Seth

Trying my best to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

If Joseph Smith forged the Book of Mormon, the title page is the one place he should have kept simple. He did the opposite.

He drew attention to the one thing that should have stayed buried.

In his 1841 history, he explained that the title page was not something he composed. It was a literal translation, taken from the very last leaf of the plates, on the left-hand side.

That is a strange thing to admit. In 1829, everyone knew a title page goes at the front. It names the author, the title, the purpose, before you read a word. Joseph moved his to the front for publication because that is what readers expected. But he went out of his way to record that it did not start there. If you were inventing an ancient record, that is exactly the kind of detail a forger keeps to himself.

Here is how scholars think about it.

When you cannot inspect the physical object, you do not authenticate a document by handling it. You authenticate it by reading it. You ask whether the text carries the internal marks of the time and place it claims to come from. Historians call this internal evidence. A document is more likely genuine when it does things people in the forger's world did not know how to fake.

So apply that test to the title page.

First, what ancient records actually looked like. The Western title page descends from Gutenberg, six hundred years ago. Paper pages, a cover, names up front. But for more than a thousand years before that, the ancient Near East organized records very differently. Mesopotamian and surrounding cultures built libraries of tens of thousands of texts, engraved, named, cataloged, and stored for centuries. Their identifying information was placed at the end of a text, in what scholars call a colophon. A finishing statement. The reader confirmed who wrote it, where it came from, and why, after finishing the record, not before starting it.

Little of the detailed scholarship on ancient Near Eastern colophons was available in Joseph Smith’s environment in 1829.

Second, the scribal signature. Ancient colophons identified the scribe with a set formula scholars transcribe as "by the hand of [name]." The Book of Mormon title page uses it twice. "Written by the hand of Mormon." "Sealed by the hand of Moroni." One signature for the man who compiled and abridged the record, one for the son who finished and hid it.

Third, the father-son pairing. Ancient scribes worked in father-son pairs. The father taught the son to write and to archive, and the son named his father in the colophon. They often linked themselves to prestigious ancestors to establish authority. The title page introduces Mormon as the architect and Moroni as the son who completed the work. Elsewhere in the text both men trace their line back to founding figures. Moroni: "I am the son of Mormon." Mormon: "I am Mormon, and a pure descendant of Lehi." The lineage move is straight out of the ancient archives.

Fourth, source and purpose. Colophons named the larger archive a text was drawn from and explained why it was made. The title page says the record was written "upon plates taken from the plates of Nephi." That is technical archival language. It identifies the source collection and the chain of custody. It then states the book is an abridgment, names the principal writers, gives the purpose, and warns that it may contain the errors of men. Line by line, that is classic colophon behavior.

Then the placement detail. Joseph said he found it on the left-hand side of the final leaf. That detail raises the possibility that each leaf was formatted in double columns, like a known ancient bronze plate. He had no reason to include it and no framework to invent it.

And the medium. Critics mocked the "Gold Bible" for decades. But ancient cultures did engrave treaties, laws, and royal records on metal precisely because metal endures when paper, papyrus, and clay do not. Archaeology has since recovered metal plates from the ancient Near East, bound and engraved, reserved for texts meant to last. What once sounded absurd now looks ordinary.

Here is what this leaves you with.

You may not believe the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be. That is a reasonable position. But the title page does the work of an ancient colophon, assembled the way ancient archives were and unknown in the time and place where he lived. The placement is wrong for 1829 and right for antiquity. The signatures, the lineage, the source language, the medium, all converge.

Take any one detail and it proves little. Take them together and a pattern emerges, pointing away from a farm boy in New York and toward something far older.

The easiest forgery would have been a normal title page at the front. Instead we got an ancient colophon hiding in plain sight.

The evidence deserves a fair hearing. But for millions of readers in nearly every country on earth, the Book of Mormon is not a debate they are trying to win. It is the thing that brought them to Christ and opened a deeper life with God.

Source: Authentic: The Book of Mormon, Evidence of a Miracle by Lundwall and Lundwall, chapter 6

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@tscottme What you are teaching is not what Jesus taught. The Jesus I believe in taught these truths.

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@ashtongramp @JasminRappleye I have read what Joseph Smith said. If it was definitively and prophetically identifying the exact location of The Book of Mormon, then the Church would adopt it, right?

The Church said it does not endorse any specific location. Logic and research fit better in Mesoamerica, imo

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@tscottme Do Muslims claim to be disciples of Jesus?

If we're going on the biblical definition in Acts 11:26, then disciples of Jesus are called Christians.

I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ, therefore I am a Christian.

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@Lew541207 @JasminRappleye Every theory has holes, but Mesoamerica fits better than the others in my opinion

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@IowaResideav @JasminRappleye No, he never said the great battle was in NY. He only called that hill Cumorah after other saints had started calling it that.

It would make more sense that Moroni wandered for years and never returned to the place of the battle when he buried the plates

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@foulweathermen @CerebralCereal0 @JasminRappleye The final battle with Mormon and Moroni is at a place they called Cumorah. Mormon dies, Moroni takes the abridged record with him and wanders alone for many years. Finally, he buries the record in upstate NY.

Then in the 1840s, some saints start calling the hill in NY "Cumorah"

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@foulweathermen @JasminRappleye What we call the "Hill Cumorah" in NY is not necessarily what Mormon called "Cumorah" as the location of the final battle of the Nephites. The hill in NY was not called Cumorah until the saints were in Nauvoo.

I believe the final battle of Cumorah was a hill in modern Mexico

[Jasmin Rappleye @JasminRappleye]

This is my very brief crash course on why I think the Book of Mormon most likely took place in Mesoamerica.

This is not doctrine. This is just my opinion. But here it is.

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@ashtongramp @JasminRappleye Yes, let's use logic.
-"America" refers to more than just the USA (i.e. Central America)
-the term "Country" has many meanings, not just the physical borders of a sovereign state (i.e. "He sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country")
https://t.co/3SjeIvaErA

[Department of State @StateDept]

SECRETARY RUBIO: "I have always believed the best foreign assistance programs are the ones that end. They end because the country that you're helping no longer needs it."

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@HappyTeach98249 @tvheidihatch @NormieUtah Can someone change their mind?

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@52movies @tvheidihatch @BurgessOwens Can someone change their mind? Looks to me like he slowly has had a change of heart

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@Jdjdjdnhdhxbeh @tvheidihatch @joyinbecomingp1 You don't know him at all

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

It's happening.

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@Lew541207 @JasminRappleye I'll agree that it can't be dismissed. But I still consider it highly unlikely

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@Lew541207 @JasminRappleye Moroni never called it Cumorah that we know of. The final battle of the Nephites could have been thousands of miles away. It's not likely that Moroni would return to that place to bury the plates, considering the Lamanites were hunting anyone who would not deny the Christ

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@Lew541207 @JasminRappleye There is no evidence that what we call the Hill Cumorah in NY is the same hill where Mormon led the Nephites to the final battle.

[Seth @CoxWebDev]

@ashtongramp @JasminRappleye None of those statements contradict the idea that The Book of Mormon took place in Central America. Central America is still part of the continent.