Yesterday the LA Times ran a fascinating story about DNA and Mormon scripture. For decades, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been very successful in converting Native Americans and Pacific Islanders to Mormonism because these people have been told by Mormon missionaries that they are decedents of a blessed lost tribe of Israel.
But in recent years, DNA tests have shown that Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are of Asian descent, not Middle Eastern descent, as claimed in the "infallible" Book of Mormon transcribed 175 years ago.
In this excerpt from the Times, it sounds like the Book of Mormon was written by a racist Harry Potter fan:
According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith in 1827 to a divine set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his New York home.
God provided the 22-year-old Smith with a pair of glasses and seer stones that allowed him to translate the "Reformed Egyptian" writings on the golden plates into the "Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ."
Mormons believe these scriptures restored the church to God's original vision and left the rest of Christianity in a state of apostasy.
The book's narrative focuses on a tribe of Jews who sailed from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 BC and split into two main warring factions.
The God-fearing Nephites were "pure" (the word was officially changed from "white" in 1981) and "delightsome." The idol-worshiping Lamanites received the "curse of blackness," turning their skin dark.
According to the Book of Mormon, by 385 AD the dark-skinned Lamanites had wiped out other Hebrews. The Mormon church called the victors "the principal ancestors of the American Indians." If the Lamanites returned to the church, their skin could once again become white.
The apologists for the Mormon scripture have the following explanation for the DNA evidence:
The latest scholarship, they argue, shows that the text should be interpreted differently. They say the events described in the Book of Mormon were confined to a small section of Central America, and that the Hebrew tribe was small enough that its DNA was swallowed up by the existing Native Americans.
"It would be a virtual certainly that their DNA would be swamped," said Daniel Peterson, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, part of the worldwide Mormon educational system, and editor of a magazine devoted to Mormon apologetics. "And if that is the case, you couldn't tell who was a Lamanite descendant."
(Isn't "delightsome" a great word?) Link
