I’m excited to have a Mesoamerican expert on the show. Brant Gardner is an antropologist, and he tells why he thinks the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica. We’ll talk about anachronisms, and Brant will give his take on the other theories, from Africa to Baja to Heartland. Can a faithful person believe in evolution and an old earth? Brant will answer. Check out our conversation…
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Intro to Meso Theory
Interview
GT 00:29 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have a wonderful guest. Tell us your name and where you’re calling from.
Brant 00:37 I’m Brant Gardner in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
GT 00:41 Nice. So, I’m excited. One of my favorite topics to cover–a lot of people don’t like it, but I do, and it’s my podcast, so, I get to talk about what I want to talk about: Book of Mormon geography theories. I don’t know if you’ve followed along, Brant. I’ve already covered Baja. I’ve covered Heartland. I’ve covered Malay, which was one of my favorites. But I have not covered Mesoamerica. I don’t know how good of friends you are with John Sorensen or–let’s see. What’s the other guy’s name? [He] lives in American Fork, Garth Norman.
Brant 01:24 Oh, Garth. I have known them both.
GT 01:27 They both passed away, recently. I know they have slightly different variations on Mesoamerica. But I’m finally excited to have an expert on Mesoamerica. I’ve been doing this for six years, and it’s the first time I’ve gotten a Mesoamerica expert on.
Brant 01:46 Well, it’s about time.
GT 01:48 It is way past time. It’s way past time. I’m still looking for South America. I’ll get a South America [expert] here, soon. So, anyway, tell us why we should believe the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica. And give us some background there.
Brant 02:09 Okay, let that let me start with the first question, which is why should you believe that it’s in Mesoamerica? And the answer is, if you’re just looking for a religious reason to believe in the Book of Mormon, that’s not it. So, Mesoamerica is there and a reason to believe in it, only because it will help enhance and enrich the way we understand the Book of Mormon. So, if you go to the New Testament, you go to the Old Testament, we know where those took place. And because we know where those took place, we can learn about the people. We can learn about the customs. We can learn about the reasons why they did certain things that they did. And if Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica, then that Mesoamerican culture that surrounded the Nephite people should inform us something about the way they did the things, and we should be able to enrich our understanding. So, to answer your question, why would you do it? You do it because you want to learn something more and enrich it. Now, what are some of the evidences for it? If I start with geography, I can tell you that just about everybody who ever does any geography finds arguments to say their geography works. So, I think geography is a toss-up. Now you have to be able to say that the geography matches the text. And you’ve got all of the verses that you have to put together to be able to do that. But everybody finds some way to make that work. So, geography alone, isn’t going to be the reason that you look at it.
Brant 03:57 And in my case, I’m not a geographer. I’m an anthropologist, and I look at it because of the cultures and the histories, and the way those things interact with everything else that we find out about the text. So, let me give you one that’s just a real simple one that combines both the geography of the area, and the text of the Book of Mormon. We have a very interesting case where, and I’m going to be assuming that your listeners are somewhat familiar with the Book of Mormon. Help me out if I need to give more detail. We have the case where there are some Nephites who leave the land of Zarahemla and go back to their previous homeland, which was the land of Nephi. And the people who are in that land of Nephi are under duress and they get the idea that they really want to leave, and they want to go back to Zarahemla. So, they send a search party off, to go back to where they had come from, only, let’s say 30-40, I didn’t know, 50 years prior. But they send somebody, and they get lost. And they end up finding somebody. They end up finding the Jaredite civilization. And all of that’s a fascinating story. It’s really, really important. But the question is, how in the world did they get lost? You know, if your father, maybe grandfather, but not too long ago, says to you, “Look, well we came from Zarahemla. We follow the River Sidon and up into the mountains. We went over the mountains came down over the mountains, and into this land of Nephi.” So you go up into the mountains, and you find the river and you follow the river. How do you get lost, if you find the river? Zarahemla is on the river. You’re going to walk through that river. You’re going to find them, you know, walk along it. So the question is, how do you miss it?
Brant 04:06 Well, in the geography of that area, the Cuchumatanes mountains are between Highland Guatemala and the Chiapas depression. And that, at least to me, fits the descriptions of why you always go down to Zarahemla and up to the land of Nephi. Because there is an elevation difference. We know that water tends to flow downhill. So, if you’re going up into the mountains, you’re going to find the source of the river. It turns out that in the Cuchumatanes, not too far apart from each other, are the headwaters of two different rivers. One is the Grijalva. The other is the Usumacinta. They followed the wrong river. Why did they follow the wrong river? Well, they went up to the mountains, and they found a river and followed it. And because of the geography where those two rivers had their headwaters close enough together, that someone could make the mistake, we can understand why that mistake was made. And why, in this particular case, when they follow the Usumacinta up, they will end in Jaredite country, which in the correlation to Mesoamerican area, would be the land of the Olmec, which are the time period for the Jaredites. So, the correlation between geography and the culture, and the story all start to come together in ways that we can’t find explanations for those actions in any other location that I know of.
GT 07:33 I’m glad you mentioned those two rivers the Usumacinta and the Grijalva because I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think John Sorenson and Garth Norman have switched those rivers. If I can remember right, one says the Grijalva, one says the Usumacinta, and so I guess there are variations on Mesoamerica. Is that right?
Brant 08:01 For the Mesoamerican-ists, there are the two rivers and there are arguments why somebody would choose one over the other. I tend to prefer the Grijalva as the Sidon, I think the geography works best.
GT 08:19 And that’s what Sorenson also prefers. Is that right?
Brant 08:22 That’s what Sorenson did. For me, that fits the historical situation, much, much better, than we get in with Usumacinta. On the Usumacinta side, the attraction is you get really nice ruins. They were a lot bigger, better, more exciting cultures along the Usumacinta, than there were on the Grijalva. And so, it’s really kind of nice. It’s really a pretty river. So, yeah, there’s reasons to want to go that way. And that example I gave of the two rivers has been used by Usumacinta people to flip it and go the opposite and say they followed the Grijalva, which was wrong. And it turns out the both of them, the Grijalva and the Usumacinta in antiquity, ended up in Jaredite land. So, you could flip the coin and get one or the other. The one thing that makes a really big difference to me, however, that I think argues in favor of the Grijalva is the cultural connections of how peoples moved and where language bases are. Now one of the things that I have to preface here is– we have to understand that the Book of Mormon gives us an idea of its geography that is pretty limited. Sorensen calculated that it’s maybe 600 miles long. And interestingly enough, it, basically fits kind of inside of what ancient Israel might have been. So, in the context of the Old and New Testament, we have a land where all of that took place that really isn’t that big, given all the cultures that were around it. I think that’s the situation we find in the Book of Mormon. It’s not that big. And there were lots of other cultures around it. And there are places where I think we see that.
Brant 10:23 But one of the ones that’s interesting, if you look at the ancient correlations of languages and where the language is put together, if you mentally map out Mesoamerica, and you’ve seen Mexico and you’ve got the toe of the boot, down near the heel of the boot, or so, that’s Guatemala. You get up into Highland, Guatemala, that’s probably land of Nephi. And then you move up into the ankle of the boot. And just south of that ankle is Chiapas. Well, on the side of the Gulf of Mexico is where you had the old Olmec civilizations. Those split up, and the ancient languages in that area where–they combine the two because they were once together, kind of like Latin generated the different languages of French, Spanish, Italian, etc. They were once all Latin. So that concept of Latin language or the one that was ancient to the area is called Mixe-Zoque. And they call it that because it became two different languages, and they don’t know what it was, previously. But they can tell that this language split. And there was a language split where the Mixe went off, and they went off sort of to the West and the North. And then the Zoque were the ones that were settled in the south and towards the east. And what we have is information that in the ballpark of a couple hundred years before Christ, there was a movement of Zoque speaking people up the Grijalva River. So, they’re starting off in the area of what we will call Olmec, Gulf of Mexico area. They start moving up the Grijalva. And then they settle in places that archaeologically can be found. We can say, okay, these were Zoque-speaking people. Well, the reason that that’s important is over the mountains, up in the land of Nephi, that’s a land of Maya speakers.
Brant 12:30 Now, most people, who aren’t Mesoamerican-ists, don’t know the difference between Maya and Zoque. Think of the difference between Spanish and Russian. These are totally incompatible languages. They’re mutually unintelligible, so totally different languages, totally different language groups. If the Maya-speaking area is where we start off with Nephites, and they move into Zarahemla, what are they going to meet? Well, the Book of Mormon says they met a people who had lost their God and lost their language. So, we have a language issue, as soon as those two people meet. Well, that just so happens to be right at the place where, if people from the land of Nephi in highland Guatemala went over the mountains down the Grijalva River and came to the location of the city of Zarahemla, they would have found mutually unintelligible language speakers. And so, again, we have this very tight correlation between what we know of the culture that’s happening in that time period, and what the Book of Mormon says about it. So for me, that tells me that the Grijalva does a better fit, because I can explain why the Mulekites had a different language than the Nephiites. If I’m going the other direction in the Usumacinta, I don’t really have that. I have to deal with earlier time periods of Maya, because most of those were Maya-speaking. So, it fits better for me in the Grijalva.
Hemispheric Model
Interview
GT 14:14 Okay. Interesting. It seems like, and I remember reading John Sorensen’s book. I can’t remember the name of it, the blue book.[1] One of the things that he said, it seems like in the early days of the church, people thought it was more of, like, Panama was the narrow neck of land and North America was the land of Nephi, and South America was where the Lamanites lived. I talked to Shannon Caldwell Montez, recently, and she said in 1922 there was the, I think it was Ivins was one of the first people to propose more of a limited geography theory and more Mesoamerica. I also remember, there’s a revelation or something. I don’t know how to describe it. But there’s something written down where Joseph Smith said that Lehi landed 30 degrees south latitude, which we would call Chile, probably. So, can you talk about how Sorenson and/or you reconcile some of those statements and the history of Book of Mormon geography?
Brant 15:42 You start off with trying to find out what Joseph believed. And it’s pretty obvious as you read what Joseph said, what we have from other people, that they began as believing that the entire hemisphere was–the entire New World was the Book of Mormon land. And if you look at any map, it’s really obvious. You get down to Panama, and you’re going to go, “Okay, yeah, that’s a pretty narrow neck.” And you obviously have a land southward. You obviously have a land northward. And they pretty much believed that. The other thing that they, obviously, believed is that because Book of Mormon lands encompassed all of that, any Indian that they found was going to be a Book of Mormon related Indian. And so, they would preach to the Lamanites as they went off, because their worldview was that everybody was explained by the Book of Mormon. That begins to change a little bit. Even at the times when Joseph Smith learns about Mesoamerica and he gets excited about it. He gets excited about it, because they’re really cool ruins. The Book of Mormon said there were civilized people. And everybody was saying, “Well, yeah, the North American Indians don’t appear all that civilized to me.”
Brant 17:02 And one of the themes of early conquest, the Caucasians coming in, the Western Europeans was, “Well, we’re going to civilize you, because you’re not civilized.”
Brant 17:17 You get down to these great ruins, and all of a sudden, you’re going, “Huh, well, wait a minute. This is something that parallels Egypt. This parallels what we have in the Old world. There were really big civilizations.” So, of course, they got excited. Now, of course, they also got excited for the wrong reasons, and they would pick certain places. And somebody said that I think Copan was Zarahemla. Well, Copan was built way after Zarahemla. Nobody really cared about archaeology at the time. Nobody knew anything about archaeology at the time. They certainly didn’t know about the time periods and what to do with it. They were just flying based on whatever they understood. Now, the really specific landing place in Chile, that comes from Frederick Williams, who wrote it down. We don’t know exactly whether or not he got it from Joseph Smith. We don’t know why that was indicated. All we know is that there is a later document written by Frederick Williams, that said that. It just doesn’t fit with anything that we can find in the Book of Mormon. So, just like all of the hemispheric things, we tend to take it with a grain of salt.
GT 18:30 Okay, because I know, the Heartlanders say, “Well, it was written by Frederick G. Williams. We don’t know that it was Joseph Smith.” But do you think that Joseph Smith said that? I know, Shannon said that there was a Doctrine and Covenants Section 7 that was written on the other side of the paper, also by Frederick G. Williams. And, of course, we wouldn’t throw out D&C 7.
Brant 18:55 No. I think the best answer to that is, it wouldn’t surprise me. So, I don’t know. Obviously, we don’t know. But it really wouldn’t surprise me if Joseph had speculated. Joseph speculated on all kinds of things. And he was pretty free with trying to guess and trying to see where it was. I do not see any indication that there was any revelatory indication to anyone of where the Book of Mormon took place. And one of the reasons I believe that is that the people who knew Joseph, a lot of them came to Utah. They would not have forgotten what Joseph said. And if Joseph had said, “This is exactly what it is,” somebody would have remembered that, and we would not have had the discussions that we had for a long time about geography. You wouldn’t have the Church convening in 1920, a sort of a symposium on Book of Mormon geography. People who were speculating and the Church never said, “Oh, yeah, you’re wrong, because this is what Joseph said.” It would be very, very strange to me that if Joseph had had a prophecy, that everyone would have forgotten that.
Digging into Meso
GT 20:22 Okay. Well, I guess also the Chile landing, does that imply a Pacific crossing or an Atlantic crossing in your mind?
Brant 20:35 It would be a Pacific crossing, yes. And frankly, I would agree with that. I think the best explanation for the Nephite arrival is a Pacific crossing. This is also what Sorenson suggested. And I agree with him, based on his information, because he did more with geography, than I ever did. But everything fits if we have them landing on the coast of Guatemala. Obviously, you land on a coast. I mean, Noah was a little unusual on landing on the top of the mountain. Everybody else lands on the coastline. So, then they go up into the land of Nephi. So, they’ve got to go over–this isn’t a flat plain that gradually comes up. You’ve got to have something, a mountainous barrier there. And of course, in Guatemala, you do. You go up into high land. And so that seems to fit the Nephite flight away from Laman and Lemuel, that probably were still along the coast.
GT 21:42 Okay, so you think it was Guatemala rather than Chile is where he landed?
Brant 21:45 Yeah, it looks better. I don’t see any reason for them to land in Chile, and then migrate up north. That’s a lot of travel over some very, very difficult ground. John Lund uses that landing in Chile, and then has everybody move up to Mesoamerica. So, John Lund has tried to correlate those two. I can’t see a real people doing that. It makes us feel better if we can put it on a map. And so, yeah, they could do that. Real people just wouldn’t, in that short of a time, make that long of a distance for no real reason. So, yeah, I don’t see that as a real landing place.
GT 22:36 Okay. I know there was another reference to some ruins found in the Yucatan Peninsula. How far is that from Guatemala? Is that relatively short distance, or it seems like it’s a little bit farther than that.
Brant 22:52 Guatemala is the heel of the boot, and everything that you’re talking about is the Peten, which is the toe of the boot. So most of what we see is the foot. That’s up into where the Usumacinta goes. There’s a lot of Maya ruins up in there. Particularly, it’s called the Maya lowlands. You come out of the highlands of Guatemala, there’s a mountain range. Then, you drop down into the lowlands. And down into the lowlands is where you start getting the famous forests. And so those are the places where there were really big Maya civilizations. And so, it’s really tempting to say that the Book of Mormon took place there, because you have really cool ruins there. It’s sort of like saying, the New Testament must have taken place, maybe in Egypt, or Greece, because all of the ruins are really cool there. And they’re not nearly as cool in Israel. My reading of the Book of Mormon is that Zarahemla was not necessarily as sophisticated as its cousins around it. Because it’s the Book of Mormon and we love the Book of Mormon people, we like to think that any pretty ruin is Nephite, and an ugly ruin is Lamanite. But I think it was probably the reverse.
GT 23:46 Oh, really?
Brant 24:18 Oh, yeah. When you get into the missionary efforts of the sons of Mosiah, it’s the first time in the Book of Mormon where we really get a picture of Lamanite life. So, they leave Nephite lands in Zarahemla. They go back to the land of Nephi and they’re there with Lamanites. And when they get there, we learn all kinds of interesting things like there is a king over kings. Well, we know that the cities, and you can call them city-states, although the idea of state in Mesoamerica is argued. But you’ve got a city. They have a king. Then you have this over-king who’s on top of all of them. You don’t seem to see that so much in the Nephite lands. But, when we get to the Lamanites lands, we’ve got it. That means it’s a much more political, much more complicated thing. You have them go from where they meet–now his name is totally [out of my mind.] Ammon and the king; Did we ever get the name of the king?
GT 25:27 Lamoni.
Brant 25:28 Yeah, Lamoni. It’s his father, we don’t get the name for.
GT 25:32 Right.
Brant 25:32 But, he’s there with Lamoni, and then they have to go to another city. And he says, “Oh,” he says, “I’m friendly with that King. I think I can go there and help.” And so, they mount a procession to go there. All of those concepts of kings over kings, multiple cities, inter-relationships, those are attested in Maya texts. We know those things took place.
Brant 26:00 And so going into that land and saying, “Oh, well, if you’re back into my land, here’s what it looked like.” It fits with all we know about the archaeology and the culture of the area. We just don’t see that in Zarahemla. Now if Zarahemla is along the Grijalva, we are a little disadvantaged in archaeology, because they built a dam and flooded the place. Now it’s underwater. So, they did a little bit of work before they did that. And we know of a couple of locations, Joppa de Corpo is the largest one. And there is a dated stone from there, from A.D. 32. So, [that’s] absolute proof that that city is around in Book of Mormon times. It’s not all that spectacular. When you see Mesoamerican cities, and they’ve got the wonderful temples and the great art and the wonderful carvings on the temples. You go along the Grijalva, and the evidence we have is they didn’t have that. There weren’t that many of these fancy carvings. You’ll get small things that were imported. Now, why is that interesting? It’s interesting, because these are related to Hebrew people. And what we know of the Hebrew relation to art is that they’re aniconic. They don’t like icons. They don’t want images of the gods. So, it’s interesting that in the place where I think we probably get the majority of Book of Mormon cities, we have fewer real artistic representations. Those all come among the Maya, and they’re wonderful, and they’re beautiful.
Brant 27:47 But it’s more aniconic in the areas where I think the Book of Mormon took place. And I think that’s probably related to their antipathy to creating icons.
GT 28:00 So are you saying that the Maya, are the Nephites/Lamanites, and the Olmec are the Jaredites?
Brant 28:10 I’m glad you asked that question, because that becomes the most complicated question to answer. Because it’s so simple to say, “This archaeologically designated group were the Nephites.” It cannot be true. And the reason it cannot be true, is because all of these cities have their own cultures. And they would not think, even though they spoke the same language, they would not think of themselves as the same people, necessarily, as somebody who was not very far away living in a different city. For example, there are two cities, Tikal and Calakmul that are about 30 kilometers apart. So, there’s a basically, a three-day walk from one to the other. And in the middle, you’ve got a day and a half walk. But the boundary, kind of, between these two really big, really powerful cities is about a day and a half walk. They hated each other. They’re mortal enemies. There’s no way that they would have thought themselves the same people and they’re that close. So, the best thing to say is that the Nephites participated in Maya culture, or participated in Mesoamerican culture. And the example I usually give is talking about Latter-day Saints in American culture. We’re Americans. We speak English and our physical remains, the things that we use all the time–there’s no such thing as a Mormon cooking pot. If you go, even in Salt Lake City, if you go down the street, you cannot tell from the way the house looks, whether it is someone who is a Latter-day Saint or not who lives there. Because our material culture is shared with this much, much larger group of people. And, yet we consider ourselves a group. And certainly, the Latter-day Saints, when they were in the territory of Deseret, when they’ve been kicked out of the United States, and they’re really not in any country, they’re off on their own. They have their own theocracy. They still spoke English. The buildings they built were very similar to buildings that had been in other places. The pots they used were things that they inherited and brought with them. So, they participated in a culture. The Nephites, the Lamanites, are all participating in the larger culture. So, I think that’s why you have to be careful. The Olmec civilization, that is the time period for the Jaredites, it would be proper to say that the Jaredites participated in Olmec culture. It would not be correct to say that they were Olmec. Because Olmec has a much greater spread than what the Jaredites would have had. But, at that time period, in that place, they would have participated in the material, the intellectual culture of the area.
GT 31:20 Okay, so I think that’s interesting that you compare Mormons to Americans, that we participate in American culture, but you wouldn’t be able to identify a Mormon based on their pottery or whatever.
Brant 31:33 The fact that you’ve got way too many minivans in a church building, other than that, there really isn’t that many ways. If somebody, if an archaeologist were to dig up our houses, and they don’t know anything about Latter-day Saints, they might find some pictures of temples here and there, but they might not know what that meant. The vast majority of the things, the material culture, that are in our houses are not Mormon. It’s just not that many physical things that define us.
DNA Problem
GT 32:09 Okay. So I guess that kind of goes to the DNA problem, right? That’s pretty much how you would explain it away, the DNA problem, as well?
Brant 32:20 Yeah, I mean, let’s just take the hypothesis that the Nephites landed on the Gulf Coast of Guatemala, somewhere in the ballpark, of 600 BC. How many people did they have in the boat with them? Sorenson suggests that, maybe 30. And that’s including people that are not named, some servants and some other people that might have been there that weren’t named in the family. So, maybe 30 people. They land on that coast. You’ve got 30 people who have to learn how to survive in a new area, in a new world where they don’t know the plants. They don’t know which ones will kill you, if you eat them. They don’t know the animals. They’re not sure which of the snakes are poisonous. And there are snakes all over the place. I mean, they’ve got a problem of how to live in this brand-new world. So, obviously, they’re going to learn what they can from the people around them. And in 600 BC, in the foothills of Guatemala, that could have seen the approaching sail, we’ve got six different communities of at least 1000 people. So, who do you go to? Well, what do you do? So you start with 30 people, and at some point in time you would like to procreate. Your children would like to have spouses. Do they take their brothers and sisters as spouses? Well, no. Who do you take as a spouse? You take people who are around you. You take the other population? Of course, you do, which means that very, very quickly 30 people’s DNA gets mixed into millions of people’s DNA. How much of that is available to us to trace 1000 years later? And the answer is [that it’s] unlikely that you’ll find anything. And the other reason is, we don’t know to whom to compare it [to.] Again, we don’t have a lot of DNA that is specifically, well, in the case of Lehi, related to the northern tribes, because he was one of the northern tribes. So, we’d have to get DNA from the North, but we don’t know where the sons of Ishmael would have come from.
GT 34:49 Was Joseph in the northern tribes?
Brant 34:52 Yeah, Joseph, the lineage of Joseph is in the north, not in the south. And Lehi would have been in the north, and then, at the time, probably somewhere around the dispersal in 700 BC, Lehi and many other northern Israelites escaped and went down into Judah. And they actually have excavated in Jerusalem, in Spanish, we’d call it a barrio. It’s sort of the community center, the area that all of these people moved to. There was kind of a specific location. They all moved down south. A lot of them came to Jerusalem, and they all lived in this particular area. It really appears that Nephi would have been one of those who came down and lived in that area. And so, when they talk about going back to the land of his inheritance, it’s a trip, because you have to leave Jerusalem, go back up into what used to be Israel. You’re down in Judah, you’d have to go back up and then come down. So, the lands of inheritance are way back up here. But he’s living down here. And so that explains more of the Book of Mormon, from the old-world perspective.
GT 36:11 So the other question I have, when you say that, if 30 people from Lehi’s group came to Guatemala, let’s say, and there were millions of people here, doesn’t it say in the Book of Mormon, that this was a land–I mean, it implies that it was an empty land, and there weren’t any other people here.
Brant 36:32 We read it that way. But if you read the text very carefully, there’s lots of indications that there were people here when they got here. There are some very interesting verses that are being chosen to indicate what they’re doing when they go there. One of the verses that Nephi cites, if I remember, is likening what the Lehites are doing when they’re going to the new world, to the people of Moses and coming in and having to sweep people off the land. Why did you choose that particular verse? Well, because you’re going to have other people there. One of the ones that I think is most compelling is that we have Nephi selecting a verse out of Isaiah and saying to his brother, “I want you to teach this to the people.” And it’s all about the Gentiles saving Israel.
Brant 36:30 Well, we look at that, and we’re going. “Okay, well, that’s a future thing. The Gentiles are going to get the Bible and bring it back.” So, we read it in the future. Why does a king say that right now, the most important thing you can tell this people is about something that isn’t even going to happen for 2000 years. But if you look in the context and say, “Well, what’s a Gentile?” Well, it’s not us. It’s not the people of Judah. And when you say the Gentiles are going to be your salvation, you’re saying, “You need to accept these people and not make a difference, because they’re your salvation.” And you have a very good reason for that. The other verse that we have that’s fascinating is when there is the split between Laman and Lemuel and Nephi, Nephi names pretty much all of the people that we know about. So, we know that Laman and Lemuel, and, I think, Zoram, sons of Ishmael may have stayed. Nephi names everybody who comes with him.
Brant 38:39 So we can pretty much go through and divide them up and know who was who. And then at the very end of it, he says, “And everyone else who would come with me.” Well, he’s just named everybody we know. But why does he say, “Everyone else who would come.” Well, because there were other people there that they had converted and brought them in. So, historically, no matter where in the New World Lehites would have come, they would have found people waiting for them. This was not an empty land. So, we know, historically, that it was not empty. If we read carefully what Nephi tells us, we can see that it was not empty. But we have to read between the lines, because that wasn’t the story Nephi wanted to tell. It wasn’t part of the reason why he wrote First Nephi. The other thing we have to remember is, of course, we get First Nephi because it was on the small plates. We don’t know what Nephi wrote on the large plates about that. The large plates had more to do with, what he said, were the political things. And that would be, “We met other people.” So, he could have set it on the large plates. But it wasn’t the reason why he was writing the small plates, so he had no reason to tell us. He wrote those small plates at least 30 years after he had been there.
Brant 40:00 So, it was sort of, “Yeah, this is in the past. That’s not the story I’m telling.” So, the absence is not surprising. But the fact that there are the clues in the text that we can read, it tells us what the reality was behind the text. And that, frankly, happens with any historical text. If it is authentic text, and you know something about history and context, you can read between the lines and see what they’re saying when they’re not explicitly saying it.
GT 40:32 The other thought that comes to my mind are the Lemba tribe in Africa. Are you familiar with them?
Brant 40:38 Yeah.
GT 40:39 So, tell us about the Lemba Tribe.
Brant 40:43 I mean, the Lemba are people who claim Jewish heritage, and they migrated down into that area. You’ll have other places, and they can trace some of their DNA back. So, the comparison is, people will say, “Well, why don’t the Lemba create a comparison to what happened with the people in the Book of Mormon?”
GT 41:09 Right.
Brant 41:10 Here’s a people–and in the real reason is, the immigration group was significantly larger. When the Lemba come down, they come down as a large community. And it’s a sufficient community where you can be insular and marry within the community, rather than have to go outside, so they can keep themselves separate. And they did. So, we find the genetic lineage there, because they were able to keep themselves separate. Why were they able to do that? They had a large enough immigrating community, that they could consistently keep themselves separate from everybody else, and still generate the progeny. Thirty people aren’t going to do that. You just don’t have enough of the people of Lehi to do that. The other indication that we have coming from the Mulekites. Again, is it’s a small population. So, the only place where we have a possibility of a larger one is with the Jaredites. But, again, that gets far enough back into history that it’s, again, difficult to trace, not to mention the fact we’re not exactly sure where they came from.
GT 42:20 So you think the Lemba Tribe was much larger than 30 people?
Brant 42:22 Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think it moved as a large community,
GT 42:27 Because they look like just your typical black Africans.
Brant 42:31 Oh, yeah, sure.
GT 42:32 It’s strange that they have, I guess, Cohen DNA or whatever, the Cohen haplotype.
Brant 42:39 Yeah. And the way you keep that is that you have a more persistent lineage. So, you marry and other people. But if you have a large enough population, you can keep that that DNA line going. But you have to have a large enough population. For example, the Cohen lineage is going to–that marker, if I remember correctly, is passed down through male lines. What happens if you’ve got 30 people and of the 30 people,15 are male. And out of the 15 males, six of them–let’s call it five, so I can do the math. Five of them only have daughters. Well, now I’ve got 10 left for the sons, but the more daughters you have, and the fewer males that produce sons, the fewer are going to pass on the patriarchal lineage and the paternal DNA. Everybody has mothers, and so that’s why maternal DNA is usually where things are traced. Because that’ll go from daughters, to sons, to everybody. So, maternal DNA, usually, works better. Paternal tends to be shorter, because you have those breaks when you don’t have a son. But, again, the DNA doesn’t really bother me, because you have so many reasons why that small population coming into a larger population, over 1000 years, it just isn’t going to persist.
GT 44:16 I mean, you said they were insular. Sorry, go ahead. Say that again.
Brant 44:20 I think the Lemba is a more unusual case, because they were able to keep culturally and, obviously, highly genetically separate.
GT 44:32 So you think they were insular as they came down, and then…
Brant 44:37 Yeah.
GT 44:38 How big do you think they were when they came down?
Brant 44:40 Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m not an expert on them, so, I would be totally guessing. So, I have no clue. But the very fact that there’s a population of them that continue to exist and continue to hold the same stories of their ancestry tells me that that’s a community that has persisted. You have to have a community that persists in order to have that. The other thing we have, again, in the Book of Mormon, that we keep forgetting about is we have the end of the Book of Mormon where it says the Lamanites were purposefully trying to wipe out anybody who is Nephite. So we don’t know–what we know is that by the time they become Lamanite, they’re not insular enough to even remember what their lineage may or may not have been. So, even in that, they’re different from the Lemba. Or there was a group of Jews from the Diaspora, I think, who went to India, and were found. Again, they sort of kept together. So, we find those kinds of groupings, but we don’t find any evidence that any of that happened in the new world. And in the Book of Mormon, there’s really no indication that that should have happened. There’s just, genetically, [it’s] too rare to find that lineage.
Not Narrow Neck? Extermination?
GT 46:12 Okay. So, let’s jump back to the boot, if I can remember that. And I don’t know my geography as well as you do. So please correct me if I make any mistakes here. So, Guatemala is kind of the toe. is that right? Is that what you said?
Brant 46:29 The heel.
GT 46:30 The heel of the boot.
Brant 46:31 Yep.
GT 46:32 Okay, so that’s the heel, then it kind of goes up into the Yucatan. Is that right?
Brant 46:37 Yes.
GT 46:37 And then [west,] I guess.
Brant 46:41 The really thin ankle up there is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. And that’s what’s considered the narrow neck of land.
GT 46:50 Oh, I was going to ask that. Because when I look at the Yucatan Peninsula, I’m like, that’s not very narrow.
Brant 46:55 No, and the people who use the Yucatan, in that model, like it best, because they like the north-south orientation, but it’s really hard to redefine a narrow neck. And, again, that’s one of the reasons why I like better what’s happening in Sorensen’s [model] is you’ve got a narrow neck there. The difficulty with the narrow neck is, and frankly, the difficulty with anything that we do, looking at ancient geography, we cannot help but be modern people and look at modern maps. The ancient world didn’t have modern maps. They didn’t have anything that looked at all like what we have. They may or may not have even understood what those general relationships were. If you get ancient maps, at least in Mesoamerica, they’re very stylistic. It’ll say, “Here are these four mountains, and we’re here in the middle.” Well, yeah, you can find those four mountains. But that’s a really interesting map, because it isn’t trying to tell you how to get somewhere, it’s trying to say, “I am defining myself in this particular area of the world.” But the other thing about looking at the maps from our perspective, is we look at the isthmus of Tehuantepec, “Well, that’s too big. It should be narrower than that.” And the reason is, we have these units of distance of a two-day’s journey for a Nephite. It’s a distance of a day and a half. And it takes longer than that to get across the isthmus of Tehuantepec. But those come because of defensive lines. The descriptions there are, this is a defensive line across this narrow neck. In Book of Mormon times, it wasn’t that the neck was any narrower. It’s that a large portion of the Gulf of Mexico side was marshland, which is really difficult to get through. And it serves as its own barrier. So, you don’t really have that.
Brant 49:02 And when we look at it, we don’t notice that. We just noticed the distance and we don’t realize that it’s the defensible or the distance that needs to be defended. Because the rest of this in the marshland, you’re going to have a real hard time getting much of an army through that without somebody noticing. And it’s just very, very difficult in the ancient world to get through these things. So, the area that needed to be defended was much more reasonable. So even that area where you say, “Well, that’s too wide to be a narrow neck.” Functionally, it was not [too wide.]
GT 49:41 Because of the marshland.
Brant 49:43 Yeah. Now, let me give you one other thing about trying to take that geography, that history and put it all together. I think the most fascinating thing for me is that we finally have an explanation for why the Book of Mormon ended when it did. And those are questions that, often, Latter-day Saints don’t ask. I mean, we know the Book of Mormon ends. He tells us. He says, “Oh, there’s this big war. They die. They’re all gone.” Well, why didn’t it happen 100 years earlier? Why didn’t it happen 100 years later? Why did it happen at that time? Well, we don’t ask that question. We just say, “Well, you know, it did.” But history usually has reasons. And in this particular case, we know one. In that time period and ballpark of AD 400 and very specifically, AD 396. There is a–I’m going to try and do it backwards here. I have no idea how this, how a mental thing will show up on your picture. Somebody’s got a picture of this, where you got Mexico City who’s up in, these are…
GT 50:49 Maybe I can use a Google Map. Would a Google Map work? I’ll try to pop one in there after.
Brant 50:54 Something like that, yeah. But you’ve got Mexico City in the area where there was a really big city called Teotihuacan. This was the big power source. And in AD 400, they’re pretty much at their height. And they’re expanding and connecting and making trade routes. So, they’re up in Mexico City. The Maya-rich areas are down in Guatemala, up in the Peten. And in order to get there, to be able to create a trade route, you have to go through Nephite lands. Well, if the Nephites aren’t cooperating, if you finally have an economic reason that is sufficiently large, that it’s worth a war of extermination. And when I was looking at this, I was looking at some of the anthropologists of warfare. They said that a war of extermination is very, very expensive. And you don’t do that unless you have a really good economic reason. So, what’s the economic reason? Well, Teotihuacan and Tikal want to create trade routes, where there’s free trade. The Nephites are sitting across this and could threaten that at any time. And now you have an economic reason that is large enough to warrant a war of extermination. When does this happen? Well, we know, for a fact, that the Teotihuacan comes down and basically conquers Tikal in AD 396. There’s a stela that indicates that. So, right at the time period that the Book of Mormon says, “Oooh, things are shifting, and things are getting worse,” we know exactly why it was. Because all of a sudden Teotihuacan is trying to help the Lamanites and they’re saying, “Okay, let’s gang up, go together, and we’ll go get rid of the Nephites. So this geography, history, culture, continues to give us information about the Book of Mormon that, otherwise, we couldn’t know. Why does the Book of Mormon end when it does? Well, because of the world that they lived in, [it] created, the conditions that changed the nature of the warfare from one where they’re just fighting with each other to a real war of extermination.
2 Cumorah Theory
GT 53:19 Well, you know, that brings up, I guess, the two Cumorah theory, Right? And I know…
Brant 53:24 Yeah.
GT 53:24 …both your critical Mormons, ex-Mormons, I guess, and the Heartland are like, “How did it get from Mexico City to New York?”
Brant 53:39 And I’ll tell you what John Sorensen’s answer was. He found somebody who actually had walked that distance. So there was–oh, shoot was it in the 1700s? Somebody walks from somewhere in Central America and gets all the way up into New York. So, could it be done? Sure. We don’t have any timeframe on when Moroni moves these plates around. So, he’s got plenty of time to walk up there. So yeah, he could have walked and carried them.
GT 54:17 Why wouldn’t he have just buried them near the battle, though, in Mexico City or whatever?
Brant 54:22 Well, yeah, here, now we’re getting into, not archaeological or historical things, but sort of theology. Why did it have to be near where Joseph Smith is? Well, if Joseph Smith is going to get them, he’s got to have access to them. And he doesn’t have access to them if they’re down in Central America, or Mesoamerica. So, having the plates in the New York hill makes theological sense. It makes sense where God’s saying, “I’m planning ahead. I know this is what’s going to happen. Let me get the right thing in the right place.” Now I’ll give you another scenario that the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me. If you think about the story of Joseph Smith and the plates, of course, he gets them from this hill. And the reason I say hill in in New York, we don’t really have good firm evidence for Joseph calling it Cumorah until about 1842. Everybody else was, but Joseph didn’t refer to it as the Hill Cumorah. And the other thing is, if we read the Book of Mormon, the reason that people think that the plates were in the Hill Cumorah, rather than a New York hill or anywhere else, but the Hill Cumorah, is it says that Mormon buried plates in the Hill Cumorah, in Mormon 10:6. Is it Mormon 10:6? Yeah, somewhere in there. That’s the problem with having scriptures or fingertips electronically. We no longer have to remember all the references anymore. I can look it up when need to find that. I can’t remember it. But, anyway, what’s important about that verse is Mormon says, “And I took all the records, and I buried them in the Hill Cumorah, except those I gave to my son Moroni.” So, as far as the Book of Mormon text itself says, we have no indication that the plates that Joseph received were ever in the Hill Cumorah. All the other plates were, but not the ones that Joseph got.
GT 56:36 So, are you saying you think that he left a bunch of plates back in Mexico, and then he only just took…
Brant 56:45 That’s what the text says. I mean, the Nephites had this big archive. Mormon says that at one point in time, he took the archive, all of the plates, all of the texts they had, and he hid them in the Hill Shim to keep them away from the Lamanites. And then when they were being forced past wherever that hill was, he said, “Oh, man, we’re being run out, again. The Lamanites are going to get these, and I’ve got to save them.” So, he takes all of the Nephite records out of the Hill Shim, and he takes them with him. So now these are the entire history of the Nephite people. This is a big archive. This is more than just the Book of Mormon. This is everything, small plates of Nephi, large plates of Nephi, other records that we know were there. Those are the big set of things that Mormon has, and he says he buried those in the Hill Cumorah. What he doesn’t say, or what he specifically says is that the plates that we know as the Book of Mormon were not among those he buried. So, maybe he came back and buried them. It could be. But as far as what we know in the text, the plates that Joseph received were never in Cumorah of the Book of Mormon.
No Metal Plates Found?
GT 58:06 How do you answer critics who say that there have been no other metal plates found? I mean, there may be, I guess there’s the copper scroll in the Dead Sea [Scrolls], but it wasn’t nearly [as long.] It wasn’t 500 pages worth of text, a book like we have now.
Brant 58:25 Yeah, the Book of Mormon, and any of the Nephite records on plates are absolutely unique in their quantity, but not in their conception. So, the Old World has a number of indications of metal plates that recorded important things. They’re just not as large. So, there have been several discoveries of plates with writing on them. Again, the concept is not unusual. What’s unusual in the Book of Mormon is quantity, not concept. And because they’re in a different place, you have a different reason, and you don’t have to have the same reasons that you had in the Old World. And one of the other things that I think makes a really big difference is that in the Old World, you really wouldn’t want to be doing something on anything that was related to gold, because gold was so valuable. What is fascinating is that in the New World, it really wasn’t all that valuable. It was interesting. It was nice to make things out of. People liked it and carried it around. And they made a lot of objects and a lot of art. But they didn’t revere it like people do in the Old World. So, in the Old World, why would you make plates that you keep metal on? Why would you make them out of gold? Well, in the Old World, you wouldn’t, because it was too valuable. In the New World, you would, because first of all, it’s soft enough that you can write on and secondly, you’re not competing economically for someone to say, “Boy, I really want that because I’m richer if I have it.” It wasn’t a measure of wealth in the New World. So, I think those changing conceptions allowed the creation of multiple plates, where in the Old World, you would not have seen that.
GT 1:00:12 Well, you know, I’ve been the Sandra Tanner’s place, and she’s got a replica of the plates that are made out of lead, which she said isn’t quite as heavy as gold. And it’s really heavy.
Brant 1:00:26 There is there’s no question that there are no descriptions of the weight of the plates that would suggest that based on weight, they could have been pure gold. So, I don’t think you’ll find very many scholars in the Book of Mormon who accept that there were golden plates, who will suggest that they were pure gold. The best explanation, there is an alloy called Tumbaga, that is a combination of gold, silver, and copper, if I remember correctly. And that was an alloy that is known from that region. It is known further south than Central America. The one thing that I don’t have a good answer for right now is metallurgy at the right time period.
GT 1:01:22 Right.
Brant 1:01:22 The metallurgy is further south at that time period. And so, we don’t have any indication of it there. But Tumbaga was being made further south at that time. But a Tumbaga set of plates would have provided the correct amount, without being pure gold. The other thing that’s fascinating is that when Nephi is writing First Nephi, and I think it’s in 1 Nephi 19, where he finally gets everybody to the New World, and he’s describing the New World. We have a chapter break that makes this kind of separate, where it should have been together. It was not a separate chapter in the 1830 version. But he gets to this point, and he says, “We found these metals. We found gold and silver and copper in abundance.” And then the very next verse, the very next thing he says, “And I made plates.” Okay, that’s interesting. Why is it that he happens to mention three metals that make up the alloy of Tumbaga, immediately before saying, “We found this stuff, and I made plates.” He does not say, “I made them out of Tumbaga. It’s just a really interesting correlation, that immediately after saying, “Here are the things we found. Here’s what I made.” The implication is there, that there’s a correlation between those two, again, because there isn’t a chapter break in 1830 [Book of Mormon.]
GT 1:02:50 Yeah, well, that brings up another point, and since we’re talking about metals. I’m trying to give all the critical questions here. You’re doing a good job of answering them. Nephi says he used ore to make tools. And to my understanding, I know George Potter he’s more of a South American proponent. And he said that they found some ore in some paint that they used to paint in South America, but ore wasn’t really used [as a metal.] We talked about [how] the Book of Mormon talks about steel swords and they rusted. And it doesn’t appear that, really, anywhere in the Americas, they used a lot of metal. I mean, there’s a little bit, but not [for weapons.] I know, John Sorenson has talked about a kind of, and you can explain this better than I can, a wooden club with a bunch of volcanic… And I’m sure it was deadly and very sharp and probably killed people. But it didn’t rust. If it’s volcanic, it didn’t rust. Right? So, it’s not really a steel sword. So how do you take that on?
Brant 1:04:03 Yeah, long explanations, I’m going to skip. There are really long explanations.
GT 1:04:11 We’ve got time here. We can take long ones.
Brant 1:04:13 For this one, you don’t have enough time, because a lot off it goes into questions of how the translation was done and why the translation is certain ways. So, some of the questions about swords, it’s a question of whether that was the translator’s words or the words on the plates. And, you know, that’s a very big discussion.
GT 1:04:13 Okay.
Brant 1:04:15 There’s all kinds of people who will disagree on how the translation took place. So, that’s a big argument right now. But let me take on just a simple one. Let’s say that Nephi does come in. First of all, we do find ore that is being mined and used in Mesoamerica. The Olmec people have large amounts of the ore put together. They used iron ore. There’s no indication, necessarily, that it was smelted and melted down, but they used iron ore. So, we know it was there. We know it was abundant. We know people used it. Now, let’s say that Nephi makes swords. If Nephi makes swords, he says he makes them after the model that he had of the sword of Laban, which is going to be a Middle Eastern sword. And we kind of know what those things look like. Most of them are not necessarily very long. And if you think of the Roman Gladius, it was much shorter. The function of the Roman Gladius, and the way it was used was as a thrusting weapon.
Brant 1:05:45 So, if you’re going to have a sword, the sword has to replicate the function for which it was built. And if you build a sword that is designed to be a thrusting weapon, you have to be trained on how to use this. And typically, it’s going to be with a shield, standing next to someone where you’re going to be thrusting around. Well, if you’re in a Mesoamerican population, and you’ve come into this new area, that isn’t the way people fought. They fought with what you were describing. It’s called a macuahuitl. You take sort of a long flat club and around the edges, you’ll put sharpened obsidian. Now you have to remember that obsidian makes a really good edge. You can get an obsidian edge that is sharper than a medical scalpel. So, you know how sharp those things would be. Well, you can get obsidian sharper than that. And so, they had this really sharp, really effective weapon. One of the stories from the time of the conquest has a Maya hero who takes one of these macuahuitls and in one blow, cuts off the head of a horse.
GT 1:07:09 Wow.
Brant 1:07:11 It was probably fantastic. It may not have happened. They were sharp. They were powerful. The difference is, here you have a really good weapon, and you would have had people trained to use it. And it’s a slashing weapon, not a thrusting weapon. So, you take a thrusting weapon and hand it to people who are using slashing warfare, and what do they do with it? Well, first of all, unless you really got good sharp steel, and likely they did not, the steel is going to dull really fast. In a macuahuitls, you will break some of the obsidian, but you pull out the piece and replace it with a new one. And you can lose a couple of pieces and the rest of it still very sharp and still very effective. So, the nature of warfare, the nature of the way they used weaponry said, “You know, I’ve got a better weapon than that.” So yeah, you can make it, but I can do better with what I have. And so not all innovations in technology take hold, particularly when they come up against another technology that, for that culture, is better. I did some research for a while on technical innovations, and what happens, and you don’t always get an innovation that we think is superior, that takes over. There’s been a lot of cases in the world history, where you’ll introduce something, and then it fades out, because there was something else that was better. And I think that’s what happens with swords in the Book of Mormon. Nephi may have made them, and everybody says, “Well, that’s nice, but I have no idea what to do with it. And this thing works better. And I know what to do with that. Get out of my way, I’m going to go kill somebody.” So I think that’s what happens.
GT 1:09:00 So you’re saying that the Middle Eastern swords weren’t as good as these obsidian clubs that were being used. Is that right?
Brant 1:09:08 I’m saying that they had different techniques for how they were used, and that the people that they were being given to would have been trained in a slashing technique, not a thrusting. And so, they had the wrong weapon for the wrong type of warfare. And that’s why you end up with the right tool for the right job. The macuahuitl was the right tool for the right job and not the Nephite imported sword, because it required a different methodology. Not to mention the fact that there’s no indication that Nephi would have known that methodology. He wouldn’t have known how to fight with the sword, necessarily. Perhaps he did. But we don’t have any occasion [that] he was a trained military man. So, no matter what he made, he may not have known how to use that technology correctly. Where it was really effective in the Old World, it may not have been effective at all in the New World, because they didn’t know how to employ it.
No Horses
GT 1:10:11 Very interesting. You mentioned cutting off the head of a horse. Because I know a lot of critics of the Book of Mormon will say, “There were no horses in America until the Spanish brought them.”
Brant 1:10:25 Yes.
GT 1:10:26 What’s your response to that?
Brant 1:10:29 Two responses. First, again, we’re in the question of translation. I really think that what we’re dealing with there is a translation anachronism, very similar to what we get in the King James Version. We’re very familiar with “you don’t put your candle under a bushel.” We know that. We go, “Oh, yeah, you don’t put a candle under the bushel.” They didn’t have candles. Candle is a mistranslation. They had oil lamps. Now, the image of a light under a bushel, same thing. But the translation was wrong because they didn’t have candles. So, it’s entirely possible in translation, to have a term that enters in translation, that is not correct for the time period, but isn’t an historical anachronism.
GT 1:11:22 So, the Israelites never use candles, you’re saying?
Brant 1:11:25 Yeah.
GT 1:11:26 They would always using oil lamps.
Brant 1:11:27 Right, right. Yeah, candles came much later. Yeah, so they don’t have candles at all. They have oil lamps, and we find them. I mean, archaeologically, they find all of these. But, by the time that King James Bible is written, everybody’s using candles. So, they translated as a candle. But candles were not around in Israel at the time that it’s written. So, it’s talking about oil lamps, not candles. And the fact that the Bible says candles, doesn’t mean that the Bible is incorrect. It means that it was a translation, and the translation didn’t get it right. And I think that’s what happens with horses in the Book of Mormon. If you go through the text of the Book of Mormon, horse technology was transformative everywhere there were horses in the Old World. They just changed the way people work. And once horses are introduced to Native Americans, they changed the way many Native Americans lived. They change their entire culture. So, horse culture becomes transformative. There’s zero evidence of that in the Book of Mormon. Zero evidence that any animal was ever ridden. You just never hear of it. Unless you’re going back to brass plates. They talked about chariots and riding horses.
Brant 1:12:46 But you don’t get that in the Book of Mormon text. If you look at what Book of Mormon text tells us, we say, “Well, what does the horse do? We know that Ammon feeds them. Som they eat. It’s an animal. It eats. We know that. And the other mention of a horse is in a list of animals that are, basically, food animals. So maybe they ate them. But nobody rides them. They don’t use them for agriculture. They don’t use them for anything. They have no transformation to their culture that’s based on horses. There’s just no indication that there was a horse culture in the Book of Mormon. So, in my opinion, based on the context of the Book of Mormon, horse is a translation anachronism. Now, having said that, there have been some interesting finds that I understand will be published shortly that indicate that there were horses that survived the die off in the Pleistocene [Period,] that we expect. And so, there are horse bones that have been found in strata that predate the Spaniards coming to the New World. So, there is a possibility that there were actual horses prior.
GT 1:13:19 From the Nephite time period?
Brant 1:14:19 I don’t know. It’s later than the Nephite time period, but earlier than the Spanish, if I remember correctly. So, it’s, obviously, controversial stuff. It’ll take a while before anybody shakes it out, and they find enough and verify it. But it’s possible that it was there. For me, that doesn’t make any difference whatsoever, because I read the text and I say, “Yeah, this isn’t a horse culture.” There’s nothing there that tells me that the horse is being used. So, from my standpoint, whatever got called a horse, wasn’t a true horse, specifically, in the way that it never had an effect on Nephite culture.
Brant 1:15:04 Now, we also know from, and there’s another book that talks about what happens when two different cultures meet. And they have, of course, the European culture meeting with Native American cultures. And they said, “Well, what do Native Americans call things?” All of a sudden, they’re seeing all these things from the Europeans that they’ve never seen before. And what tends to happen is that they’ll borrow names. They’ll make up names. For example, in the Maya, when they were trying to figure out what this horse was, they would call it a deer, and they would call it something else. They called it a big dog or something, because they had no word for horse. They had no concept of horse. So they would come up with something that was similar. So, we know that in that contrast of cultures, there are naming problems. And I think that’s related to what we’re seeing in the Book of Mormon. The difference between the way I look at it and John Sorensen does, John Sorenson would put all of those issues at the Nephite level and so that’s what caused the naming problem. And then what I would suggest is it’s probably in the translation level. I think it’s much more of the candle issue. Joseph knew horses, and so he used the word horse.
GT 1:16:35 So does that fly in the face of Joseph Smith saying this is the most correct book on the Earth?
Brant 1:16:43 That gets that gets cited a lot. And what doesn’t get cited is his conclusion to that, which is, if you’ll follow the precepts of the book. So, it’s not correct, because of the way it’s written. It’s not correct because of its language. It’s correct because of its doctrine. So, no. It doesn’t fly in the face of that at all. Because what is correct is the revealed doctrine, not the words or concepts. Now, having said that, it’s a remarkably consistent text. We get all of these indications of people going and traveling to places. And in all of that, I think there’s one mistake that John Sorensen found. There’s one city that sort of gets misplaced in the list. But other than that, it’s remarkably consistent. So, I think there’s a lot of really good reasons for saying there is an ancient underlying text there. Then, on top of that, there’s an English translation. And there were a few things that went on in the English translation that reflect, maybe, the meaning of the text underneath, but are slightly different. For example, the Book of Mormon uses the metaphor of chaff. Well, we’re all familiar with that. We read that. We’ve seen it in the Old Testament, the New Testament. We know what chaff is. Wheat culture wasn’t part of anywhere in the Americas. Corn was. Chaff has nothing to do with corn. So that metaphor that we understand, probably wasn’t exactly what the plate text said, because the agricultural concepts were completely different. But it’s not unusual for a translator to translate into the culture that they’re translating for, to try to help people understand. I’m trying to remember. There was somebody was talking about some of them in French, where the if you really translate the idiom from French, it doesn’t mean anything.
GT 1:18:58 Adieu. Is that the one?
Brant 1:19:01 Pardon?
GT 1:19:02 I bid you adieu?
Brant 1:19:03 Oh, no, I’m thinking of translation problems.
GT 1:19:06 Oh.
Brant 1:19:07 You know, translating an idiom, and nothing’s coming to mind. So I’ll skip that. But since you mentioned adieu, it certainly is a French word. Everybody who brings that up, forgets that the Normans invaded England. And French was the language of England for 100 years or so. So, yeah, we have all kinds of words that are influenced by French. Any word in English that ends in “tion” is a French loan word. So yeah, the fact that there’s a French loan word in English, yeah, of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be? We shared a language. We shared a country for a while. Of course, we have French words. The reason that we have four letter words is because of the Anglo-Saxon version of the nicer words that we get out of French. So yeah, of course there’s French, not a problem.
Skewed Directions?
Interview
GT 1:20:00 (Chuckling) I know another–and I don’t mean to bring up all criticisms, but…
Brant 1:20:08 We’re having fun, so why not. Keep it related to the Book of Mormon [and] we’re all right.
GT 1:20:14 (Chuckling) Another criticism of the Mesoamerican model is North isn’t really north.
Brant 1:20:23 Oh yeah.
GT 1:20:24 The directions are kind of off. You shift them 45 degrees. What do you say about that?
Brant 1:20:29 The biggest mistake Sorensen made was calling them skewed directions. I think he was right, but probably didn’t know why he was right and because he didn’t know why he was right, he called them skewed directions. And basically, that’s an excuse for saying, “Yeah, they were wrong, but I’m going to make up my own way.” So, it’s really a bad explanation. Now, is there a good explanation where North isn’t north? Well, it isn’t that North isn’t north. North, of course, is north. South is south. I mean, we know these things. There isn’t any population on this world, that hasn’t figured out that the sun rises in the east. Directions are oriented to the fact that the sun rises in the east, and the sun sets in the west. Everybody knows that, and that’s how we define east and west. We define find north and south as the opposite corners. You eventually find the North Star and other ways of doing it. But what you know, in the ancient world, everybody knows the path of the sun. Everybody pays attention to that. Everybody knows east and west. Now, what we modern people forget is that the ancient people knew that. And they knew that the sun didn’t always rise and set in the same place every day. So, it moves over time and through seasons, based on how the earth is rotating, and all of these kinds of things. But the sun is in a different place.
Brant 1:21:59 I happen to be in my home office, here. I’ve got this nice big window that faces east. And both with the rising of the sun and the changing of time, I have to worry about where the sun’s going to be. Because at times, it starts off over here, and then it sort of keeps moving. And sometimes I don’t have to worry about where the sun is. I don’t have to pull the shades. Other times the sun’s right in my eyes. Well, that isn’t because East has changed. It’s because the sun has moved. Well, the ancients knew that, too. And in Mesoamerica, they use that as a definition. In most of the definitions, if you kind of look at what the terms mean, where did they get their definitions? Basically, they do everything based on whether or not you’re facing the sun, or your back is to the sun. So, it will say, “Yes, north is on my left hand, if I’m facing the sun. South is on my left hand if my back is to the sun. And so, their directions are built off of the east-west axis. And because of the changing of time, that east west axis tilts, moves. So, what they did is they came up with a concept of East that wasn’t a straight line, but it was a wedge. And the wedge said, “This is east, because this is how the sun moves.” So, you end up with four wedges, rather than the straight up and down cross thing that we can see. So, north for them was, and frankly is for us, it’s an average. If we’re in a car that has a compass on it, we’re going north, and we’re still on a road that’s taking us north.” You start watching your compass, and you go, “Wait a minute, I’m going northeast or northwest.” Well, I’m still heading north. But I’m not heading pure north, I’m now off on a side, but I’m still heading north. And for them, all of that was north. So, what we call northeast or northwest, they would call north. If you put that on a map, that fits into Mesoamerica. The second concept that becomes important is everybody bases their directions on what’s east or west based on where they are. So, I am currently in Albuquerque. Albany, New York is east of me. I used to live in Albany, New York. And when I was in Albany, New York, Albuquerque was West.
Brant 1:24:40 But that shifts depending on where you are. What happens if I’m in Kansas, Missouri? Well, now they’re separated. So, if I move my locations, what’s east and west will shift based on where I am. And what happens is we get directions of North, and South based on where the people were at the time. We forget that they move. So, they start off in the land of Nephi, north and south and where they line up and where the oceans are and that kind of thing become very different when the viewpoint is Bountiful, which is near the narrow neck of land, and it’s in a completely different place. So, they’re still correct that there’s north and south, but the descriptions are different, because they’re talking about a different area where they come from. So, it goes back to the fact that, again, we’re modern people and we look at this big map. And so, we see the whole thing and expect that they did. They saw where they lived. And when they moved and came to another place, things changed and what was east, what was west, become different.
GT 1:25:46 Okay.
Brant 1:25:50 I have a whole long paper on that, for people who really curious.
GT 1:25:54 You’ll have to send me a link. I’ll link to it. Yeah.
Brant 1:25:58 I’ll send you a link. I can’t even remember where the heck it is. It’s either in a FARMS paper or Interpreter. I think it’s FARMS.
GT 1:26:05 Do you have a name of the article? Do you remember the name?
Brant 1:26:08 No, of course not.
GT 1:26:09 (Chuckling) Okay. All right.
{End of Part 1}
[1] The book is called “An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon,” and can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3hjnaTd
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