An outstanding review of the Heartland annotated Book of Mormon

In 2018 Digital Legend published an Annotated Edition of the Book of Mormon, with notes on the scriptural text provided by Rodney Meldrum, Jonathan Neville, and other Heartlanders.

This week, Stephen Smoot, with the assistance of a few other capable scholars, has begun publishing a series of blog posts that review this book. You can read the introduction to his review here.

Smoot summarizes:

While the editors of the AEBOM may be sincere in their desire to vindicate the Book of Mormon, the book, unfortunately, suffers from numerous inaccuracies, embellishments, fallacies, dubious and unsubstantiated claims, selective use of evidence, parallelomania, presentism, false claims, and pseudo-scientific and pseudo-scholarly claims. These substantive problems with the AEBOM fundamentally compromise any usefulness it might have as a serious, reliable, or credible aid for studying the Book of Mormon. Readers should be aware that a substantial number of the claims made in the AEBOM are questionable at best and outright false at worst. They should, accordingly, not put uncritical trust in the AEBOM, and should in fact be suspicious of the majority of its claims.

I’ve read the first two installments in Smoot’s series and cannot wait for the rest of them to be published. His work provides an overwhelming multitude of examples of the poor scholarship and outright fraud being perpetrated by those who are selling the Heartland hoax to an unsuspecting Latter-day Saint public.

—Peter Pan