Zosimus

My take is that the Book of Mormon was the attempt to evolve religion to keep up with the times. It was designed to align Biblical history with the science of it's day. I have dozens of examples, but here's one that is related to your comments on the Mesoamerican calendar: In the 1820s, the scientific consensus promoted by authorities like Humboldt, Carl Ritter and (surprisingly) Charles Anthon was that the Mesoamerican calendar was not native to the Americas. It was technology that was carried to the Americas by Indo-European migrants. In his Classical Dictionary, Anthon follows Humboldt in tracing the path of the Indo-Europeans from the IE heartland somewhere in northern India (Hindu Kush) over the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and into Europe via the Danube, and ultimately into Mexico. Humboldt provided a striking bit of evidence for this migration, the days of the week in the Roman, Germanic, Indian and Mexican calendars. Roman = 4th day of the week is associated with Mercury: mercredi in French, miercoles in Spanish etc. Germanic = 4th day of the week is associated with Mercury and Woden: Wōdnesdæg Indian = 4th day of the week is associated with Mercury and Budha: Budhavara Mexican = A unit of time in the Mexican calendar associated with Votan: Just read this In 1828, the leading scholars in Europe (mostly Germany) believed that the Americas were peopled by an ancient priestly class of Samanians (Shemite Buddhists) from Egypt. Martin Harris visited the two leading advocates of this theory in America and showed them the gold plate characters. Anthon would later note that the transcript included a depicition of Humboldt's Mexican calendar. According to Harris, both Mitchill and Anthon confirmed the characters were authentic, and the rest is history. Book of Ether is an even better example of alignment with the apologetic efforts of scholars like Jacob Bryant, William Jones, and GS Faber to respond to critics like Voltaire, Paine and Volney

Philip Jenkins argues that if you want a glimpse of how Christianity might have developed outside Roman state power, look at the Peshitta. (source) The Syrian churches of the East developed canon independently and their NT was even narrower than the Western NT. They did not canonize 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, Revelation. When the Portuguese reached India in the 16th century, they found ancient Thomas Christian communities that were long outside Roman jurisdiction and that were using the Peshitta. The Europeans took one look at their Bible and threw them in the bonfires, not because they had added books, but because they didn't have enough! These churches claiming direct descent from one of the 12 apostles were forced to conform to the western canon and add books like Esther, Tobit, Wisdom, 2 Peter, 2, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation that weren't considered by the Syrian churches as canonical. Protestant reformers would later remove some books, but these were never canonical in those traditions that never adopted the expanded canon of the Catholic/Orthodox traditions