Fiction is something else, but once something from the start makes a claim of being history, it can be traced, and a fake history can be traced to a fake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj_vwtWt06o
Did Quintus write a letter to Marcus (the brothers both being named Tullius Cicero) saying Romans were at that time building Stone Henge?
No.
How did this source come to be taken for that?
A) A man named Sir Thomas Brown in 1684 writes a list of among other things Latin works we don't have.
B) David Erskine Earl Buchan in the end of the XIXth C first writes it presenting it as a translation, then when discovering it has been quoted as a serious source republishes under his own name what was a satire.
C) Not all were reached by Buchan's decision to own he had written "Quintus Tullius Cicero's" Letter himself. So, continued to quote it as an actual historic source.
What is very important to note is, Britain just after the time of the Roman conquest was NOT the immediate origin of the society that Brown and Earl Erskine inhabited. Rather, it was its far off past.
What is also very important to note is, it's not just the book of Mormon, but also modern scholarly speculation about the past that's in the same boat.
BUT, given the Gospels and Acts are immediate origin story of a Church claiming them as such, we don't have that wiggle room to speculate that it could have been a misunderstood work later taken as fact. The Church was not likely to forget the actual immediate origin in AD 50 or even AD 150. Just as Thomas Brown was not forgetting the Restoration after Cromwell and David Erskine was not forgetting the Acts of Union 1707. And by 150, the Church would already have such an ossified view of its immediate origin that it would have been impossible for a new source to gain traction with a new idea about it./HGL
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