Letter Disputing View of Mormon Founder Is Authentic, Expert Says

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. —  A leading expert on Mormon documents Thursday night termed as “authentic” a recently discovered letter that indicates church founder Joseph Smith was involved with magic and treasure-digging at the time he was said to have had religious revelations leading to the Book of Mormon.

The letter, dated Oct. 23, 1830, was written by Martin Harris, Mormonism’s first convert. It challenges the official church accounts that say an angel named Moroni delayed Smith from obtaining the golden plates in 1823 that were the basis for the Book of Mormon. Instead, Harris says in his letter that the young Smith encountered an antagonistic salamander/spirit upon discovering the plates.

The salamander, which the letter said transformed itself into “an old spirit” and struck Smith three times, was considered then to be a creature with magical powers.

Sheds Light

Non-Mormon critics have long claimed that Smith was preoccupied with using occult methods to search for buried riches and that only later did he interpret his activities as religious experiences. Recent books on Smith and on the church’s origins have already started to alter the traditional saintly portrait of the founder as a religious prophet unaffected by the culture of his day.

Historians say, however, that the Harris letter is the first early writing by one of the movement’s principal figures to shed light on Smith’s initial descriptions of his experiences.

The Harris letter was found in a stamp collection in late 1983 and purchased last year by Salt Lake City businessman Steven Christensen, who is also a Mormon bishop. He commissioned historians Dean C. Jessee and Ronald W. Walker to determine its authenticity. Both researchers are associated with the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute of Church History at the church-run Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

In a paper read at the Mormon History Assn.’s annual meeting here, Jessee said, “On the basis of the paper, ink and handwriting, the Harris letter appears authentic.”

The oval, double-line Palmyra, N.Y., postmark matched precisely those used there between 1829 and 1834, he added.

Although very few other examples of Harris’ handwriting were available, “there is enough to identify the 1830 letter as an authentic sample of his writing,” said Jessee, a former church archivist frequently consulted in the last decade for his handwriting analyses.

Official Comment

The first official church comment on the document, issued this week, was cautious.

“At this point, we accept the judgment of the examiner (Jessee) that there is no indication that it is a forgery,” said Gordon Hinckley, second counselor to church President Spencer W. Kimball.

“This does not preclude the possibility that it may have been forged at a time when the church had many enemies. It is, however, an interesting document of the times,” Hinckley said in a statement.

Both Jessee and Walker attempted Thursday night to picture Smith’s mixture of religious and folk magic interests as typical of his period and region.

American “money diggers” had sought fabled coins in mines since the Colonial period, Walker said.

“They placed faith in conjuring common elemental spirits . . . dreams, seeric gifts and enchanted treasure,” he said.

Walker said Hill Cumorah, a site in Palmyra sacred to Mormon history because Smith is supposed to have found the plates there, was a popular money-digging spot before and after Smith’s claim.

‘Old Hat’

The Harris letter also said Smith found some “giant silver specticles with the plates (and) he puts them in an old hat & in the darkness reads the words & in this way it is all translated and written down.”

The standard Mormon Church account says that Smith used “seer stones” to translate the plates but mentions nothing about an old hat.

The Harris letter was addressed to William W. Phelps, the editor of a newspaper in Canandaigua, N.Y., a man who was soon to become an ardent believer in Mormonism.

Jessee pointed out that apparently neither Harris nor Phelps perceived Smith’s tale as “out of the ordinary.”

“That readers in our time do, probably tells more about our present mind-set than anything else,” he said.