5min chapter

LDS Discussions - Mormon Truth Claims Examined cover image

05: DNA and the Book of Mormon

LDS Discussions - Mormon Truth Claims Examined

CHAPTER

Intro

The hosts and Gerardo delve into how DNA evidence contradicts the origin narrative of Native Americans in the Book of Mormon, discussing changes in the book's introduction and the historical perception of Lamanites as Native Americans.

00:00
Speaker 2
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Morma Stories Podcast. I'm your host John D 'Lynn. We are so excited to be continuing our series with Mike from the amazing LDS discussions website. Today we are going to be talking about Book of Mormon and DNA. Again with Mike from LDS Discussions., you know, we've already done, I think, four episodes so far. We've done treasure digging. We've done the gold plates. We've done Book of Mormon translation. And we have done, what was it, Mike? 160 pages. Yeah. And now we're doing, we're jumping DNA and we're super excited to have with us for this episode, Gerardo. Hey Gerardo. Hey
Speaker 3
John.
Speaker 2
So glad to have you. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Yeah. Thanks for taking time off your busy work schedule to join us.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Super excited about this one. Yeah.
Speaker 2
And then of course we have with us Mike. Hey, Mike.
Speaker 1
What's up everybody?
Speaker 2
Yeah, how are you enjoying these episodes so far? They're
Speaker 1
fun. It's you know, it's funny to go over them again later on. I've forgotten a lot. I did most of these like a year ago. So it's kind of an interesting to bring them again and then to go through them. And hopefully, like I said, we're just hoping people are finding some use out of them.
Speaker 2
I'm sure my our listeners and viewers join us in being amazed at the command of detail and The conceptual command you have of all these topics Because it's a lot to keep in one brain and you do an amazing job I
Speaker 1
don't know about that. But you know, like I said, and one of the things I mentioned in one of our previous episodes, it's just, you know, anyone can do it, you know, I'm not like, some, you know, scholar that has a three degrees in history. And so there are people that can run circles around me all day long. point just shows that when you really do dig into this stuff, you can really draw some conclusions that are evidence -based. And, you know, like I mentioned many times, you put the pieces of the puzzle back together and you can do it in a way where you don't have to stretch. You can have command of the issues because as long as you take the evidence of face value, you can make it work together in a seamless way without having to jam it together.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, again, LDSdsdiscussions .com is the website. There's amazing detail there, but our job here is to try and synthesize each of these essays. So there's an essay on Book of Mormon and DNA, which is one of like 50 or 60 essays that you have on your website. So we're going to be covering that essay. We'll include a link to it in the show notes. But let's go ahead and dive in. Yeah, let's do it. All right. So we begin. How do you want to kind of set up the situation?
Speaker 1
With DNA, it's a little trickier because we don't have as much to talk about before. Most of this is going to be about apologetics, but just for me personally, when I was a convert, I was told that the Book of Mormon was basically the origin story of the Native Americans. And it gave the story and the history of the Native Americans before the European settlers arrived. And we finally knew that Jesus had visited this continent just as, you know, just as it did leave it by itself. And so basically, what was crazy for me was when I started to finally do the deep dive into this was to learn that the DNA testing that came out, really without any question tells us that the narrative from the Book of Mormon, that these are the Native Americans came from Jerusalem, is simply not the case. this is exemplified in no better way than to say that the introduction to the Book of Mormon was changed from saying that the Native Americans were the principal ancestors of the American Indians, as I was taught, to saying they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.
Speaker 2
summarize that for almost 200 years, everyone knew, Joseph Smith knew, Brigham Young knew, all the missionaries to Ohio and to the frontiers knew, all prophets, seers and revelators between Joseph Smith and let's just say, I don't know, Spence W. Kimball, everyone knew who the Lamanites were. The Lamanites were Americans, North Central and South America, along with Pacific Islanders, Alaskans, Gerardo, anything else you want to add to that?

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