Quotation ledger

Re-verification, 2026-08-08. Every entry in this file was re-checked against the source on 2026-08-08 during the citation pass. All Book of Mormon and Coe quotations passed unchanged. One quotation in index.md failed and was corrected: the article had rendered 1 Nephi 4:9 as "a blade of the most precious steel," which is a paraphrase, not the text. The verse reads "the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel," and the article now quotes it in full.

Rule for this file: an entry exists only if the source was opened and the words were copied out of it. A plausible-sounding quotation that was not opened is a fabrication. Where the article needed a claim it could not verify, the article paraphrases without quotation marks and says so, and there is no entry here.

Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are as printed in the source. Em dashes in Book of Mormon text are as the Church's online edition sets them.

Book of Mormon

Source opened: churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/…, fetched verbatim with bin/pagetext.py. Cached at /home/eric/scratch/mormon-sources/bom/.

Book of Mormon, Introduction (current edition)

Source opened: churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/introduction?lang=eng.

• "It is a record of God's dealings with ancient inhabitants of the Americas and contains the fulness of the everlasting gospel."
• "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians."
• "ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ if the book is true"
• "will gain a testimony of its truth and divinity by the power of the Holy Ghost"

Note. The wording "among the ancestors" replaced "the principal ancestors" in the 2006 edition, not in 2013. This series' conventions flag that error specifically.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Book of Mormon Geography," Topics and Questions (2023)

Source opened: churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/book-of-mormon-geography?lang=eng. Institutional, current, correlated — high on the authority ranking for present status.

• "the Church's only position is that the events the Book of Mormon describes took place in the ancient Americas"
• "The Church does not take a position on the specific geographic locations of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas."
• "Speculation on the geography of the Book of Mormon may mislead instead of enlighten; such a study can be a distraction from its divine purpose."
• "the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles urge leaders and members not to advocate those personal theories in any setting or manner that would imply either prophetic or Church support for those theories"
• Russell M. Nelson, quoted in that entry: "Interesting as these matters may be, study of the Book of Mormon is most rewarding when one focuses on its primary purpose—to testify of Jesus Christ. By comparison, all other issues are incidental."
• The entry's own quotation of Joseph Smith's 1834 letter: "wandering over the plains of the Nephites, recounting occasionally the history of the Book of Mormon, roving over the mounds of that once beloved people of the Lord, picking up their skulls and their bones, as a proof of its divine authenticity"

Joseph Smith, Letter to Emma Smith, 4 June 1834

Contemporary, firsthand. Source opened: josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-4-june-1834/2; the transcript had to be extracted from the raw page HTML because the site renders it client-side.

• "The whole of our journey, in the midst of so large a company of social honest men and sincere men, wandering over the plains of the Nephites, recounting"

The retained copy in JS Letterbook 2 was made in 1839, five years after the letter, in Scribe James Mulholland's hand. That is a later retained copy of a contemporary document, and the article should say so if it quotes at length.

The Book of Mormon, 1920 edition — study apparatus, not text

Source opened: archive.org/details/bookofmormonacco00smitrich, full text via /stream/…_djvu.txt. Public domain.

• Chapter heading, Alma 11: "Judges and their compensation—Nephite coins and measures—Zeezrom confounded by Amulek."
• Index: "Amnor, a silver coin, 222-6, 11."
• Index: "Antion, a gold coin, 222-19."

These are the source of the "coins" claim. They are 1920 editorial aids. The translated text of Alma 11 contains no word for coin, mint, or stamp.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Detailed Summary of Approved Adjustments for the 2013 Edition of the Scriptures

Source opened from the local library: sources/papers/church-2013_approved-scripture-adjustments.pdf.

• "in the chapter heading for Alma 11, 'Nephite coinage set forth . . . There is no death after the resurrection' was changed to 'Nephite coinage is set forth . . . There is no death after the Resurrection,' adding the verb is and capitalizing Resurrection."

This proves the word survived in the apparatus through 2013 and that the 2013 change was grammatical only. The current online heading reads "The Nephite monetary system is set forth," so the removal is later than 2013; the exact date could not be established because Wayback snapshots of the page returned empty bodies.

Michael D. Coe, "Mormons and Archeology: An Outside View," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 2 (Summer 1973), 40–48

Source opened: dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V08N02_42.pdf, extracted with pdftotext. Original pagination visible in the extraction.

• "While not myself a believer in the Mormon faith, I should warn readers that I have tried not to commit these sins of omission."
• "Let me now state uncategorically that as far as I know there is not one professionally trained archaeologist, who is not a Mormon, who sees any scientific justification for believing the foregoing to be true, and I would like to state that there are quite a few Mormon archaeologists who join this group."
• "First of all, there is an inherent improbability in specific items that are mentioned in the Book of Mormon as having been brought to the New World by the Jaredites and/or Nephites. Among these are the horse (extinct in the New World since about 7,000 B.C.), the chariot, wheat, barley, and metallurgy (true metalworking based upon smelting and casting being no earlier in Mesoamerica than about 800 A.D.)."
• "The picture of this hemisphere between 2,000 B.C. and A.D. 421 presented in the book has little to do with the early Indian cultures as we know them, in spite of much wishful thinking."
• "By so doing, some of its members have changed themselves from Book of Mormon archaeologists into archaeologists who happen to be Mormons."
• "In conclusion, an outside observer like myself would make these suggestions. Forget the so-far fruitless quest for the Jaredites, Nephites, Mulekites, and the lands of Zarahemla and Bountiful: there is no more chance of finding them than of discovering the ruins of the bottomless pit described in the book of Revelations. It has been Hugh Nibley himself, the Mormon philosopher and historian, who has pointed out the futility of such endeavors. Continue the praiseworthy excavations in Mexico, remembering that little or nothing pertaining to the Book of Mormon will ever result from them. And start digging into the archaeological remains of the Saints themselves."

Editorial notes on Coe. The journal spells it "Archeology" in the title; the article's prose should match the printed spelling when citing the title. Coe's own dates are quoted as his and are not adopted as the article's figures. His tone is not hostile: he calls the Mexican excavations "praiseworthy" and cites Hugh Nibley approvingly.

Reached through Coe as an intermediary — NOT used as a direct citation

Coe reports that Joseph Smith, editing Times and Seasons in 1842, "explicitly stated that Palenque was 'among the mighty works of the Nephites.'" That is Coe quoting Times and Seasons. It is second hand and the article does not quote it. The original must be opened on the Joseph Smith Papers before any version of this article puts those words in Joseph Smith's mouth.

Coe's note 4 supplies the bibliographic details of Dee F. Green, "Book of Mormon Archeology: the Myths and the Alternatives," Dialogue 4 (Summer 1969), 71–80. The article does not quote Green, because Green's article was not opened.

1 Nephi 4:9 — added 2026-08-08

Source opened: churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/4?lang=eng.

• "And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was of the most precious steel."

Warren P. Aston, "Newly Found Altars from Nahom," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 10, no. 2 (2001): 56–61, 71

Source opened: scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=jbms, extracted with pdftotext -layout. Printed pagination visible in the extraction.

• Page 58: "The federally funded Deutches Archaeologisches Institut (DAI), headquartered in Berlin, initiated the excavation of the Bar'an temple in 1988 as part of a larger project centered in the Marib province. Once excavation of the temple was completed in 1997, four seasons of restoration work followed, ending with the formal opening of the site to the public on 18 November 2000." (The spelling of the institute's name is Aston's.)
• Page 58: "The temple structure was dedicated to the worship of the moon god Ilmaqah, although the names of two other Sabaean deities, Hawbas and Athtar, also appear in some engravings."
• Page 59: "Constructed of solid limestone locally quarried, each altar stands about 26 inches high with the top measuring 21.5 inches long and 14 inches wide. The dedication inscription carved around all four sides of the altars is in three-inch-tall lettering written in the South Arabian script of that period."
• Page 59, the altar 2 translation: "(1) Bi'athar son of Sawdum, son of Naw'um, the Nihmite, (2) has dedi[cated] (to) Ilmaqah (the person) Fari'at. By (3) 'Athtar, and by Ilmaqah, and by Dhat-Himyam, and by (4) Yada'-il, and by Ma'adi-karib." The printed transliteration uses epigraphic characters; the apostrophes here are this project's rendering.
• Page 58: "On 12 September 2000, I and fellow researchers Lynn Hilton and Gregory Witt identified and examined one of the two additional altars at the site."
• Page 58: "Then during May 2001, David Johnson, a BYU archaeologist working in Marib as part of an excavation team, identified the tribal name Nihm on one of those altars (altar 3)."
• Pages 59–60: "The date has been further refined by the altar texts themselves, which refer to the ruler Yada'-il, who is likely Yada'-il Dharih II (about 630 B.C.) or perhaps Yada'-il Bayyin II (about 580 B.C.). This places the making of the altars within decades of the time that the Lehites made their desert odyssey."
• Page 61: "Bi'athar would have been unlikely to contribute to a temple that lay outside his tribal area. The simplest explanation is that in his day the Nihm tribal area extended at least as far east as Marib, a view that modern-day scholars have no problems accepting."
• Page 57, Aston quoting Terryl Givens: "the first actual archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon" and "the most impressive find to date corroborating Book of Mormon historicity." Second hand. Givens's book was not opened; the article says so where it uses these words.

Warren P. Aston, "A History of NaHoM," BYU Studies 51, no. 2 (2012)

Source opened: byustudies.byu.edu/article/a-history-of-nahom/, full HTML including notes.

• "The final dating of the three physical altars belongs to the 800–700 BC period, a century earlier than first thought. But since Bi'athtar's grandfather Naw'um lived two generations earlier, the reference to the tribe actually refers to an earlier time, roughly 850–750 BC."
• "While many toponyms, or place-names, appear repeatedly in Arabia, NHM is unique, always with 'a voiceless laryngeal,' a simple h. As a toponym, NHM has not been found to appear anywhere else except in reference to one area."
• "The tribal territory today is extensive, centered in the mountains northeast of Sana'a, Yemen's capital, but may have been even larger anciently."
• Note 9: "The map drawn by surveyor Carsten Niebuhr, a meticulous chronicler, during the 1761–67 Danish expedition to the Near East, depicts the tribal area as 'Nehhm.' Rather than being a typographical error, this spelling probably represents Niebuhr's best attempt at recording the name as he heard it from locals; Nehhm does not appear in any other maps before or after his."
• Note 36: "J. B. B. D'Anville's Premier Partie de la Carte d'Asie showing NEHEM on a two-page map with a 1:7,150,000 scale was published in Paris in 1751 … It was first published in English in John Horsley, trans., Compendium of Ancient Geography, 3d ed. (New York: R. M'Dermut and D. Arden, 1814); and in Robert Mayo, An Epitome of Ancient Geography (Philadelphia: A. Finley, 1818). As far as can be presently determined, none of these works were owned before 1830 by libraries in the areas where Joseph Smith resided."
• Note 38: "The first report of a fertile location on the Arabian coast did not come to the outside world until 1846, following the visit of Dr. H. J. Carter to Salalah."
• "knowledge of the Dhofar region's unmatched abundance began to be reported to the outside world only some sixteen years after the publication of the Book of Mormon."
• "The altar find was briefly reported in the February 2001 Ensign, in the international Liahona magazine, and mentioned in a talk given in the April 2001 general conference."

Dirk Elzinga, review of Stubbs, BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2016): 172–176

Source opened: scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4725&context=byusq, extracted with pdftotext -layout.

• Page 173: "In his book, Stubbs presents over 1,500 cognate sets that show regular correspondences between Egyptian and Semitic on the one hand and Uto-Aztecan on the other."
• Page 176: "The scholarship throughout is sound. Stubbs has a good track record of academic publication in Uto-Aztecan studies, and he is just as careful with his treatment of the present material as he is in his more traditional Uto-Aztecan work."
• Page 176: "My greatest complaint is that this book did not go through the standard academic editorial and review process."
• Page 176: "At first glance, this book seems to fall in with the type of linguistic crackpottery that claims Hebrew (or Sanskrit) as the mother tongue for all of the world's languages … However, Stubbs has something the language eccentrics do not have: the training and experience, together with extensive accurate data, to back up his extraordinary claim of significant Old World linguistic influence in Uto-Aztecan, a New World language family. It is definitely worth the trouble to work through this book."

Magnus Pharao Hansen, "An evaluation of the Nahuatl data in Brian Stubbs' work on Afro-Asiatic/Uto-Aztecan," Nawatl Scholar, 12 September 2019

Source opened: nahuatlstudies.blogspot.com/2019/09/an-evaluation-of-nahuatl-data-in-brian.html.

• "For all these reasons, I find the proposal to be very far from convincing. It seems to me that here, Stubbs is not at all doing the kind of careful comparative work that he is known for. The handling of Nahuatl data is highly problematic, with massaged translations that make words that have virtually no semantic link falsely appear to have the same meanings, with apparently selective failure to pay attention to segmentation and morphological analysis in the Nahuatl, and inattention to other possible and plausible explanations even those found in his own previous work."
• "I am not equipped to evaluate Stubbs' usage of the data from many of the other UA languages, nor the Semitic or Egyptian, but given how the Nahuatl is treated, it cannot simply be assumed that it is being handled well."
• Hansen's summary of Chris Rogers's 2019 review, used in the article as Hansen's report, because Rogers was not opened: "it does not stick to the established bilateral method of comparing languages with languages and proto-languages with proto-languages, but … it frequently cherrypicks so that a form in any Semitic or Egyptian variety can be compared with a form in any Uto-Aztecan language."
• Hansen's report of John S. Robertson's favourable review, likewise second hand: Robertson "cannot find an easy way to challenge the breadth and depth of the data."

John E. Clark, "Archeological Trends and Book of Mormon Origins," BYU Studies Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2005): 83–104

Source opened: scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3732&context=byusq, extracted with pdftotext -layout. Extraction gotcha: the PDF's embedded fonts drop the leading digit of four-digit years, so "829" in the raw text is 1829. Years are restored in the article and here.

• Page 87: "If the Book of Mormon was part of the ancient world, more and more details ought to be confirmed as scholarship learns more about the past. Therefore, if the book is history, one would expect confirmations of the book's claims to increase as modern scholarship reveals more about the ancient world and the Book of Mormon's part of that world."
• Page 94: "the Book of Mormon looks better with age."
• Page 94: "Verification is a one-way street in this instance. Positive and negative evidence do not count the same, as anyone tested for a serious medical condition knows. Given current means of verification, positive items are here to stay, but negative items may prove to be positive ones in hiding."
• Page 95: "The most frequently mentioned deficiencies of the book concern the lack of hard evidence in the New World for the right time periods of precious metals, Old World animals and plants, and Book of Mormon place names and personal names. These deficiencies of negative evidence persist, for the most part."
• Page 95: "As seen by science, the Book of Mormon is stronger today than it was in 1830, 1844, 1950, or even 2000, so I expect it will continue to become stronger in the future."
• Page 95: "Claims in the book once thought absurd that have been confirmed in recent years include evidence in the Old World of steel swords and metal plates for the right time and place, and in the New World, a strain of domesticated barley, cement, military regalia, assorted weapons, Hebrew words, evidence of reading and writing, and multiple expectations for geography and history."

Stan Larson, "The Odyssey of Thomas Stuart Ferguson," Dialogue 23, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 55–93

Source opened: dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V23N01_57.pdf, extracted with pdftotext -layout.

• Page 78, Larson quoting Ferguson's 1975 study: "Metallurgy does not appear in the region under discussion until about the 9th century A.D. None of the foregoing technical demands are met by the archaeology of the region proposed as Book-of-Mormon lands and places. I regard this as a major weakness in the armor of our proponents and friends."
• Page 78, same study: "I doubt that the proponents will be very convincing if they contend that evidence of metallurgy is difficult to find and a rarity in archaeology. Where mining was practiced—as in the Old Testament world, mountains of ore and tailings have been found. Artifacts of metal have been found. Art portrays the existence of metallurgical products. Again, the score is zero."
• Page 79, Larson quoting a 1976 Ferguson letter: "the real implication of the paper is that you can't set Book of Mormon geography down anywhere—because it is fictional and will never meet the requirements of the dirt-archaeology."
• Page 71, Larson in his own voice: "Not only did Ferguson's views of the Book of Abraham radically change, but also, domino-like, his belief in the prophetic status of Joseph Smith and the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Though this kind of chain reaction often occurs, it could be asked if Ferguson was justified in making this jump."
• Pages 71–72: "When the Thomas Stuart Ferguson papers arrived at the Lee Library at Brigham Young University after his death, they contained absolutely no letters after 1967 that indicate his views on the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, or Joseph Smith."

The Book of Mormon, 1879 edition — Orson Pratt's footnotes, not text

Source opened: Internet Archive full text, local extraction at /home/eric/scratch/mormon-sources/bom1879.txt. OCR is poor; both readings were checked against surrounding text.

• Footnote at 1 Nephi 18, on the landing: "believed to be on the coast of Chili, S. America."
• Footnote at Mormon 6: "The hill Cumorah is in Manchester, Ontario Co., N. York."

Bruce D. Smith and Richard A. Yarnell, PNAS 106, no. 16 (2009)

Source opened: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2666091/.

• "In addition to these 4 species that exhibit morphological changes because of domestication, 3 other eastern seed plants that lack such changes have also been identified, based on their abundance in seed assemblages before 2000 B.P., as likely crops and as the subjects of deliberate planting and harvesting of stored seed stock. These plants include erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum), little barley (Hordeum pusillum), and maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana)."
• "Maize (Zea mays), the first Mesoamerican domesticate to reach ENA, did not arrive for another 1,500 years, at ≈200 B.C."

W. T. T. Taylor et al., Science 379, no. 6639 (2023) — abstract only

Source opened: the Europe PMC record for PMID 36996225. The full text is paywalled and was not read. Nothing in the article rests on more than these sentences.

• "Archaeological and modern North American horses show strong Iberian genetic affinities, with later influx from British sources, but no Viking proximity. Horses rapidly spread from the south into the northern Rockies and central plains by the first half of the 17th century CE, likely through Indigenous exchange networks."

Quotations deliberately NOT included

These circulate widely and could not be traced to an original in this session. None appears in the article in quotation marks, and none should be added without opening the source.

• The Smithsonian Institution's "Statement Regarding the Book of Mormon," in any of its versions. Every copy found was a retyping on a partisan site.
• The National Geographic Society's reply letter.
• Any words attributed to Thomas Stuart Ferguson in his later correspondence.
• Any of Michael Coe's later interview statements.
• Any wording from the NHM altar inscriptions in the original script. The translation of altar 2 is quoted, from Aston 2001, and is labelled as his translation.
• Terryl Givens's By the Hand of Mormon, quoted only as Aston prints it.
• Chris Rogers's 2019 review, summarised only as Hansen reports it.
• John S. Robertson's Interpreter review, summarised only as Hansen reports it.
• Kitchen's Documentation for Ancient Arabia and Nebes's Bar'an chronology, reported only through Aston.