Book of Mormon Geography
The claim:
"This is one of the reasons why unofficial apologists have developed the Limited Geography Model (it happened in Central or South America) and claim that the Hill Cumorah mentioned as the final battle of the Nephites is not in Palmyra, New York but is elsewhere. This is in direct contradiction to what Joseph Smith and other prophets have taught."[1]
"Many Book of Mormon names and places are strikingly similar to many local names and places of the region where Joseph Smith lived."[2]
The geography complaint comes in two parts. First, that faithful scholars invented a smaller, Central American setting for the Book of Mormon to dodge the fact that nobody can find its cities, and that this smaller setting flatly contradicts what Joseph Smith and other prophets taught about the New York hill where the gold plates were buried. Second, that the book's place names were lifted from towns near Joseph's home in upstate New York, so he must have made them up.
Some of this is true. After two centuries of believing scholars searching hard, no one has tied a single Book of Mormon city to a confirmed dig site. That gap is genuine, and this page will not paper over it. (The broader archaeology question lives in the archaeology article, worth reading alongside this one.) But the two arguments the CES Letter actually makes here both fall apart on the documents, and underneath them sits the single most remarkable thing about the book's geography, which the CES Letter never mentions at all.
The Church never claimed to know
The first argument assumes the Church once taught a settled, official geography and that scholars have been quietly retreating from it ever since. That is not what happened.
The Church has held a position of official neutrality on Book of Mormon geography for over a century. The current Gospel Topics essay says it plainly: "The Church does not take a position on the specific geographic locations of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas."[3] And this is not a modern dodge. Back in 1923, a committee of senior apostles sat down with several scholars to be briefed on where the Book of Mormon happened, and the apostle James E. Talmage reported that the scholars' views "differed as widely as the continent." The apostles decided that "until we have clearer knowledge in the matter," the Church would not endorse any map or text claiming to fix Book of Mormon lands.[4] A few years later, Anthony W. Ivins made the same point from the pulpit: enthusiasts had each "found the very place where the City of Zarahemla stood," yet their guesses "vary a thousand miles apart."[4:1]
So the neutrality is a century old, and it cuts in two directions. By never staking its credibility on a particular map, the Church has never set itself up to be disproven by the next dig; the apostles in 1923 chose a candid "we don't know" over a tidy answer. But that same neutrality means the geography cannot be confirmed either, and a critic can fairly call that an open question rather than a strength. Both are true. What is not true is the picture of a Church that once knew and then backpedaled.
Joseph never contradicted the limited model
The sharper version of the first argument is the word "contradiction": that placing the events in Central America directly contradicts Joseph Smith. The primary sources tell almost the opposite story.
Matthew Roper combed through every documented statement Joseph Smith ever made on geography. Two things stand out. Joseph never claimed revelation for any geographic identification, and his views actually shifted toward Central America over time.[5] The turning point was 1841, when a friend gave him a popular new book by John Lloyd Stephens describing spectacular ruins in Central America. Joseph wrote back that of all the histories ever written about this country's antiquities, "it is the most correct luminous & comprihensive," and that it "corresponds with & supports the testimony of the Book of Mormon."[6] A year later, the Church newspaper Joseph edited ran an editorial saying it was "a good thing for the excellency and veracity, of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon, that the ruins of Zarahemla have been found" in those same Central American ruins.[7]
Notice what that does to the CES Letter's argument. The prophet it says the limited model contradicts is the same prophet who, once he saw evidence of a Central American civilization, got excited and tied it to the Book of Mormon himself. There is one more wrinkle worth knowing: Joseph's own writings do not clearly call the New York hill "Cumorah" until 1842, twelve years after the book came out, and the name appears to have entered common use through other early members first.[8] Joseph followed the community's habit of naming the hill; he did not hand it down as revelation.
The whole "contradiction" framing rests on treating a prophet's personal opinions about geography as binding doctrine. They never were. And the rule has to cut both ways: it applies to Joseph Smith's own leaning toward Central America exactly as it applies to a later apostle's leaning toward the New York hill. On geography, the Church has said for a hundred years that no one's opinion is the official answer.
The map inside the book
Here is the part the CES Letter skips entirely, and it is the strongest geography evidence the book has.
Set aside where the events happened in the real world for a moment, and just look at the geography inside the text: which city is north of which, which river runs which way, how long it takes to travel from one land to another. The Book of Mormon is packed with this kind of detail. One scholar, John Sorenson, counted more than 600 geographically meaningful passages.[9] A BYU professor named Tyler Griffin catalogued 500 to 550 specific references and found exactly two spots in the entire book where the geography seems off, a consistency rate near 99.6 percent across 531 pages.[10]
And it is not just that the place names stay in order. The same quiet patterns hold across hundreds of pages, dictated by different characters at different points in the story:
- Every major migration in the book moves north. That is an odd instinct for a young man in western New York in 1829, who would have known westward frontier expansion far better.[10:1]
- The land of Nephi is always "up" and Zarahemla always "down," tracking elevation rather than the compass, a subtle logic kept across the whole text.[10:2]
- The cities along the east seashore appear in the same geographic order every time they come up, even in separate chapters describing different wars years apart.[10:3]
What makes that hard to dismiss is how the book was produced. Two different scholars, John Clark and John Sorenson, working separately and years apart, each tried to reconstruct the book's internal map purely from the text, and they arrived at substantially the same configuration.[11][9:1] Clark even drew up a ten-point checklist of features any real-world setting would have to match: a narrow neck of land between a land northward and a land southward, a river flowing north through Zarahemla, a city of Nephi up in the highlands, and so on. Hundreds of little geographic facts in the book all have to fit together at once. A made-up geography can be padded with details; a system that closes on itself, where every piece constrains every other piece, is a different kind of thing. The text describes a real landscape, even before anyone asks where on earth it sits.
Now put that next to how the book was made. Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon, roughly 269,000 words, in about 60 working days in 1829.[12] Emma Smith, his wife and one of his scribes, testified under oath that "he had neither manuscript nor book to read from."[13] The other scribes said the same: no notes, no maps, no source text in front of him, and he resumed after breaks without reviewing what he had already dictated.[14] The historian Grant Hardy, who publishes with Oxford University Press, put it this way: the book is "remarkably consistent" on its geography, so much so that "one would assume the author worked from charts and maps."[15] But there were no charts and no maps.
Be careful with what that proves. Internal consistency by itself does not prove the events really happened. A skilled novelist can build a consistent fictional world; Tolkien did. The fair claim is narrower and still powerful: an intricate, interlocking geography, more careful than many novelists manage with years of revision, was dictated aloud in two months with no notes and no rewrites, and that makes a "Joseph just made it up as he went" explanation a great deal harder to credit than the CES Letter lets on.
The name parallels prove too much
The CES Letter's second argument is the list of Book of Mormon names that sound like places near Joseph Smith's home. It reproduces maps from a 1983 pamphlet by Vernal Holley pairing about 20 Book of Mormon names with Great Lakes locations. Side by side, it looks striking. It does not survive a closer look, for reasons that stack up fast. (The site's introduction already walks through Holley's maps as a worked example, so here is the short version.)
Start with the dates, because they are decisive. A large share of Holley's "source" towns did not exist when the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. Angola, New York was founded in 1854. Mantua, Ohio in 1898. Minoa, New York in 1895.[16] You cannot borrow a name from a town that will not be settled for another twenty to seventy years. As FAIR puts it, "We cannot legitimately use the location of American cities to create a Book of Mormon map that we then use as evidence that the Book of Mormon used the location of American cities to construct its map."[16:1]
Next, strip out the names that are simply biblical. A chunk of the "parallels" are names like Jerusalem, Jordan, Boaz, Shiloh, and Ramah (which shows up 34 times in the Old Testament).[17] Finding biblical names both on the American map, where settlers loved biblical names, and in a book that claims to come from Israelites, is exactly what you would expect. It needs no local source beyond the Bible.
Take even the example the CES Letter calls its strongest, Teancum and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. The names sound alike, and a town was named for Tecumseh before 1830, so Joseph could have heard it. But the stories share nothing. The Book of Mormon's Teancum is a Nephite soldier who sneaks into an enemy camp at night to kill a king and later dies trying it again; Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader who fell in open battle against American troops.[17:1] Two names that happen to sound alike, with no story in common, is what a coincidence looks like.
The deepest problem is that the method works anywhere. The Latter-day Saint scholar Michael Ash showed you can play the same game with place names around Virginia, or Hawaii, or anywhere else with a big enough list of towns, and "find" just as many parallels.[18] When a method produces hits no matter where you point it, all it is really measuring is how easy it is to match two long lists after the fact. And Holley's map fails on its own terms anyway: it puts cities the Book of Mormon calls "far in the land northward" down in the south, and splits a hill the book says is a single place into two locations 280 miles apart.[17:2] When a map has to contradict the very text it claims to explain, it was forced into shape after the fact.
There is a flip side the CES Letter never raises. Some Book of Mormon names carry genuine ancient Near Eastern fingerprints that random borrowing from English towns could not produce. The clearest case is "Alma." Critics long mocked it as a girl's Latin name, but in 1961 archaeologists in the Judean desert dug up a 1,800-year-old document naming a man "Alma son of Yehudah," confirming it as a real ancient Hebrew man's name, something buried in a cave and unknown until well over a century after the Book of Mormon was printed.[19] That is the opposite of a name borrowed from the neighborhood.
The CES Letter has a related argument, that "Cumorah" and "Moroni" were lifted from the Comoros Islands off Africa (whose capital is named Moroni) by way of pirate stories about Captain Kidd. It sounds clever, but it leans on a fact that did not exist yet: Moroni did not become the capital of anything until 1958, more than a century after Joseph Smith died.[20] The full unwinding of that chain is in the in-depth version.
The Hill Cumorah problem
Here are the two objections that actually have teeth.
The first is the Hill Cumorah. The Book of Mormon describes a final battle there so large that more than 230,000 Nephites died (Mormon 6). The New York hill where Joseph found the plates was long assumed to be that same battlefield. But there is no archaeological trace of any battle at the New York hill: no bones, no weapons, no fortifications. John Clark, a believing Latter-day Saint who is also a trained Mesoamerican archaeologist, examined it and concluded, "Archaeologically speaking, it is a clean hill... This is not the place of Mormon's last stand. We must look elsewhere for that hill."[21] The faithful answer is that the book itself leaves room for two hills: Mormon hid the main record "in the hill Cumorah" but gave "a few plates" to his son Moroni, who then wandered for decades before burying his small set, possibly thousands of miles away, in New York.[21:1] That reading is reasonable, and a BYU scholar named Sidney Sperry argued for it back in the 1990s on textual grounds, long before DNA or modern critics were in the picture.[22] But it sits in real tension with the fact that some early Church leaders, including the apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, taught firmly that the New York hill was the battlefield. The tension is genuine. What resolves it is the same point as before: prophetic authority covers doctrine and ordinances, not archaeology, and the Church has never made the New York Cumorah binding doctrine.
The second hard problem is directions, and it is the most technical objection to a Central American setting. The book's lands sit "northward" and "southward" of a narrow neck, with seas "east" and "west." But the best-known Central American candidate, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, runs more east-to-west than north-to-south, so making the book fit seems to require rotating the whole compass. The critic Earl Wunderli sharpened the problem into its hardest form: the same translation renders directions in the Old World accurately by the compass (Lehi travels "nearly a south-southeast direction" through Arabia, which matches the real map), yet renders New World directions in a way that has to be twisted to fit.[23] The scholar Brant Gardner has a serious answer, that ancient peoples often built their directions around the sun's path rather than a compass, and that Joseph translated those concepts into plain English words.[24] That is historically well grounded. What it only partly explains is Wunderli's asymmetry, why the same translator would handle the Old World by the compass and the New World by a different system. This one is not fully solved, and pretending otherwise would overstate the case. The fuller back-and-forth is in the in-depth version.
And the deepest critical worry, beneath all of it, is that the sheer number of competing geographies, Central American, Heartland, South American, and more, looks like a theory that can never be pinned down: when the evidence pushes on one location, proponents just move to the next. That concern is legitimate, and it should not be smoothed over. The reply is limited but real: the worry applies to fixing the book on a real-world map, not to the book's internal geography, which can be tested for consistency and has passed, or to the Old World leg of the trip, where the place names actually have been confirmed.
The map isn't the real question
Step back, and the disagreement here is not really a fight over the facts. Critic and believer are often looking at the very same things: a Church that has declined to fix a geography for a hundred years, a field full of competing models, a city no one has dug up. The critic reads that as a slow confession. The believer reads it as a text whose internal map closes on itself with near-perfect consistency, whose Old World trail has produced real confirmations, and whose New World setting stays unproven but not improbable. The scholars in 1923 who "differed as widely as the continent" were not reading different books. They were reading the same one and disagreeing about where it pointed.
And underneath the whole map dispute sits the thing that does not depend on resolving it: the book itself. A coherent geographic system, holding together across more than 500 scattered references, dictated aloud in roughly 60 working days with no notes and no rewrites, with no surviving manuscript showing the cut-and-paste a forger would leave behind, and no naturalistic account of its existence that has held up. Where Zarahemla sits on a modern map is still an open question. How a 23-year-old farmer produced the book that describes it is the better one, and it is the question the CES Letter's geography section never touches.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 6, p. 11. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 7, pp. 13-14. ↩︎
"Book of Mormon Geography," Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/book-of-mormon-geography?lang=eng ↩︎
"'Until We Have Clearer Knowledge': On Book of Mormon Geography in Church History," Maxwell Institute. https://mi.byu.edu/bom-geography-essay/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Matthew Roper, "Joseph Smith, Revelation, and Book of Mormon Geography," FARMS Review 22, no. 2 (2010): 15-85. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol22/iss2/4/ ↩︎
Joseph Smith, Letter to John M. Bernhisel, 16 November 1841, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-johnm-bernhisel-16november-1841/1 ↩︎
Times and Seasons ("Zarahemla" editorial), 1 October 1842, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/times-and-seasons-1-october-1842/1 ↩︎
"Joseph Smith Geography Statements," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Book_of_Mormon/Geography/Statements/Nineteenth_century/Joseph_Smith's_lifetime_1829-1840/Joseph_Smith ↩︎
John L. Sorenson, Mormon's Map (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000). https://scripturecentral.org/archive/books/book/mormons-map-0 ↩︎ ↩︎
Tyler Griffin, "Book of Mormon Geographical References: Internal Consistency Taken to a New Level," FAIR Conference, August 2017. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2017/internal-consistency-taken-to-a-new-level ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
John E. Clark, "A Key for Evaluating Nephite Geographies," FARMS Review 1, no. 1 (1989): 20-70. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol1/iss1/7/ ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 11-50. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/ ↩︎
Emma Smith Bidamon, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879, in Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289-290. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "The Miraculous Timing of the Translation of the Book of Mormon," in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2005), 77-210. ↩︎
Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6-7. ↩︎
"Theory of Book of Mormon Place Names from Area around Joseph Smith's Home," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Theory_of_Book_of_Mormon_place_names_from_area_around_Joseph_Smith's_home ↩︎ ↩︎
L. Ara Norwood, review of Book of Mormon Authorship: A Closer Look by Vernal Holley, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1, no. 1 (1989): 80-88. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol1/iss1/10/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal Part 6," FAIR Blog (September 2021). https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2021/09/08/the-ces-letter-rebuttal-part-6 ↩︎
Yigael Yadin, "Expedition D — The Cave of the Letters," Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962): 227-257; documenting the 1960–1961 Cave of Letters expedition that recovered Bar Kokhba-era documents including references to "Alma son of Yehudah." See also Yadin, Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome (New York: Random House, 1971). ↩︎
"Theory of Book of Mormon Place Names from Comoros Islands and Moroni," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Book_of_Mormon/Plagiarism_accusations/Comoros_Islands_and_Moroni ↩︎
John E. Clark, "Archaeology and Cumorah Questions," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13, no. 1 (2004): 144-151. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol13/iss1/15/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Sidney B. Sperry, "Were There Two Cumorahs?" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4, no. 1 (1995): 260-268. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol4/iss1/30/ ↩︎
Earl M. Wunderli, "Critique of a Limited Geography for Book of Mormon Events," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 161-197. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/critique-of-a-limited-geography-for-book-of-mormon-events/ ↩︎
Brant A. Gardner, "From the East to the West: The Problem of Directions in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 3 (2013): 119-153. https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/from-the-east-to-the-west-the-problem-of-directions-in-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎