Mormon’s purpose in writing this verse is to mark time, repeating the same pattern as that in verse 6. The years are seventy-one, seventy-two, and seventy-nine. Nothing else is tied to those years, so the pattern is the message. It is symbolic time, not real time. Mormon’s next “event” occurs at the conceptually significant hundred-year marker: the disciples’ death. Certainly they did not all die in a single year. Even though the Savior told them they would die after age seventy-two (3 Ne. 28:3) and even supposing that this number was literal and not symbolic, it is completely improbable that all of the disciples were the same age. Mormon needed a symbolic year, so the disciples’ deaths near this time were sufficiently “historical” to serve his needs.
Culture: This verse suggests that the twelve constituted an important group of leaders and that the “other disciples ordained in their stead” maintained their number at twelve.
Redaction: Mormon divides Nephite history after Jesus’s visit into four blocks of approximately one hundred years. Although events constrain that pattern, he molds that history into his pattern. Four hundred years is a very significant number in the Mesoamerican calendar. Just as we accumulate years into decades and centuries, the Mesoamericans accumulated their years into larger groupings. One of the most important was a grouping of four hundred years, known as a baktun. (See commentary accompanying Helaman 15:3.) Because Mesoamerica based its mathematics and calendar on twenty as the basic unit (rather than our system of ten), the salient division of the baktun that Mormon would be using was the culturally significant four, not the modern preference for one hundred. He would not have had a collective unit of years that equaled one hundred but would have spoken of the fourth part of a baktun.
Mormon summarized the first one hundred years in verses 1–13 and the second in verses 14–21. Verse 22 begins precisely with the two hundredth year. Mormon does not deal with specific history in these first two hundred years, so the correspondences are close. Nothing datable happens in the first two hundred years. Each of the hundred-year sections is treated as a block, and the “events” are generic. In fact, the “events” of the second hundred years nearly repeat the “events” of the idyllic first hundred years. It is important to Mormon that the effects of the Messiah’s visit last for a complete two hundred years. No degeneration occurs until the 201st year (v. 22).
Chronology: The one-hundredth year corresponds to A.D. 96.