Do you really think Joseph Smith stole the name “Cumorah” by studying a tiny island near Mozambique on an obscure 1808 map?
Unlike most people in the world, I know where Mozambique is. I’ve actually been there. Do you know how long the flight was and how hard it was to get to that country? Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the people there live in conditions we Americans cannot even imagine. School children not only don’t have school lunches provided, but they also don’t have computers, electricity, or even bathrooms to use. In many areas, classes literally meet under large trees.
The CES Letter claims that Joseph Smith plagiarized the names Cumorah and Moroni from a small, obscure island group off the coast of Mozambique.
Knowing how little people even know about Africa, particularly Mozambique, do you really think that an uneducated teenage farm boy, working hard to make a day to day living as a laborer and helping support his family, spent his free time studying obscure world maps looking for tiny islands off the coast of Mozambique?
What Would Actually Have to Happen for the “Moroni / Camora” Theory to Work?
For this theory to be true, an extraordinary chain of assumptions has to be accepted first. Not evidence. Assumptions built on additional assumptions.
Start with the first one.
The CES letter tells us that Joseph Smith must have been familiar with Captain Kidd treasure stories. Why? Because Pomeroy Tucker, a critic writing decades later in 1867, claimed Joseph liked stories about pirates and criminals. That single statement becomes the foundation of the entire argument.
But Tucker never says Joseph read anything about Camora, Comoros, or Moroni.
So the next assumption must be added.
We must assume that Captain Kidd treasure stories actually do include the names Camora or Moroni. Yet when those stories are actually examined, those names never appear. The pirate legends focus on places like Long Island, Gardiners Island, or the Caribbean. The Comoros Islands and the city of Moroni are never mentioned.
Well because Camora and Morni are never mentioned in the Captain Kidd Stories, and even though we’re not sure if Joseph Smith actually ever read these stories, we must still add additional assumptions.
Because Joseph Smith must somehow have become so fascinated by these pirate stories that he must have begun studying maps of the Indian Ocean. Not maps of New York. Not maps of the Americas. Maps of a remote region on the opposite side of the world off the coast of Mozambique.
Maps that were rare.
Maps that were expensive.
Maps that would have been completely irrelevant to a teenage farm laborer in rural upstate New York.
Yet we are supposed to assume Joseph Smith somehow obtained one.
Then we must assume that while examining this obscure map, Joseph notices a tiny island group labeled Camora and decides to steal the name for his fictional history.
But the theory still is not finished.
Now Joseph must somehow also know about the settlement Moroni on those islands. A name that was not known in the Western world and that would not become the administrative capital of the Comoros Islands until 1958, 160 years after the Book of Mormon was translated.
So the theory requires Joseph Smith to:
- rely on a secondhand claim written decades later
- find pirate stories that do not mention Camora or Moroni
- become motivated by these pirate stories to research maps of the Indian Ocean
- somehow obtain a rare and irrelevant African map in rural New York
- notice a tiny island group off Mozambique
- assume the settlement name Moroni long before it ever appeared on maps
- then combine these into Cumorah and Moroni for his book
All of that must happen.
And if every one of those assumptions lines up just right, we are told the conclusion is obvious.
Plagiarism.
But step back and ask the real question.
If an argument requires this many unsupported assumptions before it even begins to resemble evidence, is it actually evidence at all?
How likely is it that Joseph Smith even saw this map?
What evidence exists that Joseph Smith owned an 1808 world map?
Is there a journal entry?
A letter?
A record from his family?
A statement from any contemporary witness?
Did Emma Smith ever mention Joseph studying maps?
Did Martin Harris say Joseph collected geography books?
Did Oliver Cowdery say Joseph spent time analyzing maps of the Indian Ocean?
Is there even a single historical source placing such a map in Joseph Smith’s possession?
Or is the entire argument built on an extremely rare possibility that such a map may have existed in upstate New York?
Even if a map existed, why assume Joseph studied it?
Think about Joseph Smith’s life in the 1820s.
He worked as a laborer.
He helped his family survive financially.
He hired himself out for farm work.
He cut timber.
He dug wells.
He worked long physical days.
So when exactly was he studying obscure cartography of the Indian Ocean?
Late at night?
Between chopping wood and digging wells?
Carefully scanning thousands of miles of coastline looking for interesting syllables?
Is that a serious proposal?
How big is the supposed “connection”?
The CES Letter points to the Comoros Islands.
The claim is that Cumorah came from Comoros.
But are those names even the same?
Comoros.
Cumorah.
Different vowels.
Different consonants.
Different structure.
Different endings.
Different linguistic roots.
One is a modern European spelling of an island group name derived from Arabic.
The other is a name reported centuries earlier in the narrative of the Book of Mormon.
So the argument is not that the names are identical.
The argument is that they are vaguely similar.
That is the entire connection.
How many place names sound vaguely similar?
How many names in the world share similar syllables?
How many locations begin with “Co” or “Cu”?
How many names end with “rah” or “ros”?
Could we find dozens of names that resemble Cumorah?
Hundreds?
Thousands?
Would it surprise anyone that some names somewhere share similar sounds?
Is that not how language works?
What would Joseph gain by doing this?
Suppose Joseph did find the Comoros Islands on a map.
Suppose he noticed the name.
Suppose he changed the spelling.
What would that accomplish?
Would readers in 1829 recognize the reference?
Would anyone in rural America notice the connection?
Would it help persuade anyone that the book was ancient?
Or would it be completely meaningless?
What is the actual evidence?
Is there evidence Joseph Smith studied the Comoros Islands?
No.
Is there evidence he copied the name?
No.
Is there evidence he even knew the island group existed?
No.
There is only a vague similarity between two names.
Why not use one of the many other places around the world with similar sounding names to Cumorah, and claim that Joseph Smith stole the name from those instead?
If the standard of evidence is simply that two names sound vaguely similar, then there are countless candidates.
Camorra – the well known Italian criminal organization whose name dates back centuries in Naples.
Comorra – historical spellings that appear in older European texts.
Komarno – a city in Slovakia whose name contains the same “Komar” structure.
Komoro – a city in Japan.
Komarom – a historic Hungarian city name.
If someone wanted to argue that Joseph Smith borrowed names based on vague phonetic similarities, any of these could be proposed as the supposed source.
Languages repeat sounds constantly. Similar syllables appear across continents, cultures, and centuries. Names with sounds like “mor,” “rah,” or “Com” appear everywhere.
So why focus on one tiny island group in the Indian Ocean?
Moroni
The likely reason is simple.
The modern capital city of the Comoros Islands is named Moroni, which happens to look very similar to the name Moroni in the Book of Mormon.
For modern critics looking for any possible connection, this can feel like a discovery.
Two similar names.
A distant location.
A possible map.
Smoking gun.
They got him.
Another finding of one of the many sources Joseph used as plagiarism to create the Book of Mormon!
Except there is a major historical problem with that claim.
The tiny settlement in the Comoros Islands called Mroni would not have been known in the Western world during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.
The Comoros Islands themselves were obscure to Westerners in the early nineteenth century. They were small islands along Indian Ocean trade routes, occasionally appearing on nautical charts but rarely discussed in Western geographic writing.
The town of Moroni was simply one insignificant local settlement among many on the island of Grande Comore.
It was not a famous port.
It was not a colonial administrative center.
It was not widely described in European geographic works.
The islands did not come under formal French colonial control until 1886, more than fifty years after the Book of Mormon was published. Only then did Western geographic descriptions of the region become more common.
Even then, Moroni was still a tiny town.
The name did not become internationally recognizable until 1958, when Moroni was designated the administrative capital of the Comoros Islands.
In other words, the supposed connection that critics point to depends on a city name that would not have been visible or recognizable to someone in rural New York in the 1820s.
Today it is easy to find the city of Moroni with a quick internet search.
Modern researchers can zoom in on digital maps, search geographic databases, and scan obscure place names across the globe in seconds.
But Joseph Smith in the early nineteenth century had none of those tools.
There is no evidence that he owned detailed world atlases.
No evidence that he studied obscure Indian Ocean geography.
No evidence that he had any knowledge of a small East African island settlement thousands of miles away.
And certainly no evidence that he deliberately borrowed its name.
So the argument ultimately comes down to this.
Two names that sound somewhat similar.
A remote island group.
And the assumption that Joseph Smith must have secretly discovered it, studied it, copied it, and used it in his narrative without leaving a single trace of that process in any historical record.
Is that really the most reasonable explanation?
What is the probability of coincidence?
Languages share sounds.
Names repeat patterns.
Similar syllables appear across continents and centuries.
Is it really shocking that two names share a few letters?
Or is the real question why critics are searching through obscure world maps trying to force connections that no one in Joseph Smith’s world would have recognized?
It begins to look less like an honest attempt to follow evidence and more like starting with a predetermined conclusion and then searching for anything that can be framed to support it. When the supposed “evidence” is so loose that it could just as easily be a random coincidence, and when there is no historical support connecting Joseph Smith to the source being claimed, the argument stops being evidence at all. It becomes an attempt to manufacture doubt by presenting speculation as proof, even when the connection itself is little more than a coincidence of similar sounds.
The real question
If the strongest evidence for borrowing the name Cumorah is a vague similarity to a tiny island group thousands of miles away that Joseph Smith likely never saw, never visited, and probably never even heard of, why should anyone believe that connection explains anything at all?