Lizzie Wade, an excellent science writer with impressive experience and credentials (see LizzieWade.com), just published a touching and beautifully written story about Thomas Ferguson in the illustrious journal Science. Her valuable but slightly flawed essay is “How a Mormon Lawyer Transformed Mesoamerican Archaeology—and Ended Up Losing His Faith,” Science,  vol. 359, issue 6373 (19 Jan 2018): 264-268 (DOI: 10.1126/science.359.6373.264), at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6373/264.full. It is also available as a PDF.

She looks respectfully at his life, first reviewing his early enthusiasm for Book of Mormon evidence that he hoped to find easily and quickly by going to Mesoamerica. She recognizes the great good that has come from the efforts that he initiated through the New World Archaeological Foundation (NWAF) that he founded in 1951. She quotes Michael Coe, the famous archaeologist and professor emeritus at Yale University: “They were working in a part of Mesoamerica that was really unknown. NWAF put it on the map.”

Wade kindly and appropriately recognizes NWAF’s ongoing work, and gives some insight into the Church’s ongoing role in the research work being carried out:

“It’s such a stimulating place to work,” says Janine Gasco, an archaeologist at California State University in Dominguez Hills, who began working with NWAF in 1978. “It’s been a force in my life.”

In the years after Ferguson drifted away from the church and the foundation, NWAF continued to lead excavations, fund graduate students, publish an impressive amount of raw data, and store archaeological collections. Thanks to its work, a region that once seemed an archaeological backwater compared with the nearby Classic Mayan heartland in the Yucatán, Guatemala, and Belize has been revealed as the birthplace of Mesoamerican civilization and an economic and cultural hot spot, where people from all over the region crossed paths. “We wouldn’t know anything about [central and coastal] Chiapas if it wasn’t for [NWAF],” García-Des Lauriers says.

“Their work set the stage for everything I’ve done,” says SUNY Albany’s Rosenswig, who led recent excavations at Izapa to study the origins of urban life in Mesoamerica. When his graduate student Rebecca Mendelsohn, now a postdoc at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, excavated in Izapa in 2014, NWAF’s original map of its mounds and monuments served as a vital field reference (Science, 16 May 2014, p. 684). “I’ve been surprised at how sound the work from the 1960s still is,” she says.

NWAF is still run by BYU, which means its funding comes from the Mormon church and all its directors have been Mormons. But aside from a ban on coffee at headquarters, the archaeologists who work here barely notice its religious roots. “There aren’t conversations about religion,” Gasco says. “The archaeological community has a lot of respect for the work done here.”

As an aside, I’m pleased to see this acknowledgement for the pro-scholarship, hands-off approach the Church is taking. Research finds do not need to be vetted by General Authorities to ensure they are faith-promoting. This is in contrast to the New York Times harsh obituary on Thomas S. Monson that stated that the Church usually vets publications from historians who are given access to church documents, a claim sharply disputed by Scott Gordon at FairMormon as I discussed in my previous post.

One aspect of Wade’s essay that is especially interesting was her treatment of his loss in faith. She states that the real catalyst was disappointment over the Book of Abraham rather than issues over Book of Mormon evidence per se. Unfortunately, she may have missed some important facts about Ferguson and his testimony on both of these issues, which I’ll touch upon below.

As for Ferguson and the Book of Abraham, I would not expect Wade to have known this, but Wade’s struggle is based on a serious misunderstanding of a fundamental issue, a misunderstanding that our critics tend to propagate. The papyrus fragments discovered in 1967 that drew Ferguson’s interest were remnants of the original collection of papyrus scrolls in Joseph’s collection, a tiny fraction of the original set. There are good reasons to doubt that those fragments came from the same scroll that Joseph identified as the Book of Abraham. Ferguson’s faith crisis was fueled by sloppy methodology, but having gone through roughly the same faith crisis over the Book of Abraham, I can understand how easy it is to not ask the right questions and come to the wrong conclusions, especially when people like the fraudulent “Egyptologist” Dee Jay Nelson are spinning the data for you. I’m grateful that I had the patience to keep learning and get past that.

Thomas Ferguson is a favorite topic for some of our critics because his story supports such a perfect narrative for criticizing LDS claims. Here is my paraphrase of the typical argument:

A scholar decided to dig into the evidence, literally, for the Book of Mormon in the Americas. He went to the only reasonable location for Book of Mormon events and looked for the archaeological evidence that the book requires. To his great dismay, he couldn’t find anything and lost his testimony. This courageous scholar dared to speak out and let us know that instead of proving the Book of Mormon to be true, as he intended, he discovered it was fiction.

Lizzie Wade is much more even-handed. This is not a hit piece but a carefully considered and respectful retrospective. (Of course, one can ask why the focus on a disillusioned lawyer trying to do hasty archaeology?) To Wade’s credit, rather than just regurgitate anti-Mormon websites, she has actually interviewed and included quotes from a couple of people that knew Thomas Ferguson, namely, John Clark and John Sorenson. I commend her for that.

Unfortunately, the story leaves out some important information and ultimately relies on a critical narrative (from others, I think) that makes far too much of Ferguson’s loss of faith and leaves little room for readers to appreciate that there are serious LDS scholars with the training Ferguson lacked who can delve into Mesoamerican archaeology or Egyptology without losing their faith, scholars who understand that scientific research especially in archaeology is messy, difficult, and often takes a great deal of time to get meaningful results. Read alone, her story may create the impression that the evidence related to the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham is so weak that a serious scholar could not maintain their faith if they seriously considered it.

One reading Wade’s essay might conclude that Ferguson is the prime example of a Mormon scholar who actually dared to pursue and accept the evidence from archaeology (or Egyptology). One might conclude that it’s a foregone conclusion that Ferguson’s reaction to the evidence is the only intellectually honest response possible. But such conclusions do not fit the data. There is much that is left unsaid by Wade here that might be relevant. On the relationship between academic scholarship and the Book of Mormon, consider this excerpt from “Book of Mormon Archaeology and Agenda-Driven Narratives” at Studio et Quoque Fide by Neal Rappleye, 2013:

The problem with this agenda-driven narrative [regarding common treatments of the Thomas Ferguson story of his loss of faith] is it ignores the lives of countless others, like M. Wells Jakeman (deceased), Gareth Lowe (deceased), Bruce W. Warren (deceased), John L. Sorenson, John E. Clark, V. Garth Norman, F. Richard Hauck, Brant A. Gardner, Mark Alan Wright, Allen J. Christensen, and Joseph L. Allen. These 11 individuals all have 3 things in common: (1) They each have advanced degrees that in some way focused or emphasized pre-Columbian Mesoamerica; (2) They each have participated in on-site research at archaeological sites in Mesoamerica; (3) They all believe the Book of Mormon is true and has some basis in Mesoamerican history.

There are others who have those same 3 things in common with the above individuals, but I have chosen to limit my list to people who have publicly made their views clear by having published on the topic. Of course, just because I can rattle off a long list of such individuals does not mean that the Book of Mormon is true, and I want to be clear that is not what I am arguing. But surely what they think about the Book of Mormon is at least as relevant as Thomas Stuart Ferguson’s ultimate stance on the matter, if not more so. They all are more qualified than Ferguson, and most of them have spent much more time than Ferguson ever did thinking about how the Book of Mormon fits into the larger picture of Mesoamerica. John L. Sorenson, for instance, just published a lengthy volume summing up some 60+ years of research on the topic. More to the point, however, these people directly undo the agenda-driven narrative of the critics. As it turns out, it is not inevitable that if you seriously investigate this you will come up empty handed and lose your faith. They all believe in the Book of Mormon, and they insist that there is evidence which supports that belief. What’s more, many of them demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of the limitations of archeology and thus have more tempered expectations of what kind of evidence it can produce. Those (on this list) who knew Ferguson have reported that he had rather naïve expectations of archaeology and evidence.

The title of Wade’s essay promises to explain “how” Ferguson lost his faith. But before addressing the “how,” it’s fair to first ask about the “did” in this story. What exactly is the evidence that Ferguson actually and fully lost his faith? It seems that he did, but some parts of the story are unclear and some may be speculation. Unfortunately, Wade provides no footnotes or bibliography for her essay. What are her sources? She mentions several of Ferguson’s letters and quotes several people who knew him, but is she relying on other secondary sources as well?

In my opinion, her presentation of information seems to draw upon the writings of Stan Larson, who appears to be the source for much of Wade’s research on this topic. Larson has two related publications on Ferguson. First, “The Odyssey of Thomas Stuart Ferguson” in Dialog: A Journal of Mormon Thought, vol. 23, no. 1 (1990): 55–93. The other is Stan Larson’s book, The Quest for the Gold Plates (Salt Lake City, UT: Freethinker Press, 1997). I don’t yet know if the details Larson provides can be extracted from the unpublished letters of Thomas Ferguson, but in both Larson’s book and his article, he describes a scene from one of Ferguson’s early adventures with three companions in January 1948, giving details that I haven’t found in other sources: “Lying in his jungle hammock at the site of Aguacatal during a heavy tropical rain, Ferguson wrote the following by the light of a small flashlight: ‘We have discovered a very great city here in the heart of “Bountiful” land’ [emphasis added].” Wade also has this:

Thomas Stuart Ferguson lay in his hammock, certain that he had found the promised land.
It had been raining for 5 hours in his camp in tropical Mexico on this late January
evening in 1948, and his three campmates had long since drifted off to sleep. But
Ferguson was vibrating with excitement. Eager to tell someone what he had seen, he
dashed through the downpour to retrieve paper from his supply bag. Ensconced in his
hammock’s cocoon of mosquito netting, he clicked on his flashlight and began to
write a letter home.

“We have discovered a very great city here in the heart of
‘Bountiful’ land,” Ferguson wrote. [emphasis added]

The details of the hammock, the rain, and the flashlight seem like the kind of thing one would not bother to record in one’s letters or journal. Where does that come from? Let me know if you’ve got a primary source. A search for “Thomas Ferguson” plus “hammock” or “Mormon” and “hammock” for me yields only two relevant hits: Larson’s article, and now Wade’s publication in Science. Searching at Google Books also reveals Wade’s book at the top of the list and the only relevant candidate I could find.

Larson has been criticized for  employing apparent gifts of mind-reading in understanding what Ferguson thought and how he felt in the absence of solid information, and Wade seems to have outdone Larson a time or two in her article. Literary license, perhaps, or maybe she has other sources I am missing. Larson also makes much of the Book of Abraham as the turning point for Larson, which is also a major point for Wade. I think it’s fair to conclude that Larson’s thinking if not a few of his specific words have played a role in what Science has published. Wade may, for example, have relied on Larson’s account of Ferguson’s struggle with the Book of Abraham as the initial cause of Larson’s weakened or destroyed testimony and ultimate loss of faith. It may be accurate, but there is more that needs to be said and much that Larson overlooks in his more complete treatment.

Recognizing Stan Larson as the possible source for at least some of Wade’s approach, it is appropriate to consider the limitations of Larson’s work. An important and arguably devastating rebuttal to Larson’s widely adopted spin on Ferguson was offered by Daniel C. Peterson and Matthew Roper in “Ein Heldenleben? On Thomas Stuart Ferguson as an Elias for Cultural Mormons,” FARMS Review of Books, 16/1 (2004). Here is an excerpt:

At several points in Larson’s book, judgments are pronounced without a clear basis to justify them…. Consider … the following: “Disenchanted, he became a Mormon ‘closet doubter’”—that is, someone who “privately disbelieves some of the basic teachings of the Church but keeps that disbelief hidden from his/her public image. Typically this state of skepticism is preceded by an extended period of strong belief in those same tenets” (p. 134). What undergirds Larson’s judgment here? A survey? Personal experience? … More importantly, after noting that Ferguson’s beliefs subsequent to the early 1960s can be known only from “his conversations and letters” (p. 135), Larson declares that the years 1969-70 “are a documentary blank with no known letters” (p. 136). Undeterred by this lacuna, though, he proceeds to tell us what happened during that time period: Ferguson went through “a period of soul-searching and reflection” and “agonized to find a spiritual meaning to his beliefs. He reexamined his assumptions about the Book of Abraham and even began to question the historicity of the Book of Mormon” (p. 136). Fawn Brodie herself could hardly have bettered this.

Nevertheless, we are quite prepared to entertain the idea that Thomas Stuart Ferguson lost his faith. It seems the most plausible reading of some of the evidence. There are, however, several contrary indications that muddy the waters a bit. For instance, the 1975 symposium paper on which Larson places such weight can be read, in a few passages, as expressing at least a hope that the Book of Mormon might be true. And Thomas Ferguson’s son Larry recalls sitting on a patio with his father shortly after his father had returned from a trip to Mexico with Elder Howard W. Hunter of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. It was only one month before the senior Ferguson’s entirely unexpected death. “For no apparent reason, out of the blue,” Larry recalls, Thomas Stuart Ferguson turned to his son and bore his testimony. “Larry,” he said, “the Book of Mormon is exactly what Joseph Smith said it is.” Sometime earlier, Ferguson had borne a similar testimony to his wife, Larry’s mother, and, during the year before he died, he had participated in an effort to distribute the Book of Mormon to non-Latter-day Saints. He included his photograph along with the following testimony in several copies of the book:

We have studied the Book of Mormon for 50 years. We can tell you that it follows only the New Testament as a written witness to the mission, divinity, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it seems to us that there is no message that is needed by man and mankind more than the message of Christ. Millions of people have come to accept Jesus as the Messiah because of reading the Book of Mormon in a quest for truth. The book is the cornerstone of the Mormon Church.

The greatest witness to the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is the book itself. But many are the external evidences that support it.

Ferguson also called Robert and Rosemary Brown of Mesa, Arizona, and told them that, yes, the writings of the amateur Egyptologist Dee Jay Nelson had caused him a brief period of doubt about the Book of Abraham. But, he said, their devastating exposé of Nelson’s charlatanry had turned him right around. Shortly before his death, he also told the Browns that Jerald and Sandra Tanner had been publishing material from him without his permission and indicated that he was contemplating a lawsuit against them. He even declared that some of what had been published as coming from him was a forgery.

That last paragraph is important, bringing us full circle to the root cause of Ferguson’s faith crisis. If the Book of Abraham was only a temporary albeit years-long crisis for him, and if his faith was at least partially recovered after considering the clear evidence of fraud from one of the “scholars” who had convinced him to abandon the Book of Abraham, then the story of Thomas Ferguson has quite a different flavor to it than readers of Science might get. In addition to Peterson and Roper, also see several serious issues raised by John Gee in “The Hagiography of Doubting Thomas,” FARMS Review of Books 10/2 (1998).

Ferguson clearly had a faith crisis and may have doubted either the Book of Abraham or the Book of Mormon for years, but it is not clear that he permanently lost his faith or if permanent, how much was lost. He may have been a closet doubter for years, but he remained in the Church. Michael Coe is quoted as feeling sorry for him because of this, as if Ferguson lacked the courage, the strength, and the resolve to leave the Church he knew was false. But Ferguson clearly was a man of courage, strength, and resolve, ready to take swift and bold action, even if over-zealous and unrealistic. That he stayed in the Church even with his doubts, however long they lasted and how deep the ran, may say more about how much of his faith actually stayed intact than Coe or Wade have given him credit for.

Whatever degree of faith was lost, what do Ferguson’s setbacks regarding LDS scripture really tell us? Does it reveal fundamental about the plausibility of the Book of Mormon or conflicts between  archaeology and religion or faith and science? Or does it just stand as a warning against unrealistic expectations in any new field without proper preparation and training?

Wade’s article assumes that the narrative on Thomas Ferguson’s loss of faith in the Book of Mormon is accurate, in spite of some evidence to the contrary, but she may be right. But if so, what makes this newsworthy or even interesting? “The apostasy of prominent religious figures is hardly a novelty” as Peterson and Roper point out. If this lawyer did truly lose his faith when he failed to realize his
unrealistic hopes of finding dramatic evidence through amateur
jackpot-seeking, why is this significant? What does this tell us about
science or faith? Why is this worthy of so much attention, including the pages of Science magazine? It’s a question Neal Rappleye already asked back in 2013:

There are a few questions worth asking at this point. Why is the story
of a single, amateur archaeologist worthy of constant retelling, but
those of 11 persons with relevant training and field experience not even
worthy of acknowledgement? If the loosing of faith is inevitable for
those who honestly look at the evidence (or lack thereof), why is it
that those in the best position to know what the evidence is continue to
believe? Why aren’t there more stories like that of Ferguson’s among
LDS archaeologists? Is it honest of critics to use the story of Ferguson
while not mentioning these others, and often ignoring the large body of
work they have assembled on the subject?

For Peterson and Roper, the key lesson from Ferguson’s story is not the one that Larson and other critics would draw. Rather, his story warns us about the needs for realism and proper preparation in any scientific, scholarly, or even religious pursuit:

Stan Larson apparently sees the doubting Thomas Stuart Ferguson as a significant harbinger, a role model, and wants his readers to see him in the same way. But is this justified? “The odyssey of Ferguson,” wrote Larson in the earlier printed version of this work, “is a quest for religious certitude through archaeological evidences.” Precisely. And there’s the rub. Larson refers to Ferguson’s growing conviction of his personal role to demonstrate to the world the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, “His major goal in life” was “proving that Jesus Christ really appeared in ancient Mexico after his crucifixion and resurrection” (p. 69). This sort of language, if it accurately reflects Ferguson’s self-image, perhaps offers a clue to the reason for his possible loss of faith. He was distressed, for example, that inscriptions related to the Book of Mormon were not forthcoming. But it is only within the past few years that any inscriptional evidence even of the biblical “house of David” has been found. The earlier incarnation of Larson’s book quotes a letter from Ferguson to his friend Wendell Phillips, telling about his plans for a trip to the Near East in April 1961. Ferguson intended to travel, among other destinations, to Oman, where, he said, he would “climb to the top of the mountain nearest the sea in Oman and look around for any inscriptions that might have been left on the mountain by Nephi, where he talked to the Lord.” Was he serious? Ferguson’s feeling that one of his early manuscripts “would be a powerful influence for world peace” (p. 16), if it is accurately reported, suggests some degree of estrangement from reality. Likewise, his prediction—following brief remarks about the problem of identifying the Preclassic inhabitants of the Upper Grijalva River basin—that “the solution may well have far-reaching implications and results for the general welfare of the present inhabitants of the earth” clearly seems to ask of archaeology far more than it can ever possibly deliver.

“My personal experience with Tom Ferguson and his evangelism,” recalls Professor John L. Sorenson,

crystallized in a period of 10 days that he and I spent in intensive archaeological survey in April 1953 in the Chiapas central depression. In the field, out of my academic training I saw a host of things which did not register with him. His primary concern was to ask wherever we went if anyone had seen “figurines of horses.” That epitomized his unsubtle concept of “proof.” I could only cringe at this jackpot-or-nothing view of archaeology. No wonder the man’s “quest” failed! He began with naive expectations and they served him right to the end.

“He wondered,” reports Larson, “why the evidence for the antiquity of the Book of Mormon was not coming forth as expected. He was genuinely disappointed that the archaeological support for the Book of Mormon was not being discovered at the rate he had anticipated” (p. 69). Again, though, progress in Mesoamerican archaeology did not destroy the testimony of M. Wells Jakeman. An interesting future question for research would center on why a professional expert in the field remained evidently undisturbed by matters that may have proved troubling to the faith of an amateur. Were Ferguson’s expectations unrealistic? As Sorenson said in 1996 of Professor Jakeman, whose Berkeley dissertation dealt with “the ethnic and political structure of Yucatan immediately preceding the Spanish conquest,” “he remained methodologically cautious his whole life regarding ‘proof’ of the Book of Mormon,” yet “he also still remains a believer in the Book of Mormon.” Are the two facts related?

We argue that Thomas Ferguson was methodologically incautious in his believing days and that this continued into his apparent time of doubt.

Reality is complicated. Archaeology is complicated. Gaining breakthroughs or just insightful knowledge through digging or exploring even in the most fertile fields takes time, sometimes many lifetimes, no matter how sincere and zealous the hopes of a believer may be. Meanwhile, there are LDS scholars who have developed the skills needed for the patient, realistic work in archaeology, Egyptology, linguistics, and other fields relevant to the Book of Mormon, who have over the decades helped us discover and appreciate a growing body of evidence for the very complex and challenging Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham, and I look forward patiently to further discoveries and occasionally revolutions as the research continues.

Ferguson’s story does the have the romantic appeal of an amateur dashing off to a mysterious foreign land to search firsthand for evidence related to his faith, ready to go wherever the data leads. But for that angle, a much more interesting headline for Science‘s next article of this kind ought to be this: “The Warren Aston Story: How An Amateur Mormon Explorer Helped Unveil the First Hard Archaeological Evidence for the Book of Mormon in Yemen and Possibly Found the Mysterious Place ‘Bountiful’ to Boot.” See my Book of Mormon Evidences page and Warren Aston’s Lehi and Sariah in Arabia for some details.

Related resources:

• John Gee, “The Hagiography of Doubting Thomas,” FARMS Review of Books 10/2 (1998).
• Daniel C. Peterson and Matthew Roper, “Ein Heldenleben? On Thomas Stuart Ferguson as an Elias for Cultural Mormons,” FARMS Review of Books, 16/1 (2004).
• Warren Aston’s book, Lehi and Sariah in Arabia, available on Kindle. See also Lehi in Arabia, at www.lehiinarabia.com/for info on the DVD, which can also be watched online for free. 
• Neal Rappleye, “Book of Mormon Archaeology and Agenda-Driven Narratives,” Studio et Quoque Fide, 2013.