Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So is the hill Cumorah in New York or somewhere else entirely? This is maybe one of the most contentious points when it comes to Book of Mormon geography or even church history. Just because people assume that, like, oh, the hill Cumorah is in New York. Joseph Smith called it the hill Cumorah. That's like our pin in the map. So everything about the Book of Mormon, we can, like, build around that. Welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine. We've got Stephen Neil, and today we're talking about where is the hill Cumorah? So, Stephen, where is it?
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Will you be surprised to learn that it's actually on Mars? It's neither New York nor in Central America.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Moon people.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
[00:00:33] Speaker C: New Book of Mormon geography theory drops today.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: The three Cumorah theory, right? Yeah. Huh? Yeah. We're gonna talk about all about the hill Cumorah today, and there is a lot to talk about, so we won't be able to cover necessarily every little thing. Right.
I have confidence, I believe in our viewers that the comments are going to be measured and calm and thoughtful. Please, no flame wars in the comments, everybody. We're trying to do our best here, but let's talk about. But it is foolish.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: People have very strong opinions about this.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: They do indeed. And there's a lot to talk about. So let's just kind of jump right into it, right, shall we?
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Where do we even get the idea that the Hill C is in New York?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, we get that idea From Mormon Chapter 6 in the book of Mormon. That's probably the best place to go, which is where we learn about the hill Cumorah for the first time. That is the first place where a place called Cumorah is mentioned.
Mormon says that we gathered our people together unto the land of Camorra by a hill which was called Camorra, and there we could give them battle. Referring to the Lamanites. Right? So this is it, baby. The final countdown. This is the big shebang. Mormon writes to the Lamanite king saying, all right, let's. Let's have a big battle here at this hill. That's what they do. And the Nephites are obliterated, right? To near extinction at the hill Kamora. We get some further details from Mormon. He says, for example, they pitched their tents round about the hill Cumorah. It was the land of many waters, rivers and fountains. And here we had hope to gain advantage over the Lamanites. So. So it clearly has some kind of strategic value to the Nephites. That's why Mormon picks this location. And he gives us detail that it's a land of many waters, things like that. He says that they're both around the hill and also they're fighting on the hill. Right. So there's the hill and the land around the hill. Okay, we get some additional details we don't need to go too much into, but it's all here in Mormon chapter 6. There's an added detail in Ether chapter 15, verse 11 that says that the same place where the Nephites perish at Cumorah is called the hill Rama by the Jaredites, where the Jaredites perished. And so, using our critical thinking skills, Neil and Jasmine, that tells us that the land of Cumorah is located where in relative Book of Mormon geography, in the land northward. The land northward in Jaredite territory. Okay, so wherever your hill Cumorah is in your geography theory, it has to be the same place where the Jaredites are. So there is also an additional geographical detail we get from Ether chapter nine that's kind of important for situating wherever the hill in the land Cumorah is supposed to be. So it says this ether nine, three. And the Lord warned Omer in a dream that he should depart out of the land. Therefore, Omer departed out of the land with his family and traveled many days and came and passed by the hill of Shem and came over by the place where the Nephites were destroyed, and from thence eastward and came to a place which was called Ablom by the seashore. So that's another key detail where wherever your hill Cumorah is, if you go east from there, you're going to run into a sea.
[00:03:34] Speaker C: Yeah, and that is, I think it is an important, distinct, the wording there. It's not enough to say, put, put on a map. My East Sea is here and it's by Cumorah. It's gotta be geographically eastward of Camorra. Of Camorra. Right. You've gotta have sea, ocean. It doesn't even necessarily have. I mean, it doesn't say it's the East Sea per se. That's maybe a natural assumption to make.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: But you've gotta have eastward by the
[00:03:57] Speaker C: seashore, eastward from your Camorra candidate. You've got to have a seashore of some kind.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: A sea. You have to have a body of water east of your.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: Of your land, a sizable body of water, one that you would call a sea, a sea.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: The other final thing, we get this detail from about the hill specifically. So the hill in the Book of Mormon is where the Nephites perish. It's where the Jaredites perish. It's also where Mormon buries his library, essentially. And we talked about this with Brant Gardner. Shout out to our Brandt Gardner episode which we can throw up here, but it says in Mormon 6:6, when we had gathered all our people into the land of Cumorah, behold, I, Mormon, began to be old. And knowing it to be the last struggle of my people and having been commanded of the Lord that I should not suffer the records which had been handed down by our fathers, which were sacred, to fall into the hands of the Lamanites for the lamets would destroy them. Therefore I made this record out of the plates of Nephi, referring to the record he's abridging right now. Right. Mormon's abridgment, and hid up in the hill Cumorah. All the records which had been entrusted to me by the hand of the Lord, save it were these few plates which I gave into my son Moroni. So we already discussed what that may mean for different geography theories in our absolute Brant Gardner. But this is just to reiterate. Hill Cumorah is in a land of many waters. It's in a land northward. You go eastward and you run into a big body of water.
It has to have some kind of a strategic advantage in a war, in a big battle. That's why Mormon picks it tall or big. Presumably, that's why he's doing it. You have to be able to camp around it. That also, I think presumably means make, you know, readouts or battlements or whatever. Right. Something to defend yourself with. And it has to be a place where Mormon buries his records. That is what we get from the Book of Mormon text on the hill Cumorah. Right.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Kind of makes sense.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: New York.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Okay. Now that's the million dollar question, is people now. And that's what people are kind of fighting about. Right.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Joseph Smith found the plates in New York.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: He found the plates in New York. Indeed. And I think we should clarify here we're talking about two separate things because sometimes people get this mixed up and their wires crossed. There's the location where Joseph Smith finds the plates.
Nobody disputes that every proponent of the Mesoamerica model, South America model, you know, everybody agrees that's where Joseph found these plates that he translated.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: A hill in New York.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:06] Speaker C: And I think we can add that that alone is enough, if you feel like that alone is enough to make the hill valuable and important and sacred in our tradition.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: 100%.
[00:06:16] Speaker C: We don't like. I still love the hill Cumorah in New York.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:06:20] Speaker C: We don't need.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: It's a beautiful, special place.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: Everything else like that is still a sacred site because that's where the plates were found.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: And when I go there, I've been there many times, I like to go on the top and I like to sing an angel from on high. The long, long silence broke. It's great, right? That's not what we're disputing. What is being disputed is the hill in New York, that Drumlin Hill in Manchester, is that the same place being narrated here in Mormon Chapter six?
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Is that where the final battle took place?
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Exactly. Okay, so let's not get our wires crossed in case anybody in the comments is wondering. We're not saying Joseph's going to trek down to Mexico or something to find the plates. Okay, so. So that's what's kind of at stake here. Or that's kind of what we're trying to parse out. So where do we get the name for the hill in New York being called Cumorah? Right. Maybe we should sort of tackle that.
We do not have any accounts in the 1820s or the early 1830s, the time the Book of Mormon comes forth of anybody calling it Cumorah.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Okay, so Joseph Smith never says, I got the plates out of the hill cumorah in the 1820s and 30s.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Not in that specific language.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: No, not in a firsthand source.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Not in a first hand source. We have his histories. He calls it quote, the hill. Quote, a hill of considerable size or a hill near Manchester, Ontario County, New York. Okay, okay. So he, we have no record of Joseph Smith calling it the hill Cumorah
[00:07:36] Speaker A: and the angel Moroni. Does he ever say like here are the plates, this is the hill Cumorah.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: No contemporary sources again. And we can get to that.
[00:07:42] Speaker C: Again, not in the firsthand. Like Joseph Smith never attributes that to
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Moroni, that to Moroni it's called.
So we don't know exactly when this originates, but eventually the locals are calling it either Gold Bible Hill or Mormon Hill. You can imagine why they're calling it that. That has to be after 1829 or so, but the locals are calling it that.
[00:08:01] Speaker C: So that persists for a long time.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Forever. Yeah.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: Like the 1920s apparently.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: I've, I've seen some people saying there's like local maps or Gaza tears, you know, into the 19th century that are calling it Mormon Hill or something. Right. So that's kind of the local nomenclature.
We get the terminology Cumorah, the name Cumorah. Well, let me ask you do you guys know our earliest Latter Day Saint source that we have record of this is?
[00:08:23] Speaker C: You can't quiz me on that, Neil, you should know, I believe it's 1833.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: 33. And it's William Phelps.
[00:08:30] Speaker C: William Phelps in the Evening in The
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Morning Star, January 1833.
[00:08:33] Speaker C: So it's not even Oliver Cowdery.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: It's not Oliver Cowdery. It's William Phelps is the first recorded. And since we have the Latter Day Saint calling it, he says quote from the Hill Cumorah, which is in the county of Ontario and the state of New York. So that's in the church's newspaper in January of 1833. He calls it the Hill Cumorah. And he's referring to the hill in the Book of Mormon. Right. So he thinks that the hill in the Book of Mormon is the hill where Joseph got the plates in New York.
The second person to call this this is now Oliver Cowdery. Oliver Cowdery is Oliver Cowdery in 1835 in what is called letter seven. So the context for this document is, you know, in 1834 a thing called Mormonism Unveiled gets published by Edie Howe Velastus Hurlbut. Right. We've talked about this with Gerd Dirkmaat.
It's a very sustained anti Mormon polemic against Joseph Smith and the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.
Partly or majorly in response to this, Oliver Cowdery, with the assistance from William Phelps and some assistance from Joseph Smith in 1835 began publishing a history in the church's newspaper in Kirtland, the Messenger and Advocate, to counter the narrative of Edie Howe. And this is where this letter 7, because there's a series of letters between, between Oliver and William. So in letter seven, that's also where we get Oliver Cowdery in July of 1835 calling it the Hill Cumorah. He talks about being the Nephites being encamped around this hill, Cumorah. And he gives this big description of the hill and he's clearly talking about the Hill in New York. Right?
[00:10:04] Speaker C: Yeah, and, yeah, and that's, it's very explicit and like you said, very detailed. He is kind of envisioning this like, you know, to imagine, to wonder, to be in awe about, you know, these two great civilizations. He talks about like being, you know, coming to their end at this hill.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:21] Speaker C: There's obviously no question he believes this is where the end of the Nephites and Jaredites happen.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: And it's not like an outlandish conflation to make like the plates are coming from the hill. So like, oh, and Moroni, the angel Moroni is here. And like, oh, and this is a hill. And the Nephites had a battle on a hill and there were plates at that hill.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:43] Speaker C: And to add another layer on top of that, there is, is also the common 19th century mound builder myth at the time.
And this is something, I think it was. Richard E. Bennett did some research on this with Mitchell, Samuel Mitchell, who Martin Harris goes back to New York City and he's one of the people he talks to, shows the characters to and stuff. And there's this account, I think from Gordon Bennett of Mitchell basically telling Martin that it looks like it's this script from this people who were.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Who once once were lost, you know, were no more.
[00:11:17] Speaker C: Yeah. Peopled and destroyed or whatever. And his theory on. On that like actually pinpointed their destruction to like within 10 miles of like Palmyra and stuff. And so there's a little bit of a conflation of like there is this myth going around, the mound builder myth. The mound builder myth of a people who. Whose destruction and end culminated in upstate New York that I think is influencing early Latter Day Saint thinking about where the hill Cumorah is.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: So we don't have to go over all the other sources. There are a few. Orson Pratt in 1840, he makes this identification, right. You get others very early on. This becomes, we can call the traditional identification that the hill in New York is the same hill described in Mormon 6, where the final battle happens with the Nephites.
Now, well, before we get to Joseph Smith real quick, let's just kind of critically assess our sources, you know, quickly. And this has been written on extensively, so we don't have to get too much into it. But let's look at Oliver Cowdi's letter 7, for example. It is true that Joseph Smith gives some assistance in the writing of these. Of this history in the mid-1830s. That gets into letter seven and others. And some have taken that as evidence that. Aha. Therefore, Joseph Smith must have given Oliver Cowdery the idea that the hill in Cumorah or the hill in New York is the hill. Cumorah. Right. This information must be coming directly from Joseph Smith. We actually don't know how much influence Joseph has directly on the context contents of these letters. We know he says he gives Oliver some biographical details and things like that.
There's also like factual errors in the letters. We know that Oliver gets things wrong. So most infamously he gets. He Just totally botches the first vision. Right. He's narrating the first vision. Oh. There was all this religious excitement, and, you know, President Smith was, you know, our brother Joseph was worried about his soul, and so he went to pray to God.
And then. And then an angel appeared. It was in 1823. It's like, well, wait, hold on. Wait a second. Right. Like, he totally glosses over the Father and the Son and the Sacred girl, that kind of stuff.
There's theories about why maybe Oliver does this, but in any case, it's clearly an error that contradicts Joseph's own history.
So we need to be careful with just, you know, taking Oliver at face value on everything. We need to be careful with William Phelps taking him on face value at everything. The punchline is kind of. When I look at these sources, while it is true that Joseph has some kind of assistance in crafting this history, and it is true that Joseph will copy Oliver Cowgi's history into his own history, or rather, he'll have his clerks do it. His secretaries will do it for him. So Joseph kind of, in a sense, approves the history.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: He considers it valuable.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: He considers it valuable.
We actually don't know if it's originating from Joseph Smith as opposed to Oliver and William Phelps.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: And I do think it's an important distinction to make here, because I can already. You know, people might be making comments already, but. But we're not saying that this 1835 history from Oliver Cowdery is not a valuable source in church history. We're saying, and this is true of, like, literally every source in all history. It has its problems, and it needs to be used critically.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: And that's certainly true for the church history that he was a contemporary for. But when we're talking about Book of Mormon history and Book of Mormon geography, Oliver is not actually a contemporary. He is not an eyewitness source. He is another degree removed from.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: From Joseph Smith.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: From Joseph Smith.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: He doesn't meet until April 1829.
[00:14:36] Speaker C: You know, so this is. You've just got to be critical in how you use these sources. They're certainly not canonized revelations.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: So just because Oliver Cowdery identifies that Hill as the Hill, Cumorah and Joseph Smith had involvement in that production, does not necessarily mean that Joseph Smith himself is saying that Hill is Cumorah.
[00:14:57] Speaker C: Well, even maybe Joseph is, you know, but even if he is, that doesn't mean, like, this is revealed knowledge.
Joseph and Oliver are great authorities on the early history of the church and of their personal Experience of their personal experience. But Book of Mormon history is like 8, 1400 years away from them, right?
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but Joseph Smith's a prophet. Wouldn't he know?
[00:15:16] Speaker B: He would know. Well, we'll get to that in just a second. That's exactly the thing that's at stake here. Where is this coming from? I will mention. And then we'll get to Joseph Smith. If you want to accept Alder Cowgy's identification of the Hill in New York as the hill, come to Mormon 6, that's fine. But guess what else Oliver Cowdery identifies as a Book of Mormon geography site? He identifies Lehi's landing place as in Chile, the Gulf of South America.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: It's kind of hard to have.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: We have early. We have early contemporary newspaper accounts of all the Cowdery and Orson Pratt and those guys preaching in the area of Kirtland, the early 1830s, 1831, 32, when they come out there on their mission and they're saying the new Mormonites have brought their gold Bible with them. And they give the following account and they kind of summarize the Book of Mormon. They say that a prophet named Lehi landed in Chile off the coast of South America. So, I mean, if you want to accept Oliver's identification of Cumorah, you kind of have to identify his location of Lehi's landing place.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: They got to accept a hemispheric.
[00:16:09] Speaker C: They give an exact latitude, even. And I think it's worth noting because sometimes when this gets brought up, people point out that those are, you know, secondhand sources. We don't have Oliver's own handwriting. We do, of course, have a Frederick G. Williams. G. Williams has one handwriting statement, and he was, you know, he was actually part of that early missionary group. He joins them in Kirtland. And.
But it's worth noting, like, there's no reason these newspapers have to make up that detail. Like, they're just trying to report what they're hearing from these guys.
That's a weird detail for them to make up. And Orson Pratt puts it in the footnotes of the 1879 Book of Mormon,
[00:16:47] Speaker B: along with Cumorah being in New York along with Lehigh Landing in Chile.
[00:16:50] Speaker C: And so the fact that this is originating with, like, Oliver, Orson Pratt, that missionary group, it's actually. The evidence is very solid for that.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: So let's get to Joseph Smith. So what do we actually have from Joseph? Again, as we've said, it is possible that Joseph is supplying this to Oliver and William and others, that the Hill in New York is the Hill, Cumorah.
We have from my count exactly one place where Joseph Smith uses the word cumorah in some sense to maybe be talking about the hill in New York. It's in September 7, 1842, his epistle that's now Doctrine and Covenants 128. Okay, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah Moroni, an angel from heaven declaring the fulfillment of the prophets, the book to be revealed. That's it. That is what we can get from Joseph Smith directly.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: And certainly, like, when I read that, it sounds like a reference to the hill in New York, like, glad tidings from Cumorah. Like, that's where the Book of Mormon came from. The Restoration has come forth from this hill, like a wonderful thing. And he's saying Cumorah. And it is in our canon.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Well, yes, Orson Pratt puts it in there in the 1870s. It does not become canonized by Joseph Smith.
[00:17:56] Speaker C: I mean, it's not. And I don't want to diminish. Like, we have it in our canon. It's a beautiful letter. There's a lot of inspiration in there. But it isn't like a verbatim dictated revelation.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: It's not. The Lord says, cumorah is here.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: And it's also just, I think, worth noting that, like toponyms as used in our scriptures, like, we've got a bunch of, like, early 19th century toponyms in our scriptures. We don't believe that God has revealed, like that Kirtland is called Kirtland or that Ohio is called Ohio because it says, you know, go to the Ohio. Right. Like, we're using our scriptures. Use contemporary gnomon for places that's already accepted. And so you have in 1833 and 1835, you have this identification starting to be made. By 1842, you have a common identification of that hill among the Saints as Cumorah. That's common nomenclature. That's a standard toponym at that point.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: It certainly would be a little less beautiful to say, greetings from that drumlin north of my old house, which is
[00:18:54] Speaker B: what he basically calls it in his history. A hill convenient to the village of Manchester.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Right, right. I mean, Kamora is a nice, convenient way to refer to that place after everyone's starting to use it.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Start. Exactly. So I think that's a very plausible way to read the historical evidence.
And look, we'll get to the church's position in a second here. It certainly is possible that Joseph, by revelation learns that the hill in New York is a hill. Cumorah. We have no record of that if that's the case. Right. If it is a revelation of Joseph Smith, we don't have record of it being a revelation.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: So what do you say about like Lucy Mack Smith saying, oh, Joseph Smith used to tell us all these stories that we don't have in the scriptures about the Book of Mormon. And so there's this implication that like, oh, he knew way more about the Book of Mormon than what's just written in our text.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Well, we do have Lucy see Mack in 1844, 45. In her history, she's recounting Joseph getting the plates and his experiences, 1823. And at one point she quotes the angel as telling Joseph Smith, quote, the record is on a side hill. On the hill, Cumorah, three miles from this place, from their house in Manchester. Right. So that is Lucy attributing to the angel attributing to telling Joseph Smith that it's called the hill Cumorah.
[00:20:00] Speaker C: And I mean you're maybe already gonna make this point, but that's a degree of separation. Right. Lucy never talked to Moroni.
Lucy talked to Joseph, who talked to Moroni. So this is what we would call a third hand storage. It's third hand, the words of Moroni.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: And it's recorded 20 years later.
[00:20:15] Speaker C: Again, after identifications become very common.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, indeed. So you have to take that with a big grain of salt. This is her.
And Lucy does this with other conversations or quotations in her history. She will attribute sometimes these lengthy conversations that she's having with people or speeches they're giving or whatever, 20 years after the fact or whatever.
Again, it's possible the angel was saying that, but your source for that is a third hand recollection 20 years later. Is she really nailing down the specific details or is she, as Neil is saying, using the accepted nomenclature? I think that's very lineish.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: I don't think that's to disparage Lucy Mack's history, which is one of our most valuable sources from, for this early period.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Totally use it critically. That's what we're saying here.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: And it's very telling, as you talked about earlier, that Joseph Smith himself never directly attributes that language. Even though some of his histories are written after this identification starts to be made, he still never attributes that language to the angel.
That's very telling that we don't see that attribution coming until we get to third hand sources basically as to what Moroni said.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Now here's the other big one that especially our Heartlander Friends who want the hill cumor in New York that they'll like to use David Whitmer. Okay, so in 1878, David Whitmer, he's being interviewed by like Joseph Smith and Orson Pratt. He's giving these interviews and he gives a story about traveling from Harmony, Pennsylvania. He goes down to pick up, you know, Joseph and Oliver and bring them up to Fayette, New York and they encounter this stranger who they offer him a ride in the wagon or whatever. And the way I'm kind of paraphrasing and after they offer the stranger a ride, the stranger says, no, I am going to Cumorah. And he declines to ride with him to Fayette. And David Whitmer says, this was something new to me. I did not know what Camorra meant.
So we have this quote from David Whitmer again attributing that we presume the angel, right. Is on his way to Cumorah or
[00:22:08] Speaker C: one of the three Nephi.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: One of the three Nephi.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Some angelic figures.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Some angelic figure. Some figure is going to a place called Cumorah, which David Whitmer says he didn't know what that word meant. He never heard that word before.
Again, let's use our critical thinking skills here. This is David Whitmer. This is happening 50 years after the event is supposed to have transpired. So this is 1878, that the event is supposed to be 1829.
It's perfectly possible he did remember that correctly that there was some I'm going to Cumorah.
But we don't get any more details about this, like where is this Cumorah that he's going to?
[00:22:43] Speaker C: We don't know where the figure goes after that. And we also, we have indications from David Whitmer himself. He, he clearly believed like the figure's there and then he's gone. Yeah, this is kind of a supernatural sort of thing where the guy, just like the angel Moroni himself, he can come into your room, he can be gone. And so, so Kimora could be anywhere and he could have gone there and come back without.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Without skipping a beat.
[00:23:07] Speaker C: Without skipping a beat.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: We're accepting angels.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, let's also, just for the record, point out the fact that it's a little bit self serving for our heartlander friends to want you to quote David Whitmer on this to prove Kimora's in New York. But then they'll say things like, oh, but this idea of Joseph using a seer stone and a hat, that's dumb. That's not Real history, guys. That comes from David Whitmer. That's like in that same interview, like those same kinds of interviews he's giving at the same time.
[00:23:30] Speaker C: And that's a lot more credible because, like, David Whitmer is an eyewitness to the translation. And as it takes place in his father's home, at least he's not an eyewitness to where this figure goes after he says he's going to Cumorah. Right. Like we just talked about, he could have gone anywhere. And I just did. I remembered. The other thing I was going to say is if you actually look at the most likely translation timeline, Joseph and Oliver have already translated the final battles. They have already. The word Cumorah would at least be in their vocabulary. Yeah, maybe it's not familiar to David, but they would have recognized it. And that's actually interesting because if I'm remembering correctly, the account that David gives is he goes like kimora. And he looks over at them and they seem confused too. But, like, that's a difficulty with his memory because they should have recognized and known.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: Come across that word, that they would
[00:24:19] Speaker C: have come across the word and known what it was connected to pretty recently. Like, it's not like the translation happened weeks ago. Like, we're talking like we're days apart from a couple days.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Right. So this is all to say with our historical sources, just to kind of recap.
1823, Joseph gets the plates for Moroni, or at least Moroni appears first time. He'll get the plates in 1827.
We have recollections from Lucy, from David Whitmer, that place the language of Cumorah being used in the 1820s. Those are recollections. Those are second and third hand. They are not contemporaneous sources. Our earliest dateable source is 1833, William Phelps, when he's calling it Cumorah, Oliver in 1835. Joseph uses it once in 1842.
So it is fair to say that the traditional identification of the hill, Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is the hill in New York where Joseph got the plates. And we're totally fine to admit that. Right.
[00:25:09] Speaker C: And that identification does seem to start pretty early. I mean, 33 is not that far removed. Right.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: So we're not denying that it's the traditional location. But do we know as a matter of revealed truth from God that that identification is true and the answer, according to the Church, is no?
Okay, so, and we talked about this in our geography episode with Brandt. We've been very clear go Read the statements from the church on its website. The Church is neutral on Book of Mormon geography.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Every site.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Every site. You cannot claim that God has revealed the location of any site. And I will be emphatic, this includes the hill Cumorah. And how do I know that? Because I can pull up the Church's site guide. So it has these sacred sites, including Hill Cumorah, First Sacred Grove, you know, the Whitmer Farm.
And here's what it says on its site guide for its curators. So if you were called to be a guide or a local service missionary or whatever at these sites, which I hope to do one day, that'd be awesome, right? That'd be great. Here's what they say to do from the Church's website. Quote. Visitors at the Church's historic sites sometimes ask questions or make declarations about the locations of places described in the Book of Mormon. For example, some people believe that the land around the hill we now call Cumorah was the location of the final battle between the Nephites and the Lamanites recorded in Mormon 6. Others believe that the battle occurred in Central or South America. As a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you should not participate in such speculation, even if you have strong personal opinions about the topic. Instead, you should refer visitors to the Church's official statement titled Book of Mormon Geography, which includes the following, and then they quote from it. Did you guys catch that?
Such speculation, including the location of the battle Described in Mormon 6.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: I feel like it's so important because a lot of times I'll hear people when you bring up the Church's statement on geography that, like, you shouldn't speculate on where sites are, people will say, well, that's everything except Cumorah. That one's locked in, right?
[00:27:08] Speaker C: And they even say, well, the, the statement doesn't actually say anything about Cumorah. So it's not denying that it happened there. But that's pretty clear.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: It's black and white, like, we shouldn't speculate on. So all of this sounds like that's to say that the hill Cumorah in New York doesn't need to be the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon. But why can't it be, like, why is it a problem for that, that hill in New York to be the one in the Book of Mormon? Why do people say it needs to be elsewhere?
[00:27:33] Speaker B: Well, we can discuss that for a little bit. We can discuss kind of the, the pros and cons and the reasons why proponents of the Mesoamerican model, which includes ourselves, and also the Baja model. And Baja model. South America.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: South and Central America.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: Yeah, Anybody that's.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Except, like, New York and Heartland.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. Why are they reticent to locate the hill described in the Book of Mormon in New York? We've already discussed why our historical sources are not as emphatic or definitive as some people had thought. So let's go to the actual text of the Book of Mormon, which we already kind of touched, which is our
[00:28:04] Speaker C: one true primary source.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Primary source on this thing. Okay, so wherever your hill Cumorah is, has to be in a, quote, land of many waters. Right.
So what qualifies for that? I think upstate New York would qualify for that. Right?
[00:28:17] Speaker C: You've got the Finger Lakes.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Yeah, some rivers.
[00:28:20] Speaker C: Lots of rivers.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: That works. That's okay.
That also works. Well, we'll get to maybe our preferred model in a second here, but, you know, we'll steel man the heartland position for a second. So that works for them.
What about the strategic advantage the hill gives to the Nephites? Because Mormon says he specifically picked it for a straight a.
A strategic advantage in a battle they're going to have.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: Well, certainly a tall hill.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: It is a tall hill. Is it tall enough, however, to accommodate potentially upwards to 230,000 people? Because if you go on, he'll say, and so, and so with his 10,000 fell. And so, and so with his 10,000 fell, and he lists about, you know,
[00:28:55] Speaker A: 230,000 people, even if it's exaggeration, is a ton of people.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: That's a lot of people.
[00:28:59] Speaker C: A lot of people. And that's just the Nephite casualties.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: That's not the Jaredites. So you have two cataclysmic, apocalyptic, civilizational ending battles at this hill.
And my genuine question for our Heartlander listener, what is the military strategic tactical advantage that comes with the Drumlin Hill in New York, where this is where we're gonna plant our flag in the ground, and this is where we're gonna make our final stand against the Lamanites.
[00:29:25] Speaker C: And while you're thinking about that, consider that for one thing, like, it's a Drumlin Hill. There's literally thousands of them across upstate New York in the broader region.
And something that I think plays a role here, like in pictures, you tend to see, right, you've got, like, mowed grass and cleared space around the hill. You. You certainly like for where the pageant was. You've got a side of the hill that's been cleared off even now. Changing that even when, even when Oliver Cowdery is envisioning this, I suspect there's already been like a lot of farmland and tilling going on around the hill prior to all of that. Like, what's the natural state of upstate New York? It is densely wooded.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: It is.
[00:30:05] Speaker C: So this is not a hill that is really going to give you a clear view of the field, of what's going on in the broader surroundings. Like, you're actually going to have a lot of dense coverage. It's going to be really hard to see armies approaching, things like that.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: You've got the mode side. But then when you're going up the path through the forest, you can't see anything.
[00:30:27] Speaker C: You can't see anything.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: The other thing we have to address, in addition to those points, what is your eastward sea in the heartland model?
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Atlantic Ocean.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Okay, that's like 250 miles away at least I actually looked at it. It is eastward.
[00:30:42] Speaker C: To be true, it's quite away.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Is it Lake Ontario? Because in some heartland models, that's the EC that's north of Palmyra, Manchester. It's not east.
So again, how do you account for that?
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Not quite matching what the text is
[00:30:57] Speaker B: described, at least not at first glance. I would say so. So this is why it's not just. We're not just saying this because we want to have it in Mexico. Book of Mormon geography experts and theorists, when they look at the text carefully, they recognize, besides, like the fact that you have lots of water around, what other qualifications does the hill in New York have to match what's described in the text?
[00:31:17] Speaker A: And then there's also the issue of like after the final battle, Mormon and Moroni, they're like, you know, they're fleeing that area because they're getting killed or they're being hunted by Lamanite.
Are you really gonna like go back to that site?
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: To bury the plates. Are you gonna travel? I mean, he's wandering for years and
[00:31:33] Speaker B: years after 35 years. And that was something that's interesting based on the descriptions given in Mormon 6 and then Mormon 8 and then Moroni 10.
So the battle happens around 385 A.D. right. That's when Mormon gives the record to his son and he dies at the battle when Mormon, or, sorry, when Moroni opens up In Mormon chapter eight, which is his concluding his father's record, he says 15 years have passed. It's now the 400th year since the sign of the, you know, the coming of Jesus or whatever. So we're on 8,400. So 15 years passed before he finishes his father's record. And then you go over to Moroni 10, and he says 420 years have passed since the time of the sign that was given of the coming of, of Jesus. Right. So we have 35 years. My genuine question for outlanders, what is Moroni doing for 35 years?
Where is he going? What is he doing? And why is it that he's given the record at Camorra, presumably New York, just to like leave for 35 years just to come back to bury it? Yeah, like, I'm sorry, I genuinely want to know what's going on here with the heartland model, how they make sense of this. At least John Sorensen's model can make plenty of sense of this. He's hightailing it out of Veracruz to get out of there. And he's got 35, he's got three decades to wander up to New York to bury the thing.
[00:32:47] Speaker C: And he's got a lot of like, kind of open territory to head towards. I mean, that's something we know because of our satellite mapping. And he wouldn't necessarily know.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: But don't we know that the plates are his repository, his library of plates are in the Book of Mormon, Hill Cumorah. But then he buries the final plates like somewhere else on the hill, but not in the repository.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: It's very confusing. I mean, just momentarily we can discuss the accounts of the cave in the hill Cumorah. Maybe we'll do a whole episode about that to kind of scrutinize it a little bit more carefully. Cumorah's cave, that's maybe a follow up episode. In short, however, despite what some people may assure you, we do not have firsthand statements from Joseph Smith or Oliver Cowdery saying there's a cave in the hill Cumorah with all these records. And when I gave the record back to the messenger, he took us to the cave and we saw the cave. Our earliest account is from Heber C. Kimball, 1856.Heber C. Kimball says they saw it in a vision. That immediately throws you kind of in a whole different world of what this actually looks like.
Our accounts after Heber C. Kimball, they don't agree on was it the hill Cumorah or a hill next to it? Some of them say it was the next neighboring hill where the cave was. Miner Minor Hill with a hole in it. Right. A cave. Who was with them? Was it Joseph and Oliver? Was it Joseph and Hyrum and David Whitmer? Cause some accounts throw them in There the details don't match up.
Like, there's so many problems with just taking at face value this idea that, well, the records are in New York because Joseph Smith said so and. No.
[00:34:13] Speaker C: And this is to just maybe add a note here. Like, this is an era in our history where there is a. It's a very fun era. I'm sure, like, Chris Blythe loves it. It's a period when there's a lot of folklore going around.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: Kane is Bigfoot.
[00:34:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Like, this is. This is kind of like we're. We're isolated as a people and we start to develop like, a lot of these, like, fun folkloric stories and.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:36] Speaker C: Faith promoting rumors. And that's not to diminish them because I think folklore is great.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:40] Speaker C: But as a, like, from a historical standpoint, it's something you have to be very cautious with if you're going to like, pin things on it as a credible account.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: And I will say, to be very clear, we are not trying to throw water on this because we hate the idea of proving the Book of Mormon. If we found records in the Hill in New York, metal codices made on gold plates, it would be awesome. I'd be shouting it from the rooftops and I would go and I would personally shake Rod Mildrum's hand and congratulate him. It would be amazing. We just don't have it. That's why we're kind of skeptical about this stuff, guys. Okay, so there's that. Let's talk about one more thing here, which is the archeology.
[00:35:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: What do we find at the Hill? Is there a major battle there?
[00:35:20] Speaker B: There is not. At least from the current work that's been done at the site. Okay. Now to be clear and to steel man the heartlander position a bit here. There has not been like, systematic coordinated control digs on the Hill or the land around the hill. Okay.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: So the church ever tried to excavate?
[00:35:36] Speaker B: Not to my knowledge. Not in an archaeological sense. They've excavated for building the visitor center and stuff like that. Right. And there have been farmers on the hill.
[00:35:42] Speaker C: Frankly, even just doing that would pro. Like so many dicey. Well, so many archaeological finds actually happen in places like Israel and Mexico and stuff when builders are doing things right, construct something.
So even just doing that, like, you would think some fines would turn up in that process. Certainly in the process, like as it was farmed and plowed and stuff over the generations. And there are little rumors and stories. I'm sure you're.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: We'll get there in a second.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: But the church didn't even come back in possession of the hill Cumor until 1920s. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, there, there's like 50 plus years there where they're not touching the Hill Cumorah stuff could have happened. I mean, we've, we have like accounts of the box the plates were in, kind of washing out.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: And so there's just a lot the church doesn't have control over and.
[00:36:32] Speaker B: Yes. And if I want to steal my position, I could say, look, there's been disturbances on the site, there's been overgrowth. You know, there could have been looters, whatever you can. There are legitimate reasons why sometimes artifacts disappear.
Locations are hard to pin down, especially with battles. Right. This has happened before, like where the Battle Hastings happen, Things like that that we wonder about.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Well, locations are hard to pin down, but they're saying they're putting a pin here.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: And that's the thing. So we should expect something if we know. So John E. Clark wrote an article about this in the journal Book of Mormon Studies.
[00:36:59] Speaker C: Professional archaeologist.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Professional archaeologist totally believes the Book of Mormon, totally faithful Latter Day Saint. And he says, quote, archaeologically speaking, it is a clean hilt.
Now, again, there's not been systematic control digs. There have been surveying in the areas. And remember, According to Mormon 6, it's not just the hill, it's the surrounding land around the hill. We would expect to find evidence for just kind of my list, I came up with major defensive works, concentrated battle debris, large scale burials associated with reported battles, population concentrations. Okay. We have to have lots of people. We have evidence, lots of people here in the area.
A material culture sequence clearly corresponding to the Book of Mormon societies described in the text. We don't find any of that in New York. In or around the hill.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: There is some story about James E. Talmadge, like saying that there was a lot of phosphorus in the soil or something like that. That could be from all the bones. But again, that's pretty thin gruel. Right. To hang a lot on. Right.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: We do have also this. So this is an account by Susie Young Gates that appeared in Jan Siodall's book Instructions of the Book of Mormon. I'm gonna read it and let's assess it. Correct critically here.
Well, she says this happened in 1901. This book is the accounts published in 1927. Quote, in 1901, Elder Claude Taylor and myself visited the hill Cumorah and had an interview with Mr. And Mrs. Sampson, who then owned the hill and the farm adjoining Mr. Sampson was the brother of Admiral Sampson, but he was very prejudiced against the Mormon people. However, we spent some time talking to him Outside the farmhouse. Elder Taylor and myself noted several bushel baskets filled with arrowheads, And I asked Mrs. Sampson what they were.
She said they had just begun to plow up the hill, Cumorah, and around the hill to plant some crops, and they turned up these arrowheads by the basket full. I asked her what she did with them. She replied that she sold them to tourists who passed by. I inquired the price, and she replied 25 cents. I purchased two, and then I returned and gave one to president Joseph F. Smith. The other I have kept, and it's still in my possession. This seems good evidence of the wars which had been fought around this historical hill. And George Albert Smith gives a similar account. 1909. Going there and buying, you know, arrowheads.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Arrowheads by the basket.
[00:39:09] Speaker B: Bushels of arrowheads. Friends, let's put on our critical thinking hats here for a second. What are the limitations of this account from Susie Young Gates, in terms of an archaeological report of the area that we can use to establish Book of Mormon historicity?
[00:39:21] Speaker A: Provenance is sketch.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: Super sketch.
Hey, trust me, bro, these arrows are, like, totally from the hill, Cumorah. And, yeah, I know that you're a bunch of Mormons and this is, like, really important to you, this site. So, like, yeah, these totally are coming from this site, right?
So, like, yeah, the provenance, sketchy AF we have no idea. Like, well, again, I have some points here I've established To do a controlled archaeological analysis of this. Here's what you need. The exact location of the discovery. Did it come from the hill itself for the surrounding countryside? Its date, whether it was an arrow point, a spear point, or an atlatl dart point, Was it lost in warfare, hunting, or ordinary habitation? Did it belong to an isolated episode, or did it accumulate over centuries?
Do you have enough that you can do a typology of the artifacts that you can kind of date that there's all these questions.
[00:40:07] Speaker C: So that's actually. That's actually one of the points I wanted to raise, and I'm actually curious. I mean, she says she brought two back. Do we have these in the church history vault or something? Because that. That would be the biggest thing for me is. Yeah, you. I. I could honestly believe they did turn up bushels of arrowheads on the hill in the surrounding region. But, like, for at least. At least a thousand years before Europeans come over here, there are hunter gatherer groups and even probably some agriculturists who are using atlatl darts, spears, and the bow and arrow all over the place to hunt and. Yeah, probably for skirmishes and wars and stuff like that. And unless you have a typology and you can actually take these arrowheads that have been found and categorize them, that's how you date them, right?
They determine by the arrowheads. They determine by the typology what period
[00:40:56] Speaker B: that was likely used for the stratigraphy for finding them.
[00:40:59] Speaker C: So if we have them, it'd be cool to maybe have an archaeologist look at that. But that would not prove that all the arrowheads in the bushel came from that same period. Like I said, you could have, like, a thousand years of accumulation of arrowheads somewhere, and you're gonna turn up a lot. But that doesn't mean a big battle happened in one concentrated time period.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: So we're not saying that Suzy on Gates is lying. We're not saying George Albert Smith is lying. We're not saying even Mrs. Sampson and her husband are lying. Right.
Although, to be fair, they do have sort of perverse incentives.
[00:41:29] Speaker C: They have motive, right?
[00:41:30] Speaker B: They have motive to tell the Mormon yahoo. Coming through here, oh, this hill is
[00:41:33] Speaker A: young Gates, the one selling the arrows.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: The one selling the arrows. They have motive to tell Susan Gates and others. Oh, yeah, this is totally from the hill where you guys think the battle happened. You should buy some. Right? So super sketch. It cannot. It is not dispositive evidence that a giant battle happened there around 8,400. Right. So all this is to say. And then I want to. Maybe we can close with a positive argument for a hill being down in Veracruz, Mexico, if we would like.
If you want to believe the hill cumor is in New York as described in the Book of Mormon, that's fine, because the church is neutral on this. It is not a revealed truth from God where the events of the Book of Mormon have been.
[00:42:07] Speaker C: And you're certainly not obligated to accept our arguments or skepticism.
[00:42:10] Speaker B: Not at all, if you want to. I'm speculating too totally. And look, if you do put a lot of stock in Oliver Cowdery and David Whitman and those guys, that's great. Absolutely. The traditional site that many, many people, including prophets and apostles and others have taken, you know, have accepted at face value. This is the Hill. This is where it happens.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: Happened.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: We're here to say it is not revealed knowledge. We are here to say that the church has said it's not revealed knowledge. And the best scholarship the church is doing now with the Joseph Smith Papers is saying this kind of stuff. And that's why the Church's official policy is to say it's a, it's a neutral question. We don't have an official reveal position. So.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: And there are some challenges to accepting that hill in New York as indeed.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Yes, there are some challenges for a variety of reasons. So I thought maybe to round things out if we want to, there actually is a, I think a pretty good candidate for a hill, Cumorah down in Mexico that fits a lot of the descriptions given in the Book of Mormon.
My apologies. Right now to our Spanish speaking listeners. I'm going to sound like a total gringo, but it is Cerro El Valia, the Hill of the Watchmen. It's down in Veracruz, Mexico. We can throw up a picture of it here.
It's a really big hill, It's a really big mountain. It rises to at least like 2,800ft above sea level with roughly a 1700 foot prominence above the surrounding terrain. So that's a lot higher than the Drumlin Hill in New York. Right? David Palmer and then later John Sorensen, they identified this as a very promising candidate.
It fits naturally with both the geography of Tehuatepec that Sorensen kind the limited Tehuatepec model Sorensen came up with.
It is close by seacoast. It's not really east of it though. Like the sea coast is kind of northeast. But if you can go east, you will hit it.
[00:43:52] Speaker C: I mean we can throw up a map of where Veracruz and the Tushla Mountains are, but like there is a
[00:43:57] Speaker B: seacoast eastward, eastward, even though more immediately it's northeast. But yes, that does work.
It is a land of many waters, many rivers, some of the ones that I was able to identify through my research. Again, apologies for the Spanish. The Papaloapan drainage, the Huehuapan stream, Lake Katemako. There's other little like crater lakes around there. I mean the Gulf coast is right there next to it for crying out loud. So it fits that. The physical character of the hill, it will give you a strategic advantage because you're going to be high up, you're going to be forcing your enemies to come up the hill.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Is it covered in jungle or is it kind of.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: That's actually a good question. I'm not sure at the time.
Do you know, Neil, off the top
[00:44:39] Speaker C: of my head, the pictures I've seen it has.
I mean I think there is some jungle on there, but I think it does have like kind of a bald top. But I wouldn't we'll have pictures that will either confirm or disconfirm this criteria we've set.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: Totally. And that's why I'm saying this is just a candidate. Right.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: And there's a consensus among Mesoamericans.
[00:44:58] Speaker C: Well, it's worth noting that like Kirk Magleby, who is.
And Warren Astin, others have looked at some other hills in that same general region and made some other proposals.
I'm not sure what Garth Norman, what his identification was off the top of my head, but there is a.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: There's a few candidates.
[00:45:20] Speaker C: There's a few candidates, but a lot of them are in that same general region. The only people I know of who pick somewhere else is Richard Terry and Bob Roylance, who have more of an upright model going up into the Yucatan.
And so that's a little different. But a lot of people put Camorra, the General Kamora region around Veracruz.
[00:45:37] Speaker B: Veracruz. Just a couple of things.
So in addition to it, it does give a strategic advantage, being really big. You can build battlements on it, force the Lamanites to come upwards to fight you. Right. You can hold out a little bit longer. It is the location of an ancient population center around the hill. So it's right there by Tres Zapotes, which is one of the. Like. It's like the heartland of the Olmec, as I understand. Right. Like, so the Olmec and the EPI
[00:45:59] Speaker C: Olmec center there you could sustain a hundreds of thousands of people for a few years, mind you, because they're gathering at Camorra, like from like 8, 380 to 384 before the battle actually happened.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: So they're gathering there so you can sustain the population. It does. Speaking about the Olmec. Right. It does correlate with Jaredite land, northward geography.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: In this model, American people will associate Jaredites with Olmec.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is all to say, so you have the chronological Jaredite thing, Olmec
[00:46:29] Speaker C: thing going on, and there have been.
It does have the same problem that there aren't a lot of systematic excavations in the region, but there have been finds of different weapons and things like that in the area as well. And I think David Palmer talks about that.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: And my notes here say that, yeah, we don't have. We haven't identified a sort of a battle horizon in the area the way that kind of the text requires. So same problem with the hill in New York. We haven't done systematic archeological digs to see what it turns out.
[00:46:52] Speaker A: It's a lot of work to do, and it's not like we have, like a dead ringer, but we've got some promising candidates to work with besides just what's in New York.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: And the punchline here to all of this is to say if you have other candidates like to propose according to the Church, that's fine, so long as you do not say, this is the revealed location. We know it because God said so. And as it says, if you're an official representative for the Church, you should not engage in such speculation when you're on the clock, as it were.
[00:47:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: So if you are working for the Church, they want you to be very clear that they're neutral on these sorts of topics. So let a thousand blossoms bloom in terms of, like, different candidates. We can argue about, different models. We can argue about. That's totally fine.
We're not here. Again, I want to reiterate, we are not here to diminish your faith in the Book of Mormon.
We are not here to take away from the sacredness of the site of the Hill in New York. Again, I love the Hill Cumorah, by the way, the church's website goes on to say they call it the Hill Cumorah because that's the traditional name. Like, it's kind of funny, they explicitly say we just been calling that forever. So we're just going to call it. That's the official name. I love the Hill. It's beautiful. It is sacred. That's where Joseph met the angel, got the plates right. It's important for that reason. But all these other kind of arguments people have about why it has to be the Hill where the battle happens, happened, I think that's just kind of questionable and we have a lot more work to do before we can establish where that Hill actually is. So to our Heartlander friends in the comments, please do not get mad at us. We're not trying to throw a blanket on you just for the sake of trying to dunk on you. I think these are substantive problems and issues we have to address when it comes to Book of Mormon geography. And if nothing else, I hope you'll appreciate why Mesoamerican proponents like ourselves are little or South America and South America and where anybody who's not a Heartlander, why we have some reservations about just jumping on board with, oh, the Hill obviously has to be the Hill in New York. Right? There's a lot more moving parts going to all this.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: Like I said, it's a beautiful place, it's inspired, and I'm excited that the Church has been renovating the Hill Cumorah. They're gonna, you know, try to restore it more to, like, what it would have been like for Joseph Smith. And so it's.
[00:48:43] Speaker B: And the pageant was great. Everybody see the pageant? I love the pageant. I'm sad there's no more pageant there, right?
[00:48:47] Speaker A: I love that pageant. So if you wanna learn more, we're gonna put stuff links in the description, including this issue of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, which has a lot of great information on Hill Cumorah. And remember deeply, believe boldly. We'll see you next time.
