Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe as a matter of history that, centuries ago, in about A.D. 385, somewhere in the Americas there was an enormous battle between the last great army of a people known as the Nephites and the armies of a rival people known as the Lamanites. Both peoples are believed to have descended from a group of Israelites, led by a man named Lehi, who migrated to the Americas in about 600 B.C. The conflict ended with the destruction of the Nephite army and the eventual disappearance of all surviving Nephites. The details are given in the Book of Mormon, considered by Latter-day Saints to be a volume of sacred scripture.

What then became of the victorious Lamanites is a question that many Latter-day Saints have believed settled for most of the history of their religion, founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr. (Smith said that he translated the Book of Mormon from ancient records buried for centuries in upstate New York and entrusted to his care by an angel of God.) The Lamanites, church members have long believed, are the direct ancestors of the indigenous peoples found in North, South and Central America by European explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries.

It's a matter of some controversy, then, that LDS officials have now changed the text of the Introduction to the Book of Mormon, softening the assertion made when the Introduction was first included, in 1981, that the Lamanites "are the principal ancestors of the American Indians." The new text says only that the Lamanites "are among the ancestors of the American Indians."

Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of religious studies and history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and a widely respected authority on Mormonism, said that this newest tweak is a minor one. For one thing, it's not an alteration of actual scripture, as happened perhaps most famously when a verse in Second Nephi was changed from "white and delightsome" to "pure and delightsome," reverting to the wording of an earlier edition.

(There have been thousands of changes to the exact text of the Book of Mormon since its first printing, in 1830. Royal Skousen, a professor of linguistics and English language at LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University, said that all but a handful of those revisions are simple corrections of errors that resulted from the laborious and inexact process of setting type for the original edition based on handwritten manuscript pages. For example, Skousen said, "the original manuscript didn't have punctuation, so every punctuation mark is technically a change. To me it's a trivial issue.")

Besides which, Shipps said, Mormonism has a ready mechanism for revision. "You've got continuing revelation, the principle of shift and change," Shipps said. As opposed, she said, to Fundamentalist Christians "who hold that the Bible is as it is supposed to be and can never be changed. That's a very different approach to scripture." (Though she has pursued a scholarly interest in Mormonism for decades, Shipps herself is "an active, practicing Methodist," she said. "Sunday School teacher and all.")

The Introduction change became widely publicized earlier this month following a report in the Salt Lake Tribune that said New York-based Doubleday, which publishes a reader-friendly version of the Book of Mormon with no footnotes or cross references, was the first entity to print the revised Introduction. A Doubleday spokesman told the Tribune that the change had been made at the request of church officials so that the Doubleday edition would be in harmony with future LDS editions.

(Another news report revealed that the change first appeared in Doubleday's second edition, released in October 2006. The first Doubleday edition was released in November 2004. The Tribune story was the first to call attention to the change.)

Church officials subsequently confirmed that the revised Introduction would also be included in the next edition printed by the church itself (an exact date for the printing of the next church edition has not been announced). A statement by LDS spokesman Mark Tuttle said that the change "takes into account details of Book of Mormon demography which are not known."

Some Latter-day Saints may now find themselves wondering what to make of the change, and how much it says about the established LDS view of the heritage of indigenous American peoples.

Christopher Bigelow, who lives in Provo and co-authored "Mormonism for Dummies," said via e-mail that he finds the change "refreshing," and that it "tends to bolster my faith both in the Book of Mormon and in the church. As far as history goes, the Book of Mormon is like a flashlight shone in a dark room. It shows a slice of the picture quite well, but leaves many things unexplained, and this change to the introduction better reflects this reality."

Jack Christianson, who wrote the book "Setting the Record Straight: The Book of Mormon," which discusses common questions about the Book of Mormon, said in an e-mail that he considers the change to be of minor importance. After all, it's a pillar of LDS faith that such changes not only occur periodically, but are of divine origin.

"Our ninth Article of Faith states that, 'We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God,' " said Christianson, a longtime educator recently appointed to be the director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Utah Valley State College.

(The Articles of Faith, of which there are 13, are contained in a short document composed by Joseph Smith that explains LDS beliefs. It is considered a work of sacred scripture.)

And, as Bigelow put it, the change is not necessarily a retraction of the substance of the earlier version. "The change does not mean that the Lamanites are definitely not the 'principal' ancestors of the American Indians -- they could still be," Bigelow said. "After all, you could interpret the word 'principal' in several different ways, such as 'most spiritually significant,' or 'largest number of ancestors,' or 'biggest proportion of DNA.'

"The change just acknowledges that we really don't know."

A matter of genetics

There are, of course, people who believe it's been definitively established, regardless of what is or is not said in the Book of Mormon, that the Lamanites, if they existed, had nothing to do with the heritage of indigenous American peoples.

A primary sticking point for some scientists -- namely that DNA profiling of Americans Indians reveals no signs of the DNA that Nephite and Lamanite forebears would have brought with them from Israel -- is captured in the 2004 book "Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Mormon Church." The book was written by Simon Southerton, a molecular biologist and former LDS bishop who is no longer a member of the church.

"We are certain that American Indians are essentially all descended from Asian ancestors," Southerton said via e-mail. "Israelite DNA has escaped detection after tests on more than 12,000 individuals. How could the massive Book of Mormon civilizations not leave a significant genetic trace?"

The change to the Introduction, Southerton said, is merely an acknowledgement of ongoing scientific research that weighs heavily against the possibility that people of Israelite origin are prominent ancestors of American Indians.

"The Mormon Church is more or less admitting that scientific views about the colonization of the Americas are largely correct," Southerton said, adding that many LDS scholars have consistently attacked such views. "LDS claims have been severely challenged by the DNA research and the church is now retreating from them."

Bigelow said he thinks it's certainly possible that the church is, in part, responding to a sort of scientific peer pressure -- and that that might not be entirely a bad thing. The change could be an acknowledgement, he said, that "scientific evidence does weigh heavily in the minds of many people, so why leave an unnecessary stumbling block" in the Introduction?

Bigelow said it's also possible that church leadership is merely correcting what may have been a zealous overstatement, possibly on the part of the late Bruce R. McConkie. Prior to his death, McConkie was a member of the faith's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, its second-highest leadership body after the First Presidency, which includes the church president and two apostolic counselors.

(The current First Presidency, led by President Gordon B. Hinckley, includes apostles Thomas S. Monson and Henry B. Eyring.)

It's at least somewhat widely believed that McConkie authored the Introduction -- Bigelow said that he's always been told McConkie wrote the Book of Mormon's chapter headings and was at least a contributor to the other supplemental materials, including footnotes and cross references, brought forth at the time that the Introduction was added, in 1981.

Church officials referred all Daily Herald questions to Tuttle's statement regarding the Introduction change; the statement does not specifically address authorship of the Introduction. Christianson said that he does not know who wrote it, but added that, "It may have been several people on a committee."

Regardless of who wrote the Introduction, many Latter-day Saints consider the question of the exact relationship between the Lamanites and American Indians to be far from settled by DNA research.

Christianson said simply that, "I do not believe DNA research at this time is a reliable source concerning the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon."

(Christianson also made the point, sufficient to address any amount of revision in the minds of many, if not most, church members, that "the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is a spiritual matter, not a matter of scientific fact." (It is a major LDS teaching that anyone who reads the Book of Mormon and prays with sincerity to God will be told directly of its truthfulness by the Holy Spirit.)

John L. Sorenson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University, wrote in an article titled "The Problematic Role of DNA Testing in Unraveling Human History," published in 2000 in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, that, "The Book of Mormon text does not make clear just how and when Lehi's descendants got mixed up with other peoples in their new land of promise, but it is clear that they did.

"That complicates terribly our forming any idea of what they became genetically over the thousand-year history recorded in Mormon's account. After A.D. 400, the problem would be still more complicated." (A.D. 400 is the approximate date by which the Book of Mormon records that the Nephites were entirely eradicated, essentially eliminating half of the total population descended from Lehi.)

In the same article, Sorenson argues that it's not entirely reasonable to expect to find DNA typical of Israelites left over from Book of Mormon peoples since it's difficult to determine what typical Israelite DNA is. An additional source of uncertainty, the article says, is that both the Nephites and Lamanites are wholly descended from just five original Israelites, a sample size that's problematic at best.

(The lineage established in the Book of Mormon traces all Nephites and Lamanites from two men, Lehi and Ishmael, their wives, and a man named Zoram, not related to either family.)

Shipps said that the church may, in a sense, be arguing with itself, since the heaviest criticism of the connection drawn in the Introduction between Lamanites and American Indians is from people with an LDS background, like Southerton, or anthropologist Thomas Murphy.

"It's a Mormon major truth claim that nobody else takes seriously," she said.

Perhaps that's one reason why Shipps sees the Introduction change as ultimately having only minor repercussions for the church. She compared it to a prior episode in the 1960s when the discovery (and subsequent analysis) of previously LDS-owned papyrus fragments at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art led some researchers to question the authenticity of portions of the LDS scriptural volume the Pearl of Great Price.

"At the time, as an observer, I thought, 'Well, this will take care of Mormonism. Everyone will know that it's not what Joseph Smith claimed it to be,' " Shipps said. Instead, she said, "It was like dropping a stone in a pond. It caused a few ripples and sank to the bottom."

The Introduction change, she said, will most likely follow the same pattern: "It will cause a few ripples, and then go away."

• Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it