It has become apparent to me that some Book of Mormon scholars claim that Joseph Smith did not really understand the book he was translating, and this becomes more evidence of its miraculous nature.  Although I cannot copy portions of this conversation due to copyright issues, one can find an example of this claim at Fairboards.org, now renamed a MormonApologetics.com.  Under the header “LDS Dialogue and Discussion”, the thread titled “How does the Local Geography Theory square w/ what Joseph Smith said?”, on the nineteenth page of the discussion, Brant Gardner commented on December 23, 2005, at 5:01 pm that the fact that Joseph Smith apparently didn’t understand the geography of the Book of Mormon is a strong indicator that he wasn’t the author of the text, and the fact that so many past leaders adhered to the whole hemispheric model is an indication that they didn’t examine the text carefully enough.

 

While I don’t have any comment regarding how carefully past leaders did or did not examine the Book of Mormon, it seems to me that accepting the theory of the loose translation model requires accepting that how Joseph Smith understood the Book of Mormon is, in fact, extremely important.  After all, this understanding would have been obtained through the same process that resulted in the actual text of the Book of Mormon.  If Joseph Smith didn’t read individual words that appeared on a stone or through spectacles, and instead, had some sort of gestalt image or understanding conveyed to him of events that he then put into his own words, which allowed for translation errors, then that same understanding is what colored his later comments regarding the Book of Mormon and its setting. 

 

However, Joseph Smith’s understanding of the Book of Mormon is not the main topic of this article.  The main topic of this article is whether or not the claims made by adherents of the LGT are compelling given the context of what we know today about ancient Mesoamerica.  Once more, I will focus on putting these claims into context and asking “if…then” questions of these theories.