(#11: Please don’t call me “Bob”)

Another thought about the seer stones is that if Smith used them (I find no reason to fault him if he did), the stone itself could have been no more than a focusing point for him, useful in precisely the same way as I use closed eyes when I pray or give blessings in the course of priesthood duties: to avoid distractions while attempting to reach a certain state of mind. It could be no holier or more complex than that.

“… since the descendants of Adam and Noah were often thought to have all been living together until Babel.”

Or since Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided, if you take it to mean political divisions.

“In this case, I think I’m safe talking about a single narrative because even if we posit many authors, the Book of Mormon claims to have a single editor, and that on a couple of different levels: what Mormon compiled, or what Joseph Smith translated.”

It is my understanding that Mormon did not edit 1st Nephi, 2nd Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom and Omni, but rather joined those “Small Plates of Nephi” with his own without alteration or copying onto his plates.

Ray, if we assume a historical basis and a New World setting for the Book of Mormon that is mostly compatible with what we understand about pre-Columbian history, we probably have to think more or less along those lines. If we treat the first chapter of Ether as history, then we want to find Jaredite origins in the ancient Near East. But if we think of it as ethnography, then it becomes a statement about relationships. Whatever their histories, the Nephites thought of the Mulekites as familiar and compatible, and hence with similar origins; in pre-modern ethnographic terms, if you have to go as far back as Babel to find a common ancestral event, it means that there’s no almost no degree of kinship, since the descendants of Adam and Noah were often thought to have all been living together until Babel.

I’m with Bob Perkins on this one. I think Nephi takes pains to _avoid_ mentioning whether or not there were others in the land when they arrived.

This curiosity may be explained in the missing 116 pages. 1 Nephi through Omni are not redactions by Mormon, but are a different sent of plates, written directly by the hand of Nephi, that were physically adjoined to the plates upon which Mormon wrote.

One hint that there might have been others is the account in Jacob 7, “there came a man among the people of Nephi, whose name was Sherem.” That could be read that he grew up among them, or that he came to them from outside the group. If he came from outside the group, either he was a Lamanite (but he was not described as a Lamanite) or he was from a third party.

I don’t have any particular scenario in mind, just that I don’t read absence of an accounting of indigenous Americans meeting the Nephites as evidence of their absence. And it seems to me that the narrative is better served by a context in which Laman and Lemuel’s families were absorbed or integrated into a larger indigenous population.

Some of Orson Scott Card’s speculation on the matter (http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-bookofmormon.html, see the sections on Zarahemla, ‘instant cities’, more than halfway down) informs my willingness to set these kinds of things in abeyance, and not assume that the land was empty.

It’s also conceivable that the Nephites could have lived in isolation, but that Lamanites did not. That conception easily accounts for the greater Lamanite numbers later on (that is, before the designations become useless in Helaman and 3 Nephi as tracers back to the founding Nephite and Lamanite families.)

I also bristle a bit at the context you’re providing, though I don’t think my objection erases your main point. Using the word “Narrative” for a text which putatively has more than five authors seems like a mismatch, especially considering the number of times “the hundredth part” could not be written.

As to the Book of Mormon as a pointer to a reliquary, or itself a reliquary “in prose”, I’m completely untroubled, and actually kind of excited about the idea. But my lack of trouble comes from the fact that I assume that God has a much higher technology than I do, and I know my great-grandfather would stare in awe at the way I’m sharing ideas with others, using this computer gizmo. “Indistinguishable from magic,” as Clarke would have put it.