Mormons Codex

[cursor]

I am looking for the book. Can you tell me the exact title?

Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient Mesoamerican Book, John L. Sorenson

Edited January 14, 2013 by cursor

[cursor]

I received some news over the weekend regarding the availability of Mormon's Codex in stores. The Director of Publication Production for the Maxwell Institute has informed my father that Deseret Book is going to fast-track production of the book, with a target publication date of September (they'll try for earlier if at all possible). The book still needs to be designed, typeset, proofread, and indexed. That is apparently very aggressive for a complex 800-page scholarly book like Mormon's Codex.

Wouldn't it be great to have copies for sale at the next FAIR conference?

[EllenMaksoud]

Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient Mesoamerican Book, John L. Sorenson

OK, this is what had me confused. There is a book on Amazon called: "The Book of Mormon as a Mesoamerican Codex- FARMS Reprint by John L. Sorenson (1976)

So this new book is an update of that?

[Darren10]

I received some news over the weekend regarding the availability of Mormon's Codex in stores. The Director of Publication Production for the Maxwell Institute has informed my father that Deseret Book is going to fast-track production of the book, with a target publication date of September (they'll try for earlier if at all possible). The book still needs to be designed, typeset, proofread, and indexed. That is apparently very aggressive for a complex 800-page scholarly book like Mormon's Codex.

Wouldn't it be great to have copies for sale at the next FAIR conference?

I've been waiting for a release date for months now. At least I now know I can stop biting my nails. September seems likea long way though I do understand that large books do take time, especially whe they are to meet the high publishing standards like that from the Maxwell Institute.

[cursor]

[url="http://www.mormondialogue.org/user/19418-ellenmaksoud/"%5DEllenMaksoud%5B/url%5D

"]OK, this is what had me confused. There is a book on Amazon called: "The Book of Mormon as a Mesoamerican Codex- FARMS Reprint by John L. Sorenson (1976)

So this new book is an update of that?

The Book of Mormon as a Mesoamerican Codex was written in 1973 and was first published in Society for Early Historic Archaeology, Newsletter and Proceedings, No. 139 (Dec.). It is just 9 pages in length. Mormon’s Codex: An Ancient Mesoamerican Book, on the other hand, is an 800 page volume that amplifies the premise of the original paper with an additional forty years of scholarly work.

[Brant Gardner]

OK, this is what had me confused. There is a book on Amazon called: "The Book of Mormon as a Mesoamerican Codex- FARMS Reprint by John L. Sorenson (1976)

So this new book is an update of that?

Not exactly. That article is a much older discussion of the Book of Mormon in a Mesoamerican context. There will be a little overlap and certainly the idea for the new book's title goes back that far, but that article shouldn't be confused with the book. (so I see after posting this that Cursor has already answered--that's what I get for being on a phone call in the middle of writing the post!) Edited January 14, 2013 by Brant Gardner

[nealr]

I received some news over the weekend regarding the availability of Mormon's Codex in stores. The Director of Publication Production for the Maxwell Institute has informed my father that Deseret Book is going to fast-track production of the book, with a target publication date of September (they'll try for earlier if at all possible). The book still needs to be designed, typeset, proofread, and indexed. That is apparently very aggressive for a complex 800-page scholarly book like Mormon's Codex.

Wouldn't it be great to have copies for sale at the next FAIR conference?

I recently had the privileged of sharing a dinner table with Dr. John L. Sorenson, among others, at an event held this last Friday. Sorenson informed us that Deseret Book would be getting his book fast tracked and published ASAP. (My paraphrase.) Then, after a pause, he said with wry smile, "Which for them means September."

My friend (who was also there) and I have since debated as to whether 'September' was just a joke about how long this process has taken/how slow Deseret Book is, or if it was the actual target date of the release. So thank you for confirming the September release date. (I was the one who argued that it was the actual target date, by the way.)

I look forward to the getting my hands on it, and yes, it would be GREAT if it could be ready in time for the FAIR Conference, but that would require them to be a whole month ahead of schedule. I'll cross my fingers though.

[cursor]

Dad is great with his "wry smile," don't you think. Such a kind sense of humor. I hope that you enjoyed the dinner, Neal! =)

[cursor]

My father just passed on a very nice compliment from the art director at Deseret Book regarding the maps that I authored for Mormon's Codex (“Beautiful, really beautiful!”). I just loaded the source vector files for review, then proceeded to make a number of graphic edits, addressing some details that I'd previously somehow missed. I'll be mailing a CD of those edits to Deseret Book (Suzanne Brady) sometime this next week. Small steps forward.

Edited March 15, 2013 by cursor

[MormonMason]

If Cerro El Vigía has been identified as Hill Cumorah. Would it be expected to find remnants of the massive battles fought there? Hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in a small area. Bones, weapons of war, etc?

Weapons? Potentially, but not necessarily. That would assume non-perishable materials used in the construction of the weapons. That also would assume that the victors left behind useful weapons and that any weapons that followed the wars would survive the acidic soils of Mesoamerica.

Bones? Likely not. If the bodies weren't buried immediately it is likely that the bones degraded into dust after a decade or so. That is what happens to bone that is left in the open for long periods of time on wet, acidic soils. The Book of Mormon suggests that the bodies of the slain were not buried immediately, if at all.

Edited March 16, 2013 by MormonMason

[Daniel Peterson]

My father just passed on a very nice compliment from the art director at Deseret Book regarding the maps that I authored for Mormon's Codex (“Beautiful, really beautiful!”). I just loaded the source vector files for review, then proceeded to make a number of graphic edits, addressing some details that I'd previously somehow missed. I'll be mailing a CD of those edits to Deseret Book (Suzanne Brady) sometime this next week. Small steps forward.

Thanks for your efforts on this, and for your help to your father.

I've been looking forward to this book -- a very important Mormon scholar's crowning work -- for a long time.

[MormonMason]

I've been waiting for a release date for months now. At least I now know I can stop biting my nails. September seems likea long way though I do understand that large books do take time, especially whe they are to meet the high publishing standards like that from the Maxwell Institute.

I had to wait years for the coming forth of the third edition of Bauer's Greek-English Lexicon. I learned patience from that so I can patiently wait for Mormon's Codex. I just hope it doesn't come out when I am flat broke. I'd have to wait months to be able to attempt to get it again. Well, there's that patience again...they say it is a virtue.

[Darren10]

I had to wait years for the coming forth of the third edition of Bauer's Greek-English Lexicon. I learned patience from that so I can patiently wait for Mormon's Codex. I just hope it doesn't come out when I am flat broke. I'd have to wait months to be able to attempt to get it again. Well, there's that patience again...they say it is a virtue.

Yes, yes. Patience is a virtue.

[cursor]

My father and I are working on a digital volume that will be entitled Mormon's Atlas (please excuse me if I've previously mentioned this). He just emailed me a 5000+ word OUTLINE on the project. We foresee offering a wealth of digital maps and perhaps even chronological/historical animations and aerial flybys that clearly illustrate human movements on real (3D) Mesoamerican geography. For Dad there is no such thing as "neutral." He'll(/I'll) celebrate his 89th birthday in April.

[CASteinman]

I am personally preparing all of the dozen or so maps for the book, by the way.

What do you do to prepare the maps? Is there software you use?

[cursor]

Foreword by Terryl Givens for John Sorenson’s Mormon’s Codex, slated for publication in September by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship and Deseret Book:

Controversies about the Book of Mormon of the past have given way to a growing accommodation. Historian Nathan Hatch complained a generation ago that, “for all the attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to the Book of Mormon itself. . . . The pivotal document of the Mormon church, ‘an extraordinary work of popular imagination,’ still receives scant attention from cultural historians.”[1] The publication of the scripture as a Penguin Classic in 2008 signaled an important milestone in the quest for respect and legitimacy of a sort. After all, the series imprint has a well-deserved reputation as “the leading publisher of classic literature,” providing scholarly editions of “the best works from around the world, throughout history.”[2]

But the accommodation, like all compromises, represents an acceptance of a very limited kind. It is “an important historical document,” explains the Penguin editor.[3] “Not everyone may believe its contents,” writes one scholar in a similar vein, “but fewer and fewer can continue to doubt the importance the book holds in American history and culture.”[4] Given the curt and often rabid dismissals of the book for most of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, such willingness on the part of academics to countenance the study of the Book of Mormon represents progress. Believing Mormons, however, will note in the contexts cited above the absence of any reference to American religion, an area in which the record is not considered to have a meaningful presence.

In a particularly pronounced way, the meaning and value of the Book of Mormon as a religious text are tied to a specific set of historical claims. Some voices have argued that the book’s religious value can be divorced from those claims. As “inspired fiction,” the argument runs, there is still much spiritual profit to be found in the volume, even if its origins are mired in fraud or delusion rather than grounded in pre-Columbian prophets inspired of God. While such efforts at a kind of religious détente may be well intentioned, they are untenable. The book’s unambiguous account of its own construction, as well as the historically defined reciprocity between Joseph Smith’s own moral authority as a religious leader and the sacred status of the book inseparably wedded to his claims and career, admit of no simple divorce.

Given the fact that the scripture’s status as an ancient document and its status as divine word are so inextricably connected, the willingness to bracket questions of the book’s claims to ancient provenance is a reasonable expedient in the academic world, where religious texts are rightly studied in isolation from the religious claims they make upon readers. The observed result, then, is the condition that currently prevails: scholars ignore the book’s claims to have originated with ancient Israelites in a pre-Columbian setting and emphasize its reception history and reflection of nineteenth-century religious yearnings and preoccupations. The case is different with the Bible. Whether or not God spoke to Moses on Sinai, Jesus resurrected from the dead, or Paul wrote words given him by inspiration, no one doubts the Old World setting and ancient origins of the Old and New Testaments. Until such time as a preponderance of evidence provides comparable historical plausibility for the Book of Mormon, no one can expect scholars to consider the book as anything other than a nineteenth-century cultural artifact.

If such a time is to come, it will arrive in large measure through the efforts of John Sorenson, who has done more than any Latter-day Saint scholar to shift the terms of the Book of Mormon debates. Taking biblical scholars William Dever and Kenneth Kitchen as his models, he intends to be a Darwin in reverse. If the great scientist made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist, Sorenson aims to make it intellectually respectable for academics to consider the Book of Mormon to be a translation of an authentic ancient American codex, or what he calls “a historically valid record.”

Joseph Smith and his contemporaries found support for the Book of Mormon’s ancient American origin in the writings of amateur antiquarians and explorers of their day—Josiah Priest, Alexander von Humboldt, John Lloyd Stephens, and others. Orson Pratt was confident in asserting New World names for Book of Mormon topographical features, and by 1900, LDS Church leaders had tentatively approved an expedition led by Brigham Young Academy’s Benjamin Cluff to do fieldwork with an objective of finding hard evidence for the scripture’s New World setting. After a few generations of fits and starts, Hugh Nibley did the most extensive work in establishing the plausibility of the Book of Mormon’s ancient provenance; however, his method was deliberately self-limiting. As he insisted, “If you want proof of the Book of Mormon, you must go to the Old World. You won’t find it in the New World.”[5]

Nibley’s legacy continued in the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, organized by John Welch in 1979 and assimilated in 2006 into Brigham Young University’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Welch and a host of scholars largely adopted Nibley’s model of emphasizing textual correspondences between the Book of Mormon and Old World languages, texts, and culture. At the same time, LDS scholars were also actively pursuing New World convergences and contexts, addressing topics from horses and metalworking in pre-Columbian America to Semitic/Uto-Aztecan connections. It is safe to say, however, that no one has remotely approached Sorenson in the scope of his project: this present work encompasses hundreds of “correspondences,” or points of “particular similarity” involving geography, chronology, archaeology, biology, and other disciplines, all with an end to establishing a New World setting, rather than merely Old World backgrounds, for the Book of Mormon. By processing massive amounts of scientific data in twenty-five chapters, Sorenson finds convergences based on literary forms, material culture, and an array of “knowledge systems” from astronomy and calendar systems to measurement practices. Health and medicinal practice, warfare, writing, and political systems also constitute his area of study: his range is astounding, and what follows constitutes a veritable encyclopedia of Mesoamerican scholarship. It is a fitting finale to a professional life dedicated to reconciling the commitments of the mind and heart, scholarship and faith.

So influential has Sorenson’s work on Book of Mormon geography been that there is widespread consensus among believing scholars in support of what is now called the “Sorenson model,” which identifies the scripture’s setting with a Mesoamerican locale. A prolific scholar, Sorenson has published more than two hundred books and articles. With the present work, he makes the most comprehensive and compelling case ever presented for the Book of Mormon as a record of real American antiquity. In 1998, the harshest critics of the Book of Mormon were already acknowledging that LDS scholars working on the Book of Mormon were “producing serious research which desperately needs to be critically examined.”[6] John Sorenson has again upped the ante with this work of fundamental scholarship.

[1] Nathan O. Hatch,

The Democratization of American Christianity

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 115. It was Gordon S. Wood who referred to it as “an extraordinary work,” “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,”

New York History

61 (October 1980): 381.

[2] “About Penguin Classics,” Penguin Classics, accessed February 19, 2013,

http://www.us.pengui...ics/about.html.

[3] Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, ed.,

The Book of Mormon

(New York: Penguin, 2008), vii.

[4] Paul C. Gutjahr,

The Book of Mormon: A Biography

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 195.

[5] Hugh W. Nibley,

Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Semester 1

, lecture 4 (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2004), 35.

[6] Carl Mosser and Paul Owen mention those names in “Mormon Scholarship, Apologetics, and Evangelical Neglect: Losing the Battle and Not Knowing It?,”

Trinity Journal

19 (Fall 1998): 184.

[cursor]

What do you do to prepare the maps? Is there software you use?

I employ a suite of software applications in a workflow that allows me to interpret precise Shuttle scan elevation data (SRTM), and then add clarifying vector graphic data that illustrates Book of Mormon peoples' movements.on that geographically precise terrain.

Edited March 17, 2013 by cursor

[CASteinman]

I employ a suite of software applications in a workflow that allows me to interpret precise Shuttle scan elevation data (SRTM), and then add clarifying vector graphic data that illustrates Book of Mormon peoples' movements.on that geographically precise terrain.

Woah. Maybe I am sorry I asked!

But I think that will be very interesting to see when its published.

[cursor]

It's guaranteed to be stimulating and enlightening, CASteinman.

[Hamba Tuhan]

Foreword by Terryl Givens for John Sorenson’s Mormon’s Codex, slated for publication in September by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship and Deseret Book:

The academic editor in me wishes desperately to make two corrections to this, but no doubt Deseret Book employ their own editors.

As one who has never found the Mesoamerican model compelling (and not because I think any other model is more compelling), I'm interested to find out if this work can possibly change my mind! Givens's foreword certainly suggests that hope.

Edited March 17, 2013 by Hamba Tuhan

[MormonMason]

The academic editor in me wishes desperately to make two corrections to this, but no doubt Deseret Book employ their own editors.

As one who has never found the Mesoamerican model compelling (and not because I think any other model is more compelling), I'm interested to find out if this work can possibly change my mind! Givens's foreword certainly suggests that hope.

While I still keep an open mind in many respects, when I really started studying out the issue is what convinced me that Book of Mormon most likely took place mostly in Mesoamerica. There were cultural elements there in the text that just did not seem to fit other regions but fit perfectly in Mesoamerica. I had favored a South American location before I started noticing things like that.

A few of a number of evidences for such are: varieties of alcoholic beverages, preparation thereof in various strengths, oblique mention of the Mesoamerican practice of sacrificing blood, rulership structure of the Lamanites comparing favorably with that of various groups in Mesoamerica such as the Maya (local kings ruled over by a great king), weapons that can be permanently stained with blood and which seem to be used like those in Mesoamerica, dwelling in houses made of wood, structures made of cement dating to the right time period, armor made of thick clothing like that of known among the Mesoamericans, head plates, arm shields, weather patterns, and so forth.

I am looking forward to seeing this detailed material and photos to see if it lends further strength to a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon. It should be interesting, nonetheless.

[livy111us]

Will there be a digital copy available?

[cursor]

Are you referring to a digital copy of Mormon's Atlas? If so, copies will be available at JohnLSorenson.com, once the work is completed.

If you might be referring to the digital version of Mormon's Codex, I (Curtis Sorenson) won't have rights to digitally publish until three years after the print version is offered by Deseret Book (which is projected to be in September of 2013). After that time, I hope to release an enhanced version, with optimized maps. We'll see how things develop.

Edited March 18, 2013 by cursor

[cursor]

Will there be a digital copy available?

Deseret Book (DB)/Maxwell Institute (MI) is pushing hard for digital rights to Mormon's Codex. (Based on their recent email communications with my father, I suspect that some reader(s) here might be syphoning contents/ideas from my posts and feeding them back to MI or DB. Oh well ... whatever.) Some years ago DB marketed a digital version of An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (without the author's permission). I purchased a copy of it from Amazon.com, and then proceeded to carefully evaluate the presentation. Virtually all the maps and tables were worthless. As a single example, the 2-page inside cover map of Mesoamerica was reduced to the size of a business card on my Barnes & Noble Nook (with no zoom feature). I hope that those failures are soon responsibly corrected. DB now insists that they have a different team in place, with superior ebook publication skills. If they can come to terms with my father (with respect to quality of digital publication and monetary compensation), I suspect that DB will co-release an ebook version of Mormon's Codex in September (or with some close time frame). Details are being ironed out.

Edited March 18, 2013 by cursor

[cursor]

Attached is a graphic that illustrates how maps were handled in the ebook version of An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (published by Deseret Book).

• A page in the printed book measures 6" wide x 9" tall.
  
• The size of a B&N Nook Color is 3-9/16" wide x 5-13/16" tall
  
• A screen shot of my Nook displays Map 5 at just 2-1/8" wide x 3-1/2" tall
  

There is no option for zooming in.