Good morning stranger!
I want to talk to you about Jesus!
Wait don't go, I swear it's fascinating!
So, I’m a Youtuber, and I’ve been doing this series about the crackpot theories about
people who discovered America before Columbus, and, well you’re gonna be in the penultimate
episode!
How good for you!
So, let me tell you about the claims that Semitic peoples came to America before Columbus,
and yes, that includes the Mormon claim that one of those people was Jesus.
I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
Semitic people have a significant role in history.They’re a language group that consists
of ethnicities today like Jews and Arabs.
However, it goes back to several civilisations that developed in… this general area almost
as far back as we have been developing in general areas.
Today we’re going to talk about arguments that Semitic people made it to the shores
of America long before Columbus sailed that ocean blue.
Let’s begin our story in China.
Over the centuries, the Chinese have been trading with the middle-east.
The middle-east was in the centre of a trade route running through Asia moving goods from
east to west.
The fact that the record of Arabs going to America comes from China is not a surprise,
as they saw each other a lot.
Also, Mongols destroyed many Arab writings, so a lot of our knowledge about the medieval
Islamic world comes from strange places.
The Chinese have accounts from Arab traders that they sailed to an unknown region called
Mulan-Pi.
This comes from two writings dating to the year 1178 and 1225.
These two writings together go by the name the Sung document.
Now, most interpretations think that Mulan-Pi is Spain, but a few people think this might
be the Americas.
The theory’s most prominent supporter was American historian Hiu-lin Li in the sixties.
There is also one document by Muslim historian Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī that claims
someone named Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad crossed the Atlantic and discovered unknown
land in the year 889, coming home with a ship full of goods as proof.
Now, here is the major problem with these theories.
Arab ships in this period might have been able to make the trip over, but not back.
The thing about travelling across the Atlantic is that without knowledge of the wind and
water currents, it can take a very long time to cross the Atlantic.
The time required is likely longer than an old Arab ship could handle, and even if they
knew about the northeastern trade winds, it would still add more time on the open ocean
than a boat could handle.
This is, of course, assuming you didn’t get lost at sea centuries before the Islamic
world would get the compass.
Add in the fact that there is no physical evidence of this, and you have a sort of floppy
argument.
Now the next two theories build upon each other.
For quite a while it was a favourite theory that sailors from ancient Phoenicia sailed
to America as far back as three thousand years ago.
So the Phoenicians were a civilization from the age of antiquity.
They lived in what today would be Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Gaza.
They were famous sailors and traders, noted for their vessels crafted from high-quality
trees that grew in the Levant.
The claim of Phoenician Atlantic explorers comes from a boulder located in Massachusetts.
There are a series of markings on the stone that garnered attention for quite a long time.
Even famous early American settlers like Cotton Mather would write about them.
The story got interesting, however, when the president of Yale Ezra Stiles made the claim
that these markings were not produced by indigenous peoples, but were, in fact, hebrew text.
This assertion is significant for an important reason.
When the first European settlers arrived in the Americas, they were quite shocked to find
people already there.
People who made the very distinct claim that this was the continent they originated on.
Keep in mind, the theory of evolution was centuries away, so Europeans had a pretty
hard time trying to draw a path from the garden of Eden to indigenous peoples.
They suspected that the ancestors of the indigenous people were one of the lost 12 tribes of Israel.
So, the claim that ancient Hebrew writing turned up in Massachusetts verified their
theory.
Some other stones turned up over the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, but all of them
turned out to be hoaxes.The most famous being lithographs or a carving in stone found in
the southeast United States called the Bat Creek Inscription.
There was also a claim that a map found on a coin from the empire of Carthage showed
the Americas but again this artefact was exposed to be a modern forgery.
It’s almost as if in situations where theology really REALLY needs something to be true,
forgeries pop out of the ground, but more on that later.
The discussion of Phoenician treks across the sea is still active today, with many scholars
coming to the pretty tired conclusion in this series that there is just no evidence that
it happened.
Some historians like Ronald Fritze point out that while technically possible, like the
Viking site in Newfoundland we discussed in the first episode of this series, Phoenicians
who crossed the Atlantic would’ve left something behind that would be found.
So at the moment there’s no reason to believe the crossing ever happened.
And so we come to the last of the essential Semitic contact theories, the one you clicked
on this video for.
The Mormon church asserts that ancient Jews crossed the Atlantic and that after his resurrection,
so did Jesus.
Hoo boy.
Ok, this is going to be a tough one to talk about.
The Mormons have a well-established field of people trying to prove once and for all
that the events Joseph Smith wrote in the Book of Mormon are real.
I’m not going to put kid gloves on for this discussion, but I also don’t want to be
a jerk to Mormons.
So if any Mormons are listening, I don’t know what to tell you.
I will probably make a video about Mormonism, so I will just do a quick TL;DR rundown for
you.
A 19th-century man named Joseph Smith published a book called the book of Mormon.
The book acts as a third testament of the bible that he translated from golden plates
he found under the direction of the angel Moroni.
Joseph Smith and his followers worked their way west across the United States, getting
chased out of town by people who didn’t like them.
In one case an angry mob killed Joseph Smith and the leadership of the church passed on
to his right-hand man Brigham Young.
They eventually found Salt Lake City, and since then it has been the centre of their
religion.
They’ve since branched out all over the world, do a lot and I mean a LOT of missionary
work, and do their thing over in Utah.
The religion makes some claims about American history, including the garden of Eden being
located in Jackson County Missouri, and some questionable things about black and native
people they’ve since had to walk back on.
The Book of Mormon claims that around the 5th century BCE, two Jewish groups called
the Nephites and Lamanites crossed the ocean to come to America.
There was a war, the Lamanites wiped out the Nephites, and became the indigenous people.
Some also argue that Polynesian people are descendants of the Lamanites; their darker
skin colour a curse for their cruelty in wiping out the Nephites.
Though to be fair, the Mormon church no longer asserts this.
There is also the book of Abraham.
Joseph Smith purchased some Egyptian papyrus off an antiquities trader.
In a time before we could translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, he claimed he could tell that
this was a book written by the famous biblical Abraham with divine inspiration.
However, we do know hieroglyphics now, and what was thought to be the book of Abraham
turned out to be part of the famous book of the dead, a description of the Egyptian concept
of the afterlife.
The field of pre-Columbian archaeology is a well-established field.
It’s massive; my most popular video is about the developments in it.
We have well-evidenced timelines of civilisations flourishing either during or before the time
of the events occurring in the book of Mormon.
The book’s claims simply don’t add up.
The Book of Mormon also references a lot of animals, plants, and objects as existing that
have never been found in the Americas until after contact.
You could handwave some of these off.
Cattle could just be llamas, goats could be deer, etcetera.
The tougher claims from the book of Mormon are that technologies like chariots existed
when no such technology, nor horses to pull them existed in the Americas.
Indigenous people had wheeled toys found in Mesoamerica, but no native groups ever went
all the way as to make chariots, or anything even close.The Book also talks about steel,
which there was also none of in the Americas precontact.
There is lastly the issue of language.
The Nephites described in the Book of Mormon have a language based on Egyptian and Greek,
and they had a writing system.
However, the only societies shown to have any written word in the Precolumbian Americas
were the Maya and the Olmecs.
Their languages have no resemblance to either Egyptian or Greek.
Furthermore all the writings of the Americas have undergone pretty extensive linguistic
analysis and point to the first peoples in the Americas arriving somewhere near Alaska
about 12 to 17 thousand years ago.
The scientific consensus seems pretty clear that there is no evidence for any of the factual
claims of the book of Mormon.
Other scholars also point out that the historical claims of the book of Mormon are more in line
with a genre of “mound builder” fiction popular in the 19th century.
I want to end this with a positive takeaway, even for any of my Mormon viewers who haven’t
posted an angry comment and left by now.
I don’t pretend that the Mormon religion makes any more factual claims than other faiths.
The other religions do have the benefit of age, and over the years they’ve gone through
a lot of work to make their text less literal and more allegorical.
Just a thought.
Religion man makes doing this job complicated.
Ok, so this is the second last episode of this series.
I have one left in me that I’m going to produce in my next batch of videos, so expect
it in December.
We’re going to look into African claims of Pre Columbian contact.
Did the Egyptian Pharaoh's do coke?
Are these stone statues carvings of African traders?
You’ll just have to hang on to find out.
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So every Sunday on the Alternate History Hub channel Cody, Emperor TigerStar, a pair of
Tylers, and myself talk about stuff.
History isn’t the primary focus, but we’re all big history fans, so it comes up a lot.
If you can’t make the streams though, the podcast can be found at a link down in the
description.
Our theme song is by the beautiful and talented 12Tone.
Lastly, I’d like to thank these excellent Patrons as well as Don and Kerry Johnson for
keeping Step Back going.
You just unlocked the $150 stretch goal, so expect a video about the Swastika in the next
month or so, and we’re just 21 dollars away from my next stretch goal where I’ll make
a video on the history of the fasces.
So if you want to see it, go to Patreon.com/StepBackHistory and help make it happen!
Now hang on tight for the next Step Back!