Mormon Genesis - Paperback

by Arthur Chris Eccel (Author)

Mormon Genesis is a comprehensive secular study of the development and maintenance of the Mormon (LDS) scriptural community, including its scriptures, rites and official establishment of the faith. These Rocky Mountain (Latter-day) Saints arguably constitute the first scriptural community since Islam. Like the Jews with their Torah, the Christians with their New Testament, and the Muslims with their Qur'an, the Mormon community of believers derive their identity and even their sobriquet (Mormon) from their own foundational scripture, the Book of Mormon. This text posits a thousand-year history of Israelites in pre-Columbian America, with a population in the millions, and over forty cities by 200 BCE. The world is changing. Extensive high-tech archaeology has been done throughout the Americas. The Mayan writing system has been deciphered, yielding king lists, city names and religious inscriptions. The Egyptian hieroglyphs have been deciphered, enabling scholars to translate the Joseph Smith (so-called Abraham) papyri. DNA research has been done, not only on living descendants of pre-Columbian populations, but an increasing number of ancient human remains. This represents serious challenges to the keystone scriptures, which make a number of unusual assertions that are amenable to objective testing. The level of official LDS concern can be gaged by the major assets allocated to institutions and researchers at Brigham Young University to defend the faith. Mormon Genesis evaluates some of their more striking claims, and the origins and development of the movement. With 45 tables, it presents information and data sets never before published.

Author Biography

Chris Eccel is a specialist in the Semitic languages and the sociology and history of religion. Apart from Mormon studies, his research has been primarily in Islamic studies, with his principal publication, Egypt, Islam and Social Change: Al-Azhar in Conflict and Accommodation (Berlin). He has published research articles in Muslim World, Der Islam and Social Compass. He has worked as a project ethnographer in an archaeological project in south Syria (Busra). With his BA in Classics from the University of Utah, MA in Semitic Languages from Harvard, and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in association with its famous Oriental Institute, he is well equipped to develop new approaches to the study of the Mormon scriptural community and its foundational scriptures. His work is well within the tradition of Biblical higher criticism. His academic career includes university teaching in the US, Egypt and Lebanon, as well as research fellow positions at the American University in Cairo and the American Research Center in Egypt. Subsequently, 21 years of service as a U.S. Diplomat have enabled him to spend most of his adult life in the Middle East. During this time he was paid a substantial salary bonus for his total professional competence in Arabic. For his ongoing Semitic lexical database project, see www.sembase.org.