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(→Question: How should a valid Book of Mormon geography be modeled?) |
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==Question: How should a valid Book of Mormon geography be modeled?== | ==Question: How should a valid Book of Mormon geography be modeled?== | ||
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[[pt:Pergunta: Como deve ser um livro de Mórmon válida geografia ser modelado?]] | [[pt:Pergunta: Como deve ser um livro de Mórmon válida geografia ser modelado?]] | ||
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1 Nephi takes place in the Old World, but the remainder of the Book of Mormon is located in the "promised land" of the New World, the Americas. Old World locations (such as Jerusalem) are firmly fixed, while the New World geography requires more detective work. There are key geographical features mentioned in the New World accounts in the Book of Mormon. Decisions about how such features are to be interpreted have a major impact upon the final model. Some important issues are:
The first readers of the Book of Mormon tended to conceive of geography stretching for thousands of miles in a north-to-south direction. However, careful examination of the text revealed that the Book of Mormon was quite consistent in its use of distances, and that these distances covered only a few hundred miles at most, and not thousands as some had thought.
As John Sorenson observed:
Using this distance (which is established quite definitively in the text), Sorenson is then able to use other textual evidence to build a model in which the distances traveled in the Book of Mormon do not exceed more than a few hundred miles.
Sorenson's analysis cannot be considered the last word, but any coherent Book of Mormon geography must address the issues of distance within the text, as laid out by Sorenson.[3]
It is interesting that, while the text is internally consistent in suggesting relatively small distances, Joseph Smith's contemporaries did not notice this, and simply read the Book as describing all of North and South America. If, as the critics insist, Joseph or a contemporary composed the Book of Mormon as fiction, why is the text
Notes
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