I have already done most of the commenting on Mormonism that I am going to do, but since the topic has come up again in Ross’ latest bloggingheads and prompted a reply to Ross’ request for a clarification from Prof. Fox, a longtime friend of Eunomia, I thought I might add a few comments.  Prof. Fox writes:

For example: Matt Yglesias claims in the Bloggingheads video that the Mormon church teaches that “the New World, in pre–Columbian times, was dominated by two vast rival empires.” (Those would be “the Nephites,” the people who carried on the family name and traditions of an early prophet named Nephi, and “the Lamanites,” a group named after his brother and enemy, Laman.) While the history of Book of Mormon interpretation over the past 180 years is actually pretty complicated, the basic facts are that Matt here is correctly describing what most Mormons who read the book believed…up until about 20-30 years ago, that is. The Book of Mormon itself never suggests the existence of massive, continent-wide, roaming empires; rather, serious readers have come to recognize that in fact the book talks about a couple (or actually more than a couple) pretty densely populated yet nonetheless localized tribes, and nearly everything presented in the book as fact takes place, according to its own narrative, within an area that a person on foot could cross within week, if not less. This is what we Mormons called the “limited geography” thesis: specifically, that the book isn’t telling us the whole history of the Native Americans (which many Mormons admittedly thought the primary purpose of the book was for decades), but rather telling the story of some relatively restricted groups, whose story God thought important enough to make certain it would be preserved and brought forth in our day.

However, the official LDS version of the Book of Mormon has this passage (Helaman 3:8):

And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea ^awest to the sea east.

And again, Helaman 11:20:

And thus it did come to pass that the people of Nephi began to prosper again in the land, and began to build up their waste places, and began to multiply and spread, even until they did ^acover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east.

There may be ways to reconcile this language with the “limited geography” thesis (perhaps the land between the two seas is exceedingly small?), and I won’t pretend that I am anything close to being thoroughly versed in these matters, but it appears at first glance that the earlier prevailing view of vast territories is one that seems to have some direct support in a central LDS scriptural text. 

Incidentally, there are other things that will leap out at the reader of the online version of the Book of Mormon (especially since they are hyperlinked).  For instance, there are several references to weapons made of steel.  Leaving aside the technological question, this creates another problem.  The official site does the cross-referencing work for you, pointing you to citations from the Bible that (in the traditional King James language) also refer to steel.  This seems a strange thing to draw attention to, since these passages about steel weapons from the Bible are English mistranslations of the adjective for a bow made of bronze (toxon chalkoun in the Septuagint versions of 2 Sam. 22:35 and Ps. 18:34/LXX 17:34), which tends to confirm that the language was taken directly from the King James mistranslation rather than echoing the content of the Old Testament books to which it is being compared. 

These are probably familiar arguments to Prof. Fox and others, and they may therefore be as tiresome to them as shocked secularist discoveries of contradictions between the Gospel accounts are to me.  Nonetheless, if a Mormon defense of the historicity of their scriptures’ claims is to persuade anyone, it will need to sort out these contradictions.