Stephens' ruined cities with those in the Book of Mormon ( Times and Seasons 3 (1 October 1842): 927).” It thrived 60 years later when Benjamin Cluff embarked from Provo, Utah on a horse-drawn expedition to South America with 23 students and explorers in hopes that they would “discover the ancient Nephite capital of Zarahemla. got his hands on a copy of John Lloyd Stephens' Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan and enthusiastically declared, “It will not be a bad plan to compare Mr. It thrives today just as it did when Joseph Smith Jr. But the passion and spirit of such explorations has not diminished. And as a result, such investigations by the saints have regularly produced an abundance of promising data, even if our conclusions have sometimes been premature, overreaching, or impetuous. In fact, it was precisely because their faith was firmly entrenched that they fully expected to find a richness of geographical, anthropological and archeological parallels.

On the contrary, Latter-day Saints who pursue such studies will generally acknowledge that their faith-particularly in the Book of Mormon-was already established and “buttressed” before their search for cultural parallels even began. Non-Latter-day Saints have often interpreted efforts by LDS scholars and layman to draw parallels between the Book of Mormon and pre-Columbian cultures as an effort to buttress or prove the tenets of their religion.

They'd heard rumors that it was just some clumsy attempt to explain a prevalent pet theory about the Indians (and never really discovered that the Book of Mormon doesn't really offer any additional insight about the location of the Lost Ten Tribes than the Bible!) The point is that theories, questions, and speculations connecting Mesoamerican religion with Old World Christianity did not begin with Latter-day Saints. Such discussions even took place across the fence in Joseph Smith's own neighborhoods, which is one reason why some detractors of the Book of Mormon summarily dismissed it without even reading it. While others proposed that the Indians were the lost ten tribes of Israel. Thomas had preached among the Mayans and Aztecs. 37-8) Others suggested that the apostle St. (Juan de Torquemada, Monarchichia Indiana, volume I, cited in Fair Gods and Stone Faces, pp. Many wondered-long before the Latter-day Saints-if Christ, or some deceptive incarnation of Christ, had come to the Americas. Early Catholic friars and Spanish chroniclers of the 16th Century like Diego de Landa, Diego Durán, Juan de Torquemada and Bartelomé de Las Casas noted many puzzling similarities between Christianity and New World religions. Ever since the days of Columbus, and the successful invasion of Mexico by Cortez, significant efforts have been made by religious and scholarly figures to interpret the beliefs and mythologies of the peoples of the New World through a prism of Christian understanding.

Chris heimerdinger