Skylanders and The Book of Mormon

I found some Skylanders Skystones game cards in my cereal the other day and as I read the back of the little box they came in I was amazed at how familiar the story line sounded. I switched out a few nouns and a verb and this is what I got:

"The origins of [The Book of Mormon] go way back to the days of the [Nephites]. While experimenting with early [translation] technology and magic they discovered a form of enchanted stone that would allow anything [read through] it to become real. The Ancients worried that this power might fall into the wrong hands so they turned it into a [treasure hunt], purely for fun and leisure."

"Fuckin' A, dude, you found the magic stone! You win! Fun!!!"

It sounds like fun to me!

Nephite ward lists

To all of you out there who are struggling with the recent excommunication news, let me just say, PEACE! BE STILL! This is all part of God's plan for his church. We read in The Book of Mormon that excommunication is a divinely inspired practice that brings order. It can be very hard for the faithful, it's true, but we've got to be strong. No slipping up! Heaven forbid you lapse into apostasy too!

Now if only we could find some of these Nephite lists of believers. Wouldn't it be great to see if Nephites blotted out the names of the unrepentant completely or if they just earmarked them in their database as excommunicated so they could more easily reinstate those lost sheep once they returned like we do today? I mean the Church totally has it figured out now! Don't delete anybody! Keep them all signed up! Just hide the names of excommunicated members until they return to the fold! It might not be honest, but you have to agree it's generous and loving.

Sun miracles

God's awesomest miracles happen in the sky. According to scripture the Sun, err... Shinehah miraculously did not set because Joshua prayed that it wouldn't. That's pretty amazing. We all know that the setting sun is really just the Sun fading from our view as the earth spins away from facing it, so saying the Sun stood still actually means the earth stopped spinning, and we know that if the earth were to suddenly stop spinning (coming to a halt in less than 24 hours is extremely sudden for a massive object like the earth to stop spinning at it usual speed of 1038 mi/hr along the equator if you're American or 2670 km/hr if you're not) anything that isn't bedrock would keep spinning around. think about what would happens inside a snowglobe when you stop shaking it - the internal atmosphere keeps shaking and splashing around for a while. We're talking about massive tsunamis and land upheavals that would trash the world worse than the Flood. And yet the holy word of God cannot be wrong! (For anyone tempted to play the "symbolic language" card, please explain how a symbolic reading is supposed to fit the context of this miracle.)

"C'mon, God! Please? We're not done killing people yet."

Then there was that time in 3 Nephi when the Sun set but it was still as bright as noon day. The star of Bethlehem hadn't even shown up yet to help illuminate the earth and some how no darkness fell at all that night. Amazing! What on earth or in heaven could equal the brightness of another star that's only 8 light minutes away from the earth? Don't worry about the science, just believe.

Plains Indians go to Mesoamerica to venerate the cross with the Nephites.

The Lehites' neighbors

You know what would really help us in our search for Book of Mormon lands? The names a few neighboring peoples. We all know that the America's have been populated by human beings for at least the past 15000 years, so why don't we have any mention of these first inhabitants in the records of the Jaredites, or the Lehites, or the Mulekites. We get all manner of "-ites" deriving from these three sets of settlers, but no manner of neighbor.

The LDS Church has currently decided to take the stance that the Book of Mormon peoples integrated extensively with the populations already in the Americas to the extent that virtually all Near Eastern DNA markers have disappeared somehow.

All it would have taken to clear up this whole mess would have been a mere name of a tribe or two, even a verifiable name or two of individuals of an origin other than Jaredite, Lehite, or Mulekite. Just one. Anything to match up with what scholars know about pre-Contact peoples.

It's just hard to take The Book of Mormon seriously when there are holes this big running throughout its supposed history of 2200 BCE - 400 CE.

Lehi's land of inheritance

I grew up in a time when the LDS Church was saying that the Nephites and Lamanites once lived throughout North and South America. North America was "the land northward," South America was "the land southward," and the isthmus of Panama was "the narrow neck of land" spoken of in The Book of Mormon. By the time I got to seminary discussions about Book of Mormon geography was a little more vague. We were shown an unbiased rendering of the geography described that looked like this:

So pretty much the Church was still teaching that The Book of Mormon characters were living just north and south of the isthmus of Panama. Latin Americans were Lamanites to us then.

Currently this North/Central America-South America configuration (a.k.a. the hemispheric models) have fallen out of favor and have been replaced by limited geography models. The most popular camp has set its sights on the pyramid-building peoples of Mesoamerica and are proposing maps such as this one:

Far less popular but still a notable second are the theories placing the main events of The Book of Mormon in the American heartland.

Not too far from those theories are the ones who look to the Great Lakes area where Joseph lived and where the gold plates were discovered.

One advantage to this last map is that it actually corresponds nicely with a number of towns Joseph Smith would have heard about or potentially seen on a map.

Hey, if the shoe fits...

The fact is we have no facts other than the claims Joseph made. Now, as time buries brother Joseph ever deeper and people seek facts through science rather than visions, our knowledge of where this whole "ancient history" might be sinks farther and farther into speculation.

It's all Greek to us

Joseph Smith had a very difficult time distinguishing Hebrew names from Greek and Latin ones. One of his biggest blunders shows up in Doctrine and Covenants 110, which reccounts the supposed visitations to Joseph and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland temple. In verse 12 Joseph says "Elias appeared, and committed the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, saying that in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed," which sounds totally cool and only slightly confusing (why's Elias officiating for the gospel of Abraham, and what the hell is Abraham's gospel anyway?). The problem occurs in the next verse when "Elijah the prophet, who was taken to heaven without tasting death, stood before us." The problem is that Elias is the Romanized Greek version of the Hebrew name Anglicized as Elijah. In other words Elias and Elijah are the same person, the former spelling of his name appears in the New Testament and the later form is found in the Old Testament.

LDS Church leaders have since decided that (1) there must have been some other prophet out there during Abraham's time named Elias (a Greek dude was hanging around with Abraham?) and that (2) Elias is probably a title for a forerunner prophet. I'm not making this shit up.

The more likely possibility seems to be that Joseph just didn't know the difference between Hebrew and Greek versions of the name in question.

Corroborating evidence to this latter theory is found in The Book of Mormon when Nephi uses the terms "Messiah," a Hebrew term, and "Christ," a Greek term - both literally meaning the anointed - in the same verse. Twice. Isn't that amazing? Nephi, a Hebrew is using messiah correctly (as a title) but using the Greek word Χριστός as Jesus' proper name. Nephi and Joseph need some serious help with their Greek.

Not that their Hebrew was any better. In 3 Nephi Jesus gives the Nephites chapter four of Malachi and the Nephites write down that "the Son of Righteousness" shall arise whereas Malachi wrote about "the Sun of righteousness." Now unless Jesus was speaking to the Nephites in English, it would have been very difficult for them to hear shamesh (Hebrew for sun) and then write down ben (Hebrew for son). What are the chances that Joseph's scribe screwed things up and the mistake going uncorrected all these years? What are the chances that Joseph thought he was being clever and screwed up?

The Book of Mormon also inserts the use of synagogues "after the manner of the Jews" in Nephite America even though synagogue worship did not exist at the time Lehi left Jerusalem. So where did the Jewish synagogue practice come from? Might Joseph have imposed New Testament era Jewish worship on people who would have been entirely ignorant of those practices?

"Just because we'll be living in the New World without any kind of telecommunicative technology doesn't mean we won't know exactly what our fellow Jews are up to in several hundred years."

Well how about Jews going to church? Laban and Zoram, two Jews living ca. 600 B.C.E., apparently were church goers, if that makes sense at all. It seems as though Joseph really liked Hellenizing his Hebrews.

Scriptural errors

"And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ." (Title page of The Book of Mormon)

This would be a great "Get out of jail free card" for the ancient writers of The Book of Mormon if the faults and mistakes in their writings were not the same faults and mistakes of the translators of the King James Bible.

The Book of Mormon repeats verbatim the mistranslated words, it often keeps the non-textual words and phrases added by KJT translators, it promotes  misunderstandings of the Bible popular in Joseph Smith's time, and it doesn't even align with the "inspired" corrections of the JST.

To suggest that the Lehite prophets possessed the KJT is absurd. To suggest that God filled Joseph's illuminated translating mind with the texts he was already familiar with instead of giving him the actual translation of the gold plates defeats the purpose of bringing out new and improved scripture.

We need to think about this a little bit. If a student turns in homework with the same mistakes as another student, what is the teacher to think? If Thomas Monson came out tomorrow with a new book of freshly translated ancient scripture from Australia and a large part of it quoted verbatim sections from the Doctrine & Covenants and, say, the Book of Enoch, how would we feel about that?

Losing the Lamanites

Back in the day Joseph Smith regularly spoke with Nephite angels and had no trouble at all locating their evil kin, the Lamanites. They were all over the place and they were commonly referred to as Indians. Joseph knew exactly where the Lamanites overtook the Nephites in a great final battle, he found the remains of a Lamanite warrior named Zelph (as revealed to him by God) once, and he even took direction (from God) to send missionaries to western Missouri to convert the Lamanites residing there.

We knew exactly who the Lamanites were and it wasn't uncommon growing up to hear someone say to a young man with a mission call to Central or South America "Oh wonderful! You'll get to teach those wonderful people about their own family history!"

Today the Church isn't nearly as certain about who's a Lamanite. In fact, the Church now openly admits that it cannot find any Lamanites at all. But don't worry! Lack of evidence is not evidence of non-existence! (The existing evidence, however, does discredit the notion of Nephites and Lamanites ever physically existing.) So believe on, dear brothers and sisters! Everything has been explained sufficiently for our needs, and, on the plus side, the Church's statement indicates that it has finally officially accepted human evolution as legitimate, truthful science!

Or you can read why Simon Southerton thinks we should doubt on.

The Testaments

 (This is Jeremy Hoop, not Ben Stiller.)

You know what shook my faith? The Testaments: Of One Fold and One Shepherd, that Church-made feature about Jesus' visit to the Nephites "somewhere in the Americas". Talk about hyper-sentimental dog shit. I cringed through the entire film wondering how in the world the LDS Church (a church considering itself to be led directly by Christ's own resurrected hand) dare produce such an embarrassment of a film.

The story is sappy as all hell. Helam sees the star of Bethlehem as a teen and sets his heart on one day seeing the Messiah. In the 33-year interlude, Helam has a family; his wife has died and his son, Jacob, has become a rebellious pain in the ass who totally forsakes "the traditions of his fathers" in favor of a secular life in the court of evil Kohor. Jacob eventually changes his mind after witnessing the murder of a prophet of God by Kohor's stooges. Helam's disappointment and pain over his son is only compounded when he loses his sight and can no longer hope to see Jesus in the flesh. Then Jesus shows up in the sky, lands on the temple steps, and sets everything right. The end.

The movie plays the pain-of-lost-family card as much as it can to drive home the sense of fear and despair that is so crucial to the film. To say the music is heavy-handed would be an understatement. The Testaments manages to pound all subtlety to smithereens and send it out of screen with a sneeze. I found the movie horribly distasteful and I didn't want to be associated with it.

To top off my discomfort, the makers of the film decided to place the film squarely into a Mayan context. Seeing a bunch of white and Polynesian Mormons running around Mayan temples with with Mayan headdresses felt disrespectful to the Mayan, kind of like putting on blackface. Besides, the connection of the Nephites/Lamanites/(and all manner of "-ites") doesn't work. They weren't speaking a Hebrew dialect, weren't writing in Reformed Egyptian, weren't talking about the Messiah and American Revolution-related concepts of freedom and civil duty, and were not divided into "-ites". But in the film they're running around like there are singles wards and playing with non-Book of Mormon animals, like monkeys. 

I suppose it didn't help much either that Tomas Kofod was a damned ugly white Jesus...

...but my faith remained in tact. The Testaments is just a film after all, my faith was in the Living Christ and his living church!