Stan Larson, Quest for the Gold Plates: Thomas
Stuart Ferguson's Archaeological Search for the Book of
Mormon (Salt Lake City: Free Thinker Press in
association with Smith Research Associates, 1997), 305
pages, paperback, $12.95. ISBN 0-9634732-6-3
This is a candid yet even-handed survey of Book of
Mormon (BOM) archaeology, told through the career of Thomas
Stuart Ferguson, one of its most ardent twentieth century
champions.
The story begins in the fall of 1977 with a telephone call
author Stan Larson placed to Ferguson, the author of popular
books defending the authenticity of the BOM. Larson, then an
employee of the LDS Church's Translation Services
Department, had long followed Ferguson's work. He was
calling to dispel what he assumed was an unfounded rumor:
that Ferguson had come to doubt that the BOM is a
translation of ancient records. To Larson's surprise,
Ferguson frankly confirmed – "with no bitterness but with a
touch of disappointment" – his "present skepticism about the
historicity of the Book of Mormon" (xiv).
Ferguson's public career as BOM defender began in 1941 when
he published an article in the LDS church's monthly
Improvement Era magazine (predecessor to the Ensign)
espousing the then controversial "limited geography" model —
that the BOM people occupied only a small region in Central
America, not the entire Western Hemisphere, as had been
traditionally thought. This was followed by several popular
books, including Cumorah Where?, Ancient America and the
Book of Mormon, co-authored with General Authority
Milton R. Hunter, and One Fold and One Shepherd.
A lawyer by profession, Ferguson was a man whose ability and
passion for defending the BOM attracted notice. J. Willard
Marriot became his wealthy patron and apostle John A.
Widtsoe his mentor. In 1952 Ferguson single-handedly founded
the New World Archaeological Foundation (NWAF), with the
vision of doing academically credible archaeological
research in Central America to prove the BOM. Initially, his
requests to the First Presidency of the LDS church for
funding were rebuffed, despite his strong contacts through
the likes of Widtsoe and Hunter. After limping along with
private funding for the first year, NWAF got $15,000 from
the First Presidency in 1953, but with the strict provision
that there was to be absolutely no publicity. A break came
in 1955 when the First Presidency pledged $200,000 to NWAF
to sponsor four years of field work. Then in 1960 the NWAF
was re-organized as BYU-NWAF, with Ferguson relegated to the
greatly reduced role of Secretary. By the mid-60s BYU-NWAF
was gaining recognition in the non-Mormon archaeology
community for its contribution to Mesoamerican Preclassic
archaeology, but Ferguson was becoming disenchanted. Despite
broad conjectures about how the people described in the BOM
might fit into the picture of Mesoamerican history, the
reality was that no evidence had been uncovered that
substantiated the BOM, or resolved the serious discrepancies
between the kind of agriculture and material culture
described in the BOM, and the very different picture that
emerged from archaeology. Findings that once seemed
promising evidence for the BOM, had proved fallacious:
- It turned out that the supposedly "white god" Quetzalcoatl, thought to represent Jesus Christ, was only described as white in accounts dating after the coming of the Spaniards (18-19).
- Joseph Smith's 1842 identification of the ancient ruins of Palenque, Mexico as a Nephite city — which Ferguson had once cited as support for locating the Nephites in Mesoamerica — was now known to date not earlier than A.D. 600, after BOM times (22).
- Likewise, Joseph Smith's identification of impressive ruins and an engraved stone at Quirigua, Guatemala with such a stone mentioned in Omni 1:20, was now known to be impossible, since the ruins date after the BOM period (22-24).
Then on November 27, 1967 an event took place that was to rock Ferguson's already weakening faith — the announcement of the rediscovery of Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham (BOA) Egyptian papyri. Ferguson saw in these ancient Egyptian documents from which Joseph Smith was supposed to have produced the Book of Abraham, an immediate means of testing Joseph as a translator of ancient scripture. Ferguson's thought process is revealed in a letter of December 4, 1967 to Aziz S. Atiya (a non-Mormon at the University of Utah who had discovered the papyri in the New York Metropolitan Museum, and arranged for their donation to the LDS church):
I am a Mormon and recognize that your discovery has a strong bearing upon the validity of the foundations of the Mormon Church. Since today Egyptologists can read and translate the documents on which the "Book of Abraham" is based, we can readily determine whether ... Joseph Smith was fabricating, lying, and conjuring up 'scripture' for the Church. If the manuscript material which you found is nothing more nor less than a bit of one of the Book of the Dead, such would be the required deduction as to Joseph Smith as of 1835 ... (91).
Larson notes that Ferguson already had misgivings
about the BOA because it provided the scriptural basis
of the LDS church's prohibition of Black men holding the
priesthood (Abraham 1:25-27), finally overturned in
1978.
When the LDS church was slow to have scholars in
Egyptology examine and translate the scrolls, Ferguson
obtained photos of them from Hugh B. Brown, first
counselor in the LDS First Presidency, and took them to
Henry L. F. Lutz, emeritus professor of Egyptology at
the University of California at Berkeley. Lutz, unaware
the papyri were related to Mormon scripture, identified
them as part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
This identification was subsequently confirmed by other
Egyptologists, both Mormon and non-Mormon. The universal
conclusion of these scholars: neither the Book of
Abraham story nor even the name Abraham are found
anywhere in the Joseph Smith papyri. And the
identification of the Facsimile No. 1 scene as "The
idolatrous priest Elkenah attempting to offer up Abraham
as a sacrifice." (see BOA, Facsimile No. 1, Explanation
— Fig. 3) is completely erroneous; in reality it is a
well known scene of the Egyptian god of embalming
(Anubus), standing over a corpse on an embalming table.
In December 1970 Ferguson visited apostle Hugh B. Brown
and voiced his conclusion that Joseph Smith "had not the
remotest skill" in translating ancient Egyptian, so that
the Book of Abraham was not a translation from an
ancient Egyptian document written by the biblical
patriarch, as the Mormon prophet had claimed. Recounting
this meeting in a letter to a friend, Ferguson recorded
that, "To my surprise, one of the highest officials
[Hugh B. Brown] in the Mormon Church agreed with that
conclusion when I made that very statement to him"
(138). Unfortunately, apostle Brown's views on the Book
of Abraham cannot be independently confirmed from his
own papers in the LDS Church archives, because they are
closed to researchers (139).
The Book of Abraham revelations led Ferguson to
reevaluate other key parts of the Mormon story,
including the charge that Joseph Smith has been brought
to court in 1826 for claiming magical abilities to
locate buried treasure (just at the time he was supposed
to have been waiting for the angel Moroni to give him
the BOM plates). Before this trial was verified, Mormon
apologist and BYU religion professor Hugh Nibley had
written that if solid evidence of such a trial were ever
brought forth, it would be "the most damning evidence in
existence against Joseph Smith" (The Myth Makers,
Salt Lake City, Bookcraft, 1961, pp. 141-42). Then in
1971 Wesley Walters discovered just such evidence — the
original court record of Justice Albert Neely's bill
concerning this episode, as well as constable Philip M.
DeZeng's bill concerning the arrest of Joseph Smith.
Marvin S. Hill, then professor of history at BYU,
concluded that "it is clear that a trial did take place
and that at issue was Joseph Jr.'s money digging" (144).
Ferguson commented in a letter to a friend, "In 1826
Joseph Smith was 21 [20] and at this point was midway
between the First Vision and 1830 [publication of the
BOM]. What a strange time to be convicted of fraud —
fraudulently getting money after convincing the victim
that he could detect the whereabouts of hidden treasure"
(142). When Ferguson took this evidence to his stake
president Joseph R. Hilton, the man refuse to look at it
(144).
The final chapter of Quest for the Gold Plates
surveys the archaeological problems with accepting the
BOM as an ancient scriptural record of
pre-Columbian Nephite and Jaredite civilizations. The
chapter summarizes a 1975 paper Ferguson prepared for a
BOM archaeology symposium, and which Larson has updated
from current scholarly sources. The BOM fails four
archaeological tests: (1) Plant-Life Test — it
describes plow agriculture of wheat and barley, but
there is no evidence from archaeology or ethnography of
this level of civilization in the pre-Columbian New
World. (2) Animal-Test — The Nephites and
Jaredites raised many domesticated Old World animals,
including horses, cattle, and sheep and goats, according
to the BOM. However, there is no evidence from
archaeology to support this picture. These animals were
not found in the New World in BOM times, but were
brought here by Europeans. (3) Metallurgy Test
— The BOM attributes advanced metallurgical skills to
the Nephites and Jaredites, whereas the archaeological
record shows that "no pre-Columbian iron metallurgy
developed anywhere in the New World;" only gold and
silver working skills developed in BOM times, and this
was in Peru, hundreds of miles distant from where LDS
archaeologists locate the Nephites and
Jaredites(196-97). (4) Script Test — "Scholars
today see no linguistic relationship between any native
American language or script and 'ancient Egyptian,
Sumerian/Akkadian, or Hebrew languages or writing
systems'" (209-10). Ferguson saw this as a major problem
in 1975, and twenty years later the problem remains.
Ferguson ended his life as a "closet doubter." He
avoided open criticism of the LDS church, but privately
explained to friends and acquaintances his reasons for
rejecting the prophetic claims of Joseph Smith, the
historicity of the BOM, and the spiritual authority of
the Mormon church. Larson notes that some Mormons have
minimized Ferguson's loss of faith, while some critics
of Mormonism have overstated it. In Larson's view,
Ferguson came to reject the religious claims of
Mormonism but continued to find social value in
it as a "fraternity" (156). This book avoids partisan
polemics of either strain, giving a straightforward
account of the facts, and leaving the conclusions to the
reader. This is aided by the book's meticulous
documentation and thorough index.