Those who live in glass houses, pt. 16

(Part sixteen of a series.)

On August 24, 2022, Jonathan Neville wrote:

Some people wonder why I discuss SITH on this page which originated as a discussion about M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory). One reason is that both theories share the claim that Joseph and Oliver were unreliable speculators who misled the Church. M2C teaches that Joseph and Oliver misled everyone about Cumorah. SITH teaches that they misled everyone about the translation.

“SITH teaches that [Joseph and Oliver] misled everyone about the translation.”

This, from the man who claims that Joseph Smith merely pretended to translate when he used a seer stone in front of other people as a “demonstration” that all who observed him believed to be the actual process of translation.

This, from the man who claims that Joseph pretended to translate the Isaiah portions of the Book of Mormon, but instead he memorized Isaiah from the King James Bible and recited it back to his scribes.

As I said in my previous “glass houses” post, it takes true audacity—or cluelessness, or both—for a man like Jonathan Neville to accuse fellow Latter-day Saints of doing precisely what he himself does on nearly a daily basis.

—Peter Pan
 

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 15

(Part fifteen of a series.)

On July 11, 2022, Jonathan Neville wrote:

As I’ll show in upcoming posts, the critics of the Church are having a field day with the “stone-in-the-hat” theory (SITH). It’s astonishing to see our so-called “apologists” make every effort to support SITH by trying to find “evidence” in the historical record that SITH has been taught by Church leaders in the past.

First of all, critics of the Church have been “having a field day” since 1829 by mocking and deriding the Saints for things they believe which are true. Just because some critics today think that translating a sacred record from a stone placed into a hat is preposterous doesn’t make it any less true. Our reaction to them—and to Jonathan Neville—should be the one given by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf: “Not long ago, the Church published photos and background information on seer stones. People have asked me, ‘Do you really believe that Joseph Smith translated with seer stones? How would something like this be possible?’ And I answer, ‘Yes! That is exactly what I believe.’ This was done as Joseph said: by the gift and power of God.”

Secondly, the evidence (a word that I won’t use in scare quotes as Neville did) that leaders of the Church have taught that Joseph Smith translated from stone that he placed into his hat is overwhelming, and Jonathan Neville’s feeble attempts to hand-wave this evidence away doesn’t make it any less true. As this blog has demonstrated, Church leaders who have publicly and privately taught that Joseph Smith used a seer stone include President George Q. Cannon, President Wilford Woodruff, and Elder B. H. Roberts, as well as respected, faithful eyewitnesses to the translation like Joseph Knight Sr. Modern prophets and apostles have continued to teach this, including President Russell M. Nelson, President M. Russell Ballard, Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Elder D. Todd Christofferson, Elder Quinten L. Cook, and Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr.

The only thing that’s “astonishing” is Jonathan Neville’s repeated, continual attempts to disregard the many testimonies and witnesses of prophets and apostles, past and present, who have taught what what he rejects.

But where Neville really goes off the rails in his most recent blog post is when he writes (emphasis in the original):

The SITH scholars insist that Joseph didn't even use the plates but merely read words that appeared on the stone he found in a well. E.g., from BYU Studies: “when Joseph “translated,” he was rarely looking at the characters on the plates, which were usually either on the table covered in cloth or hidden elsewhere in the house or vicinity.” Essentially, these scholars claim that Joseph merely pretended to translate.

“Merely pretended to translate.”

This, from the man who claims that Joseph merely pretended to translate when he used a seer stone in front of other people as a “demonstration” that all who observed him believed to be the actual process of translation.

This, from the man who claims that Joseph pretended to translate the Isaiah portions of the Book of Mormon, but instead he memorized Isaiah from the King James Bible and recited it back to his scribes.

It takes true audacity—or cluelessness, or both—for a man like Jonathan Neville to accuse fellow Latter-day Saints of doing precisely what he himself does on nearly a daily basis.

—Peter Pan
 

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 14

(Part fourteen of a series.)

On November 30, 2021, Jonathan Neville shared some of his favorite websites and apps for studying the scriptures.

Among the sites he likes are the Joseph Smith Papers and the Church History Catalog. He also likes the WordCruncher app for desktop computers and the Church’s Gospel Library app for desktops and smartphones.

He calls the Scripture Notes website (which has free and paid versions) “awesome” and says it’s “the best scripture study tool out there.”

He then immediately pivots to this spiteful cheap shot:

The worst scripture app, IMO [in my opinion], is ScripturePlus by Book of Mormon Central. That app heavily pushes their M2C agenda with their Mayan logo and content that imposes their ideology on users. It’s unbelievably dogmatic and the way they are trying to lure Latter-day Saints away from the Gospel Library is inexcusable, IMO.”

This is completely bizarre, since, in the preceding paragraph, he recommended Scripture Notes, which apparently isn’t “trying to lure Latter-day Saints away from the Gospel Library,” even though it uses exactly the same approach as ScripturePlus—only with a paid version, which ScripturePlus doesn’t have.

This is not the first time that Neville has claimed that ScripturePlus “competes with the Church’s own Gospel Library” or is trying to “entice Church members away from the Gospel Library.” As I’ve asked before, what does Neville believe that the Heartland Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon is doing? Would he admit that their expensive volume is “competing with” or “enticing members away from” scriptures published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I suspect not.

This is simply yet another example of the double standard Jonathan Neville frequently employs when he criticizes “M2C scholars.”

—Peter Pan
 

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 13

(Part thirteen of a series.)

Of all of Jonathan Neville’s trite expressions, perhaps his favorite is the term “M2C citation cartel.”

He continually employs this phrase to describe those who are affiliated with “FARMS, BYU Studies, the Interpreter, FairMormon/FairLDS, Meridian Magazine, and Book of Mormon Central [who] promote and reinforce M2C,” the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon. He calls these people “fine scholars, faithful Church members, nice people, etc.,” while simultaneously accusing these fine, faithful, nice people of destroying faith in the Book of Mormon, modern prophets, and the gospel and being complicit in the loss of testimonies among the youth of the Church.

From time to time, Neville feels compelled to defend his use of the term “citation cartel.” In his latest apologia, he tells us:

Here’s one way to identify a citation cartel:

In our experience, a citation cartel differs from the ordinary in that it usually involves one or more or all of the following:

i) a small number, often just two or three, journals are involved;

ii) similarly, the diversity of authors involved is small, i.e., smaller as one would expect for a healthy research community;

iii) often there is a large overlap of editors in the journals that sustain a particular cartel.

The M2C citation cartel easily satisfies these criteria.

Dear Brother Neville: If that three-point criteria “easily” describes the “M2C citation cartel,” what does it say about the incestuous group of pseudoscholars, self-taught amateurs, self-published authors, doomsday preppers, energy healers, and other cranks that make up the Heartland citation cartel?

—Peter Pan
 

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 12

(Part twelve of a series.)

Netflix recently debuted their three-part documentary series, “Murder Among the Mormons,” about forgerer and murderer Mark Hofmann.

Ever eager to use a current event as a cudgel with which to attack his foes, in a March 10, 2021, blog post, Jonathan Neville once again compared Mark Hofmann to scholars who disagree with the “Heartland” theory of the Book of Mormon:

Erasing Church history for ideological reasons, the way our Church historians and our M2C* citation cartel does, is just as destructive to the pillar of social trust as Hoffman’s [sic] effort to create new history through forged documents.

Censoring actual history is the mirror image of forging historical documents.

Both produce a distorted understanding of history that undermines social trust. They just take different routes to get there.

Since Neville thinks it’s okay to compare those with whom he disagrees to a sociopathic serial killer, perhaps this is a reasonable time to ask:

Which side of the Heartland/“M2C” debate promotes forgeries and pseudo-history for money?

—Peter Pan
 
* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.
 

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 11

(Part eleven of a series.)

Recently, the Interpreter Foundation launched WitnessesOfTheBookOfMormon.org, a website dedicated to sharing and defending the testimonies of the Three and Eight Witnesses.

Jonathan Neville—who simply cannot stand anything the Interpreter Foundation does—complained about their new website on one of his blogs:

This new web page is another storefront in the Potemkin village of the Interpreter, FairMormon, Book of Mormon Central, Evidence Central, Meridian Magazine, BYU Studies, BMAF, etc. It’s all the same people behind the scenes. Somehow, they seem to actually believe that if they put up enough different-looking store fronts, they can convince Church members to accept M2C and SITH.

Keep in mind that this was written by a man who has twenty-eight blogs and websites (only recently pared down from as many as seventy-three) and who cross-posts his own writings on these various blogs on his main website, MoronisAmerica.com.

For Jonathan Neville, of all people, to complain about “Potemkin villages” and “different-looking store fronts” is truly the Everest summit of audacity and chutzpah!

—Peter Pan

(P.S: WitnessesOfTheBookOfMormon.org is a terrific website that I warmly recommend.)

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 10

(Part ten of a series.)

In his latest broadside against any and all things connected to Book of Mormon Central, this week Jonathan Neville published a petty attack on their new website, Evidence Central, a site that defends the historicity of Book of Mormon and the truth of restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

This statement from Neville’s latest hit piece is deeply ironic in at least two ways. (The bold formatting is Neville’s.)

A moment’s reflection may remind us that the first principle of the gospel is faith, specifically faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Next is repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost.

“Reliance on evidence” doesn’t make the list. Actually, the Articles of Faith don’t mention or imply that “reliance on evidence” has anything to do with the gospel. They are Articles of Faith, not Articles of Evidence.

People can believe whatever they want, but it does no one any good to simply censor the teachings of the prophets while promoting scholarly theories as “evidence.”…

[Evidence Central offers] a restatement of scholarly theories and interpretations, focused on promoting the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory and the stone-in-the-hat (SITH) theory, both of which directly contradict what Joseph and Oliver taught.

Evidence Central is an elaborate effort to indoctrinate Latter-day Saints to accept the theories of scholars, while rejecting the teachings of the prophets on these topics.

First, it’s quite bold of Neville to rail against “reliance on evidence” and appeal to the Fourth Article of Faith when he himself has spoken repeatedly at Rodney Meldrum’s regular conferences that are held under the name “Book of Mormon Evidence.” Meldrum’s site sells Neville’s books along with DVDs of his presentations at these conferences.

So, Neville doesn’t appear to be opposed to evidence, per se, only to evidence that “rejects the teachings of the prophets” on the location of the hill Cumorah and how Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon.

Neville, of course, doesn’t bother to address the inconvenient fact that prominent Church leaders have questioned—or at least have been hesitant to be definitive about—the “one Cumorah” idea. These leaders include President Anthony W. Ivins, Elder John A. Widtsoe, and President Harold B. Lee (see here and here.)

Neville also continues to falsely assert that the claim that Joseph Smith used a seer stone, in addition to the Urim and Thummim, to translate the Book of Mormon “rejects the teachings of the prophets,” while simultaneously ignoring that the living prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, has repeatedly taught that Joseph used to seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon.

If anyone should be concerned about using evidence to contradict prophetic teachings, it’s Jonathan Neville, not Evidence Central.

—Peter Pan

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 9

(Part nine of a series.)

Jonathan Neville invites us to contemplate:

Imagine how much stronger the Church would be, and how much more united Latter-day Saints would be, if our scholars decided to support and corroborate the prophets on such basic topics as the truthfulness of the scriptures, the translation of the Book of Mormon and the New York Cumorah.

This, coming from the man who doesn’t support President Russell M. Nelson, the living prophet, on such a basic topic as the translation of the Book of Mormon.

This, coming from the man whose pet theory about the identity of the angel who appeared to Mary Whitmer contradicts the public teaching of Elder Gerrit W. Gong in October 2020 General Conference.

This, coming from the man who has implied that prophets, seers, and revelators who speak in General Conference have strayed from teaching doctrinal and historical truths since 2008.

This, coming from the man who apparently believes that the members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are dupes who don’t understand supposedly basic doctrines of the Restoration.

Happy 2021, everyone! It sadly appears that we’re in for another year of Jonathan Neville rejecting the teachings of the prophets.

—Peter Pan

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 8

(Part eight of a series.)

Jonathan Neville writes:

In Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, there are zero accounts of people building massive stone temple, pyramids, or other structures. Yet the M2C* citation cartel has retranslated the text to describe these and other features of Mayan culture.

Setting aside his misrepresentations of Mesoamericanist arguments for a moment, Neville is in no position to criticize “M2C” Book of Mormon believers on this matter when his own writings on the Book of Mormon are filled with conjecture and downright fantasy about the Nephites and Lamanites.

Here are just a few examples from his book Moroni’s America. (Page numbers here refer to the Moroni’s America – Maps Edition volume he edited.)

Jonathan Neville’s fantasy map of the Book of Mormon

• According to Neville, the term “wilderness” means “river,” and the “narrow strip of wilderness” was “a water barrier that acted as a border—effectively a fence.” (pp. 2, 9)
• According to Neville, the Book of Mormon’s references to the “narrow pass,” “narrow passage,” “narrow neck,” “narrow neck of land,” and “small neck of land” were not references to a single, narrow passage in a narrow neck of land, but five different passes, passages, and necks spread out across a distance of nearly 500 miles. (p. 4)
• According to Neville, the sea west was actually two seas, one south of Nephite lands (the Mississippi River delta) and one northeast of Nephite lands (Lake Michigan). (pp. 12–13)
• According to Neville, the narrow neck between the land Bountiful and the land of Desolation was a passage between the Grand Kankakee Marsh and the Great Black Swamp. Neither the terms marsh nor swamp appear anywhere in the Book of Mormon. (p. 16)
• According to Neville, Lehi’s prophecy that the Lord “will take away from [the descendants of the Lamanites] the lands of their possessions, and he will cause them to be scattered and smitten” (2 Nephi 1:10–11) was fulfilled “at the beginning of the 1830s, [when] nearly 125,000 Native Americans” were forced the by federal government of the United States to relocate to modern-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. (p. 29–30) Neville ignores the important context of Lehi’s prophecy, written by Nephi in the preceding chapter: “The Lord God will raise up a mighty nation among the Gentiles, yea, even upon the face of this land; and by them shall our seed be scattered. And after our seed is scattered the Lord God will proceed to do a marvelous work among the Gentiles, which shall be of great worth unto our seed.” (1 Nephi 22:7–8; emphasis added). Nephi informs us that the scattering of the descendants of the Lamanites will take place before the Lord’s “marvelous work” in restoring the gospel to the earth—in other words, prior to the 1830s. Lehi’s prophecy, therefore, cannot refer to the Trail of Tears.
• According to Neville, the peoples of the Book of Mormon used rivers (which are wildernesses?) to travel extensively throughout their lands. (pp. 37, 38, 40, 88, 89) There is not a single account in the Book of Mormon of anyone traveling by boat using rivers.
• According to Neville, Hagoth the shipbuilder sailed his “exceedingly large ship” (Alma 63:5) between the Great Lakes and eventually out the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean. (p. 73) Before the modern invention of locks, neither the rivers and rapids that connect the Great Lakes nor the St. Lawrence River could not be navigated by boats of any size.
• According to Neville, the Nephites fortified Bountiful (Helaman 4:7) by building a massive earth-and-wood wall from Lake Michigan, down into southern Ohio,and then up to western New York. (p. 75) This wall would have been nearly 600 miles long. Needless to say, there is absolutely zero archaeological evidence of such an enormous structure.
• According to Neville, the Nephites had “lambs, sheep, [and] rams,” which they sacrificied according to the law of Moses. (p. 85) Sheep—domesticated or wild—did not exist anciently in the eastern part of North America; they were introduced to the continent by the Spaniards. Sheep are mentioned twenty-five times in the Book of Mormon, all but once in a metaphorical context. The single passage that refers to the existence of sheep was during Jaredite times (Ether 9:18); the Nephites are never described as possessing sheep, nor using them for sacrifice.

Despite these and many other inaccuracies in Neville’s Book of Mormon claims, he feels free to criticize believers in a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon for things they never claimed in the first place.

Glass houses, indeed.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 7

(Part seven of a series.)

This is the masthead of BookOfMormonCentralAmerica.com, one of Jonathan Neville’s seventy-one blogs.

Tell me if you can’t see the unintentional irony here:

Didn’t catch it? Permit me to emphasize it for you:

Sure thing, Brother Neville: Book of Mormon Central is obsessed, and you aren’t.

That he, unironically and with a straight face, would accuse anyone of being “single-minded” and “contradict[ing] the Church’s policy of neutrality” on geography—a policy that he himself has tried to downplay and dismiss over 120 times—would be astounding were it not so utterly routine for him.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 6

(Part six of a series.)

As an opponent of all things “M2C,”* Jonathan Neville does not care for the research and conclusions of Kirk Magleby, the executive director of Book of Mormon Central who has spent decades doing on-site research on connections between the Book of Mormon and Mesoamerica. Since 2011, Magleby has published nearly 350 posts on his blog, “Book of Mormon Resources,” that set forth his conclusions about specific sites in southern Mexico and Guatemala that may correspond to Book of Mormon locations.

Neville is, of course, free to disagree with Magleby, and he did so in a May 21, 2020, blog post that criticizes Magleby’s assertion that the description of Cumorah being “among many waters” (Mosiah 8:8) means that it was surrounded by bodies of salt water.

Many of Neville’s criticisms of Magleby’s claim are legitimate and fair. I, myself, am not overly convinced by Magleby’s arguments on the meaning of “among many waters,” and I think Neville brings up some reasonable questions to which Magleby should respond.

What is less honest, however, is Neville’s characterization of those who hold a Mesoamerican view of Book of Mormon geography and the way they interpret words and phrases used in the book. Regarding Magleby’s interpretation of the word surrounded, Neville writes:

This is the type of analysis we find throughout the M2C literature. They change definitions and expect everyone to salute and agree. But just because the fine young scholars they hire talk themselves into buying off on this approach doesn’t mean anyone else has to.

In M2C-speak, “Surrounded” doesn’t mean encircled, but only sort of bordering on two sides.
In M2C-speak, a “horse” is really a “tapir.”
In M2C-speak, “wood and cement” really means “cut stone and cement”
In M2C-speak, “tower” is really a “massive stone pyramid.”
In M2C-speak, “translate” really means “read words off a seer stone that were put there by someone from the 16th century.”
And so forth.
And lest we forget, in M2C-speak, “north” means “west” and “south” means “east.”

Some of the points in Neville’s list are distortions of Mesoamericanists’ arguments, and others (such as Joseph Smith’s use of a seer stone) have nothing to do with “M2C” at all. But what’s worse is that it’s acutely hypocritical of Neville to roll his eyes and scoff at Mesoamericanists’ interpretations of words when he himself is at least as guilty of doing exactly the same thing.

Consider the following proposed Book of Mormon map from Neville’s book, Moroni’s America – Maps Edition:

If Neville is going to take his “M2C” opponents to task for creative interpretations of words, then Neville himself should also have to explain his own peculiar definitions:

• In Neville-speak, “sea west” really means two different seas, one in the north and one in the south, both of which are east of the Nephite capital city of Zarahemla.
• In Neville-speak, “sea east” really means two different seas, one to the north and one to the south.
• In Neville-speak, “sea south” really means the sea that’s north of almost all Book of Mormon lands.
• In Neville-speak, “wilderness” really means river (as we’ve discussed before).
• In Neville-speak, “on the west…in the place of their fathers’ first inheritance” (where Lehi’s family landed) really means on the south of all other Book of Mormon lands, on the Gulf of Mexico.
• In Neville-speak, “land northward” (where Cumorah was) really means land eastward, for, according to Neville’s map, Cumorah is 750 miles nearly due east (78°) from Zarahemla.

Neville’s proposed Book of Mormon is case study in distorting the facts to fit a predetermined conclusion. Neville is as guilty or more of doing everything that he accuses “M2C scholars” of doing.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 5

(Part five of a series.)

Jonathan Neville really doesn’t like BYU’s Virtual Book of Mormon map. A Google search I ran today on MoronisAmerica.com, his flagship website, indicates that he’s referred to it as BYU’s “fantasy map” in 131 separate articles on that site.

In a blog post last month, Neville criticized an article in the fall 2019 issue of BYU Religious Education Review about the Virtual Book of Mormon map. (Neville’s blog post incorrectly states it was in the winter 2019 issue.) The article, “Visualizing the People, Places, and Plates of the Book of Mormon,” was written by Tyler J. Griffin, an associate professor of ancient scripture at BYU and co-founder of BYU Virtual Scriptures Group. (He’s listed as a member of the team that created the virtual map.)

Neville framed his blog in light of the Church’s Gospel Topics essay on Book of Mormon geography. He quoted the essay’s counsel that “all parties should strive to avoid contention” on matters of Book of Mormon geography and then wrote:

The connotation of “contention” in that statement is surely “heated disagreement.” This is wisdom because some people have an emotional, intellectual, or financial interest in a particular position that clouds their judgment and their ability think critically.

Neville wrote that statement without a shred of self-awareness. Remember, this is Jonathan Neville, the man who maintains 67 blogs that he uses almost exclusively to attack the Mesoamerican theory of Book of Mormon geography and those who advocate for it. He claims those who believe in what he calls “M2C”* are “rejecting the teachings of the prophets” and that there is a massive conspiracy within Church administration to censor anything that is contrary to “M2C,” a conspiracy that has even fooled the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. And he has the gall to claim that other people have interests that cloud their judgments and make them unable to think critically?

Glass houses, indeed.

Turning to his assessment of Griffin’s article, let’s look at an example of how Neville misreads Book of Mormon geography while criticizing others for supposedly doing the same thing. In his article, Griffin explains:

Attempts to visually represent geographical features in the Book of Mormon will naturally lead to judgments that may not always match other interpretations of the same passages. For example, we represent wilderness references in the book as mountains on our map. The wildernesses could have just as easily been unclaimed land, swampland, jungle, desert, or any combination of these or other natural features. It is intended that readers will be able to take our internal map and stretch it, compress it, and modify it to fit whatever model they prefer for their own study purposes.

Neville, however, disagrees with Griffin’s decision to represent wilderness ares in the Book of Mormon as mountains. He writes:

Wilderness as “mountains” is the specific M2C interpretation from John Sorenson, Book of Mormon Central, and other M2C proponents.

I once had well-known M2C scholars tell me the Book of Mormon refers to “a narrow strip of mountainous wilderness.” I asked them to show me the passage in the text. Of course, they couldn’t. They were referring to Alma 22, but they had read John Sorenson’s version so many times they thought the text actually said that.…

This axiomatic statement leads us to ask, then why does the fantasy map depict the wilderness as mountains? The answer is simple: the creators and proponents of this map work with Book of Mormon Central and they’re promoting the specific M2C interpretation.

Had they wanted to, the map’s creators could have portrayed a generic “wilderness” instead of depicting and specifying mountains. However, the M2C interpretation requires mountains to work, so that’s what this fantasy map shows.

Firstly, I must point out to our readers that Jonathan Neville interprets “wilderness” in the Book of Mormon to mean rivers. His Heartland interpretation of the text requires that wildernesses be rivers, so that’s what his fantasy map shows:

Detail from Jonathan Neville’s book, Moroni’s America – Maps Edition, map 8, “Necks, Lines, Passes, Strips, and the Narrow Neck of Land.” (Click to see the whole map.)

As Joe Anderson notes on pages 28–30 of his review of Neville’s book, Moroni’s America, the Book of Mormon never refers to wilderness as a river. Neville invented that definition because it was the only way he could get the geography of the Book of Mormon to fit into the American Midwest. Yet, in his blog post, Neville has the temerity to criticize Griffin for displaying wilderness as mountains!

There are, in fact, good reasons to believe that the narrow strip of wilderness that separated the Nephite and Lamanite lands was composed mostly of mountains. (And those reasons go much deeper than “promoting M2C” or being a fan of Book of Mormon Central.) Here’s the short version:

• The land of Nephi, which was controlled by the Lamanites from the time of King Mosiah¹ onward, was higher in elevation than the land of Zarahemla where the Nephites lived. Whenever one traveled from the land of Nephi to the land of Zarahemla, one went down, while those traveling from Zarahemla to Nephi are described as going up. The Book of Mormon is consistent throughout its text on this point. (See Mosiah 7:2, 4; 9:3; 20:7; 28:1, 5; 29:3; Alma 17:8; 20:2; 24:20; 26:23; 27:5; 29:14; 51:11; 57:15-16, 28, 30; Helaman 1:17.)
• After the death of Kishkumen, Gadianton “feared lest that he should be destroyed; therefore he caused that his band should follow him. And they took their flight out of the land, by a secret way, into the wilderness.” (Helaman 2:11) It was from this wilderness hideout that the Gadianton band of robbers staged hit-and-run attacks against the Nephites and the Lamanites, compelling both groups to take up arms against them (Helaman 6:18; 3 Nephi 2:11–12). So it seems almost certain that the “wilderness” in which Gandiantons lived was the narrow strip of wilderness between the land of Zarahemla and the land of Nephi—it’s the only wilderness that had easy access to both lands.
• The text of the Book of Mormon describes the wilderness where the Gandiantons lived in secret and could retreat to safety from the armies of the Nephites and Lamanites as mountains (Helaman 11:25, 28, 31; 3 Nephi 1:27; 2:17; 3:17, 20; 4:1–3, 13).
• Therefore the narrow strip of wilderness was mountainous, just as the Virtual Book of Mormon map portrays it.

Now, it’s entirely possible to make an argument that the narrow strip of wilderness wasn’t mountainous, but that would require one to actually use the text of the Book of Mormon in a coherent and reasonable manner. Neville has not done this. Instead, he’s simply criticized Griffin for inferring something that the Book of Mormon doesn’t directly say, while instead offering his own forced, absurd wilderness = river interpretation.

If this were the only time that Neville employed such a double standard, this blog wouldn’t exist. Sadly, it’s par for the course for Neville, and so Captain Hook and I are forced to continue to point out to unsuspecting Latter-day Saints the the fraudulent methods he uses to sell the Heartland hoax to unsuspecting Latter-day Saints.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 4

(Part four of an ad hoc series. See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Jonathan Neville clearly loves the Book of Mormon and its message. What’s puzzling to me is that, with all the time and effort he commits to blogging, he spends virtually none of it advocating for what he finds positive about the Book of Mormon and almost all of his time disputing what he claims are the arguments of “M2C.”*

In other words, he could use his 67 blogs to promote what is good and beautiful and interesting about the Book of Mormon. Instead he uses his time to tilt at windmills and slay imaginary giants.

This week Neville blogged about “M2C sophistry,” taking potshots at Brant Gardner and Gardner’s forthcoming book, Labor Diligently to Write: The Ancient Making of a Modern Scripture, without mentioning either of them by name. Gardner’s book isn’t about Book of Mormon geography, but Neville took the opportunity to criticize Gardner for the merest mention of connections between Book of Mormon and Mesoamerican cultures:

Today’s topic…involves yet another Interpreter article, this one an excerpt from a book.

The author is a well-known M2C proponent, as you will see. I like much of his work, but his obsession with M2C undermines his objectivity and even credibility, IMO [in my opinion].

Neville’s opinion that Gardner has an “obsession with M2C” gave me a good chuckle. If anyone is obsessed with “M2C,” it’s Neville, who, as I previously mentioned, spends all his blogging time stating and restating the same shallow objections to the Mesoamerican theory of Book of Mormon geography.

Likewise, it’s stunning to see Neville criticize Gardner’s “objectivity and credibility,” when Neville possesses neither of those traits. Regarding objectivity, Neville’s constant, repeated misrepresentations of views he disagrees with have been cataloged on this blog. And if credibility is measured by how and where one’s arguments have been published, then Neville and his catalog of CreateSpace self-published books (which include the intriguingly titled Goop Calder and the Haunted Cowboy Robots) hasn’t got a leg to stand on compared to Gardner’s extensive list of publications on many Book of Mormon subjects, including the over 4,600 pages he’s written and published through Gred Kofford Books, which have received awards from the Association for Mormon Letters.

But Neville doesn’t measure credibility by how robust an author’s arguments are; rather, he judges them credible if they accept Neville’s views on the Book of Mormon and Church history (which Neville, of course, claims align with the prophets’ views).

Neville continues:

For example, in this chapter, the author [i.e., Gardner] writes, “Books have been written to examine the geography and history described in the Book of Mormon. This isn’t one of those books.” But as a dedicated M2C advocate, he inserts M2C anyway. In fact, starting on page 39 he delves into one of the “correspondences” that, IMO, are pure bias confirmation; i.e., “it is important to note that this method of recording annalistic history was part of the cultures of Mesoamerica, which I consider the most plausible location of the Book of Mormon events. Perhaps the change to the way time was recorded was influenced by the introduction of the long count among the Maya.” He spends a few pages comparing Mayan annals to the Book of Mormon text.

My reaction to such “correspondences” is to consider whether they have any relevance or are merely examples of Loserthink bias confirmation and pattern recognition.

Neville being Neville, he can’t help but shove anything he disagrees with into the paradigm of his new favorite book, Scott Adams’s Loserthink. The title is so pejoratively delicious that he’s taken to using it as a cudgel with which to beat “M2C” and its proponents.

It’s at this point that Neville falls into a bottomless pit of the double standard:

Annals are ubiquitous on human history. The history of China includes “The Basic Annals” dating to around 2853 B.C. Ancient Roman and Christian annals were well known by the time Joseph translated the Book of Mormon, as were the Chaldean annals, the Phoenician annals, and others. Josephus discussed the annals of the Tyrians.

It may be more difficult to find an ancient civilization that did not keep annals than to find one that did. The Nephites and the Mayans were no exception, but that doesn’t make the Nephites Mayans.

Here we see Neville again misrepresenting his opponents: Gardner didn’t claim that the keeping of annals proves that the Nephites were Mayans. Rather, he claimed that “annalistic history was part of the cultures of Mesoamerica,” which means it was compatible with Nephite culture.

Do you know which civilization didn’t keep annals, Brother Neville? The Hopewell Indians—the people you and your Heartlander colleagues claim were the Nephites of the Book of Mormon.

Neville criticizes Gardner for what Neville considers to be a meaningless correspondence, yet Neville’s own views don’t even have such a correspondence, meaningless or not. The peoples of the Book of Mormon were diligent in keeping records, as they had been commanded to by the Lord; meanwhile, the Hopewell culture left no written works of any kind or even evidence that they had writing. In fact, the only pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas that left behind any known writings were in Mesoamerica.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 3

(Part three in what appears to becoming a series. See Part 1 and Part 2.)

On September 15, 2019, Jonathan Neville again attacked Daniel Peterson’s publication, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:

As we’ve seen in several examples on this blog, so-called “peer review” for The Interpreter [sic] is little more than “peer approval.” Otherwise the obvious errors of fact and logic that we’ve observed would not have gotten through to publication.

It take shipping container full of chutzpah for Neville to make this claim, considering the overwhelming errors in fact, logic, exegesis, history, science, and even grammar, spelling, and punctuation that are found in his own publications.

Notable examples of this include his blogs (this site has now published 114 responses to what he’s written online), his book Moroni’s America – Maps Edition (which is full of spelling errors and fantastic leaps of logic), and his coauthored Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon (which Stephen O. Smoot exposed as being full of “forgeries, unprovenanced artifacts, and pseudo-archaeology; misrepresentations of historical sources; parallelomania; unsubstantiated claims and arguments; [and] the abuse of DNA science”).

If you want to find abundant examples of “peer approval,” look no further than the publications produced by Neville and his colleagues in the Heartland Book of Mormon movement. Neither he nor anyone else involved in spreading that hoax have any formal training in the subjects on which they expound, and it shows in the numerous, continual errors in their materials.

Jonathan Neville’s house, probably.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.

Those who live in glass houses, pt. 2

(Part two in what may become a series. See Part 1.)

Jonathan Neville has an entire blog—it’s just one of the sixty-six blogs he currently maintains—dedicated to criticizing publications by The Interpreter Foundation. (And Neville complains that Daniel Peterson “keeps mentioning” him online!)

In a post published August 24, 2019, Neville mocked a misspelling in The Interpreter Foundation’s 501(c)(3) filing:

Maybe they reject the teachings of Joseph Smith that they don’t like because they’re actually focused on Jeseph Smith:

What’s ironic about this is that here we have Jonathan Neville making fun of Interpreter for misspelling a word, when Neville’s own publications are filled with misspellings, poor grammar, and incorrect punctuation.

Here are just a few examples from Moroni’s America − Maps Edition, written by Rian Nelson and edited by Jonathan Neville:

The “forward” [sic] to Nelson & Neville’s book. (p. iii)

Rian Nelson has a testimony of the “Bok [sic] of Mormon.” (p. iii)

Nelson & Neville refer to the book of “Heleman” [sic] four times. (pp. 17, 18, 74, 106)

Nelson & Neville present comparative “lattitudes” [sic], including the ones for “Tallahasse” [sic], Florida, and “Guatamala” [sic]. (p. 28)

Nelson & Neville even misspell the name of their own book: “Mormoni’s [sic] America.” (p. 46)

Nelson & Neville correctly spell the plural “Anti-Nephi-Lehies” in one instance, but then misspell it “Anti-Nephi-Lehis” [sic] twice on the very next page. (pp. 56, 57)

I have searched in vain for any mention of the “City Buntiful” [sic] in the Book of Mormon. (p. 79)

These are just a handful of the many, many spelling errors in Moroni’s America − Maps Edition. To these could be added grammatical errors, errors in punctuation, and rampant inconsistencies in formatting (for example, some book titles are italicized and others not, some quotation marks are “typographic” and others "neutral" etc.). Most of these errors could have been corrected with a common spell-checker; the rest could have been fixed by hiring a competent editor.

So it’s more than a little hypocritical for Jonathan Neville to point out the mote in The Interpreter Foundation’s eye, when he has a steel girder protruding from his own eye.

—Peter Pan

Those who live in glass houses…

On July 18, 2019, Jonathan Neville blogged about the Mayan glyph that was in the old FARMS logo that is now the logo used by Book of Mormon Central:

Book of Mormon Central is doing a great job telling the world that the Book of Mormon is a Mayan codex. They've got their Mayan logo everywhere.…

Of course, the Mayan logo directly contradicts the Church's policy of neutrality regarding Book of Mormon Geography. It also makes the Book of Mormon look ridiculous to non-LDS experts on the Mayans.

Many believers in the Book of Mormon still accept the teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah. That does not exclude Central America as a possible site for some Book of Mormon events, but Book of Mormon Central excludes the New York Cumorah as a possibility for Cumorah!

Oh, my dear Brother Neville. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, shall we?

…

Heartlanders are doing a great job telling the world that the Book of Mormon is connected to the Michigan Relics. They’ve got the “Mystic Symbol” logo everywhere, including on the breastplate supposedly worn by Zelph:

Left: The “Mystic Symbol” on the Michigan Relics, also called “the sign manual of the forger.” Right: The “Mystic Symbol” imagined on Zelph’s breastplate by artist and Heartlander Ken Corbett; image retrieved from Jonathan Neville’s blog. (Click to enlarge.)

Of course, the Mystic Symbol directly contradicts the Church’s (supposed) policy of neutrality regarding Book of Mormon geography. It also contradicts James E. Talmage’s conclusion, published in the Church’s official magazine, that he was “thoroughly convinced that the alleged ‘relics’ are forgeries and that they [were] made and buried to be dug up on command.” It also makes the Heartland movement look ridiculous to many Latter-day Saints and it makes the Book of Mormon look ridiculous to non-Latter-day Saints who think it has ties to fraudulent relics.

Many believers in the Book of Mormon accept the declaration of living prophets and apostles that “the Church does not take a position on the specific geographic locations of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas.” That does not exclude the American Midwest as a possible site for some Book of Mormon events, but Heartlanders exclude anywhere but New York as a possibility for Cumorah because they selectively interpret specific dead prophets.

…

Who looks worse here, Brother Neville?

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.