Cement, highways, Old World steel: the genuine corrections

A handful of 19th- and early 20th-century criticisms were simply wrong, and an honest site should say so.

What the Church claims

Features once mocked (cement houses, highways, steel in 600 BC Jerusalem, writing on metal, a warlike urban civilization) are now established.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Holds up. Each of these is now established: Mesoamerican cement, highways, writing on metal plates, steel in the Levant by 600 BC. The claim that the old ridicule was wrong is simply correct. It reaches no further, because every one of them was recoverable from what a reader in Joseph's decade could learn, so being right about them is not evidence of antiquity.

The record

  • Mesoamerican lime plaster dates to 1100-600 BC, structural lime concrete to the Late Preclassic, and Teotihuacan shows fully developed cement in the 1st century AD; Helaman 3 puts its cement houses in the 'land northward' at about 46 BC.
  • Heber J. Grant told the April 1929 conference of being ridiculed over cement.
  • Scripture Central notes B. H. Roberts found late-18th and early-19th-century sources mentioning Native cement; Humboldt described Mexican monuments in 1811 and 1814.
  • More than 177 km of Preclassic Maya causeways are documented in the Mirador basin; steel blades are known from Iron Age Israel.

The moving target

  • 1929-04: Predicted cement would be vindicated.

The exchange

Scripture Central; John Welch; Roper

These are fulfilled predictions that a New York farmhand could not have guessed.

The answer: They are real corrections, but 'could not have guessed' is too strong: accounts of Mexican stone-and-mortar cities were in print before 1830, and Old World items such as steel and engraved metal are in the Bible. They show the book is not absurd, not that it is ancient.

What they get right: Cement is right on material, approximate date and relative location, which is better than chance description of 'Indians' in 1829.

The chart's compilers; FAIR

Whatever the exact total, the direction of travel is one way: items move from the unconfirmed column into the confirmed column and never back. That asymmetry is itself the evidence.

The answer: The asymmetry is built into the scoring rather than found in the world. An item retires as confirmed as soon as any arguable instance appears, and nothing is ever added when evidence moves against the book, which is why the list has no entry for DNA and none for the absence of Nephite remains. A ledger that can only be credited will always show a profit. The honest version of this argument is the narrow one this page already grants: a handful of 19th-century objections were simply wrong, and saying so costs nothing.

What they get right: Cement, highways, writing on metal and steel in 600 BC Jerusalem were real objections that were really answered, and a site that will not say so is doing the same selective accounting it complains about.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Granting every item here, the list is short, several were knowable, and none bears on the items that would actually demonstrate an Israelite presence.

The apologetic case

Each of these was asserted as an impossibility by educated critics and each was wrong; a pattern of critics' overconfidence should temper confidence about the remaining items.

What would change this

N/A: these are conceded.

Closely related

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.