Original subtitles

Tonight, the search for the biblical birthplace of man.

God created Adam and Eve and placed them in this Garden of Eden that no one

knows exactly where it's located.

Is the Garden of Eden a tale to explain human creation, or could it be a real

place? The three major Western religious traditions, Islam, Christianity, and

Judaism, all say it exists.

All the way from Genesis to the Gilgamesh epic for some 4 ,000 years, we

memory of a place like Eden.

If the Garden of Eden did exist, where was it?

Now, we explore the top theories surrounding the location of this

Earth. Genesis talks about four rivers that come together. If we can kind of

chart out where those rivers are, maybe we can find out where the Garden of Eden

was actually located.

It only makes sense to turn to this place where humans lived for thousands

years. This is what the book of Genesis is describing.

This is where you find the Garden of Eden.

This is the search for the Garden of Eden.

The first book of the Hebrew Bible is the book of Genesis.

There's no dispute that the word Genesis means in the beginning.

And it tells a story of the creation of the world.

It starts out by indicating that God gives order to chaos.

That within the context of six days, God maps it all out.

Separates light from dark. Separates land from water.

gives existence to various creatures. And out of dust, God creates the first

man, Adam, and breathes into him the breath of life.

So we read in the creation story that God created humankind, Adam and Eve, and

then placed them in the Garden of Eden, and that this place should be understood

as being a beautiful, life -giving oasis.

God plants trees.

Beautiful trees, good for eating, all around the garden.

And in the middle of the garden, he plants the tree of the knowledge of good

evil.

God tells them, go about your business, enjoy this paradise, but the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil, you don't mess with that.

You eat from that, and you will die.

Everyone knows what happens next.

Eve encounters this serpent, according to the narrative.

And the serpent, Tells Eve, I know what God has said, but if you eat this fruit,

you won't die.

You'll just get really smart.

You'll have the kind of knowledge that God has, and that's what God fears.

She eats. She gives some to the man who was with her. He eats.

And sure enough, the serpent was right.

They don't drop dead.

Their eyes are opened.

They see that they're naked.

And they're ashamed, and they're fearful, and they hide from God behind a

According to the account in Genesis, Adam and Eve cover their nakedness by

fashioning fig leaves into loincloths.

And God says, who told you you were naked?

Did you eat from the tree I told you not to eat from? They admit it, and God

picks the man and the woman out of the garden.

And this changes everything.

God says, this paradise, you can no longer have.

When God chucks the man and the woman out of Eden, he stations cherubim to

the way back in. The cherubim are frightening hybrid creatures, and God

stations them east of Eden.

But where on earth did this biblical story of man's expulsion from paradise

place? Where can we locate the Garden of Eden?

For those who are determined to find the physical location of the Garden of

Eden, they will turn to Genesis.

In the early chapters of Genesis, there are a couple of geographical markers

that relate where Eden was or may have been as per the writer of this section

the narrative.

The story specifies that God plants a garden in the east.

Now, the writers are in Israel.

In the east means somewhere east of Israel.

It is written in Genesis that a river went out of Eden to water the garden,

from thence it divided and became four headwaters.

We are given four rivers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Pishon, and the

And we know in our day and age where the Tigris and the Euphrates are, but we

don't know exactly where the Gihon and the Pishon are.

We can do our best.

to make educated guesses, but we do not know the location of those rivers. We do

not know if topography is the same.

And so this brings up another question as to whether those rivers still exist.

When they stopped existing, we simply do not have enough information concerning

where these two rivers may have been.

According to the biblical text, the Garden of Eden is east.

And so you have to think about the vantage point of those who are writing.

for some of those who are writing, pushing towards the east and thinking in

terms of two of the rivers that are outlined, the Euphrates and the Tigris,

would argue that where those are situated is where you find the Garden of

This is where the Bible is trying to direct us.

In ancient times, Iraq was part of a land 500 miles east of Israel known as

Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia is the ancient Greek word for the land between the two rivers of

Tigris and the Euphrates.

It's a land in central Iraq, not altogether too far from the great cities

today, such as Baghdad. And the ancient city of Babylon is actually relatively

near to Baghdad.

What archaeologists have established were the first cities in human history,

such as Ur, were built within this fertile space between the two rivers.

Ancient Mesopotamia was part of what's called the Fertile Crescent. There were

sections of this area that were fertile because there was water running through

the Fertile Crescent.

It was a fruitful location.

It produced a great deal, just like the Garden of Eden.

And there's one town within this once vibrant region that claims to be the

location of the Garden of Eden.

This is the town of Al -Qorna. Al -Qorna is about 60 miles north of the city of

Basra in southern Iraq.

It's between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. It's a place then that

certainly... Christian archaeologists and scholars in the 19th century very

began to associate with the place where the real Eden might have been located.

In Al -Gurna, we have a sign that says, the tree of Adam, purporting to be the

tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Even today in Al -Qudna, local Iraqi Christians and Muslims still go on

pilgrimage to the tree of Adam.

But it's doubtful a tree could live that long.

Science tells us that the oldest living tree, an ancient bristlecone pine in

California, is a little over 5 ,000 years old.

For Alcornaz tree of Adam to have been growing in the Garden of Eden, it would

have to be far older than that.

In the mid -1980s, an American scientist proposes a theory which backs the

hypothesis that the Garden of Eden was in present -day Iraq.

Dr. Joris Zarens, he was involved in a dig in the 1980s where his team starts

do a lot of satellite photography of the Persian Gulf.

From these satellite photos, Zarens sees an area of these wadis, these

riverbeds, that are now completely dry. But thousands of years ago, they were

not. So if you look now at any map...

Google satellite, Google Earth, you're not going to find the same geographical

location or the same geographical features as you found thousands and

of years ago. There's been climate change. Things have kind of moved

Places that were dry were completely flooded out. One of the really

things, though, about the Middle East is how dramatically the geography has

changed in the last 10 ,000 years.

So many parts of the world that are submerged now were really just above

One of those places that was above ground was the Persian Gulf.

Dr. Yuris Zerens, an archaeologist from Missouri State University, says there's

a reason that we can't find the Garden of Eden. And it's because it's in that

part of Iraq that lies underneath the water of the Persian Gulf.

And today, much of this area of Iraq is nothing like the lush paradise described

in Genesis.

We need to understand that this was a... a long, long time ago. And with the 8th

age, there were really profound shifts. From Zarin's perspective, as the

glaciers melted and began to contribute their water to the Persian Gulf, the

waters would have risen and covered the space where the Garden of Eden was.

He notes that the people who lived in that area were hunter -gatherers who had

to move as the waters rose.

So Zarens presumes that the people who were living in the place now covered by

seawater would have moved northwest into the Tigris and Euphrates River Basin

that we're familiar with today.

This isn't in the Bible, but some of the legends are that the Garden of Eden

ends up being kind of washed away in the flood.

There was a world before the flood, and there was a world after.

So, is the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden a symbolic

From a flooded homeland?

Or could the Garden of Eden be someplace else?

What the Garden points to is our most intense relationship with the divine.

folks will say you have to look in Jerusalem, that this is where God is

forcefully felt.

The Bible describes the Garden of Eden as a land of lush vegetation.

Filled with animals and abundant food, a true paradise on earth.

But where on earth exactly?

There's four rivers coming out of Eden toward in the garden.

So you can see the garden in the center of Eden and four rivers coming from Eden

into it.

The book of Genesis makes it clear that one of the four rivers there in the

garden of Eden is the Gihon.

And we don't really know where the Gihon is. However, there is actually a

spring.

That's called the Gihon, a word that means, in fact, gushing up of water. And

that spring is located in Jerusalem.

So some may have identified this word with the same Gihon that's in the

narrative at the beginning of the book of Genesis.

And so that may lead people to identify the location of the Garden of Eden with

Jerusalem in Israel.

You have to understand the...

the symbolic significance of the garden. What the garden points to is our most

intense relationship with the divine.

And so some folks will say, ah, that's Jerusalem.

That's the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

For nearly 3 ,000 years, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has been one of the

holiest sites of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. It's where the first

and second Hebrew temples were built. As the Book of Kings tells it, the

Jerusalem temple was built by King Solomon in about 1000 BCE, that is,

the time of Jesus.

We know a little bit about this temple. It's rectilinear, and it's got

progressively smaller rooms. And each one of these rooms, as you move into it,

becomes more holy.

And the holiest place in the Jerusalem temple is the Holy of Holies.

And that is where the Ark of the Covenant was kept.

And it was also thought to be really the throne of God and that God lived in the

Jerusalem temple. And there are two places in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old

Testament, where God is said to be physically present. One is the Garden of

and the other is the Jerusalem temple.

Part of this whole creation narrative is the idea of God communing with human

beings. Eventually we see God having a special presence, God's glory in this

temple. He had a special presence there.

This is set up to be the place where God will commune with humankind, not

dissimilar to the Garden of Eden.

Is it possible the ancient biblical author had the temple in mind when

describing Eden?

What's interesting about how the tabernacle and the temple are

the story of the Torah, is that there's an immense amount of garden imagery.

If we were to go into that temple that Solomon built, this is a cedar wood

-lined building. Look at the walls.

I'm seeing palm trees. I'm seeing flowers.

I'm seeing pomegranates.

I'm indoors, but I feel like I'm outdoors.

And if I was permitted to go past the guardian curtain that would lead to the

Holy of Holies, what I'd see on the Ark of the Covenant, two cherubim.

In the Holy of Holies, two giant statues of cherubim guarded

the Ark.

In the first creation story in Genesis, God stations the cherubim at the exit

to Eden so that no one can turn and enter again.

So for some folks who are interested in finding a physical location for the

Garden of Eden, the Temple Mount is the proper location.

But you can also look at the Temple Mount and the Garden of Eden and think

it in terms of just being a metaphor.

Could the Garden of Eden story have been actually just sort of a metaphor for

Jerusalem and the most important building in Jerusalem, which was the

Temple?

It is recorded history that the Temple was destroyed in 587 BCE.

After the destruction of their temple, the conquered Hebrew people are carried

off into exile in Babylon.

According to the narrative, when Adam and Eve are forced out of the garden,

head east. When the temple is destroyed, the people of God also move east to

Babylon. Could it be that the Garden of Eden story is a metaphor for the exile

of the Jews from Israel and the loss of the great temple where God and man

coexisted?

An event as cataclysmic and traumatic as the Babylonian exile, the destruction

of Jerusalem, is bound to be remembered and imagined and processed in all kinds

of different ways.

One possibility is that the story of the Garden of Eden symbolizes the Jerusalem

Temple. What we see in the exile of the people from the temple building all the

way through their exile, we see...

The pattern that we end up seeing also in the first couple chapters of the book

of Genesis, that is God commuting with human beings, disobedience, exile.

And there's also some really strong themes about how while we might have

the Garden of Eden, that there's going to be a new Eden. And so that's why some

people have really hit on the idea of maybe it's being Jerusalem where the

Garden of Eden was.

So to think about Jerusalem as the location for the Garden of Eden.

on the level of metaphor works for a whole lot of folk the

search for the garden of eden often focuses on middle eastern lands where

biblical stories take place but some eden explorers have taken another

While some point to this kind of physical geography as the way to locate

Garden of Eden, some turn and argue it's best to try to locate the Garden of

Eden based upon the early presence of humans. Even in science publications,

there's discussion of the Garden of Eden as a metaphor of the origin of humans.

If the Garden of Eden story is an explanation of human creation, then

might the real paradise be found in the cradle of humankind?

Given that our oldest human fossils actually all come from Africa,

maybe we should think of the Garden of Eden as having been in Africa. It's not

Iraq. It's Africa. The science would suggest this is the birthplace.

It only makes sense to some folks who are looking for the garden to turn to

place where humans lived for thousands upon thousands of years, that this is

what the book of Genesis is describing, this is what the garden is all about.

Some scientists believe that the answer to human origins is not really just to

be found in the fossil record, but actually in human genetics.

In 2019,

A scientific breakthrough ushers in a new theory about the birth of Homo

sapiens. We have very early bone and skull fragments from South Africa, and

those date back to about 260 ,000 years ago.

So in 2019, an Australian geneticist, Dr.

Vanessa Hayes, actually goes to South Africa and wants to trace back the DNA.

of humans to try to see if they can get back to the earliest record of human

beings, looking at them genetically.

There are two types of DNA, nuclear DNA, which comes from both the mother and

father, and mitochondrial DNA, which only comes down through the maternal

And it stays stable for tens of thousands of years. You can still trace

mitochondrial DNA.

So it becomes a really powerful tool for tracing back human genetics.

Using mitochondrial DNA, Dr. Hayes sought to trace back the genetic

the exact spot where modern humans first emerged.

One element in that genetic sequence, L0, can be traced back through mothers

all the way back to one mother, the so -called mitochondrial Eve.

The best science now tells us that Adam and Eve, if they existed in the past,

even in the relatively recent past, would most likely be ancestors of

including everyone in America.

So Dr. Hayes engages in this large study where she looks at the mitochondrial

DNA of a sample base of about 1 ,200 indigenous Africans.

What the study has done...

It followed the L0 sequence back through 200 South Africans and compared it to

more than 1 ,000 Africans from the north and determined that mitochondrial Eve

likely is to be located in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana.

For a whole lot of folks thinking in terms of the Garden of Eden, within the

context of Botswana, you've got two things that are undeniably significant

them.

Longstanding presence.

of humans, and a lush environment.

The Kalahari Desert in Botswana is a very, very arid, dry place.

But it wasn't always so. 300 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago, it was wetlands. It was

very, very green. The wetlands there were actually part of a giant lake

that was as large as England called Lake Makati Kati.

Based on the fossil record.

This wetland was home to an abundance of fish, birds, and other animals large

and small.

Around 130 ,000 years ago, Lake Makarikari dried up, and the people who

living in that area would have been forced, really kind of expelled from

area, to go and find where they could survive.

So once again, we have an interesting kind of mirroring with the story of the

Garden of Eden, where they're cast out of the garden that gave them everything,

where they need to go and they need to find a new way to exist.

Some researchers believe the existence of 315 ,000 -year -old Homo sapien

fossils found in other parts of Africa contradicts the Botswana theory.

Ultimately, the birthplace of humankind remains a matter of scientific debate

and further discovery.

It's a tremendously complex question, where human beings originated from, and

just don't know the answer yet.

In the search for the Garden of Eden, scientists and scholars have looked to

some of the oldest sites in human civilization.

But it's a shepherd in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 1994 who

upon a temple more than twice as old as any ancient ruins ever found.

Did he accidentally rediscover?

The Garden of Eden?

There's a shepherd who is tending his flocks in the sort of mountainous area

southeastern Turkey.

And his foot sort of hits something hard on the ground. It's a rock. And he

bends down and brushes away the debris to see what he's got there. And he finds

a large stone, just kind of carved.

And it turns out that's not the only stone. There are many others like it.

We have now discovered a temple which very well may be the oldest temple

ever discovered.

We call it Gobekli Tepe, which is just a word for pot -bellied hill. By 1995,

a year later, this site has caught the interest of international

And there is a dig there that is initiated by a German archaeologist by

of Klaus Schmidt.

When Dr.

Schmidt's team arrives on Gobekli Tepe in 1995, they begin to unearth giant T

-shaped megaliths, some still standing, surrounded by many millennia of earth

and rocks.

It's a huge site. We have 22 acres of excavated territory,

and we think that maybe only 5 % of it has actually been uncovered.

Gobekli Tepe is really a series of temple structures.

At the center of each one of these structures are two massive

T -shaped monoliths. They're massive. They're 16 feet high. They weigh tons.

And the most mind -blowing thing is how old it is.

The carbon dating results.

appear to fundamentally change the timeline of human civilization.

The discovery of Gobekli Tepe has really revolutionized how we start to think

about early human history.

It very likely dates to between 12 ,000 and 14 ,000 years ago.

That would make it...

about 6 ,000 years older than Stonehenge, probably about 7 ,000 years

more older than the Pyramids of Giza.

That's thousands of years before the birth of agriculture.

What that means is that this extraordinary structure was built by

-gatherers who were very likely wearing animal skins and who hadn't invented the

wheel yet.

Gobekli Tepe's most remarkable features?

are its ornate carvings, carvings which could link this ancient site to the

story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The megaliths are carved very beautifully with all kinds of images,

animals. In fact, snakes are among the most commonly depicted animals at

Tepe. There seems to be some consensus that what we have at Gobekli Tepe could

reflect a very...

complex mythology these serpent carvings aren't the only possible connection to

the book of genesis there is one other geographical notation in the garden

of eden mythology which is that it is in the east very likely

what that means is east of the holy land but west of Assyria.

That location, which is also along the lines of Tigris and the Euphrates, would

place the Garden of Eden probably closer to southeastern Turkey than in

modern Iraq.

It's clear that the region around Gobekli Tepe has been a place of sacred

geography for Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, and indeed the earliest

Neolithic peoples who made that transition from hunter -gathering to

cities in that region of northern Mesopotamia and what is now southeastern

Turkey.

You know, this is pre -agrarian Gobekli Tepe, but... According to Schmidt, the

site marks this kind of transition of hunter -gatherers as a culture

into an agrarian society.

So when we think about the Garden of Eden mythology, it represents a world

before the rise of agriculture.

Maybe this Garden of Eden story about these primordial hunter -gatherers,

Adam and Eve being cast out and having to till the soil and work the soil for a

living, that story is very profound about the change in human civilization

we know actually was factual.

While archaeologists believed the builders of this massive complex were

-gatherers, the civilization that occupied the same land thousands of

later was far more advanced.

The Sumerians invented irrigation systems that made that part of the world

fertile and lush for them.

The Sumerians were the first agriculturists. They were the first

food.

The Sumerians also developed the oldest known written language in the world.

They were able to actually write down their great mythologies.

These stories were able to be spread beyond the boundaries of the

Sumerian Empire.

Sometime between 2100 and 1200 BCE, a Sumerian writer produced the Epic

of Gilgamesh.

Scholars believe the Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about a thousand

years. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Mesopotamian story about a

man who goes on a quest to find the secret of eternal life.

He makes it as far as a special mountain, the Mountain of the Sunrise.

sunrise, meaning in the east. Gilgamesh makes it through the mountain and finds

himself... In a jeweled garden.

We see so many similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of the

Garden of Eden. There's the key role of the serpent in ensuring that humankind

is going to stay mortal forever.

There's the jeweled garden.

This sacred realm.

unique location where immortality is kept and guarded is not a

place any human being can ever really find.

The Garden of Eden that's written down in the Book of Genesis could refer back

to earlier written precedents like the Epic of Gilgamesh. And if you want to...

Back to the Garden of Eden story.

Some say the location of the Garden of Eden might actually have been in

southeastern Turkey.

In the late 19th century, a new theory emerges, placing the Garden of Eden in

one of the most unlikely locations imaginable.

In 1885, William F. Warren, who's the president of Boston University, a

theologian, actually argues that maybe the Garden of Eden used to be at the top

of the world.

William Warren's book, Paradise Found, The Cradle of the Human Race at the

Pole, opens with a redrawn world map on which all the continents are arrayed

around the Arctic Circle.

A few.

take a globe and flatten it out. His argument was, you get the North Pole at

top and everything else seems to move around it. And for him, it lent support

his argument that the North Pole, the top of the world, it is the birthplace

humanity.

For Warren, the similarity in the perspective on a Garden of Eden -like

the idea that you have a similar story being told in all of these different

places, suggests a common starting point that eventually spread over the entire

world.

Warren lives in an era when new scientific evidence begins to reveal

before the Ice Age, the Earth was not as cold.

If we look at a world that is much, much older than maybe we had thought it was

before, we're suddenly going to see changes in glaciation, we're going to

changes in geologic record that suggest this world was a warmer place than it

had been before.

Which, by the way, isn't necessarily out of harmony with the book of Genesis,

which I think suggests a different world than we had before.

Warren believes a warmer Earth means the North Pole would have once been a

livable place.

And a study published in the journal Nature in 2006 may support his claim.

The study, based on core samples taken from more than 1 ,000 feet below the

floor of the Arctic Ocean, concluded that over 50 million years ago, the

had an average temperature of 74 degrees.

There is actually really good evidence that these places often were very lush

the very, very distant past.

So that encouraged some speculation about the idea about Adam and Eve maybe

being in the Garden of Eden back then.

Warren was looking for a place for the Garden of Eden. He presumed that he

needed one where he had lots and lots of sunlight.

A better place than the North Pole.

Because the Earth rotates on a tilted axis as it revolves around the sun, the

North Pole has six straight months of daylight followed by six months of

darkness. Warren sees the dark half of the polar year as a time for spiritual

reflection. There's this romantic idea that you would be there and you would be

directly under the heavens in communication with the heavens and you

the stars and everything swirling around you.

So this was a kind of connection between the heaven and earth, that sense of

being at the place where God was when he separated the firmaments and he put the

heavens above.

and the earth below.

In Islamic tradition, the Garden of Eden is the garden from which humans were

expelled before history.

And when Adam and Eve were expelled, they were separated in different parts

the world.

For Dr. Warren, as the North Pole changed, as it became colder and colder,

changes in the natural environment forced folks to flee, to migrate to

that better supported life.

Warren connects that ancient Ice Age migration from the North Pole to stories

man's expulsion from Eden.

For Warren, as he looks at these traditions around the world, he sees

evidence of a memory of being kicked out of paradise and moving down towards the

equator. And for him, the Adam and Eve story that we have in Genesis was that

story in Israel.

It's important to recognize in the 19th century, folks knew very little about

the North Pole. And so for a lot of folks, this was a real possibility based

upon what they assumed concerning the North Pole. And so for some folks, this

argument was persuasive.

Till his dying day, age of 96, Warren maintained the Garden of Eden was at the

North Pole.

However, skeptics point out that the period when the North Pole had a

climate predates the rise of man.

What he points to in terms of that area being able to support robust life, we're

talking about roughly 50 million years ago.

There wasn't really anything like a human or even a monkey or an ape at that

time. And there's another factor that makes Warren's theory less likely.

The North Pole itself is really just ice through and through. If you melt it

away, there's no ground.

Ever since satellite images began to be taken of the Arctic 40 years ago, it's

been determined that up to half of that ice has gone away. And the prediction is

that by 2040, it'll be gone. And if that happens, we're going to watch Warren's

theory quite literally melt away.

In the spring of 1820, in western New York State, a 14 -year -old Joseph Smith

claims that God came to him in a vision.

In 1820, Joseph Smith was given a revelation by God. Now,

Joseph Smith lived in the heart of what's called the Second Great

time of religious revival.

And so young Joseph...

really felt that he was called as a prophet.

Joseph Smith, it says that, you know, God the Son and the Father came to him

a vision. And also the angel Moroni came to him as well and told him that all

these other churches are wrong.

In 1823, Smith claims to have another revelation in which an angel leads

him to find a series of gold plates buried for more than 1 ,400 years.

in the hills of Palmyra, New York.

Joseph Smith said that these golden plates were written in an otherwise

language he called Reformed Egyptian.

And he spends some years translating these golden plates, and that's how we

the Book of Mormon.

Which is like the testament of when Jesus actually came to the Americas

rose from the dead and kind of proclaimed the gospel there.

The Book of Mormon not only lays the foundation,

for the beliefs of the Mormon faith. But it also describes Middle Eastern tribes

that leave the Middle East and arrive in America about 589 B .C.

According to Mormon belief, an Israelite named Lehi journeyed with his family

from the Middle East to the Americas around 600 B .C.

Some church leaders teach that during the great biblical flood, humanity on

ark was carried back across the ocean to the Middle East.

As Smith builds his following, he claims to have another visit from God on July

20, 1831.

According to Mormon history, in this revelation, God shows him

the real location of the Garden of Eden.

God revealed to him that the Garden of Eden wasn't actually in Mesopotamia.

Although Smith didn't name the location in his translation, he told many early

followers of his where the site actually was.

It's not uncommon for religious communities to think theologically about

location as being powerful, important, connected to the biblical.

And that is the case for the Mormons who argued that God told Joseph

Smith that the Garden of Eden wasn't over there somewhere. It's not Turkey.

not any of those locations. The Garden of Eden is actually in Missouri.

In 1831, Smith establishes a Mormon outpost in Jackson County, Missouri,

the town of Independence.

Smith says God revealed this location.

as the site of the Garden of Eden.

Mormonism, as the quintessentially American religion, quite naturally

places the Garden of Eden in America.

After all, that is the birthplace of the religion. It's the birthplace of the

prophets of the religion. So if a Mormon is looking for the Garden of Eden,

chances are that they're looking in Missouri.

According to Mormon tradition, Adam built two altars in this Missouri Garden

Eden, an altar of sacrifice and an altar of prayer.

And in fact, if you go to that area today, you'll find that those stone

are still there, the ones that Adam himself was said to have built.

For a time, Smith and his followers settled in Missouri to be near their

garden paradise.

But tensions with their non -Mormon neighbors grow violent, and they're

to move.

After they were asked to leave Missouri by the governor, they end up going a

little bit north and settling just to the north of Missouri.

Smith and his flock settled in Nauvoo, Illinois.

But in 1844, Smith and his brother were arrested and jailed in Carthage,

Illinois. An angry mob attacked the jail and shot Smith and his brother to

death.

Two years later, Smith's successor, Brigham Young, leads the Mormons west.

finally settling in Salt Lake City, Utah.

But a group of Joseph Smith's original followers actually don't go with

everybody out to Utah, and they stay put, and they're still there in the area

around Independence, and they're known as the Community of Christ.

They're still there in the Promised Land.

Official Mormon teaching hasn't abandoned the idea that the Garden of

Missouri. Joseph Smith believed that when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the

Garden of Eden, which he had near Independence, Missouri, they moved 70

the north to a valley called Adam -on -de -Aman, which is translated,

the Valley of God, where Adam dwelt. So Joseph Smith has suggested that Adam

will return to this place, Adam -on -de -Aman, in order to prepare for the

second coming of Jesus.

Starting in 1947, members of the Mormon Church began purchasing land in Missouri

near the Valley of God where Adam dwelt. As of 2021, the church owns

approximately 3 ,000 acres there.

We really have no reference in the biblical text to places in North

reference to any place that could have been maybe even misunderstood as

North America.

Why is it important to locate the actual Garden of Eden? Human beings have been

asking since day one where we came from.

It's important to us as contemporary readers because we are inquisitive. We

to know. We want this to also be part of our story.

And so that's why I think we're asking this question.

While researchers and scientists continue their quest to find the cradle

human life, for many people of faith, There's no point in searching, because

it's written in Genesis that after Adam and Eve were banished, God blocked man

from ever returning to Eden by posting an angel to guard the entrance.

An angel with a flaming sword. So even if someone does locate the garden, they

may have a challenging time trying to get in.

I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mystery.