LDS biologist Trent Stephens thinks he may have triggered the change in the Book of Mormon's introduction that became public last week.
Stephens' efforts came after a lifetime of hearing Mormon leaders and members talk in glowing terms about the link between American Indians and the Book of Mormon's small band of Israelites who sailed from Jerusalem to establish a civilization in the Americas. After centuries of warring among themselves, the book says, the last ones standing were known as "Lamanites."
To the LDS faithful, Lamanites were real people with a real history.
Every Mormon prophet since the church's founding in 1830 has taught that Indians descended from Lamanites. The perceived link explains the church's initial outreach to Indians in the northeast and later in Utah. It is why the church created an Indian Placement Program, urging members in the 1950s to care for those they saw as part of their religious family. Mormon missionaries working in Central and South America have always told potential converts the Book of Mormon is their ancestors' story.
Sometime in the past decade, Stephens learned about DNA evidence suggesting American Indian origins were in Siberia, not the Middle East. It was no crisis of faith for Stephens, a former Mormon bishop and Idaho State University professor. He found lots of ways to explain the discrepancy.
Besides, Book of Mormon text makes no claims about lineage. The book's 1981 introduction was the only text that said "Lamanites were the principal ancestors of American Indians," and that could be changed.
On March 23, 2004, Stephens told his LDS stake president in Pocatello that critics were using DNA evidence against the book, pointing to the introduction's wording. The leader recognized the problem and took it to the LDS Area Authorities, who took it to the LDS Missionary Committee in Salt Lake City.
Sometime last year, LDS authorities instructed Doubleday, which published the only unofficial version of the Book of Mormon, to change its introduction to read: "Lamanites were among the ancestors of the American Indians."
The move didn't satisfy critics, such as Simon Southerton, a former Mormon excommunicated for the arguments in his book, Losing a Lost Tribe: DNA, Native Americans and the Mormon Church.
"The change raises more pressing questions for those seeking the truth. If science was right all along about the dominant Siberian ancestry of American Indians, are they also right about the timing of their entry?" Southerton wrote in an e-mail from his home in Australia. "There is abundant evidence, some now coming from the DNA research, that their Siberian ancestors arrived over 12,000 years ago. How does such a date fit with other LDS beliefs?"
DNA is not the only challenge to the Book of Mormon's version of history.
Mormon founder Joseph Smith said the book was written in "Reformed Egyptian," which he claimed to translate from the writings on gold pates he unearthed in Upstate New York. Non-Mormon scholars have never heard of such a language and wonder why Jews would use the language of their oppressors rather than Hebrew to record their sacred history. introduction was the only text that said "Lamanites were the principal ancestors of American Indians," and that could be changed.
On March 23, 2004, Stephens told his LDS stake president in Pocatello that critics were using DNA evidence against the book, pointing to the introduction's wording. The leader recognized the problem and took it to the LDS Area Authorities, who took it to the LDS Missionary Committee in Salt Lake City.
Sometime last year, LDS authorities instructed Doubleday, which published the only unofficial version of the Book of Mormon, to change its introduction to read: "Lamanites were among the ancestors of the American Indians."
The move didn't satisfy critics, such as Simon Southerton, a former Mormon excommunicated for the arguments in his book, Losing a Lost Tribe: DNA, Native Americans and the Mormon Church.
"The change raises more pressing questions for those seeking the truth. If science was right all along about the dominant Siberian ancestry of American Indians, are they also right about the timing of their entry?" Southerton wrote in an e-mail from his home in Australia. "There is abundant evidence, some now coming from the DNA research, that their Siberian ancestors arrived over 12,000 years ago. How does such a date fit with other LDS beliefs?"
DNA is not the only challenge to the Book of Mormon's version of history.
Mormon founder Joseph Smith said the book was written in "Reformed Egyptian," which he claimed to translate from the writings on gold pates he unearthed in Upstate New York. Non-Mormon scholars have never heard of such a language and wonder why Jews would use the language of their oppressors rather than Hebrew to record their sacred history. and barley - all of which had yet to be discovered in Meso or South America during the scripture's time period, 2200 B.C. to 400 A.D. Critics see no sign of Book of Mormon kings, no palaces or tombs, no mention of important names from the scripture, no site of the book's final battle that included thousands, if not millions of soldiers.
Non-Mormon archaeologists take the whole thing "as a complete fantasy, that this is a big waste of time," said Michael Coe, an emeritus professor of Mesoamerican studies at Yale, in last spring's PBS documentary "The Mormons."
"Nothing can ever come out of it because it's just impossible that this could have happened, because we know what happened to these people. We can read their writings: They're not in reformed Egyptian; they're in Maya."
Mormon scholars at Brigham Young University's Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and at FAIR (The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research), though, think they have an answer for every critique. They've spent decades collecting relevant pieces of archaeological, geographical and linguistic evidence to prove it.
Finding correspondence: For the past 55 years, John Sorenson has inhaled every detail of Book of Mormon life and history. It was Sorenson who first proposed that the scripture's action likely took place in Guatemala and southern Mexico, rather than encompassing both North and South America. This idea, known as the limited geography thesis, better explained the book's description of a "narrow neck of land" and the Land Northward and Southward, and helped solve some of the earlier archaeological challenges and is now the consensus view.
Sorenson, 83, retired from BYU's anthropology department about 21 years ago but still comes every day to the school's Museum of Peoples and Cultures. He is completing what he says will be his final work, tentatively titled, The Mormon Codex.
"The intent will be to show that only a Mesoamerican native from about fourth century A.D. would have known enough to write what's in the Book of Mormon," Sorenson said. "I have hundreds of correspondences between the [Mormon] text and archaeology. I will put down the most persuasive, cogent ones of those with the aim to demonstrate that it was written by an eyewitness in Mesoamerica."
Metals were used much earlier than most archaeologists believe, for example, and 50 purported horse bones have been found, some of which may be old enough to fit the scripture's time frame, he said.
Then there's the question of naming.
"We are dealing with the names, horse, cattle, goat, and sheep, but that's in English," Sorenson said. "There are a variety of animals native to the Americas that could qualify as bearing those names."
To find clues, Sorenson has poured over Mesoamerican scholarship and matched it with Old World findings, suggesting a connection between the two.
Sorenson belongs to a renegade group of anthropologists known as "diffusionists," who believe numerous voyages carried people and animals to the New World. Last year, he collaborated with Carl L. Johannessen, a non- Mormon geographer at the University of Oregon on a paper, "Biological Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages." In it, they cited 99 plant species that appeared in both the old and new worlds before the Spaniards' arrival.
Such views are scorned by most conventional archaeologists, Sorenson said, but it doesn't deter him.
"I don't have time to wait for it all to become clearer to everyone else," he said. "I need to publish everything I've learned."
On the ground: While Sorenson and the Maxwell Institute are careful about declaring a certain site to correspond directly to a Book of Mormon city or story, Joseph L. Allen is more confident.
Allen, a retired teacher in the LDS Church Educational System with a doctorate in Mayan studies, has been leading Book of Mormon tours for 40 years. He has taken more than 200 trips to Guatemala and southern Mexico with groups eager to walk where scriptures say important episodes happened.
More than 80 percent of the book's action takes place between the Land of Nephi and Zarahemla, which are described as being about 30 days of travel apart, or some 250 miles, he said. "It is a small area."
Allen believes the book's final battle took place in Veracruz, Mexico, not in New York where Smith said he found the plates. He sees many connections between the Mayan civilization and Nephites and Lamanites. He see the myth of Quetzequatl, the white god who appeared in the Americas, as a possible link to the Book of Mormon tale of Jesus Christ appearing in the New World after his resurrection.
"We've learned more in last 30 years about the history and geography of the Book of Mormon than in previous 170 years," Allen said. "The best days of this research are still ahead of us."
Despite such enthusiasm, Allen knows it is not archaeology that persuades readers to believe in the scripture's authenticity - it is faith.
"When all is said and done," he said, "it's a spiritual book."
That's why Stephens, the Idaho biologist, works so hard to explain the lack of DNA evidence for Lamanites.
He sees a parallel between the Mormon text and the Bible.
Biblical writers viewed themselves as the stars on God's center stage, a favored people. To everyone else at the time, the Hebrew prophets and people were little more than a footnote in the epic histories playing out around them.
Though some biblical names, places and episodes have been identified by archaeologists, scientists have not found any hard evidence that the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt even took place.
The same could be true of the Book of Mormon, said Stephens, co-author with Jeff Meldrum of Who are the Children of Lehi: Lamanite Identity, DNA and Native American Origins, is due out later this year.
"It tells the story of a small group of people among a lot of other groups who were largely unaware of this tiny colony," he said. "How small would a subpopulation have to be before it would be completely missed?"
On top of that, Stephens doesn't believe every group arrived via the Bering Strait.
"To think that over a 30,000 year history, every hominid came in one single migration over a few year period is ridiculous," he said. "There's an arrogant naiveté about how accessible the Americas were before Columbus."
Mormons, too, have their own arrogance, he said.
The revised wording in the Book of Mormon's introduction "should cause members to rethink their perspective on Native American traditions," Stephens said." I do think it will change people's minds, but it will take it a long time."
