in Mesoamerica, specifically Nahuatl and Yucatec May. Is that correct?
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Right, correct.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Awesome. And you are presenting at the upcoming Book of Mormon Culture Conference coming up in November in Provo, Utah. We are all very geeked out and excited about it because it's just like, right up our alley, things we love. And if this is kind of a preview of what you're going to be talking about at that conference.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it is.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: And so one thing that we've been doing a lot on the channel recently is talking about Mesoamerica. We've been talking about geography, we've been talking about the Hill, Cumorah, and lots of stuff.
And, you know, we're fans of Mesoamerica, but we at Informed Saints, like, you know, we want to be responsible and do our best work. And so I think it's good to even call out some things that happen on the Mesoamerican side side where we can maybe, like, do a better job threading the needle, dotting our eyes, crossing our teas, that kind of stuff.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: And so we would love to talk to you about some of the common myths you see, or common faith promoting rumors kind of stuff that people love to talk about when it comes to Mesoamerica. But maybe we need to be a little bit more careful with the Book of Mormon. So you're a professor of history, and yet you've seen the DNA studies, you've seen the lack of archeological evidence. How can you believe the Book of Mormon's true?
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Right.
I get that a lot.
And a lot of this, where this talk came from is I basically picked the four or five main concerns my students seem to have, the ones that never seem to die. Right. It's the girlfriend or boyfriend. You can't quit. You just always come back to them. We can't get him out of our mind. Right. And it's just always there.
And so the DNA thing. Right.
A lot of this revolves around this misunderstanding of the who the Book of Mormon peoples are versus the Mesoamerican peoples. I get this all the time, number one question is, well, so the layman, it's. They're the Maya, right? Like Nephi, he was like, those are the Aztecs, right? Like, like, what's. You know, and that's. They're trying to. And I appreciate that. Right.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: You're trying to coordinate apples, equate something.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Absolutely. They're taking something they know and trying to make the unfamiliar familiar with it.
But in, you know, in a lot of my classes, in my, my history classes, I teach History 201 at BYU. And we, we kind of talk from the dawn of time, 1500, and we, we talk about early migration in the Americas. Right? And so you have, you know, year 16,000, right. Or 16,000 years ago, actually, you have people crossing Beringia to come down into the Americas.
By the end of the last ice age, 13 and a half thousand years ago, you got people coming into the Americas. And so there are people here long before, like the Jaredites get here or the Nephites or the Mulekites and things like this. And so what I always tell my students is you have to realize not everyone in the Americas, the indigenous people, descended from either the Jaredites or Lehi or the Mulekites. And this is kind of the starting point. You got to get into that. Right. And it's like, oh, okay. Because then if that's true, then that completely changes the whole narrative. And this actually isn't coming from me. There's a great quote I'll use in my paper. It's from Elder Oaks at the time, now President Oaks, and he talks about a class he took at BYU where he came to that realization and he's like, it changes everything, right? Because now it's not for DNA. It's not as, oh, well, we didn't find any, like, you know, Semitic blood and things like this. Well, you know, you have to appreciate the fact that the vast majority of people you're testing are going to have Asiatic origins because that's where they came from.
And this isn't. I mean, of course, Book of Mormon peoples are there, but I mean, this is a.
This is a needle in a haystack in a haystack. You know what I mean? This is insane. Especially when you look at the more complicated things of, like, genetic drift and all these different sorts of things.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: Yeah, bottlenecks and bottlenecks.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: There's some. And there's some really great websites out there that talk about this in more technical terms. But it's, it's just insane when you actually. And no real geneticists would give credence to any of the, you know, supposed studies that have really been done. And so that really helps the students, I think. Yeah.
[00:04:13] Speaker D: I've heard some people compare it to like dropping a little drop of food coloring into like a big swimming pool.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:19] Speaker D: And it's like, what do you expect? If you then run to the other side of the pool and test the water to see if you can find the food coloring. Right. It's going to disperse and you're never going to find it.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: That is my favorite one. I love that one.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: I think it's worth pointing out that as you said, Mark, part of the problem that we have is self imposed where we as readers of the Book of Mormon come to the text with certain assumptions baked in on what we think the text is saying. And I think for most Latter Day Saints it was innocent enough. They were taught this in primary or in Sunday school. Right. And their teachers were not trying to lie to them. They weren't trying to manipulate them. They inherited certain assumptions. The ways we read the Book of Mormon. What I appreciate when we look at the history of Book of Mormon interpretation and reception is that Latter Day Saint thinkers and church leaders, not the least being Elder Oaks now, President Oaks, they too have said, guys, we don't have to have an empty hemisphere when Lehi comes here. We don't have to have like every single last Native American is a direct lineal blood descendant of Lehi in the absolute sense. The text itself allows for this more kind of nuanced picture that's been helpful to me as I, you know, I, I took these classes at byu, American Anthropology and archeology and things like that. And I don't know, it's no skin off my nose right. When I encounter these things because I have that more sort of nuanced perspective on it, which I appreciate.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: I mean, and it takes care of what I call the 95% of the, of the gotcha concepts that opponents of the church will come at you with. It's like, okay, I got one. You know, this is gonna, this will tank your testimony. 95% of them fade away. It's like, you know, well, how come we don't see any graffiti of Nephi was here in Chichen Itza, in reformed Egyptian. And they just step back, go like, oh, yeah, answer that. Well, there's other people there, you know.
[00:06:00] Speaker D: Well, and, and Chichen Itza's like, later.
Much, much.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: The bar for evidence just changes drama.
The bar for evidence changes dramatically when you just assume that they're being surrounded by other cultures because if they're isolated, that means every DNA needs to be Nephite, every pottery shard needs to be Nephite. But if they're surrounded by other people, then yes, you're drop a food coloring in a big vat of water.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Absolutely. And it may seem to some. Oh well, that's kind of, you know, they're just glossing over. But again, understanding Mesoamerican cultures, even when, even when we are doing digs on temples, on Maya temples.
[00:06:33] Speaker D: Right.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: What you have to understand is what you're looking at is a shell that's been built upon numerous pre existing temples. And so if you're looking at, okay, what was originally there, it is nearly impossible to even get to that. You're only really seeing what's most recent. And so there's so many complicated leaders to all of this. But like we say, Jen, I mean it's 100%. If you have that mindset, then the question isn't so much.
And this is how we've done a lot of Book of Mormon studies and thankfully I think we're getting better at this. But it used to be in the past. Okay, how can we find the Old World in the New World?
[00:07:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: How have the Nephites imprinted on that
[00:07:11] Speaker D: was kind of Thomas Stewart Ferguson parallel sort of stuff.
Old world, New world.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And like, you know, if you look at this Maya glyph and you squint your eyes and you tilt your head sideways a little bit, it looks like an Egyptian glyph and it's like, that's it, that's it. Now we can come through the Book of Mormon, Right. But instead the conversation becomes, how does the New World imprint on the Nephite peoples? Do we see evidence of that? Yeah, in the Book of Mormon, Right. Can we see trends and things? And so that's a much more interesting question. And that allows me as a professional scholar, I can go to these conferences and hold my head high and say, yes, I do believe in the Book of Mormon and be like, how do you believe in this? And this? And everything they say, of course is not.
[00:07:51] Speaker D: It's just stuff you don't believe.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: It's very easy to debunk all of that. But when you come to it from this, it's like, oh, well, yeah, that makes sense.
[00:07:59] Speaker C: We need to stop equating one for one, the Maya were the Nephites or whatever, pre Columbian indigenous group, the Hopewell were the Nephites or whatever. Rather what we're seeing in Pre Columbian anthropology is again, a tapestry, a diverse sort of blending of different cultures, of which for those who believe the Book of Mormon is a historical record. We would say the Nephites and the Lamanites and the Jaredites participated in this broader cultural tapestry. So instead of identifying one group or the other with them, it's rather how do we see them fitting into this bigger mosaic of pre Columbian America? And Brett Gardner, that's been his methodology for even John Sorensen. Right. I find that a much more viable methodology going forward, 100%.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: It's more careful, it's more, I don't want to say academic, but it's more responsible, I should say. And sometimes people may sit back and it's like, oh, what's the big deal? Like, why do we care? And things.
It does matter, especially for students today, because then students will come to you with all of these things they've been told. And I like how you said at the beginning, look, no one's trying. There's no ill will here. You've just been taught this and you just kind of believe it. And fair enough, but then with the Internet, right, they start checking all this stuff and if it doesn't turn out to be accurate, they feel that they've been gamed and they've been tricked by. And you know, of course it's unfair. But then they just say, oh, well, the church has been holding withholding information,
[00:09:19] Speaker C: they've been lying to me, they've been gaslighting me.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: And then it just comes this whole spiral, like, well, what else have they been lying to me about? And right. And so it actually, it, we do bear the responsibility to be careful in what we say. You know, we're entitled to our own opinions, but we should be careful. And you know, even, you know, even sitting here, like, I represent myself, I don't represent the Church, I don't represent byu. This is just my own personal opinions on everything. But I think too many times we, we offer opinions and maybe we should have just said anything at all.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: So as a professional historian, why do you find mesoamerica a helpful milieu for understanding the Book of Mormon?
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Right. And, and okay. And so this is a, you know, this is some rage bait for every, all the heartlanders out there, I suppose. Right. And look, and, and because I'll get some of my students. Before I came to BYU eight years ago, just to kind of preface this, I, I taught in Massachusetts for eight years. I mean, for. Yeah, no, I was there.
I think I was there. Anyways, where were you Teaching there at Assumption University. Catholic University. Oh, it was great.
[00:10:20] Speaker C: That's where I got my doctorate, Catholic University of America.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: It was one. Yeah. I mean, it's. It was absolutely. Loved it. Wonderful, wonderful people. I have, have really, really close relationship to the friars and they still help me with my Latin translations to this day. Latin is rush. Anyways, so, you know, I would give. People would ask, you know, because they hear you do Mesoamerican, it's like, okay, you know, they pull you up and they're like, well, Book of Mormon, right? Like, where was it they want? So I'd give fire sites and stuff. But Massachusetts. There's a lot of heartlanders in Massachusetts. Fair enough. What I would say is, look, until it appears on the temple recommend questions, I don't think we need to be as contentious about this as I think we need to be, right. However, that being said, when people ask me, okay, well then what's your professional opinion? Right.
For me, being a world historic, teaching world history and being in Mesoamerica, there are certain boxes that need to be ticked in order to be able to have a population density like you see in the Book of Mormon, to have writing, to have the buildings, the permanent architecture, the social stratification, all this. And you need to have these intensive sedentary civilizations that are producing intensive agriculture with a lot of surplus food. Right?
Look, the only place in America is really at that point that could. That is supporting something that ticks. Every single one of those boxes is going to be Mesoamerica. And I know there's going to be arguments to be made, like there's certain places in, like down in Peru, right? You had the Inca and things like that. And everyone's thinking, oh, what about the Mississippi Mound Builders and those cultures and things? Fair enough. But not all the boxes get ticked. And so for me, it's a pretty simple. Especially when you look at the limited geography of the Book of Mormon, there's a lot of reasons where, for me, at least, this would be the area where it has to be.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: So is it then like, okay, Mesoamerica, game over. Everything Mesoamericanists touch is gold. Or are there maybe some conversations to be had about even people who promote Mesoamerica as a potential side for the Book of Mormon, maybe being more careful?
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. And that's the thing. It's like, now that, you know, once you hone in, I'm a big fan of Sorensen, right?
Classic book that really, I think, kickstarted so many great things and now we, you know, that a lot of people think they have an area. It's like, okay, well, let's look for the evidence.
And sometimes we look too hard.
Another thing I tell my students is like, look, I'm sure the Book of Mormon appreciates it, but it doesn't need your help in being true.
You don't need to prove the Book of Mormon true. It is true.
Right. And sometimes I think we're trying too hard to prove it true. And so we're like, okay, well, what can we pull out? Well, Quetzalcoatl, there's one. Right. And I understand, you know, people have different beliefs on this and it's a, it's an important kind of part of the story.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: But when, for those who don't even know who Quetzalcoatl is.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, Quetzalcoatl is. It's a very popular God in Mesoamerican cultures. The Aztecs called him Quetzalcoatl, which is feathered serpent. Right. He's a very important God. The Maya called him Kukukan. Right. Feathered serpent again, same thing.
I think he actually made.
Oh, what is that popular movie that came. It was one of the, the second Black Panther movie, wasn't it?
[00:13:24] Speaker A: I know.
[00:13:25] Speaker D: Yes. No. Yes, he was, he was in the second culture.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: He's all over the place.
[00:13:30] Speaker C: Well, the currency down in Guatemala are called quetzales, aren't they not. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, for like bird feathers.
[00:13:36] Speaker D: Bird feathers.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Quetzales, the bird is that kind of like Makosh bird. And a kawat is a snakes in
[00:13:42] Speaker D: Latter Day Saint culture. I mean, this was certainly like there was Chris Heimerdinger's tennis shoes among the Nephites that talked a lot about like the feathered serpent and stuff like that. And hey, I was a fan of those books.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: I love those books growing up.
[00:13:52] Speaker D: They're great. We've worked with Chris in the past. We love him. But tell us, be the bearer of bad news. What are some of the.
[00:14:01] Speaker C: Be the wet blanket for us.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Mark.
[00:14:02] Speaker D: No, just kidding. So some people have taken this idea of some ideas around him and they've associated it with Jesus Christ and, and, and things like that. So what are some of the problems there?
[00:14:12] Speaker B: Well, it really stems from this idea that it's all about the Spanish, really. So the Spaniards come and it's this idea that according to the Spaniards, the Aztecs were waiting for the return of a, of a white bearded God. Right.
And this is kind of where this legend then picks up and then it, you know, the late 1800s kind of picks up by Latter Day Saints and we kind of morph that into Christmas. It had been morphed into Christ a little bit before. Honestly, this legend of a white bearded God returning was something largely fabricated in the schools that the Catholic missionaries were bringing in the sons of the Aztec nobility to train them. So, you know, when the priests get here and they would, they want to convert everyone to Christianity, they adopt every member, a missionary type of an idea. And so they set up their own MTCs, as it were, and they bring all the sons of the nobility, the Aztec nobility, into these schools and they keep them there for two to three years. You know, kind of like these boarding schools. Teach them how to write their spoken language in the written Alphabet, right. So. Or in the Roman Alphabet. So we have Nawat, you can write Spanish doctrine, all these different sorts, Latin even.
And the legend starts to pop up. You really start to see it in the, the 1560s into the 1580s, where there was this reported white bearded God that was supposed to come back. His name was Quetzalcoatl and he was supposedly not a fan of human sacrifice. He wanted to have a more peaceful alternative, even the sacrifice of butterflies, things like this. And this got early on, it was morphed into Cortez.
And so Cortez was the first Quetzalcoatlan to Christ, as it were. Right. It was first going to be him and then Quetzalcoatl gets morphed into a figure known as St. Thomas.
And Spanish Catholic doctrine, kind of he went out to preach the gospel, we're not entirely sure where.
And so but they think it was in the New World and things. And so it's. He becomes. And I actually have images of Quetzalcoatlus, St. Thomas. And so this starts to pick up currency and then later it gets morphed into Christ. So Quetzalcoatl has had a variety of avatars. This whole Quetzalcoatlus Christ is the most recent.
But honestly, we didn't start as Latter Day Saints. We're actually kind of stealing it from the Spaniards.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: I will just add, and we touched on this in our episode on View of the Hebrews and its alleged influence on the Book of Mormon. But Ethan Smith, Reverend Ethan Smith, I keep mentioning him, I'm doing all this research on Ethan Smith. I'm obsessed with that. He's an interesting guy, but, you know, one of his many evidences he offered for the Native Americans being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, was Quetzalcoatl legends there we Go. But specifically, it's not that Quetzalcoatl is Jesus Christ. For Ethan Smith, he's Moses the Lawgiver. And he uses that. He says there's these legends of this beneficent Lawgiver that comes to the people. Who else can this be but Moses? You know? So, yes, when you say that he's had many kind of permutations and avatars. That was another sort of popular one among some Protestants, at least, was that.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Well, my favorite is the Road to El Dorado where they kind of feature Cortez appropriating the Quetzalcoatl imagery in the Aztec way. Great movie.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: The other thing about this whole kind of looking the Mesoamerica and kind of pulling out the stuff to prove it is that, look, if you're going to do it, you got to pull out all the pieces, right?
And we cherry pick the data. You know what I mean? We only pick the aspects of Quetzalcoatl that we like, you know, oh, you know, the Quetzal, because he's up in heaven and stuff. The Quad, it's a strong, you know, and it's a serpent and it's. This is true. But he was also. He was kind of this.
This conglomeration of a lot of different gods, right?
But he also, you know, got drunk. He also slept with his sister. He also did a lot of stuff we wouldn't associate with Christ. None of that ever gets mentioned in the literature. But for Mesoamericanists, we're like, are you sure that's the one you want to pick? Like, I don't know if it's. If you're going to be picking one, there's some other ones I can throw you away, but. And so it's just kind of a tongue in cheek way of saying, again, we gotta be fair. We gotta be fair with the evidence because we're not doing ourselves any favors. Because the rest world, especially with the Internet and AI and stuff, they can find this stuff up in a second. And then it makes us look like, you know, I don't know. Yeah, religious delusion.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: Would we expect to find any evidence for a Jesus Christ figure in Mesoamerica? I mean, we already talked about needle in the haystack stuff, but if we were to find evidence, do you know what that might even look like?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: I wouldn't expect to. I wouldn't expect to. Because after the Nephite Nation falls, you know, we're looking around 400 AD, one of the first things you did as a Conquering people in Mesoamerica is you destroyed. Yeah, you destroyed records. The Aztec glyph for conquering was a temple on fire. You would burn it. And so I wouldn't expect really to find it. You look at the temperature, the humidity, the preservation difficulties that you have in Mesoamerica.
Even if it was like inscribed on glyphs and things like that, it'd be quite possible. Maybe it's under layers of different temples or things of this. But the fact that we haven't found evidence of that, it is to some it's like, oh, well, I think we should find it.
As Mesoamericanists, I think, and any non member Mesoamericanists would 100% agree with what I'm saying here. This was not the main religion of that area.
And so you're not expecting really to find that.
[00:19:26] Speaker D: And I would just note that this concern about records being destroyed, it's reflected right in the Book of Mormon itself. Right. They fully expect. They're like, hey, the Lamanites, they want to destroy us, they want to destroy our records. And so that's why they're riding on metal in the first place. They're like, this is something that's permanent and that we can preserve.
And they're hiding their records and things like that to try and make sure they're preserved.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: And when I read stuff like that, that for me I read that and I'm like, yeah, this is a historic document set in Mesoamerica. Like all those things, it's just kind of these little things that just like make sense.
[00:19:57] Speaker D: Fingerprints of antiquity.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's nothing huge and like glorious that I can make like a Book of Mormon tour out of. But you know, this is, it's these little hidden truths that are in there that are just like spectacular.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: Yeah. When I was Mark Wright's ta, he called it death by a thousand cuts in terms of Book of Mormon evidence. Because people would ask him what's, what's like your favorite one. He says, I can't just name like one or two. It's like, it's a little snowball effect of a thousand little things that accumulate.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: I couldn't agree more, 100% when it
[00:20:23] Speaker A: comes to the gods. I think my educational background is more in like ancient Near Eastern stuff. But I think also Western civilization in general. When we think of pantheons, we think of like the Egyptian pantheon, the Greek, the Roman, where there is often a head God. And a lot of the roles of the gods map similarly. Like there's, you Know of the hearth, of the hunt, of the. Of war, of love. But then you go to Mesoamerica, and at least from what I've cursorily found is those. Those categories don't always map the same. And some of these gods are pretty dark and gritty.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: No, they are. And. And we have to understand, although you don't really have. You don't have a Maya empire, Right. This often gets mixed up and people get this really wrong.
So you have these individual Maya kingdoms, and sometimes they conquer each other to form larger kingdoms. Right.
But in each one, they have their own essential creation myth of why they are the best. And so they're going to have their own takes on the gods and which ones are most important to them. And so it's going to vary as time. Now, we will find similarities. Absolutely. Right. We were talking about the Popol Vuh earlier on, like the hero twins. You can map them throughout so many of the ancient Maya sites.
[00:21:28] Speaker D: Right.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: But there's going to be emphasis placed on each site, on each particular God and how it relates to their rulers and why then their city is the best.
[00:21:38] Speaker D: I actually do want to maybe come back to this idea, though. You're talking about, like, each polity, each city state really, amongst the Maya would really kind of have their own version of the creation myths of maybe their own origins.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: There's no pope. The Maya endorsing orthodoxy. Yeah.
[00:21:54] Speaker D: Their own history. And I think when you start to understand that and there's.
I mean, how many cities have we even found? I mean, I think there's like thousands of them.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Oh, with lidar. Yeah.
[00:22:06] Speaker D: And I think once you start to understand that and the complexity that's there, I think you start to see how Book of Mormon peoples can fit into this. Right. Because now you have, like. Okay, well, you have this polity at Zarahemla, and you have a Nephite religion. Right. That has, you know, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or at least what we have now translated in these very Christian terms. And certainly we believe they were Christian, but what that would have actually looked like on the ground for them is probably really different than what we imagine. But they have their own history. Right. Their own origin story, all of this kind of stuff. And you can fit. You can see how they would have just been one among many.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:22:43] Speaker D: Within that broader milieu.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Right, exactly, exactly.
And this kind of actually, you bring that up with all these individual city states. One of the very first things we started talking about was kind of the early migration of the Americas. Right.
And we're trying to map who the Nephites are with the Maya or like the Lamanites of the Maya. We're trying to, like, figure these things out. And I think one of the problems is we need to consider the terminology of what. What do members of the church mean when they say Nephite or Lamanite?
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Because it's the big one, especially.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Right, exactly. Right. And so, because if you pull it out of the scriptures, I mean, there are some. And I'll go into this more in my talk. Right. But it becomes much more broad, more of almost a political association. Right. Nephites are those who are friendly to the people of Nephi, who are, you know, maybe say, like the covenant people.
[00:23:33] Speaker D: Right.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: And Lamanites more and more are basically just everyone else. Everyone else who does not like the Nephites who don't accept Christ, who. And it's kind of, you know, if we want to think about it as, you know, kind of again, the covenant people and the Gentiles, it's these broad terms which absolutely they would have used as, you know, from their Jewish heritage. It's. It's a very much an us versus them. It's an othering of everyone else.
And when you understand Lamanite in a broader term like that, or if you choose to. Right. I mean, and, you know, many people do, but, you know, you certainly can have your own opinions on that, then it honestly makes sense of how the Nephites and Lamanites were having wars after 30 years. Yeah. Because demographically, it's like you got like 50, 60 people.
[00:24:17] Speaker C: I think it absolutely is in the text. It's like as early as, well. I mean, two Nephi five, when the family splits, and then later, Jacob in Jacob Chapter one, he's the one who, within his generations, anybody that's not friendly, we're calling them Lamanites. So that could have included this very broad umbrella of plenty of other indigenous cultures and groups that may have had nothing else otherwise to do with the Book of Mormon, other than the fact that in this one specific record, they are called Lamanites, and they're lumped in with Laman and Lemuel and their descendants.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: All right, go ahead.
[00:24:45] Speaker D: I was just going to say he. I mean, already with Jacob, you have him talking about polygamy and stuff like that.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:49] Speaker D: Which is like, if you. If you just have this one little group of. Of direct descendants from Lehi, where are all the women coming from that they're doing polygamy with and things like that? Right, Absolutely. Yeah. There's a broader culture that they're participating with. And, yeah, they seem to be using these. These categories, Nephite and Lamanite, as an umbrella to classify everyone they're encountering one way or another.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Right. And then when you. When you have your mind thinking about it like that, and then you start reading the Book of Mormon, things start popping out. Like when Alma goes to the Zoramites, right, And he's on that mission and he has that prayer right before, and he prays, help us to convert them, because many of them are our brethren, not all.
[00:25:29] Speaker D: Any of them.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Why would he qualify? You know what I mean? Like, all of a sudden, things just start popping out. And this then helps us to understand perhaps how the Book of Mormon is fitting in with them, you know, within what we know about Mesoamerica, when you just don't consider that they all have to be direct descendants.
[00:25:45] Speaker D: Right.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: We're looking at different groups of people. So, yeah, always go back to the evidence, to the documents, and look at what it says, not what people say that it says.
The vast majority of people that lose their testimony about the Book of Mormon is because they're listening to what people say that it says, and they've stopped reading it. They've stopped reading for what it says. Right.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: If there's challenges with using these colonial documents, is there any. Anything we can learn about the Book of Mormon from these colonial texts? Or are we just, like, guessing in the dark?
[00:26:17] Speaker B: No, no, no. There are things. And there are those little nuggets, little things you learn about Mesoamerica that pop up as you read it. Like, we kind of already discussed with the burning of the records, Right, the one that I.
I don't know if you were there at the last Book of Mormon conference where I talked about with the annals.
[00:26:33] Speaker D: Yes, I was there, and I watched it again on YouTube. We'll put the link in the description.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: It was super cool.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: So the Namas had a tradition of keeping annals, which. It's, you know, it's like a chronology. It's a. It's a history, you know, and kind of like an almanac.
And they would write it, you know, in this year, and then you would say the eventful things that happened. And sometimes it would be, well, in this year, I don't know, it rained really hard in this month, and then the next entry is the next year. And then the next year might be like, you know, the next couple years, not much. And then in this year, this king was.
Came into power. This ruler did. And then all these great things that happened. Right. And it's going to go on and on and on. When I read in the Book of Mormon, I read annals all the time where it's like. And it came to pass in the 30 and fifth year this happened. And the next verse. And it came to pass in the 30 and 6th year, this. And in the 37th year and 8th year, there's a lot of prosperity. And then in the 39th year, and then they'll spend like five chapters on it.
[00:27:30] Speaker D: Right.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: That is so Nahua annals to me. So when I read that, it's a very distinctive thing. There are similar comparisons with Jewish history and that, but they tend not to be quite as concise and they go much, much longer. And so for me, it resembles more. And so there are things that we can read and we see and we pull over, you know, but also keep in mind, you know, Nahua had written documents. I mean, you're looking in the 1500s here. These Nahua annals are coming out in the 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, and we are far removed from Book of Mormon peoples. And so not only are we trying to look at Mesoamerica to find the proof, but we're looking in Mesoamerica a thousand years plus after the Book of Mormon ended, still trying to find that. I mean, it gets really difficult sometimes. And this is where, again, more of this danger kind of like ekes in.
[00:28:23] Speaker C: We're not saying this is proof for the Book of Mormon or that we can map it one for one, but it does give us kind of a representative case that we can compare with the Book of Mormon to see similar things sort of enacting.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Absolutely. And even when you look at the Aztec Hamya, I mean, okay, you're not going to find any direct lines. But what do we know from these documents? One, they kept records like Book of Mormon peoples. Right. Two, look, what mattered to them? You know, it's going to be religions and kings and things like this. Not saying they're getting this from Book of Mormon peoples, but they have kind of this shared identity. Right.
And kind of going back to you said about the burning of the records, there has to be records to burn.
Right. And so the fact that they're even afraid of this, I mean, so there's so many kind of like larger things that I really do think that it makes it worthwhile.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: So.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Are there any other examples of cool Book Mormon evidence in Mesoamerica that we maybe should be more cautious about?
[00:29:16] Speaker B: The classic is it's a pastela Five. And I think the early work in this that came out.
I think the article came out in the early 50s, and then the late. In those late 50s, like 58, I think, is when the book hit, talking about what is more popular, known as the Lehigh Stone, the Tree of Life from Itzapa.
And they think it was made around 300 BC around there.
And you see this stamped on, you know, carrying cases for scriptures. I've seen it in so many homes.
You could go right now on Amazon and on Etsy, you can get your own little. It's Apostela 5, right.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: I've got some in my office.
[00:29:51] Speaker C: Right there.
[00:29:51] Speaker B: Right there.
[00:29:52] Speaker D: It's right behind us. And regardless of any connection to the Book of Mormon, it is a very cool.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:29:58] Speaker D: Piece of Mesoamerican.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: Mesoamerican art.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: Absolutely beautiful. Everyone should. Should look at it. And so what. Early on, it's. It was. It was taken to be kind of a representation of. Of the Tree of Life and Lehi and everything like this.
And modern. More modern studies. There's a really great one by Clark that kind of really gets into this. Well, I think. And I think he does a really good job.
It's easy, especially in academia, to disparage those who have come before and say, oh, they totally got it wrong. And I don't think we need to do that here. I think it starts a conversation, and we can kind of continue that conversation, see where it takes us. So the modern conversation with Zapa Stella 5 is that it's not necessarily a representation of the Tree of Life. Right.
What Clark did is he actually got better images of drawings of it. And so now that we can actually see it better, we can make better conclusions from it.
And instead, it represents bloodletting rituals that are really common in Mesoamerica.
It represents later a Nahua God, Hekat, which is a God of wind. There is a.
Which he was also kind of a manifestation of Quetzalcoatl. So there is that as well.
But these are rulers, familiar motifs. I believe there's a maze God in there. So now that we know more, we can actually see what this actually is. And then the tree, right? It's oftentimes it's described as, you know, the tree going up from the branches, kind of the Tree of Life, this. This Sava tree, this world Tree. Thank you is the word I'm looking for. It has its roots going into the underworld. On the new drawings of Clark that Clark produced, you can actually see that the roots are actually aren't roots at all originally, it was like, there's 12 roots. So it's 12 tribes of Israel, right? This was a really big thing. It's actually a crocodile face, and the roots are the teeth or the aquatic kind of. You've seen a catfish, kind of like the aquatic appendages that hang down. Very, very common in the gods of Tylock and things to represent aquatic animals.
And so this was the celestial cayman, right? This crocodile. Very, very common motif in Mesoamerican. So it's actually his crocodile. And that's. That's what the roots are. And there are 12.
And so we've come to a kind of a better understanding. So some people like, well, I mean, do I got to take it down for my. No. I mean, it's an awesome piece of Mesoamerican art. Keep that up in your house. That's wonderful.
You need to ask yourself, if it doesn't represent the Tree of Life, then what is the Book of Mormon still true, right? Of course it is. 100% right. It's true in other ways, in different ways. And we kind of learn and we go on, you know, and so.
[00:32:41] Speaker A: So if the tree represented in that Stella would have been a world tree, what would that have meant to the Maya? What. What does that symbolize?
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Right. So you have different. We have four world trees kind of holding up the universe. And it's. It's kind of.
It's almost like a connection between the underworld, the Middle World and the upper world. And the motif of a world tree is actually quite ancient. You get it in the Old World as well.
The Assyrians used.
Was all over the Old World, which for me. So when I read the Tree of Life, you know that Lehi's writing this back in, you know, just right outside of Jerusalem. This makes sense to me. I mean, he has no Maya influence at this point, but I think personally, it would have made sense for that vision to have a world tree, because that is a motif he would have understand in an Old World setting.
And there's so many other aspects of that dream, I think also would have really made sense to Lehi and kind of like a Jewish background.
But yes. So the fact that we have a world tree and it's like, well, you know, that's a totally my thing. It's true. But the world tree is not monopolized by the Mai. You see this in other world cultures as well.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: So on critique, I've heard of John Clark's paper in 1999 that he published in the journal Book of Mormon Studies. Is that. Yes, these were, like, new drawings, excellent renderings of the stone. But it was many decades later, after there was a lot of weathering, potentially leading him to misinterpret or misdraw or photograph some of these images that lead to different interpretations. What would you say to that?
[00:34:07] Speaker B: I would say it's always possible. I mean, I very seldom asking my students. I very seldom speak in absolutes because I.
[00:34:16] Speaker C: Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I learned that from Star Wars.
Perfect.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: Perfect segue to that.
So it's always possible.
But from what I've seen, even on the original ones in the 1958 book, that is a bloodletting tool that supposedly, you know, I can't. It might even be Soraya, that she has it. I'm not. I'm not sure. It's a stingray spine going through a tongue.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: There's nothing Nephite about that. That is Mesoamerican, right? That is the God Eckhart.
I've seen his motif a thousand times. I'd recognize that. And so I would just turn it around and be like, okay, if this is. Then you've got to explain to me why we have bloodletting going on. Right. You know, with the Tree of Life. And you have to, like, explain how these gods are there, and maybe there's an explanation. They can explain it. But I would just kind of ask that question.
[00:35:08] Speaker D: So I actually. I want to key in on something you've. You've mentioned a couple times, because we've also.
We've kind of talked about this concept a little bit when we've done some episodes on, like, the Book of Abraham facsimiles and things like that, this idea of these motifs that you see in the art, as someone who has an expertise and background in this, you're able to look at a drawing of, like, steel of five or other things, and you recognize these cultural motifs that show up that help you make sense of, oh, that's what this is depicting. And, you know, we've. Like I said with the Book of Abraham facsimiles, we've talked about how, hey, these are. These have certain Egyptian motifs. And that's how we can make sense of what's going on in these images from an Egyptian perspective, which is separate from, like, what they're doing in the Book of Abraham. Right. But I think that's a really important concept to understand, because when you. Once you start trying to take the image and you try to say, oh, well, okay, this is actually Lehi's vision of the Tree of Life. And this is what this means. Like, there's no, like, handbook of Nephite art or anything where we can parse what the motifs were for Nephite art so that we could say, hey, here's how you responsibly interpret this.
And so I think that's just something important to understand is, like, responsible interpretation of a piece of art that doesn't have text. Describing or explaining what it means requires that you have kind of canons or standards of motifs and things like that that come from this systematic study of everything that's going on. And so I think what I hear you saying is, hey, whatever might be the more accurate drawings or whatever, we've got to take this stele and we've got to put it within its Mesoamerican milieu, and that's how we've got to make sense of it. And only after we've made sense of it in that way can we potentially say, all right, how might this inform. Maybe not connect to or prove, but how might this inform Nephite, something we might interpret about the Tree of Life in the Book of Mormon or whatever?
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I love the way you put that.
It's that careful analysis in the day and age that we're in. I really do think that we can slow down a little bit and be a little bit more careful with our conclusions. We're not doing anyone any favors. In fact, as I said at the beginning, it can actually do some harm. And so it's important that we do this. We're careful about it. Right. And we don't try to make the Book of Mormon.
I know. We don't try to prove things that just aren't there because it's already proved. It's already true.
[00:37:29] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: It doesn't need our help.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: With all of your professional experience, why do you believe the Book of Mormon's true?
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Because I read it, is the simple answer. I still read it, and I still feel it.
I've never met a book that makes me feel the way that it does after having read it so many times.
And that's as simple as it is. And it's what I tell everybody who asks me at a conference or anything like that, because it's the 100% truth. And I think that is the power in the Book of Mormon. Right.
I love doing these types of things. I think these conversations should be had about all the, like, the what ifs and the proofs and evidences and stuff like that. At the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything if you stop reading it. Like, you gotta read it.
All the other prophets, they, they were, they were right. You know, reuse the Book of Mormon and you'll feel it. And sometimes I'll get a student in my office and they'll have. They'll be struggling with testimony.
And I love it when they come in. I absolutely love it because they're looking for something, you know, and every single time I'll ask them, when was the last time I read the Book of Mormon? Oh, it's been months, a year, something. It's because you stop, you got to read it. So that's the answer. I keep reading it. That's why.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Well, thank you. And if you want to learn more about this specifically, you should come to the Book of Mormon Culture Conference in Provo, Utah at the beginning of November. We'll put a link in the description below. Remember, guys, you can study deeply and still believe boldly. We'll see you next time,
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Sam.
