President Nelson, the Book of Mormon, and Mesoamerica

While Jonathan Neville’s main assertion is that the hill Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is same hill today called “Cumorah” in western New York, he’s also opposed to a Mesoamerican Book of Mormon geography in general. Although he often claims that, outside of Cumorah, we don’t know where the Book of Mormon took place, he does argue that “the core of Book of Mormon geography is in North America, while Mesoamerica is the periphery.”

This week President Russell M. Nelson is on tour in Latin America. On his first stop in Guatemala, he told 22,000 members of the Church who had gathered to hear him:

The lands of Central America and South America are studded with ruins—remnants—of ancient civilizations. One wonders what life must have been like among those people.

Add to that the message on the title page of the Book of Mormon, that it is “written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel,” we not only learn more about those ancient inhabitants, but we learn that the Lord cares for His children in this hemisphere, both in ancient times, and in modern times.

(emphasis added)

President Nelson—the prophet, seer, and revelator, and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—testified to the Saints in Guatemala that it is through the Book of Mormon that “we…learn more about those ancient inhabitants” of Central and South America.

Does Jonathan Neville support the teachings of the prophets, as he continually claims?

—Peter Pan