Shulem wrote: ↑Tue Jul 26, 2022 12:04 am
For Dan Vogel,
A INTERESTING ACCOUNT OF SEVERAL REMARKABLE VISIONS, AND OF THE LATE DISCOVERY OF ANCIENT AMERICAN RECORDS. BY O. PRATT, MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL.
This pamphlet published by Orson Pratt in 1840 while serving a mission in Great Britain serves as a classic example of how Latter-day Saints interpreted Book of Mormon geography late in Smith’s ministry. The descriptions given by Pratt (not necessarily Smith) are gross mutations of time & measurement as explained in Book of Mormon narratives. Pratt’s ideas mutate and morph narratives and stories into a scene of utter chaos that cannot be substantiated by the text with the least degree of accuracy. Pratt’s geographical descriptions completely defy and distort the text of the book that provides vital information in understanding three key elements and how they define the scenes:
Orson Pratt and wildly zealous Latter-day Saints turned the Book of Mormon into a
CARTOON whereby
time,
space, and
measurement are not grounded in reality and contradict the information contained as precisely given in the text. It’s like smoking crack cocaine (wow man) and visualizing Book of Mormon stories in cartoon format. It turns the book on its head in such a silly way that it has zero credibility. The hemispheric model was not original to the Book of Mormon but was a later construct used to promote faith and visualize something that could never be narrowed down and proven scientifically. What’s more, it completely contradicts definitions given in the book.
In comparison, the Delmarva peninsula works perfectly with matters of time, space, and measure -- expressed in the text in defining the geography as the civilization lived in a limited fluid zone. The Delmarva model is what Smith used to build his story. The area and topography of this model is what Smith originally used.
I can prove it and my threads do just that. Pratt’s ridiculous accounting of Book of Mormon geography is cartoonish and totally spaced out compared to the measured and accurate accounting that is carefully plotted within the covers of the Book of Mormon. There is simply no comparison whatsoever! Pratt was a dope not to have seen that.
Shulem,
I’m sorry but I don’t have time to read long threads at the moment. In my video series on the Book of Mormon, I plan to do at least one on Book of Mormon geography. I’m truly baffled that you would buy into the apologists’ arguments for a limited geography; it is the hemispheric geography that makes the Book of Mormon a fairytale. It had nothing to do with Orson Pratt; he was just reflecting what Joseph Smith taught. If hemispheric geography is so obviously wrong, why did the early Mormon believe it? Most Mormons still believe it, despite the hearlanders. The search for a limited geography began after M. T. Lamb criticized hemispheric geography in 1887, which Pratt had incorporated in the footnotes of his 1879 edition of the Book of Mormon.
As you mention, Pratt in 1840 said:
“[Lehi’s party] were first led to the eastern borders of the Red Sea; then they journeyed for sometime along the borders thereof, nearly in a southeast direct; after which, they altered their course nearly eastward, until they came to the great waters, where, by the commandments of God, they built a vessel, in which they were safely brought across the great Pacific Ocean, and landed upon the western coast of South America.” -- Orson Pratt, A Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions and of the Late Discovery of Ancient American Records (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hughes, 1840), 16.
Later, Pratt will specifically identify Chile as the place of Lehi’s landing.
There is an uncanonized revelation of Joseph Smith’s known as “Lehi’s Travels,” which existed in the early days of the church, probably 1830. The earliest copy is in the handwriting of Frederick G. Williams.
“The course that Lehi traveled from the city of Jerusalem to the place where he and his family took ship, they traveled nearly a south south East direction untill they came to the nineteenth degree of North Lattitude, then nearly east to the sea of Arabia then sailed in a south east direction and landed on the continent of South America in Chili thirty degrees south Lattitude.” – LDS Church History Library.
This item exists on a sheet of paper with other Book of Mormon items. He probably got his copy from Oliver Cowdery when he preached in the Kirtland area in November and December 1830. As one witness reported in Ohio’s Observer and Telegraph on 18 November 1830, Cowdery gave a public address in which he related Joseph Smith’s discovery of the plates and gave an outline of the Book of Mormon’s contents, including the information that Lehi’s party “landed on the coast of Chili 600 years before the coming of Christ, and from them descended all the Indians of America.”
There are a lot more sources pertaining to Lehi’s travels and other items relevant to what early Mormons believed about geography that I will discuss in my video. I’m not sure how you fit Zelph into your geography.
Hemispheric geography comes from the Mound Builder Myth. Joseph Smith’s contemporaries saw the ruins and mounds as one long chain, beginning in Peru, extending through Central America and Mexico, and ending in the Great Lakes Region, where the builders were destroyed in a great battle and buried in the mounds.
Your neck at the top of the Delmarva Peninsula is only 10 miles wide at most, which seems too small for a day and a half’s journey. What would Joseph Smith call a day and a half’s journey? Certainly more than 10 miles. From Palmyra to Harmony was about three days, and that’s about 150 miles or so. Panama is about 60 miles across. Some early descriptions mention that the sea on both sides can be seen from the mountains. The Book of Mormon describes both a “small neck of land” and a “narrow pass.” This seems to fit Panama. The line in Alma 22:32 is said to run from the east to the west sea. Several geographers have noted that the passage doesn’t say “east sea” as a way of shortening the distance across the neck. Yet the context implies that it touches water on both sides and that the land southward would be entirely surrounded by water if it weren’t for the neck. This also fits Panama since on the east there is a bay instead of the Atlantic Ocean.
Anyway, I think you get where I’m going. My job isn’t to make Book of Mormon sound reasonable, as it the book doesn’t have a lot of impossible things in it. My job is to contextualize the Book of Mormon in its 19th-century Mound Builder setting and show how Joseph Smith and early Mormons read the book.