Recent comparative attempts to characterize the DNA challenge to Book of Mormon historicity as a “Galileo Event” are interesting and provocative, but they have led to turf wars over who, exactly, is the “Galileo” figure and whether the revolutionary “events” in sixteenth-century astronomy and Catholic doctrine are an appropriate model for under-standing the debate on Book of Mormon historicity. In this paper, I argue that the global imaginaries, geographies, and mythologies of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World offer a more compelling model for our attempts to articulate the current debate on Book of Mormon historicity, in short, a “Colon-ializing Event.”

R. John Williams, Brent Metcalfe