The Methodological Flaw in Mesoamerican Comparisons With the Book of Mormon

Often, when we read a text, if we have learned to interpret in a particular way, we have trouble differentiating our image of what the text says from what the text actually says. For example, most people, when asked what happened to Paul on the Road to Damascus according to Acts 9, will describe Paul riding on a horse. Whether he did or not, the text never says that he was on a horse, and he may as well have been walking. Yet, even for well-read students of the Bible, many read the story as if the text itself said that Paul was riding on a horse. With this in mind, consider this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgqMddRmoNE&

The video compares the state of Mesoamerican civilization at the ostensible time of Nephi's arrival with the narrative in the Book of Mormon. Noting the development of the Preclassic at this point in the archaeological record, Sorenson and Gardner suggest a correspondence between the text and the story.

Here's my issue. The narrative described and attributed to the Book of Mormon is not the narrative presented in the text of the Book of Mormon. Rather, it is a synthetic narrative created out of the Book of Mormon text an an interpretive overlay placed upon the text using information from ancient Mesoamerican civilization. The narrative that is tested against the data is this: The Lehite colony, bearing high technology, arrives in Mesoamerica, and, through a combination of leadership, technology, and divine grace, gathers together a host of indigenous people who take on the name of the leader of the group, crowning him king. He then initiates a project of urban and economic development. This is compared with ancient America and locked in with a context where such urban development is in evidence.

This would be an important and significant convergence, but the argument for such a convergence is, in fact, circular. The information from Mesoamerica has been fed back into an informed reading of the Book of Mormon and then used as an interpretive key to expand the narrative and fill in what are assumed to be missing details. The "raw" narrative is, on a prima facie reading, this:

The Lehite colony arrives in the New World as their divinely appointed promised land. Coming ashore, the colony splits into Nephite and Lamanite branches. The Nephite branch, on account of their righteousness, is blessed by God with economic productivity and high civilization. Agriculture begins in the New World using seeds taken on the ship from the Old World. Implements of self-defense are created from Nephi's knowledge of metallurgy and his creation of metal swords after the model of Laban's sword. The Lamanite colony is a basically savage colony of hunters and gatherers.

Where this "raw" narrative is compared with the Mesoamerican archaeology, it bears almost no resemblance to what is found. If one had never been informed of indigenous outsiders other than the Lehites, one would not infer them from any statement in the text. This contrasts with the biblical story, which, despite taking place on a limited geography, records a host of specific non-Israelite nations along with the significance of their engagement with Israel and the names of their national gods. There is no analogue to this in the Book of Mormon.

Outsiders are brought into the narrative from the archaeological evidence, synthesized through the narrative described in the first half of this video (the entirety of which is inferred and never mentioned in the text) and then compared to ancient Mesoamerica. That it bears remarkable likeness to Mesoamerica is hardly surprising: Mesoamerican data has been fed into the text, which has then been fed back into a comparative analysis with the data.

This isn't dishonesty so much as it is an interpretive habit. Scholars like Sorenson and Gardner are so used to reading the text of the Book of Mormon with the assumption of indigenous outsiders and their relation to the Lehite colony that they create a synthetic narrative which does not exist in the text but comes to exist in their mind's habitual conception of what the text says. This methodological flaw is everywhere in Mesoamerican Book of Mormon Studies. When reading a Book of Mormon that has nothing to do with Mesoamerica in reality, the scholarly reader sees Mesoamerica in their mind's eye and then thinks it a striking convergence when what exists in their mind's eye bears a certain relationship to ancient Mesoamerican culture and archaeology.

[the YT comment saying this was my own writing, in case anyone is wondering if I stole it.]