A shameless misrepresentation of Kirk Magleby’s words

Kirk Magleby, executive director of Book of Mormon Central, maintains a private blog about Book of Mormon geography. In a post dated June 9, 2019, Magleby discussed a new tool he’s developed to audit various geographical theories to see how closely they align to the text.

He concluded his blog post by describing the urgency of using this tool:

The first [Book of Mormon geography] model was audited last night, June 6, 2019. With a robust audit procedure in place, I now predict rapid progress. There is no time to waste. Many BYU professors, even on the religion faculty, do not believe the Book of Mormon is historical.

In his own blog post, dated June 10, 2019, Jonathan Neville has seized on Magleby’s final sentence, distorted it, and used it as a club with which to beat Book of Mormon Central. He writes:

Kirk says, “many BYU professors, even on the religion faculty, do not believe the Book of Mormon is historical.”

Trust me on this: Kirk would know.

He has BYU professors working with him at Book of Mormon Central.

Perhaps Neville’s statement is inartfully worded—if so, I hope he would clarify it because, as it stands, it appears that Neville is claiming that BYU professors who work with Book of Mormon Central do not believe the Book of Mormon is historical.

It is quite obvious to anyone who has read anything Book of Mormon Central has produced that the organization and its officers and employees believe the Book of Mormon to be an actual history of an actual people who lived in the Americas. The BYU professors and staff associated with Book of Mormon Central—including Jack Welch, Taylor Halverson, and Tyler J. Griffin—all believe in a historical Book of Mormon.

As he has repeatedly claimed for years, Neville believes that the teaching that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica—what he derisively calls “M2C”*—is the root cause for a supposed spreading belief within the Church that the Book of Mormon is not historical:

Why would many BYU professors disbelieve in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

It’s simple.

They believed M2C.

By definition M2C is based on the premise that the prophets are wrong about the New York Cumorah. Such a teaching is a sandy foundation that will, eventually, collapse.…

Being built on a foundation of sand, M2C is destined to implode. Already, for many people, M2C has imploded, and when it does, if there are no alternative explanations for the setting of the Book of Mormon, people naturally lose faith in the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

Neville’s claim is completely bonkers. Mesoamericanists like John Sorenson, Brant Gardner, and others have done more to ground the Book of Mormon in an actual, historical setting than anyone else. (Gardner has even written an excellent book subtitled The Book of Mormon as History.) What is truly primed to “implode” is the Heartland hoax—the theory pushed by Jonathan Neville, Rod Meldrum, and other amateur researchers. The truly appalling false claims and misrepresentations in Heartlander Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon are only going to destroy the testimonies of those who believe them and then come to realize that they’ve been misled.

Jonathan Neville should be embarrassed and ashamed at the way he’s abused Kirk Magleby’s legitimate words of concern.

—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.