Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Book of Mormon online update

If you aren't familiar with it yet, there's an excellent website that features all known editions of the Book of Mormon, here:


I've referred to this site for many years. It is undergoing updates and it seems to work better than ever.

It includes a helpful index of people and places. For example, here is the entry for Cumorah:


One thing I really like about this site is the effort to present multiple working hypotheses about geography. At the Cumorah page, for example, you can see various interpretations including settings in Sri Lanka, Mesoamerica, New York, Heartland, etc.

(click to enlarge)

Users of this site need to be aware that Book of Mormon Central (BMC) funded some of the development. BMC aggressively teaches M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory) as the only acceptable geography setting. In its Spanish version, BMC promotes specific M2C geography to its audience, directly contradicting what it tells its English donors about neutrality.

While this site is far more useful and informative than BMC because it makes efforts to follow the Church's position of neutrality about Book of Mormon geography, it unfortunately includes the so-called "Internal" map developed by M2C promoters that is based on their M2C beliefs. This subliminal grooming leads unsuspecting viewers toward the Mesoamerican model. 

(click to enlarge)

An odd omission from the site: there is no discussion of Church history regarding the origins or translation of the Book of Mormon. Maybe that's a future development, but I hope they include references to the original documents in the Joseph Smith Papers instead of the theories of scholars such as the so-called "Internal map." 

There are other odd omissions that, presumably, are merely oversights that will be corrected during development. 

For example, for the Hill Shim, the map omits locations for the New York and Heartland scenarios.

(click to enlarge)

This omission could lead unsuspecting users to conclude that Heartland models do not account for the Hill Shim. 

Hopefully such omissions will be corrected in updates.








 

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