Fellow LDS apologist Jeff Lindsay has a good blog post addressing the journal Science and their recent piece on Thomas Stuart Ferguson:
Science: "How a Mormon Lawyer Transformed Mesoamerican Archaeology—and Ended Up Losing His Faith"
Lindsay also links to a number of excellent pieces on Ferguson, including John Gee and Daniel Peterson & Matt Roper's reviews of Quest for the Gold Plates by Stan Larson:
Related resources:
Science: "How a Mormon Lawyer Transformed Mesoamerican Archaeology—and Ended Up Losing His Faith"
Lindsay also links to a number of excellent pieces on Ferguson, including John Gee and Daniel Peterson & Matt Roper's reviews of Quest for the Gold Plates by Stan Larson:
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.
John Gee reproduced the following from John L. Sorenson, author of Mormon's
Codex and other excellent volumes on the Book of Mormon, in his
review of Charles Larson's By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus (1992)
Addendum
John L. Sorenson
John L. Sorenson
A recently published
book by Charles M. Larson, . . . By His Own Hand upon Papyrus: A New
Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri, contains references to Thomas Stuart Ferguson
(p. 180) which demand that I correct the record.
In the first place,
the writer makes a number of errors which show, at least, lack of rigor in
preparation of this book:
1. Ferguson
established the New World Archaeological Foundation as a private organization,
not "at Brigham Young University." After problems arose in
administering its work, under funding from the Latter-day Saint Church, the
Church insisted that the Foundation be brought under the administrative and
financial cognizance of Brigham Young University if support was to continue,
whereupon Ferguson's role became advisory and limited.
2. The Society for
Early Historic Archaeology was independent, not "BYU's." Ferguson
briefly had a nominal connection with the SEHA but in fact opposed most of what
the SEHA undertook.
3. Milton R. Hunter,
coauthor with Ferguson of the book Ancient America and the Book of
Mormon, was not an apostle but one of the First Council of Seventy.
4. Ferguson himself
never "received substantial grants from the LDS Church." The
Foundation he originated did, but the money was to fund professional
archaeologists, about half of them non-Mormons, and was never for his
individual use.
The early history of
the Foundation has been sketched by J. Alden Mason, non-LDS professor emeritus
of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, in his Foreword to
"Research in Chiapas, Mexico." Dr. Mason referred to the Latter-day
Saint Church's funding of the work this way: "The world is much indebted
to this Church for its outstanding contribution to the advancement of
archeological [sic] research and the increase of scientific knowledge,"
and "The stated purpose of this Foundation is not to seek
corroboration of the Book of Mormon account, but to help to resolve the problem
of whether civilization in Middle America developed autochthonously or as a
result of diffused or migrated influence from some area of the Old World, and
to shed light on the culture and way of life of the ancients during the
formative period." (J. Alden Mason, foreword to "Research in Chiapas,
Mexico," Papers of the NWAF, No. 1 (1959), iii, the first of a distinguished series of
professional monographs now running through No. 65.)
Larson implies that
Ferguson was one of the "scholars and intellectuals in the Church"
and that "his study" was conducted along the lines of reliable
scholarship in the "field of archaeology." Those of us with personal
experience with Ferguson and his thinking knew differently. He held an
undergraduate law degree but never studied archaeology or related disciplines
at a professional level, although he was self-educated in some of the
literature of American archaeology. He held a naive view of "proof,"
perhaps related to his law practice where one either "proved" his
case or lost the decision; compare the approach he used in his simplistic
lawyerly book One Fold and One Shepherd. (Thomas S. Ferguson, One Fold and One Shepherd, rev. ed. (Salt
Lake City: Olympus, 1962), 230ff.) His associates with scientific
training and thus more sophistication in the pitfalls involving intellectual
matters could never draw him away from his narrow view of "research."
(For example, in April 1953, when he and I did the first archaeological reconnaissance
of central Chiapas, which defined the Foundation's work for the next twenty
years, his concern was to ask if local people had found any figurines of
"horses," rather than to document the scores of sites we discovered
and put on record for the first time.) His role in "Mormon
scholarship" was largely that of enthusiast and publicist, for which we
can be grateful, but he was neither scholar nor analyst.
Ferguson was never
an expert on archaeology and the Book of Mormon (let alone on the book of Abraham,
about which his knowledge was superficial). He was not one whose careful
"study" led him to see greater light, light that would free him from
Latter-day Saint dogma, as Larson represents. Instead he was just a layman,
initially enthusiastic and hopeful but eventually trapped by his unjustified
expectations, flawed logic, limited information, perhaps offended pride, and
lack of faith in the tedious research that real scholarship requires. The
negative arguments he used against the Latter-day Saint scriptures in his last
years display all these weaknesses.
Larson, like others
who now wave Ferguson's example before us as a case of emancipation from
benighted Mormon thinking, never faces the question of which Tom Ferguson was
the real one. Ought we to respect the hard-driving younger man whose
faith-filled efforts led to a valuable major research program, or should we
admire the double-acting cynic of later years, embittered because he never hit
the jackpot on, as he seems to have considered it, the slot-machine of
archaeological research? I personally prefer to recall my bright-eyed,
believing friend, not the aging figure Larson recommends as somehow wiser.