Book of Mormon on the Baja Peninsula?

I’d like to introduce David Rosenvall, who thinks the Book of Mormon took place on Baja Peninsula. He’s a name you may not be familiar with. He has a few claims to fame: 1) He is the person who put together the scriptures on https://scriptures.lds.org! 2) While putting that project together, he and his father came up with a new Book of Mormon geography theory on the Baja Peninsula. 3) He was a witness to the bomb blast that injured Mark Hofmann back in 1985. (We played an excerpt of his interview with Curt Bench.) Let’s get acquainted with him.

David: When I returned home from my mission in 1987, my father at the time was showing me something called hypertext. It was a new technology on our little Macintosh computer. He showed how he had the text of the scriptures, put it in and he was linking verses to footnotes. At the time, boy, that was kind of interesting and neat way of reading the scriptures. The scriptures at that time really weren’t in a hypertext format.

…

So we have an electronic version of the scriptures, probably the first one. In fact I know it was the first one. The church didn’t even have one. It had the footnotes and everything. It was about the year 2000, we had been maintaining this, that we donated all of this text, all linked up in a format that the internet could use. In 2000 that became https://scriptures.lds.org .

For about 10 years we maintained that for the church and did about 22 languages for them. We got very intimate with the scriptures. We got a really great understanding of them, just the linking and how they all went together.

His father is a geographer at the University of Calgary.

Baja Peninsula

he picked up the scriptures and started going through them, and just trying to think as a geographer would think. He says he remembers reading a scripture where it talks about the seeds. The seeds from Jerusalem were taken with them to the new land and wherever they went, it said they grew exceedingly. He said at that point he said, “I know right where this is.”

Because as a geographer he taught it for many, many years: seeds only grow in certain climates as you’re moving around the world. He said, wait a second. The climate of Jerusalem, it’s got to be California or Baja California, one of those Californias. So that’s when he phoned me. From then on, we spent the next two weeks combing the entire text in our search system trying to find things, so that’s how it started, kind of out of a phone call and a question. We’re trying to disprove it to be honest with you. That’s kind of been our approach from the beginning. How do we disprove the Baja? We keep getting deeper and deeper trying to disprove it.

What do you think? Is this a plausible location for the Book of Mormon lands? Check out our conversation in the audio above or video below…

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Guest: David Rosenvall
Theology: Book of Mormon
Science Topics Covered: Baja, Geography, Mormon Science, Science & Religion
Historical Mentions Mormon History
Tags: Baja Peninsula, David Rosenvall, GT Podcast, iTunes

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4 Responses

Chrys Reynolds says:

July 12, 2017 at 8:50 pm

I think that would work if the only seeds you had were from Jerusalem; but they lived in Bountiful before they sailed to the Americas, and probably also brought seeds with them from there, too, and that is a tropical climate! You might want to add that info to the equation and think of which seeds grow in Oh of Kharfot and also in areas they might have stopped at along the way from there to the Americas!
rick bennett says:

July 14, 2017 at 4:45 pm

Yes seeds are an important consideration to consider for this model!
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David Rosenvall says:

July 18, 2017 at 11:47 pm

The area we believe is Bountiful, in the old world, could have been Oman. It isn’t a tropical climate (not even close) it is actually a semi-arid climate that matches southern Baja California, where we believe Lehi’s family landed. You can look at the Koppen classification of climates to verify this. A study was done at the University of Arizona where they looked at the DNA of old world crops (grapes, figs, pomegranates, dates, olives, barley and wheat) in North America and found that the old world crops in Baja California matched Oman and Egypt. Thanks for making the point that Lehi brought seeds from Israel (Egypt) and probably from Bountiful (Oman).