Book Of Mormon Anachronisms?

A pillar couple in the Kananga Church — Brother Martin, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, received this copy of the Book of Mormon from the pastor of another Church. He read it and believed. Eventually, he learned that Church members had recently started meeting in Katoka. He and his family would leave on foot (or, when the children were small, on a single bicycle) each Sunday morning at 4 or 5 AM to travel the distance to Church meetings. They have raised faithful children, including some who have been called as full-time missionaries. Brother Martin is now serving as a counselor in the mission presidency. He was a chauffeur and mechanic in the last part of the reign of Mobutu Sese Seko (1980s-90s), but now struggles to find any kind of work. Sometimes, I wonder whether we relatively wealthy and comfortable members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are too spiritually lax even to be considered fellow Saints with such wonderful, humble people. See how they value the Book of Mormon!

I’m obviously very late with calling attention to them — see below for the reason behind my delay — but these items went up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation on Friday afternoon, and I heartily commend them to your attention. Two of them appear in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:

“Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms: Introduction,” written by Matthew Roper

[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present the Introduction from a book entitled Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms. It is presented in serialized form in this volume of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.]

“Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms: Chapter 1 Book of Mormon Animals,” written by Matthew Roper

[Editor’s Note: We are pleased to present chapter 1 from a book entitled Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms. It is presented in serialized form in this volume of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.]

“Interpreting Interpreter: (Non-)Anachronisms – Animals,” written by Kyler Rasmussen

This post is a summary of the article “Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms — Book of Mormon Animals” by Matthew Roper in Volume 65 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreterseries is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/MO8BmbL93uo.

The Takeaway: Roper introduces a book outlining past criticisms of the Book of Mormon and how they have fared in the light of new historical and archaeological evidence. In his first chapter on claims regarding the book’s descriptions of animals, he finds that 82% of these criticized claims have since been confirmed and an additional 14% are trending toward confirmation, based either on new evidence of the presence of these animals in the Americas or through the identification of loan-shifts used by early European settlers.

Валерий Дед does Dubai — A 2012 photo of Dubai by Валерий Дед (Wikimedia Commons public domain image). This is pretty much the view that I saw from the runway during takeoff from there. The Burj Khalifa, at the center of the photograph, is the tallest structure on Earth.

So why am I so delinquent in blogging? Why did I miss the Abraham conference on Saturday?

By the time I got to bed at home following the train ride from Samarkand to Tashkent and the flights from Tashkent to Dubai and from Dubai to Houston and from Houston to Salt Lake City and the drive from Salt Lake City down to Utah Valley, I calculate that I had been awake for about fifty-four consecutive hours. That may be the longest I’ve ever gone without sleep. And, in recompense, I then slept solidly for twelve hours, from almost 3 AM — the flight from Houston was delayed for three hours, which was just what I needed! — until nearly 3 PM.. Which is, I think, almost certainly the longest I’ve ever slept. And, even then, my wife had to wake me up. I couldn’t believe what time it was; I thought that she was playing a trick on me.

I had planned to attend the first installment of the Interpreter Foundation’s two-day conference on “Abraham and His Family: In Scripture, History, and Tradition,” which was held on the Brigham Young University campus on Saturday, 3 May 2025, and will conclude (at the same location) this coming Saturday, 10 May 2025. I thought that I would at least attend part of it. I thought that I would definitely be able to make the afternoon sessions.

Not even close. Happily, though, videos of the presentations that were given yesterday (Saturday) are available at no charge online. So I hope to catch up:

I did, however, manage to get up and become at least minimally functional in time to go with my wife to meet friends for dinner and then to proceed with them up to a Utah Opera performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. It was a good, solid , and I very much enjoyed it. (I even stayed fully awake.). I especially liked Hiromi Omura’s portrayal in the title role and the work of the entirely Japanese and Japanese-American creative team (including an entirely female Japanese “design collective”) behind it. The staging was excellent, and palpably more “Asian” than any version that I’ve seen before. I did not, however, like the idea of placing the story of the opera within a modern American setting, making the deeply caddish B. F. Pinkerton of the opera into a modern guy who watches the Puccini opera via a virtual-reality headset. It added absolutely nothing, in my view, and couldn’t bear sustained thought. If anything, it only added confusion.

twilight in the Registan — Nightfall at Registan Square in Samarkand (from an official Uzbek travel site)

By the way, I would judge the conference in Samarkand a success. It gathered people together from the United States, Iran, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the United Kingdom, and several other countries, and there was a really friendly spirit throughout. I’ve even been invited to participate in an October 2025 conference in Qom, Iran, devoted to the topic of Islamic and Christian ethics. I would like to do it, and I’m going to try to make it work. (I can simply never experience too many unendurably long plane rides!)