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A dealer in rare documents came forward with the Holy Grail of heretical texts: a letter that threatened to dismantle the foundation of an entire religion. But the man who “found” the text had actually forged it. Calling so-called prophets frauds was a profitable business for a while, but when this dealer’s own fraudulent dealings caught up to him, things took a shocking and deadly turn.
It all played out in the 1980s, in Salt Lake City, Utah, over a religion less than 200 years old.
In most of the world’s religions, what counts as “canon” can be a tricky question. Because many sacred texts were once passed down as oral traditions, or their original copies were translated and reshaped across the ages, it’s often the case that, centuries or even millennia after a faith is founded, some assemblage of scholars or holy men must come together to sort the “official” texts from the apocryphal. For the majority of the major religions, nobody could credibly claim to have discovered any original, from-the-pen-of-the-prophet document just lying around.
But the Book of Mormon, one of the central books of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is not one of those kinds of texts.
The man who assembled it, Joseph Smith Jr., personally saw to its publication at a printshop in Palmyra, New York in 1830. The building that housed that printshop still stands to this day and is frequently visited by Mormons, or Latter-day Saints as they prefer to be known, from around the world wanting to explore their faith’s unusually tangible history. As far as religions go, after all, this is recent history. The Book of Mormon is roughly the same age as the lawnmower.
Similarly, unlike some ancient biblical figure whose very existence is debated, Joseph Smith was inarguably a flesh and blood man who walked among his fellow Americans, making friend, follower, and foe alike. But while this is a positive for those wanting to make a pilgrimage to Palmyra, it’s also a double-edged sword, because you can find contemporary documentation from those who encountered Smith and his cohorts, and not all of it is flattering. For example, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, recalled in his diary an encounter with Smith that led him to conclude the prophet was a “mountebank apostle”—mountebank, derived from the Italian montimbanco, or the equivalent of what we would now call a “snake oil salesman.”
It’s precisely because contemporary accounts like that one exist that the supposed discovery of the “Salamander letter” seemed credible, though no less remarkable.
Mark Hofmann and His Remarkable Mormon Documents
The instantly controversial document appeared in 1984, courtesy of Mark Hofmann. Hofmann, a historical document hunter, was already respected in his field for his remarkable acumen at tracking down authenticated handwritten records related to the early LDS Church.
He’d made his name in 1980 when he announced the discovery of the Anthon transcript, a document purportedly handwritten by Joseph Smith in a language called “reformed Egyptian” (Mormon 9:32), which early Mormon acolyte Martin Harris had sent to Columbia College scholar Charles Anthon.
Mormon tradition holds that Joseph Smith Jr. had been guided by the angel Moroni to find buried golden plates at what is now called Hill Cumorah in upstate New York. These plates, which revealed an ancient history recorded in around 400 C.E. by Moroni and his father Mormon, were written in their “reformed Egyptian” language. Smith would need seer stones (Mormon scholarship commonly associates these stones with the Biblical Urim and Thummim, but secular scholars often evoke seer stones’ role in the esoteric practice of scrying during the period of the Second Great Awakening) to translate the plates from reformed Egyptian into English, but he would also need someone to transcribe what he read aloud as the translations appeared to him.
That’s where Martin Harris came in.
Harris, who had been an employer of Smith’s father and a self-described “un-churched Christian,” was brought in not just to transcribe, but crucially, to bankroll the eventual publication of the Book of Mormon. Hoping to have Smith’s purported discovery of an ancient reformed Egyptian text authenticated by a man of letters, Harris sent the aforementioned selection of Egyptian glyphs to Charles Anthon.
Whether or not Anthon deemed the text he’d been sent authentic is a subject of debate, a “he said, he said” in which Harris claimed Anthon had authenticated the transcript, while Anthon insisted that he hadn’t. What wasn’t in doubt was the legitimacy of Hofmann’s rediscovered Anthon Transcript letter, which the LDS Church’s experts not only authenticated, but appraised at a value of more than $20,000, per Robert Lindsey’s A Gathering of Saints. The Church acquired the Anthon Transcript from Hofmann, launching his career as a full-time dealer in rare books and letters.
Hofmann continued to discover more and more previously lost or unknown documents that pertained to early LDS Church history, and many were willing to pay a high price for a piece of authentic Mormon history.
But Mark Hofmann did not have some remarkable ability to sniff out long-lost theological texts, as his clients believed. He was, instead, a master forger, with skills so great he would ultimately fool even the FBI. And in 1984, with the Salamander Letter, Hofmann executed the second part of his grand plan.
The Accepted Heresy of the Salamander
LDS Church scholars had long wanted the Anthon Transcript, which scholar Hugh Nibley called “as good a test as we'll ever get of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.” Until 1984, the documents Hofmann forged and profited from were ones that gave the church elders and LDS scholars what they wanted in that regard.
But no one among the LDS faithful wanted what was in the Salamander Letter. Hofmann knew that, and that’s precisely why he forged it.
The letter in question appeared to have been written by Martin Harris, and described a different version of the discovery of the golden plates than the one held by official church doctrine. The letter portrayed Joseph Smith as actively involved in treasure hunting and mystical practices prior to the discovery of the plates. It also claimed that Smith was guided to the golden plates not by Moroni, but by a “white salamander.”
These revisionist ideas read like something out of some anti-Mormon tract from the 1850s Utah War, and yet here it was, apparently in Martin Harris’ own handwriting. It’s not the kind of thing true believers would readily believe, but top figures in the field of rare documents attested to its authenticity.
“After examining the White Salamander Letter,” notes an article in Veneer Magazine, “experts working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they could find no evidence that it was forged, a conclusion also made by Kenneth W. Rendell, a Newton, Mass. document dealer who is often ranked . . . among the nation’s leading detectors of forged documents.”
So why would Hofmann, who stood to profit from enthusiastic Mormons buying artifacts that affirmed their faith, produce a document that would dispute LDS doctrine, especially when Hofmann himself was born and raised as a Mormon? The answer is that Hofmann’s machinations went beyond the realm of pure greed. He was doing this to amuse himself.
During Hofmann’s mandatory time as a Mormon missionary in the U.K., the naturally curious and already adept forger encountered anti-Mormon texts he’d previously been shielded from, ranging from Eber D. Howe’s 1834 exposé Mormonism Unvailed to the critical 1945 biography No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith by Fawn McKay Brodie. Hofmann began to quietly resent what he saw as deceptions and hypocrisies within the church, and he thought that forgeries offered a way to expose the Church’s falsehoods. The President of the LDS Church was supposed to be a “prophet, seer, and revelator” who received divine revelations directly from God. If Hofmann’s forgeries could fool even the President of the Church (Gordon B. Hinkley, at the time), he felt, that would disprove the whole thing.
One might expect a religious body to rebuke a document like the Salamander letter, but Hofmann had earned a reputation for finding real documents, and this letter was a perfect match for previously discovered poems and letters written by Harris (the bulk of which had also been forged by Hofmann).
So instead, acceptance began to set in.
Mormon bishop and Salt Lake City businessman Steven Christensen purchased the letter from Hofmann, and some prominent figures in the LDS Church began attempts to reconcile the white salamander with Mormon tradition. At the 1985 CES Doctrine and Covenants Symposium at Brigham Young University, for example, Elder Dallin H. Oaks (who is, as of this writing, the current President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) argued that, in the past, the word salamander could also mean “a mythical being thought to be able to live in fire” and therefore Harris’ letter could still have actually been referring to the angel Moroni.
Surprisingly, the people who raised the loudest doubts about the veracity of the Salamander Letter were the same people who raised loud doubts about the Mormon faith itself: ex-Mormons like Jerald and Sandra Tanner, founders of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry and publishers of dozens of books critical of Mormonism. In August 1984, the Tanners, through ULM, published a booklet entitled “The Money-Digging Letters” that questioned the authenticity of Hofmann’s discoveries and condemned his fraudulent business dealings. According to the Tanners, the day after publication, Hofmann came to their home to confront them. “He seemed very distressed and hurt that we, of all people, would question his discoveries,” they wrote.
The Tanners were fortunate that all Hofmann did was confront them. As he began to feel the walls closing in on him, Hofmann would become far more desperate.
Mark Hofmann’s Nauvoo Moment
Mormon faithful and skeptics alike are familiar with Nauvoo, the site of Joseph Smith’s last stand. Formerly the town of Commerce, Illinois, Smith and his followers moved there after they were violently ejected from Missouri in 1839, and they renamed the site Nauvoo. As the National Parks Service summarizes, the new Mormon settlement grew in population and political power, backed by a 2,000-man militia. The Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper vocal in its suspicions of Smith as a fraud, published an exposé that claimed Smith had secretly married multiple women. Smith denied the claim (though the LDS Church acknowledges that he indeed had) and ordered the town marshal to destroy the Nauvoo Expositor’s printing press. That led to the state government of Illinois ordering Smith’s arrest, which he originally opposed by declaring martial law in Nauvoo. He would ultimately surrender to authorities and be murdered by an angry mob.
Hofmann was no doubt familiar with the Nauvoo story, and as attention grew around his Salamander letter and other acquisitions, he began to feel a similar sense of desperation. His own Nauvoo moment had come.
In addition to the scrutiny from figures like the Tanners, Hofmann was also in considerable debt, and making more and more risky business deals as a result. He recklessly invited the scrutiny of the federal government by forging a copy of the long-sought Oath of a Freeman, the first document produced by a printing press in the United States, which he attempted to sell to the Library of Congress.
Meanwhile, on the Mormon front, Hofmann had accepted money from Salamander Letter purchaser Steven Christensen in anticipation of Hofmann’s acquisition of the McLellin collection, a set of papers critical of the Mormon faith that were written by one of its earliest apostles. But Hofmann made the deal before he’d actually forged the promised documents, and time was running out. Christensen was growing suspicious of Hofmann, and the forger felt on the brink of being exposed.
So he built some pipe bombs.
Hofmann used the first bomb to kill Steven Christensen, the man he feared was on to him. Then, to draw suspicion away from himself, Hofmann planted a second bomb at the home of J. Gary Sheets, a business associate of Christensen’s who was completely unrelated to Hofmann and his document deals. That bomb killed Sheets’ wife, Kathy.
A third pipe bomb went off in Hofmann’s car. Hofmann would claim the detonation was a suicide attempt, but law enforcement speculated that the pipe bomb may have simply gone off before it reached its intended target. Whatever the intent behind the third bomb, it succeeded in bringing back all the attention Hofmann had been trying to avoid.
Police searched Hofmann’s home, and in the process, discovered not just the equipment he’d used for his forgeries, but even the plate he’d used to print the forgery he’d been trying to sell to the Library of Congress. In January 1986, Hofmann was arrested on charges of murder and fraud. He faced five indictments in Utah for his crimes, which could have resulted in the death penalty, as well as an indictment in New York for the fraudulent Oath of a Freeman sale.
Hofmann ultimately chose to accept a plea deal, avoiding execution, in exchange for some reduced charges and the promise that he would reveal to prosecutors the methods of his masterful forgeries. He was ultimately sentenced to four concurrent terms of five-years-to-life, and is serving time in prison to this day.
However, the dark story of Mark Hofmann has a troubling legacy beyond the damage we know he did. While Hofmann testified about how he accomplished his forgeries, which were good enough to fool even the best experts, he never verified just how many forged documents he’d put out into the world. Hundreds of documents Hofmann allegedly found had made their way into the Church’s collections, to say nothing of how many Hofmann passed off to private collectors. As he also dealt in genuine books and documents, it remains unclear just how many “genuine” historical documents brought to light within the last 40 years came instead from the mischievous mind of a murderous forger.
The story of the golden plates, whether guided by angel or salamander, is one that asks the faithful to believe in writings their own eyes can never see. Mark Hofmann’s story warns us, when it comes to new discoveries of secret histories, not even to believe our own eyes.
