DNA vs. The Book of Mormon Video

[NSMinistries]

DNA vs. The Book of Mormon (http://www.lhvm.org/dna_view.htm)

Interesting but how accurate? :nsm:

[Xmansmommy]

Dunno, but thanks for providing the link, :nsm:! I enjoyed it. :thumb:

[just Johnna]

DNA vs. The Book of Mormon (http://www.lhvm.org/dna_view.htm)

Interesting but how accurate? :nsm:Hi there NSM,
I tried to play the video and make some notes for you, but I had too many interruptions with kids getting out of bed, so I'll give you the broad strokes.

Yes, DNA of native american populations show they are an asiatic people in origin. They got the history of the church down far better than it's usually represented. The illustrations from the Book of Mormon will be familiar to any Latter-day Saint, which makes it easy to spot where some are used out of context, but it's not too bad. The people interviewed are real, though I can tell where they cut Thom Murphy to make their own point instead of his point. Thom's baliwick has been self-determination, the problems of whites projecting labels on native people, and he has a heart for native peoples, in his anthrolopological work he respects the people he studies and his academic work can in some ways seen to be an advocacy, that I can only applaud.

Did you have specific questions?

"Mormon scholar" means a scholar who happens to be mormon. And there's lots of mormons who have left the faith, on or off the membership roles, who chose to retain the identity of mormon as an entitlement. So, a mormon scholar might be a apologist faithful to the church as you might expect, or a mormon scholar might be someone raised in a mormon community (particularly within historical deseret or mormon colony of mexico/canada), from a mormon family, for whom being mormon is a sense of who he is, though he may not believe or participate.

Tom Murphy has his bona fides with the LDS intellectual community by being published in Dialogue, and now in American Apocropha(sp?). People like my family members are suspicious of Dialogue or self-titled intellectuals, because intellectuals may or may not be faithful so they can't trust them for advice. Also, family members believe Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought is not a productive or uplifting way to spend time. It's like asking YEC people to hear any opinion from a scientist in evolution. People like my husband used to be on the Dialogue editorial board.

Unless I missed it, the tape doesn't mention that the Book of Mormon puts a previous migration into America, called in the book of Ether the Jaredites. The Book of Mormon has them migrating to the Americas at the time of the Tower of Babel.

I went to BYU in the 1980s. While I was there we talked about Hugh Nibley's Book of Mormon interpretations, published before then, which argue the Nephi/Lehi/Laman party entered a continent already populated by people from the destroyed Jaredite civilization and possibly other migrations. This interpretation was made based on internal evidence of the Book. Nibley points out the naming practices show cultural contact between the Jaredite and Nephite cultures. But the real sock 'em in Nibley's interpretation is that he's willing to say the Nephites were to some degree paranoid and racist. Around the same time, Eugene England is active on campus, pointing out that the term "Lamanite" has different parameters depending on which third of the history it's in, and that none of these uses matches up with how the Leadership uses "Lamanite" then and today, to mean any Native American or Pacific Islander heritage. These issues were all very topical also, but also very controversial, because of the damaging folklore that had grown around restricting the priesthood from black members.

So, for someone like me who has believed since college that the Book of Mormon people have to be asiatic to make the book work, an interpretation I've held since 1985, the DNA evidence doesn't upset me at all. In fact, I'm hoping it will lead to closer reading of the book, wider familiarity with Hugh Nibley and Eugene England's ideas, and more willingness to be less self-righteous as we give up making the Nephites "the good guys," an oversimplification which obfuscates many important messages in the book, particularly about race. But you have to be able to do unreliable narrator interpretation on scripture, which people don't want to do. For example, doesn't anyone else think it's strange that Paul lists the requirementsof the Jerusalem council that theAntioch church must continue to support Jerusalem financially, an item which James doesn't include in hislist of strangled meats and sexual immorality.

For someone like a friend of mine, the DNA evidence gives him nail to hang his annoyance on, and he's happy to privately declare the work pious fiction, while continuing to be a member of the church who attends regularly, and holds a calling (has an official assignment in church work).

I believe I have stayed up too late, and probably been not at all helpful.

just Johnna

[Krusader]

JustJohnna: I think the Mormons are doing some fancy foot work to get around the whole Lamanite and Indian DNA issue.

When Joseph Smith sent Oliver Cowdery on a mission to the Indians, he said (speaking as god)" "And now, behold, I say unto you that you shall go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them..." (D&C 28:8). This terminology is reaffirmed in D&C 32:3 when Joseph, again speaking as god, states: "And that which I have appointed unto him is that he (Parley P. Pratt) shall go with my servants Oliver Cowdery and Perter Whitmer, Jujn., into the wilderness among the Lamanites." In D&C 54:8, Joseph, again in his "god" voice, says the "borders of the Lamanites" are near the "land of Missouri."

There is no doubt that Smith, Young, and other Mormon leaders consistently taught that the Lamanites were the American Indians - and, thus, these Indians should have DNA related to the ancient Hebrews. They do not!

[master_mormon]

JustJohnna: I think the Mormons are doing some fancy foot work to get around the whole Lamanite and Indian DNA issue.

When Joseph Smith sent Oliver Cowdery on a mission to the Indians, he said (speaking as god)" "And now, behold, I say unto you that you shall go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them..." (D&C 28:8). This terminology is reaffirmed in D&C 32:3 when Joseph, again speaking as god, states: "And that which I have appointed unto him is that he (Parley P. Pratt) shall go with my servants Oliver Cowdery and Perter Whitmer, Jujn., into the wilderness among the Lamanites." In D&C 54:8, Joseph, again in his "god" voice, says the "borders of the Lamanites" are near the "land of Missouri."

There is no doubt that Smith, Young, and other Mormon leaders consistently taught that the Lamanites were the American Indians - and, thus, these Indians should have DNA related to the ancient Hebrews. They do not!Many of the things said by LDS leaders regarding this issue was based on speculation. The term Lamanite is used in a variety of ways in the Book of Mormon. I personally simplify into two categories and that is literal lamanites and generic lamanites. A literal lamanite is one who is a direct decendant of Lehi's family. The generic can be any one called a Lamanite who is not. It can even include American Indians who have absolutely no genetic or cultural connection to the Nephites.

Since the Book of Mormon is the authorative and best source one can look at in terms who this issue, its the one that should be first consulted. Hugh Nibley gives a nice short discourse in the who the Nephites and Lamanites as a group were. Following from Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol.7, Ch.8, p.215-218

"There is no mention in the Book of Mormon of red skins versus white; indeed, there is no mention of red skin at all. What we find is a more or less steady process over long periods of time of mixing and separating of many closely related but not identical ethnic groups. The Book of Mormon is careful to specify that the terms Lamanite and Nephite are used in a loose and general sense to designate not racial but political (e.g., Mormon 1:9), military (Alma 43:4), religious (4 Nephi 1:38), and cultural (Alma 53:10, 15; 3:10-11) divisions and groupings of people. The Lamanite and Nephite division was tribal rather than racial, each of the main groups representing an amalgamation of tribes that retained their identity (Alma 43:13; 4 Nephi 1:36-37). Our text frequently goes out of its way to specify that such and such a group is only called Nephite or Lamanite (2 Nephi 5:14; Jacob 1:2; Mosiah 25:12; Alma 3:10; 30:59; Helaman 3:16; 3 Nephi 3:24; 10:18; 4 Nephi 1:36-38, 43; Mormon 1:9). For the situation was often very mobile, with large numbers of Nephites going over to the Lamanites (Words of Mormon 1:16; 4 Nephi 1:20; Mormon 6:15; Alma 47:35-36), or Lamanites to the Nephites (Alma 27:27; Mosiah 25:12; Alma 55:4), or members of the mixed Mulekite people, such as their Zoramite offshoot, going over either to the Lamanites (Alma 43:4) or to the Nephites (Alma 35:9--not really to the Nephites, but to the Ammonites who were Lamanites who had earlier become Nephites!); or at times the Lamanites and Nephites would freely intermingle (Helaman 6:7-8), while at other times the Nephite society would be heavily infiltrated by Lamanites and by robbers of dubious background (Mormon 2:8). Such robbers were fond of kidnapping Nephite women and children (Helaman 11:33)....

At the time of the Lord's visit, there were "neither . . . Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites," (4 Nephi 1:17; see also 3 Nephi 2:14) so that when the old titles of Lamanite and Nephite were later revived by parties deliberately seeking to stir up old hatreds, they designated religious affiliation rather than race (4 Nephi 1:38-39). From this it would seem that at that time it was impossible to distinguish a person of Nephite blood from one of Lamanite blood by appearance. Moreover, there were no pure-blooded Lamanites or Nephites after the early period, for Nephi, Jacob, Joseph, and Sam were all promised that their seed would survive mingled with that of their elder brethren (2 Nephi 3:2, 23; 9:53; 10:10, 19-20; 29:13; 3 Nephi 26:8; Mormon 7:1). Since the Nephites were always aware of that mingling, which they could nearly always perceive in the steady flow of Nephite dissenters to one side and Lamanite converts to the other, it is understandable why they do not think of the terms Nephite and Lamanite as indicating race. The Mulekites, who outnumbered the Nephites better than two to one (Mosiah 25:2-4), were a mixed Near Eastern rabble who had brought no written records with them and had never observed the Law of Moses and did not speak Nephite (Omni 1:18); yet after Mosiah became their king, they "were numbered with the Nephites, and this because the kingdom had been conferred upon none but those who were descendants of Nephi" (Mosiah 25:13). From time to time large numbers of people disappear beyond the Book of Mormon frontiers to vanish in the wilderness or on the sea, taking their traditions and even written records with them (Helaman 3:3-13). What shall we call these people--Nephites or Lamanites?"

The picture is a little more complicated than many want to make it. In regards to the DNA issues, probably one of the best articles i have found on the subject is at http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/Whiting_DNA.pdf
Here you will see a sound argument based on Genetic principles that will demonstrate the complicated issues regarding DNA studies that is fair and balanced to both sides. LDS and non-LDS should both read it and know the limitations of field of DNA and the Book of Mormon. Just as it would be wrong for Non-LDS to say DNA has disproved the BOM, it would be wrong for LDS to say that DNA has or even possibly can be used to prove it.

[Benster]

I'm going to have be the atheist supporting the moromons on this one. Look, this weirdo Joseph Smith claimed that American Indians were originally Israelites. We know that Indians came from Asia. So what? Israelites (Palestinians) could have migrated East through Asia and crossed the Bering Straits. It's no crazier than believing Jesus or Moses were white Jews.

Benster you have been warned about posting in theist only areas repeatedly. You are now on a period of moderation of at least two weeks.