Plates of Gold and the Shrinking Map

Picture the map most of us grew up with. Nephi’s ship lands somewhere on the coast. Over the next thousand years his people spread across two continents, from the Andes to upstate New York. The Lamanites become the ancestors of the Native Americans, all of them. The last great battle is fought at the Hill Cumorah, a few miles from Joseph Smith’s farm.

For years that map was simply assumed. From 1981 until 2006, the introduction to the Book of Mormon itself said the Lamanites “are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.” In 2006 the wording was quietly changed to “among the ancestors” (Deseret News, 2007).

That one-word change is a small example of something I call the shrinking map. This page is about what it is, why faithful scholars embraced it, and why I think it quietly undercuts more than it saves.

Where I stand

Let me say it plainly first. I do not suspect the Book of Mormon is historically accurate, nor that it is the translation of an ancient writing. I think it came from Joseph Smith’s own remarkable creative genius.

But I want to start with a much smaller question, one that can be asked entirely from inside a believing frame. It’s about geography.

The problem of distance

Imagine you lived in the Americas two thousand years ago. There are no phones, no roads to speak of, no printing presses. If you want to send word to a city five hundred miles away, someone has to walk it there, and walk back with an answer. That’s a round trip of weeks, maybe months.

Now read the Book of Mormon again with that in mind. Its peoples trade, preach, send armies, exchange letters, defect, and return. Prophets keep track of wars and dissenters across the land. The records are kept in one place and handed down from one keeper to the next.

That kind of steady contact simply doesn’t fit two whole continents. North and South America together cover more than sixteen million square miles. Even 1 percent of that is bigger than what the story seems to need. Read closely, the story makes much more sense across an area a few hundred miles wide, roughly the size of a single western state.

I’m not the first to see this. Most Book of Mormon scholars who believe the book is ancient now favor some version of a limited geography, often placed in Mesoamerica. The church itself now takes no position on where it happened: “the Church’s only position is that the events the Book of Mormon describes took place in the ancient Americas” (Book of Mormon Geography).

The believer’s best case

The limited geography is, honestly, the strongest answer believers have, and it deserves a fair statement.

If the Book of Mormon peoples lived in a small region, then the Americas were already full of other people when Lehi arrived, and they stayed that way. The Nephites and Lamanites were one small group among many. That explains why archaeologists haven’t found Nephite cities across the continents. It also explains the DNA. The church’s own essay concedes that “the majority of Native Americans carry largely Asian DNA,” that “Nothing is known about the DNA of Book of Mormon peoples,” and that their DNA “likely represented only a fraction of all DNA in ancient America” (Book of Mormon and DNA Studies).

It’s a coherent position, and many sincere, intelligent people hold it.

What the shrinking map costs

Here is the open question I couldn’t put down. If the story only covered a small area and a small population, what else has to shrink with it?

The prophecies shrink. Much of the Book of Mormon is about preserving a record for the descendants of Lehi’s family. On a small map, those descendants are a tiny fraction of the native peoples of the Americas. Missionaries have long taught Native Americans and Latin Americans that the book is their own family’s history. On the shrinking map, for most of them, it isn’t.

The evidence shrinks. We have sometimes seemed desperate to find tangible support for the book: ruins that look like Zarahemla, a carving that looks like a vision. But on a small map in an unknown place, there’s nothing in particular to look for. A claim that can’t be located can’t be confirmed. Of course, it can’t be disproved either, which is part of its appeal.

The prophets shrink. For most of the church’s history, leaders and members taught the big map with confidence. If they were that wrong about where and who, it’s fair to ask what else they were wrong about.

That last point is the one I think matters most. The shrinking map isn’t threatening to most members. It was a respectable, faithful idea. But it opened a door: if a view that popular and that confidently taught can be plainly mistaken, then popularity and confidence aren’t evidence. And if we’re willing to give up the big map because the reasoning is sound, why are we so unwilling to reconsider other things when the reasoning is just as sound?

I think the answer is that other beliefs are so tied into the whole structure of our faith that questioning them feels like pulling out the foundation. The map can move. The plates can’t.

About those plates

Which brings me to the plates themselves. We picture Joseph Smith studying golden pages, tracing ancient characters with his finger. But the church’s own essay on the translation describes something different. Joseph “placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat” and “pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light,” then “read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument.” The same essay notes that as a young man he had “used a seer stone to look for lost objects and buried treasure” (Book of Mormon Translation).

According to Emma Smith, quoted in the same essay, the plates “often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth” while Joseph dictated with his face in the hat. To me that is one more way the story shrinks: from an ancient record translated, to a text received.

None of this makes the book worthless. I still find stories in it that move me. Its picture of people who “mourn with those that mourn” is as good a description of community as I know (Mosiah 18:9). I just read it now as scripture written in the 1820s, not as history from the year 600 BC.

Back to the map

Go back to the map we started with: two continents, one family, the last battle a few miles from Joseph’s farm.

Today the church says it doesn’t know where the story happened. Its scholars say it happened somewhere small. Its essays say the people left no genetic trace we can find. The map has shrunk to a question mark.

A believer can still hold that question mark with faith, and I won’t tell them they can’t. But I’d ask them to notice how much has already been given up, by the church itself, and to give themselves permission to ask honest questions about the rest. The truth can handle it.

For a better vocabulary for questions like this, read Historicity. For the church’s own concessions on other topics, see The Best of the CES Letter.