Posted on 11/08/2007 5:23:05 PM PST by Colofornian
The LDS Church has changed a single word in its introduction to the Book of Mormon, a change observers say has serious implications for commonly held LDS beliefs about the ancestry of American Indians.
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe founder Joseph Smith unearthed a set of gold plates from a hill in upperstate New York in 1827 and translated the ancient text into English. The account, known as The Book of Mormon, tells the story of two Israelite civilizations living in the New World. One derived from a single family who fled from Jerusalem in 600 B.C. and eventually splintered into two groups, known as the Nephites and Lamanites.
The book's current introduction, added by the late LDS apostle, Bruce R. McConkie in 1981, includes this statement: "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians."
The new version, seen first in Doubleday's revised edition, reads, "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians."
LDS leaders instructed Doubleday to make the change, said senior editor Andrew Corbin, so it "would be in accordance with future editions the church is printing."
The change "takes into account details of Book of Mormon demography which are not known," LDS spokesman Mark Tuttle said Wednesday.
It also steps into the middle of a raging debate about the book's historical claims.
Many Mormons, including several church presidents, have taught that the Americas were largely inhabited by Book of Mormon peoples. In 1971, Church President Spencer W. Kimball said that Lehi, the family patriarch, was "the ancestor of all of the Indian and Mestizo tribes in North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea."
After testing the DNA of more than 12,000 Indians, though, most researchers have concluded that the continent's early inhabitants came from Asia across the Bering Strait.
With this change, the LDS Church is "conceding that mainstream scientific theories about the colonization of the Americas have significant elements of truth in them," said Simon Southerton, a former Mormon and author of Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Mormon Church.
"DNA has revealed very clearly how closely related American Indians are to their Siberian ancestors, " Southerton said in an e-mail from his home in Canberra, Australia. "The Lamanites are invisible, not principal ancestors."
LDS scholars, however, dispute the notion that DNA evidence eliminates the possibility of Lamanites. They call it "oversimplification" of the research.
On the church's official Web site, lds.org, it says, "Nothing in the Book of Mormon precludes migration into the Americas by peoples of Asiatic origin. The scientific issues relating to DNA, however, are numerous and complex."
Mormon researcher John M. Butler and DNA expert further argues that "careful examination and demographic analysis of the Book of Mormon record in terms of population growth and the number of people described implies that other groups were likely present in the promised land when Lehi's family arrived, and these groups may have genetically mixed with the Nephites, Lamanites, and other groups. Events related in the Book of Mormon likely took place in a limited region, leaving plenty of room for other Native American peoples to have existed."
In recent years, many LDS scholars have come to share Butler's belief in what is known as the "limited geography" theory. By this view, the Nephites and Lamanites restricted their activities to portions of Central America, which would explain their absence from the general American Indian genetics.
Kevin Barney, a Mormon lawyer and independent researcher in Chicago, welcomes the introduction's word change.
"I have always felt free to disavow the language of the [Book of Mormon's] introduction, footnotes and dictionary, which are not part of the canonical scripture," said Barney, on the board of FAIR, a Mormon apologist group. "These things can change as the scholarship progresses and our understanding enlarges. This suggests to me that someone on the church's scripture committee is paying attention to the discussion."
It tells me the LDS organization was very lax concerning the accuracy of their printings.
Well. See, now you part ways with what the Doctrine & Covenants say. (What you say here and what D&C says can't both be right). In several places (D&C 20:9; 42:12; 133:57), the D&C says that the Book of Mormon IS "the fullness of the everlasting gospel."
Who's correct? Joe Smith & the D&C? Or you? (Or neither?) Is it you, who now claims, "No, I guess the gospel wasn't full post completion of the Book of Mormon, after all. It took "several stages and a lot of revelation..."?
You can't both possibly be right without twisting the English language.
When there is something new that God wants the church to receive as doctrine or prophecy it will be received by the prophet, given unanimous consent by the 12 and the 70, then formally presented to the church and added to our scripture.
Oh, so "when there is something new that God wants the Church to receive as doctrine or prophecy...", there must be "unanimous consent by the 12 and the 70,"eh? Wanna explain, then, when LDS "prophet" Wilford Woodruff introduced the Sept. 25 1890 "manifesto" which publicly slowed down the number of LDS polygamous marriages why only Woodruff's name was attached to that document? Wanna explain to all of us why counselors George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith (part of the "First Presidency") did not sign the document? (Even when the LDS "apostles" met over that next week on Sept. 30, Oct. 1, and Oct. 2, only 8 or 9 of the apostles gave tentative concurrence on the document...see John Henry Smith diaries, entries for those three days, George A. Smith Family Papers available @ the University of Utah Library).
So who's right? The Smith diaries as recorded on those very days those "apostles" met? Or you and the revelation formula you mentioned?
Um, because our bodies are the living temple of God and He dwells in us and doesn’t need a man made temple anymore, since Christ paid the final penalty for our sins.
So the whole book of Mormon is supposed to have been translated from these gold tablets?
Just how big were these things and how much did they weigh?
And how could anybody have just *lost* them?
The plates were supposed to have been buried in the ground. How could an angel have taken them "back"? That implies that the angel gave him them first.
So an angel took them back? Pretty convenient.
How did he find them in the first place?
Your screen name is showing.
Elsie IS a sir.
You need to get out more.
http://scriptures.lds.org/en/js_h/1
I’m sure the antis on this thread will point you in other directions, but this is the official canonized version. Not even an “intro” by McConckie, this is in Joseph Smith’s own words.
But as to the genetics of the tribes of Jacob, we know what Judah’s descendent's were like 2000 years later, but not the rest of his children, from different mothers. One can only guess.
Read pages 36 and 37 of this book, Indians in the Americas, the untold story. It’s quite interesting, and it’s not LDS, but has many many accounts of similar encounters with white skinned, light hair Indians.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Obgdz8auwkMC&printsec=frontcover
Elsie, you just made my nose bleed I laughed so hard. Thanks dude! (Mormon dude that is)
There you go again!
Trying to use LOGIC!!!
--MormonDude(hooked on a feelin')
To Whom It May Concern:
Press dispatches having been sent for political purposes, from Salt Lake City, which have been widely published, to the effect that the Utah Commission, in their recent report to the Secretary of the Interior, allege that plural marriages are still being solemnized and that forty or more such marriages have been contracted in Utah since last June or during the past year, also that in public discourses the leaders of the Church have taught, encouraged and urged the continuance of the practice of polygamy
I, therefore, as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice, and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.
One case has been reported, in which the parties allege that the marriage was performed in the Endowment House, in Salt Lake City, in the Spring of 1889, but I have not been able to learn who performed the ceremony; whatever was done in this matter was without my knowledge. In consequence of this alleged occurrence the Endowment House was, by my instructions, taken down without delay.
Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.
There is nothing in my teachings to the Church or in those of my associates, during the time specified, which can be reasonably construed to inculcate or encourage polygamy; and when any Elder of the Church has used language which appeared to convey any such teaching, he has been promptly reproved. And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.
WILFORD WOODRUFF
President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
President Lorenzo Snow offered the following:
I move that, recognizing Wilford Woodruff as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the only man on the earth at the present time who holds the keys of the sealing ordinances, we consider him fully authorized by virtue of his position to issue the Manifesto which has been read in our hearing, and which is dated September 24th, 1890, and that as a Church in General Conference assembled, we accept his declaration concerning plural marriages as authoritative and binding.
The vote to sustain the foregoing motion was unanimous.
Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6, 1890.
Oh??
VERSION??
Why is there a 'version'??
Shouldn't there just be THE vision??
I've noticed.
You need to check the humidity in your home. Dry air makes for some nose bleeds.
(I can just hear the ol’ Horndog-in-Chief, as he lusts over some dried out woman!)
Do you have any data on When and by Whom this took place?
Anyway needed to be said. Its refreshing to see you all bond together now instead of jumping down one another's throats in the name of love. You can all thank me later in life or in the next.
May the interstates run through all of your out houses. :-)
I’m sorry I always thought he was a woman. My mistake.
When someone posts like a girly man its easy to get confused. :-)
I have no personal knowledge as to Elsie’s sex. That is one of those things I am happy to be “Willfully Ignorant” of.
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