About that, this is Coe’s strongest argument—and it is difficult to dismiss.

Linguistic Evidence

The Maya writing system has been largely deciphered and is now well understood. It records the Ch’orti’ Maya language, which is still spoken today. Linguists worldwide have analyzed thousands of inscriptions—on monuments, ceramics, and codices—have been analyzed by linguists worldwide by linguistics.

Crucially, none contain Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian, or any Near Eastern linguistic influence.

The Olmec Case

In addition, the Olmec — sometimes proposed by some LDS scholars as the Jaredites — left behind the Cascajal Block, the only known Olmec inscription. Coe co-published this discovery. It is entirely Native American in character. In contrast, the Book of Mormon describes a literate Near Eastern civilisation maintaining records in a Near Eastern language for 1,000 years in the Americas. Researchers have never found any trace of that language tradition has ever been found anywhere across Mesoamerica.

Geographic Implications

In Part I, Coe noted this point with BYU linguist Robertson in mind: Robertson himself worked on Maya decipherment and could not produce Old World linguistic parallels. In Part II, Coe returned to this when responding to Sorenson’s open letter, noting that Sorenson’s reference to Brian Stubs finding Semitic influence in Uto-Aztecan languages is disputed and entirely outside Robertson’s Maya speciality.

Geographically, the Maya lowlands, where LDS scholars most often place the Book of Mormon — the Maya lowlands —have the most thoroughly documented language record, and it is wholly non-Semitic.

Assessment: Coe Has the Stronger Argument — By a Significant Margin

Archaeological Absence

The Book of Mormon mentions many animals, like horses, cattle, oxen, donkeys, goats, sheep, swine, and elephants. Also mentions instruments and supplies like chariots, steel swords, shields, wheat, barley, and silk as features of Nephite and Jaredite civilisation. Meanwhile, the archaeological record of Mesoamerica contains none of these in the relevant time periods.

Pollen Evidence

Even more decisively, pollen evidence is exceptionally strong. Wheat and barley, if grown, would have produced windblown pollen preserved in lake sediments. Palynologists (pollen scientists) have drilled lake beds across Mesoamerica for decades. Researchers have never found wheat or barley pollen in pre-Spanish sediments.

Rather than an absence of excavation, it is a direct scientific test that fails. Steel and iron, even if rusted, would leave chemical traces that modern methods can detect by modern methods. Archaeologists have found none in the relevant contexts. Gold and copper do not appear in Mesoamerica until roughly 700–800 AD, after the Book of Mormon narrative ends.

LDS Response: Loan-Shift Theory

Where LDS scholarship has a partial response: The “loan-shift” argument — that the English translation may use familiar words for unfamiliar animals (e.g. “horse” for tapir, “chariot” for litter) — has genuine linguistic precedent. The Aztecs called Spanish horses “deer that people ride.” FAIR LDS documents multiple historical examples of this phenomenon. And some LDS scholars note that BYU archaeologist John Clark has documented possible pre-Columbian horse remains in Yucatán caves, though the dates remain disputed.

However, Coe’s response was direct: you can’t twist language indefinitely. If “sword” means obsidian club, and “horse” means tapir, and “chariot” means carrying platform and “steel” means something else entirely, the text loses its predictive power. The cumulative weight of multiple simultaneous loan-shift explanations strains credibility even if each explanation is linguistically possible.

DNA Evidence

The scientific consensus on Native American origins is robust and has been strengthened since 2018 by ancient DNA studies. Pre-Columbian Native Americans — including skeletal remains from underwater Yucatán caves dated to well before the Book of Mormon period — descend from populations that crossed the Bering land bridge from Northeast Asia. No pre-Columbian DNA sample from anywhere in the Americas has shown Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, or Mediterranean ancestry.

Church Response

The Church’s own Gospel Topics Essay on DNA and the Book of Mormon acknowledges this directly and responds that Lehi’s group may have been too small to leave a detectable genetic signature. This uses legitimate population genetics — small immigrant groups can be absorbed into larger populations without leaving detectable traces. However, it requires the same “small population” reasoning used for linguistics, and creates the same tension with Book of Mormon population descriptions of armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Chiasmus — a Hebrew literary structure in which a passage’s elements are repeated in reverse order — appears extensively throughout the Book of Mormon. LDS scholars, particularly John Welch, have documented complex chiastic structures that they argue are too sophisticated and numerous to have occurred by chance. Scholars first identified chiasmus in the Book of Mormon by Welch in 1967 — well after Joseph Smith’s death — suggesting he could not have deliberately inserted it as a forgery signal.

Coe acknowledged chiasmus exists in Mesoamerican literature (including the Popol Vuh) and throughout world poetry generally, and noted the King James Bible contains extensive parallel and chiastic structures that Joseph Smith knew intimately. He is right that chiasmus is not unique to the Book of Mormon. But the LDS argument is more specific: the Book of Mormon contains large-scale, multi-element chiastic structures that are characteristic of Hebrew composition but unlikely to arise spontaneously in 19th-century American writing.

Both sides have a point. The debate continues in peer-reviewed venues and has not been resolved.

Assessment: Genuinely Contested — Both Sides Have Legitimate Points

Chiasmus is neither a decisive proof of ancient authorship nor easily dismissed. It is one of the most interesting textual features of the Book of Mormon, and merits continued scholarly attention from both directions.

LDS blogger Kirk Magleby’s February 2018 article — which Dehlin read to Coe in detail — did overreach significantly. Claiming that LiDAR’s discovery of roads, fortifications, and settlement patterns constitutes specific proof of Book of Mormon historicity conflates generic civilisational features with specific textual predictions. Coe’s pushback on this was warranted.

Where Coe somewhat understated his case, LiDAR has genuinely revealed that Mesoamerican civilisation during the Book of Mormon time period was more complex and populous than previously understood. The El Mirador basin in Guatemala shows evidence of one of the largest pre-Columbian cities in the Americas, with a pyramid larger by volume than any Egyptian pyramid, dated to approximately 300 BC–150 AD — directly within Nephite narrative time periods. Coe himself had confirmed that morning (before the interview) that LiDAR had found previously unknown fortifications in northern Guatemala.

The honest framing: LiDAR found things consistent with large-scale civilisation during the right time period in the right geographic area. It did not find specifically Nephite culture — no inscriptions, no identifiable religious structures, no Old World cultural markers. Consistency is not confirmation.

Coe’s falsifiability concern is real and important. Karl Popper’s principle — that scientific hypotheses must be capable of being disproved — is foundational to scientific reasoning. If a theory can explain any evidence (or absence of evidence) by making its target population infinitely small, it becomes scientifically untestable. Coe was right to identify this pattern in how some apologists respond to every challenge.

Where LDS scholarship has a genuine point: The small-population argument is not invented mythology — it is standard population genetics. Small immigrant groups do get genetically and linguistically absorbed into larger existing populations. The Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland — which Coe himself visited — lasted only a couple of years yet left detectable archaeological evidence precisely because it was eventually excavated after decades of targeted searching. Scholars developed the limited geography model from internal textual analysis, not invented to escape criticism.

The honest tension: the model does use legitimate science, but it requires abandoning Joseph Smith’s own and all subsequent prophets’ identification of Native Americans broadly as Lamanite descendants — a high theological cost that LDS scholars acknowledge.

Coe is largely correct about the Quetzalcoatl narrative. The “great white god” identification was substantially constructed by Spanish conquistadors seeking to portray Cortez as a returning deity to ease the conquest, not by pre-Columbian peoples as a religious tradition. Researchers have fully deciphered the Temple of the Cross: it depicts King K’an B’alam’s dynastic succession, with no reference to Christ, Hebrew figures, or any Old World religious tradition.

Where this actually points LDS scholarship forward:

Modern LDS apologetics has substantially moved away from the Quetzalcoatl argument. The New World Archaeological Foundation — founded by Thomas Stewart Ferguson and supported by the Church — conducted serious scientific archaeology in Chiapas for decades and found no such evidence.

Contemporary LDS scholars at FAIR and the Interpreter Foundation rarely lead with Quetzalcoatl precisely because Coe’s type of critique has been internalised. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essays do not mention Quetzalcoatl. This is an argument where Coe won, and LDS scholarship has largely conceded the ground.

Assessment: Coe Correct — But the Best LDS Scholarship Has Moved Past This

Coe’s 19th-century composition theory — that Joseph Smith synthesised the King James Bible, mound builder mythology, Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, the racial theories of his day, and his own imagination — is historically well-grounded and serious. Much of the Book of Mormon’s structure does map onto identifiable 19th-century sources and concerns.

Where this argument is incomplete:

The Book of Mormon contains features that are genuinely difficult to explain by 19th-century composition alone. The Nahom/NHM discovery — three altars dated to the 7th–6th centuries BCE found by non-LDS German archaeologists in Yemen, corresponding to the location where Nephi says Ishmael was buried — was not known in 1830 and was not discoverable from any available map or text of the period.

The complex chiasmic structures discussed above were unknown to Western scholars until 1967. The Book of Mormon’s conspicuous absence of distinctively Mesoamerican features (chocolate, turkeys, jaguars, Maya writing) — which Coe himself raised — is also awkward for a 19th-century composition theory: why would someone imagining an elaborate ancient American civilisation leave out these things?

Coe did not engage Nahom in either interview. It is not a decisive proof, but it is a feature of the text that the 19th-century composition hypothesis handles poorly.

Assessment: LDS Scholarship Has Genuine Responses, Coe Did Not Engage

Those who deploy Coe’s arguments against the Book of Mormon rarely quote his extraordinary assessment of Joseph Smith himself. Coe consistently — in both interviews, in the PBS documentary, and in his 1973 Dialogue article — expressed deep admiration for Smith.

He compared him to shamans and prophets across history who begin with what may be performance, accumulate followers, and ultimately come to genuinely believe their own revelations. Coe said he believed Joseph Smith was “willing to sacrifice his life for it, which is the ultimate test.” He did not call Smith a con man or a liar; he called him a genius.

This nuance matters for how truth seekers receive Coe’s critique. He is not saying Joseph Smith was corrupt or malicious. He is saying the Book of Mormon is the product of one of the most remarkable minds in American history, working in a specific cultural moment, producing something extraordinary — whether or not it is what it claims to be. That is a more honest and more interesting argument than “it’s a fraud.”

A Point the Episode Does Not Dwell On

Both interviews — presented by Dehlin as potentially the most faith-challenging in Mormon Stories history — end with Coe giving essentially the same compassionate advice: the archaeological and historical questions about the Book of Mormon are separable from the question of whether LDS faith produces good human lives. He drew this distinction explicitly in Part I (“render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”) and again in Part II.

His concern was never with the faith itself — it was with the anti-science epistemology of Mormon apologetics, and with the racist implications of the Lamanite narrative as historically transmitted. On the faith as a way of life, he was genuinely respectful. In Part I, he explicitly recommended that members could become “cultural Mormons” — embracing LDS values and community without requiring literal historical accuracy. He cited Darwin as someone who lost religious faith but lived a deeply moral life, suggesting the same is possible for Mormons.

Presenting Coe’s interviews as simple demolitions of LDS faith misrepresents his actual position.

Essential Context: Both Episodes Underemphasise

Dr. Coe explicitly and repeatedly advised believing Mormons not to leave their faith on account of his arguments. His critique was directed at specific epistemological errors in apologetics — not at LDS life, community, or moral values.