The placement of this verse immediately after expelling the Lamanites by force from the lands of Zarahemla and soon after the “contentions” suggests that these false Christs are arising among the Zarahemlaites and represent significant apostate tendencies among Benjamin’s people. Verse 16 will again mention contentions and describe Benjamin as cooperating with the prophets to establish peace.
It is expected that the Nephite religion would generate controversy. The Mulekites were no longer observing the tenets of the religion they had brought from Jerusalem. Conversion to the Nephite Messianic religion therefore required the abandonment of their known deities and observance.
It is interesting that Mormon describes the problem as false Christs. When Sherem challenged Jacob, modern interpreters (though not the record itself) labeled him an anti-Christ, not a false Christ. Mormon, writing ca. A.D. 400, may be using different wording than that on Benjamin’s plates. What might he have meant?
A false prophet is one who teaches falsehoods. While a “false Christ” would also teach falsehoods, the person himself is “false.” To be a false Christ, the person must claim to be Christ. Sherem denied the future Christ entirely, so it seems unlikely that Sherem would have attempted to claim this future Messiah’s identity. Furthermore, only adherents to the Nephite religion would have known enough to present themselves as a “Christ,” but such a claim seems unlikely given the religious cohesiveness of Mosiah1’s followers. Nor does it seem likely that the Zarahemlaites, who had lost their Jewishness and had had only a generation of instruction in the Messianic religion would have made such a claim. Mormon seems to be capturing something else in this phrase of “false Christs.”
A possible explanation comes from the Nahua concept of teixiptla, even though this hypothesis is speculative and even though both term and culture postdate the Book of Mormon era: “The Aztecs appear to have been a people compelled to insist on the visible presences of their gods,” explains ethnohistorian Burr Cartwright Brundage. “In the conceptualization of these presences they went to extremes of detail.… But the Aztecs had a special type of idol which differed radically in that it was animate and incarnate. This was the teixiptla, ‘image’ or ‘representative,’ a person who wore the regalia, acted out the part of the god, and then was sacrificed.” Some aspects of the Aztec teixiptla probably did not pertain to Benjamin’s time, such as the final sacrifice of the incarnate deity. However, the custom of representing a god by donning its masks appears very early in Mesoamerican history. The site of Chalcatzingo was abandoned in 500 B.C. and contains impressive art in the Olmec style. On Monument 2 are found “four persons.… At the right is a seated personage who faces two central figures walking towards him and a third who walks away on the left. The standing figures wear their ‘bird-serpent’ masks so their faces cannot be seen. The seated individual has turned his mask to the back of his head, revealing his face and pointed beard. All the masks seem to cover the entire face instead of simply the mouth area.” The masks indicate the presence of the extra-human in the scene. That the seated personage wears a mask turned to the rear highlights that these are men in costume, or men imitating gods, just like the later Aztec teixiptla.
Perhaps “false Christs” was an appropriate term because these individuals were impersonating deities from the displaced competitor religions. If this speculative scenario is, in fact, what Mormon meant, then it is obvious why this practice would have caused “contention” in Zarahemla along both ethnic and religious lines.