Jonathan Neville and the importance of reading comprehension

Jonathan Neville, advocate for the Heartland hoax, has a singular ability to misread the texts that he uses. His March 3, 2019, blog post, “The M2C hoax – Part 8 – impact on Church history,” contains some prime examples of this.

In his post, Neville quotes from Oliver Cowdery’s “Letter IV,” one of a series of letters that Oliver wrote for publication in the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate containing his record of the early history of the restored Church. This portion of Letter IV contains Oliver’s description of the angel Moroni’s first appearance to Joseph Smith in September 1823:

He [Moroni] then proceeded and gave a general account of the promises made to the fathers, and also gave a history of the aborigines of this country, and said they were literal descendants of Abraham. He represented them as once being an enlightened and intelligent people, possessing a cerrect [sic] knowledge of the gospel, and the plan of restoration and redemption. He said this history was written and deposited not far from that place, and that it was our brother’s [i.e., Joseph Smith’s] privilege, if obedient to the commandments of the Lord, to obtain, and translate the same by the means of the Urim and Thummim, which were deposited for that purpose with the record.

Neville then states his belief that, “to accommodate M2C*, our LDS scholars and historians are teaching that this story is impossible” (outside of the fact that Moroni did appear to Joseph Smith, he grants). What are the scholars and historians teaching, pray tell? Neville informs us:

According to the intellectuals, the history referred to was not of the aborigines of this country; it was a history of a still-undiscovered group of Hebrew Mayans, living in Mesoamerica.

Since, by the time of Joseph Smith, virtually every Native American had Lehi for an ancestor, the Book of Mormon is a history of the ancestors of “the aborigines of this country,” whether you define country to mean the United States (as Neville does) or a much broader swath of territory (as Joseph Smith did).

They were not literal descendants of Abraham; their ancestors migrated from Asia thousands of years before Adam and Eve were created.

The DNA evidence for the origins of Native Americans is much more complex than Neville lets on. But Lehi and Sariah are “are among the ancestors of the American Indians,” as the current introduction to the Book of Mormon published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints indicates.

The history was not “written not far from” Joseph’s home; instead, it was written thousands of miles away in Mesoamerica, and then Moroni hauled it to an obscure hill in New York where Joseph found it.

Not so fast, Brother Neville! We’ve noticed how you edited the quote to make it say something that it doesn’t! Oliver actually wrote: “[Moroni] said this history was written and deposited not far from that place.…”

There are two equally-valid ways to read Moroni’s statement:

1. The history was written not far from Joseph’s home and deposited not far from Joseph’s home.
2. The history was written and the history was deposited not far from Joseph’s home.

Neville believes Moroni meant it the first way. Most other Latter-day Saints believe he meant it the second way.

(All of this assumes, of course, that Oliver was directly quoting Moroni, not paraphrasing him. Like Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith didn’t have a tape recorder or write down what Moroni said to him.)

Joseph did not translate the record with the Urim and Thummim; instead, he put a stone in a hat and read the words that appeared.

Actually, Joseph used both the Nephite interpreters and his seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon. Both instruments were later referred to by early Latter-day Saints as “Urim and Thummim.”

For that matter, Joseph never even used the plates; they remained under a cloth or outdoors the entire time he was reading from the stone.

Neville apparently doesn’t believe the eyewitness testimony of Emma Smith, who assisted her husband as he translated.

(It must be nice to simply ignore or toss out any evidence that contradicts one’s personal theories.)

Joseph couldn’t have been the original English translator anyway because the language in the text is much too sophisticated for Joseph and statistical analysis shows it is a form of Early Modern English that had to have been somehow translated in the 1500s. Joseph was not the translator; he was merely the transmitter of someone else’s translation.

This is a gross distortion of Royal Skousen’s conclusions, based on over two decades of painstakingly reconstructing the original English text of the Book of Mormon. Skousen writes: “Evidence from the original manuscript supports the traditional belief that Joseph Smith received a revealed text through the interpreters. This idea of a controlled text originates with statements made by the witnesses of the translation. The evidence from the original manuscript, when joined with internal evidence from the text itself, suggests that this control was tight, but not iron-clad.”

Not all Book of Mormon scholars agree with Skousen’s “tight translation” theory, but one thing is certain: Royal Skousen has forgotten more about the early text of the Book of Mormon than Jonathan Neville knows.

In his blog post, Neville also goes on to (again) quote Joseph’s 1834 letter to Emma in which Joseph expressed (perhaps poetically) his belief that he and Zion’s Camp were wandering over “the plains of the Nephites” as they made their way across Illinois. Neville has yet to demonstrate that the contents of this letter were received by Joseph as a revelation and weren’t just his assumptions and interpretations of the Book of Mormon narrative. (Unlike Neville, I and many other Latter-day Saints don’t believe Joseph Smith was omniscient. And neither did Joseph himself.)

Neville also (again) claims that “Joseph and Oliver (and others) actually visited the depository of Nephite records and artifacts in the hill Cumorah in New York” and that ”they spoke about it to Brigham Young and others.” I’ve already demonstrated on this blog that there’s no evidence whatsoever that Brigham Young learned about the account of the cave full of plates from Joseph and Oliver; rather, the evidence seems to indicate that he received his account (perhaps a garbled oned) from Heber C. Kimball, who received it from W.W. Phelps.

The more I read Jonathan Neville, clearer it has become to me that he lacks the ability to critically read and understand the texts he cites. This is one reason, I believe, why he’s fallen so hard for the Heartland hoax.

—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.