Moroni Day 2024

To commemorate September 21-2, there's a new page on mobom.org, here:

https://www.mobom.org/moroni-day

Moroni's interactions with Joseph Smith are simple and clear when we stick with what Joseph, Oliver, their contemporaries and successors said.

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During the night of September 21-22, 1823, Moroni told Joseph the record of the aboriginal inhabitants of "this country" was "written and deposited not far from" his home near Palmyra, New York. It wasn't written thousands of miles away and then somehow transported to the stone box in New York.

That night Moroni also told Joseph the record was deposited in the hill Cumorah, three miles from his house, and instructed him to remove the grass and moss, then remove the stone.

Joseph and his family referred to the hill as Cumorah even before he translated the plates, as Joseph explained in D&C 128:20. "what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah! Moroni, an angel from heaven, declaring the fulfilment of the prophets—the book to be revealed."

In late May or early June, 1829, before leaving Harmony, Joseph gave the abridged plates to the messenger who Joseph said was one of the Three Nephites, not Moroni. The messenger returned the abridged plates to Cumorah and picked up the plates of Nephi, which he took to Fayette so Joseph could obey the commandment in D&C 10 to "translate the engravings which are on the plates of Nephi." (Doctrine and Covenants 10:41)

This is all very simply, clear, and obvious. 

Compare that with the convoluted M2C theory which

(i) insists that Joseph, Oliver, their contemporaries and successors misled their fellow Latter-day Saints and everyone else in the world about Cumorah because they were ignorant speculators compared with modern credentialed scholars who know more about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon.

(ii) insists that the "real Cumorah" is somewhere in southern Mexico, although no one knows for sure where.

(iii) insists that Moroni hauled the plates and other artifacts thousands of miles from southern Mexico to western New York.

(iv) insists that Oliver Cowdery either lied when he told about visiting the repository of Nephite records in the hill Cumorah multiple times, or was relating a vision he and others shared of a hill in southern Mexico.

(v) insists that Cumorah can't be in New York because it is not near any volcanoes...

etc.

Here are examples of Scripture Central scholars teaching the world that the prophets were wrong about Cumorah:

Tyler Griffin teaching that Christ appeared at a pagan Mayan temple
(click to enlarge)

Jack Welch teaching that Mormon and Moroni were Mayans
and Cumorah was at a Mayan pyramid
(click to enlarge)

Tyler Griffin teaching the Book of Mormon with
a fictional fantasy map resembling Mesoamerica,
complete with showing Cumorah in southern Mexico
(click to enlarge)