Mark Hofmann and What Seership Is For

A forger deceived the First Presidency. He also deceived the finest document examiners in America. The critic quotes six words from President Hinckley and cuts the sentence that follows.

The Six Words, and the Rest of the Paragraph

The argument arrives in one line: Hinckley admitted, I frankly admit that Hofmann tricked us. He did say that. Here is what he said next, from an interview of 18 October 1995, printed in Sheri Dew’s biography:

Gordon B. Hinckley, 18 October 1995

“I frankly admit that Hofmann tricked us. He also tricked experts from New York to Utah, however. We bought those documents only after the assurance that they were genuine. And when we released documents to the press, we stated that we had no way of knowing for sure if they were authentic. I am not ashamed to admit that we were victimized. It is not the first time the Church has found itself in such a position. Joseph Smith was victimized again and again. The Savior was victimized.”

Read the whole thing and the quotation stops working as an indictment. It was never a confession that seership had failed; it was a plain statement that a professional criminal fooled everyone who handled his work, that the Church said so publicly at the time, and that being lied to is not a novel condition for the Lord’s servants. The critic keeps the first six words and deletes the next fifty. Why? Because the seventh word onward is the answer.

That is not a quibble about context. It is the difference between a confession and a defense, produced by a pair of scissors.

Who Else He Fooled

The claim is that prophets, seers, and revelators discerned nothing while ordinary skeptics saw through it. So who actually certified Hofmann’s work? The names that matter are not in Salt Lake City at all — they belong to the men whose entire professional reputation rested on catching precisely this crime, who examined his documents with the tools of their trade, and who pronounced them genuine in writing.

Kenneth W. Rendell, one of the most respected dealers and authenticators of historical documents in the United States, examined the Salamander Letter and reported that the ink, the paper, and the postmark were all consistent with the period. His conclusion: “there is no indication that the document is a forgery.” Charles Hamilton, then the best-known handwriting expert in America, authenticated it as well.

Hamilton later described what had happened to him, and the sentence is worth sitting with:

Charles Hamilton

“To fool me, to fool Ken Rendell, to fool the whole world, requires not only forgery but a packaging of himself. He packaged himself as a bespectacled, sweet, unobtrusive, hard working, highly intelligent scholar dedicated to the uncovering of history.”

Hamilton and Rendell both later ranked Hofmann among the top four or five forgers in American history, which is a remarkable thing for two authenticators to say about the man who beat them, and they said it in public. These are the men whose entire profession is detecting exactly this crime. He beat them COLD. A review in BYU Studies put the general finding bluntly: expert opinion proved unreliable across the whole collecting community, and not in some way peculiar to the Church.

One correction while we are here, because it gets repeated carelessly. The Salamander Letter was not bought by the Church at all. Steven Christensen, a Salt Lake businessman, purchased it privately and later donated it — after Rendell had authenticated it. So the document sitting at the very center of the whole indictment reached Church hands as a GIFT, unsolicited and already carrying a clean bill of health from the most respected authenticator in the country. Does that look like leaders chasing a document their discernment should have caught?

So the honest version of the sentence is this. Hofmann fooled the First Presidency, the document trade, the professional authenticators, the collectors, and most of the historians on every side of the argument. Naming only one of those groups is not reporting. It is selection.

The Tanners Were Right — and Nearly Alone

Give Jerald Tanner what he earned. Beginning in 1984, while the Salamander Letter was being celebrated as a weapon against the Restoration, he argued in print that it was probably a forgery. He was right, and he said it when saying it cost him something with his own audience. That is genuine intellectual honesty and this page will not shave it down.

Now look at what the argument tries to build on it. If the lesson is that critics track truth better than seers, the case has to show critics generally getting it right. It shows the opposite. The critical community embraced the Salamander Letter. So did the press, the dealers, and the examiners. ONE critic dissented, and his dissent was rejected by most of the people who shared his conclusions about the Church.

And how did Tanner reach it? Not by revelation, not by prophecy, and not by any special insight into Joseph Smith — he noticed that the provenance would not stand up, that document after document kept surfacing through one man and one man only, with no traceable chain of custody behind any of them. That is ordinary source criticism, available to anyone who bothers, and it is exactly the kind of reasoning the Restoration commends. It is not a rival to seership. It is HOMEWORK.

Which leaves the argument in an awkward place. Its own example proves that one careful researcher outperformed hundreds of other researchers, believing and unbelieving alike. It says nothing whatever about prophets.

What a Seer Is Actually For

Underneath the whole complaint sits an unexamined premise: that a seer is a device which fires automatically whenever a lie enters the room. Where does scripture teach that? It does not. It teaches the reverse, and it does so in a story so on point that it could have been written for this case.

Joshua 9:14–15

“And the men took of their victuals, and asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord. And Joshua made peace with them, and made a league with them, to let them live: and the princes of the congregation sware unto them.”

The Gibeonites came to Joshua in worn-out shoes with mouldy bread and a false story about a distant country. Joshua examined the evidence. The evidence had been manufactured. He signed a treaty he would never have signed had he known the truth, and Israel was bound by it. Joshua was the prophet who had led the nation across Jordan and taken Jericho, and he was taken in by a costume and a bag of stale food.

Notice the diagnosis the text supplies. Not that Joshua lacked prophetic standing. Not that God had abandoned him. The failure named is procedural — they “asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord” before signing. Revelation was available and was not sought on that question. Does that sound like a scripture written to reassure people that prophets are never deceived? It is in the canon precisely because they can be.

The pattern holds everywhere you look. Satan is “transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). False signs and wonders will be good enough to “deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24). John does not tell the Saints that deception is impossible; he tells them to test (1 John 4:1). And the Restoration takes the danger seriously enough to canonize a procedure for detecting false messengers (D&C 129). A church that thought its leaders were deception-proof would have no use for that revelation.

Seership is the capacity to receive what God chooses to reveal. It is not a metal detector, and it was never advertised as one. God does not suspend a criminal’s agency to spare His servants an embarrassment, any more than He stopped the Gibeonites from lying or the Sanhedrin from bribing Judas.

Count What Actually Changed

Here is the question the argument never asks. Hofmann sold his forgeries for years. What doctrine moved?

NOT ONE. Not a verse of scripture, not an ordinance, not a revelation, not a temple covenant, not a line of the Articles of Faith. No Hofmann document was ever canonized, taught from, or built into a doctrine. They were bought as historical artifacts and archived as historical artifacts, and when the forgeries were exposed the Church lost money and suffered public humiliation and lost precisely nothing else that mattered. Could it have been otherwise? No — and that is the point most worth sitting with, because the foundation of this faith was never a paper trail in the first place, and a man who forges paper can therefore reach nothing that holds it up.

There is a hard irony in the timeline too. Hofmann built his forgeries to be believed by critics. He gave them the folk-magic Joseph they already wanted, and they bought it — enthusiastically, in print, for years. Whose expectations was he actually exploiting?

The Verdict

The Church was deceived by Mark Hofmann. Say it plainly; the Church said it first, in public, in 1995, and had said at the time of release that it could not vouch for what it had bought. What the record will not support is the conclusion hung on it.

The claim was that critics’ skepticism outperformed prophetic revelation. The case chosen to prove it shows one critic getting it right while his entire community got it wrong alongside the leading professional authenticators in the country. The claim was that Hinckley confessed the failure of seership. The full quotation shows him saying the opposite, and the quotation is truncated at exactly the point where it turns. The claim was that the fraud was exposed by murders and forensics rather than by prophecy — and that much is true, and it has never been otherwise. Joshua was undeceived by the passage of three days and a look at a map, not by a vision.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ has never promised that the Lord’s servants cannot be lied to. It promises that the work will not fail, and that the deceiver will not have the last word. Judas sat at the table with the Twelve for three years and the Savior did not expose him at the first meal. Was Christ therefore no prophet? Ask the question out loud and the whole argument comes apart in the hand.

A forger stole money and told lies, and two men were murdered for it. That is a tragedy and a crime. It is not a refutation of anything, because no revelation ever rested on a document Mark Hofmann handled.

The men who quote six words of President Hinckley and stop know where the sentence goes. That is why they stop.

Related

On This Site

Sources

  • Gordon B. Hinckley, interview of 18 October 1995, quoted in Sheri L. Dew, Go Forward with Faith: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley (1996), 432
  • Kenneth W. Rendell — authentication of the Salamander Letter: ink, paper, and postmark consistent with the period; “no indication that the document is a forgery”
  • Charles Hamilton — authenticated the letter, and later described how Hofmann “packaged himself”; with Rendell ranked Hofmann among the top forgers in American history
  • George J. Throckmorton and William J. Flynn — forensic examiners whose work on ink “alligatoring” from December 1985 separated the Hofmann documents from genuine ones; investigative files at BYU Special Collections
  • Jerald Tanner, Tracking the White Salamander — argued from 1984 that the letter was a forgery, on the ground of unproven provenance
  • “Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case,” BYU Studies

Citation Traps

  • “I frankly admit that Hofmann tricked us” — almost never quoted past the first sentence. The next line is “He also tricked experts from New York to Utah.” Ask anyone using it to read the paragraph out.
  • “The Church bought the Salamander Letter” — it did not. Steven Christensen bought it privately and donated it, after Rendell had authenticated it.
  • Document counts — figures like “over forty” circulate without a source. Hofmann’s output and the Church’s acquisitions are two different lists, and accounts differ. Ask which list is meant before accepting a number.
  • “The Tanners called it fake” — true, and to their credit. But stated without the rest of the critical community’s enthusiasm for the letter, it reverses the actual lesson of the episode.