Nephi prophesied that Christ would be born 600 years from the time he left Jerusalem. Wasn that a mistake?
Good question! Nephi wrote that he left Jerusalem after the beginning of the first year of Zedekiah (1 Nephi 1:4). We are pretty sure that this was 597 B.C. Opinions vary as to the date of Christ’s birth, with some putting it around 4 B.C. A common LDS interpretation of the date of Christ’s birth puts it at April 6, 1 B.C. The problem is that there were only 596 years from that beginning of Zedekiah’s reign until 1 B.C. (and fewer years still if an earlier birth date is used). Some LDS writers postulate that 600 is a round number, not meant to be exact. Other suggest the use of a “sacred calendar” system with 360-day years, with plausible grounds. For example, in “Book of Mormon Event Structure: The Ancient Near East” (Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1996, pp. 98-147), Robert F. Smith points out that the 360-day year of Mesoamerica seems to solve the problem nicely, and argues that what critics saw as a gaffe actually adds to the plausibility of the Book of Mormon as
