Alma explicitly describes Jesus’ birth in Jerusalem of Mary. As was noticed earlier, Nephi had seen the vision of the birth of Christ, but had not named his mother. We have the first indication of the name of the mother in Mosiah 3:8 as part of King Benjamin’s speech. We cannot tell if any other prophet had received that information, but Benjamin certainly could have been the first. In the case of Alma, he may also have had first hand information, or he could have received his information from reading the plates of Nephi. Either possibility is valid, and he could also have read it and received a spiritual confirmation. Since Alma is writing in the large plates, it is guaranteed that he was familiar with them. Nevertheless it is not clear that this was the source, or the only source for this passage.
The passage in Benjamin does not list the mode of conception. Alma indicates that Mary “shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost.” Benjamin does not discuss the mode of conception at all. To find any information on the mode of conception we must go back to Nephi’s secondary set of plates, the “small” plates. On those he indicates: “And it came to pass that I beheld that she was carried away in the Spirit; and after she had been carried away in the Spirit for the space of a time the angel spake unto me, saying: Look! 20 And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms” (1 Ne. 11:19-20).
The language is not identical, although the Holy Ghost is mentioned. In this case, it cannot be conclusively stated that Alma did or did not read Nephi’s account, and the language of this particular verse very clearly owes a debt to Luke: “Luke 1:35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”
As has been noted previously, Joseph used the vocabulary and phraseology of the New Testament when similar ideas appeared on the plates. Alma may have been quoting Nephi, but Joseph used the more familiar (to him) configuration from Luke.
Place of birth: This verse suggests that Jesus was born “at Jerusalem.” How is it that the Book of Mormon lists Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem? If Joseph were citing Luke, why did he get the words right, but miss the location? The answer lies in the nature of territories conceived as attached to Jerusalem, or under the political purvey of that city.
“For anyone honestly concerned with the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, there was little to argue about after Hugh Nibley showed in 1957 that one of the Amarna letters, written in the 13th century B.C. and discovered in 1887, recounted the capture of “a city of the land of Jerusalem, Bet-Ninib” (Nibley, Hugh. An Approach to the Book of Mormon. Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, FARMS 6:101). Predictably, this evidence, along with further evidence of the general usage of this type of terminology in the Old World (see John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon, 170-72) has been ignored by critics of the Book of Mormon.
Now from the Dead Sea Scrolls comes an even more specific occurrence of the phrase “land of Jerusalem” that gives insight into its usage and meaning - in a text that indirectly links the phrase to the Jerusalem of Lehi’s time.
Robert Eisenmann and Michael Wise, in The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (1993), discuss one document that they have provisionally named “Pseudo-Jeremiah” (scroll 4Q385). The beginning of the damaged text reads as follows:
...Jeremiah the Prophet before the Lord
[...w]ho were taken captive from the land of Jerusalem [Eretz Yerushalayim, column 1, line 2] (p. 58).
In their discussion of this text, Eisenmann and Wise elaborate on the significance of the phrase “land of Jerusalem,” which they see as an equivalent for Judah (Yehud):
“Another interesting reference is to the ‘land of Jerusalem’ in Line 2 of Fragment 1. This greatly enhances the sense of historicity of the whole, since Judah or ‘Yehud’ (the name of the area on coins from the Persian period) by this time consisted of little more than Jerusalem and its immediate environs.” (p. 57)
Based on the evidence from Qumran, and in the words of Eisenmann and Wise, we can conclude that consistent usage of such language among a people of Israel who fled Jerusalem at the time of Jeremiah also “greatly enhances the sense of historicity” of the Book of Mormon.” (Thomasson, Gordon. “Revisiting the Land of Jerusalem.” In: Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon. FARMS 1999, p. 139--40).