Population growth, army sizes and battlefield remains

The book reports hundreds of thousands to millions of war dead; no corresponding remains have been found.

What the Church claims

About two million Jaredite men died in one war; 230,000 Nephites fell at Cumorah in AD 385.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. Numbers can be hyperbole and fortifications are a fair hit; the missing material culture of war remains a real problem.

The record

  • Roper scores 'remains of Book of Mormon battles' unconfirmed and 'millions of war deaths' only partially confirmed, by analogy to a Chinese rebellion.
  • He scores fortifications, early Maya warfare, armour and large armies confirmed; the older scholarly picture of a peaceful Maya was wrong.
  • Bow and arrow in Book of Mormon times is only partially confirmed (Copan points AD 400-600).

The moving target

The Church has no position on Book of Mormon population figures, army sizes or the absence of battlefield remains. Its manuals repeat the numbers as written. The inflated-numbers answer offered below, which treats the book's own figures as unreliable, has never been adopted by the Church and sits awkwardly beside a curriculum that teaches them as history.

The exchange

Sorenson; William Hamblin; Roper

Ancient historians routinely inflate numbers; Mesoamerican warfare with fortifications, seasonal campaigns and mass casualties matches the text.

The answer: Both halves are fair, but they pull apart: if the numbers are hyperbole the book is not the precise record it claims; if they are real, the absence of any battlefield, mass grave or weapon debris, especially of metal arms, is glaring. Rapid growth from a few dozen people requires unmentioned native populations that the text never acknowledges.

What they get right: The discovery that the Preclassic and Classic Maya were warlike and built earthwork fortifications is a real point in the book's favor against mid-20th-century critics.

FAIR; Book of Mormon Central

The figures are military reporting conventions rather than census counts, and Mormon was abridging records centuries after the events. Read as Mesoamerican units rather than literal headcounts, the book's demography is internally consistent.

The answer: Reading the numbers as conventions solves the demography by deleting the text. Mormon gives 230,000 Nephites at Cumorah in named units of ten thousand, listing each commander one by one, and the Jaredite figure is presented as a count of the dead. If those are literary conventions, the Book of Mormon is not the plain historical record the Church teaches, and the same move is then available for every number in it. The archaeology is also untouched by the rescue: a battle on that scale at either candidate hill left no bones, no weapons and no burials.

What they get right: Ancient sources really do inflate battle numbers, and skeptics who treat the Nephite figures as uniquely absurd have not read much ancient history.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The warfare is described in the idiom of the Bible and of early American militia (swords, breastplates, head-plates, standards, stratagems), at a scale that should be archaeologically loud, in a period when it is silent.

The apologetic case

Large ancient battles often leave almost nothing (Cannae, Hastings), the text's fortifications match Becan-style earthworks unknown in 1829, and population figures make sense if Nephites ruled over larger native groups.

What would change this

A dated Preclassic or Early Classic battlefield with metal weapons in a proposed land.

Sources

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