Neville-Neville Land 2022 year in review

The end of 2022 brings to a close the fourth year I’ve been publishing this blog. What started as something of a lark has developed into a full-blown escapade.

This year I published 48 posts examining the iconoclastic beliefs and assertions of Jonathan Neville and his associates in the so-called “Heartland” Book of Mormon movement. That’s down from 72 in 2021 and 74 in 2020. The reduced number of posts this year has been due mostly to (a) my increasingly busy schedule and (b) Jonathan Neville’s regular routine of regurgitating the same content over and over again, only using just ever-so-slightly different words. There’s only so many times that I can write about (to use just one example) his repeated fatuous assertion that people who don’t agree with him are “rejecting the teachings of the prophets.”

Among the significant developments this year in Neville-Neville Land, I would include the following:

• The most impactful event was the publication in the journal Interpreter of Spencer Kraus’s reviews of Neville’s two recent books, A Man That Can Translate: Joseph Smith and the Nephite Interpreters and Infinite Goodness: Joseph Smith, Jonathan Edwards, and the Book of Mormon. Neville’s theories on the origins and translation of the Book of Mormon have long needed to be examined in a detailed manner, and Kraus delivered the goods in two excellent essays.
  The editors of Interpreter graciously gave Neville the opportunity to respond to Kraus, and he did so in a 3,600-word response they published—after which he had the temerity to claim that Interpreter and other scholarly Latter-day Saint organizations “refuse to permit alternative faithful interpretations [of Book of Mormon geography] on their websites” and implied that these organizations are responsible for the declining growth in Church membership.
  Spencer Kraus responded to Neville in Interpreter, on his own blog, and in an interview with Robert Boylan, ably demonstrating that Neville misunderstands and misinterprets original sources and the arguments of those who criticize him.
• A key individual in the Heartland movement finally decided to engage my criticisms: On December 22, 2022, Rian Nelson of the FIRM Foundation wrote a blog post complaining about the way I characterize him and his associates. What followed was something approaching an actual conversation (see part 1, part 2, and part 3). Even though we didn’t come to an agreement, I am grateful to Rian for respectfully discussing some of our differences.
• Adding to the list of disturbing statements made by prominent Heartlanders, this year we saw David Hocking refer to Book of Mormon artwork approved by Church leaders as “visual pornography” and Kimberly W. Smith (who, in 2021, accused the Church of being “off course”) claim that Church members who follow the First Presidency’s counsel on vaccines have “fallen victim to a cult mindset.” (And Rian Nelson wonders why I say that he and his comrades are flirting with apostasy!)
• Adding to his long history of making dishonest statements, this year Jonathan Neville falsely claimed that the people he calls “M2Cers” and “SITH sayers” don’t want people to read his books.
• An important document came to my attention this year that refutes Jonathan Neville’s claim that Oliver Cowdery never said Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by placing stones in a hat and his claim that the “stone in the hat” stories were invented in 1834 by an anti-Mormon author. Both of those assertions are shown to be false by the January 29, 1831, diary entry of Richard NcNemar, who heard Oliver Cowdery preach in November 1830 that Joseph translated by using “two transparent stones in the form of spectacles thro[ugh] which the translator looked on the engraving & afterwards put his face into a hat & the interpretation then flowed into his mind.” Neville’s assertions continue to fall apart under the weight of documentary evidence.
• Finally, one of the worst people on the internet triumphantly claimed that he’s figured out my true identity, and yet he’s completely, hilariously wrong. Like, not even in the ballpark. But since he’s wrong concerning most things about which he arrogantly opines, I guess that’s to be expected.

Finally, here are the top ten Neville-Neville Land posts for 2022 by number of reads:

1. The First Presidency reviewed Saints before publication (July 27, 2022).
2. Jonathan Neville reacts to Spencer Kraus’s reviews (June 30, 2022).
3. President Nelson and the attention to detail in Saints (August 4, 2022).
4. Follow-up: The character of Stephen Reed (“TwoCumorahFraud”) (March 14, 2022).
5. “Doctor Scratch,” perpetual gadfly and blowhard (July 23, 2022).
6. Recommended watching: Spencer Kraus’s interview with Robert Boylan (July 19, 2022).
7. Peter’s hiatus and three brief notices (March 6, 2022).
8. Jonathan Neville’s latest folly: The Kinderhook Plates (March 30, 2022).
9. Spencer Kraus’s devastating review of Jonathan Neville’s A Man that Can Translate (June 17, 2022).
10. Rian Nelson pulls a Michael Scott (April 11, 2022).

Last year at this time, I wrote, “I see little evidence that Jonathan Neville will retreat from his extremist views in the coming year and bring himself more in line with the teachings of the prophets regarding the Book of Mormon and how the Prophet Joseph Smith translated it.” I’m saddened to report that I was right. However, 2023 brings a new year and new opportunities, so here’s hoping that more people will see through the transparent falsehoods of the Heartland movement in the coming year.

Happy new year!

—Peter Pan
 

David Hocking’s claim about temples and steps

Yesterday I posted about Heartlander David Hocking’s claim that Church-approved Book of Mormon art is “visual pornography.” The quote I provided from Hocking included this claim:

If [the Church is] going to be truly neutral, they need to remove that kind of image and make it more Hebrew, not some other weird religion that has stone steps with a little square box [at the top]. I’ve never been to a Mormon temple or go to Hebrew [sic] when you go to the temple after the manner of Solomon that has multiple steps with a little square box at the top.

As it turns out, this is one of the primary arguments Heartlanders make to refute the Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon: According to Hocking, a temple designed after the law of Moses cannot have steps or stairs due to the prohibition in Exodus 20:26.

Spencer Kraus saw my blog post and wrote a response to Hocking’s claim. Unlike Hocking, Kraus can read Hebrew, and he has some interesting insights into the meaning behind Exodus 20:26 and how some Mesoamerican structures fit the pattern for temples revealed to ancient prophets of Israel.

Read “A Note on Temples, Stairs, and Mesoamerica,” by Spencer Kraus.

—Peter Pan
 

Heartlander David Hocking calls Church-approved artwork “pornography”

David Hocking is a noted figure in the Heartland movement who has self-published his own annotated editions of the Book of Mormon, the New Testament, the Book of Jasher, and the Old Testament book of Isaiah. His Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon, which he co-edited with Rodney Meldrum, contains forgeries and unprovenanced artifacts, misrepresentations of historical sources and DNA science, and unsubstantiated claims and arguments. His editions of the New Testament, Jasher, and Isaiah are texts in the public domain—usually translations that are well over one hundred years old.

Hocking was recently interviewed for the Gospel Tangents podcast, which bills itself as “the best source for Mormon history, science, and theology.” Among the eyebrow-raising things he said in this interview was that Church-authorized artwork depicting the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica is “visual pornography.”

The pertinent part of the interview begins at 1:04:13. Podcaster Rick Bennett noted that there may be “people who admire the work you’ve done,” but who are going to be “turned off with the Heartland theory stuff.” Bennett then asked:

Rick Bennett: Would you consider creating an edition [of the Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon] that was more geography…

David Hocking: Neutral.

Bennett: …neutral, yeah.

Hocking: Yeah. And, actually, the Church should be doing that, but they’re not. Every—everything that they talk about—they have never been neutral—

Bennett [crosstalk]: That’s so weird about [unintelligible]

Hocking: But, yeah, they want us to be neutral, but they’re not. They have never shown anything in Central—uh, in North America; they always show it as in Mesoamerica. Although the background has mountains in it, it’s got palm trees, it’s got Chichen Itza-type/style temples that have nothing to do with the law of Moses, but that’s their choice. All the artwork—now I’m going to be very bold here; people are going to hear this from Dave Hocking—we hear a lot about pornography in the Church. You know, we have a problem with pornography and what is [unintelligible]? It’s a visual image that you can’t get out of your brain, and it desecrates the human body. These images of the temple that are in our church buildings, that’s in our church material, to me is visual pornography. Why? Because those are not temples after the order of Solomon. You don’t do the law-of-Moses types of sacrifices in these models that they show as images, and you can’t get it out of your mind, and it desecrates the law of Moses. So, for me, that’s visual pornography.

Bennett: Hmm. Wow, that’s pretty bold.

Hocking: It is very bold, but to me that’s what it is, because you cannot get that out of your brain. And if they [Church leaders?] attempt to do that [remove or change the artwork?], there’s going to be a huge backlash. Like, you’ve been given this all this time—you know, image after image after image, iterations after iterations —and now we’ve got new videos that we’re going to show you, and it’s going to be the same image, and I think that’s not right. If they’re going to be truly neutral, they need to remove that kind of image and make it more Hebrew, not some other weird religion that has stone steps with a little square box [at the top]. I’ve never been to a Mormon temple or go to Hebrew [sic] when you go to the temple after the manner of Solomon that has multiple steps with a little square box at the top. They’re all rectangular, and they have different compartments, and you go through these different—and you’ll never see that as part of the depiction of where the Savior came. You see them in a Chichen Itza-style temple with these stone—and, you know, you read the book of Mormon, they never built out of stone.

Hocking is probably referring to Church-commissioned or Church-approved artwork like “And He Healed Them All Every One” by Gary Kapp, “Christ Asks for the Records” by Robert T. Barrett, and “Jesus Christ Visits the Americas” by John Scott. These paintings are published in Church manuals and magazines and approved by Church leaders for use in meetinghouses. (John Scott’s painting hangs in the high council room in my stake center. I confess that I’ve never felt especially turned on when looking at it during stake meetings.)

Strictly speaking, the “Chichen Itza-style temples” in Latter-day Saint depictions of the Book of Mormon are anachronistic. The city of Chichen Itza didn’t become prominent until after 600 A.D., and the Temple of Kukulcán—the building with “multiple steps with a little square box at the top”—didn’t reach its final form until after 900 A.D., hundreds of years after the fall of the Nephite civilization near the end of the 4th century. Art often uses anachronistic elements. (For example, consider the Italian Renaissance setting of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.) The use of Mayan-style architecture in Book of Mormon paintings is intended to represent a Mesoamerican setting without actually claiming that the Mayans were the people of the Book of Mormon. (They weren’t.) Hocking is protesting the use of artistic license; no one who knows Mesoamerican history is arguing that the Temple of Kukulcán was a Nephite temple.

But Hocking’s claim that Church artwork is “visually pornographic” goes well beyond mere disagreement over artistic style. He’s implicitly accusing Church leaders, including the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve, of defiling Latter-day Saint temples and meetinghouses because they’ve approved artwork for them that depicts the Savior in a setting that Hocking disagrees with.

How captivated does he have to be with his own theories to claim that Church artwork is pornographic? It’s beyond bizarre, bordering on obsessive madness.

(Also, his claim that the Nephites “never built out of stone” is manifestly false. Alma 48:8 tells us that they built “walls of stone” as defenses against Lamanite attacks. No passage in the Book of Mormon so much as implies that they didn’t use stone in constructing buildings and other structures.)

—Peter Pan
 

A curious comment from David Hocking

 
Editor’s note: On June 20, 2021, David Hocking left a comment clarifying his statement that I critiqued in this post. In fairness to him, please be sure to read his response.

As of right now (April 16, 2020), Jonathan Neville’s flagship site, Moroni’s America, is down for some unknown reason. Before it went dark, David Hocking left a comment on Neville’s blog post that argues the Church’s missionary effort should be retooled to be center on Heartlander dogma.

(The post was here. A copy of it is still up at Neville’s Book of Mormon Consensus blog.)

David Hocking’s professional background is in sales and marketing in the biotechnology industry. He recently founded BeaconLight Books, which has published two books that Hocking himself has edited: The Heartland Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon and an edition of the Book of Jasher, a sixteenth-century Hebrew midrash written in Italy or Spain that some Latter-day Saints (including Hocking) mistakenly believe is an ancient document.

Anyway, here’s the comment Hocking left on Meldrum’s blog post about missionary work and declining convert baptisms as a percentage of total worldwide members:

Hocking’s comment is curious—and perhaps revealing—for several reasons:

First, it demonstrates there are Heartlanders who believe—contrary to Neville’s persistent claim—that non-belief in the New York Cumorah is not the only supposed obstacle to convert baptisms. (In fact, Hocking comes much closer to identifying actual obstacles to conversion than Neville ever has.)

But notice that Hocking also seems to be arguing that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should never have practiced polygamy or made the Word of Wisdom a requirement for baptism and full fellowship. His statement implies that generations of Church leaders, including the current ones, were and are wrong about these doctrines.

So, if I’m reading Hocking right (and I think I am), the Church hasn’t just gone astray by not affirming the New York Cumorah and teaching that Joseph Smith used a seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon—it’s also off the rails because of D&C 132 and elevating D&C 89 to a commandment.

Heartlanders naturally lean toward what Cassandra Hedelius called “Mormon gnosticism.” More specifically, polygamy and the-Word-of-Wisdom-as-commandment are two major criticisms of the Church made by ex-Latter-day Saint apostate cult leader Denver Snuffer.

Based on his comment, above, Hocking worryingly sounds like a nascent Snufferite. As I’ve written before, the Heartland hoax is a “gateway drug” into apostate cults like Snuffer’s.

So it seems that Heartlanderism has taken one more small step toward declaring the Church to be in apostasy and to becoming its own offshoot group.

—Peter Pan

Cumorah and the Bicentennial Proclamation to the World

This weekend’s 190th Annual General Conference of the Church was deeply moving and inspirational. My family and I watched all five sessions, and we rejoiced in the knowledge that we have a living prophet whom the Lord has sustained well into his ninth decade so that He might carry out His divine purposes. The announcement of temples to be constructed in Dubai and Shanghai was especially amazing; the restored gospel is truly going forth across the world!

That makes writing this blog post more difficult, because I don’t want to detract from the spiritual “high” that I—and I’m sure many of you—are still riding. But there’s an important point to be made, and I must make it. The point is this:

At the Sunday morning session of the conference, the First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a proclamation to the world. The Church’s website explains:

Titled “The Restoration of the Fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: A Bicentennial Proclamation to the World,” this document outlines core Latter-day Saint beliefs. These include the supremacy of Jesus Christ in salvation, the divinity of Joseph Smith’s revelations and the Book of Mormon, the unique mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the ongoing nature of the Restoration that began with Joseph Smith’s First Vision of Deity in 1820. The proclamation invites people everywhere to know for themselves that God speaks and that this Restoration of truth is occurring to help them prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

For years now, Jonathan Neville has been publishing in print and online his argument that the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon is the same hill in western New York where Moroni buried the gold plates and Joseph Smith unearthed them. This is a core doctrine for him—the only one, he asserts, that aligns with “the teachings of the prophets.”

On the day before this April’s General Conference began, Neville even published a blog post with his thoughts on how the Church should “retool the missionary program” in a way that “happens to corroborate the prophets” instead of “repudiat[ing] the prophets.” (The latter is, by implication, what he believes the current missionary program does.) He believes that his approach will “generate more interest and bring more people to Christ” by affirming as “a definite fact that Cumorah, the scene of the final battles, was in New York.”

This doctrine is of vital importance to Jonathan Neville and to his fellow travelers in the Heartland movement, including Rod Meldrum, Wayne May, Rian Nelson, and David Hocking. It is the basis behind everything they publish, everything they offer for sale, and every conference they hold. One of Rod Meldrum’s series of video lectures is titled “Joseph Knew,” meaning that Joseph Smith knew, by revelation, that the Book of Mormon took place within the boundaries of the modern United States.

In their proclamation to the world, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had a singular opportunity to affirm that what Jonathan Neville and his associates teach is true. So how did they describe the role of the Book of Mormon in the restoration of the gospel?

We further witness that Joseph Smith was given the gift and power of God to translate an ancient record: the Book of Mormon—Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Pages of this sacred text include an account of the personal ministry of Jesus Christ among people in the Western Hemisphere soon after His Resurrection. It teaches of life’s purpose and explains the doctrine of Christ, which is central to that purpose. As a companion scripture to the Bible, the Book of Mormon testifies that all human beings are sons and daughters of a loving Father in Heaven, that He has a divine plan for our lives, and that His Son, Jesus Christ, speaks today as well as in days of old.

Jonathan Neville and other Heartlanders had an opportunity to have living prophets and apostles back up their assertions. And yet they got nothing—the word Cumorah isn’t even mentioned in the proclamation, and, instead of affirming that the people of the Book of Mormon lived in the area of the United States, the First Presidency and the Twelve simply stated that they lived “in the Western Hemisphere.”

Neville may be asking himself, “Why don’t the living prophets and apostles declare the teachings of the prophets and the apostles?”

Perhaps he has his own way of resolving his cognitive dissonance on this matter. Perhaps his resolution even explains how the living prophet, Russell M. Nelson, can publicly teach the saints that the peoples of the Book of Mormon lived in Central and South America, and how Jesus ministered to the people of South America. Perhaps his resolution also explains how living apostles, including President M. Russell Ballard, Elder Quentin L. Cook, and Elder D. Todd Christofferson can publicly teach that Joseph Smith used a seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon (something Neville emphatically rejects).

This historic conference is a unique opportunity for Jonathan Neville, Rod Meldrum, and their compatriots to reassess their beliefs in the light of the bicentennial proclamation and the public teachings of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. It’s not too late for them to align themselves with the teachings of the prophets and the apostles.

—Peter Pan