It’s good, clean fun to apply scholarly critical methods to the Book of Mormon like to any other historical text.  The delicious joke is that , yes, you are using scholarly methods designed to subvert the authority of tradition and to assert scholarly status and preeminence. But you are doing so sly.  By treating the book as historical at all, you are acknowledging the reality of ancient secrets, beings of light in the woods, supernatural authority, mysteries and  miracles walking the earth . . .  It is delicious.

You’ve heard of Orson Scott Card’s theory that the people of Zarahemla were not descended from Mulek at all.  That was, he thinks, probably just their way of claiming a little face in front of these chesty Nephite newcomers, and probably acceptable to both sides as a formula for union.  Hey, you guys and us guys, we’re just Israelites together.

Someone out there likely has already suggested that Nephi is a legend.  You bet that if the Book of Mormon were history to historians, historians would be racing to rush into print the first denial that he existed at all.  He would be viewed much like Romulus is in Roman histories.  At times the orthodox view would be that he existed but that much of the story about him  was made up, while the revisionists would be arguing he was total myth.  At times vice versa.

Because in many ways he fits the template of legendary founder and the small plates the template of a post hoc justification..  The small plates sections are written in a completely different style from the rest of the Book of Mormon text as we have it and there is an extremely fuzzy transition from the small plates to the large plates, big chunks of time just get skipped over or summarized into almost nothing.  Unlike in normal histories, the further away it gets from the “present” of King Benjamin and Mosiah, the more detailed it gets.  The closer to the present, the vaguer.

And Nephi is a name hero (always suspicious) whose story suspiciously explains the origins of various ethnic groups (also suspicious) while coincidentally giving the Nephites a historical basis for claiming rulership over those other ethnic groups and the land they are in (extremely suspicious).  Any good historian could whip up the revisionist case in a heartbeat.  All good, clean fun.

Here is my own contribution to that good, clean fun.  Don’t believe it, my pollywogs.*  I don’t.  Here’s the theory.  King Mulek, et al., existed and founded Zarahemla in some way.  Later Zarahemla gets conquered by some outsiders.  Faced with an existing literary and scribal and religious tradition superior to their own, the newcomers adopt it.  But graft on an invented history of their own that trumps the old one.  Oh, you’re Israelites?  So are we, but even better!  Its much the same process that produces the repeated Nephite insistence that King Benjamin is seer, which is better than a prophet.