What is the M2C Citation Cartel? One of Jonathan Neville’s biggest issues is with the traditional Book of Mormon scholars is what he calls the M2C Citation Cartel. These scholars won’t accept any Book of Mormon geography theories outside the Mesoamerican theory.
GT: It’s funny to me that you call it M2C, because I’ve had a Baja guy on. I’ve had Malay. Except for Heartlanders, anybody who has any sort of other theory believes there are two Cumorahs.
Jonathan: Right.
GT: And so it’s funny to me that you referring to M2C as meso, only.
Jonathan: That’s right.
GT: That applies to pretty much everybody else.
Jonathan: That’s a really good point. And I’ve addressed that a few times, but I’ll explain why I did this.
…
GT: I mean, you could probably argue that Book of Mormon Central and Interpreter are children of FARMS. Would that be a good way to say it?
Jonathan: Yeah, you could say that. I call them a Potemkin village, because they have these storefronts. You have Book of Mormon Central, FAIR LDS, Interpreter, Meridian Magazine, and they all look like different entities, but it’s all one village. It is all the same interlocking people.
GT: Okay.
Jonathan: And that’s the M2C citation cartel. I call them the M2C because the Mesoamerican and two Cumorahs, but none of those guys go with the Baja guys, or the Thailand or Malaysia, or even the Peru or Panama guys. Those guys are not part of the M2C citation cartel. If you want to publish something in the Interpreter, or BYU Studies, or Book of Mormon Central, it has to at least be consistent with M2C, the Mesoamerica two Cumorahs theory. I’ll give you an example of that, and I have to emphasize this, because I really feel this way. I love those guys. I like every one of them that I’ve ever met, and I respect their scholarship. I appreciate what they do. I think in terms of facts, I really like what they’ve come up with in doing historical research or archaeology, whatever. It’s the conclusions that they derive from those facts that I don’t agree with.
Find out how he is peer-reviewing their work. Another one of the major differences with the Heartland Theory is that Lehi crossed the Atlantic, rather than the Pacific Ocean as Meso claims. Jonathan Neville will tell us why he thinks this is the case.
GT: But I think for most, almost every geography theory agrees, okay, Nephi and Lehi left Jerusalem. They traveled south, probably along the Frankincense Trail.
Jonathan: Right.
GT: They took a left in, I want to say Oman, and then there’s a..
Jonathan: At Nahom.
GT: Yeah, and then there’s two [candidates for Nephi’s Harbor.] Well, Oman is [the name of the current day country.] Am I getting that right?
Jonathan: Yeah, there’s three places in Oman that they think were the land of Bountiful.
GT: Right.
Jonathan: Right near Salalah. Salalah is the city there now.
GT: Then, anyway, they took a left turn. They headed to the land Bountiful. There’s a couple of different harbors, and George Potter has one. I’ve had him on and then I need to get the Ashtons on, too, because they have a different harbor in Yemen. So, then the question is, [how did Lehi get to the Promised Land?] Most of the [theories], I will say, Malay and Baja and Meso all agree, most of them think that they kind of hugged the coast of India, and went down by the Malay Peninsula, which is a really interesting thing for the Malay people.
Jonathan: Yeah.
GT: Then, they had to shoot across the wide open ocean. So, they were doing pitstops all along the way. Then, all of a sudden, well, we’ve got 3000 miles of ocean or whatever it is, and we’ve got to just jet across here to either Baja or Meso.
Jonathan: Or Chile.
GT: Or Chile, yeah. Whereas you, which I thought was fascinatingly interesting said, “No, they didn’t go across the Pacific at all.: They went around the horn of Africa. So, can you tell us about that? Because to me, that’s the first really big difference. Tell us about that.
Jonathan: That’s definitely a big difference. The rationale behind that, and I have a long discussion of it. I don’t remember if it’s in that book or not. But the idea is that when they left the Oman area, Yemen-Oman border area, there’s two monsoon seasons. There’s one where the winds blow, as I recall, north and east and the other south and west. They said that they gathered, as I recall, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at this, but as I recall, Nephi says he gathered fruits and honey before they left. So, if you look at Oman, and the seasons when they would harvest fruits and honey, it’s roughly in the fall, October, November timeframe. At that time of the year, the monsoon is blowing south and west. So, if they left after they collected honey and fruit, because they went before the wind. They weren’t powered ships, right?
GT: Right.
Jonathan: They would have had to go south and west, which takes them along the east coast of Africa and around the tip of Africa and up.
Do you agree?
When the Book of Mormon was first published, and even for a century onward, most Mormons believed the Book of Mormon covered the whole of North & South America. But most scholars of Book of Mormon geography now believe that the area was much smaller and refer to this as the Limited Geography Theory. Heartland proponents believe the Book of Mormon covers North America and reject the Limited Geography Theory. Jonathan Neville explains why.
GT: So, you’re rejecting the limited geography and saying that the Book of Mormon people were river travelers.
Jonathan: Yeah.
GT: So they could go a lot farther.
Jonathan: It is still a limited geography, compared to the hemispheric model.
GT: Yeah.
Jonathan: I have to tell you, in my book, Moroni’s America, I dedicated it to John Sorensen, Jack Welch, Rod Meldrum and Wayne May, because those are the four most influential people in this whole thing, in my opinion. I really appreciate John Sorenson, because he made the Book of Mormon real to me. He said, “These are real people. They’re not imaginary, and there’s actual archaeology to show it.” He made us think in terms of what were the people really living like? Unfortunately, he focused on the Mayans, which don’t have any connection to the Book of Mormon. But, when you take what Sorenson started with, and then you combine it with what Wayne and Rod have developed in terms of looking at Ohio archaeology–I read, it’s called the Ohio History Connection, where they report all the latest discoveries in Ohio and archaeology and stuff, and I read all that stuff. It’s really exciting, because, now, to me, that’s Book of Mormon people. You can understand the woven cloth that they had and the pearls that they had. They excavate pearls in these mounds in the hundreds, things like that. So, it just makes it much more real, and the idea of traveling on rivers is so obvious that why would they even have to talk about it? The Book of Mormon never says they breathed oxygen, but we assumed they did. I find it really interesting that Mormon made that point that I haven’t even talked about our building of ships and shipping.
GT: I will bring up one more thing. Actually, let’s go back here. So, Lehi lands in the panhandle of Florida.
Jonathan: Okay, let me mention something about that. Anywhere in Florida is good. In fact, some say the oldest Hopewell site is north of Tampa, Florida. That’s a perfectly legitimate landing, too. It could be anywhere along there. I know up in Palmyra, this is anecdotal, but, I was told that they had an artifact that had an alligator engraved on it, a wooden artifact. One of the local tribes came into the museum where it was on display and said, “Where did you guys get that?”
He said, “That’s our symbol.”
The guy asked him, “Why would an alligator be your symbol?”
He says, “Because that’s the first animal we saw when we arrived,” which is Florida, right? If you look at the history of the Hopewell, there’s archaeologists debate about who was first and all that. But the earliest settlements appeared to have been in Florida, of that tradition. So, whether it’s the panhandle, I chose the Panhandle just because it kind of fit with the rivers that they would have gone on to go up to Georgia and Tennessee. But, even if they landed in Tampa, they’d have gone up that way.
What are your thoughts? Are you Team Heartland, Team Meso, or neither?
Wheat & Tares 
The best explanation for the lack of geographic detail in the BoM, IMO, is that it takes place in the Biblical landscape of Joseph Smith’s imagination. Joseph knew the Bible extremely well, but the Bible isn’t an atlas so how would he know which route Lehi should take to the New World? It has all the grand simplicity of an ancient myth without the mundane details of a travelogue: wander in wilderness, build ship on beach, get in water, pass through storms, arrive at promised land. If Nephi had been a real person traveling through real places, I think the text would read very differently.
It is interesting to contemplate, though, where Joseph imagined the book taking place after the family arrives in the New World. From what I understand, Joseph would have had very little knowledge of Mesoamerica, so the forests, hills, and lakes of Vermont/New York are probably what he saw. Then again, the whole thing has a very Biblical feel to it, so I almost wonder if the setting is more like a copy/paste of the version of the Middle East in Joseph’s mind. Maybe some combination of sword-and-sandals locales and his own environs.
He complains a lot about the Mesoamerican scholars not accepting his view. Why should they? He dos not accept their views either it is a mute point! In other places he has been very negative towrds anyone with other vies. Calling them apsotates etc. IN your inervies he comes across vry diferent.
I’m impressed with how patient and respectful you are to a guy who is anything but to those in the “M2C Citation Cartel.” Book of Mormon scholarship and the Church at large are not served well by pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and any concern whatsoever with how many Cumorahs there are.
The test of a reasonable theory is whether it is able to win over doubters. The problem with both of these theories is that the objective facts that non-Mormons depend upon to weigh the world and make real life judgments undermine those theories. I’m a Mormon myself, but can find not a single fact to make either perspective tenable. We need to face up to the fact that the BOM is an imaginative work, with zero historical relevance. If the scholars of the Church will start talking like this, they’ll start being reasonable again. All the Limited Geography talk is nothing but a headache.
I listened to the Mormon Stories podcast with Rod Meldrum about the Heartland theory. DON’T LISTEN. It was horrible. Instead of covering the theory the host and guest spent the entire time discussing race and queer issues in a most horrible way.
I’m now quite interested in the heartland model, though also extremely skeptical. For example, I thought sailing around Africa was extremely perilous in modern times so curious how Nephi handled it. Where in OH is a narrow neck of land? Where in North America did Nephi get gold to make plates? Wouldn’t snow have been mentioned if this was a new phenomenon to Nephi’s family? (Goes to the point above about NOT mentioning certain things like breathing since that’s the world they live in but snow would be new for example). How did they migrate from the coast to Ohio? Where are the remains of these ancient cities and battles in Ohio? You get the picture.
I grew up with ONLY the Meso view so I’m genuinely curious about how they answer these questions. Make a believer out of me.
Pretend like the Heartland folks are Will Smith and the Meso America folks are Chris Rock. Does it really matter who wins? Isn’t it kind of entertaining to watch them fight?
Team Heartland for me. The Book of Mormon was written in 19th-century upstate New York.
But if you’re a traditional believer who refuses to even entertain the idea that the Book of Mormon doesn’t contain the words of pre-Columbian American Christians and Jews, but also someone who is willing to accept that the Book of Mormon peoples didn’t span both North and South American continents, a Book of Mormon that took place closer to Joseph Smith’s home simply makes more sense. Moroni carried heavy plates thousands of miles across rugged terrain to bury them in upstate New York?
This is like comparing Middle Earth to Europe and figuring out what inspired Tolkien’s geography. It’s entertaining, but it doesn’t make Lord of the Rings factual. Lord of the Rings could function very well as a book of scripture, however, and it’s a much, much better read than the Book of Mormon. Which begs the question, by the way: how factual does a book need to be to inspire people? Why are Mormon “scholars” choosing this hill to die on?
Dot, “Why are Mormon “scholars” choosing this hill to die on?”
An excellent question and one that I’ve reflected on considerably. I long inhabited the world of academia, obtaining a PhD in the History of the Middle East (modern, not ancient, although I’ve studied ancient). I’ve long been a believer in academia, in that it is most rigorous, most trustworthy environment from which get answers to challenging questions. Why? Because it is the environment least tainted by money (there are cases where it is tainted, but it mostly isn’t), people at the top have had to prove their knowledge and work on merit, the peer review system makes it so people’s research has to pass review by other leading people in their field of study, and the tenure system allows academics freedom to research and publish without fear of losing their jobs over what they write and say.
This doesn’t mean that all academics are trustworthy, good researchers, or right. Some arrive at conclusions with more rigorous research and insight than others. When many leading, respected academics of a particular discipline announce agreement on a particular issue, I tend to place stock in that explanation. Not even necessarily because its something that I’ve independently researched (no one has the time, ability, or mental capacity to independently research large numbers of topics), but because leading researchers and minds say that that is the way things are and show the evidence for those conclusions. It could even be an idea that is proven wrong over time. That’s fine. That’s the beautiful thing about academia. People are free to, and even encouraged to, challenge each other’s findings and ideas.
Now in a widely studied field where there is a lot of money for research, say like oncology or US history, and a wide and diverse market to consume research and publications, there is likely to be a healthy competition to be a leading researcher in those fields. Commanding the respect of other researchers in these fields is difficult and the few who do win widespread respect and renown of colleagues are commendable indeed.
Now, let’s look at Mormon Studies. This is a discipline that simply doesn’t have a diverse array of people interested. Those who are interested in it tend to come from a Mormon background. A Mormon background in the US tends to be heavily interconnected and with lots of social pressure to uphold traditional Mormon church teachings and social punishments for the believers who reject them. Mormon studies is also heavily tainted by Mormon church and Mormon believer money. The few jobs there are in Mormon studies are at Mormon church-owned schools. For a person to rise in Mormon studies, they almost can’t without being networked with the believing Mormon community. If they want to publish in Mormon studies, the overwhelming number of outlets for them to publish are controlled by Mormon believers. Once someone publishes on a controversial issue, they develop a reputation. It is human psychology to protect one’s reputation among colleagues. And once that first publication is out, it is heavily likely that that person won’t back down on what they originally said in the subsequent publications. Apologists have long spun intricate webs of mental gymnastics, so there is lots of specious reasoning to borrow from. Additionally, many Mormon apologists are sunk down deep in the sunk-cost fallacy. Many have spent considerable time and effort trying to defend the Mormon church. They don’t want to appear as if all that time has been for naught. Mormon studies is heavily compromised. It cannot fairly deal with controversial issues. It is a discipline inhabited by many pseudoscholars and people acting in bad faith, who might have recognition by other apologists, but in no way, shape, or form have any recognition outside their bubble, let alone in more serious disciplines like Mesoamerican studies. The John Sorensons, Kerry Muhlesteins, and Dan Petersons of this world are untrustworthy and shamelessly resort to conspiracy theorist-level logical fallacies to justify their opinions before people who already believe in Mormonism. Their target audiences are already heavily biased and they preach to the choir. Mormon apologetics is a sham through and through. Mormon Studies is an exception to the general reliability of academia-produced research.
“The John Sorensons, Kerry Muhlesteins, and Dan Petersons of this world” — are brilliant in my opinion. I’ve read enough of their work to make that determination for myself.
@John W: Yes, true—and seeing it laid out like that is just sad and disappointing. Especially because piecing together the sources of Joseph Smith’s ideas would be a perfectly legitimate and fascinating academic exercise if one weren’t focused solely on apologetics.
Dot, wait! “The Lord of the Rings” isn’t factual? But…but I had a burning in my bosom that it was true! OK. that might have been the flaming hot Cheetos, but…
@vajra2: I’m so sorry! You never know—I could be wrong. Maybe you can get Kerry Muhlestein to look into it for you.
Jack, you simply confirm what I wrote. Are you a believer in the general teachings of the LDS church? Yes. Sorenson et. al. are simply preaching to people already predisposed to agree with them. Do they have any standing outside Mormonism? No. Have they persuaded any non-Mormon experts in their fields that their conclusions are even worthy of consideration? No. At best, their non-Mormon peers place their apologetics in a special religious belief bracket which they neither attack nor validate. At worst, their non-Mormon peers see their apologetics as seriously flawed, so much so that they don’t waste time trying to address it and avoid them with a ten-foot pole.
Clay, I think people on social media are often quite different than in person.
John W, While I generally agree with you about non-Mormon academics, I think it is starting to open up. I have upcoming interview with Dr. Sally Gordon (U Penn) who credits non-Mormon scholar Jan Shipps with getting her interested in the field. I previously interviewed Pentecostal scholar Dr. Chris Thomas who has huge interest in Book of Mormon studies. Younger non-LDS scholars like Chris Smith, Christina Rosetti, and others (I can’t remember names) at the Quinn conference at the U this past weekend, as well as Mormon Studies programs at Claremont, Virginia, and other places show that Mormon Studies are gaining wider acceptance. University publishers like Oxford, Illinois, North Carolina, and Oklahoma carry academic Mormon history books, because the books often sell better than other historical topics. This does show a wider audience among “gentile” academics.
Now, none of the non-LDS scholars believe in a historical BoM, and those scholars who are interested in geography generally come from LDS or CoC circles. However, I was reminded of an interview with George Potter who claimed that some of his Arab friends were smoking cigars while debating Lehi’s trail in the Arabian Peninsula. But your overall point is well-taken. I think that non-LDS scholars are more interested in Mormon history and BoM theology than geography.
John W,
Many LDS scholars have done a lot of peer reviewed work outside of their apologetic work. But we shouldn’t assume that their “apologetic” scholarship is any less robust because it lacks a peer review process staffed by nonbelievers. Who are the *non* Latter-day Saint experts on the Book of Mormon? Or church history? Or restoration theology?
Don’t include BYU Studies in your M2C category. We try to remain neutral on BoM geography theories and steer clear of the geography wars. Personally, I’m a BoM geography agnostic. I haven’t seen a theory yet that actually fits the text very well. Every theory has to make huge leaps of logic and leave out significant details in order to be even in the same zip code as the descriptions in the BoM. The convoluted explanations on all sides convince me that nobody has yet figured out where the story took place. But it is a thriving industry.
As the Beatles sang, “it’s a nowhere land.”
Jack,
Of course many LDS apologists have produced peer-reviewed publications that are not related to apologetics.
“we shouldn’t assume that their “apologetic” scholarship is any less robust because it lacks a peer review process staffed by nonbelievers.”
No. It would be more robust and trustworthy if it passed formal review by non-believing peers. What makes a written argument robust is its formal validation by a wide array of experts from different academic and cultural backgrounds.
“Who are the ‘non’ Latter-day Saint experts on the Book of Mormon? Or church history??”
Actually there are lots of non-believers and non-LDS people that have studied the Book of Mormon in depth and have published and presented research on it. Chris Johnson comes to mind. Check out his marvelous presentation on the Book of Mormon using big data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAGasQ7j_ZI. Lots of non-believers have studied church history and have published wonderful works. Believing scholars have also published great works on church history and on the Book of Mormon. What is problematic are the arguments of the written works defending the idea that pre-Columbian Christians and Jews existed in the Americas. No one validates them in the world of academia other than already believing Mormons.
rkt,
Would you consider the theory that the BoM is not actually historical to fit the text of the BoM very well? I personally find that to be the only theory that actually fits the text itself. Every other theory is missing obvious pieces of evidence that one would expect to find if the book was an actual historical record, and multiple data points that shouldn’t be there but unfortunately are.