Billy Sheer continues to land devastating blows to the paper. When Bruce Dale brought up the presence of a calendar as a commonality between the Book of Mormon and The Maya, he readily pointed out the Dales' ongoing issues with confusing broad shared subjects with no details shared as actual misses being my misconstrued as strong hits.
The null hypothesis of the Book of Mormon is that it is a made-up account of a group of proto-Christian Jews who immigrated from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 B.C. These people brought their Jewish/Christian heritage with them, built a great civilization (as evidenced by the then well-known Moundbuilders who had once inhabited North America), and after 1,000 years they fell from grace and devolved into the “savages” that were discovered 1,000 years after that. Anything that is consistent with how Joseph Smith could have reasonably conceived of an epic story of a group of people who went from being pilgrims from Jerusalem to civilized Moundbuilders to savages over the course of thousands of years is completely consistent with this theory.
The Jewish calendar is based lunar months, solar years, and pays particular attention paid to the seasons (that is why Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox), and most importantly, seven-day weeks. This calendar eventually evolved into the Gregorian calendar which Joseph Smith used and is still used today.
Everything regarding dates and calendars in the Book of Mormon is consistent with this. They had seven-day weeks and kept the sabbath holy (e.g. Jarom 1:5, Mosiah 18:25, Alma 32:11). They had lunar months (Omni 1:21). Solar years were carefully counted, sometimes in unlikely ways (e.g. 3 Nephi 5:7). According to this counting, one can easily verify that Lehi left Jerusalem in 600 B.C., right before the fall of Jerusalem, that Jesus was then born on cue in 1 BC, and then died, was resurrected, and visited them 33 years later, right on cue. This all seems like it was written by somebody creating historical fiction that needed to calibrate with some events that were predefined and presumed to be historic. The counting is done exactly as somebody using a Gregorian calendar would do it.
In contrast, here are some quotes from Cole: “The Calendar Round of 52 years was present among all Mesomaericans, including the Maya, and is presumably of very great age. It consists of two permutating cycles. One is of 260 days, representing the intermeshing of a sequence of the numbers 1 through 13 with 20 named days…the 260-day count was fundamental…Meshing with the 260-day count is a “vague year” or Ha’b of 365 days…from this it follows that a particular day in the 260-day count, such as 1 K’an, also had a position in the Ha’b, for instance 2 Pop. A day designated as 1 Ka’n 2 Pop could not return until 52 Ha’b (18,980 days) had passed. This is the Calendar Round, and it is the only annual time count possessed by the highland peoples of Mexico….”
But for keeping track of history, the Mayans didn’t count Calendar Rounds, much less “vague years.” Rather, they used Long Counts. Quoting Coe:
“Instead of taking the Vague Year as the basis for the Long Count, the Maya and other peoples employed the turn, a period of 360 days. The Long Cycles are:
20 k’ins = 1 winal or 20 days
18 winals = 1 turn or 360 days
20 turns = 1 k’atun or 7,200 days
20 k’atuns = 1 bak’tun or 144,000 days
“Long Count dates inscribed by the Maya on their monuments consist of the above cycles listed from top to bottom in descending order of magnitude, each with its numerical coefficient, and all to be added up so as to express the number of days elapsed since the end of the last but one Great Cycle, a period of 13 bak’tuns the ending of which fell on the date 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u….”
Analysis: The Book of Mormon keeps track of history in months and years in a way that is indistinguishable from the Gregorian calendar, and is carefully calibrated so that Lehi leaving Jerusalem, the birth of Christ, and the death of Christ can all be reconciled with old-world history. In contrast, the Mayans kept track of historical days using Long Count days, which is really about counting up days since the end of the last “great cycle,” but rather than being “base 10” as we would count, they are counted using k’ins, winals, tuns, k’atuns, and bak’tuns. There is nothing in this that could be construed as months and years, nor could it easily be converted into lunar months and solar years.
Central to Mayan life were 260 day cycles. Central to Book of Mormon life were 7-day weeks.
The calendar in the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with the Mayan Calendar. This is very strong evidence that it is not based on Mesoamerican history. I score this a “likelihood ratio” of 50+.
i should have put a /s because, no, I have NO idea where they got that!