The Book of Mormon's 19th Century Context

and welcome to our history theology and philosophy lecture group um every week at tuesday we broadcast lectures on a wide variety of topics within that you know kind of broad set of categories we always begin with our mission which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and end suffering to promote peace and justice and to live life meaningfully together as we always mentioned that our our capacity to provide content is listener supported and we really appreciate uh the donations that you've made in the past and we appreciate any any further ones that you would like to give if you would like to contribute to support these uh and this content you can always go to our website centerplace.ca so we're beginning uh this week a three-week um series on the book of mormon and so next week uh we're going to go into uh the authorship of the book of mormon and so that'll be next week on tuesday october 13th and then the week after that we're going to look at more of the content of the book of mormon how it was understood at the time and then also what meaning we can draw from it today and so that will be on tuesday october 20th but our topic tonight is the book of mormon's 19th century context whenever we want to talk about a historic document like this we always want to look at the historical context in which it emerged all texts are written in particular time for a particular audience and what how the audience will have understood it informs how we can understand um its meaning and its intent so let's look a little bit at um this text the book of mormon so alongside uh the old and new testaments of the bible and also a book called the doctrine and covenants the book of mormon is part of the canon of scripture and the latter day saint movement it is largely um the book of mormon as opposed to the doctrine and covenants which varies by denomination denomination the book of mormon is is largely the same across the different latter-day saint tradition churches although there have been a few um minor wording changes and then also the uh the chapter and versification differ pretty substantially uh the book of mormon has also been the topic of a popular musical that has been on obviously broadway but also here in toronto uh the book of mormon musical and part of that uh kind of lampoon and sometimes mean lampoon um uh there's a song where the main uh elder uh sings he's called believe and one of the uh things that he believes is he's bearing his his testimony is i believe that ancient jews built boats and sailed to america and so which is played up as a kind of a crazy laugh line of a strange very strange seemingly in the 21st century uh thing for anybody to believe much less to have it be at the center of a sacred text or of a um a modern religion so i want to look a little bit at um you know the plot of the book of mormon for people who aren't familiar with it and so if you are and you're very familiar with it you'll hopefully this won't last too long but anyway it's uh just reviewing things that you already know um so although the text of the book of mormon actually narrates multiple uh biblical era migrations from the old world from the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere the shorthand uh in the book of mormon musical i believe that ancient jews built ships and came to america is essentially correct in its essentials so the primary story um in the book of mormon actually follows a family of ancient israelites who leave jerusalem prior to its destruction at the hands of the babylonians in 586 bc that family wanders into the desert builds a ship and ultimately uh sails to the americas uh the patriarch of that family is a uh character in the book named lehi lehi then has you know again the whole family his righteous son or most righteous son is named nephi and then nephi's descendants a car called the nephites and they become a great vast civilization in the new world they retain literacy build cities and they have a high civilization in general by contrast nephi's wicked older brother layman who becomes the father of another people the lamanites his descendants essentially ba abandon well the capacity to read and write and they ultimately are portrayed as the principal ancestors of indigenous americans the american indians the first nations peoples of the western hemisphere while the nephites throughout the text are more civilized the lamanites become far more numerous and so the bulk of the book of mormon texts actually narrates what seemingly incessant warfare between the two groups there's a brief interlude when christ visits the new world after his crucifixion and resurrection in the old world and at that moment there's essentially a great cataclysm and destruction but then a couple centuries of peace that are dispensed with in just a few verses and then after that the uh the wars break out again and uh the two sides fight until ultimately the nephites are exterminated um the book of mormon uh also includes a kind of an explicit negative uh racial bias and theme and so the nephites in the text are described as a white and delightsome people and meanwhile because of their unbelief the lord is said to have laid a curse on the lamanites causing quote a skin of blackness to come upon them and so this is the explanation within the text anyway for uh anyway racial differences between indigenous americans and and middle easterners or european americans okay so these ideas seem very extraordinary very alien today you know in the book of mormon musical as i mentioned the idea that indigenous americans are descendants of ancient jews is pretty much a laugh line and i would say frankly that the idea today seems incredible in the sense that it's not credible or even fantastic in the sense that it's it's fantasy so using drawing upon these original meanings of those two worlds in words incredible and fantastic um nevertheless even though it seems like a totally alien and off-the-wall idea today um at the time of its publication back in 1830 uh most european americans this would have been a very commonplace assumption this is not the thing that they would have found um surprising in any sense about the book of mormon the idea that the narrative uh is what it is indeed most european americans assumed at the time that the continent had previously been home to a high civilization that had been died out it becomes exterminated become extinct somehow and actually many um european americans speculated uh that the natives that the indigenous americans were actually um you know somehow related to they had a biblical worldview and were somehow related to peoples described in the bible and many indeed speculated uh that native americans were descended from for example the lost ten tribes of israel and so in a book uh by ethan smith uh he's not actually related to joseph smith but in any event he's from the same state vermont and um and in fact indeed he's a pastor in a church there that uh is in the same town that one of joseph smith's scribes is even from and not that that coincidence necessarily even matters because these views were so widespread he published just a few years earlier than the book of mormon a book called view of the hebrews or the tribes of israel in america which again is talking about such things as the destruction of jerusalem and and how for example uh refugees from uh ancient israel might have made their way to america and why he thinks anyway that uh native languages and customs have so much in common uh with judaism and things like that and so it's a it's a it was a commonplace idea it's not uh it doesn't actually have any basis in anything uh it's a parallelism arguments that ethan smith makes that are not that aren't that aren't valid in any way but nevertheless it was definitely a a very central assumption that european americans made in the early 1800s i want to read a um uh of some verses from a poem here called the prairies that's published just a couple years actually after the book of mormon is published uh by william cullen bryant so he writes uh as or the verdant waste i guide my steed so the prairies in the um in north america among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides the hollow beating of his footstep seems a sacrilegious sound i think of those upon whose rest he tramples are they here the dead of other days and did the dust of these fair solitudes once stir with life and burn with passion let the mighty mounds that overlook the river these great earthworks or that rise in the dim forest crowded with old oaks answer a race that long has passed away built them a disciplined and populous race heaped with long toil the earth uh yet uh while yet the greek was hewing uh the penta pentatellicus uh to form symmetry and rearing on its rock the glittering parthenon so in other words when the ancient greeks were making their various wonders these mounds were being built by this civilization here in north america the red man came the roaming hunter tribes warlike and fierce and the mound builders vanished from the earth all is gone all save the piles of earth that hold their bones the barriers which they builded from the soil to keep the foe at bay till or the walls the wild beleaguerers broke and one by one the strongholds of the plane were forced and heaped with corpses happily some solitary fugitive lurking in the march and i'm sorry the martian forest till the sense of desolation and the fear became bitterer than death yielded himself to die man's better nature triumphed then kind words welcomed and soothed him the rude conqueror seated the captive with their chiefs he chose a bride among their maidens and at length seemed to forget yet nare forgot to the wife of his first love and her sweet little ones butchered amid their shrieks with all his race so you can even see here this the same um central idea it's just a commonplace as um this poet is more or less writing what people understood what european americans understood to be the histories of north america this idea that there had been a fair civilized race and of which they are ultimately exterminated by the ancestors of uh the indigenous americans this is the idea so where did they get this idea so in the 1800s when european americans spilled out after the revolution after the united states uh becomes a uh free republic and has access to the entire midwest and and so on do you need to say something to me that's one thing that's that our friends know okay okay thank you so um as this early period then of settlement of displacement as european americans have spilled across the appalachians and start to settle the midwest the south of the old southwest uh one of the things when they get to the ohio river valley the mississippi river valley is they find these great abandoned and frankly very ancient earth works everywhere so you can see here just in this map of all of the different um vast mound sites that were very very apparent when uh the colonists first started to displace indians and live in these places so an example here is uh the great serpent mount in adams county ohio you can see also in addition to it the 19th century engraving that is made of it as people are identifying these vast earth works another example here miamisburg mount uh it's near fort ancient and near dayton ohio then down in georgia here at toa indian mound um there's mounds all over the place when i grew up in in minnesota there's a suburb called mound there's all kinds of places that are called mound and moundsville there used to be just mounds absolutely everywhere they're largely destroyed by european american farmers and settlers who came and moved in afterwards although a few of these examples survived so when i was a little kid and i lived in ohio with my family here there's me at age nine with my sisters and brother um my mom would take us to about a half an hour drive to one of the indian mounds that's preserved a place called fort ancient state historic site it's a very impressive site that's been nominated to become a unesco world heritage site and so this is kind of a 3d setup of how for ancient would have worked in terms of this vast earth works surrounding this kind of elevated space in this river valley above this river valley you can see here's an 1843 map of an engraving as someone has kind of surveyed the earth works and shown how it works and so this site that we would visit when i was a little kid was the largest prehistoric hilltop enclosure north of mexico there's three and a half miles or 1800 feet of walls in a hundred acre complex so it's built by uh hopewell first nations peoples between 100 bc and the 500s of 80 and although it's called for an ancient by the uh the english settlers who um the european american settlers who moved went there it's actually not a fort it's a ceremonial center the um the mounds are are not defensive walls despite what people imagined because of the way they're built very clearly their ditches are on the wrong side for them to work as a defensive wall so all right how did we get to that place so when european americans first started to settle the east coast when the british when the english started colonizing uh for example this is virginia this is the chesapeake bay a map of the chesapeake bay um what they what they observed initially was uh just native settlements were everywhere so if you kind of see this very dense map that's zoomed very much in on maryland and virginia and uh i guess this is just yeah a little part of maryland and virginia there's just all these little dots everywhere these are all indian um settlements and towns in other words the whole land was initially quite full when um north uh when the europeans got there um but what ended up happening uh was there were so many diseases that were very common in the old world in the eastern hemisphere that people in the western hemisphere had essentially no uh immunity to all for so everything from bubonic plague chickenpox cholera the common cold diphtheria influenza leprosy malaria measles scarlet fever smallpox typhoid typhus whooping cough yellow fever all of these things came across and had the effect of essentially having 15 black deaths all at once so it's a much more substantial series of pandemics for the natives of the western hemisphere than anything that we're experiencing now or indeed anybody that anybody has ever experienced so because the natives lacked immunity to all the old world diseases uh in part because they had fewer domestic animals and fewer animal born diseases they were just simply staggering catastrophic uh death tolls and so somewhere in the range of 85 to 100 percent of natives died in different areas so this is a population chart here of the native population in mexico which went from over let's say 25 million people at the beginning around 1 500 to by the end of that century under two and a half million people so 90 90 percent or more uh died um and of course the european conquerors and colonizers simply exacerbated the catastrophe so they weren't being helpful as they were displacing and also killing natives in in warfare so after then centuries of these kind of crises after centuries of decimation from disease losses of land for agriculture and hunting to colonists uh direct warfare where colonists and natives were fighting each other as killing natives first nations peoples then of eastern north america were in a kind of condition of permanent crisis by the year 1800 so ultimately existing as bands of displaced refugees in their own homeland so at that point by the time 1800 rolls around that map you know that i showed of jamestown of that kind of time period that's all been forgotten the idea that uh pocahontas is a princess and her dad is a king those analogies are lost to the um memory of the settlers who now think of indians as as chiefs and as as extremely impoverished and poor uh uh and they also then therefore believed that these impoverished survivors there's no way that they would have had the capacity to produce all of these vast numbers of earthworks so that's the kind of the reality that they were living in as they started to discover um just the amazing extent of what first nations civilization would have once been and they couldn't believe that as i say then the survivors had anything to do with those mounts and so as a result european americans imagined that there must have been some previous race that had built the mounds and that were afterwards exterminated by savages which is to say they had in their minds than the model of how the tartars the mongols had overrun asia had overrun muslim worlds and and russia for much of russia anyway and so in that same sense they had this idea well there had been the civilization that was like the roman empire that fell when uh barbarians took it over and this as a result of this this arose um two very common colonial narratives colonial myths so as native populations were devastated by disease and warfare english colonists kind of created these narratives one is the myth of the vanishing indian which is to say that native peoples more or less just disappeared on their own and that was certainly something that i was very much raised with so i as i mentioned grew up in uh in different places in the midwest but one of them being ohio and excuse me and to my as far as i knew there were no indians i mean the indians were something that was something in a movie or that people played cowboys and indians or something like that but as they had all vanished as far as um anyway i was led to believe or understand um and then another myth then is that the new world was essentially vacant and europeans had discovered effectively an empty colony i'm sorry an empty continent um and that was obviously a very um anyway it's a you can imagine why that's a more mentally satisfying than the real story which is europeans displaced and helped destroy a full continent of people so the european narrative then becomes europeans expanded uh around the world and filled essentially avoid a place is devoid of civilization and in some cases devoid of people um in actual fact you know when at the time of contact um there was maybe 60 million people in europe and between 40 and 100 million people in the americas depending on the estimate that people have and so it was certainly not a void but there was a an incredible handicap on the part of the people in the western hemisphere which is uh the lack of resistance to old world diseases okay so we know now that the mounds actually were built by ancestors of the first nations peoples so native americans were then their ancestors are the ones who built all of these great earth works and mounds and ceremonial centers and so therefore we need to recognize that despite the fact that in the 1800s european americans anglo-americans didn't believe that and they attempted then to impose their own ideas which are based on an alien biblical history and world view on the natives i think we now understand that as uh as imperialism and colonialism and ultimately as a kind of uh both cultural genocide and in a lot of cases actual physical genocide uh that we obviously want to uh disavow and to uh disclaim as not you know as something that is is a one of the horrible tragedies of history something that we certainly shouldn't look back upon and applaud or support in any way and or should rather do the opposite and condemn and so then we should also then deconstruct these kinds of narratives like the myth of the mound builders the myth of the vanishing indian that have played such a destructive role so but just but we also need to be aware of them right and so aware of the context and so as we are looking at texts that emerge out of this time like the book of mormon um i want to look at the rest of uh what people with european americans are thinking at that time so that we can understand the book of mormon in that context so one of the things that had happened at the beginning of the 19th century was a very vast rise in interest in antiquity in ancient times so after the french revolution as napoleon became an important general of the french republic and later emperor france in the meantime though he had invaded egypt and um because he went there and there was a kind of a semi-scientific um uh expedition where they're going through all of the kind of egyptian ancient egyptian ruins it set off what was nothing more or less than an antiquities craze and so it is beginning archaeology is pretty much little more than organized looting and grave robbing so you're going around to these places you're finding ancient sites you're plundering and robbing them taking artifacts back and they make their way you know into the louvre or into the british museum now or any other place that's uh that all of these kind of imperial museums have got all these artifacts too and so among of course the artifacts that the french looted in egypt was the famous rosetta stone the british successfully stole it from the french before it ever got to the france and so then that that made it that's in the british museum now if you want to um go and see it uh and so the rosetta stone then by having um the ancient egyptian hieroglyphs in a text first then the um also ancient but more classical era uh uh demotic text next and finally a um koine greek text and so in other words it's written from the time of the ptolemies from the time of ptolemy and cleopatra kind of thing that was uh what the uh the kind of key that'll enabled uh shampoo leon to decipher uh egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822. so people um because of these kinds of uh capacity that western europeans actually had to encounter um ancient places and specifically like one of the most ancient places and one of the most mysterious for western civilization ancient places egypt that got everybody kind of thinking about all things ancient at this time period so archaeology then and antiquities hunting became gentlemen's passions in europe british lords actually went so far as to build artificial ruins on their estates so many of them maybe were already blessed with you know old norman castles or any other number of things but if you didn't have a suitably run down kind of ancient castle you could build something that is like a ancient thing as a you know in order to also show that right american gentlemen then uh wanted antiquities of their own and so they were aware of all of these mounds these great earth works and they began excavating them and so then one of these most famous uh gentlemen archaeologists who went and did one of these excavations is thomas jefferson a philosopher and also uh the third president of the united states this is an example or a cross section then from the time period an american gentleman antiquarian directing his slaves to excavate a native mound and you can see kind of the cross section with bodies buried in grave goods and so on and so forth so i want to look at another one of these william henry harrison another also becomes another u.s president he's a u.s general who fought uh american indians first nations peoples in the american midwest and the year 1811 harrison defeated uh native chief tecumseh in the battle of tippecanoe and so that's why um uh william henry harrison had the nickname old tippecanoe so tippecanoe and tyler ii was a presidential slogan for the campaign he later became a u.s president for 31 days dying of pneumonia in 1841 however before that in 1838 he delivered quote a discourse on the aborigines of the valley of the ohio and in this harrison wrote that if a man visited the ohio river valley prior to white settlement quote his eye might have rested on some stupendous mound or lengthened line of ramparts which proved that the country had once been possessed by a numerous and laborious people but he would have seen also indubitable evidences that centuries had passed away since these remains had been occupied by those uh for whose use they had been reared how he would not fail to arrive at the conclusion that their departure must have been a matter of necessity for no people at any stage of civilization would have willingly abandoned such a country this is just amazing farmland um there's these massive mounds and ramparts but nevertheless there's giant oak trees on top of them now which in other words they've been there for a whole long time long enough for centuries-old trees to grow on top of them who built all the mounds harrison's harrison asserted that four answers quote we must search amidst the remains which are still before us we learned first from the extensive country covered by their remains that they were a numerous people so they're everywhere this was people who are covering the whole whole land secondly they were congregated in considerable cities thirdly that they were essentially an agricultural people you wouldn't be able to have enough people to do this kind of labor in order to produce fast cities and earth works because collected as they were in great numbers they could have depended they couldn't have been dependent on the chase but for a small portion of their subsistence so in other words unlike the uh their descendants the natives of the 19th century who had been dispossessed of all of their lands and were now largely back to a place of subsistence hunter and gathering this was a agricultural an organized agricultural state harrison asserted therefore that the race of the mountain builders quote were compelled to fly from a more numerous or more gallant people no doubt the contest was long and bloody and that the country so long their residence was not abandoned to their rivals until their numbers were too much reduced to continue the contest taking into consideration all the circumstances i've come to the conclusion that these people were sailed both from their northern and their southern frontier and made to recede from both directions and that their last effort of resistance was made on the banks of the ohio so again by having gone all around the midwest looked all around at all of these artifacts harrison's conclusion is like so many of the others who have been reading that there had been this ancient high civilization uh that were ultimately overcome by um savages hunter-gatherers who are the ancestors of of the natives that the uh people in the european americans were were used to meeting so there was a near universal then acceptance of what we now understand is a myth of the mound builders the mounds were extensively studied mapped and discussed in the 19th century i've just shown up just a few of these diagrams that were made so these are the new arc works and all with the conclusion that they must have been the remains of a now extinct non-indian race the mound builder myth likewise seemed to absolve the settlers of the responsibility for their own ongoing role in displacing and killing the american indians the first nations people and their cultures because people would have reasoned if the current native natives had actually previously exterminated a lost presumably white civilized race than the modern genocide that was happening was imagined to be justified or even divinely ordained so something like manifest destiny or the just results of what the pre what the natives had previously done to this imagined uh earlier people so there's one problem that remained so everybody you know agreed with the basic premise that a civilized superior race of mound builders had been exterminated by the ancestors of the red men unfortunately the problem is that unlike in egypt where we have uh what had previously been you know indecipherable hieroglyphics we had all of this writing from the egyptians but we had no idea uh what they had said uh until it was able to be deciphered uh in the same time period right by champollion and uh and all of his work the likewise the the um later found out for example that the civilizations of the babylonians the assyrians the sumerians in in uh in mesopotamia in iraq um their language had also wasn't you know ceased to be able to be read but at this time period uh the cuneiform you know was rediscovered and uh also deciphered so all of these great decipherments allowed uh contemporary europeans to start learning about um the antique ancient civilizations of the middle east but there but the ancient civilizations of the mound builders of north america uh were lost unless um uh unless somehow uh a text could be found and so as dewitt clinton um who is uh just famous governor of new york who was partially responsible or you know greatly responsible for the construction of the erie canal and therefore opening um of the midwest to commercial opportunities by connecting it to the east coast he pointed out in a in a discourse to the literary and philosophical society of new york in 1823 that unless you found in one of these mounds something engraved on stone or metal um that would that would have survived because otherwise if it was on a parchment or something like that that would all be lost and so nothing has survived uh and so but and so they hadn't found anything unfortunately to be able to to recover this lost history and so uh just because nothing um legitimately was found uh that didn't stop people from from finding stuff right so guess what we found so fortunately uh or unfortunately a number of white men who excavated mounds found precisely what they were looking for which is to say lost records of a mound builder race so for example in 1890 here james o scottford announced that he had dug into mounds in the state of michigan and discovered relics of a lost race including writing on an un uh of an in an unknown script on slate tablets and so this is a picture of one of the slate tablets and you can kind of see this kind of curious hieroglyph-like writings that are on there or pictogram even style of writings um scotford joined forces with promoter daniel e soper who had been a former michigan secretary of state who had to resign his office after allegations of embezzlement and the two then staged additional mound excavations in front of local witnesses who then helped discover hundreds of more relics and tablets over the next two decades and these became more and more you could kind of get a sense of what's going on in them so he might be able to see from this for example tablet um it sort of seems to be illustrating if you can kind of see the details here a particularly well-known story so there's an all-seeing eye kind of divinity there's a guy some animals there's a big rainstorm all these people drowning it looks like you can see what looks like a giant uh ark that's floating around in the water and then you can see the ark resting on uh land and animals are coming out two by two including all these you know happy people uh who have survived the flood and so um anyway you can kind of get a sense that uh where this is connecting into the flood story that would have been known contemporarily to uh european americans here's another example of one of the michigan artifacts it became clear from hundreds of michigan relics that the mound builders were monotheists who worshipped the god of abraham and perhaps were a lost tribe of israel and so you can kind of see in this particular set there's god with angels at the creation of first man and then the creation here of woman on the two of them with a tree and a snake and an apple and then getting kicked out of the area then we can see one and them wearing skirts and one boy is killing another boy cain and abel and then we can see another guy sacrificing his son or about to except an angel stops him and there's a ram so really it's really the genesis story that's being pictured here okay so there's one little problem with the michigan relics after all these hundreds of relics were dug out of the mountains upon examination it turns out that all of the slate tablets upon which the michigan relics were engraved are actually all industrially cut so in fact actually all the characters and images are drawn on scraps that are apparently have been salvaged from a school slate chalkboard factory so you can tell the difference between slate when it's been industrially produced you know in other words with scraps from a chalkboard factory as opposed to if you were to have a bunch of naturally occurring slate anyway nevertheless even though it's very clear that this is a hoax and a fraud the relics were studied at brigham young university until the 1970s and they were actually displayed in the lds church museum until 2000 2003 so anyway hope springs a turtle on that way um there's another example there's actually there's actually dozens of examples of um of different things that uh european americans found uh that were purporting to be the the lost text or lost histories of the mound builders and so an example another example here uh here's a manuscript by a guy named solomon spalding his story is called manuscript story and it's also known as the manuscript found so a manuscript found in the early 1800s a resident of koniak ohio penned a manuscript that began with the claim quote near the west bank of the cognate river there are the remains of an ancient fort so again the mounds right as i was walking and forming various conjectures respecting the character situation and numbers of those people who far exceeded the present race of indians in the work of art and ingenuity i happened to tread upon a flat stone this was a small distance from the fort and it lay on the top of a great mound of earth exactly horizontal the face of it had a singular appearance i discovered that a number of characters which appeared to me to be letters but so much a face by the ravages of time that i could not read the inscription with the assistance of a laver i raised the stone but you may easily conjecture my astonishment when i discovered that its ends inside rested on stones and that it was designed to cover an artificial cave i found on examining that its sides were lined with something there's a blank there built in a conical form uh with down and that it was about eight feet deep determined to investigate the design of this extraordinary work of antiquity i prepared myself with the next necessary requisites for that purpose and descended to the bottom of the cave within this cavity i found an earthen box with a cover which shut it perfectly tight when i had removed the cover i found that it contained 28 scrolls sorry 28 rolls of parchment uh and that when appeared that appeared to be manuscript written in an elegant hand with roman letters in the latin language they were written on a variety of subjects but the role which principally attracted my attention contained a history of the author's life and that part of america which extends from the great lakes to the waters of the mississippi so spalding's story then portrays the mound builders of as descendants of survivors of a roman ship who were split into two great kingdoms who were called the skiottas and the kent kentucks and you may be aware anyway that there's a river in southern ohio called the skiota river and then kentuck you know the kentucky and so it's the kind of the warfare between the ancient roman uh ohioans and ancient roman kentuckians um overall i'd say solomon spalding's poorly written romance novel went unpublished and it would have been forgotten had it not been misremembered by his neighbors and family as the source for the more famously told mounted builder tale the book of mormon and so actually throughout the uh 19th century as a result of affidavits from spaulding's family he had subsequently died but his family and neighbors remembered him writing this other story that is got similarities to the book of mormon but is in fact not related to the book of mormon nevertheless many people throughout the 19th century and some some cases a couple people into the present um uh assumed that it was actually a source or the source for the book of mormon okay so i mentioned before there's this ongoing idea in all of this are the ideas of race and there's also ideas of the bible and so this map here is actually a medieval world map although this is a later early modern printed version of it and you can see that this is a it's called a to map that's showing the old world as the romans would have understand it with east oriented to the top and divided into three bits uh which are the three old world continents asia europe and africa and you can see i put it on here because it also lists under the word asia it says sem under the word europa it says jaffeth and under the word africa it says champ right and so europeans all the way back combined their ideas of race that were evolving at this point in the age of discovery this is before darwin but it's um after they've developed racial slavery for example um they imagined they the europeans imagined that they were descended from uh moses sorry noah's son japheth and then as you see here that asians were descended from his son shem and hence we have the word semitic and so the idea the reason we use that now we say people are anti-semites are anti-semitic it's a shorthand for saying anti-jewish but the idea is that jews are not are just one of the descendants of this this second son or the son's shem and that's that's the word semitic and that africans were descended of uh uh the the the least liked son ham and are thus you uh described with the you can still sometimes hear it uh the um adjective hemetic and so i think it's the nylon asiatic um language group used to be called uh uh hemetosemitic i think as a language group but anyway they don't we don't use that word anymore but this was the this is generally speaking how um how uh people who had a literalistic biblical worldview who therefore assumed that all the peoples of the earth were descended after the flood from noah and his three sons japheth shem and ham assumed therefore that europeans african and asians are coming from those ancestors but they had to question okay well what of native americans where did native americans come from uh how would they have gotten to the new world if it hadn't if uh everybody had died who wasn't on noah's ark right and so um as i've said here anglo-americans generally presumed that there must have been a story similar to noah in the ark to explain for example how animals got to the americas how how people got to the americas and we've even seen how some of the uh some of the michigan arctic attacks for example um are assuming a kind of a loss 10 tribes style of an ancient israelites connection for indians and that was also true in that text view of the hebrews so the book of mormon when it was published is not saying something that is unusual or something that would have been totally unfamiliar or was blowing everybody's minds in in 1830 or is the butt of jokes like in isn't the musical in the 21st century rather this is simply confirming all of the answers that european americans already knew and so um we're going to look at it and explain try to see what it's also trying to do as a text but one of the things we can say is that there's since we don't have um a direct admission of motives about why the text might have been written by an author um we can at least look at the text and see the purposes that it's uh claiming within itself and so this is a lot of times the way we look at uh texts for example when we don't know much about the authorship we will know about about the authorship in the next lecture um but anyway in looking at the text and reading it um i would say that the text conveys at least four purposes the first is to fit america into that biblical worldview so how um how do all of noah's after the flood how do all the animals and and humans uh fill up the uh western hemisphere and and how do they fit into the biblical narrative um the second purpose of the book is to end protestant sectarianism and we'll look at that context uh in the next lecture as well and so essentially just the shorthand of this is that the majority of colonists in the united states were protestants and there was now in the beginning of the young american republic a just explosion of sectarianism and so this is when people started to become methodists and baptists in vast numbers as the different churches are forming in a period that's called the second great awakening and this was very troubling to people at the time which sect that you should be in or shouldn't we not have sex shouldn't we all believe the same things as one christian church but nobody could agree on what that would be three to instruct the young united states and so this is actually coming at a very particular time in american history sometimes we've been speculating that we're right now at a at a period of the decline and maybe fall of the american empire this is at the time period of um the very beginning of the young american republic uh and the book of mormon has a lot to say about that and especially about the anxieties and fears of americans in this uncertain time and then finally it's clear that part of the goal of the book of mormon is to help native americans recover as far as um the author here is concerned their lost history as it was understood by the european settlers it's not their real lost history but anyway what that was understood by contemporary european americans like settlers um to be their history and to embrace christianity which is of course the all-important um uh goal of the society and so we are going to look at that in a lot of detail beginning next week when we tackle the authorship of the book of mormon and so that'll be the lecture next week and then also then we will look at the what the book is actually saying what the author was trying to convey at the time and we'll also look now uh to our own time period and see what the text what meaning the text might have for us today um as for example in community of christ and in other latter-day saint tradition churches the text continues to be part of the canon of scripture but it's also potentially important i think for people who are fully secular to get a sense of this particular time period also in american history and culture and so um what i want to do is we've got another 10 minutes or so that that we can open this up to any comments or questions and so i'll ask um leandro if uh people have um asked any questions and there's a couple already here it says so ron wagner writes i remember a line in the book jackson land that a missionary uh embed with cherokee believed that the native americans were descended of a jewish people so yeah so that would have been you know that would again been very common so it is simply the the thing that i i guess i want to make is very clear here it seems such like a such a crazy thing in the book of mormon musical when when the mormon elder declares that he believes that and is like where is this crazy thing coming out of left field um but this would have just been absolutely commonplace and so um you know like you say in jackson land um there would have to the idea that a regular baptist ministry or missionary or whoever it would have been um who's hanging out with the cherokees believed uh that the cherokees uh are the descendants of the jewish people there were whole books many books on the topic the view of the hebrews is only one of many of those books that made that claim likewise i only just covered a couple of these the spalding theory the i'm sorry the spaulding manuscript the um the book of mormon of course the michigan artifacts there's actually a dozen more um different uh attempts by that settlers made in order to produce uh these kinds of artifacts you know which are not the actual artifacts in other words to to recover the story that they all believed was the case but nobody had nobody had a rosetta stone nobody had this lost writing and so um the goal was to to actually recover it and show that it was the case people were longing for that proof okay charles boyd does the idea of continental drift possibly account for the collection of uh disparate animals and peoples in the same area well so continental drift is what we how we understand you know how the continents have been you know moving around and doing all this stuff now and absolutely um uh when uh you know so as you know like south america used to be wedged together with africa and so when they pulled apart there were animals at the time on in what had been a shared continent and then there's a rift and the animals are separated and so they therefore animals are uh you know some of the whatever animals were on either side or split apart as a result of that and so yes the so to your point chuck what we can say is there there was not a universal flood that's not a literal story so even though that's in the bible and it's understood to be um it's a it's what we call a myth and so that didn't actually happen um and so therefore all the animals never got killed in any way and so so animals didn't just um make their way to you know the the they were already here like you said prior to the continents splitting apart um and and different animals cross-pollinated since then but in generally uh you know there was some spreading across the land bridge and such and so on but generally that's why the animals here were different um by the because they've been apart so long from old world animals and that's why for example things like horses weren't here until the spanish brought them so elizabeth writes ben ehrenreich in desert notebooks says that the near extermination of the people of the americas might have been a cause of the little ice age with 95 percent of the people disappearing in the 16th century large-scale agriculture all but ceased and no burning of wood and grasslands to clear them for planting once cultivated land recovered swiftly growing back as forest and savannah by one estimate this vegetation sequestered five to ten trillion uh metric tons of carbon lowering i'm just i'm just trying to get the sense of this lowering uh the co2 content of the atmosphere and dropping the temperature by two percent from about 1570 europe suffered from a series of deadly winters cool summers and failed harvest famines and feudal structure began to fall apart so um so yeah so obviously there's an interaction um with climate and actually the the fact is although we're doing stuff uh globally that it's on a kind of crazy unprecedented scale like for example just depleting the oceans of all the fish and everything else that's been done in let's say their last century nevertheless um for for a while humans have been having fairly significant effects on the environment we we definitely see and so and they are also then in turn infected by the environment and so in the time periods like you're saying here with the the little ice age and then maybe this is quite interesting maybe the this uh major death of people in the western hemisphere had a climate effect that also then affected europe so that's very interesting elizabeth justice manning when these metal plates began appearing does anybody know uh of the reaction of the new york governor so as far as confirming his belief so i don't believe no so he wouldn't have believed any of these um uh any of these particular plates coming forward and so certainly the by that he would have been dead by the time the michigan artifacts were coming forward um there is uh there is uh one um there is one of these that was very successful i'm trying to think it's called the um it's called like the wallam olum or something like that but it's purports to be a history of the delaware and it's written by a very clever settler who knew delaware and actually wrote the whole thing out and then he translated into delaware and then he translated it back so that it would sound like delaware or have all these signs that it had come from delaware and so that one you know was uh believed largely to be real and um including by people like dewitt clinton who we could tell the difference between the michigan artifact those those kind of things and also you wouldn't believe the book of mormon so those he would not he would have rejected um those claims um by less sophisticated writers um but the one he might have believed the one about this the lenape this wall of olam uh book which uh uh is only detected as a fraud in the in the late um 20th century uh so that's i don't believe that there is any record though of of his belief uh justice okay so leon donald berg writes how much do historians know of the reading done by joseph smith jr or conversations about the mounds that he might have had with contemporaries about such subjects or how common was it in the early 1800s that farming families in upper new york state would have had knowledge about early civilizations so so everybody's aware of these mounds so they're all over the place it's not you don't have to go to the new york philological society to um to be aware um you would have encountered indians back then obviously not making mounds but anyway the mounds are there so he doesn't have to have read uh view of the hebrews uh he could have read view of the hebrews we don't know people have speculated about it endlessly there's um as i mentioned one of his scribes oliver cowdery is actually from this little tiny town in vermont where ethan smith who wrote view of the hebrews was actually the pastor of the church that oliver cowdery might have gone to so there's complete it's completely possible that the the text itself um would have been available to joseph smith it also isn't necessary because it's so generally understood to be the case so everybody just understands that to be the history whether you um whether you've read the book or not um how common was that primary families would have had knowledge about early civilization so these are just this is just what i would say is that they wouldn't have known much about um anything more than kind of the folk understanding of it but you don't have to know too much to just have the sense that there was an ancient the the myth of the mound builders and its essentials you don't need there's no details to know about it it's a just a kind of a very common myth like the vanishing indian when i was a kid and was taught that i hadn't um i hadn't been i hadn't read that that's just how it was portrayed everywhere and so that's how i got it uh elizabeth block writes um thomas selected lewis and clark to find uh 10 lost tribes of israel as well as dinosaurs etc yeah so he was definitely everybody was very hopeful to find wooly mammoths right so um they were very hopeful when they got out west that there would you know that we'd be able to find you know um living mastodons and things like that and sure um same thing like uh discovering dinosaurs so um that was a um a hope that's kept alive all the way up to like movies from the from the 1930 or whatever king kong right there's a there's an island somewhere where there's still dinosaurs and a giant monkeys and apes running around and things like that so the hope is always that way or that maybe um people have said maybe this the earth is hollow and the under all of the dinosaurs and other things will be found in the center of the earth so those kind of things were continuing on um and it was the world was much less um you know in 1830 uh it hadn't been fully charted in the way that we now can uh go on google earth and i can i was doing today you know looking at by at satellite images of kyrgyzstan and central asia because you can you know drill down anywhere and see uh see that everywhere uh the world was way less known and more mysterious um still 200 years ago um so elizabeth says horses were in the americas before the spanish brought them but disappeared hunted out climate we don't know for sure but a bit uh but a lot of the big mammals seem to have been hunted out so yeah so i'm yeah so when i say that there the horses were gone there was there were no horses when at the time of the colombian exchange so at the time of european uh contact with um natives in the west the horses were all that they had been here that were all extinct so but it wasn't because they weren't extinct because of the flood or something like that it's that that they had been um horses here at the time that the continents are separated and then uh or or at least the horses had been here you know anyway at some point there and then like you say either through hunting or um other kinds of problems that they would have had environmentally horses and things like that had been um killed like mammoths or killed everywhere or or died out uh leandro do we see any commonalities between the um context of the book of mormon and the book of deuteronomy well so the book of deuteronomy is an interesting thing and so we'll talk about um we'll talk about the book of deuteronomy a little bit maybe next time when we're talking about uh textual criticism um and so the book of deuteronomy is one of the five books of of moses the five books of the torah and specifically it's one that is written by its own own author it hasn't it isn't related to the other texts but it is has some kind of relationship to um the deuteronomic histories that follow um in terms of in terms of context the the the common thing that we would um potentially have here is that the um that one of the explanations for um the writing of the book of mormon the presentation of the book of mormon by joseph smith given that it's a 19th century text is that for example dan vogel has characterized that as a as a pious fraud so in other words it's a book that isn't what it claims to be but nevertheless has maybe piously motivated um as i was kind of talking about some of the uh the motives like bringing the natives to a recovery of their imagined history and also to christianity likewise the book of deuteronomy seems to have been a pious fraud it's certainly not written by moses and may have well been found by the scribes that actually composed it um at the at the time period of the reign of josiah there's a talking about finding a book of the law um in the book of in the book of kings um and the and so in that sense um there could be a similarity there in terms of a book that isn't what it reports to be um and and nevertheless this is considered scripture with that has uh let's say pious motives uh of the people who are presenting it um barbara vickery clavie says could you explain the idea of the lost tribes of israel yes so um so we talked about uh a little bit about the destruction of jerusalem uh by the babylonians and so that was the end of what we call um first temple period uh of judaism so that's when um all of the early biblical period uh you know kind of ends and then the the nobles uh of judea the nobles of jerusalem including the last kings the royal family of david are brought to you know babylon as where they're in exile and so they are there in what's called the babylonian captivity until they're allowed to go back and rebuild jerusalem uh under the persian empire and then jerusalem and its province become a uh a province of the persian emperors and so prior to that's that's kind of the history and that leads down to um uh when jerusalem and judea is a roman province and the temple uh the second temple is destroyed by the romans anyway prior to though the destruction of jerusalem by the babylonians in the generations preceding that the northern kingdom the more important kingdom of israel the ten tribes the two tribes are the southern tribes of of judah and benjamin the northern tribes are uh the ten tribes uh sundering centering around especially the tribe of ephraim and manasseh are um the stronger kingdom that kingdom was destroyed though by the assyrians and so in the same way that the nobles of judea and benjamin are taken off to um are taken off to babylon the other 10 tribes nobles are all taking off to nineveh the capital of syria and so therefore they're lost but people hear that they're lost and like oh well we got where'd they go we got to find them well we know where they went they went to nineveh and then they assimilated and they became um the regular people the descendants that are of those people today are up there right now which is to say northern iraqis uh and so or syrians you know that kind of area of the northern fertile crescent uh and so nevertheless though um there became kind of this legend that there's these lost 10 tribes that are away somewhere and that's filling the imagination of people uh who are wondering for example again how all the peoples of the world came from different places so lots of different people claim to be one of the lost tribes of israel or to be um descendants of of lost ancient jews um and a lot of people have speculated that about others as well all right do you think we have any more questions or is that it all right well lots of great questions and so we'll be looking forward to next week which is um here we go authorship of the book of mormon like i say and then we're gonna do a little bit of a deep dive into the meaning of the text so those are the next two weeks thanks for joining us and we will talk to you next week

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 12,669

Keywords: religious sudies, history, lecture, community of christ, john hamer, theology, lds, mormon, mormonism, joseph smith, latter day saint movement, latter day saint, book of mormon, history of mormonism, exmormon, lds history, history of new york state

Id: AZTdwMJKc3M

Length: 68min 35sec (4115 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020