What does the Book of Mormon claim, briefly?
… Well, the Book of Mormon is a migration story, similar to the idea of the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, except there are three migrations involved in this: an early one [involving a people] called the Jaredites, who landed in the New World at a very early date, thousands of years ago — these people disappeared; and then a great one, and the most important one to the Mormons, which are the Nephites’ passage across the ocean in boats with cattle, Old World domestic plants, with metallurgy and so forth. And after a while, of course, … it starts to fall to pieces, as all civilizations usually do, and a faction called the Lamanites wins out. These people are the ones that are cursed by God, with dark skins. They’re not at all beloved by God, and these are the ancestors of the American Indians today. So it’s a triple migration story. The job, according to a lot of Mormon archaeologists, their job is to find that this is a true story: that all these things actually existed in th
