TheJedi said:
Wow, that is a lot of info. I dont have time now to read it all, but it all seems very interesting. thank you for posting it.
And that is only scratching the surface, Jedi. As DeepShadow mentioned, we don't base our belief in the
Book of Mormon on archealogical evidence. Sure, if you believe that something is true, and then evidence turns up to support your opinion, it's exciting. But I've never heard of anybody who came to the conclusion that the
Book of Mormon is truly an ancient document simply because someone discovered a few artifacts buried in a Guatamalan hillside.
I may have been "too hasty" in my response to Deut (as DeepShadow) said. If I was, I'm sincerely sorry. My first impressions of people are not always accurate. I believed (and he will have to prove me wrong, I'm afraid) that he wanted to do nothing more than pick a fight. I don't have time to fight. I hate to cut and paste huge articles, and links to other sites can be overwhelming, as you undoubtedly found when you went into the one I mentioned. So, I'm just going to give you one very brief example of something that I personally found to be interesting.
The Book of Mormon, as you may or may not know, was translated by Joseph Smith, Jr., then a 23-year old boy with a third-grade education. His background was in farming. He lived in rural New York state in 1830 and had no knowledge of ancient cultures, either American or Middle-eastern. Joseph claimed that the record he translated was written on plates that had the appearance of gold. They were etched with strange characters which resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics and were bound together using metal rings, like a book. They had been stored in a large stone box and buried for centuries in a hillside near his home.
When Joseph described these plates, he immediately became the laughing stock of upstate New York. :biglaugh: Egyptian letters engraved on gold plates and hidden in a stone box! How could anything be so ludicrous? No one had ever heard of such a thing, and so of course it was dismissed as not only far-fetched but as virtually impossible.
Now, jump forward almost 100 years. In 1933, the Plates of Darius I were discovered in a stone box in a palace in Persia. They dated from about the same time as the earliest Book of Mormon plates. Half of the plates were gold and half were silver. They were very similar in appearance to the plates Joseph Smith had described. Since then, a number of other ancient records have been discovered -- all of them written on metal plates, any many deposited in stone boxes. They are on display at museums throughout the world (Chicago, Tehran, Lima, Rome, and Paris). Don't make the mistake of assuming that their content is the same as the content of the plates Joseph Smith translated, because it wasn't. The content, of course, is beside the point. What is significant is that archealogists now know that it was common for ancient people in various parts of the world to record their histories and other important information in this way. Joseph Smith didn't know this, and yet, in spite of all the ridicule, he never changed his story. History has now vindicated his claims in this regard.
Kathryn
