4

4 NEPHI

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the only sign that given was a star which the Wise Men followed to his manger (back when they thought stars were basically just ceiling ornaments). Meanwhile in America, the sun went down but the land was remained in light somehow all “night” until the sun came up again. And the Nephites and Lamanites could also see the new star, because after fulfilling its purpose of leading the Wise Men to the place where Jesus was born it apparently drifted off to the western hemisphere too.  A star did.

The Nephites stopped counting years from the time Lehi left Jerusalem in 600 BCE and started counting them from the day these signs appeared, which theoretically put the Nephite calendar in sync with our own Western calendar today. In practice, it was off by a few years. Centuries after Christ came, a monk took a best guess at when he came and chose 753 AUC (ab urbe condita – in the year of the city of Rome) but we now know it could not have been later than 4 BCE when Jesus was born, because Herod died in Jericho in that year. But for the sake of brevity I will pretend the two calendars are in sync so I can get on with it. In the year 34 and 35 the disciples of Jesus formed churches throughout America. And if someone truly repented of their sins, they were baptized in the name of Jesus and received the Holy Spirit.

By the year 36, all the people in the Western Hemisphere, both Lamanites and Nephites, were in the church of Jesus Christ. There were no more wars of even arguments between them. And they shared all their property.

For the passages from the Old and New Testament that appear again in the Book of Mormon we know Joseph Smith plagiarized the King James Bible rather than translated them anew from the Reformed Egyptian on his plates, because he even included the italicized words which were included by the translators of the 1611 Authorized Version for clarity, but do not appear in the original text.

When Joseph Smith plagiarized the King James Bible, there were passages of great beauty, because it is a beautiful Modern English translation. Even I, an atheist, admire it as literature.  But when Smith, who had almost no formal education, struck out on his own he produced prose like this:

And thus did the thirty and eighth year pass away, and also the thirty and ninth, and forty and first, and the forty and second, yea, even until forty and nine years had passed away, and also the fifty and first, and the fifty and second; yea, and even until fifty and nine years had passed away.

As a result, the Book of Mormon is three or four times longer than it has to be.

The Nephites stopped obeying the law of Moses and obeyed the commandments of Jesus instead. After the year 100 CE, all the original disciples of Jesus had died, except for three which he allowed to live on and on until the end of human history. But new disciples were ordained to replace the ones that died.

And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness. . . no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of –ites…

Yes it actually says “nor any manner of -ites.”

A whole generation came and went, over the course of 110 years, and there was no contention in the land. Imagine, by analogy, that the last contention in America was the Civil War, which ended in 1865. Now imagine that for the whole period ending in 1976, no one rekindled the issues from the Civil War at all.  No Jim Crow laws, no segregation, no KKK.

The Nephi who recorded the coming of Jesus to American died, and the keeping of the plates passed to his son Amos, who kept it for 84 years. And there was still peace in the land, but a small group of people began to call themselves Lamanites again. No reason for introducing this flaw into the perfect utopia is given. In my analogy, it is the year 2060, almost two hundred years after the southern states declared independence from Washington, and some of them inexplicably start calling themselves the Confederate States of America again.

After that, the people started to get rich, and wear expensive clothing and jewelry, and divide themselves into rich and poor, and the communist sharing of private property came to an end. Then they formed churches which were essentially businesses for the purpose of gaining profits. One of these churches began to persecute members of the True Church of Christ, casting them into prison (but the prison then broke in two), or casting them into fiery furnaces (but the victims walked out unscathed), or casting them into a lion’s den (but the victims played with the animals as if they were lambs). “And they did smite upon the people of Jesus; but the people of Jesus did not smite again.”

In the year 231 the non-Lamanites began to call themselves Nephites again, for no reason. But the strangest thing was the Lamanites “did not dwindle in unbelief . . . but they did teach their children that they should not believe, even as their fathers, from the beginning, did dwindle.”  This is like parents retaining their belief in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus, but teaching their own children not to believe in them. But the Nephites became mostly wicked too, until only a tiny remnant still believed in Jesus. “And it came to pass that when three hundred years had passed away, both the people of Nephi and the Lamanites had become exceedingly wicked one like unto another.”

So despite God’s best efforts, even after allowing two generations to die out as a buffer between the old warring factions and the new, and even after sending the Son to establish a Christian Utopia in America, the old controversy between the Lamanites and Nephites reared up once again. Except this time the Nephites were just as wicked as the Lamanites, and the target of their wrath became a mere handful of faithful men who went into hiding. That is the overarching message the Book of Mormon is sending.  That no matter how good you think you are,  or how much faith you have, or how hard God works to give you blessings, at some point everything is going to turn to shit anyway, for no logical reason.