Join us today for another re-mastered classic Mormon Stories episode!
This interview with Dr. Michael Coe is one of the most important Mormon Stories episodes to date. In order to introduce this significant conversation to our newer audiences, we have compiled it into a single episode and re-broadcasting it.
The original description for this episode reads,
“Dr. Michael Coe 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 episode originally aired in August 2011, and was titled “Dr. Michael Coe – An Outsider’s View of Book of Mormon Archaeology” (episodes 268-270). A follow-up conversation was filmed and released in April 2018, which will be re-broadcasted this week as well.
Episode Transcript
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Introduction and Welcome
John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very
Guest [00:00:02] special week on Mormon Stories podcast. This week on Mormon Stories podcast, we are going to be featuring one of the most important interviews or series of interviews ever in the history of Mormon Stories. And we're talking about over 2,000 interviews and over 10,000 hours. This week, we're going to be focusing on the interviews with Dr. Michael Kohler. If I had to have a top five or even top three most important episodes of all time, most important interviewees of all time, Dr. Michael Koh would definitely be in the top three, if not number one. So Dr. Michael Koh, who has passed away, he passed away in 2019, but he was the Charles J. McCurdy Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Yale University, and he was the world's leading expert on the Mayan, the Mayan civilization, you know, those who inhabited Mexico and Central America during the time that the Book of Mormon took place. I first learned about him when he was featured on a PBS documentary about the Mormons in the mid 2000s. And we just took a chance and reached out to him and asked if he'd be willing to come on Mormon Stories, and he was. So I interviewed him twice for Mormon Stories. The first time was episodes 268 through 270. It's audio only, so be warned. And in that series, it was just basically, it was called Dr. Michael Coe an Outsider's View of Book of Mormon Archeology. So basically, we just wanted to have an outsider like Dr. Robert Ridner with the Book of Abraham. It was the first episode like this where we just said, what does the world's leading scholar on, you know, the Mayan, you know, civilization say about the prospects of the Book of Mormon being a historical document from an anthropological and an archeological perspective? And so I did three episodes with him. And, you know, unless you've really been with us a long time or really have dug deep, you've never heard this episode. So that's part one of what we're going to be featuring this week on Mormon Stories podcast during Michael Ko Week. And I promise you, this first episode, it will blow your mind. And it's definitely one of the most important interviews I've ever done. That was released August 12, 2011. So this was quite early on in the Mormon Stories catalog. It wasn't even, you know, a three episode 300. Then seven years later, in April of 2018, my friend in Travis Stratford and I, we traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, and we wanted to get Michael Coe on video. So we did three more episodes with Dr. Michael Koh in his house on video where he responded to this technology called LIDAR that had been used heavily in Mesoamerica by the time we did the recording. We also had him respond more directly to the apologetics of John Soren Sorensen of Farm, the Maxwell Institute. And we just got an update from him, but also in video. So that's part two of our Michael Co series. So part one is going to be the audio only episode. I'm going to use this intro for both. So if you've already heard this intro from part one or part two, go back and watch or listen to part one or part two. I'm going to use this intro on both. But part one is my original audio only interview with Michael Coe. Most important top five episode of all time. Part two will be my video follow up interview with Dr. Michael Koh from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. And then what I want to do for part three is pull the LDS discussions crew together along with any of you in the audience who have comments or feedback or input or want to pay tribute to Dr. Michael Koh. We'll do a third live episode with the LDS discussions crew. So that's Nemo and probably Colby and Julia. Maybe we'll invite Bill Real or RFM or Brett Metcalf or others, Dan Vogel to come on as well if they want to give a tribute to Michael Koh. But we're going to do a third episode where we bring on you and special guests and the LDS discussions crew just to do a final tribute to Dr. Michael Koh and what he's meant to everybody. So thanks for joining us on Michael Ko Week on Mormon Stories podcast. We're so thrilled to have you. We promise you're going to love and value all of these episodes. So without any further ado, please enjoy either part one or part two of our very important interviews with Dr. Michael Ko. I'll see you all on the flip side, everybody.
Introducing Dr. Michael Coe
John Dehlin [00:05:05] Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, and today I am very, very excited to have with us a very special guest. His name is Dr. Michael Koh and the subject for today is sort of an outsider's view of Book of Mormon archaeology. Very fascinating. Let me give a quick introduction of Dr. Ko. He is the Charles J. McCurdy 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 America where Mormon scholars say the events. Well, I should say where some 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 view, views of Joseph Smith. I'm now reading from the biography from a PBS documentary in which Dr. Ko was featured. But with that, I guess I'll just say. Dr. Koh, thank you so much for joining us on Mormon Stories today.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:06:13] I'm happy to be here.
John Dehlin [00:06:15] All right, so I guess I stumbled upon your interview with PBS just on Facebook. Someone had posted a link to it and I read it and I said, wow, this is a Yale anthropologist who cares about Mormonism. A. And I found that to be fascinating. And so I did a little more investigation of you and found out that you published an article on the Book of Mormon and archaeology as early as 1973, I believe you said. Is that right?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:06:41] That's correct, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:06:43] So this is interesting because the Book of Mormon is, in the year 2011, coming under a lot of scrutiny that. I guess it's been under a lot of scrutiny for some time, but the. That scrutiny hasn't really penetrated the traditional orthodox conservative or kind of. I guess I should just not be repetitive. The traditional Mormon consciousness until, let's just say the past five years as DNA evidence and other things have really started people, Mormons thinking more clearly about what the Book of Mormon claims to be, what type of record and evidence it. It purports versus the evidence that science continually affords us. And so I thought it'd be fascinating to bring you on and talk all about, you know, your life and how it intersects with Mormonism and what you know about the Book of Mormon and Mayan archeology. How's that sound?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:07:40] That sounds good.
John Dehlin [00:07:41] Okay. And I should add that I served an LDS mission in Guatemala. And so I've spent a little bit of time.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:07:47] That's excellent.
Guest [00:07:48] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:07:49] So I've spent a little bit of time in the area that you're in which you're a specialist. So let's start in typical Mormon stories fashion, Dr. Ko, and please tell us a bit about your early years, your upbringing, if religion, and specifically reconciliation of religion with intellectual issues was a part of your formative years, I'd be curious just to have you talk briefly about that, and then we'll jump into how your training led you to be interested in Mormonism in the Book of Mormon.
Dr. Coe's Background and Loss of Faith
Dr. Michael Coe [00:08:22] Well, I was a. I was born in 1929 to a very devout Episcopalian or Rather Anglican family. My parents were strong churchgoers. My father had been to a church school, a boarding school in New England called St. Paul's and I was raised. I went to Sunday school when I was a little kid. Raised with the Bible, with Christianity, right from the very beginning. And St. Paul's was a church school, really. The head of the school was. The rector, was a reverend Episcopalian minister. That's not true now, but it was back then, a whole series of them. And you've had very serious study of Christianity there. Not only did you go to chapel every day that you were there twice on Sunday, three hours on Good Friday, minimum.
John Dehlin [00:09:31] Holy moly.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:09:32] But you had. Literally, you had something called Sacred Studies, which was a course that you took. And all we had forms rather than grades. In every form, you had Sacred Studies. And I must say, I rather enjoyed it all. It's fascinating. The Anglican Church has a marvelous tradition. And it was fun reading the King James Bible. I suspect during my years there, I read the Bible twice, which is more than I can say than a lot of the whole Bible, the entire thing.
John Dehlin [00:10:04] Oh, my goodness.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:10:04] Beginning to add. So, of course, with emphasis on the New Testament. And I was confirmed at the age of 13 in the Episcopalian Church by the bishop of New Hampshire, which is where that church was. We had a retreat. I was very religious, I think, up to this point.
John Dehlin [00:10:24] Were you a believer? Did you kind of believe in the story?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:10:27] Of course, Absolutely. And then, because I'll say one thing, the Episcopalian Church and its Anglican background, they got some of the best music in the world. It was an aesthetic, you know, very satisfying experience as well as a religious one.
Guest [00:10:45] So
Dr. Michael Coe [00:10:47] during Sacred Studies in my last year there, my Sacred Studies teacher in that particular class, who was a minister, tried to give us the reasons for the existence of God, 10 of them that St. Thomas Aquinas came up with. How can you prove the existence of God? And suddenly it hit me. One of the reasons that was given by St Thomas was Thomas Aquinas was that this world exists. Therefore it had to have a beginning, and therefore a creator. I stuck my hand up and class. Suddenly it hit me. I said, what if the world is eternal? That is, if there's eternal in the past and eternal in the future. And the guy was stumped. It's a stupid, silly child's question, but one that I thought was important. You know, maybe the world is eternal. There's no beginning and therefore probably no end. And he couldn't answer it. And suddenly things started to slip away from me. By this time I was already, I think, 16 or 17. My last year before I went to college and I discovered an amazing book by a wonderful English anthropologist named Fraser called the Golden Bough, which is sort of a popular introduction to anthropology and all about it. And suddenly everything slipped away from me completely. I lost all my belief in religion, although I still kept a real interest in it.
John Dehlin [00:12:37] What about the book made you lose your belief in religion?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:12:42] Frazier went through the guy had an encyclopedic knowledge. He's one of the founders of anthropology, 19th century, and went through and showed for instance, all the things we take for granted, like celebrating Christmas, things of that sort. And the sacrifice of a figure like Christ, for instance, found in many, many other cultures through history. He was a classical scholar and could go back in the Greek and Roman classics. And he knew all about Africa, all about different places. It seems that he put it all in perspective, that this is a religion is a man made construct to answer certain important questions, not something that comes down from on high. And it's from then on. I suppose it got me started on trying to find out scientifically what religion really means to a people. Why is it religion? And of course there are many, many answers because religion is many, many things to many people. But any rate, I started to become a skeptic then, and I'm still a skeptic now, absolutely. So that was my background in being interested in religion, of course, about Mormonism. I knew very, very little. An uncle of mine in Wyoming, where my grandfather had a nice place, told me to go, if you want to read something interesting, we had an Encyclopedia Britannica there on the ranch. Now go look up Mormonism and you'll find it fascinating. And there was a wonderful article on Mormonism, an early edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And I really, I think, got my interest in Mormonism started back then as an amazing phenomenon in the history of religions and the history of America. So I always was interested in this subject. When I went to Harvard as a graduate student, although I eventually had to leave because of the Korean War, I was taking a seminar there with some really hotshot graduate students who were way ahead of me in anthropology. And walking back at night to the place where I lived with one of the students there who we got started to talk about Mormonism for some strange reason. Turned out he was a Romney and a Kimball Romney, descendant of presidents of the church and, you know, cousins of all the famous Romneys and a direct descendant of George Romney, the portrait painter English portrait painter. And we started to talk about this, and he again was. His career as a Mormon had followed my career as an Episcopalian, the same kind of a thing. He discovered anthropology and was no longer, you know, let's say, a true believer. So we talked a lot about this. I learned things about the Mormons that I never, ever knew, such as garments. I'd never heard of garments. This was, to me, amazing. Just all these fascinating things. And I love to talk to him about this. He's an extremely distinguished anthropologist in this field now with the Smithsonian for years. But any rate, that also sparked my interest. And even before that, as an undergraduate, once I got into anthropology, I'd taken a great course on the anthropology of religions by one of my professors, Evan E V O N Vote V O G T, who was born and raised in Mormon country in the Southwest, but his family were not Mormons. But he had deep interest in Mormonism. And he had a guest lecturer named, I think it's Thomas o', Day, who wrote a standard book on the Mormon religion, a Catholic anthropologist writing this. And he gave a lecture on Mormonism which just held me spellbound, such as, for instance, the whole concept of that as God once was, man now is. As God now is, man may become. He went into that, and it fascinated me, absolutely. I never became a Mormon, obviously, but I really got through him to respect this whole thing, not as a weird phenomenon of crazy polygamists, but as something really serious, worthy of study. Now, I never really deeply studied this, except when I was asked to write this article for Dialogue magazine back in 1973, Journal of Mormon Thought. And I did a lot of research at that point to write that article and found out things that I never knew about, you know, the background of Smith and Book of Mormon archaeology and all the rest of it. So I've always been. And then, of course, later on, I really got to know a whole lot of Mormon archaeologists, so both in the field and at BYU and elsewhere. So, yes, I've always been sort of connected with this.
Dr. Coe's Training and Expertise
John Dehlin [00:18:23] Okay. And just really quickly, I read your bio, but tell us how you're trained in ways that it relates to how you might know a thing or two about the scientific record versus kind of what the Book of Mormon might be claiming.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:18:42] Well, of course, anthropology has various sub fields in it, and one of which was archaeology, the past, the study of the past. And that's what I was from the beginning, an archaeologist. And I had had the good luck in my sophomore year at Harvard to visit the Maya area just As a tourist, I went to Yucatan over Christmas holiday and to Chichen Itza, which is a famous site. It's quite a late site in central Yucatan and great, a beautiful, wonderful place. I came back, I was flabbergasted by it. So I discovered that to really get into this seriously, there wasn't any major in Maya archaeology. When I got back, I wanted to. I was in English literature until then. I couldn't change to Maya archaeology. I found out that if I wanted to do this, I had to take anthropology. And that was my introduction to anthropology as a field. But right from the beginning, I was hooked on Mexican Central American archaeology and in particular the Maya. And that, of course, leads directly into Book of Mormon archaeology. It's the same area and I can talk something about this, the same time period involved, supposedly. So I've always had that connection. I got my. Finally, I took three years off during the war to do other things during the Korean War, which I can't tell too much about, and then got back to Harvard as a serious graduate student in what we call Mesoamerican archaeology. That's Mexico and Central America, the past. We call that whole area Mesoamerica. I'll be using that term later on. It's basically the area of Mexico and Central America, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, etc. That were had high civilization at the time of the Spanish conquest. Okay, so northern Mexico is not part of it, but the rest of it is in southern Mexico. So it's Mesoamerica that claimed me.
John Dehlin [00:21:10] Gotcha. Gotcha. So you're both. Tell me if I got this right. You're an anthropologist, broadly, an archaeologist, sort of specifically. And you focus on Mesoamerica.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:21:23] Right on. That's it.
John Dehlin [00:21:24] Okay. And you, what, were a professor at Yale for?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:21:28] I taught at the University of Tennessee for two years. Volunteers frantically writing my PhD thesis, which I got accepted by Harvard and eventually was invited up to Yale. And I spent about 35 years here at Yale.
John Dehlin [00:21:48] Okay, all right.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:21:50] I'm now retired. I was retired in 1995, but I still write books, still write about the Maya. And I have other interests too, that I've written about, but mainly racial America.
John Dehlin [00:22:02] Okay, gotcha. All right, well, good. So I guess let's jump right in to what your understanding is of what the Book of Mormon claims from an archaeological, geographical, historical perspective.
Migration Stories and Book of Mormon Claims
Dr. Michael Coe [00:22:21] Well, the Book of Mormon, of course, like the Old Testament, has a migration or series of migration legends in it. And there were, you know, and it involved people crossing, you know, whole oceans, not just Crossing the Red Sea, but crossing the Atlantic out of what today we would call the Middle east, the near east, the Holy Land, to what Smith claimed to be a land that he eventually the land Zarahemla, to be somewheres down towards Central America. So this is what it's about. Now. There were actually two big migrations in the Book of Mormon, there are, the first of which were the Jaredites. And these people came across, but they didn't really survive terribly long. The great migration was, of course, the Nephites, who were highly civilized people. You know, they had the compass to navigate by, they had iron, they had. They had horses, they had wheat. All the things that they had at that point in the Middle east, of course, and frankly, none of which, or almost none of which were ever found in Mesoamerica. But that didn't. Joseph Smith would not have known about that. But he went ahead and described this mighty civilization with people who built these huge temples and so forth. And then, of course, as you know, if you follow the Book of Mormon, that there were a kind of a heretical group sprang up of discontents, Malcontents called the Lamanites. And the Lamanites eventually won out and destroyed the Nephite civilizations and killed all the Nephites and basically took over. And according to Book of Mormon archaeologists and according to the faithful, who are the Lamanites, well, they're still there. They're the American Indians. And as Smith or somebody said that if they play their cards right, these pathetic Lamanites, these awful Lamanites, they'll become white once more. White and delightsome, I think, is the term. They'll become white men and white women and white children. So basically, that's my whole migration thing, and that's the whole business about Book of Mormon archaeology. To find Zarahemla, to find the plates of gold that were inscribed at the last trump, so to speak, that were shown miraculously through Joseph Smith, that he supposedly translated as the Book of Mormon. That's the background of Book of Mormon archaeology. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Book of Mormon archaeology, especially at byu, although it's basically not practiced now, but it was back then at the beginning, and I got to know the people involved with this.
John Dehlin [00:25:53] So let's actually, we'll talk a bit about the specifics of the discrepancies, and then we'll talk about your experiences with the archaeologists and what they were trying to do. Does that make sense?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:26:06] Yeah, that's fine.
John Dehlin [00:26:07] Okay. So according to what the Book of Mormon. And let's go in a little bit more detail about what the Book of Mormon would lead us to expect to find archaeologically, geographically, anthropologically. If the Book of Mormon historical record were accurate, what would we have expected to find? And let me just maybe give a little bit of a disclaimer. You know, I think Hugh Nibley, at some point, I'm sure you're familiar with, with Hugh Nibley.
What Archaeology Would Expect to Find
Dr. Michael Coe [00:26:41] I never met him, but I certainly know who the name Hugh Nibley. All right, Right.
John Dehlin [00:26:46] So one of the defenses that I think he would have made at some point is that with jungles and with weather and with temperature, you know, lots of things can be destroyed and eroded. Bones, you know, books, records, weapons, you know, who knows what can be rusted and deteriorated over time. You know, when you're talking about a thousand, 2000 years, maybe even, you know, 2400 years. And so, you know, let's just assume at the beginning that we're going to account for reasonably sort of plausibly deniable apologetic responses that are reasonable, given that, what would we expect from the Book of Mormon text to find if the Book of Mormon text were in historical document?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:27:40] Well, Hugh Nibleer is wrong about the idea that this stuff, all of it, has disappeared forever. Take iron, for instance. Nobody ever used iron in the New World per se.
John Dehlin [00:27:57] Does the Book of Mormon claim iron or does it claim steel? I know it claims steel.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:28:01] Well, okay, call it steel. Iron is the principal component of steel.
John Dehlin [00:28:08] And I think there are steel swords mentioned in the Book of Mormon or shields or helmets or whatever.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:28:13] That's correct. You would expect, you know, with all this mayhem taking place, let's say, with the Nephites fighting the Lamanites, you'd expect to find that stuff. Archaeology relies on a host now of physical and chemical methods of detection that we didn't even know about. A lot of this stuff 50 years ago when I first got into archaeology, that are now available now. And these things don't disappear forever. They leave traces. If you had iron or steel, you would expect to find these things. Even if they were all rusted, you still find them. You'd find the chemical remains. They've never been found ever. Take wheat. Now, wheat, you know, may claim that the Book of Mormon archaeologists claim, well, the wheat's going to disappear. It's organic and so forth. Well, if wheat were grown, it would have to pollinate, like all grasses. It's a grass. It would have windblown pollen. Hundreds of tests have been made in lakes and other places in mesoamerica coring going down through the sediments. Nobody has ever found prior to the arrival of the Spaniards any indication that wheat was grown. The pollen is distinct in all of these plants. Maize pollen, for instance, shows up naturally all through the thing. There's no maize, by the way, isn't really mentioned in the book of Mormon.
John Dehlin [00:30:03] Dr. Koh, just going back to metal for a second. I seem to recall that the Book of Mormon mentions brass, iron, copper, gold, silver coins and steel swords. So does any of that.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:30:22] Let's do the coins.
Guest [00:30:23] Okay.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:30:24] Nobody has ever found pre Columbian coinage ever, okay. Anywhere in the New World, Mesoamerica or Peru or you know, Wisconsin, any place has never been found in pre Spanish times coinage. Coinage was brought by the Spaniards first to the New World, okay? So there's one that you can discount right away as proof for the correctness.
John Dehlin [00:30:53] And you think those things could survive in the dirt?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:30:55] You know, oh, they certainly would. They certainly would. Coinage is, you know, this is the whole idea behind coinage is that it's common, that it's a, that it's a, that commerce is conducted with it. You certainly would have done it. The only real coinage in quotes that they ever had in Mesoamerica was cacao. Chocolate beans, which did serve as small change, had value. The chocolate bean, dried chocolate beans. That's exactly. If there were coins, there'd be chocolate beans. Why aren't chocolate beans mentioned in the Book of Mormon?
Guest [00:31:32] Right.
John Dehlin [00:31:33] Also I've never thought about that. What isn't mentioned in the Book of Mormon like corn and soy.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:31:38] Now copper alloys like brass, copper in any form doesn't show up in Mesoamerica, although it's very ancient in its use in the Andes in the Peruvian area, doesn't show up in Mesoamerica until at the earliest 800 AD period. The same way in Mesoamerica that gold doesn't show up in any way until 7 or 800 A.D. period. There's none. Although these things existed in the Andes, it isn't until people brought them up probably by sea trade early on that you'd ever find anything like that.
John Dehlin [00:32:20] And the Book of Mormon record ends somewhere when like 300 or 400.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:32:25] Well, yeah. The whole idea of Book of Mormon chronology is, I think this has all been worked out by Book of Mormon archaeologists that the Jaredites of the first. And they go back what, something like 400 or 500 BC that would put them scientifically, if they existed as Olmecs. Now that's one of my specialties, is the Olmec civilization of Mexico. I've excavated a very, very big and the oldest Olmec site. And I can assure you that everything we found there is Native American. Everything.
John Dehlin [00:33:11] Meaning what? Meaning it's not what.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:33:13] Meaning it's got a tradition of these people are eating maize, they're growing maize, they're using chocolate. We just found that out, that they were drinking chocolate there. All sorts of things that are typically American, nothing to do with the Middle east at all. These are amazing people who could make absolutely huge monuments of basalt, volcanic rock, carve them as colossal heads. They're amazing in their own right. There are many questions still about the Olmec to be answered, but we know that they're very ancient. They go back to the Olmecs were there from probably about 15, 1400 B.C. until about 400 B.C. so let's say they're pre Lamanite, and it's already an advanced civilization. And you can check with one famous Mormon archaeologist about this, my friend John Clark, those are the dates, because he's had a lot to do with this whole business. They don't check in with the Book of Mormon, Jaredites bringing civilization over from the Middle East. There's nothing in the slightest bit Middle east about the Olmec.
John Dehlin [00:34:31] Okay?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:34:32] Not at all. So you've got crops mentioned in the Book of Mormon that never existed in pre Columbian America, and that's barley and wheat and. Exactly. Never has there been any. All of these things would have produced pollen if they'd been grown by anybody. And a lot of this stuff is windblown. It would fall onto ponds and lakes and get enclosed in sediments. And tremendous amounts of pollen work has been done in this area in Mesoamerica. Very interesting, because it shows climate differences, the arrival of maize, corn cultivation, and things like that.
John Dehlin [00:35:11] So you're finding ancient pollen. You're not finding ancient barley or wheat.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:35:17] This kind of work for 50, 75 years, drilling down into lake beds. And yes, we find ancient pollen. And there's none of this stuff that's in the Book of Mormon does not exist, period.
Silk, Chariots, Swords, and Warfare Evidence
John Dehlin [00:35:30] Okay, what about things like silk, chariots, swords?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:35:36] Okay, silk, Nothing. Now, that silk, of course, is highly organic, but there was never any production of silk in the New World prior. Well, probably the colonial Spaniards brought it across eventually. You know, it says silk was invented in Asia Far east, not in the Near East. And there's no silk whatsoever. No idea of silk cultivation. No conquistador mentioned silkworms eating mulberry leaves or anything like that, which you need for the production of Silk. So silk wasn't there. What else do we have now besides
John Dehlin [00:36:18] that seven day calendar?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:36:22] Seven day calendar was unknown in Mesoamerica. Our seven day calendar was totally unknown. They had a completely different calendar that operated on different principles. They had a. They had a 260 day calendar that saw the permutation of the number of 13 numbers with 20 day names. And these produce to see, 13 and 20 have no common denominator. They produce a 260 day calendar. Every 13 days the same number will repeat again. That would make a week, but it would be a 13 day week. Or the 20 day cycle would produce a 20 day week. 7 day week. Totally unknown. None of the names associated with the seven days, which are all planets, the sun and the moon and so forth with us. That was unknown in Mesoamerica.
John Dehlin [00:37:21] Okay, no evidence of that. What about like war stuff like chariots and helmets and swords and shields and
Dr. Michael Coe [00:37:27] stuff like that, Right? Well, they had helmets all right, but they weren't made out of brass, that's for sure. And they used them in the ball game and probably in something that resembled jousting, where they fought each other with special stones that they held in their hands and tried to smash each other's heads. This game is still being played in west Mexico, incidentally. Highly dangerous. These guys were sort of like gladiators. They probably wore padded wooden helmets, probably with leather over them. For this. We have actual, in Oaxaca and even in the Maya area, scenes that show this. Chariots. They never had chariots, that is for sure.
John Dehlin [00:38:13] What about wheels?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:38:14] Well, they had the wheel, but because they hardly ever used it. There are wheel toys known in classic times, that is, you know, probably from about 4 or 500 AD on, in Veracruz, on the Gulf coast of Mexico. There are wheeled clay toys and they probably had a very simple potter's wheel, which was still in use in Yucatan through the conquest period. But for transportation, they had the backs of people. All records that we have show that enormous amounts of goods passed or people passed on foot and stuff was carried on people's backs with a tump line that went around the forehead and connected to these big packs. And it was highly efficient. By the time the Spaniards got there, all the battles were fought on foot by native troops against the Spaniards. There were no chariots there whatsoever. And never been any remains of chariots. Never any remains of the wheels of chariots. You'd expect to find these things eventually. There are places where preservation does happen. Nothing after 100 years of archaeology. Zero.
Animals Mentioned in the Book of Mormon
John Dehlin [00:39:42] Okay, let's do animals so the Book of Mormon mentions horses, cattle, oxen, donkeys, goats, sheep, swine and elephants.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:39:52] Okay.
John Dehlin [00:39:53] And curlems and kumamums.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:39:55] Let's get the horses out of the way. First. There were. The horse was not domesticated. The horse evolved in the New World. The whole evolution of the horse took place in the Americas and during the height of the Ice Age, I guess.
John Dehlin [00:40:14] Oh, so you mean like tens of
Dr. Michael Coe [00:40:16] thousands or tens of thousands of years? Hundreds of thousands of years ago. Okay. And the horse crossed over into the Old World across the Bering Straits during a period when the ice. There was a lot of ice and the water level dropped and revealed dry land as a land bridge into Asia. This is something Book of Mormon archaeologists don't really like to talk about. But yes, this was a huge way of animals crossing back and forth between the Old and New World. So when the first American Indian ancestors arrived, probably, certainly by 15,000 years ago, probably as long ago as 20,000 years ago, there are plenty of horses in the New World. But very shortly, in the space of, let's say, five or 10,000 years, they had wiped them all out, every single one. The horse was extinct, probably by 7,000 B.C. the horse horses were gone, along with many of the other large animals. It was human overkill. They came in, it was happy hunting grounds, and horses were food in those days, as they had been to our European ancestors back in the Paleolithic. So they wiped them out very quickly. The horses disappear from the new world by 7000 B.C. there's no evidence for horses whatsoever at any archaeological site ever. Until the Spaniards arrived with horses. And of course, the horses, their horses became feral. A lot of them ran out onto the Great Plains, and the Great Plains Indians got them, became the greatest cavalrymen who ever lived. We think of Indians and horses together, but that's late.
John Dehlin [00:42:04] So it would have made sense for Joseph Smith to associate horses with Indians because.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:42:08] Yeah, right. He sees them incredible people like the Comanche and the Sioux and Cheyenne and people like that. Unbelievable, ferocious horsemen. I mean, like the horse and the animal was one thing. They were the greatest horsemen who ever lived. But that probably would have influenced him a lot. He had to have horses. But of course, you've got horses in the Old World, in the Bible, in the Holy Land, and he might have
John Dehlin [00:42:36] even associated the crops that we talked about and coins with Indians because maybe what the Spaniards would have brought them over.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:42:44] It took a long time. Coinage probably wouldn't have been among the Indians for a long time, actually, but they eventually got it. You Know, particularly down in the Southwest in the pueblos after the Spaniards took them over. Spaniards were eventually kicked out down there in 1691, I think it was. But they had already introduced the horse wheat, certainly to the Pueblos. The Pueblos were growing wheat eventually, but only introduced by the Spaniards there. Okay, so that. So the horses. There's no question about the horse. That's late. That comes in with the Spaniards.
John Dehlin [00:43:23] Okay, what about the others?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:43:26] So let's remind me.
John Dehlin [00:43:30] Donkeys, goats, okay.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:43:31] Cattle and oxen are the same thing. They're all genus. Both tourists in the Latin name. Definitely Old World. No evidence whatsoever for any kind of cattle of any sort, whether oxen or what have you in the New World prior to the time of the Spaniards, Spaniards brought those in donkeys. The same thing again. No wild asses or donkeys have ever been found in the New World. They were evolved in the Old World and came in with the Spaniards. Or if they had existed before they were reintroduced by the Spaniards. Absolutely no bones of these creatures ever showed up. Peg zero. Not one pig bone has ever shown up in pre Columbian excavations. And I can tell you that huge amounts of excavations all through the New World have been made over the last hundred years.
John Dehlin [00:44:31] And they do find animals. Do they find ancient animals?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:44:33] Oh, lots of animals.
John Dehlin [00:44:34] What do they find?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:44:36] You find wild animals. Deer, for instance. Dog. Dogs were in the New World and were eaten by almost all the American Indian groups. I've dug up Olmec kitchen mittens. You know, they're old Olmec garbage down in Mexico, just full of dog bones and whatnot.
John Dehlin [00:45:01] So animal bones can survive 2,300 years?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:45:04] Oh, no question about it. They're highly impervious to disappearing turkeys. Lots of turkey bones eventually, especially in classic times, once you get into the classic civilizations, like the Maya, one Muscovy duck, which is the New World duck, definitely show up. And then many, many wild animals. Deer, South America, relatives of the camel. How about what?
John Dehlin [00:45:32] Tapirs.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:45:33] Tapirs, yeah, but tapirs, they were formidable animals. And they generally used tapirs for their hide, which was. They could make armor out of it. So heavy and thick. But yes, tapir bones do show up in these things. All of us who do these excavations have saved all the animal bones. They've all been carefully identified by competent zoologists who have comparative collections. And there's no question, none of those things mentioned by Smith in the Book of Mormon are in pre Columbian or pre Spanish archaeological sites from 10,000 B.C. i mean on. There's absolutely nothing.
John Dehlin [00:46:20] And let's do Elephants, real quick.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:46:22] Elephants. There's nothing, absolutely zero.
John Dehlin [00:46:26] You're not giving us much to go on here, Dr. Ko.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:46:28] No, I'm sorry, this is zero. I would, you know, back in Smith's day, let's say 1835 or 30s or back in those days, 20s and 30s, these things just weren't known. Nobody had ever dug an archaeological site except to loot it for gold or something like that. Nobody knew any of this stuff. We have enormous amounts of information now about all of this. Just vast, vast quantities. So basically, if you're looking for Old World connections and looking at the near east, you're looking in the wrong place. That's another topic because I'm not saying that there was never any contact between the Old World and the New World in pre Columbian times, because I'm sure there was. But none of it looks like it comes out of the Middle east in the form of Jaredites, Nephites or Lamanites or what have you.
John Dehlin [00:47:29] Yeah, so that's an interesting point. I think I recall and for my listeners, a lot of this information I'm getting from my questions comes from a website called MormonThink.com it's an excellent website which lists a lot of the stuff, but it mentions something about some type of painting or drawing on a cup or some type of material that has an elephant, an Indian elephant, roaming a city that might be dated to kind of the 600 to 900 AD time period.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:48:02] Well, that 600 to 900 AD would be late Classic Maya. There's a lot of painted pottery. I mean, we now know not only from excavations, but principally in museums and private collections. We've got a record of over 6,000 Maya vases. There's a website devoted to them, a wonderful website. My friend, the photographer and archaeologist Justin Kerr has rolled these things out photographically available to everybody. So we know what they cover. And I have never seen on any of this stuff convincing elephants. There used to be a British anatomist, Sir Elliot Grafton Smith, back in the Beginning of the 20th century in England, who wrote a book called Elephants and Ethnologists in which he claimed that some of the monuments, the stone stele, the standing dated stone monument at the site of Copan in the western part of Honduras in Central America, that what's shown on the top of one of those are elephants with the mahout, the guy running the elephant, Indian style, on top, sitting on top of his back of his ears. Well, we now know that those things are not elephants. It's, they're rather baroque. Macaws which is a very large parrot with a huge beak. And in fact, the hieroglyphs that go with it tell us that we can now retell us that those are in fact macaws up there. They're not elephants.
John Dehlin [00:49:46] They kind of look like them. Right.
Dr. Michael Coe [00:49:48] There were elephants in the New World back in the Pleistocene, in the Ice Age, definitely. There are wonderful elephant kill sites that the Clovis people, the people who made these beautiful fluted points at about, you know, 10,000 BC that they slaughtered these animals, but they killed them all. All the elephants were killed off. By the end of the Ice Age, they're all gone. There's none.
John Dehlin [00:50:16] Do we have digs from before the Ice Age for humans that we've found or anything?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:50:25] No. I mean, when you get back beyond the Ice Age, you're back beyond the Pleistocene, you're in the Tertiary period, the Pliocene, and there were no humans in the New World at that point. They arrive at the end of the Pleistocene or the Ice Age. From Asia, from northeastern Asia. We all. That is all of us who are scientific archaeologists think that the evidence is conclusive. That was never a barrier at any point, to tell you the truth. It's a highway into the New World. And we now know that they had boats. Boats are very, very ancient in the world, much more ancient than we ever thought. And then the reasons for thinking this. And people would have had boats, would have come down the Pacific coast all the way to the Pacific coast of South America in boats, establishing colonies on the way. And by shortly after their arrival when they saw these amazing, this megafauna, they like to call it, the huge animals roaming the landscape, including elephants, they would have. They wiped them out. It was overkill. There are also, people claim there are environmental reasons for this climate change and whatnot that probably entered into it. But the main reason most of us think was humans slaughtered them. Overkill just wiped them out. And you don't have any elephants until God knows when. Who brought the first elephant over after the Spanish conquest? I mean, P.T. barnaby, somebody. Somebody brought it across established zoos.
Language, Culture, and Hebrew Origins
John Dehlin [00:52:14] All right, all right, so let's turn a little bit now to language and culture. What language do we think that, you know, people in Jerusalem, you know, Layman or Lemuel or Nephi or Lehi. What language do we think they would have spoken in 600 B.C. coming out of Jerusalem?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:52:35] Well, they would spoke in a Semitic language. I mean, they would have spoken, you know, the illiterate of them probably knew Babylonian, Old Babylonian, some of them probably would have, you know, been literate in Assyrian. I don't know how far back Aramaic goes, but that was the language of Jesus at the time when he lived. Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic. That was a kind of everyday language that people spoke at that time point. But all of these languages there that they would have spoken, except possibly some people who knew Old Persian, which is an Indo European language, they would have spoken Semitic languages.
John Dehlin [00:53:19] And what about people who would have been descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel and Abraham and all that? You know,
Dr. Michael Coe [00:53:28] they would have spoken one of the other Semitic language, Hebrew. Hebrew was becoming a literate language rather than a spoken language at that point. But the literate among them would have certainly spoken Hebrew as a scholarly and sacred language. But the everyday language was Aramaic. So you want to know, is there any evidence for these languages in the pre Spanish New World?
John Dehlin [00:54:00] What would a linguist tell you is realistic? Because languages I guess can die all the time and so and they can get subsumed and combined. And so, you know, I guess apologists now are okay, so here's. I'm going to go back for our listeners and just restate kind of my understanding of what the deal is. It seems to me like the Book of Mormon pretty early claimed to be a historical record of the ancient American inhabitants. And, and whoever wrote the titles, the title of the Book of Mormon clearly tied Native Americans to the Book of Mormon. And then Joseph Smith himself would walk around and see a pile of bones and say that was the famous Nephite warrior Zelf or whatever. He would see a city and say this was the ancient city of blah, blah, blah. So it's pretty clear that Joseph Smith tied Native Americans to the Book of Mormon.
Guest [00:55:01] Now
John Dehlin [00:55:03] what apologists are saying now is that even though Joseph Smith may have got it wrong, there's nothing in the Book of Mormon that precludes the possibility of other peoples living in ancient America prior to the arrival of the Jaredites or prior to the arrival of Nephi and Laman and Lemuel and Lehi. And so it's very possible that they lived in these small little colonies or cities, but that they also had interactions with existing civilizations such that it's very easy for not only their language and not only their culture, but also their DNA to ultimately be subsumed or enveloped and eventually erased by these other larger existing cultures. Now if you believe that latter theory, then you have to say that Joseph Smith didn't understand the Book of Mormon or didn't get it right, that he made a lot of errors and you also have to assume that pretty much all the church leaders from then to now who had traveled to Latin America and call descendants of, you know, call Native Americans and the descendants of Native Americans who would call them Lamanites. And they do. I mean, in Guatemala, the Guatemalan members of the church there would call themselves Lamanites. And they would do that because Spencer B. Kimball, one of our former prophets and others would go down there and call them Lamanites too. And so there's this a bit of a pickle where there's going to be a problem either way. Either Joseph and all the prophets from Joseph to now, or most of them pretty much all got it wrong calling people Lamanites who they shouldn't have called Lamanites, or we should have to think about what's realistic to expect for a potentially existing culture to then envelop and subsume another one. So talk about that if you can.
Maya Language and Decipherment
Dr. Michael Coe [00:57:04] Well, let's talk about the evidence for language in, let's say, the Maya area. You know, when Joseph Smith read the great two volume work that came out by John Lloyd Stevens with his artist Frederick Catherwood, Travels in Central America, Yucatan, etc.
John Dehlin [00:57:34] How do we know Joseph would have read this book?
Dr. Michael Coe [00:57:37] He did read it because it was one of the most popular travel books ever published in the United States or anywhere else. It was a wild hit, huge edition. Everybody had copies of it. And I have read, I hope it's true that when Smith read this, which was the first really solid account of the Maya ruins by a marvelous writer and a wonderful artist, that was accurate. He said, that's it. Those are the Nephite cities. If the Nephite cities, you take the Nephite cities were Maya, therefore Classic Maya, because the civilization, pretty much Classic civilization disintegrated by 900 A.D. you would have to say, what language did they speak? Were these people. They would be one of those enclaves that you're talking about and these highly civilized people. And every time you look at, say, the illustrations in the popular edition of the Book of Mormon, you see, that's a Maya city because there are Maya temples, Maya pyramids and people dressed as Maya. So let's say they're Classic Maya. What language did the Classic Maya speak? Now it used to be that you could play around with that, you know, and say, well, we can't really read the hieroglyphs except for the, you know, the dates and the calendrical stuff and whatnot. That's not true. Now we can read almost everything we can read 95% of what follows, the dates on these inscribed monuments. We can read 95% of what the Maya themselves wrote. And what language is this in? It's in Maya. Not only Maya, there are 29 extant Maya languages which are all closely related to each other, but all somewhat mutually unintelligible. It's like we speak English, but our language is related to German, to Dutch, to the Scandinavian languages, you know, mutually unintelligible when we speak them. But they were all one at one point. They're now 29 Maya languages. Which particular of those languages is being reflected in the hieroglyphs now, since because of the great decipherment which has taken place in the last 20 or 25 years, we can read those, and they are all in one particular ancestral Maya language which we call Choltan. Now, the guy, one of the two main people who discovered, I think, conclusively what this language is, happens to be a professor at Brigham Young University, John Robertson, a good friend of mine, fantastically good linguist. All of the inscriptions now we know from all through Guatemala, all the way up to the northernmost part of Yucatan, Belize, Honduras and so forth, southeastern Mexico. They're all in this literary language which was a special language. And the only language that's close to it now among these Maya languages is Chorti, which is spoken by a small group of people on the border between Guatemala and Honduras. If you drive from Guatemala City to the ruins of Copan, you go right through chorti country. This is the language that was spoken by their ancestors, that became the literary language now, like Hebrew is the literary language of the Bible, of the ancient Bible, like Sanskrit is the language of the Hindu religion, like Latin is the language of the Roman Church, the Catholic Church, or what used to be the Western church. A prestige language that was understood by everybody, and it was a literary language. It's in Maya, it's not in Aramaic, it's not Semitic. There are no Semitic words whatsoever in it. It's got no relation whatsoever with any languages that we know of in the Old World. It's strictly Mesoamerican. And right from the beginning, they were starting to write. About 400 B.C. we got some evidence for that, right until the Spanish priests wiped it out and burned all their books. That's how. I mean, that's what the language is. And there's nothing Old World about it.
John Dehlin [01:02:10] No characters, no references, no we know
Dr. Michael Coe [01:02:13] we can read all these hieroglyphs.
John Dehlin [01:02:15] What do they say? What do they talk about?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:02:18] Now, the monuments, of course, are Public monuments. Most of their books, except for four extant ones, are missing. The monuments mainly talk about the dynasties. They're all about the people who ran these city states. They were all city states. The royal marriages, birth marriages, conquests, royal death, rituals that they performed at important times. That has to do with their conquests.
John Dehlin [01:02:55] Is it stuff happening? Do we have writings between 600 BC and 300, 400 AD?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:03:03] Oh, yes, we certainly do.
John Dehlin [01:03:06] Do they talk about a King Benjamin, or do they talk about an Alma
Dr. Michael Coe [01:03:10] and a range of sages where you start with, you know, back, let's say, Go BC There are some writings. We know they were already starting to write that they're very hard to interpret, but there's nothing in them other than a Mesoamerican explanation for them. There are no King Benjamins or anybody like that. The Olmec, for instance, who Book of Mormon archaeologists say were Jaredites. We had no writing whatsoever for the Olmec. None. Zero. Which is peculiar if these people came from the Middle east, where writing goes back to at least, what, 2800 BC or earlier. We have nothing from them except that not so long ago, a tablet was found. I call it that because that's what it looked like. And it's inscribed with hieroglyphs that are all Olmec, but we can't read them. We call that the Kaskaha block. I published it along with a whole bunch of other people who are interested in this whole thing. And it's probably about 9 or 800 B.C. the date of it. But this is the only Olmec writing we have, and we can't read this. Unfortunately, there's not enough to crack. We have about beginning about 200 A.D. we start getting extensive Maya inscriptions. And they're in Maya and they can be read in Maya.
John Dehlin [01:04:45] And do they mention a Mormon or a Moroni?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:04:47] They don't mention any of these wonderful people out of the Book of Mormon. Nothing. Zero. They're all Maya, every single one of them. So the language of these people who Smith was talking about was Maya.
John Dehlin [01:05:05] So when I was on a mission in Guatemala, we showed a little film strip. And the little film strip was, I think it was called Ancient America Speaks. I'm not sure, but I think, have you seen this film strip? But here was the basic premise. It was that, you know, Jesus lived in the Old World and he, you know, visited people there. But he also said in the Bible, other sheep I have that are not of this fold, you know, them too shall hear my word. And then it said, did you Know that Jesus, after he died, came and visited the Americas and he came to America. There's a big earthquake and came to America, sat down, called twelve apostles, formed a church. And this is what the Book of Mormon claims. And the people prior to Jesus were already believing that Jesus was going to come. They were baptizing in his name. They were, you know, setting up temples or doing rituals that were kind of Jewish or pretty or Christian rituals. But that Jesus came, called 12 apostles, started his church. And there's evidence of that in the New World because, you know, there's this legend of a great white God, maybe his name was Quetzalcoatl, who came and visited. There was a light, you know, there are hieroglyphs about a light skinned people and a dark skinned people. And you know, there are excavations of temples that had baptismal fonts, which is likely where people performed these Christian baptisms. And you know, there's even hieroglyphs about the Tree of Life, about a big tree that very much maps what Lehi's dream and what he would have told in the Book of Mormon. So this is a film strip that I showed, you know, probably a thousand people on my mission, basically saying that New World, you know, this was published by the church, this was given to missionaries to teach people. And it basically said, hey, you people in Latin America, did you know that you are the descendants of these Lamanite people, that the light skinned people were killed off and the dark skinned people lived and they're the pure blood of Israel? And you're awesome because you are these people and you're the chosen blood. You know, that was kind of what I remember. I could have some of the details wrong.
Maya Religion and Old World Comparisons
Dr. Michael Coe [01:07:36] That's a big order here. You know, I first came into contact with this when I took, when I first got married. I took Sophie, my wife. I said, you've got to, this is Christmas vacation. Let's go down to Yucatan and whatnot. You've never seen Maya Seitz. I mean, you know, she married to a Maya archaeologist. She was an anthropologist, but a social anthropologist. I said, let's go on down and see some of the main Maya sites in Yucatan and get down to Palenque and Chiapas in southeastern Mexico and I'll take you through these. So we did, and we spent two or three weeks down there. We saw everything. I mean, went back to Chichen Itza and places like that, got to Palenque and when we were sitting in a, an outdoor restaurant cafeteria in Veri, the capital of Yucatan, saw this obvious American, with a young guy who seemed to be, you know, his assistant there, a Maya kid, teenager there. And he was listening to us talking. He came across and he said, are you folks Americans? Hey, Allah, we are and whatnot. And he said, well, why are you down here? I said, well, I'm really an archaeologist and I'm looking to get my PhD in archaeology. He said, well, I'll tell you something. He said, did you know that Jesus came, had a second coming to this part of the world? I said, well, I said, I've heard that some people believe this. And he said, yes. He came to Palenque down in southeastern Chiapas and actually preached from the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. Well, we were headed to Palenque, I'd never been there. And then he gave me his card and it had a name on it and it said Council of the twelve Apostles. But not from Salt Lake City, from Independence, Missouri. He was a reorganite. And this is the first time I'd ever heard of the Reorganized. Very nice guy. So I heard about that a long, long time ago, over 50 years ago. Let's talk about Palenque, the Temple of the Cross at Palenque. There are three temples together in one part of this great, beautiful, well understood site of Palenque. Huge amounts of inscriptions there. We can read everything on them. Now, the Temple of the Cross. There is something that looks like a cross, a great slab in the back. It's all got a huge bas relief on it with two individuals facing each other on either side of this thing. And there's a bird on the top sitting there. We now know that this is basically a world direction tree. It's a stylized tree, that it's sprouting vegetation and whatnot on all sides. That the two individuals are not Jesus, they or somebody else and a disciple, but rather that this is a great Maya king whose name we know. And his name is Kanvalam, which means snake, jaguar. And he's shown as a kid and as a mature individual who's taken office. It's two parts. It's really his life story. And the Kambalan built all of these other temples around it are his work. There's no mention of Jesus or apostles or anything that's Christian or Hebrew in that inscription. It's a very long one. And as I say, we can now read it in its totality. There's no mystery about it whatsoever. It's got to do with a Maya creation, with a Maya whole Maya idea of this particular dynasty at Palenque, about their divine origins, how they descended from the gods and so forth. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with the Bible or with Jesus. So that one which is often used is simply invalid. I think that's, you know, the other things that were in your film strip, again, when you really analyze them, they all turn out to be things that are either misunderstood or else they're Native Americans, period, that have nothing to do with the Middle East. Now, I'd like to say one thing now is that about this whole idea of contact between the Old World and the New World. I'm not entirely against the idea of transoceanic contacts. In fact, there's beginning to be evidence for it. The leading scholar of this kind of stuff is a. Is a Mormon, a friend of mine, John Sorensen at byu, who's written extensively on this whole thing. Very interesting stuff. I mean, he's a real scholar. I think that he's, again, often looking in the wrong direction. But I think there's pretty good evidence for contact between East Asia and Southeast Asia. Not the Middle east at all, but totally in another direction, across the Pacific. Recently, not so long ago, very recently, within this past year, they have done analysis of bones found on the coast of Chile, northern Chile, in what was the Inca empire, within the Inca Empire, but right on the coast, a culture of a community that could be dated about 1100, 1200, 1300 A.D. you know, hundreds of years before the Spaniards got there. There are chicken bones in this. We've got the radiocarbon dates now on it. They have analyzed the DNA in the chicken bones, and they turn out not to be Middle Eastern chickens at all, I'm sorry, but rather Polynesian chickens. The Polynesians, who are an Old World people, they moved out into the Pacific, had been in contact with the New World, I think, for a very long period of time. Wonderful, wonderful. Certainly from, say, 1200 A.D. on, they had the means to get to America and go back. They brought the sweet potato, which is a totally American plant, back across the Pacific to the Old World long before the Spaniards got to the New World with the name, the native name of the sweet potato Man.
John Dehlin [01:14:19] I would like to meet those Polynesians who made that boat trip.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:14:22] Those people were really good. I mean, listen, they reached Easter island, which is the farthest point of anything from anywhere else on Earth. I mean, it's the most distant place on Earth. They got there, you know, and these are the people who set up all the big heads on Easter Island. The Polynesians and the Micronesians also were the most incredible navigators. Really incredible.
John Dehlin [01:14:46] Wow.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:14:47] Okay. So all of, as I say, I'm not against this kind of study and John Sorensen has really come up with some interesting stuff. But to me, it all points to the eastern part of the old world of eastern Eurasia, that is China, China and Southeast Asia in particular.
John Dehlin [01:15:06] Gotcha, Gotcha. And just this idea of is there any evidence that a Christ figure came that, you know, the light skinned, dark skin, that any of the narrative in the Book of Mormon, the reign of Judges, just, you know, all that stuff, Any evidence of that? Christian teachings, Christian remnants in, you know, Mesoamerican religious ritual?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:15:32] Well, let's say that Mesoamerican religious rituals and religious beliefs and whatnot were really complex, highly complex. When the Spaniards came, the Catholic priests came, the first friars arrived, they were kind of amazed to see that they had confession to the gods. They had a mother goddess. They had, which is not again, something out of Jewish ideas at all. They had all sorts of things which made it easy for them to, they thought to convert these people to get them to recognize Jesus. The question about Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, the culture hero, the great white God, right? This comes up over and over and over again. And you have to go to the original sources about Quetzalcoatl. The Spaniards, I think, had every reason to want to make this guy into a white man because they weren't thinking about Jesus coming, you know, second coming to the New World arriving, but rather Cortez, the white conquistador. They wanted a story that was they could identify a native prophecy that would justify and kind of clinch the idea that Cortes was a God. They're not thinking about Jesus at all. They're thinking about Cortes as their returned God.
John Dehlin [01:17:18] So the Indians would accept the conquest.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:17:21] More the Indians would accept the conquest. There's now a big literature, a study about this thing. You have to take what the Spaniards, they built this thing up big to justify the horrible things that they did to the Indians. But this whole idea of a white people coming to the New World is basically made out of whole cloth. It was propaganda. First set up by the Spaniards, then picked up by European racists who didn't want to accept the idea that dark skinned people could have built temples and huge mounds in, let's say, the middle part of this country or anything, or the Inca. It all had to be somebody from elsewhere with white skin.
John Dehlin [01:18:08] So there is a dark and a light skin narrative outside of Mormonism that tries to explain or Interpret first by
Dr. Michael Coe [01:18:15] the Spaniards and I think to justify their conquest. What I consider, I would rather call the invasion, the European invasion of the New World. Yes. And it was picked up by people in 19th century America very quickly. This whole idea that there must have been another race that built those mounds because these miserable Indians that we look at, they couldn't have possibly have done something like that.
John Dehlin [01:18:46] Okay? And so, and so those who would
Dr. Michael Coe [01:18:49] say,
John Dehlin [01:18:53] those who would say, yes, Jesus came, yes, he descended in a pillar of light, yes, he taught Christianity and started a church and you know, yes, all this happened, but because the dark skinned people killed all the light skinned people. And they were savage, you know, kind of ignorant savages. Their culture devolved to the point where their language deteriorated, their legends and stories deteriorated, their knowledge of coinage and of metallurgy and everything else deteriorated. And not only do we not find any artifacts, but we don't even find any written or cultural remnants of Christianity. You know, that argument of saying, of course we don't find any of this because they denigrated into savagery. How do you find, how do you find that type of.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:19:50] That's one more racist story. Absolutely without any merit whatsoever. Look at what the American Indians, these degraded Lamanites, these dark skinned people gave to the rest of the world, you know, after the conquest, after contact had been made between the conquistadores, let's say, and the Portuguese and others with these people, look what they gave to the rest of the world. The list of domestic plants is enormously long.
John Dehlin [01:20:26] What does that mean? That means that they had to work and use their intellects.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:20:29] No, they were all domesticated by them. They're all carefully selected. I mean, domestication is evolution under the control of man. And these, over thousands of years, they domesticated these wild plants. What we eat would be unheard of before they were discovered, so called by Columbus and whatnot. What were Europeans eating? Mush mainly. I mean, tasteless mushroom, these people. I mean corn, for instance, maize, which is a giant grass, wild maize. You would never look at it twice. It's so small and miserable looking. It's called teosinte, you wouldn't even think about it. They took that and domesticated it over thousands of years. They took all of the squashes that we eat, the tomatoes, the peppers, just a whole manioc or cassava or tapioca, whatever you want to call it. There's a list that's enormously long, not even mentioning the pharmaceutical plants that they had. They were incredible people, the Spaniards, these wonderful white skinned Spaniards that everybody says are superior conquistadores and whatnot, because they're, you know, how wonderful they were. How many plants were ever domesticated by the Spaniards? 0 How many plants were ever domesticated by the Italians, who really were civilized? Zero. How many plants were ever domesticated in Europe? Zero. The Middle east domesticated them. These are the plants in the Book of Mormon, but they're basically a tiny list compared to the list that New World Indians these degraded Lamanites did.
John Dehlin [01:22:16] Maybe they got their domestication from the Middle East.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:22:20] No, they didn't. It goes back. Plants were starting to be domesticated in the New World according to radiocarbon date, at the same time that they were being domesticated in the Middle east and in China. The dates are the same. They started doing this way back then, very close to once the Ice Age was over. It didn't take them long to do this. And maize, for instance, is probably the most productive plant in the world today. It now runs our automobiles. There's nothing like it that never came out of the Middle East. These people were incredibly civilized. Even if they didn't have temples like the Maya or the Incas and their ancestors, they were hard at work on the natural world, molding it for human needs.
John Dehlin [01:23:11] Wait, who didn't have temples?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:23:13] Well, a lot of the Indians of the New World who lived more marginal areas like southern South America didn't have temples. And in the far north of North America. No.
John Dehlin [01:23:24] Okay, okay.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:23:25] The Pueblo peoples of the Southwest had them, and they had mighty apartment houses. Really, the big temple people were in Mesoamerica and in the Andes.
John Dehlin [01:23:37] Okay. And do you find their technologies other than, you know, agriculture, their language, their technologies, their civilizations, their cultures to be highly evolved for their time or devolved
Dr. Michael Coe [01:23:52] or, you know, the Andes metallurgy was highly evolved from really very, very, very early. I mean, going back to, you know, 1000 B.C. and earlier, they started to experiment with technology and casting metals and doing things like that. Never iron or steel. Never.
John Dehlin [01:24:15] What were they? What were they?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:24:16] What metals were these? Copper, gold, bronze. Bronze alloys. Very sophisticated technology which they later brought to mesoamerica after. From 7 or 800 AD on.
John Dehlin [01:24:31] Okay. So the general idea that at one point these were civilized people, but then they devolved into savages doesn't resonate with you.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:24:41] It does not resonate with professional archaeologists at all. And I'm amazed that it would resonate with the Native Americans themselves in any way, because they're being depreciated.
Guest [01:24:53] Right.
John Dehlin [01:24:54] And to be honest, that's kind of bugged me a little Bit if the narrative is that the bad darkies killed off the good whiteies and became savages. And by the way, you're a descendant of these people. Like maybe they have a, maybe they have ancestors they might be more proud of and gain confidence by instead of shame, you know, from. Does that make sense?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:25:18] Yeah, it does. And it's had political repercussions too. I mean, I don't want to really get into this, but Guatemala as you know, went through this terrible period of civil wars and outright genocide on the part of the Guatemalan military and Guatemalan government where hundreds of thousands of these dark skinned Maya were slaughtered at the behest of a white government and white army officers. And I think some of that racism has spilled over to them. There are still people in Guatemala who think that way. When I first, when I came to Yucatan early on, first in Merida, again in a restaurant, remember this old Yucatecan, completely white descended, you know, of the conquistadores, you can be sure. A little Maya shoeshine boy shining his shoes and he, he points to him and he says, do you consider this guy human? I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, you know, people say that this guy and all of his. Those other Indians built Chichen Itza. Do you really believe that? I said, why not? You know. And you know, he was saying this in Spanish, so this poor little guy was understanding what he was talking about. That's the mindset that really I object to and that's in this idea of, you know, the Lamanites as the dark skinned savages.
John Dehlin [01:26:52] Gotcha. Okay, but is it possible? Well, I'll get to what Joseph Smith might have been thinking at the time real quick. DNA. What's your understanding of the DNA? I know you're not a geneticist, but what is.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:27:05] I'm not a geneticist. My father in law was a very distinguished one, Theodosius Dobzhansky. I married the daughter of one of the great geneticists, but he died some time ago. But I would submit this question to him. I know they use a lot of the DNA stuff, but as far as I've never seen anything there that would convince me that these people have Middle Eastern DNA, let's put it that way.
John Dehlin [01:27:36] Okay, gotcha. Okay, so. And then the Book of Mormon mentions hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes if I recall correctly, battles where hundreds of thousands of people kind of fought each other again with swords and shields and whatever. If I'm recalling correctly, you are. Is that type of population possible?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:28:08] Yes, that's true. I mean, well, whether this. You'd have hundreds of thousands of sides in an army and one army. The Aztecs could field fairly good sized army, but never that size. The Maya area, which is the one in question, if we're going to talk about, you know, what happened to the Nephites, the Maya area, there was never an empire. People used to think there was an old empire, a new empire. You know, archaeologists like the great sylvanus Morley back 75 years ago, he was big on an old empire that then collapsed. And then there was a new empire up in northern Yucatan. There was never any overall political empire in the Maya area. They were quite small city states, but there was big populations. I mean there were a lot of Maya. Nobody can really estimate how many Maya there were because we don't have any census figures for us at all. But you can estimate what could have been the productivity of this kind of maize, corn, agriculture, given this kind of land, etc. And come up with some guesses. And it would have been many millions. There's no doubt about it. At the height of, of the Classic Maya, let's say at about 500 to 700 A.D. there would have been probably several million people in the Maya area. But the way they fought, there were never probably any big armies fielded, you know, permanent armies. The Aztecs had them later on, but they never amounted to that many people. And certainly not with swords and shields. You'd find evidence for that.
John Dehlin [01:30:00] Big mounds of bones and shields and helmets.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:30:02] Yeah, you'd find big mounds of bones. What you do find, there's limited evidence for this. Well, I'd like to backtrack and say it's very hard to find evidence for battles, even well known ones, except in modern times where you have so much hardware out there. But for instance, the battle of Hastings, 1066 in England, that changed the entire course of English history. The Normans defeated the Anglo Saxons there. The English, you think that that would be, that battlefield would be very easy to identify archaeologically, even if you didn't know from the records what happened in 1066. Hardly any evidence whatsoever archaeologically for the Battle of Hastings. It's very hard to pick up battlefield evidence. Nevertheless, there are limited. In the Maya area, there have been found limited evidence for mass battle or for defeat of a particular city. And one of them is a site called Aguateca in Guatemala upon the petish Patun region, where you have almost a Pompeii like situation where everybody had to leave, including the royalty and the scribes and the whole work Pick up and leave everything there that's been dug by a very good University of Arizona archaeologist, Takeshi Inomata. There is at the site of Yaxchilan along the river that divides Mexico and Guatemala, the usa, Macinta, one of the mounds there that really the result of a temple collapsing is covered with stone arrow points, not steel ones. And then Richard Hansen, who is a Mormon archaeologist, but likes to say he's an archaeologist who happens to be a Mormon who's digging this great early site of El Mirador in northernmost Guatemala, the greatest probably of all Maya sites. He's got evidence for again, such a battle. But these are stone points, you know, obsidian and things like that. No steel, no metal whatsoever.
John Dehlin [01:32:21] Okay, okay, I forgot to mention, this is just jumping back, but I forgot to mention any reformed Egyptian remnants in the languages or linguistics of. I mean, we don't even know what that is. But I mean, any, any remnants of Egyptian hieroglyphs in Mayan or.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:32:39] Well, let's say this way. No, there's no hieroglyphs have ever really shown up. There are some roller seals, clay roller seals that showed up in one of the New World Archaeology foundation sites called Chapada Corso. And it was claimed early on by Thomas Stewart Ferguson, who I might say a few things about, that there were Egyptian hieroglyphs on that, but nobody really believes that anymore. What is reformed Egyptian? I mean, you know about the Book of Abraham, which is really an extremely important Mormon text in the Mormon religion, which Smith claimed was. Smith said he translated this from an Egyptian manuscript which was sold to him. It actually was. I've forgotten what the date was, but it was something like 1835. And he immediately saw that it was Egyptian, but he claimed it was in reformed Egyptian and that he could read it. And he did. He provided this translation, which is the Book of Abraham, supposed to be Abraham's sojourn in Egypt in captivity when he worked for the pharaohs and what happened to him and his relatives and all the rest of it. And this is a well known Mormon text. It's part of the, I think, what the pearl of great price. This manuscript disappeared after a while and it showed up in fragments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I don't know how long ago, but it was, let's say within several decades ago. And they have extremely good Egyptologists there who immediately recognize it as an Egyptian Book of the Dead. A fragment of it. That's the most common Egyptian. It's a funerary text, deals only with Egyptian gods. You Know Isis, Osiris, all the rest of them. Thoth, the God of writing, etc. It has to do with the journey of the soul, the Egyptian soul, to the land of the dead and what he or she is going to inquire. It's a very common text. There are dozens and dozens of books of the dead. Smith had absolutely no knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs. He had no ability whatsoever to translate any Egyptian hieroglyphs, whether he called them reformed Egyptian or not. Now let's get to Thomas Stewart Ferguson. You mentioned that idea of one fold and one shepherd.
Tom Ferguson and Book of Mormon Geography
John Dehlin [01:35:28] Yes.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:35:30] Tom Ferguson was a lawyer from Orinda, California and a former FBI guy, worked for the FBI for quite a while. A really, really nice guy. I knew him. He's a wonderful person with a wonderful family and of course a believing iron rod Mormon. I think an old time. And he was desperate to find, to get archaeologists interested in finding evidence, archaeological evidence, digging to identify Zarahemla and to dig there and to find evidence for it. And so he was one of the founders, along with Milton Hunter and others, And I think Mr. Marriott of the New World Archaeological foundation, which is still in existence. And he and others persuaded the church to put in a huge amount of money into this project. They did the right thing from the beginning. They got some of not only, you know, Book of Mormon archaeologists and enthusiasts onto this, but they got renowned American archaeologists, Americanist archaeologists, scientific ones on it, like Aviation Kidder, Alfred Kidder, who I knew very well, who I think was the great archaeologist of his day anywhere. And this was going to be set up not as specifically as Book of Mormon archaeology, but to dig in the most likely place in the right time, according to the Book of Mormon, to find evidence for the Jaredites and the Nephites. And this was identified by Book of Mormon geographers as a location in southeastern Chiapas, specifically the coast, and then inland at a site called Chiapa de Corso. And they dug there for years and years. I visited them early on, really under orders from AV Kidder, to find out if this was a legitimate excavation. I came back singing high praises for these people who are doing this job. Really amazing guys like the late Gareth Lowe, who knew more about this pre classic formative period of Mesoamerica as anybody else I ever knew. A wonderful human being, now deceased, but a really terrific guy. And most of the archaeologists, almost all of them who have been working there are first class. It's now run by really in the hands of John Clark, who I consider one of the Great Mesoamericanists of today, they really never found plates of gold or wheels or steel swords or anything of the sort. They've got a wonderful evolution of stuff from really very ancient villages going back to, let's say, almost 1800 to 2000 BC all the way on through the whole story of pre Columbian Native Americans in that area. And they're nothing else but Native American cultures one after another. Magnificent piece of work. So constantly arriving there in early days were kind of slight screwballs out of Salt Lake and places like that, coming down with metal detectors. They tried to shoo off the sites, running around trying to find plates of gold and whatnot with metal detectors. But it was a completely legitimate operation. They published everything that they've ever found. Beautifully, wonderful reports. I rely on them very, very much. I've worked very, very closely with these guys. I'd say, okay, if they're Mormons, they're Mormons who are scientific archaeologists, not Mormon archaeologists.
John Dehlin [01:39:33] Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, I want to ask you about these archaeologists, but before we close, kind of the more detailed section, what about Book of Mormon geography? Is there any geography that you think find is credible or reasonable that could map or tie to Book of Mormon geography?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:39:51] Well, there's a huge amount of literature on this, and I relied on a good friend at Princeton who was raised as a Mormon to help me in this. And when I did that article for Dialogue, I had to go into all of that, and I've forgotten a lot of it. I do know that there's considerable disagreement between Salt Lake City Mormons and Independence, Missouri Mormons about Book of Mormon geography, because there are all kinds of stuff in both traditions. And so I really. It was so long ago that I looked at. I hate to even open my mouth on it.
John Dehlin [01:40:29] That's fine. The general idea traditionally was that the Book of Mormon, I guess we've gone back and forth, but some people kind of view kind of a limited geography where somewhere in Mesoamerica, you know, the Lamanites and Nephites existed as part of a smaller group of these other existing populations. And, you know, when they talk about Zarahemla and when they talk about the waters of Mormon, you know, it's somewhere in Mesoamerica and then there's others. But the problem with that is if Mormon and Moroni wrote plates and buried them in a hill. Cumorah.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:41:05] That's right.
John Dehlin [01:41:05] Does that mean that Moroni carried these plates all the way up to New York to bury the plates? I mean, could. Could a feasibly a Mesoamerican 300, 400 AD walk and carry metal gold plates up to Palmyra, New York, to bury them. Like, any idea of whether that.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:41:27] Let's put it this way, it's unlikely, but of course not impossible. Actually, in ancient America, I think people were moving around a lot. Really. People? People. I mean, for instance, Central Mexicans, they knew about the Maya area. They traveled there as traders and whatnot. I mean, the Aztecs relied on all kinds of products from the tropical lowlands, such as chocolate, you know, in their culture. We do know that in Illinois and Ohio, in the Hopewell culture, which is about contemporary with the Classic Maya, they went all the way to Yellowstone park to get obsidian. That's a long way.
John Dehlin [01:42:17] So they could travel a long way.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:42:18] Oh, yeah, that doesn't bother me. But the idea that there were plates of gold that even existed. There's no gold among the Classic Maya period.
John Dehlin [01:42:29] I thought there was a ton of gold among the Aztec.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:42:32] Right, but I'm talking about the Classic in the time frame of the Nephites, there's no gold.
John Dehlin [01:42:40] Oh, gold.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:42:41] Gold comes out of the Aztecs, but gold is late in Mesoamerica.
John Dehlin [01:42:45] How late?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:42:47] There's no real provable gold until about 700 A.D. and that's after. And just a little bit of it shows up.
John Dehlin [01:42:53] And that's after Moroni went to Berry.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:42:55] And it's a technology done in. A technology that came to them from the northwestern part of South America, Ecuador and Peru, where people had sailing rafts that could get up to those places and were trading, I think extensively in pre Columbian times. All up and down the. That's on the Pacific coast side. The idea that somebody could get from the Maya area carrying golden plates up to bury them. I've been to the hill, Cumorah. I know where it is. Palmyra, New York. I've stood on it. To get up there is about 99.9% unlikely to me.
John Dehlin [01:43:33] Gotcha. And there's no record of there ever being metal plates in the New World where things were written on them, or is there?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:43:42] No, none. Wait. Let's say there are a few hieroglyphs on some of the gold discs that are very, very late. They're probably about 1400 A.D. they were fished out of the sacred well at Chichen Itza. No, there are probably about three hieroglyphs on some of that. That's where they went. And some guy went diving down there with a Greek sponge diver's costume. The beginning of the 20th century brought all kinds of Stuff which is up at Harvard. And the gold is very, very late. And there are a couple of hieroglyphs. They're round, they're discs, and the stuff that's on them is completely Mesoamerican.
John Dehlin [01:44:35] Okay, not like Hebrew.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:44:37] But I'm not going to say there are no hieroglyphs on gold because there are one or two examples of that and they're kind of unreal. They're really badly done hieroglyphs. They're very late.
John Dehlin [01:44:46] But never like plates in a ring binder.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:44:48] No. Make up a book, period, nothing, period.
Conversations with Mormon Archaeologists
John Dehlin [01:44:52] Let's switch really quickly to your experience with Mormon archaeologists. And I'm curious to know if you've ever pulled these guys aside and asked, man, do you believe this stuff? And how they reconcile it. I'm curious to know if you've ever seen a believing archeologist lose a believing Mormonologist lose his faith, or if you've seen nuanced views of the Book of Mormon. And then finally, wasn't there a famous, you know, Mormon who wrote a book about ancient American archaeology who then stopped believing the church and left? So talk about all that to the extent that you've got stories,
Dr. Michael Coe [01:45:32] of course, this is a very tender subject with archaeologists who are Mormons. A very tender subject. I had many, many discussions over the years with Gareth Low, who was a really good friend. I just, I still respect him enormously, you know, one of the great people of New World archaeology. He started out when I first met him that time when Doc Kidder told me to go over and look at those excavations in Chiapas. I was working on the Pacific coast of Guatemala on really early stuff, finding stuff that was quite amazing on the earliest villages. And I went over not only because of Doc Catter telling me to be my spy in the New World Archaeology foundation, but also because I wanted to see what they've been getting because they were right next door to where I was. And so I got to know Gareth then and we remained close friends all through his life. Gareth was definitely a believing Mormon then, he really was, but he was bothered by certain things, there's no question about it. And he was seriously embarrassed by these amateur enthusiasts who come trundling down to his site with metal detectors and try to shoo them out. I mean, he wanted to do serious archaeology, but he still, he was an anti evolutionist. I don't know whether the Church takes a stand on this or not now, but being the son in law of one of the noted evolutionists of his day, I felt I had to bring this up. And he wouldn't buy that evolution, it couldn't take place. But he said, it bothers me. You know, I'm bothered by this because he was a good thinker and whatnot. Year by year by year by year, I think he lost his faith. I think at the end, I don't think he had any of it at all left at all. And, you know, he would talk, ironically, of some of those old Book of Mormon archaeologists, like M. Wells Chaikman at BYU and people like that, who really were iron rods, but he didn't take them seriously at all. And he was a total skeptic on everything. And really, I'd say a scientist at the end, I think he'd lost all his faith. I don't care what anybody says. I knew him as well as anybody, and I think he'd lost his faith. I know others who had worked for the foundation who also no longer believed in it. They accepted the church as a social, cultural thing completely, very much so. How could they do otherwise? When you're living in Utah and Provo or anywhere else, it's a complete way of life to give up, you know, when I became, let's say, a Jack Episcopalian, I didn't have to give up my way of life, you know, at all. Not one bit.
John Dehlin [01:48:39] You didn't, like, your wife didn't divorce you and your parents didn't.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:48:41] That's exactly right.
John Dehlin [01:48:42] Estranged you and everyone judged you as being evil and wicked.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:48:46] Episcopalians, Anglicans in general are very tolerant of all this kind of stuff. They say, well, you might come back someday. But no, you may be right. Who knows? They're quite open to this kind of thing. But not, of course, as we know, for Mormons. And so it became a real problem. And I know a really. Let's just mention, I won't mention their names, a couple of really truly outstanding Mormon archaeologists, that is, archaeologists who are Mormons, one of them like to talk about it at all. I don't think either of them want to talk about it to me, at any rate, as a goy, you know, as a gentile, that they want to do it. They're both extremely good archaeologists and go to meetings and talk our language and never bring this stuff up, never mention Zarahemla or any of this kind of stuff. Moroni, there's not one, not one word of it. But I think when they're back among the true believers, it's another story. And I just think it may be because they can't afford to Openly break intellectually with their own culture and their own people and their own families and their own wives. I don't know what I mean. It's an extremely touchy subject. You know, I've known devout Marxist archaeologists very well, who I have a lot of respect for and whatnot, but it's another thing they can't seem to break with it. You know, it's a given mindset. I've been a rebel, I think all my life and what I do and I just can't. I couldn't accept this kind of thing. But if you have done so and it's a cradle to grave kind of thing like Mormonism and Marxism both are, then it's a tough call. So now let's get to the one guy that you mentioned who did, was a believer all his life and openly broke. And this is Tom Ferguson. Thomas Stewart Ferguson, already talked about as this Orinda, California lawyer and ex FBI man who was one of the founders of the New World Archaeological Foundation. He brought out a book early on once the foundation had been going and digging and whatnot called One Fold and One Shepherd. And I was asked to review it. Can you imagine that? By American Antiquity, which is a kind of house journal of American archaeologists. And you know, he's such a nice guy, I wanted to be nice to it. I didn't want to hurt his feelings at all. But I had to point out the total illogic of the whole thing. And you know, it's built on a. Found totally on a foundation of sand in general and in details that just don't add up to anything. But you're dealing with a native New World culture that mainly 99.9% autoxinous, that is it rose up by itself. These people, these Mayas and these Aztecs and all these people did this stuff under their own steam. And this approach just is taking away from them a heritage which belongs to them and not to Europeans or to Hebrews or ancients out of the near east or anybody. They did it themselves. And I thought that was unfair, not unfair to Tom, but unfair to the New World people to take that position. And I pointed out the fallacies all through that. But you know, this is the reaction is very interesting because Mormons are some of the nicest people I know. And the average guy author who's written a book like that that got torn apart the way the young Michael Coe did it would have really been burned up and resentful and never speak to me again. Not Tom. We remained friends for a long, long time. Always cordial. I always had the best of relations with the people at byu. The ones who I know were true believers and the ones who weren't. And I think I've kept this up. I mean, I'm still invited to byu. Wonderful. Department of Anthropology, which includes archaeology now.
John Dehlin [01:53:23] So why would you want to talk about all this stuff and risk, you know, making hurting some feelings?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:53:29] Well, they're very frank about this and their feelings. If they've been hurt, they've been very nice in disguising them because they are really nice to me. I mean, you think after my review of Tom Ferguson's book and after what I wrote in dialogue, which is all over the Internet, still you think, keep this guy out? You know, not at all. If you'd been Marxist, I would have been sent to the Gulag, but. Or worse, to the Lubyanka prison and shot. No, the Mormon people are really nice, moral, upstanding people, really. And as a whole, as archaeologists, they're a lot nicer than a lot of the Goyan archaeologists and anthropologists. I know, a whole lot nicer. I still have very good friends among them.
John Dehlin [01:54:24] Right. What happened to Ferguson?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:54:27] Ferguson, Ferguson. I talked about the Book of Abraham, you know, and that Egyptian manuscript he finally saw, came to the conclusion that if Joseph Smith made basically made up all this kind of stuff out of whole cloth out of the top of his head, that this was the Book of Abraham, that he had the ability to translate this stuff when, you know, actually the first steps were being taken by Old World scholars like Champollion to crack the Egyptian script. You know, this is after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. If this was made up of whole cloth by Smith out of his fertile brain, then the Book of Mormon was made up too, that there's no truth in it whatsoever. And he. It was just like his skin sloughed off, his heart dropped out of his body. He just lost his faith completely. But he didn't want to give up his membership of the church because it brought him so much satisfaction. He's involved his family, he's got big family and kids and all the rest of it. And he simply felt guilty about doing this, but nevertheless, he couldn't intellectually, his brain just couldn't handle this idea that there was any truth whatsoever in either the Book of Abraham or the Book of Mormon. So that's a tragedy. There's a lot of stuff on the Internet about Tom Ferguson. He's a tragic figure. I mean, he died, I think, a very, very unhappy man.
Credible Scholars and Scientific Standards
John Dehlin [01:56:23] All right, so do you know any credible Mormon anthropologists or anthropologists who happen to be Mormon who will look you in the eye and say, yes, I believe in. Is there a Hemla? And yes, I believe in the waters of Mormon and a King Benjamin and in a Nephi and in Moroni, and I'm a credible scientist.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:56:47] I think I know one. One. And he's very, very credible.
John Dehlin [01:56:53] And then how many Mormon anthropologists do you know who don't view it that way, who don't view the Book of Mormon as a literal historical document?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:57:04] Well, I can't ask them all, but, you know, it's only. I have my suspicions here. I knew one. No one. I think he's still alive. Who actually wrote this stuff down? Why? Book of Mormon archaeology is basically a lot of hooi, really. I think took a lot of brickbats for it. You know, people like Hugh Nibley rising up to defend the faith and whatnot. It's hard to say, but I would say I know about a half dozen.
John Dehlin [01:57:42] And have you known some to lose their faith completely in the Book of Mormon?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:57:46] Yeah, I think Gareth Lowe is one of them. I mention him because I know he's dead. He, by the way, was also a wonderful guy, but also a true fundamentalist at one point, and you know what that means. But he gave. It just disintegrated on him. We have many conversations about this over the years, over the decades.
John Dehlin [01:58:13] Not fun. Okay, so there's this rumor that went around in Mormonism for a lot of years that I don't know if it was Smithsonian or National Geographic. Archaeologists used to take the Book of Mormon along with them to help them find ancient American archaeological sites. And apparently it got so annoying to the point where the Smithsonian, I believe, actually published a letter. Do you know this story at all?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:58:45] I do. I do.
John Dehlin [01:58:46] Talk about that for a second.
Dr. Michael Coe [01:58:47] I've seen that letter and their official statement about the Book of Mormon. I don't know of any National Geographic archaeologist or anybody backed by the National Geographic anywhere in the world, whoever, especially in the New World, who would have taken the Book of Mormon with him or her or Smithsonian as a guide or the Smithsonian. And I've known a lot of archaeologists out of both places. They knew about what goes on and they knew about Book of Mormon archaeology, but basically they didn't buy any part of it.
John Dehlin [01:59:26] Okay, and are you aware of, like, farms, the foundation for Ancient Research?
Dr. Michael Coe [01:59:30] Yes, I am.
John Dehlin [01:59:31] Like, you know, there's a Daniel Peterson there.
Guest [01:59:34] There are other.
John Dehlin [01:59:35] There's a John Gee, there are all
Dr. Michael Coe [01:59:36] these different that was a Book of Mormon archaeologists essentially and are like,
John Dehlin [01:59:45] you know, when 10 non Mormon archaeologists are sitting around smoking a cigar or drinking a glass of wine and Farms comes up or Book of Mormon apologists comes up, what's the general sentiment or feeling or would this never happen?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:00:07] I think it's been mentioned and the general feeling is that this is not a really serious scientific group at all, that it's a continuation of the old Book of Mormon archaeology that used to be practice at BYU in the bad old days or good old days. However you look at it by people like Christensen and Jakeman and people of that sort, it's basically true believers. I mean they've got their minds made up and all they want to hear is confirmation what they already know. It's a lot like Marxist archaeology. The Marxists go into the field especially this is true in the Soviet Union in the old days, used to be true in China and it's now changed. These people are dropping a lot of their Marxism. But you only went into the field in the Soviet Union to find out whether Marx and Engels theory about the development of societies and cultures is correct or not. Well, you knew it was correct. You just wanted to find further corroborative evidence. And never what a scientist would ask is, is this true or false period. And to pose a question, what science is, is a way of posing a question, or at least science has questions, poses them in a certain way where a thing can be validated or shown to be false. It's why science and religion don't really coordinate at all. Because how can you pose a question whether God, whether there is a God or not, that can be falsified or validated and it can never be done. And these are two different realms. So when you mix them together as in let's say old style Mormonism or Marxism, which to me is another religion, or let's say Catholicism in the days when Galileo was around, it becomes totally non scientific. It can't be. If you accept as given everything that's in the Book of Mormon, how can you say whether it's true or false, you know, as a total proposition? And it can't be done. It's a religion, it's not a scientific question. So therefore to try to come up with a hard data without asking this question, you know, can it be falsified as well as corroborated? You can't do it the way FARMS is approaching it.
John Dehlin [02:03:00] Hmm, can it be? But can it be falsified? Like you know, I know that some people Mock this notion of, you know, there's an argument that you can never prove that God doesn't exist. You can never prove.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:03:11] Yeah, that's why that's not a scientific question.
John Dehlin [02:03:13] And then people laugh and say, well, maybe there's a flying spaghetti monster, you know, living on the dark side of the moon, but we can't prove it. Like it's so ridiculous. What would the probability be?
Probability and the Book of Mormon's Origins
Dr. Michael Coe [02:03:26] That's what it comes down is probability.
John Dehlin [02:03:28] And for you, what's the probability that the Book of Morality Mormon narrative happened and is a historical document?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:03:36] It's less than 1%, I'd say it's as close to zero as you can get it. That's all probability. But it's highly improbable. Someday somebody may dig up a chariot with whales on it, but it hasn't been done yet. Or someday somebody may dig out of a classic Maya site and a firm context, a steel sword or a steel shield. It hasn't been done in a hundred years. And they've been digging, I'd say now 80 or 90 or 100 mile sites. So I'd say the probability is almost non existent. It exists. There's always a probability that I can jump over the Empire State Building, but it's pretty small.
John Dehlin [02:04:19] And so I guess we could hear all this if I were to ask you and the evidence from the Book of Mormon, that would conflict. And the details from the Book of Mormon that would conflict with the evidence we have percentage wise, A lot, A little bit. None. Some.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:04:37] I'd say 99% almost of everything that the Book of Mormon has as details is falsifiable.
John Dehlin [02:04:51] 99% is falsifiable.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:04:54] That's right. It's false. Yeah. You can say, do chariots exist in Mesoamerica before, say the Spaniards came in with wheeled vehicles and the answer is no, they do not. You can go through that and you come up with a. I'd say those are falsifiable questions, those are scientific questions.
John Dehlin [02:05:22] And what about those who would try and redefine the language in the Book of Mormon? They would say, well, when they said horse, and this is a common one,
Dr. Michael Coe [02:05:31] I've heard this comment.
Guest [02:05:32] Okay, yeah.
John Dehlin [02:05:33] When they said horse they meant taper, or when they said steel, they meant shale or some type of rock.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:05:40] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:05:41] What are your thoughts about that?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:05:43] Well, you can go through and twist all those things. The person who's done most of this work is John Sorensen. He's a wonderful guy and I respect a lot of the stuff that he's done. But I think he's barking up the wrong tree. I mean, linguistics is a science now. It's not guesswork and moving this word around and seeing if you can twist it. We know how the Maya languages work. We know their phonetics. We know the history now going back a couple of thousand years thanks to the great Decipherment. And you can't fool around with that all that much. And you always want to remember that when the Spaniards came to the New World, they'd never dealt with these people before in their lives. They're dealing with languages that they knew nothing about. The friars learned them rather quickly, and they had to come up with words they could use in their sermons that dealt with things that were in the Bible that they were trying to put over when they were Christianizing these people. So they came up with some new vocabulary. And for instance, this business of the Maya word is qi min, which means taper and Maya. And if they ever, for instance, they took that word and started to apply this to actually to cattle, to cows which they brought in with them, which never had existed before. Then they said, okay, we have to now have a word for tapir. So they use the word double word, tsimin kash ka means forest or wild jungle. So it's the cattle of the wild jungle sort of coming back. They warp the language to fit it to their own things. You have to remember where these words come from and what their history is. But in pre Spanish times, we know what those words meant and we know their history. You can't warp those.
John Dehlin [02:07:46] Okay? And when a Book of Mormon apologists finds like chiasmus in the Book of Mormon or he finds bees in the Arabian Peninsula, that sort of say, hey, wait a minute, how would Joseph have known that there were bees in the Arabian Peninsula? That maybe Laman and Lemuel could have traversed through there and then came here, or even a fertile land? Or why is there chiasmus in the Book of Mormon? How could Joseph have known that chiasmus was an important thing back in the Old World, and now it's in the Book of Mormon. What are your thoughts about those types of proofs? You know?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:08:25] Well, let's start with the bees. I used to be a beekeeper. I had six hives until up at my farm, until the bears wiped me out three years in a row. So I got interested in bees. These are domesticated. These bees are Old World bees. Actually, they're Italian bees, which are the best for honey production and the tamest, the least likely to sting the living daylights out of you. There are many species of bees and of course, a larger group of them, much, much larger group, which include New World bees. The New World bees, however, are all stingless. They keep them in log hives still today in the Maya area, you can see them back of people's houses. These are stingless bees. They don't sting. They're not Old World bees at all. They're native New World bees, especially in the tropics like the Maya area. They produce a wonderful honey, but you know, they're wild as can be. They're really hard to domesticate. You really can't do it. The bees are just completely different. But there are bees. And beekeeping shows up in one of the four Maya manuscripts, actually the Gods of the Beekeepers. They just simply happen to be there all along. And this particular manuscript is pre Spanish, pre Columbian, had nothing to do, you know, it was already there. And it has nothing to do with bees in Arabia or Jerusalem or any other place in the Middle East. Absolutely nothing to do with it. It's a native stingless bee. They can still bite you. They can get quite unpleasant, get in your hair and in your eyebrows and so forth. They're sort of like sweat bees. You all may be familiar with that which is a typical New World bee. Remind me what chiasmus is. I know Hugh Nibley's written about this.
John Dehlin [02:10:19] It's some. I can't even fully. I can Google it real quick, but it's something about a pattern. It's okay, I'll read it. From the great sage, Google crossing. A rhetorical trope in which the first line or click clause of a statement is repeated in reverse order in the second.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:10:44] Okay, okay, I got it, I got it.
John Dehlin [02:10:48] Why doesn't that prove the Book of Mormon is true?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:10:53] It's certainly something similar to it existed in the New World, but it exists in a lot of places. Actually, the most famous piece of literature from Mesoamerica, and I think the greatest piece of literature ever to come out of the New World is called the Popol Vuh. It's been wonderfully translated. It's been translated into a number of languages. There's two great English translations. One by a non LDS guy, Dennis Tedlock, who's at the University of New York, Buffalo, New York State University, Buffalo. And then by Alan Christensen, who happens to be at byu, who's a good friend of mine too. It's a wonderful translation in the original. And this is typical of Mesoamerican tropes altogether, to be a great What's a trope?
John Dehlin [02:11:54] What's a trope?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:11:56] It's a form of poetry. It's a poet to say something as poetry or metaphor. It's a trope. And let's call it metaphorical speech. The way in the Aztecs are well documented for them who aren't even in Book of Mormon Zarahemla. It's a way of oratory and of poetry and of myth declaiming myth in which you say something as a declarative sentence in the first line. In the second line, you say something with the same meaning, but you change the words slightly. And often these it's on the final word and it often rhymes with the word in the first line. You can also do this as triplets, which is really tricky. And the popol vu is written that way. The original in K' iche Maya. K' Iche is One of the 29 Maya languages still spoken in the highlands of Guatemala. You probably heard it when you were a missionary there. So this is what you find. But it's sort of scattered through the New World in general. It means nothing to me that this proves the Book of Mormon is correct. The Book of Mormon is to me, frankly, a recreation of the language of the Old Testament, as in the King James Bible, which I grew up on. And you find the same kind of thing there in the Book of Genesis, for instance. It's very common in that. I mean, this stuff is basically poetry in there, but poetry is found all around the world. And. And that's the kind of things of this nature. A metaphorical speech where you're showing how really wonderful you are by doing this. Aztecs highly valued this. I mean, you were considered to be a great thinker and whatnot. If you could speak this way. And it's all laid out.
John Dehlin [02:14:07] How you can do doesn't prove the Book of Mormon.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:14:11] It has nothing to do with the Book of Mormon.
John Dehlin [02:14:13] Okay.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:14:14] Except what it does show when is that Joseph Smith knew the Old Testament very, very well.
John Dehlin [02:14:21] Gotcha. Okay.
Guest [02:14:23] So
John Dehlin [02:14:25] one of the biggest arguments for the Book of Mormon is its mere existence. You'll find most traditional believing Mormons will say, this is an incredible, amazing book. It's got intricate economies, entire measuring systems, currency systems. It has different styles from different authors. It's just so inspirational. So intricate, so complex, so sophisticated, so advanced. So many things that are in there that Joseph Smith couldn't possibly have known that there's no way that one person, especially an uneducated, illiterate farm boy from upstate New York, there's no way that he could have generated this book. So how Dr. Koh in the world, can you explain what so many people would think is a miraculous book?
Joseph Smith as a Historical Figure
Dr. Michael Coe [02:15:25] Well, this brings me to how I feel about Joseph Smith. I think, and I said it on the PBS program on the Mormons, that I think he was one of the greatest people who's ever lived. I think every once in a while you get a guy who's illiterate or I think he wasn't totally illiterate. I think he may have been semi literate who was able to memorize something like the Old Testament. I think he memorized a lot of it, especially the book of Genesis. I think Joseph Smith was not only one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, but I think he was one of the greatest men who ever lived. He was an incredible leader. I know it's anathema to a lot of Mormons, but the biography of him, no man knows my history. I think it's the greatest biography ever written by Fawn Brody, who was drummed out of the church for writing this thing. It's an incredible thing, the respect one has for Smith. After reading that, I just had enormous. One of the most interesting, amazing people. I think that the guy, if you look at how he started and whatnot, as a very bright kid interested in old things and treasure hunting and, you know, sort of Tom Sawyer like guy, first in Vermont, then in upstate New York, that this guy had an incredible brain. I really do think so. If you really knew the Old Testament, all those things you mentioned, that Book of Mormon apologists come up with, they're all in the Old Testament, every single one of them. And all you have to do is change things around a bit with a fairly lively imagination and stick to the language of that, which was really the beautiful English of the King James Bible, the best English ever written. I think you can do it. And it takes an incredibly amazing guy to do this. The question is, did he fake the whole thing? Now, I think in the interview that I did for pbs, I said as an anthropologist, I look on him as a shaman or shaman. You look at some of these amazing people who've been studied, let's say in Africa or amongst the Inuit, the Eskimos and so forth, or anywhere in North South America. I think a lot of these people start off as kind of magicians where it's hocus pocus. They're going to fool somebody and do something to really put themselves on the map. But then they start picking up followers and they wonder now, why does this person believe this, and then you start asking yourself, well, maybe it's true what I found. And then after a while you get enough followers as he did. I mean, he was a born leader of men. They begin to believe that this really happened. I don't think he was a faker at the end at all. Like a lot of anti Mormon people. I think he truly believed that he had received this, you know, on the hill, Cumorah, you know, as divine intervention. And I just say if you were dealing with any old farmer, New England farmer, farm boy, which is what he started out with, they wouldn't know anything, Nothing. I mean, this guy had an inquiring mind. I think he was brilliant. I think he was a genius. And I ascribe it to that. I'm not denigrating it. I don't believe in it. I think originally he made the whole thing up from beginning to end, but it wasn't any old person who did it. And I think at the end he truly believed it. He was willing to sacrifice his life for it, which is the ultimate test.
John Dehlin [02:19:25] And have you thought about. There's a really good book by a man named Grant Palmer called An Insider's View of Mormon Origins where he tries to explain. He tries to explain where he thinks the Book of Mormon came from. And there's also a book called Losing a Lost Tribe by Simon Sotherton, who also tries to discuss kind of what the environment was during the day that Joseph Smith would have come up with the Book of Mormon. And you know, we know, for example, that there were several books that talked about the Native Americans. You know, a lot of people were saying, where do these people come from if there was a flood and the Tower of Babel, like, how did they get here to America? And so there would be theories about Israelites somehow arriving in America. Can you talk about that or should I talk more about it or.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:20:16] Well, this goes back to the early Spanish friars. You know, they had no idea where these people came from also. And they had to deal with it very fast without, you know, no fooling. And you know, originally they thought, well, maybe it's the. These were Israelites. That was one of the theories that came up. Finally one of them, Father Acosta, said, you know, from everything he's read about Asians and Northeast Asia and so forth, he thinks they came over there must have been some kind of a land bridge between East Asia. Of course, that's Acosta theory. And of course it finally won out and eventually became the scientific theory. In fact, scientific fact during this time that Joseph Smith was in upstate New York. Can you still hear me?
John Dehlin [02:21:14] Yep, I'm here.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:21:15] Okay. When he was, you know, in upstate New York there. Upstate New York was of course, what's called in historians the burnt over district. It was a time when all of these new religions were coming up. One of the most well known ones were the Millerites, who prophesied the end of the world on a certain date that it never happened. And they were transformed into the Seventh Day Adventists of today. But there are a lot of others. The Shakers were very active communities at this point. I think a lot of Mormon theology, I know Mormon friends won't believe it came from the Shakers. The idea of a male and a female God, a God goddess, a Mr. God and Mrs. God, which is very much part of Mormon theology and ingrained in Shaker theology. The Shakers are gone because they believed in celibacy, which is not a good way to keep a religion going. There's one working Shaker left in southern Maine. Now it's Sabbath day Lake. Whereas how many Mormons are there? 10, 15 million Mormons, which tells you something. But I just think that this was the milieu in which this happened. It was part of the culture for trying to find, you know, people wouldn't accept that the Indians, they knew, I mean, Joseph Smith must have known some of the Iroquois peoples in upstate New York, the Seneca, the Oneida, the Iroquois, the rest of them, and not accepted that they could have had anything to do with the mounds that you can see, not so much in upstate New York, but in the Middle west and whatnot. At the same time this was going on, all of these people were coming up with new religions and new theories about the American Indians and having to fit them into these new religions. There were actual scientists at work too. And our first surveys of the great mound sites of the Middle west were taking place at that time. And the conclusion that these people came to, they were U.S. government archaeologists, was absolutely correct in retrospect, that this was all the work of the ancestors of the Indians that you see there today. The Hopewell Mounds, the great Mississippian ones like Cahokia, which is one of the largest, has one of the largest pyramids in the world, et cetera, that these were Indian civilizations, Native American ones, and not from white people coming over. But a lot of whites couldn't accept that. They just could not accept the idea that Indians somehow or another were inferior and because of their dark skins and their so called primitive way. And of course they were the Enemy to a lot of people on the frontier. So you had to denigrate them. I mean, it's the way a lot of Americans feel about Muslims. You can't say anything nice about Muslims, you know, because you're fighting them. And it's, it's unfair to a lot of the Muslims who don't want to be involved in this thing the same way today then with the American Indians. They were the enemy to probably most white Americans and were treated as such.
John Dehlin [02:24:46] Okay. And so you could look at the Book of Mormon as a text and look at the environment that Joseph Smith was swimming in. And you know, and this is kind of Grant Palmer's thesis, you know, a fifth of the Book of Mormon is copied straight out of the Bible. In fact, it's copied out of a version of the Bible that we know Joseph Smith had where it even carries over some of the errors that that actual edition of the Bible.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:25:13] Yeah, I do know that carried.
John Dehlin [02:25:14] So that's like you can explain a fifth of the Book of Mormon away like all the Isaiah part and second Nephi as just direct copying from the Bible. Then you've got all these evangelical ministers preaching sermons about baptism and repentance and faith and all that stuff. And you know, Grant Palm would say that maybe a fifth of the Book of Mormon is just sermons that Joseph Smith heard in the burnt over district that he puts into the mouths of King Benjamin and Alma and Mosiah and
Dr. Michael Coe [02:25:47] all these great people and the second coming, of course.
Guest [02:25:49] Right, right, right.
John Dehlin [02:25:50] And all that kind of stuff. And then there's a good chunk, some would argue there's a good chunk of Joseph Smith's own narrative in there that he had brothers, that he had a father who was a visionary. In fact, there's even a record of Joseph Smith Sr. Having a dream very much like Lehi's dream was with the tree and the fruit and too delicious to the taste. And a lot of the stuff about a younger brother who was righteous and maybe a little more noble than some of his older brothers and you could write off a good chunk of the Book of Mormon to that. And then if you want to say that there was these concerns about the Native Americans, these racist teachings about a light and a dark skinned people and even, you know, from the Book of the view of the Hebrews and other books, even, you know, claims or allegations contemporary to Joseph Smith that maybe the origin of the Native Americans, you know, came from Israel and Jerusalem itself, you can find books that said that. Then that whole part about the race narrative and the dark and the light skin and the traveling from Jerusalem can all be attributed to those sources. Is that right?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:27:03] That sounds right. That sounds convincing to me actually. You know, you mentioned the Dream of Lehi. There are two interesting publications that came out back in the days when the Book of Mormon archaeologists were running the archaeology department in BYU about what we know of as Stela 5 from ISAPA. That's a wonderful site that the New World Archaeological foundation excavated, wrote wonderful reports on. And a very early one that's in Chiapas, not too far from where I was digging in Guatemala, full of beautiful carved stone monuments, really interesting ones. These stelae are, let's say slab stones with reliefs on them, full of iconography, gods doing all sorts of interesting stuff, stuff right out of the Popol Vu narrative actually having to do with the hero twins and their defeat of the underworld gods and etc. There's one publication with that stele on it which is a very big and intricate one. It's been, you know, artists have been trying to copy it many times because it's somewhat worn. One is a straightforward description of this stele. It dates, I would date the thing to about 100 BC, maybe late, what we call late pre classic or late formative. And it's very Maya in its content. Actually this scene that it describes shows a world tree. Not a cross but a world tree with a lot of branches. All kinds of other weird looking stuff going on underneath it. All of which I think can be explained from Mesoamerican president on the. Okay, that comes out with a plain cover with. It looks like an archaeological report and it's very good by M. Wells Jakeman, who was a Book of Mormon archaeologist. Very important one back in those days. Then there's one that's put out for the true believers which is totally different in content and in its cover. Its cover is. I've got it. It's wonderful, it's blue. And the so called Tree of Life Lehi's dream is all in. It's a gold on blue one. It's a magnificent looking publication. It's a pamphlet but it really looks good. And inside it it's completely dream of Lehi interpretation. So that is for the true believers and the other one for the gentiles like myself and whatnot. This split goes all the way back. People trying to narrow this thing down so that that became an icon and they made plaster or plastic replicas of it. Very good ones sent all around the world too. So it becomes sort of like the Russians would have an icon in the corner with a candle burning from it. I've seen it in Mormon houses that I've been in. There's the dream of Lehi. Steal a five from Aesopa. It's just a different world. And if you want to believe, that's it. But if you take a scientific point of view, you'll have to read the other publication. Absolutely. It's two different worlds.
Overall Assessment of the Book of Mormon
John Dehlin [02:30:32] So, okay, so I guess those who've made it through this podcast so far would kind of view this as a stinging denunciation or critique or evisceration of the Book of Mormon.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:30:51] You mean from my point of view
John Dehlin [02:30:53] and just the narrative of this podcast. Right.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:30:55] I mean, I would never eviscerate somebody's holy book. I mean, the Quran, you can look on the Quran. You know, you can do that kind of job on the Quran. But I don't think it's a good idea, really, because how's that not an enormous amount of people believe in this thing, and I'm not going to take their beliefs away from. Just don't make me believe it.
John Dehlin [02:31:16] Well, how is that not what we're. I mean, okay, I'm not saying should you have done this podcast, but I mean, I think the effect to those who listen, who are trying to square these things, the data and the perspective that you offer will, you know, will have that effect for some. Right.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:31:32] Well, you know what Jesus said famously when asked, you know, rabbi, should we pay taxes to Caesar? And he said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God? Gods. And to me, this means that there's two paths here. One is science and the other is religion. And they don't mix up very well in most cases, particularly not in the case of the Book of Mormon. If people feel that this makes their lives better, as it obviously does for several million people, I'm not going to take that away from them. But don't tell me that this is science, because it's not.
John Dehlin [02:32:13] Hmm. And, you know, let's say there's someone who let's. Someone who says, well, Dr. Koh, I believed, you know, the Book of Mormon isn't just some peripheral part of Mormon doctrine and theology. The church calls the Book of Mormon the keystone of its religion. Joseph Smith claimed that the Book of Mormon is the most correct book on the face of the earth. And if the Book of Mormon is a laughingstock to non LDS anthropologists, and if the historical record and the scientific record, if 99% of it is contradicted by the scientific record versus what's in the Book of Mormon. This is devastating to me and to my faith and to my religion. And, you know, do you have thoughts or feelings or perspective on that clash? I mean, you can kind of live in a partitioned world where you kind of reap the benefits of science and of intellectual inquiry and at the same time compartmentalize and still believe. But at some point, for some, it becomes untenable. But then you don't want to throw off the traditions and the heritage of your forefathers. So now I'm asking you to step out of the realm of scientists and now into the step into the place of a counselor or a father or a sage. But how would you help someone who's sort of reaching this point in their lives, facing this conflict? What would you say?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:33:59] I started out with a little bit of biography. I mean, I'm not a believing Christian. That's certainly true. But I'm not going to give up my culture. I'm not going to give up what's in the Bible necessarily, not going to give up the teachings of Jesus, because they were very good teachings. I just happen to not believe in the supernatural side of it, in the miracles, in the transubstantiation of the host. All these things that go along with Christianity, I simply can't accept them as a scientist totally. But I think in the world of morals and ethics and things of that sort, texts like the Bible, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be followed by many political fundamentalist Christians these days, I think those are really important. I mean, the Golden Rule, these are things given in these texts which have nothing to do with science. They have to do with living as a human being. I mean, I'm a father, I'm a grandfather many times over. In fact, people think I'm a Mormon because I have so many children and grandchildren. I want them brought up in the right way. But you don't necessarily have to accept supernatural explanations to do that. There's a lot of morality in these things. The Bible's full of things of this sort. I mean, the Book of Job about, you know, how do you cope with disaster and misfortune? But certainly the teachings of Christ can stand by themselves. Jefferson, one of our great founding fathers and presidents, actually constructed for himself out of the Gospels all of the things that Jesus actually said during his time on earth. And as a core of, you know, he wasn't a big believer either. I don't think he believed at all in the supernatural. But he followed, he tried to follow.
John Dehlin [02:36:09] Who didn't?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:36:11] Jefferson.
John Dehlin [02:36:11] Oh, okay, yeah, right.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:36:12] And I think other people in his generation were that way. A lot of the founding fathers, basically, at the most, they were deists who kind of lead in a general kind of nature worship. But you could be a very moral, ethical, decent person without having to go the God way and decide that there's some pie in the sky and supernatural up there. Most scientists that I know, and I think there have been polls taken of this, are either agnostics or atheists. And they live very moral, good lives. They're good people. Darwin was one of the finest people who ever lived. In spite of what these enemies against evolution say. He was a better Christian than almost all Christians I know, to his family, to his people, to his country, to his contemporaries and whatnot. I mean, he was an exemplar. And yet he didn't have any faith. He lost it. But he was a very moral, ethical person. If you can take this out of the Book of Mormon, don't give it up.
John Dehlin [02:37:19] Okay, so you're saying that you can embrace science in the historical record and either look at religion as more of a social phenomenon, as a moral, moral phenomenon, spiritual phenomenon in your life and just let go of the literality of it all and kind of become absolutely, as you wrote in dialogue, kind of a Liahona Mormon, or a metaphorical, symbolic Mormon, a cultural Mormon, but not take the doctrines and the teachings literally. That's one option.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:37:52] That's exactly the point. Right to it.
John Dehlin [02:37:55] Or you can stop believing, but still be a highly moral, ethical person.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:38:02] That's absolutely true. The majority of scientists in the world are that way, believe it or not. They're not demons, crazed mad men doing what they want to do with the world. They're family men too.
John Dehlin [02:38:16] You're not debaucherous. Are you saying you're not debaucherous?
Guest [02:38:18] No.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:38:21] You can give up all supernatural stuff and live a decent life as part of your own culture and society.
John Dehlin [02:38:28] Have you known?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:38:29] It's hard for Mormons, though, because that's a cradle to grave thing. I mean, you're in a place where the majority of the people around you are Mormons. You're part of a society, you've been an educational system. Everything you do is surrounded with the church. And I think this was a dilemma faced by Tom Ferguson. But I think the thing to do is to be philosophical about it and accept that this is a good way of life. But you don't have to accept the literal side of the Book of Mormon at all to do that.
John Dehlin [02:39:10] Some people are going to say, man, it's either true or false. And if it's false, I'm out of here. You know what I mean?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:39:15] Well, you know, there's a lot of history behind this. After all, you have to remember that LDS was once at war with the United States. You know, there's a lot of bad history here. And you know, one of the first Sherlock Holmes books, A Study in Scarlet, is all about the avenging angels and the Danites chastising and tearing after Mormon apostates. It's an amazing book. I mean, incredible story. But, but there's a long history about this anti Mormonism, anti Mormon feelings and vice versa. There's a terrible history of this. So I think a lot of people will say, man, I'm out of here too. But for a lot of people, it's impossible. That's their lives. They're living there. I mean, there they are.
John Dehlin [02:40:04] What if people were to just discount you and your perspective? This Dr. Koh is just clearly an anti Mormon with an actual to grind. He's just an atheistic, secular, bitter, angry man who must have some, must have been wronged by someone at some point and is just coming at us as much as he can. What would you say to that?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:40:25] Well, okay, it's not true.
John Dehlin [02:40:29] Where's your evidence? Where's the data?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:40:31] Yeah, well, I'm not going to throw my curriculum vitae at you. I have managed to raise a family, children and wonderful grandchildren, to be surrounded with a circle of friends, both scholars and non scholars and all kinds of people, many of whom are fellow fly fishermen. And I have had some of the best students in the world while I've been at Yale who are still part of my family in many respects. And they now have their students who I look on as my grandchildren. And even they are starting to get senior and to have their students too. So I don't think I've done wrong.
John Dehlin [02:41:19] Right, gotcha. And just really quickly, in this world of new media, Facebook and Twitter and such, you know, different things are kind of possible. I went ahead on Facebook and just kind of posted, hey, I'm finishing up an interview with Dr. You know, the Al anthropologist, Dr. Koh, and you know, a bunch of people are having this big long conversation before this interview is even released. And a close family member of mine, this is what he wrote. He wrote, if Dr. Koh thinks there's no evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus, then I'm not sure why I should care what he says about the Book of Mormon. And so he's basically. And really what my question there is, what about people who say, oh, well, the Book of Mormon, okay, problem with that. But we still got the Bible to cling to. Like, you know, is the Bible, if someone's going to dig into the Bible, are they going to find similar archaeological problems or not quite as severe or,
Dr. Michael Coe [02:42:20] well, let's say which part of the Bible you're dealing with. There's plenty of archaeological evidence for quite a lot of the stuff in the Bible, but there's no. For instance, take the Exodus, which is so important to believing Jews as well as Christians. There's no archaeological evidence whatsoever that the Exodus ever took place. There is not one shred of evidence for this. So this whole sections of the Bible that are there for a purpose, but it's not. It's to convince people that there was a reality when there was no reality there. And the Exodus is a fiction. It's what you would expect from a people who are lording it over other people of a different ethnic group or a different tribe that we came in and we conquered you people, you know, we took this land over. You know, that's what it's all about. And you find this type of myth for the Aztecs, very similar myth like that, that they came in and conquered all these people and made things new, you know, came out of the desert and did these wonderful things. It's a typical thing that you find in anthropology and archaeology around the world. So there's a lot of the Bible that one cannot take to get back to the crucible. There isn't any archaeological evidence or even valid historical evidence from the Romans, let's say that Christ was ever crucified. We know they crucified plenty of people, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people. Is that the way did that actually happen? Probably did. I mean, I'm not denying that, but there isn't any, you know, scientific evidence for it. I think the Romans later on pretty much decided that Jesus lived, that there was such a person because they had to deal with his followers. But as far as the miracles go and, you know, the ascension to heaven, there isn't any evidence for that. That's in the realm of religion, of God. Keep it there. There's no archaeological, scientific evidence for this at all. That's all I'm trying to say.
John Dehlin [02:44:38] Gotcha. Okay, okay. Well, this is a. I mean, this is a tough thing for believing Mormons to hear, but I think it's important if we're going to live in a world of reality if we're going to benefit from all that science has provided us, I don't think we as Mormons can just conveniently dismiss what science and history and linguistics and anthropology and archaeology and genetics all tell us about the Book of Mormon. So I really appreciate you being willing to share with us your life's work and perspective, even though it's a really tough pill to swallow.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:45:24] It is. I mean, I don't have any feelings of vengeance or anything of that sort. Not at all. I'm dispassionate about it. As I say, I have a lot of very good friends who happen to be Mormons, so I'm certainly not out to get them by any means. I respect them, absolutely. And I respect what's been done by the church in many places. But as far as scientific truth of it, no, I can't swallow it.
John Dehlin [02:45:56] Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, let's end in the way Mormon stories always ends. Well, first of all, thanking you so much. You're brilliant, and it seems like you've led a really good, meaningful, exemplary life in so many ways. And I'm inspired. Makes me wish I could start my life over a little bit in some ways, but, you know, you may not. You know, I usually ask the people that I listen to to kind of bear their testimony about the. The truths of Mormonism that they still embrace. And I'm not going to ask you to do that, but what I would ask you to do is to bear your testimony just about the things that are true for you in your life. And when a Mormon says bear their testimony, it just means give us a few minutes of what's true and what's meaningful and what's lovely that you've learned from your experiences in life. It's a tall order. But just tell us a little bit about your life's philosophy and what you find is beautiful and true as a way to maybe close this interview, if you don't mind.
Closing Reflections and Farewell
Dr. Michael Coe [02:47:02] Well, I think the first thing is, of course, I'm involved with my own family, in my own society, in my own country, in my own world. And I think science, science can help understand all of this. I really can. I think there's a scientific way to knowing all these things that is not necessarily the way of religion, although religion, you know, looks for things that perhaps science doesn't. But it's been a meaningful life for me. I've had to me to contemplate, to read about what's going on in astronomy, cosmology, about the Beginnings of the world, about how the earth and the moon were formed and the galaxies and all the rest of it. To me, this gives me a feeling of immense awe at everything. Not that I believe that there's a supernatural hand running everything. I get an immense kick out of reading about the evolution of people and of man. And I also, at the other side, that I think I have been influenced by, by Christ's teachings. I mean, not that I'm a Christlike person in any way, but that his way of living and dealing with other people was the right one. Absolutely. I mean, and tolerance is certainly one thing that I think I've learned from that which is not found in a lot of religions by a long shot. Tremendous amounts of intolerance and hatred are bred by religions. You only have to look at the world today, what's going on. People like Yugoslavia, ex Yugoslavia, for instance. All the identical people, three different groups, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats. They're all identical, speak the same language. Absolutely. In culture, the same people. And yet they hate each other. They're willing to kill each other. And why? Because they all differ in religion. Religion can lead to terrible intolerance as well as tolerance. The history of religion, of Christianity has been a very bad one, actually, in Europe and elsewhere. But if you took what was the germ of the thing, what Christ actually said and stood for, that's a different story. And you can do that without being a believer that there is a God and do it very well, as many people have, as Darwin had. I think if I were asked who was the greatest man who ever lived, other than Jesus, I would say Darwin. And I've had other scientists, very distinguished ones in this case, tell me the same thing. He was a wonderful person. And I think I'm. To be loyal to one's family and good to them, and then to be loyal to one's society and country. Those are all important things. And I don't think you need give them up just because you don't have a sacred text to hark back to all the time. I think that's all part of my life. Well, that's my philosophy for what it is, and that's the way I am, and I'm too old to change it.
John Dehlin [02:50:24] Well, Dr. Michael Koh, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. Is there any book or website or anything I can help you promote to? Thank you for what you've shared with us today. Anything you want to leave us with something to go to?
Dr. Michael Coe [02:50:38] Well, I actually wrote an autobiography a memoir.
Guest [02:50:43] Oh,
Dr. Michael Coe [02:50:45] yeah. And it's called Final Report. Now, that sounds grim. Okay. That's the last thing this guy's going to say. And then he's off. It's called Final Report, published by Thames and Hudson, New York. And it's called Final Report because archaeologists, after they finish, you know, tearing a site apart, doing all this digging and whatnot, have to write a final report. And this is a final report on what I know as an archaeologist and as a human being. Oh, wow.
John Dehlin [02:51:15] Okay. We'll try to remember to put a link up to that when we put a self act. All Right. All right. Dr. Koh, thank you so much. I can't thank you enough.
Dr. Michael Coe [02:51:24] Thank you, John, for inviting me.
John Dehlin [02:51:26] All right, take care.
Thumbnail Credits: Main image of Michael Coe from Mormon Stories Studio
One Response
Professor Coe mentioned Thomas Stuart Ferguson. I think his whole life story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stuart_Ferguson would be a really insightful episode, if researched enough.