Mormon Genesis is a comprehensive secular study of the development and maintenance of the Mormon (LDS) scriptural community, including its scriptures, rites and official establishment of the faith. These Rocky Mountain (Latter-day) Saints arguably constitute the first scriptural community since Islam. Like the Jews with their Torah, the Christians with their New Testament, and the Muslims with their Qur'an, the Mormon community of believers derive their identity and even their sobriquet (Mormon) from their own foundational scripture, the Book of Mormon. This text posits a thousand-year history of Israelites in pre-Columbian America, with a population in the millions, and over forty cities by 200 BCE. The world is changing. Extensive high-tech archaeology has been done throughout the Americas. The Mayan writing system has been deciphered, yielding king lists, city names and religious inscriptions. The Egyptian hieroglyphs have been deciphered, enabling scholars to translate the Joseph Smith (so-called Abraham) papyri. DNA research has been done, not only on living descendants of pre-Columbian populations, but an increasing number of ancient human remains. This represents serious challenges to the keystone scriptures, which make a number of unusual assertions that are amenable to objective testing. The level of official LDS concern can be gaged by the major assets allocated to institutions and researchers at Brigham Young University to defend the faith. Mormon Genesis evaluates some of their more striking claims, and the origins and development of the movement. With 45 tables, it presents information and data sets never before published.
