The most fundamental claims of authentic revelation of the Book of Mormon is the geographic details listed below were not known in Joseph Smith's time.
I will say this in a plainer phrasing:
There is no way Joseph Smith could have known these things, so the text must be of divine origin.
This is...in LDS phrasing...both proof and faith promoting.
Yes it was known.
I didn't even have to spend 5 minutes to find a few maps that were in circulation in the 1830s that give enough detail to inform Joseph Smith enough to write his science fiction and then claim it is of divine origin. Go to a search engine and paste in the phrases, scroll down to links with old copies of maps. Be more thorough and creative than me with your own research method.
- Search phrase → map oman 1830
- Search phrase → map saudi arabia 1830
The Middle East, being an epicenter of trade routes, literate civilization and territorial empire since the dawn of writing has never lacked for well publicized maps and geophraphic awareness. With two thousand years of Christian interest in the region (for historical religious study) there has been an incentive for map publishing for the region since the spread of popular print.
The Protestant/Puritan culture of Joseph Smith's rural New York was, like all of New England, notoriously over-literate relative to the rest of the world. "Intellectuals" of that time and place often put their research and reading energies into Biblical related topics. Given all of this as a reasonable assumption of the culture, the thought of no maps of the Middle East is an odd, reality averse position to take.
Joseph Smith spun a story and then claimed God gave it to him. He did it again with the LDS Book of Abraham, which has been more thoroughly refuted because we have the actual physical copies of the Egyptian papyrus, and Joseph Smith's "revelation" and the documents do not say the same thing at all. The documents are manuals on common Egyptian funeral techniques. He claimed they were written by Abraham, and tells a radically different theology from Judeo-Christian ... of a planet Kolob and God having once been a man.
"Mormons" are a really nice upstanding and honest people who mentally work overtime to prop up the lies told by founder Joseph Smith. Within the mental space of faith they actually have all the dynamics of sunk cost fallacy. They work hard to pull the wool over their own eyes.
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