Transcript of Mormon Stories 2011 interview with Michael Coe
This is a transcript of the interview of Dr. Michael Coe conducted by John Dehlin for Mormon Stories Podcast in August 2011.
Part 1
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John: Hello, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I’m your host, John Dehlin. Today I’m very, very excited to have with us a very special guest, his name is Dr. Michael Coe. The subject for today is sort of an outsider’s view of Book of Mormon archeology, very fascinating.
Let me give a quick introduction of Dr. Coe. He’s 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 America where some Mormon scholars say the events of The Book of Mormon took place.
In this interview, Coe discusses the challenges facing Mormon archeologists attempting to prove the historical truth of their central scripture and his own views of Joseph Smith. I’m now reading from the biography, from a PBS documentary, in which Dr. Coe is featured. But, with that, I guess I’ll just say, Dr. Coe, thank you so much for joining us on Mormon Stories today.
Dr. Coe: I’m happy to be here.
John: 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”, and I found that to be fascinating. I did a little more investigation of you and found out that you published an article on The Book of Mormon and archeology, as early as 1973, I believe you said. It’s that right?
Dr. Coe: That’s correct.
John: This is interesting, because The Book of Mormon is in the year 2011 coming under a lot of scrutiny. It’s been under a lot of scrutiny for some time, but that scrutiny hasn’t really penetrated the traditional Mormon consciousness until, let’s just say, the past five years, as DNA evidence and other things have really started Mormons thinking more clearly about what The Book of Mormon claims to be: what type of record and evidence it supports, versus the evidence that science continually affords us. I thought it’d be fascinating to bring you on and talk all about your life, and how it intersects with Mormonism, and what you know about The Book of Mormon and Mayan archeology. How does that sound?
Dr. Coe: That sounds good.
John: I should add that I served an LDS Mission in Guatemala. I’ve spent a little bit of time-
Dr. Coe: That’s excellent.
John: Yes. I’ve spent a little bit of time in the area in which you’re a specialist.
Let’s start in typical Mormon stories fashion, Dr. Coe. Please tell us a bit about your early years, your upbringing, if religion and specifically reconciliation of religion with intellectual issues, was 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 and The Book of Mormon.
Dr. Coe: Well, I was born in 1929 to a very devout Episcopalian or rather Anglican family. My parents were strong church goers; my father had been to a church school, a boarding school in New England called St. Paul’s.
I went to Sunday school when I was a little kid, raised with the Bible, with Christianity right from the very beginning. The head of the school was a Rector, a Reverend Episcopalian Minister. That’s not true now, but it was back then, a whole series of them. You had very serious study of Christianity there. Not only did go to chapel every day but you were there twice on Sundays, three hours on Good Friday, minimum.
John: Holy Moly.
Dr. Coe: 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. 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 is a lot of-
John: The whole Bible?
Dr. Coe: The entire thing.
John: Oh my goodness.
Dr. Coe: Beginning to end. Of course, with emphasis on The New Testament. 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: Were you a believer? Did you believe the stories?
Dr. Coe: Of course, absolutely. I’ll say one thing, the Episcopalian Church and its Anglican background, they’ve got some of the best music in the world. It was a very satisfying aesthetic experience as well as a religious one.
In the Sacred Studies, in my last year there, my teacher in that particular class, who was a Minister, tried to give us the reasons for the existence of God. 10 of them that-
John: 10 reasons.
Dr. Coe: St. Thomas Aquinas came up with. Why, how can you prove the existence of God? Suddenly it hit me, one of the reasons that was given by St. Thomas Aquinas was that this world exists, therefore it had to have a beginning and therefore a creator. I stuck my hand up in class.
Suddenly it hit me. I said, “What if the world is eternal? That’s if it’s eternal in the past and eternal in the future.” And the guy was stumped. That is a stupid, silly child’s question, but one that I thought was important. Maybe the world is eternal, There’s no beginning, and therefore probably no end. And he couldn’t answer it. 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. I discovered an amazing book by a wonderful English anthropologist named Frazer, called The Golden Bough, which is a popular introduction to anthropology and all about it. And then everything slipped away from me, completely.
John: Like what?
Dr. Coe: I lost all my belief in religion, although I still kept a real interest in it.
John: What about the book made you lose your belief in religion?
Dr. Coe: Frazer went through — the guy had an encyclopedic knowledge. He’s one of the founders of Anthropology in the 19th century. He 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. He knew all about Africa, all about different places.
It seems that he put it all on perspective that religion is a man-made construct to answer certain important questions, not something that comes down from on high. From then on, I suppose it got me started on trying to find out scientifically what religion really means to people. Why is there religion?
Of course there are many, many answers, because religion is many, many things to many people. But anyway, I started to become a skeptic. I’m still a skeptic now, absolutely. 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, “If you want to read something interesting” — we had an Encyclopedia Britannica there, on the ranch — “go look up Mormonism and you will find it fascinating.” [laughs] And there was a wonderful article on Mormonism in one early edition of this Encyclopedia Britannica. I really think that my interest in Mormonism started back then and the amazing phenomenon and the history of religions and then the history of America.
Overall, 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. Walking back at night to the place where I lived with one of the students there — we got started to talk about Mormonism for some strange reason, turned out he was A. Romney. [laughs]
John: No.
Dr. Coe: A. Kimball Romney, descendent of Presidents of the church and cousins of all the famous Romneys. A direct descendent of George Romney, the portrait painter, the English portrait painter.
John: Wow.
Dr. Coe: And we started to talk about this, and 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, let’s say, a true believer. 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. It’s just all these fascinating things, and I loved to talk to him about this. He’s an extremely distinguished anthropologist in this field now. Worked for the Smithsonian for years. Anyway, that also sparked my interest.
Even before that as an undergraduate once I got into Anthropology, I had taken a great course on the Anthropology of Religions by one of my Professors, Evon Vogt, who was born and raised in Mormon country in the Southwest. His family were not Mormons, but he had deep interest in Mormonism. He had a guest lecturer named, I think, Thomas O’Dea, who wrote a standard book on the Mormon religion — a Catholic anthropologist writing this. He gave a lecture on Mormonism which just held me spell bound. Such as for instance the whole concept 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 it except when I was asked to write this article for Dialogue Magazine back in 1973, Journal of Mormon Thought.
I did a lot of research at that point to write that article and found out things that I never knew about the background of Smith and Book of Mormon archeology and all the rest of it. Then of course later on, I really got to know a whole lot of Mormon archeologists, both in the field and at BYU and elsewhere. So yes, I’ve always been connected with this.
John: Okay. Just really quickly: I read your bio, but tell us how you’re trained in ways that relate to how you might know a thing or two about the scientific record versus what The Book of Mormon might be claiming?
Dr. Coe: Well, of course, anthropology has various subfields in it. One of which is archeology, the study of the past. That’s what I was from the beginning, an archeologist.
I had had the good luck in my sophomore year in Harvard to visit the Maya area just as a tourist. I went through 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. I discovered that to really get into this seriously you… there wasn’t any major in my archeology when I got back. I was in English literature until then. I couldn’t change to archeology. 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 archeology, and in particular the Maya. That of course leads directly into Book of Mormon archeology. It’s the same area and the same time period involved, supposedly.
I took three years off during the war to do other things during the Korean War which I can’t tell too much about. Then I got back to Harvard as a serious graduate student and made what we call Mesoamerican archeology, that’s Mexico and Central America, the [unintelligible]. We call that whole area Mesoamerica and I will be using that term later on.
It’s basically the area of Mexico and Central America: countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, et cetera that had high civilization at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Northern Mexico was not part of it, but the rest of it is, in Southern Mexico. It’s Mesoamerica that claimed me.
John: Gotcha. Tell me if I get this right. You’re an anthropologist broadly, an archeologist specifically, and you focus on Mesoamerica?
Dr. Coe: Right on. That’s it.
John: Okay. And you were a Professor at Yale for?
Dr. Coe: I taught at the University of Tennessee for two years, frantically writing my PhD thesis which I got accepted by Harvard. Eventually was invited up to Yale and I spent about 35 years here at Yale.
John: Okay. All right.
Dr. Coe: I’m now retired. I was retired at 1995 but I still write books, still write about the Maya. I have other interests too, that I’ve written about, but mainly Mesoamerica.
John: Well, good. Let’s jump right in to what your understanding is of what The Book of Mormon claims from an archeological, geographical, historical perspective.
Dr. Coe: Well, The Book of Mormon of course, like the Old Testament, has a migration or a series of migration legends in it. It involved people crossing whole oceans — not just crossing the Red Sea, but they were 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 the land Zarahemla, some ways down towards Central America. This is what it’s about.
Now, there were actually two big migrations in The Book of Mormon. The first of which were the Jaredites and these people came across but they didn’t really survive terribly long.
The Great Migration was the Nephites, who were highly civilized people. They had the compass to navigate by, they had iron, they had cattle, they had horses, they had wheat. All the things they had at that point in the Middle East of course. 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, where people built these huge temples and so forth. Then of course as you know if you follow The Book of Mormon, there was a kind of a radical group that sprang up: discontents, malcontents called the Lamanites. The Lamanites eventually won out and destroyed the Nephite civilizations and killed all the Nephites, and basically took over.
According to Book of Mormon archeologists, according to the faithful, the Lamanites are still there, they are the American Indians. And Smith or somebody said that if they play their cards right, 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. Basically that’s the whole migration thing, and that’s the whole business about Book of Mormon archeology. To find Zarahemla, to find the plates of gold that were inscribed at the last trump so to speak, that were shown miraculously to Joseph Smith, that he supposedly translated as The Book of Mormon.
That’s the background of Book of Mormon archeology. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time, 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 in this.
John: We’ll talk a bit about the specifics of the discrepancies and then we’ll talk about your experiences with the archeologists and what they were trying to do. Does that make sense?
Dr. Coe: Yes, that’s fine.
John: Let’s go into a little more detail about what The Book of Mormon would lead us to expect to find archeologically, geographically, and anthropologically. If The Book of Mormon historical record were accurate, what would we have expected to find?
Let me give a little bit of a disclaimer. I think Hugh Nibley at some point — I’m sure you’re familiar with Hugh Nibley.
Dr. Coe: I never met him but I certainly know the name Hugh Nibley, all right.
John: Right, 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, lots of things can be destroyed and eroded. Bones, books, records, weapons, who knows what can be rusted and can deteriorate over time, especially when you are talking about 1,000, 2,000 years, maybe even 2,400 years.
Let’s just assume at the beginning that we are going to account for reasonably plausible apologetic responses. Given that, what would we expect from The Book of Mormon text to find if the Book of Mormon text were a historical document?
Dr. Coe: Well, Hugh Nibley is wrong about the idea that all this stuff has disappeared forever. Take iron for instance, nobody ever used iron in the New World per se.
John: Does the Book of Mormon claim iron or does it claim steel? I know it claims steel.
Dr. Coe: Okay, call it steel, but iron is a principle component of steel.
John: I think there are steel swords mentioned in The Book of Mormon, or shields or helmets or whatever.
Dr. Coe: That’s correct. You would expect with all this mayhem taking place, with the Nephites fighting the Lamanites, you’d expect to find that stuff. Archeology now relies on a host of physical and chemical methods of detection that — we didn’t even know a lot about this stuff say 50 years ago when I got into archeology, but they are available now.
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’ll still find them. You’d find the chemical remains. Those have never been found, ever.
Take wheat now. Mormon archeologists may claim, well the wheat is going to disappear, it’s organic and so forth. Well, if wheat were grown, it would have to pollinate like all grasses: it would have wind-blown pollen.
Hundreds of tests have been made in lakes and other places in Mesoamerica, coring going down through the sediment, 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. Maize, by the way, isn’t really mentioned in The Book of Mormon.
John: Going back to metal for a second, I seem to recall the Book of Mormons mentions brass, iron, copper, gold, silver coins and steel swords. Does any of that — ?
Dr. Coe: Okay, let’s go back on that, and let’s do the coins. Nobody has ever found Pre-Colombian coinage, ever. Anywhere in the New World, Mesoamerica, Peru or Wisconsin, anyplace. There’s never been found in pre-Spanish time’s coinage. Coinage was brought by the Spaniards first to the New World. There is one that you can discount right away as proof for the correctness.
John: You’d think those things could survive in the dirt hundreds —
Dr. Coe: They certainly would. The whole idea behind coinage is that it’s common. That commerce is conducted with it. You certainly would have found it. The only real “coinage” that they ever had in Mesoamerica was cacoa, chocolate beans which did serve as small change and had value, the dried chocolate beans. If there were coins, they’d be chocolate beans. Why aren’t chocolate beans mentioned in The Book of Mormon?
John: I’ve never thought about that — what isn’t mentioned in The Book of Mormon like corn and chocolate…
Dr. Coe: Now, copper alloys like brass. Copper in any form doesn’t show up in Mesoamerica — although it is very ancient in its use in the Andes and the Peruvian area. Copper doesn’t show up in Mesoamerica until at the earliest, 800 AD period. The same way in Mesoamerica, gold doesn’t show up in any way until 7 or 800 AD, 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: And The Book of Mormon record ends somewhere when? Like 3 or 400 AD?
Dr. Coe: Yes. The whole idea of Book of Mormons chronology is — I think this has all been worked out by Book of Mormon archaeologists — that the Jaredites are the first and they go back something like 4 or 500 BC, that would put them scientifically that they existed as Olmecs. [Dr. Coe is confusing the Jaredites and Nephites.] Now that’s one of my specialties, is the Olmecs’ civilization of Mexico. I excavated a very, very big and the oldest Olmec site. I can assure you that everything we found there is Native American, everything.
John: Meaning what?
Dr. Coe: Meaning it’s got a tradition of these people are eating maize, they are growing maize, they are drinking chocolate. 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, a volcanic rock, curve them as colossal heads. They are amazing in their own way. There are many questions still about the Olmec to be answered, but we know that they are very ancient, they go back to — The Olmecs were there from probably from about 15, 1,400 BC until about 400 BC. Let’s say, they’re pre-Lamanite. And it’s already an advanced civilization.
You can check with one famous Mormon archeologist 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, with Jaredites bringing the civilization over from the Middle East. There is nothing in the slightest bit Middle East about the Olmec, not at all. So, you’ve got crops mentioned in the Book of Mormon that never existed in Pre-Columbian America —
John: And that’s barley and wheat and-
Dr. Coe: Exactly. Never has there been any — all of these things would have produced pollen if they’d been grown by anybody. A lot of this stuff is windblown, it would fall into ponds and lakes and get enclosed in sediment. Tremendous amounts of pollen work has been done in this area, in Mesoamerica. It’s very interesting because it shows climate differences, the arrival of maize, corn cultivation and things like that.
John: You are finding ancient pollen? You’re just not finding ancient barley or wheat pollen?
Dr. Coe: This kind of work for 50, 75 years drilling down into lake beds. Yes, we find ancient pollen and there’s none of this stuff that’s in The Book of Mormon. It does not exist, period.
John: Okay, what about things like silk, chariots, swords?
Dr. Coe: Okay, silk: nothing. Now silk of course is highly organic, but there was never any production of silk in the New World prior — well, probably until the colonial Spaniards brought it across eventually. Silk was invented in Asia, in the Far East, not in the Near East. There’s no silk whatsoever, no idea of silk cultivation, no Conquistador mentioned silk worms eating Mulberry leaves or anything like that which you need for the production of silk. Silk wasn’t there. What else do we have now besides that?
John: Seven day calendar?
Dr. Coe: A 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 260 day calendar that saw the permutation of 13 numbers with 20 day names, and because 13 and 20 have no common denominator, they produce a 260 day calendar. Every 13 days the same number would 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. A seven day week would be totally unknown.
None of the names were associated with seven days [either]. Those are all planets, the sun and the moon and so forth.
John: Okay, no evidence of that. What about war stuff? Like chariots and helmets and swords and shields and stuff like that?
Dr. Coe: Well, they had helmets all right, but they weren’t made out of brass, that’s for sure. They used them in the ball game and probably something that resembled jousting, where they fought each other with special stones that they held in their hands and practiced smashing each others’ heads. This game is still being played in West Mexico, so that is highly dangerous. These guys were like gladiators. They probably wore padded wooden helmets, probably with leather over them for this. We have in Wahaca and even in the Mayan areas, we have scenes that show this. Chariots, they never had chariots, that is for sure.
John: What about wheels?
Dr. Coe: Well, they had the wheel but they hardly ever used it. There are wheeled toys known in classic times — that is probably from about 4 or 500 AD on — in Veracruz, like 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. Stuff was carried on people’s backs with a tumpline, [a strap] that went around the forehead and connected to these big packs, and it was highly efficient.
When the Spaniards got there, all the battles were fought on foot by native troops against the Spaniards. There were no chariots there whatsoever, and there have 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. [But we have] nothing after 100 years of archeology, zero.
John: Okay, let’s do animals. The Book of Mormon mentions horses, cattle, oxen, donkeys, goats, sheep, swine and elephants. And “cureloms and cumoms.”
Dr. Coe: Let’s get the horses out of the way first. 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: So you mean tens of thousands or-
Dr. Coe: Tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years ago. The horse crossed over into the Old World across the Bering Straits, during a period when the water level dropped and revealed dry land as a land bridge into Asia.
This is something Book of Mormon archeologists 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 Worlds. So when the first American Indian ancestors arrived, certainly by 15000 years ago, probably as long as 20000 years ago, there were plenty of horses in the New World.
But very shortly in the space of let’s say 5 or 10,000 years, they had wiped them all out, every single one. 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 disappeared from the New World by 7,000 BC. There’s no evidence for horses whatsoever in any archeological site [from then] until the Spaniards arrived with horses. Of course, their horses became feral, a lot of them ran out onto the Great Plains and the Great Plains Indians got them and became the greatest cavalrymen who ever lived. We think of Indians and horses together, but that’s late.
John: So it would have made sense for Joseph Smith to associate horses with Indians because —
Dr. Coe: Yes, right. He sees the Comanche and the Sioux and Cheyenne and people like that, unbelievable ferocious horseman. I mean like the horse and animal were one thing. They were the greatest horsemen who ever lived; that probably would have influenced him a lot, he had to have horses [in his book]. But of course you’ve got horses in the Old World too, in the Bible, in the Holy Land.
John: And he might have even associated the crops that we talked about and coins with Indians, because maybe the Spaniards would have brought them over?
Dr. Coe: It took a long time. Coinage probably wouldn’t have been among the Indians for a long time actually. But they eventually got it, particularly down in the South West of the Pueblos, after the Spaniards took them over. The Spaniards were eventually kicked out down there, 1691 I think it was. But they had already introduced the horse and wheat, certainly for the Pueblos. The Pueblos were growing wheat eventually, but only introduced by the Spaniards there. The horses, there’s no question about the horse, that’s late, that comes in with the Spaniards.
John: Okay. What about the others?
Dr. Coe: Remind me what are some of the —
John: Cattle, oxen, donkeys, goats.
Dr. Coe: Okay, cattle and oxen are the same thing, they are all genus Bos Taurus, the Latin name. Definitely Old World; there is no evidence whatsoever for any kind of cattle of any sort in the New World, prior to the time of the Spaniards. The Spaniards brought those in.
Donkeys, the same thing again. No wild asses or donkeys have ever been found in the New World; they evolved in the Old World and came in with the Spaniards. If they had existed before, they were reintroduced by the Spaniards. Absolutely no bones of these creatures ever showed up.
Pig? Zero, not one pig bone has ever shown up in pre-Columbian excavations. I can tell you that huge amounts of excavations, all through the New World have been made over the last 100 years.
John: And they do find animals. Do they find ancient animals?
Dr. Coe: Lots of animals.
John: Okay. What do they find?
Dr. Coe: You find wild animals, deer for instance. Dog. Dogs were in the New World and were eaten by almost all of the American Indian groups. I’ve dug up Olmec kitchen mittens. The old Olmec garbage then in Mexico just full of dog bones and what not.
John: So animal bones can survive 2000, 3000 years.
Dr. Coe: 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 a New World duck, definitely show up. And then many wild animals, deer; in South America, bones of the camel.
John: Tapirs? How about tapirs?
Dr. Coe: Tapirs? Yes. Tapirs were formidable animals, and they generally used tapirs for their hide. 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.
There’s no question that none of those things mentioned by Smith in The Book of Mormon are in pre-Columbian or pre-Spanish archeological sites from 10,000 BC on, there’s absolutely nothing.
John: Let’s do elephants real quick.
Dr. Coe: Elephants? There’s nothing, absolutely zero.
John: You’re not giving us much to go in here, Dr. Coe.
Dr. Coe: I’m sorry. But this is zero. Back in Smith’s day, let’s say 1835 or the 20’s or 30’s, these things just weren’t known. Nobody had ever dug in archeological sites, except looted for gold, or something like that. Nobody knew any of this stuff. We now have enormous amounts of information now about all of it. Just vast, vast quantities. 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: Yes. That’s an interesting point. (And for my listeners, a lot of this information I’m getting for my questions comes from a website called mormonthink.com. It’s an excellent website which lists a lot of this 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. Coe: Well, that 600 to 900 AD would be late Classic Maya. There’s a lot of painted pottery. We know now it not only from excavations, but principally in museums and private collections. We’ve got a record of over 6,000 Mayan vases. There’s a website devoted to them, a wonderful website. My friend the photographer and archeologist, Justin Kerr, has rolled these things out photographically, available to everybody.
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. He wrote a book called Elephants and Ethnologists, in which he claimed that some of the monuments, the stone stele — the standing dated stone monuments 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 riding the elephants Indian style on top, sitting on the back of its ears.
Well, we now know that those things are not elephants. They’re rather baroque macaws, which is a very large parrot, with a huge beak. And, in fact, the hieroglyphs that go with it, that we can now read, tell us that those are in fact, macaws up there. They’re not elephants.
John: But they kind of look like them, right?
Dr. Coe: 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 10000 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. And —
John: Do we have digs from before the Ice Age?
Dr. Coe: For humans? No. When you get back beyond the Ice Age, you’re back beyond the Pleistocene, you’re in the tertiary period of the Pliocene, and there were no humans in the New World at that point. They arrived at the end of the Pleistocene, or the Ice Age, from Asia, from Northeastern Asia.
All of us who are scientific archeologists 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. 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 shortly after their arrival, when they saw all these megafauna, these huge animals roaming the landscape, including elephants, they wiped them out. It was overkill. People claim there are environmental reasons for this; climate change and what not. That probably added into it, but the main reason, most of us think, was humans slaughtered them.
Then you don’t have any elephants until God knows when. Who brought the first elephant over after the Spanish Conquest? Somebody brought it across. Probably P. T. Barnum.
John: All right. Let’s turn a little bit now to language and culture. What language do we think that people in Jerusalem — Laman, or Lemuel, or Nephi, or Lehi — what language do we think they would have spoken in 600 BC coming out of Jerusalem?
Dr. Coe: Well, they would have spoken a Semitic language. They would have spoken — the literate among them probably knew Babylonian, old Babylonian. Some of them probably would have 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 the everyday language that people spoke at that point. But all these people, they would have spoken Semitic languages, except possibly some people who knew Old Persian, which is an Indo-European language.
John: And what about people who would have been descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and Abraham, and all that? Jews.
Dr. Coe: What language would they have spoken? They would have spoken one of the other Semitic languages.
John: Hebrew?
Dr. Coe: Hebrew was becoming a literate language rather than a spoken language at that point. The literate among them would have certainly spoken Hebrew as a scholarly and sacred language. But the everyday language was Aramaic.
You want to know if there’s any evidence for these languages in the New World.
John: What would a linguist tell you is realistic? Because languages can die all the time. And they can get subsumed and combined.
I’m going to go back for our listeners and just restate 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 whoever wrote the title page of The Book of Mormon clearly tied Native Americans to the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith himself would walk around and see a pile of bones and say, “That was the famous Nephite warrior Zelph.” He would see a city and say, “This was the ancient city of blah, blah, blah.” It’s pretty clear that Joseph Smith tied Native Americans to The Book of Mormon.
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. 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. You’ll also have to assume that pretty much all the church leaders from then to now, who would travel to Latin America and call native Americans and the descendants of native Americans, they would call them Lamanites, and they still do. In Guatemala, the Guatemalan members of the church there would call themselves Lamanites. And they would do that because Spencer W. Kimball, one of our former prophets, and others would go down there and call them Lamanites too.
There’s this 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.
Dr. Coe: Well, let’s talk about the evidence for language in let’s say the Maya area. When Joseph Smith read the great two volume work that came out by John Lloyd Stephens with his artist Fredrick Catherwood, [Incidents of Travel in Yucatan] —
John: How do we know Joseph would have read this book?
Dr. Coe: 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. 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 were Maya — therefore classic Maya because the civilization, pretty much classic civilization disintegrated by 900AD — You would have to say, “What language should they speak with these people?” They would be one of those enclaves that you’re talking about and these highly civilized people.
Every time you look at the illustrations of 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. 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 and say, “Well, we can’t really read the hieroglyphs except for the dates and the calendrical stuff and what not,” 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. 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 Scandanavian languages, mutually unintelligible when we speak them, but they were all one at one point. There are now 29 Maya languages, [so] which particular of those languages is being reflected in the hieroglyphs?
Because of the great decipherment which has taken place in the last 20 or 25 years, we can read those. They are all in one particular ancestral Maya language which we call Chortian. One of the two main people who discovered I think conclusively what this language is, happens to be a professor at Brigham Young University [laughs], John Robertson, a good friend of mine, fantastically good linguist.
All of the inscriptions now, from Guatemala all the way up to the northern most part of Yucatán, Belize, Honduras and so forth, South East of Mexico, they’re all in this literary language, which was a special language. The only language that’s close to it now among these Maya languages is Ch’orti’ which is spoken only 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 Ch’orti’ country.
This is a language that was spoken by their ancestors, that became the literary language. Like Hebrew is the literary language 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 in 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. Right from the beginning, they were starting to write about 400BC; we’ve got some evidence for that, right until the Spanish priests wiped it out and burned all their books. That’s what the language is and there is nothing Old World about it.
John: No characters, no references to —
Dr. Coe: No, we can read all these hieroglyphs now.
John: What do they say, what do they talk about?
Dr. Coe: 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, births, marriages, conquests, royal deaths, rituals that they performed at important times, that have to do with their conquests —
John: Is this stuff happening — do we have writings between 600BC and 300, 400AD?
Dr. Coe: Yes, we certainly do.
John: Do they talk about a King Benjamin or do they talk about an Alma and the reign of the judges?
Dr. Coe: No. We’ll start with back, let’s say go BC, there are some writings, we know they were already starting to write that. They are 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 have no writing whatsoever from the Olmec, none, zero. Which is peculiar if these people came from the Middle East where writing goes back to at least 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. It’s inscribed with hieroglyphs that are all Olmec but we can’t read them.
We call that the Cascajal block. I published it along with a whole bunch of other people who were interested in this whole thing. It’s probably about 900 or 800BC, 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 200 AD, we start getting extensive Maya inscriptions, and they are in Maya and can be read in Maya.
John: Did they mention a Mormon or Moroni?
Dr. Coe: They don’t mention any of these wonderful people out of The Book of Mormon; nothing, zero. They are all Maya, every single one of them. So the language of these people who Smith was talking about was Maya.
Part 2
John: When I was on a mission in Guatemala, we showed off a little film strip. I think it was called Ancient America Speaks; I’m not sure. Have you seen this film strip?
Dr. Michael Coe: I don’t know.
John: Here is the basic premise: Jesus lived in the Old World and he visited people there. But he also said in the Bible, “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold, they too shall hear my word.”
Then it said, “Did you know that Jesus, after he died, came and visited the Americas?” There was a big earthquake, he came to America, sat down, called 12 apostles, formed a church, and this is what The Book of Mormon claims. Prior to this, the people were already believing that Jesus was going to come. They were baptizing in his name, they were setting up temples or doing rituals that were kind of Jewish or Greek or Christian rituals.
But then Jesus came, called 12 apostles, started his church, and [the film strip says] there’s evidence of that in the New World. Because there’s this legend of a great white god, maybe his name was Quetzalcoatl, who came and visited. There are hieroglyphs about light-skinned and dark-skinned people. There are excavations of temples that had baptismal fonts, which are likely where people performed these Christian baptisms. There are even hieroglyphs about the tree of life, about a big tree that very much maps to Lehi’s dream and what he would have told them in The Book of Mormon.
This is the film strip that I showed probably a thousand people on my mission. This was published by the church, it 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 are the pure blood of Israel, and you are awesome because you are these people and you are the chosen blood. That was kind of what I remember; I could have some of the details wrong.
Dr. Coe: That’s a big order here. I first came into contact with this when I first got married: I took Sophie my wife, I said, “This is our vacation, let’s go down to Yucatán and whatnot, you’ve never seen Mayan sites. You’re married to a Mayan archaeologist” — she was an anthropologist but in social anthropology. I said, “Let’s go on down and see some of the main Mayan sites in Yucatán and get down to Palenque and Chiapas in south eastern Mexico. I’ll take you through this.” And we did, and we spent two or three weeks down there. We saw everything, back to Chichen Itza, places like that.
When we were sitting in an outdoor restaurant cafeteria in Merida, the capital of Yucatan, we saw this obvious American with a young guy who seemed to be his assistant there, a Maya kid, a teenager there. And he was listening to us talking and he came across and he said, “Are you folks Americans? I said, “Yeah, we are.” And he says, “Why are you down here?” I said, “Well, I’m really an archeologist and I’m looking to get my PHD in archeology.”
“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, “I’ve heard that some people believe this.” He said, “Yes, he came to Palenque, down in southeast Chiapas, and actually preached from the Temple of the Cross at Palenque.” Well, we were headed to Palenque, I’d never been there. 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. It was the Reorganized.
John: Got you.
Dr. Coe: And this was the first time I’d ever heard of the Reorganized, very nice guy. This was a long, long time ago, over 50 years ago.
Let’s talk about Palenque, and the Temple of the Cross there. There are three temples together in one part of this great, beautiful, well understood site of Palenque. We’ve got huge amounts of inscriptions and 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 got a huge [unintelligible] leaf 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 this is basically a world direction tree. It’s a stylized tree that is sprouting vegetation and whatnot on all sides. The two individuals are not Jesus and below somebody else or a disciple, but rather this is a great Maya king whose name we know. His name is Kan Bahlam which means snake jaguar. And he’s shown as a kid and then as a mature individual who’s taken office. It’s two parts; it’s really his life story. And that Kan Bahlam built all of these; the other temples around it are his work. There’s no mention of Jesus or apostles or anything 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 are no more mysteries about it whatsoever. It’s got to do with a Maya creation, with a whole Maya idea of this particular dynasty of 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. That example which is often used is simply invalid. 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 from the Native American period. [Either way, they] have nothing to do with a Middle East.
John: Okay.
Dr. Coe: I’d like to say one thing now is about this whole idea of contact between the Old World and the New World. I’m not entirely against the idea of Oceana contacts. In fact, there’s beginning to be evidence for it. The leading scholar of these kinds of stuff is a Mormon friend of mine, John Sorenson at BYU, who’s written extensively on this whole thing, very interesting stuff. He is a real scholar. I think that he is, again, often looking in the wrong direction. But I think there’s pretty good evidence for a contact between East Asia and South-East Asia, not the Middle East at all, but totally in another direction across the Pacific.
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, but right on the coast. [They found the] culture of a community that could be dated about 1100, 1200, 1300 AD — hundreds of years before the Spaniards got there. There were chicken bones in this, and we have 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, but rather Polynesian chickens. The Polynesians (who are an Old World people), they moved out into the Pacific, and they have been in contact with the New World for a very long period of time, from say 1200 AD 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 native name of the sweet potatoes.
John: Man, I would like to meet those Polynesians who made that boat trip.
Dr. Coe: Those people were really good. They reached Easter Island, which is the farthest point from anywhere else on earth. They got there! These are the people who set up all the big heads on Easter Island. The Polynesians and the Micronesians too were the most incredible navigators, really incredible.
So as I say, I’m not against this kind of study. And John Sorenson 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 and Southeast Asia in particular.
John: Got you. And is there any evidence that a Christ figure came, that the light-skinned, dark-skinned, did any of the narrative in The Book of Mormon, the reign of judges, just all that stuff, any evidence of that? Are there Christian teachings, Christian remnants in the Mesoamerican religious ritual?
Dr. Coe: Well let’s say that Mesoamerican religious rituals and religious beliefs were really highly complex. When the Spaniards came, the Catholic priests came too. They were kind of amazed to see that the natives had confession to the gods. They had a mother goddess, which is again, not something out of Jewish ideas at all. They had all sorts of things which the Spanish thought would made it easy for them to convert these people, to get them to recognize Jesus. The question about Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, the [unintelligible] —
John: The great white god, right?
Dr. Coe: This comes up over and over and over again.
You have to go to the original sources about Quetzalcoatl. The Spaniards had every reason to want to make this guy into a white man — not because they were thinking about Jesus coming to the New World, but rather Cortez, the white conquistador. They wanted a story, a native prophecy that would justify and clinch the idea that Cortez was a god. They were not thinking about Jesus at all. They were thinking about Cortez as their returned god.
John: So the Indians would accept the conquest more.
Dr. Coe: So that the Indians would accept the conquest. There’s now a big literature, a study about this. The Spanish built this thing up 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 across the middle part of this country. It couldn’t have been the Inca. It all had to be somebody from elsewhere with white skin.
John: So there is a dark and a light skinned narrative outside of Mormonism that tries to explain or interpret this?
Dr. Coe: Yes, first by the Spaniards, to justify their conquest — I would rather call it invasion, the European invasion of the New World. 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: And so, those who would say, “Jesus came, he descended in a pillar of light, he taught Christianity and started the church and all this happened, but because the dark-skinned people killed all the light-skinned people and they were 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.”
That argument of saying, “Of course we don’t find any of this because they denigrated into savagery.” How do you find that type of statement?
Dr. Coe: 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. After the conquest — after contact had been made between the conquistadores, let’s say, and the Portuguese and others with this people, look what they gave to the rest of the world. The list of domestic plants is enormously long. And —
John: What does that mean? That means that they had to work and use their intellect?
Dr. Coe: Those were all domesticated by them. They were all carefully selected. Domestication is evolution under the control of man, and over thousands of years, they domesticated these wild plants. 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 [eating it]. They took that and domesticated it over thousands of years. They took all of the squashes that we eat, the tomato, the peppers — just a host maniac, or cassava, or tapioca whatever you want to call it. This list is enormously long, not even mentioning the pharmaceutical plants that they had. They were incredible people.
The Spaniards, these wonderful white-skinned Spaniards that saw themselves as so superior — how many plants were ever domesticated by the Spaniards? Zero. 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 that are found in The Book of Mormon, but they’re basically a tiny list compared to the list that New World Indians, these degraded Lamanites domesticated.
John: Maybe they got their domestication from the Middle East.
Dr. Coe: No, they didn’t. Plants started to be domesticated in the New World according to radiocarbon dating 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, once the Ice Age was over. It didn’t take that long to do this. Maize, for instance, is probably the most productive plant in the world. Today, it 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: Wait, who didn’t have temples?
Dr. Coe: Well, a lot of the Indians of the New World who lived in more marginal areas like [unintelligible] in South America didn’t have temples, and the far north of North America didn’t either. The Pueblo peoples of the southwest had mighty apartment houses, but the big temple people were in Mesoamerica and in the Andes.
John: Okay. Do you find their technologies, other than agriculture, their language, their technologies, their civilizations, their cultures, to be highly evolved for their time or devolved or —
Dr. Coe: The Andes metallurgy was highly evolved from very, very early, going back to 1000 BC and earlier. They started to experiment with technology and casting metals and doing things like that. Never iron or steel, but —
John: What were they? What metals were these?
Dr. Coe: Copper, gold, bronze, bronze alloys. Very sophisticated technology, which they later brought to Mesoamerica, from 700 or 800 AD on.
John: So the general idea that at one point these were civilized people but then they devolved into savages doesn’t resonate with you?
Dr. Coe: It does not resonate with professional archeologists at all. And [unintelligible] with the Native Americans themselves in any way because they are being depreciated.
John: Right. 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 whiteys and became savages, and by the way you are a descendant of these people — maybe they have ancestors they might be more proud of and gain confidence by instead of shame from. Does that make sense?
Dr. Coe: Yes, it does. And it’s had political repercussions too. 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 Guatemala’s 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 came to Yucatan early on, at a restaurant in Merida — this old completely white Yucatecan, a descendant of the conquistadores you can be sure, with a little Maya shoe shine boy shining his shoes. And he points to him and he says, “Do you consider this guy human?” And I say, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, people say that this guy’s ancestors and all of those other Indians built Chichen Itza. Do you really believe that?” (And he was saying this in Spanish so this poor little guy was understanding what he was talking about.) I said, “Why not?”
That’s the mindset that really I object to, and that’s in this idea of the Lamanites as the dark-skinned savages.
John: Got you. Real quick, DNA. What is your understanding of the DNA? I know you are not a geneticist, but what —
Dr. Coe: I’m not a geneticist, but my father-in-law was a very distinguished one, Theodosius Dobzhansky. I married the daughter of one of the great geneticists. He died some time ago, or I would submit this question to him.
I have never seen anything that would convince me that these people have Middle Eastern DNA; let’s put it that way.
John: Okay, got you, okay. And then The Book of Mormon mentions battles where hundreds of thousands of people kind of fought each other, again with swords and shields and whatever, if I am recalling correctly.
Dr. Coe: You are.
John: Is that type of population possible?
Dr. Coe: Well, whether you’d have hundreds of thousands of soldiers in one army — the Aztecs could field fairly good size armies, but never that size. The Maya area, which is the one in question if we are going to talk about what happened to the Nephites, there was never an empire there. People used to think that there was an old empire and a new empire. Archeologists like the great Sylvanus Morley 75 years ago, he was big on an old empire that then collapsed and then there was a new empire up in northern Yucatan.
But there was never any overall political empire in the Maya area. There was a big population, there were a lot of Maya, but they were in quite small city states. Nobody can [say for sure] how many Maya there were because we don’t have any census figures at all. But you can estimate what could have been the productivity of this kind of maize corn agriculture given this kind of land, et cetera, and come up with some guesses. It would have been many millions, there is no doubt it, at the height of the classic Maya, let’s say at about 500 to 700 AD, there would have been probably several million people in the Maya area.
But the way they fought, there were probably never any big armies fielded, permanent armies. The Aztecs had that later on but they never amounted to that many people.
John: And no swords and shields.
Dr. Coe: The Maya wouldn’t have fought that way, and certainly not with swords and shields. You’d find evidence for that. There’s —
John: Big mounds of bones and shields and helmets.
Dr. Coe: Yes, you’d find big mounds of bones — well, I’d like to backtrack and say it’s very hard to find evidences for battles, even well-known ones except in modern times where you have so much hardware out there. 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’d think that battlefield would be very easy to identify archeologically even if you didn’t know from the records what happened at 1066. But there is hardly any evidence whatsoever archeologically for the Battle of Hastings; it’s very hard to pick up battle field evidence.
Nevertheless there are limited evidences that have been found in the Maya area for mass battle or for defeat of a particular city. And one of them is a site called Aguateca in Guatemala up on the Petexbatun region where you have almost a Pompey like situation: everybody had to leave, including the royalty. And the scribes and the whole workforce pick up and leave everything there. That’s been dug by a very good University of Arizona archeologist, Takeshi Inomata.
There is at the site of Yaxchilan along the river that divides Mexico and Guatemala, the Usumacinta, one of the mounds there that really is a result of temple collapsing, it’s covered with stone arrow points (not steel ones). And then, Richard Hansen, who is a Mormon archeologist — but who likes to say he’s an archeologist who happens to be a Mormon — he’s digging this great early site of El Mirador in northernmost Guatemala, probably the greatest of all Maya sites, he’s got evidence for, again, such a battle, but these are stone points, obsidian and things like that. No steel, no metal whatsoever.
John: Okay. And this is jumping back, but I forgot to ask: are there any remnants of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the language or linguistics of the Mayan?
Dr. Coe: No Egyptian hieroglyphs have ever shown up. There are some roller seals, clay roller seals that showed up in one of the New World Archeology Foundation sites called Chiapa de Corzo. 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 any more.
You know about the book of Abraham, which is an extremely important text in the Mormon religion which Smith said he translated from an Egyptian manuscript that was sold to him. I’ve forgotten what the date was, but it was something like 1835.
And he immediately saw that it was Egyptian, but he claimed that he could read it. And he did — he provided this translation, which is the book of Abraham. It’s supposed to Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt in captivity when he worked with the pharaohs and what happened to him and his relatives and all the rest of it. And this is a well-known Mormon text, I think part of the Pearl of Great Price.
This manuscript disappeared after a while, and then it showed up in fragments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, several decades ago. And they have extremely good Egyptologists there who immediately recognized it as an Egyptian book of the dead, a fragment of it. That’s the most common Egyptian funerary text, it deals only with Egyptian gods; Isis, Osiris, Thoth, the god of writing, et cetera.
It has to do with the journey of the Egyptian soul to the land of the dead and what he or she is going to encounter. It’s a very common text. There are dozens and dozens of books of the dead. Smith had absolutely no knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He had no ability whatsoever to translate any Egyptian hieroglyphics whether you call them reformed Egyptian or not.
Now let’s get to Thomas Stewart Ferguson. You mentioned that idea of “one fold and one shepherd.”
John: Yes.
Dr. Coe: Tom Ferguson was a lawyer from Orinda, California and a former FBI guy. He worked for the FBI for quite a while. A really, really nice guy. I knew him, he was a wonderful person with a wonderful family, and of course a believing iron rod Mormon. [laughs]
John: [laughs] Right.
Dr. Coe: An old-time Mormon. And he was desperate to get archeologists interested in finding evidence, archeological evidence, to identify Zarahemla and to dig there. And so he was one of the founders along with Milton Hunter and others, and I think Mr. Marriott, of the New World Archeological 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 not only Book of Mormon archeologists and enthusiasts onto this, but they got renowned American archeologists, historical and scientific experts on it like A.V. Kidder — Alfred Kidder, who I knew very well and who I think was a great archeologist of his day, anywhere. And this was going to be set up not specifically as Book of Mormon archeology 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.
John: Right.
Dr. Coe: And this was identified by Book of Mormon geographers as a location in South Eastern Chiapas, specifically the coast and then inland at a site called Chiapa de Corzo. And they dug there for years and years.
I visited them early on, under orders from A.V Kidder to find out if this was a legitimate excavation. I came back singing high praises for these people who were doing this job, really amazing guys like the late Gareth Lowe who knew more about this pre-classic formative period of Mesoamerica than anybody else I ever knew, a wonderful human being. And most of the archeologists, almost all of them who had been working there, were first class. It’s now in the hands of John Clark, who I consider one of the great Mesoamericanists of today.
They really never found [laughs] plates of gold or wheels or steel swords of anything of that sort. They’ve got a wonderful evolution of stuff from the 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 are nothing else but Native American cultures one after another. Magnificent piece of work.
Now, constantly arriving there in the early days were slight screwballs out of Salt Lake and places like that coming down with metal detectors, running around trying to find plates of gold and whatnot, but they tried to shoo them off the site. It was a completely legitimate operation. They published everything that they ever found in beautiful, wonderful reports. I rely on them very, very much. I worked very, very closely with these guys. I’d say, “Okay, if there are Mormons there, they are Mormons who are scientific archeologists, not Mormon archeologists.”
John: Got you. I want to ask you about these archeologists but before we close this section, what about Book of Mormon geography? Is there any geography that you find as credible or reasonable that could map or tie to Book of Mormon geography?
Dr. Coe: There’s a huge amount of literature on this. And I relied on a friend, a good friend in 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 have forgotten a lot of it. I do know that there is 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’m sorry; it was so long ago that I looked at it. I hate to even open my mouth on it.
John: No, that’s fine. I guess we have gone back and forth but some people view a limited geography where somewhere in Mesoamerica the Lamanites and Nephites existed as part of a smaller group of these other existing populations. And when they talk about Zarahemla and when they talk about the waters of Mormon, it’s somewhere in Mesoamerica. And then there are others, but one problem with that is if Mormon and Moroni wrote plates and buried them in a hill Cumorah, does that mean that Moroni carried these plates all the way up to New York to bury them? Could a Mesoamerican in 300–400 AD feasibly walk and carry metal gold plates up to Palmyra, New York to bury them?
Dr. Coe: Let’s put it this way: it’s unlikely, but of course not impossible.
Actually in ancient America, I think the people were moving around a lot. For instance, in Central America, the Mexicans knew about the Maya, they travelled there as traders and whatnot. The Aztecs relied on all kinds of products from the tropical lowlands in their culture, such as chocolate. We also know that in Illinois and Ohio, in the Hopewell culture — which is about contemporary with classic Maya — they went all the way up to Yellowstone Park to get obsidian. That’s a long way.
John: So they could travel a long way?
Dr. Coe: Yes, 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: I thought there was a ton of gold among the Aztec, right?
Dr. Coe: But I am talking about the classic period. In the time frame of the Nephites, there was no gold.
John: Gold comes out of the Aztecs.
Dr. Coe: The Aztecs had gold all right, but gold is late in Mesoamerica.
John: How late?
Dr. Coe: There’s no real proof of gold until about 700 AD. And then it’s just a little bit that shows up.
John: And that’s after Moroni would have buried the plates.
Dr. Coe: And it’s done with a technology that came 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 — that’s on the Pacific coastline.
John: Okay.
Dr. Coe: 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 in Palmyra, New York; I’ve stood on it. To get up there is about 99.9% unlikely to me.
John: And there is no record of there ever being metal plates in the New World where things were written on them — or is there?
Dr. Coe: No, none — wait. There are a few hieroglyphs on some of the gold disks that are very, very late: probably about 1400 AD. They were fished out of the sacred well at Chichen Itza. 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 heiroglyphs. They are round, they are discs, and the stuff that’s on them is completely Mesoamerican.
But I’m not going to say there are not hieroglyphs on gold because there are one or two examples of that, and they are really badly done hieroglyphs. They’re very late.
John: But never like plates in a ring binder that make up a book?
Dr. Coe: No. Nothing, period.
Part 3
John: This has been fabulous. Let’s switch really quickly to your experience with Mormon archaeologists. 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 Mormon archaeologist lose his faith, or if you’ve seen nuanced views of The Book of Mormon. And then finally, wasn’t there a famous Mormon who wrote a book about ancient American archaeology who then stopped believing in the church and left?
Dr. Michael Coe: Yes.
John: Talk about all that to the extent that you have stories or experience.
Dr. Coe: Of course, this is a very tender subject [laughs].
John: You don’t have to name names [laughs].
Dr. Coe: I had many, many discussions over the years with Gareth Lowe, who is a really good friend. I still respect him enormously. He is 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 at 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 Kidder telling me to be his “spy” in the New World Archaeology Foundation, but also because I wanted to see what they’ve been finding, because they were right next door to where I was.
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 those amateur enthusiasts who came trundling down to his site with metal detectors [laughs]. He tried to shoo them out.
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 the day, I felt I had to bring this up. And he wouldn’t buy that evolution could take place, and he said, “It bothers me, you know. I’m bothered by this.” Because he was a good thinker.
Year by year, I think he lost his faith. I think at the end, I don’t think he had any of it left, at all. He would talk, ironically, of some of those old Book of Mormon archaeologists like M. Wells Jakeman at BYU, and people like that who really were as they say 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 knew him as well as anybody, and I think he’d lost his faith.
I know others, who have worked for the foundation, who also no longer believed in it. They accepted the church as a social, cultural thing, very much so. How could they do otherwise [laughs] when you’re living in Utah, in Provo or any of those? It’s a complete way of life to give up. When I became, let’s say a jack Episcopalian —
John: [laughs]
Dr. Coe: I didn’t have to give up my way of life, at all. Not one bit.
John: Your wife didn’t divorce you and your parents didn’t reject you —
Dr. Coe: That’s exactly right.
John: And everyone judged you as being evil and wicked.
Dr. Coe: Episcopalians, the Anglicans in general, are very tolerant of all this kind of stuff. They’ll say, “You might come back some day, but no, you may be right, who knows?” [laughs] They’re quite open to this kind of thing, but it’s not that way, of course, for Mormons. It became a real problem for a couple of really, truly, outstanding Mormon archaeologists. I won’t mention their names.
One of them doesn’t like to talk about it at all. I didn’t think either of them want to talk about it, to me at any rate, as a goy, as a gentile. They’re both extremely good archaeologists. They go to meetings, they talk our language, and never bring this stuff up, never mention Zarahemla or any of this kind of stuff; Moroni — not one word of it.
But, I think when they’re back among the true believers, it’s another story. And I 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. It’s an extremely touchy subject. (I’ve also known devout Marxist archaeologists very well, who I have a lot of respect for — but that’s another subject.) They can’t seem to break with it. It’s a certain mindset. Me, I’ve been a rebel all my life in what I do, and I just 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.
Now let’s get to the one guy that you’ve mentioned who was a believer all his life, and openly broke with the Church, and this is Tom Ferguson, Thomas Stuart Ferguson. I’ve already talked about him as a Marinda California lawyer, 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 what not — called One Fold and One Shepherd. And I was asked to review it — can you imagine that? — by American Antiquity, which is the kind of house journal of American archeologists.
He is such a nice guy, I wanted to be nice to him [laughs]. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings at all, but I had to point out the total illogic of the whole thing. It’s built totally on a foundation of sand in general, and the details just don’t add up to anything. You’re dealing with a native new world culture that is mainly, 99.9% autochthonous, that is, it rose up by itself. These people, these Mayans, and Aztecs, and all these people did this stuff under their own steam, and [the Mormon] approach takes away from them a heritage which belongs to them — and not to Europeans or Hebrews, or ancients out of the near East, or anybody.
They did it themselves, so 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. [laughs]
The reaction was very interesting because Mormons are some of the nicest people I know, and the average author, who’s written a book that got torn apart in a journal the way the young Dr. 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’ve always had the best of relations with people at BYU, both 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 by BYU. They have a wonderful department of anthropology, which includes archaeology now.
John: Why would you want to talk about all this stuff and risk hurting feelings?
Dr. Coe: They’re very frank about this, and if their feelings have been hurt, they’ve been very nice at disguising them, because they are really nice to me.
You’d think after my review of Tom Ferguson’s book, and after what I wrote at Dialogue, which is all over the internet still, you’d think, “Keep this guy out” [laughs]. But they didn’t do that at all. Now if they’d been Marxist, I would have been sent to the gulag, or worse, to the Lubyanka prison and shot. No, the Mormon people are really nice, moral, upstanding people. And as a whole, as archaeologists, they’re a lot nicer than a lot of the goyim archeologists.
[laughter]
I still have very good friends among them.
John: Right. What happened to Ferguson?
Dr. Coe: I talked about the Book of Abraham and that Egyptian manuscript. Ferguson finally saw, he came to the conclusion that if Joseph Smith basically made up all this kind of stuff up out of whole cloth, off the top of his head, that this was the origin of the Book of Abraham — that Smith had the ability to “translate” this stuff when actually, the first steps were being taken by old world scholars like Champollion to crack the Egyptian script (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. And there is no truth in it whatsoever.
He felt just like his skin sloughed off, his heart dropped out of his body, he lost his faith completely, but he didn’t want to give up his membership in the church because it brought him so much satisfaction. He was involved, with his family — he had a big family, kids and all the rest of it, and he simply felt guilty about doing this. But nevertheless he couldn’t intellectually 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. He died, I think, a very, very unhappy man.
John: All right. Do you know any credible Mormon anthropologists, or anthropologists who happened to be Mormon, who will look you in the eye and say, “Yes, I believe in Zarahemla”, and “Yes, I believe in the waters of Mormon, and the King Benjamin, and the Nephites and Moroni, and I’m a credible scientist”?
Dr. Coe: I think I know one. [laughs] One. And he is very, very credible. [unintelligible]
John: 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. Coe: I can’t ask them all, but I have my suspicions here. I knew one — I know one; I think he is still alive — who actually wrote this stuff down why Book of Mormon archeology is basically a lot of hooey. [laughs] I think he took a lot of brickbats for it, People like Hugh Nibley rising up to defend the faith and what not. It’s hard to say, but I would say I know about a half dozen.
John: Have you known someone to lose their faith completely in The Book of Mormon?
Dr. Coe: Yes, I think Gareth Lowe was one of them.
I mentioned him because I know he is dead. He, by the way, was a wonderful guy, but also a true fundamentalist at one point, and you know what that means. [laughs] But it just disintegrated on him. We had many conversations about this over the years, over the decades.
John: Not fun. Okay. There is this rumor that went around in Mormonism for a lot of years that — I don’t know if it was a Smithsonian or National Geographic archeologist who used to take The Book of Mormon along with them to help them find ancient American archeological 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. Coe: I do. I have seen that letter and their official statement about the Book of Mormon. I don’t know of any National Geographic archeologist or anybody anywhere else in the world, especially in the new world, who would have taken the Book of Mormon with him of her as a guide. Or the Smithsonian. I’ve known a lot of archeologists out of most places, they [laughs] they knew about what goes on and they knew about Book of Mormon archeology, but basically they didn’t buy any part of it.
John: Okay. Are you aware of FARMS, the Foundation for Ancient Research and —
Dr. Coe: Yes, I am.
John: There is a Daniel Peterson there, there are other — there’s John Gee, there are all these different —
Dr. Coe: Those are Book of Mormon archeologists, essentially.
John: And when 10 non-Mormon archeologists are sitting around smoking a cigar or drinking a glass of wine, and FARMS comes up or Mormon apologists come up, what’s the general sentiment or feeling, or would this never happen?
Dr. Coe: I think it has been mentioned and the general feeling is that this is not a really serious scientific group at all, but it’s a continuation of the old Book of Mormon archeology that used to be practiced at BYU in the bad old days — or the good old days, however you look at it — by people like Christiansen and Jakeman, and people of that sort.
It’s basically true believers, they have got their minds made up, and all they want to hear is confirmation of what they already know. It’s a lot like Marxist archeology and when the Marxists go into the field — this was especially true in the Soviet Union in the old days, it used to be true in China, it has now changed. [laughs] These people are dropping a lot of their Marxism now, but back then you only went into the field in the Soviet Union to find out whether Marx and Engels’s theory about the development of societies and cultures is correct or not. And, well, you knew it was correct, you just wanted to find further corroborative evidence.
What a scientist would ask is, is this true or false? Period. Science is a way of posing a question, or at least science has questions and poses them in a certain way where they can be validated or shown to be false.
That’s why science and religion don’t really coordinate at all, because how can you pose a question whether there is a god or not that can be falsified or validated? 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, as a total proposition?
It can’t be done. It’s a religion, it’s not a scientific question. Therefore, to try to come up with a hard data without asking this question — can it be falsified as well as corroborated? You can’t do it the way FARMS is approaching it.
John: Can it be falsified? I know that some people mock this notion of — there is an argument that you can never prove that god doesn’t exist, you can never prove that Jesus did exist.
Dr. Coe: Yes, that’s why it is not a scientific question.
John: And then people laugh and say, “Maybe there is a flying spaghetti monster living on the dark side of the moon, but we can’t prove it.”
Dr. Coe: That’s true. [laughs]
John: It’s so ridiculous. What would the probability be?
Dr. Coe: That’s what it comes down to, is probability.
John: And for you, what’s the probability that the Book of Mormon narrative happened and it’s a historical document?
Dr. Coe: It’s less than one percent. I would say [laughs] as close to zero as you can get it. It’s all probability, but it’s highly improbable.
Some day somebody may dig up a chariot with wheels on it, but it hasn’t been done yet. Some day somebody might dig out of a classic Maya site in a firm context, a steel sword or a steel shield. It hasn’t been done in a 100 years, and they’ve been digging, I would say, 80 or 90, or a 100 Maya sites, so I would say the probability is almost non-existent. It exists, there is always a probability that I can jump over the Empire State building, but it’s pretty small.
John: 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. Coe: I’d say 99% almost of everything that the Book of Mormon has details on is falsifiable.
John: 99% is falsifiable?
Dr. Coe: That’s right, it’s false. You can say, “Do chariots exist in Mesoamerica before the Spaniards came in with wheeled vehicles?” The answer is, No they do not. You can go through that and you come up with those falsifiable questions. Those are scientific questions.
John: What about those who are trying to re-define the language in the book on Mormon. They would say, “Well, when they said ‘horse’ — and this is a common one —
Dr. Coe: I’ve heard this comment.
John: When they said ‘horse’, they meant ‘tapir’, or when they said ‘steel’, they meant ‘shale’, or some type of rock.
Dr. Coe: Yes, right.
John: What are your thoughts about that?
Dr. Coe: [laughs] You can go through and twist all of it. I’ll tell you, the person who has done most of this work is John Sorenson. He is 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, you know — moving this word around and saying, “twist it.” We know how the Maya languages work. We know there are phonetics, we know the history now going back a couple of thousand years, thanks to the great decipherment. You can’t fool around with that, all that much.
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. They dealt with things that were in the Bible, that they were trying to put over when they were Christianizing these people. They came up with some new vocabulary.
For instance, this business of — the Maya word t’ix, which means “tapir” in Mayan. If they ever, for instance, took that word and started to apply this to cattle, to cows which they brought in with them and which have never existed before. Then they said, “Okay, we have to now have a word for tapir.” They used the word, double word t’ix k’ache’laj. K’ache’laj means ‘forest’ or ‘wild jungle’. So it’s a cattle of the wild jungle [laughs]. They warped the language to fit it to their own things. You have to remember where these words come from and what their history is. In pre-Spanish times we know what those words meant and we know their history, you can’t warp those.
John: Okay, and when a Book of Mormon apologist finds like chiasmus in the Book of Mormon or he finds bees in the Arabian Peninsula, they sort of say, “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 [like Bountiful], or why there’s chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. How could Joseph have known that chiasmus was an important thing back in the old world? Now it’s in The Book of Mormon.” What are your thoughts about those types of proof?
Dr. Coe: Let’s start with the bees. I used to be a beekeeper, six hives until bears wiped me out. Three years in a row, so I got interested in bees.
John: [laughs].
Dr. Coe: Mine were domestic, old world bees. Actually, they were 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, there is a much larger group which include new world bees. The new world bees, however, are all stingless. They keep them in a log hive — still today in the Mayan area you can see them back at people’s houses. These are stingless bees, they don’t sting, they are not old world bees at all. They are native new world bees, especially in the tropics like the Maya area.
They produce a wonderful honey. But they are wild as can be; they are really hard to domesticate, you really can’t do it. The bees are just completely different, but they are bees. Beekeeping shows up in one of the four Mayan manuscripts, actually, the gods of the beekeepers. They just simply happen to be there all along.
This particular manuscript is pre-Spanish, pre-Colombian. 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, in your eyebrows and so forth. They are sort of like sweat bees, you may be familiar with that, which is a typical new world bee.
Remind me what chiasmus is — I know Hugh Nibley has written about this.
John: It’s something about a pattern — I’ll read it from the great sage Google: “A crossing, a rhetorical trope in which the first line or clause of a statement is repeated in reverse order in the second.”
John: Why does that prove The Book of Mormon is true?
Dr. Coe: [laughs] Something similar to this existed in the new world, but it existed 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 into a number of languages. There’s two great English translations, one by a non-LDS guy named Dennis Tedlock who is at New York State University in Buffalo. Then by Allan Christenson who happens to be at BYU, he’s a good friend of mine, too. It’s a wonderful translation. In the original — and this is typical of Mesoamerican tropes all together —
John: What’s a trope?
Dr. Coe: It’s a form of poetry, it’s poetic, to say something as poetry or metaphor, that’s a trope.
John: Okay.
Dr. Coe: Let’s call it metaphorical speech. The Aztecs are well documented for that. (Who aren’t even in Book of Mormon [chronology].) 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.
Often it’s on the final word and it often rhymes with it, or in the first line. You can also do this as triplets, which is really tricky. The Popol Vuh is written that way, the original, in K’iche’ Maya. K’iche’ is one of the 29 Mayan languages still spoken on the islands of Guatemala.
John: That’s right.
Dr. Coe: You probably heard it when you were a missionary there.
John: Yes.
Dr. Coe: This is what you find, but it’s sort of scattered through the new world in general. It means nothing to me as far as proof The Book of Mormon is correct. The Book of Mormon to me is, frankly, a re-creation of the language of the Old Testament as found in the King James Bible, which I grew up on. You find the same kind of thing there, in the book of Genesis, for instance, it’s very common in that. This stuff is basically poetry in there.
But poetry is found all around the world and things of this nature, a metaphorical speech where you are showing how really wonderful you are by doing this — Aztecs highly valued this. You were considered to be a great thinker and whatnot if you could speak this way. It’s all laid out how you can do it.
John: But doesn’t prove The Book of Mormon —
Dr. Coe: It has nothing to do with The Book of Mormon.
John: Okay.
Dr. Coe: Except, what it does show is that Joseph Smith knew the Old Testament very, very well.
John: Got you.
One of the biggest arguments for The Book of Mormon is its mere existence. You will find most traditionally 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 are in there that Joseph Smith couldn’t possibly have known.” That there is 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 Dr. Coe, how in the world can you explain what so many people think is a miraculous book?
Dr. Coe: This brings me to how I feel about Joseph Smith. I think — and I said it on the PBS program on the Mormons — I think he was one of the greatest people who’s ever lived.
Every once in a while, you get a guy like this. I think he wasn’t totally illiterate, I think maybe semi-illiterate; he’d memorized a lot of the Old Testament, 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 Brodie, 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. He’s one of the most interesting, amazing people. I think that the guy, if you look at how he started, as a very bright kid interested in old things, treasure hunting. He was sort of Tom Sawyer-like, first in Vermont and then in Upstate New York.
This guy had an incredible brain. I really do think so. If you really knew the Old Testament, all those things you’ve mentioned, that Book of Mormon apologists come up with, they are 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? In the interview that I did for PBS, I said, “As an anthropologist, I look at him as a shaman.” You look at some of these amazing people who’ve been studied, in Africa, among the Hindu, the Eskimo, or anywhere in South America, I think a lot of these people start off as kind of magicians, where it’s hocus pocus: they are going to fool somebody and do something that really puts them on the map.
But then they start picking up followers. And they wonder, “Now, why did this person believe this?” And then you start asking yourself, “Or maybe it’s true, what I’ve found?” Then after a while you’ve got 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 on the Hill Cumorah, as divine intervention.
And I’ll just say, if you were dealing with New England farmers, which are what he started out with, they wouldn’t know anything. 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 that 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: 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 where he thinks The Book of Mormon came from. And there is also a book called Losing a Lost Tribe by Simon Southerton, who also tries to discuss what the environment was when Joseph Smith would have come up with the Book of Mormon.
And we know that there were several books at the time that talked about the Native Americans. A lot of people were saying, “Where did 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?
Dr. Coe: This goes back to the early Spanish friars. They also had no idea where these people came from, and they had to deal with it very quickly. And originally they thought, “Well, maybe these were Israelites.” That was one of the theories that came up.
Finally one of them, Father Acosta, said that from everything he’s read about the North-East Asians, there must have been some kind of a land bridge between East Asia and there. That was Acosta’s theory. And, of course, it finally won out, and became the scientific theory — in fact, scientific fact.
It’s during this time when Joseph Smith was in Upstate New York, which was what’s called by historians, the “burned-over district.” It was a time when a lot of new religions were coming up. One of the most well-known ones was the Millerites, who prophesied the end of the world on a certain date. When that never happened, they transformed into the Seventh Day Adventists of today.
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 who won’t believe this — came from the Shakers. The idea of 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; that’s not a good way to keep a religion going.
There is one working Shaker left in Southern Maine, out of Sabbathday Lake, whereas, how many Mormons are there? Ten to fifteen million Mormons, which tells you something.
But I just think that this was the milieu in which this happened. Joseph Smith must have known some of the Iroquoian peoples in Upstate New York: the Seneca, the Oneida, 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 what not.
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 sides of the Middle West were taking place at that time. And the conclusion that these people came to — they were US 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 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 weren’t that inferior, because of their dark skin 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. It’s a way a lot of Americans feel about Muslims: you can’t say anything nice about Muslims, because you’re fighting them. That’s unfair to a lot of Muslims that don’t want to be involved in this thing! It was the same way then with American Indians; they were the enemy to most white Americans and were treated as such.
John: You could look at the Book of Mormon as a text, and look at the environment that Joseph Smith was swimming in — and this is kind of Grant Palmer’s thesis. 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 from that actual addition of the Bible.
Dr. Coe: Yes, I do know that, yes.
John: So you could 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 Grant Palmer would say that maybe a fifth of the Book of Mormon is just sermons that Joseph Smith heard in the burned over district, that he puts into the mouths of King Benjamin and Alma and Mosiah and all these great people.
Dr. Coe: And the second coming, of course.
John: Right, all that kind of stuff. And then there’s a good chunk, he somewhat argues 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, with the tree and the fruit 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 this older brothers. You could ascribe a good chunk of the Book of Mormon to that.
And then if you want to say that there were these concerns about the Native Americans — these racist teachings about a light and the dark skinned people and even the book The View of the Hebrews and other books, claims or allegations contemporary to Joseph Smith that maybe the Native Americans came from Israel and Jerusalem itself, you could find books that said that. Then that whole part about the race narrative, and the dark and the light skin, and the travelling from Jerusalem can all be attributed to those sources, is that right?
Dr. Coe: Yes, that sounds right. [laughs] That sounds convincing to me, actually.
You mentioned the dream of Lehi. There are two very interesting publications that came out back in the days when the Book of Mormon archaeologists were running the archaeology department at BYU, about what we know of a Stela Five from Izapa. That’s a wonderful site that the New World Archeological Foundation excavated and wrote wonderful reports on. It’s a very early one that’s in Chiapas, not too far from where I was digging in Guatemala. It’s full of beautiful carved stone monuments, really interesting when stelae are slab stones with reliefs on them, full of iconography: gods doing all sorts of interesting stuff — stuff right out of the Popol Vuh narrative, actually, having to do with the hero twins and their defeat of the underworld gods, et cetera.
There is one publication with that stela on it, which is a very big and intricate one that artists have been trying to copy many times because it’s somewhat worn. One is a straightforward description of this stela. I would date the thing to about 100 BC maybe, what we call late pre-classic or late formative. And it’s very Maya in its content, actually.
But 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 precedent.
Okay, the publication comes out with a plain cover. It looks like an archaeological report, a good one, by M. Wells Jakeman who was a Book of Mormon archaeologist, a very important one back in the day.
Then there is another that’s put out for the true believers, which is totally different in content and in its cover. I’ve got a copy; it’s wonderful. Its cover is blue and the so-called tree of life from Lehi’s dream is all in gold. It’s a gold-on-blue cover; it’s a magnificent looking publication. It’s a pamphlet, but it really looks good, and inside it is completely dream-of-Lehi interpretation. So that is for the true believers and the other one is for the gentiles like myself.
This split goes all the way back, people trying to narrow this thing down. So 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 an icon that the Russians would have in the corner with a candle burning. I’ve seen it in Mormon houses that I’ve been in: there’s the dream of Lehi, it’s Stela Five from Izapa!
It’s just a different world. 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. It’s absolutely two different worlds.
John: 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. Coe: You mean from my point of view?
John: And just the narrative of this podcast, right?
Dr. Coe: I would never eviscerate somebody’s holy book. I mean, the Quran, you can look at the Quran, and you can do that kind of job on the Quran, but I don’t think it’s a good idea, really, because an enormous amount of people believe in this thing, and I’m not going to take their beliefs away from them; just don’t make me believe it.
John: I’m not saying you shouldn’t have done this podcast, but I think the effect to those who listen, who are trying to square these things, the data and the perspective that you offer will have that effect for some, right?
Dr. Coe: Well, you know what Jesus said famously when asked by a Rabbi, “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?” and he said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s”.
That amazes me 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, but 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: Let’s say there’s someone who says, “Well, Dr. Coe, I believed 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. If the Book of Mormon is a laughingstock to non-LDS anthropologists, and 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.” Do you have thoughts or feelings or perspective on that clash?
You can live in a partitioned world where you 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 into the place of a counselor, or a father, or a sage. How would you help someone who’s reaching this point in their lives, facing this conflict? What would you say to us?
Dr. Coe: I started out with a little bit of biography. 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, I’m not going to give up the teachings of Jesus, because they’re very good teachings. I just happen to not believe in the supernatural side of it. The miracles, the transubstantiation of the host, all these things that go along with Christianity. I simply can’t accept them as a scientist.
But I think in the world of morals and ethics, texts like the Bible — particularly the Sermon on the Mount, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be followed by many political fundamentalist Christians on these days — I think those are really important principles to go by, like 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’m a father, I’m a grandfather, many times over — in fact, some people think I’m immoral because I have so many children and grandchildren. I want them brought up 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 is full of things of this sort; the book of Job is about how 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. He wasn’t a big believer either. I don’t think he believed at all in the supernatural, but he tried to follow —
John: Who didn’t?
Dr. Coe: Jefferson, and I think other people in his generation were that way. A lot of the founding fathers at the most were deist, who believed in a general nature worship.
You can be a very moral ethical decent person without having to go the God way and decide that there’s a pie in the sky and a supernatural up there. Most scientists that I know, and I think there has 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 despite 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. He was exemplary, and yet he didn’t have any faith. He’d lost it, but he was a very moral ethical person, and if you can take this out of the Book of Mormon, don’t give it up.
John: 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 phenomenon, spiritual phenomenon in your life and just let go of the literality of it all and become —
Dr. Coe: Absolutely.
John: — as you wrote in Dialogue, a Liahona Mormon or a metaphorical symbolic Mormon, a cultural Mormon: not taking the doctrines and the teachings literally. That’s one option, right?
Dr. Coe: That’s exactly the point, you’re right to it.
John: Or you can stop believing, but still be a highly moral ethical person.
Dr. Coe: That’s absolutely true, I think. The majority of scientists in the world are that way, believe it or not, they’re not —
John: Demons.
Dr. Coe: — crazed madmen doing what they want to do with the world. They are family men, too.
John: Are you saying you’re not debaucherous?
Dr. Coe: No [laughs], you can give up all supernatural stuff and live a decent life as part of your own culture and society.
It’s hard for Mormons though, because that’s a cradle-to-grave thing. You’re in a place where the majority of the people around you are Mormons. You’re part of a society where your educational system and everything you do is surrounded with the church.
I think this was the 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 in order to do that.
John: And 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. Coe: [laughs] There’s a lot of history behind this, after all you have to remember that the LDS once had war with the United states. There’s a lot of bad history here. One of the first Sherlock Holmes’ books, A Study in Scarlet, is all about the avenging angels, the Danites, chastising and tearing after Mormon apostates. It’s an amazing book, an incredible story, but there’s a long history about this. Anti-Mormonism, anti-Mormon feelings, and vice versa. There’s a terrible history of this.
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. There they are.
John: What if people were to just discount you and your perspective, “This Dr. Coe is just clearly an anti-Mormon with an axe to grind, he’s just an atheistic, secular, bitter, angry man who must have been wronged by someone at some point, and he’s just coming at us as much as he can.” What would you say to that?
Dr. Coe: [laughs] Well, okay. It’s not true.
John: [laughs] Where’s your evidence, where’s the data?
Dr. Coe: [laughs] I’m not going to throw my curriculum vitae at you, but I have managed to raise a family, with 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, and they now have their students who I look on as my grandchildren, and they’re starting to get senior and have their students, too. So I don’t think I’ve done wrong.
John: And just really quickly: in this world of new media — Facebook and Twitter, and such — different things are possible. I went ahead on Facebook and posted, “Hey, I’m finishing up an interview with the anthropologist Dr. Coe”, and 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, “If Dr. Coe 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.”
What my question there is, what about people who say, “The Book of Mormon, okay, problem with that, but we’ve still got the Bible to cling to.” If someone is going to dig into the Bible, are they going to find similar archeological problems or not quite as severe or — ?
Dr. Coe: 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’s not one shred of evidence for that. So all these sections of the Bible are there for a purpose, but it’s to convince people that there was a reality when there was no reality there. The exodus is a fiction. It’s what you’d expect from people who are lording it over other people of a different ethnic group or different tribe that, “We came in and we conquered you people, we took this land over.” That’s what it’s all about, and you find this type of myth for the Aztecs. A very similar myth like that, that they came in and conquered all these people and made things new, came out of the deserts 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 crucifixion, 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.
Did that actually happen? It probably did, I’m not denying that, but there isn’t any 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 the ascension to Heaven, there isn’t any evidence for that. That’s in the realm of religion, of God, keep it there. There is no archeological scientific evidence for this at all. That is all I am trying to say.
John: This is a tough thing for believing Mormons to hear, but I think it is important if we are going to live in a world of reality, if we are 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. I really appreciate you being willing to share with us your life’s work and perspective even though it is a really tough pill to swallow.
Dr. Coe: It is. I don’t have any feelings of vengeance or anything of that sort, not at all. I am just passionate about it. As I said, I have a lot of very good friends who happen to be Mormons, so I am certainly not out to get them by any means. I respect them, absolutely, and I respect what has been done by this church in many places. But as far as scientific truth of it, no, I can’t swallow it.
John: Let’s end in the way Mormon Stories always ends. First of all, by thanking you so much. You are brilliant, and it seems like you’ve led a really good meaningful exemplary life in so many ways, and I am inspired. It makes me wish I could start my life over a little bit in some ways, but…
I usually ask the people that I listen to kind of bear their testimony about the truths of Mormonism that they still embrace. And I am 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.
When a Mormon says bear a testimony, it just means give us a few minutes of what’s true and what’s meaningful, and what’s lovely that you have learned from your experiences in life. It is a tall order, but just tell us a little bit about your life’s philosophy and what you find as beautiful and true as a way to maybe close this interview, if you don’t mind.
Dr. Coe: I think the first thing is, of course, I am involved with my own family, in my own society, in my own country, in my own world. I think science can help understand all of this, I really do. I think there is a scientific way to knowing all these things that is not necessarily the way of religion — or religion looks for things that perhaps science doesn’t, but it’s been a meaningful life for me.
I got to contemplate, to read about what is 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 a man’s awe at everything.
Not that I believe that there is a supernatural hand running everything. I get an immense kick out of reading about the evolution of people and men, and the other side that I think that I have been influenced by Christ’s teachings. Not that I am a Christlike person in any way, but his way of living and dealing with other people was the right one, absolutely.
And tolerance is certainly one thing that I think I have learned from that, which is not found in a lot of religions by a long shot [laughs]. Tremendous amounts of intolerance and hatred are bred by religions. You only have to look at the world today, what’s going on. People from the former Yugoslavia, for instance, three different groups — Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats — they are all identical, speak the same language, in culture they are the same people. And yet they hate each other, they are willing to kill each other, and why? Because they are all different in religion.
Religion can lead to terrible intolerance as well as tolerance. The history 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 did.
If I were asked who was the greatest man who ever lived other than Jesus, I would say Darwin. And I have had other scientists, very distinguished ones, to this day tell me the same thing. He was a wonderful person, and I think 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 to give them up 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 [laughs], and that’s the way I am, and I am too old to change it.
[Laughter]
John: Dr. Michael Coe, 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 have shared with us today? Anything you want to leave with us something to go to, to read —
Dr. Coe: I actually wrote an autobiography, a memoir, and it is called Final Report. Now that sounds grim [laughs] — that’s the last thing this guy going to say and then he’s off. Final Report, published by Thames and Hudson, New York, and it is called Final Report because archaeologists — after they finish tearing a site apart, doing all this digging — have to write a final report, and this is the final report on what I know as an archaeologist and as a human being.
John: Wow. We will try to remember to put a link up to that when we —
Dr. Coe: That’s self-advertising.
John: All right, Dr. Coe, thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough.
Dr. Coe: Thanks for inviting me.
Further Reading
- An Open Letter to Dr. Michael Coe by John L. Sorenson. Sorenson, professor emeritus of anthropology at BYU and author of Mormon’s Codex, offers a rebuttal to some of the points made by Coe in this interview.
- Mesoamerican Archaeologist Dr. Michael Coe — LiDAR, Response to John Sorenson, and the Book of Mormon [2018]. Coe returns to Mormon Stories Podcast and responds to Sorenson’s 2012 open letter.
- Fact-Checking Mormon History: Could Joseph Smith have Authored the Book of Mormon?
- More by Jonathan Ellis.
