Scripture Central announced some changes in their offerings in 2025.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEX_qfuqe0R/?igsh=MXhyazV0ZTk4aWVrNQ%3D%3D
One change is Tyler Griffin's new project:
Tyler Griffin has decided to start a video series on the Scripture Central YouTube channel delving into the most common questions investigators ask the missionaries. It will hopefully be a great resource for missionaries and friends curious about the faith alike.
Tyler is awesome. He's highly educated and experienced, he's effective, he's enthusiastic, and he's a great guy.
Like Tyler, we all agree that the main purpose of the Book of Mormon is to convince people that Jesus is the Christ. Anything that encourages people to read and study the Book of Mormon will help fulfill that purpose. Surely Tyler's set of answers will be useful and inspirational for many people.
Except for his answers about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon.
Like every other post on this blog, this one is intended as a suggestion for improvement, a move toward transparency and accommodation of multiple working hypotheses, all in the pursuit of clarity, charity and understanding.
We're fine with Tyler teaching whatever he wants. We continue to hope that he will acknowledge that there are other faithful interpretations and that he will inform his students, readers, viewers and listeners about those alternatives.
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The first two questions that 97.6% of new readers of the Book of Mormon have is "Where did this book come from?" (origin) and "Where did these events take place?" (setting)
Tyler's answer to the first question presumably consists of Scripture Central's stone-in-the-hat (SITH) explanation, including Royal Skousen's obvious and inevitable SITH conclusion that Joseph and Oliver intentionally misled everyone about the translation.
That's obviously problematic for those of us who still believe what Joseph and Oliver claimed, along with the evidence that corroborates their claims.
But that's not the only attack on the credibility of Joseph and Oliver from Tyler and Scripture Central.
Let's focus on the second question people ask: "Where did these events take place?"
Tyler's answer will undoubtedly consist of Scripture Central's Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory (M2C) which consists of three elements:
1. There are two main locations of Book of Mormon events: the Old World of Jerusalem/Israel and the Arabian peninsula, and the New World of the Americas. Most Latter-day Saints agree with this.
2. Some Old World locations are known, such as Jerusalem, while locations of others are less certain but probable, such as "Bountiful," the place from which Lehi sailed, being in Salalah, Oman, or another site along the coast. Most Latter-day Saints agree with this.
3. No New World locations are known, so we use an imaginary map to explain the Book of Mormon, pursuant to these principles.
3a. The prophets were wrong about the hill Cumorah/Ramah in New York.
3b. The prophets were correct about "the Americas."
3c. The best way to understand the book of Mormon is by using an imaginary (fantasy) map.
Some Latter-day Saints agree with this, but many do not.
Analysis.
The text of the Book of Mormon doesn't mention any modern geographical locations. Not even America.
Joseph found the plates in New York, which suggests that the events took place in New York, but the text itself doesn't say that. Based on the text alone, the events could have taken place anywhere in the world, which is why some have proposed sites in Africa and Asia.
Let's look at the three parts of element 3.
3.a. Cumorah.
The historical record gives us extrinsic insight into the setting of the Book of Mormon events. This includes not only Joseph Smith's own explanation that he learned about Cumorah before he got the plates (D&C 128:20) but his mother's explanation that Moroni told Joseph the first time they met that the plates were in the Hill Cumorah near their house, and that Joseph referred to the hill as Cumorah before he ever obtained the plates.
We have Moroni's explanation to Joseph that the history was "written and deposited not far from" Joseph's house, which means Mormon and Moroni both wrote the record in the vicinity of Palmyra.
We have Oliver Cowdery's declaration that it is a fact that the hill in New York is the very hill Cumorah/Ramah mentioned in the text. Oliver was Assistant President of the Church when he made that formal declaration, and he did so in collaboration with Joseph Smith, who not only had the declaration copied into his own history, but had it republished for all Latter-day Saints to read and understand, including in the Times and Seasons, the Gospel Reflector, the Millennial Star, and The Prophet (a New York-based newspaper edited by his brother William). Later in Utah, it was republished in the Improvement Era.
We have explicit statements from Joseph's successors in Church leadership that corroborate the New York Cumorah, including testimony from members of the First Presidency speaking in General Conference.
These and more references are found here: https://www.mobom.org/church-history-issues
But along with everyone else at Scripture Central, Tyler explicitly rejects and repudiates all of these teachings about the New York Cumorah. That's why he created his fantasy map, which we'll discuss below.
This leads to part 3.b.
3.b. The Americas
Despite rejecting the New York Cumorah, Tyler and Scripture Central have concluded that the events took place in the Americas, based on the teachings of the prophets. But the same prophets who taught the events took place in America also taught Cumorah was in New York. How do we explain this inconsistency?
One rationale for rejecting the New York Cumorah is the assertion that there was no revelation about Cumorah. This, despite D&C 128:20 and the historical record about Moroni revealing the name Cumorah to Joseph Smith and the messenger Nephi telling David Whitmer about Cumorah. Beyond these known revelations, we have the reported experience of Joseph and Oliver having visited Mormon's repository of records in the hill, etc.
But let's follow the logic where it leads.
If there was no revelation about Cumorah (and no personal experience with Cumorah), there was also no revelation about America, the American continent, the Western Hemisphere, etc. No one has cited any revelation about the Americas, apart from what Joseph and Oliver taught in the first place.
The knowledge that the events took place in America arose from Moroni's explanation to Joseph about Cumorah in the first place; i.e., that the history was written and deposited not far from Joseph's home, and that it "gave a history of the aborigenes [sic] of this country." In the Wentworth letter, Joseph even explained that Lehi's descendants "are the Indians that now inhabit this country," thereby correcting Orson Pratt's speculation about Central America.
https://www.mobom.org/wentworth-orson-pratt
Obviously, the M2C explanation--rejecting what the prophets said about Cumorah but accepting what they said about the Americas, which is derived from the fact that Cumorah is in New York--is irrational.
That irrationality doesn't mean there is a problem with Tyler offering this inconsistency as one of multiple working hypotheses. The problem is he doesn't also offer the alternative evidence and interpretations that corroborate the teachings of the prophets. IOW, he makes an irrational argument but doesn't tell people about a rational interpretation.
3.c. The imaginary map.
Although the location of Cumorah/Ramah in New York is well established in the historical record, that does not determine the location of any other events in the Book of Mormon. The New York Cumorah/Ramah accommodates a wide range of possibilities, ranging from a limited geography around New York all the way to the hemispheric setting that was favored by some early Church members.
The variety of possibilities, combined with the destruction of ancient sites and geological changes, explains why Church leaders have never identified any other Book of Mormon sites, apart from D&C 125, which is ambiguous, some second-hand accounts regarding Manti and a few other places, and Joseph Smith's identification of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as the "plains of the Nephites."
This is reflected in the Gospel Topics entry on Book of Mormon Geography, which focuses on geography theories. The entry says nothing about Cumorah/Ramah, but correctly points out that there are numerous theories about the setting of the Book of Mormon, none of which have prophetic authority.
The omission of Cumorah/Ramah from that entry is significant because it avoids the direct and explicit repudiation of the teachings of the prophets.
But Scripture Central generally, and Tyler Griffin specifically, don't follow that example. Instead, they insist the prophets were wrong about Cumorah. Scripture Central puts Cumorah/Ramah in southern Mexico to make their geography theory work. Tyler puts it in the equivalent position on his fantasy map.
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| Tyler's map with his Cumorah circled |
We can all see that Scripture Central and Tyler Griffin persist in trying to persuade Latter-day Saints (and their friends) to reject what Joseph and Oliver taught about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon, all to promote their private speculations and theories about the Mesoamerican setting.
With that foundation, does it matter much how Tyler answers the other questions people ask?
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I write all of this in my ongoing hope that Scripture Central will someday abandon its dogmatic repudiation of the teachings of the prophets about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon and at least acknowledge and accommodate alternative faithful evidence and interpretations so Latter-day Saints can make informed decisions.
