Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum

Second is a very brief article discussing work by Dr. F. Richard Hauck on sacred space and temple dimensions.

Third is a report about BMAF's presening the "Father Lehi" and "Mother Sariah" award to Dr. John Sorenson and his wife.

Book of Mormon geography articles by Joseph Smith?

By Michael De Groote

Mormon Times
Published: 2009-10-30 00:15:14

It was, for its day, as big a book-selling phenomenon as Harry Potter. For decades it was a No. 1 best-selling phenomenon unlike anything seen before in America.

And Joseph Smith loved it.

Or did he?

Two unsigned newspaper articles from the 1842 Nauvoo newspaper Times and Seasons reviewed the best-seller and said it supported the Book of Mormon having taken place in Central America. But nobody knew for sure who wrote these articles -- until now.

Author John L. Lund spoke at the Book of Mormon Archaeological Conference on Oct. 17 about the best-seller and says he believes he knows who wrote the Times and Seasons articles.

The best-seller was John Lloyd Stephens' two-volume "Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan." They were beautifully illustrated volumes that chronicled Stephens' exploration of great ancient ruins in Mesoamerica.

According to Lund, up to that point Americans thought the ancestors of American Indians were "uncivilized." Stephens' books were a mind-bending thing for pre-Civil War Americans: an Indiana Jones-like tale of adventure, exploration, archaeology and mystery.

A side-effect of Stephens' books was to bolster Book of Mormon claims for advanced ancient civilizations in the Western Hemisphere.

No doubt recognizing this, Dr. John M. Bernhisel, Mormon bishop in New York City, sent copies of Stephens' books to Joseph Smith in 1841.

The Prophet wrote back that Stephens' work "corresponds with and supports the testimony of the Book of Mormon."

About a year after Bernhisel sent the books to Joseph Smith, the two unsigned articles appeared in Times and Seasons.

Joseph Smith had assumed the editorial chair of the official Mormon newspaper earlier that year and was in town to supervise the Sept. 15 and Oct. 1, 1842, issues.

The articles quoted extracts from Stephens' best-seller and included commentary that implied that the Book of Mormon might have taken place in Central America:
"Mr. Stephens' great developments of antiquities are made bare to the eyes of all the people by reading the history of the Nephites in the Book of Mormon. They lived about the narrow neck of land, which now embraces Central America, with all the cities that can be found.

"The city of Zarahemla, burnt at the crucifixion of the Savior, and rebuilt afterwards, stood upon this land. ... It is certainly a good thing for the excellency and veracity, of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon, that the ruins of Zarahemla have been found where the Nephites left them.

"It will not be a bad plan to compare Mr. Stephens' ruined cities with those in the Book of Mormon."

According to Lund, the most likely authors were those who worked on Times and Seasons: the Prophet Joseph, John Taylor or Wilford Woodruff. Proponents of a North American Great Lakes setting for the Book of Mormon say the Prophet couldn't have written the articles. Proponents of a Central or Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon believe he did.

Lund drew upon statistical analysis of communication styles and word usage -- something he learned about while getting his doctorate in 1972.

"One of the things that I discovered when doing the research for my doctoral dissertation, was that when we went to analyze people, we could separate them rather quickly by doing what we called their 'average sentence length,'" Lund said.

Lund looked at Joseph Smith, Taylor and Woodruff -- analyzing more than 100,000 words per author.

Woodruff's average sentence length was 22 words. Taylor's was 25 words. Joseph Smith's: 40 words. The two Times and Seasons articles had 36 words per sentence -- statistically close to the words of the Prophet, considering the articles' sample size was only 906 words.

"The chances of John Taylor or Wilford Woodruff authoring these articles is about one out of 100,000," Lund said. "That's a huge discriminator. A huge discriminator."

But Lund didn't just look at average sentence length. He looked at sentences using 10 words or less, 100 words or more and even one-word sentences. He looked at how sentences began and ended.

He also looked at specific words and phrases.

Joseph Smith is the only one who uses the phrase "none can hinder," according to Lund. "It's not found in any of the writings of Wilford Woodruff ... nor in John Taylor's writings. ... But it is found in this (Sept. 15, 1842) article."

Other phrases from the articles, "dwelling upon" and "in the eyes of all the people," are used frequently by the Prophet, but not by Woodruff and Taylor. Joseph Smith uses the term "great joy" 234 times in his writings. Woodruff and Taylor only about five or seven times in all their writings.

Other words in the articles -- "proof," "agoing" and "cuts" -- are used often by Joseph Smith, but much less often or not at all by Woodruff and Taylor.

"When (people) look at all the evidence they are going to find that Joseph was the author of those articles," Lund said.

This means that the Prophet was probably also the author of one of the articles' headlines: "Facts are stubborn things."

Hebrew design in Mesoamerica: Temples match

By Michael De Groote

Mormon Times
Published: 2009-10-18 00:15:20

It probably isn't too surprising to learn that the tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon have the same proportions. They all came from the same culture, after all.
 
But what if temple complexes in Mesoamerica matched those same architectural proportions?
 
Archaeologist F. Richard Hauck researched the shapes of ancient Hebrew sacred space. Relying on the work of Asher Kaufman, Hauck learned that the tabernacle of Moses and Solomon's temple both used cubit measurements of 43.7 centimeters and 42.8 centimeters in their construction. The building's spaces -- such as the Holy of Holies, sanctuaries, outer walls and other rooms -- were also proportionally related. Solomon's Temple was twice the size of the tabernacle, yet it kept the same ratios of width and length.
 
Even the Ark of the Covenant matched those proportions on a much smaller scale.
 

A proportionally enlarged plan for Solomon’s Temple is superimposed over the temple complex in Izapa, Mexico. The various temples, pyramids and buildings appear as topographical hills. The temple is the pink and yellowish diagram. The Izapa buildings align with the temple priest storage areas in the pink and then in the entrance, sanctuary and Holy of Holies in the yellowish area (the Holy of Holies is to the left and has an Izapa building at each end). By F. Richard Hauck, used with permission.
  Hauck told participants of the seventh annual Book of Mormon Archaeological Conference, held Saturday, Oct. 17 in Salt Lake City, about his examination of the temple complex at the ruins of Izapa in Mexico. He plotted out the spatial relationships of Izapa’s various buildings and pyramids along various lines. He discovered that, like the Hebrew sacred spaces in the Old World, Izapa architects used cubit measurements of 43.7 centimeters and 42.8 centimeters.
 
Then, one day, as he worked on recreating architectural drawings of Solomon's temple, Hauck said he felt inspired to compare the proportions of the Temple of Solomon with the shapes in the Izapa ruins.
 
They matched.
 
In the same way that the temple of Solomon was a larger version of Moses' tabernacle, the Izapa temple complex was aligned with the same proportions -- only 15 times larger than Solomon's temple. There was a direct correlation, according to Hauck, to Izapa's mounds and plazas with the tabernacle and Solomon's temple.
 
"They were all built on the same model," Hauck said.
 
From the cloth and wood tabernacle, to the stone temple of Solomon, to the huge complex of buildings in Izapa, there was a correlation in size, according to Hauck. "The measurements system used to design Izapa, and the basic architecture in Izapa were copied directly from sacred architecture employed by Moses and Solomon."
 
To learn more about the Book of Mormon Archaeolgical Conference, presented by the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum, go to www.bmaf.org.

John L. Sorenson's life, next book celebrated

By Michael De Groote

Mormon Times
Published: 2009-11-12 00:17:24

John L. Sorenson's life was celebrated in a video produced by The Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum (BMAF). The short biography reviewed the BYU professor emeritus' groundbreaking work on establishing an ancient American setting for the Book of Mormon.

Sorenson and wife Helen were honored Oct. 17 at the seventh annual Book of Mormon Archaeological Conference with the "Father Lehi" and "Mother Sariah" awards. BMAF board of trustee member Robert Starling created the video for the event. The video is made available on Mormon Times by permission.

"I always just thought I was a plodder," Sorenson said in response to receiving the award. "I guess that's my view of myself. I just kept plodding along, or slogging through the mud. And there's been a lot of mud to slog through."

Some of that mud was real mud in excavations in Central America. Other slogging has been persistence -- such as the more than seven years it took to have articles on Book of Mormon geography approved for printing in the LDS Church's official Ensign magazine. The articles, "Digging into the Book of Mormon: Our Changing Understanding of Ancient America and Its Scripture," appeared in two installments -- Part 1 in the Sept. 1984 Ensign and Part 2 in the Oct. 1984 Ensign.

"I'm doing my last book," Sorenson said. "At age 85 it ought to be my last."

The book is "Mormon's Codex: An Ancient American Book." Sorenson said the book will cover "at least 420 points at which the Book of Mormon has Mesoamerican material in it, material that could not possibly have been included by anyone except an ancient Mesoamerican writer of the fourth century A.D."

He said there was no publisher for the book yet, but hoped to find one soon.

"Finally there will be an answer to those who say, 'There's no archeological evidence of the Book of Mormon.' There will be hundreds of pages of it in spades."

"It is what it is," Sorenson said. "It is exactly what it said it is."