The tragedy of Thomas Ferguson
Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:38 pm
http://www.pbs.org/Mormons/interviews/coe.html
This is a fascinating website, with an interview with Michael Coe, who is:
At last a professional archeologist who IS willing to talk seriously about the Book of Mormon.
The whole interview is fascinating - but there is a sad story in the closing section:
That really is interesting ... no, sorry, Coe is clearly an anti-mormon bigot who doesn't want the church to be true because he is too addicted to SIN.
This is a fascinating website, with an interview with Michael Coe, who is:
the Charles J. MacCurdy professor emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University and curator emeritus of the Division of Anthropology at the school's Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is an expert on the Maya, who inhabited the same part of Mexico and Central American where Mormon scholars say the events of the Book of Mormon took place. In this interview, Coe discusses the challenges facing Mormon archaeologists attempting to prove the historical truth of their central scripture and his own views on Joseph Smith. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted May 16, 2006.
At last a professional archeologist who IS willing to talk seriously about the Book of Mormon.
The whole interview is fascinating - but there is a sad story in the closing section:
You knew ... [New World Archaeological Foundation founder] Thomas Ferguson. His story is poignant. ... Tell me about this man who really put his faith in the archaeological digs he was involved in; he believed he would find in the dirt what he was longing to find.
Thomas Stuart Ferguson, whom I knew, Tom Ferguson was really a wonderful man. He had a long-range vision: that if the church would simply put money into actually digging at these sites, at the right time level and the right place where Zarahemla ought to be, they're going to find pay dirt; they're going to find evidence for it; that it's there. This faith carried him all the way through decade after decade of big excavations in this region by really fine archaeologists working for the New World Archaeological Foundation.
But then a terrible thing happened. The so-called Book of Abraham that Joseph Smith claimed to have derived by reading some Egyptian papyri that were sold to him turned out to be simply just that: Egyptian papyri. They were not the Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith said he could actually read this stuff, could read these hieroglyphs, and of course at this point neither he nor anybody else could read those hieroglyphs. So Ferguson lost his faith in one fell swoop. It just fell from him, this whole idea that you're actually going to find this stuff in the dirt, that pick and shovel are going to come up with Zarahemla. He lost the whole thing.
But the terrible, sad thing was that here he is in Mormon culture with his family, as a churchgoer, and all the social events and good things that are part of a whole Mormon way of life he would lose if he turned his back publicly and openly. And he never did. He went to his grave as a unbeliever but still feeling that the Mormon way of life was the best and not giving it up. So it was a total disjunction between these two things that must have really torn him up.
As someone who has moved in and out of the Mormon culture, you've had numerous friends who are Mormons, not just archaeologists. As an outside observer, what do you feel are the special difficulties of being a Mormon intellectual?
I think that being a Mormon archaeologist, you have to be two people. You have to be, one, an archaeologist that happens to be a Mormon, and also, you have to believe in the Mormon religion. Mormon archaeology can be the Book of Mormon archaeology, where you're actually going right from the beginning, trying to find the evidence that the Book of Mormon is correct.
Doing archaeology as a scientist who happens to be a Mormon is another dish of tea completely, and this is what most of my friends who are archaeologists are doing right now. They're extremely good archaeologists, and they have made wonderful discoveries in what we call the Formative Period in southern Mexico and Guatemala and amazing stuff that's being discovered right now. But they are quick to tell me that they are archaeologists who are also Mormon, like you can be an archaeologist and you can be a Catholic or a Muslim or Buddhist or nothing, as I am. You can do this.
But again, still it must bother them, because there are many people in the Mormon Church who want them to be doing Book of Mormon archaeology, and this they don't want to do. And the people who do Book of Mormon archaeology are no longer in the ascendancy. In major educational places like Brigham Young University, which has an absolutely marvelous anthropology/archaeology department, most people are archaeologists and anthropologists who are also Mormons, and that's a different thing. ...
How would you describe the attitude of most professional historians to orthodox Mormon archaeology? ...
One might wonder how my profession in general, the profession of archaeology, has used Book of Mormon archaeology -- or let's say archaeology done by Mormons; I always separate these two things out. I think that for the Book of Mormon, even though they don't know much about the Book of Mormon or Mormonism, they take the whole thing as a complete fantasy, that this is a big waste of time. Nothing can ever come out of it because it's just impossible that this could have happened, because we know what happened to these people. We can read their writings: They're not in reformed Egyptian; they're in Maya.
On the other hand, there are the archaeologists who are Mormons, and I think there's a huge amount of respect among my colleagues -- there certainly is with myself -- for the work that they have done and the work they're continuing to do. They're really great, whether they're from BYU or other institutions. They're doing a wonderful job; they're telling us about the American Indian past, the past of Native American civilizations. And they've made a unique contribution, I think, to the study of New World cultures. ...
That really is interesting ... no, sorry, Coe is clearly an anti-mormon bigot who doesn't want the church to be true because he is too addicted to SIN.