It looks like the topic of horses and the Book of Mormon is going to crop up every few months like a nasty case of eczema, so I feel it’s worthwhile to summarize the debate as it currently stands. There's another post on this blog about more recent research, but it always goes back to the (in)famous analysis done by Matthew Roper and his colleagues at BYU, John Clark and Wade Ardern, all the way back to 2005. But first, let's look even further back.
What the Book of Mormon Said
The word “horse” appears 14 total times in the Book of Mormon in the context of domesticated livestock, with half of those references being connected with pulling chariots of war. Both Lamanite and Nephite peoples equated these horses with those described in Isaiah 2:7 and 5:28, which Nephi expressly quotes in his own record (compare 2 Nephi 12:7 and 15:28), with no distinction made between them. The horses of the Americas, per the Book of Mormon, are intended to be the same in form and function to the Arabian horse of the Levant.
the horse as described by both the Bible and Book of Mormon (Wikimedia Commons)
What Early Critics Said
The earliest anti-Mormon publications took note of, among many other things, the distinct lack of any horses among indigenous peoples until Spanish conquistadors first arrived. One such critic, Hugh Stevenson, noted that the proliferation of horses among Native Americans was entirely due to European transportation and trade of the Arabian Horse to the Americas, and indigenous peoples then bred those horses for their own uses (Stevenson, Lecture on Mormonism, 9-10).
What the Apologists Say
In 2005, Matthew Roper, et. al contended that the horses existing in the Americas was now “trending” in the direction of being “confirmed,” as modern archaeology had revealed the fossils of an ancient Pleistocene “horse”, equus neogenus, in South America, from the likes of no other than Charles Darwin. In 2019, Roper reiterated this stance, claiming that critics were "backing off" of their claims that horses never existed in the Americas, as the extinction timeline for equus neogenus had been pushed forward “a few thousand years.”
What the Science Actually Says
Roper and his colleagues appear to have left out some critical details in their reporting:
Firstly, equus neogenus was not the Arabian species of horse we think of (the equus caballus), nor are they what are described in the context of Isaiah, who the Nephites understood as synonymous with the horses they alleged to have. The equus neogenus is extrapolated to be about 5 feet tall and zebra-like, dying out roughly 11,700 years ago as humans crossed the Bering Strait. Archaeological evidence has repeatedly confirmed that this equus was used as a source of food and fuel, but not as domesticated livestock. Other equus fossils have been established across both North and South America, but all of them date to the same time period and resemble the equus neogenus in both form and function.
Secondly, at least in the case of Lecture on Mormonism, Stevenson was careful to specify that his complaints were focused within the timeline of the Book of Mormon. He did claim that many wild animals mentioned in the Book of Mormon “likely never were inhabitants of America,” but he did not claim that horses "could never have existed in the Americas," and the findings of equus negenus do nothing to refute this as they are not a “horse” as would have been understood by ancient Hebrews in either the Old World or the New.
Roper’s Strawman
In his 2019 presentation, Roper criticized Book of Mormon detractors (emphasis added):
One of the problems we encounter with that and a lot of sources that criticize the Book of Mormon, you have selective representation of the problems that people mention about the Book of Mormon…and even a misrepresentation of literature that has already addressed those issues…a caricature of what a defense of the Book of Mormon might even look like.
Roper is describing the fallacious strawman argument, but the content of his own presentation clearly fits that description:
- Roper selectively curates the arguments against the Book of Mormon
- Roper creates a composite caricature of the criticisms, citing them without quoting them in any fashion.
- Roper misrepresents the scientific literature in order to make the evidence appear palatable to his audience whose primary motivation is to be reassured that their faith is not misplaced
And then, Roper makes this admission:
I’m not attempting to show or establish what may or may not have been known in Joseph Smith’s day...we’re taking what the critics themselves have said and tracking the status of those issues that they raised. Okay? So we’re going to take them at their word...
So not only is Roper not interested in accurately summarizing the complaints of critics or our modern science, but he can't even be bothered to compare apples to apples!
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