The founding claims
Is It Ancient History?
DNA, archaeology, anachronisms, and seven words added by translators in 1611.
Start with their standard
"A keystone is the central stone in an arch. It holds all the other stones in place, and if removed, the arch crumbles. All the Church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon."
Ezra Taft Benson, Teachings of Presidents
You are not imposing an outside standard. You are applying theirs.
What the text describes, and what the record shows
Every item below appears in the Book of Mormon. The right column is the archaeological status in pre-Columbian America.
| Item | Status | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Horses | No evidence. Extinct ~10,000 years before Europeans reintroduced them | 1 Nephi 18:25, Alma 18:9 |
| Chariots and wheels | No evidence for transport use in Mesoamerica | 3 Nephi 3:22 |
| Steel | Did not exist as a deliberate alloy anywhere in 600 BC | 1 Nephi 4:9, Ether 7:9 |
| Swine | No remains, no art, no evidence at all | Ether 9:17 |
| Elephants | Vanished ~10,500 years earlier | Ether 9:19 |
| Cattle, sheep, goats | Old World domesticates, absent pre-contact | Ether 9:18 |
| Silk | No evidence | Ether 10:24 |
| Barley | Partially resolved. Native "little barley" was cultivated | Mosiah 9:9 |
| Hebrew or Egyptian script | None of ~15 Mesoamerican scripts shows any relation | Mormon 9:32 |
Sources: Church Gospel Topics Essays; published archaeological scholarship
DNA
- The Church's essay concedes: "The majority of Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA."
- And: "Nothing is known about the DNA of Book of Mormon peoples." Read that carefully. It is not claiming evidence exists. It is explaining why none does.
- The introduction called Lamanites "the principal ancestors of the American Indians" until 2006, when it was quietly changed to "among the ancestors."
The believer who spent his life looking
Thomas Stuart Ferguson was a faithful Latter-day Saint who founded a BYU affiliated foundation specifically to prove the Book of Mormon archaeologically. After decades:
"You can't set the Book of Mormon geography down anywhere, because it is fictional and will never meet the requirements of the dirt archeology."
This was not a critic. Michael D. Coe of Yale put it more bluntly: "nothing, absolutely nothing, has ever shown up in any New World excavation which would suggest to a dispassionate observer that the Book of Mormon is a historical document."
The cleanest item on this whole site
No interpretation required. Open two books.
Malachi 3:10 in the King James Bible contains seven words printed in italics, meaning the 1611 translators added them because they are not in the Hebrew: "there shall not be room enough to receive it."
Those same seven words, in the same order, appear in 3 Nephi 24:10, spoken around 34 AD.
The italics are the King James translators’ own honesty marker: they printed added words in a different face so readers would know the Hebrew did not contain them.
God would have had to reproduce not the meaning of the Hebrew, but the specific interpretive guesses of seventeenth century English translators.
Seven words that exist only because the King James committee added them, printed in italics to say so, sitting inside a text set in 34 AD.
The Book of Mormon never uses the word. Older Church chapter headings did, that was fairly criticized, and it has since been corrected to "monetary system." An informed member will correct you.