The Book of Mormon as Myth

So to begin with I wanted to clarify my attitude about the BoM and why I write so much on the topic of its historicity. Because I don’t want to be seen simply as a critic or be pigeonholed along with tendentious anti-BoM ideologues. I actually see a great amount of value in the BoM and respect it as a work of early 19th century mythopoesis of unrivaled scope and complexity. The BoM recounts a rich and compelling narrative, articulates many useful moral principles (though these should be examined critically), and perhaps more important than anything else, reflects a kind of creative synthesis and wrestling with the theological and cultural themes that predominated in early American thought even as it reproduced them in various ways, which is an aspect that I can really appreciate and admire.

Yet I don’t believe that the BoM is a real authentic history of people who lived in ancient America and think there is a great need for more members of the church to begin to feel comfortable with that idea. Because of my training in critical study of the Hebrew Bible I have come to see how profoundly implausible and unrealistic the BoM narrative is based on everything that we know about how and when the literature of the Bible was written and the nature of Israelite religion, society, and culture as it existed in the pre-exilic period (Israelite history prior to 586 BCE). From my perspective, it is only a matter of time before careful literary and historical study demonstrates that the BoM presentation of the past is untenable in virtually almost all details.