Reading the Letter

Why It Spread in 2013

Older documents made the same arguments and went nowhere. The CES Letter arrived in a narrow window when almost nothing stood in its way — and that window explains its reach far better than its contents do.

A reasonable question to ask about any influential document is why this one. The Tanners published the same documentary objections for four decades and reached a comparatively small audience. Grant Palmer’s book, which covers much of the same ground with more care, sold modestly. The CES Letter, which is largely a compression of both, was downloaded on a scale neither approached.

Something changed, and it was not the arguments. Brian Hales and Michael Peterson described the change as a convergence of four conditions, none of which had much to do with the letter’s merits. Their account is worth understanding, because it explains a phenomenon that is otherwise easy to mistake for a verdict.

One: Distribution Became Free

The Tanners had to print and mail. Palmer needed a publisher, a print run, and a bookstore willing to stock him. By 2013 an eighty-page PDF cost nothing to produce, nothing to host, and nothing to forward. Adobe had opened the PDF specification in 2008, so the format was universally readable without licensed software.

The platforms arrived at the same moment. Reddit had passed 90 million users by 2013, with subreddits that concentrated exactly the audience most likely to pass the document on. Facebook approached 1.3 billion users the following year, and a PDF attachment moved through family and ward networks in a way a mail-order pamphlet never could. A document that could previously reach hundreds could now reach hundreds of thousands, at no cost, in a form that felt like a personal recommendation from a friend rather than a purchase from a critic.

Two: The Institutional Answer Had Just Been Dismantled

For thirty years the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies had functioned as the standing scholarly response to exactly this kind of material. FARMS reviewed critical books, published rebuttals, maintained specialists in Egyptology, Mesoamerican archaeology, and Near Eastern studies, and did so on a predictable schedule. When Palmer’s book appeared in 2002, FARMS scholars answered it in detail within two years.

In 2010 FARMS was reorganized out of that role at BYU. Three years later the CES Letter appeared, and there was no equivalent body positioned to answer it quickly. The responses that eventually came — Michael Ash, Brian Hales, Jim Bennett, Sarah Allen, FAIR — were largely the work of individuals, arriving over the following decade. By the time they existed, the letter had already been read by an enormous number of people who never encountered a reply.

Three: The Church’s Own Answers Were Six Months Late

This is the detail that most deserves attention, and it cuts in an uncomfortable direction.

The Church began publishing its Gospel Topics Essays in late 2013 — frank, well-sourced treatments of seer stones and the translation, the multiple First Vision accounts, the Book of Abraham, plural marriage in Nauvoo, race and the priesthood, and Book of Mormon DNA studies. They address, directly and in the Church’s own voice, a large share of what the CES Letter raises.

They appeared roughly six months after the letter. For half a year, a member who went looking for an official treatment of the seer stone found the CES Letter’s account and no institutional counterpart. That gap was real, and it did genuine harm. A member encountering the translation account for the first time in a critical PDF, rather than in a Church publication, had every reason to feel that something had been kept from him — and pointing out that the essay arrived a few months later does not fully answer the feeling.

Four: The Framing Fit the Moment

The document does not present itself as an attack. It presents itself as a member’s questions, submitted respectfully and left unanswered. That framing is what allowed it to travel through believing networks, where a Tanner pamphlet would have been recognized and stopped at the door.

It also created a rhetorical position that is difficult to argue against. If the letter is a sincere request for help, then answering it forcefully looks like bullying, and not answering it looks like an admission. Where the document actually came from is treated in more detail on Where the CES Letter Came From.

The Honest Version of the Church’s Position

A site like this one should be willing to say the part that is not flattering.

The CES Letter found an opening because an opening existed. For much of the twentieth century, Church curriculum told the founding story in its simplest form — the plates and the Urim and Thummim, one First Vision account, plural marriage as a Utah-era practice. None of that was false. All of it was incomplete, and the completions were sitting in archives that most members had no practical way to reach.

When the internet made those archives universally available, the gap between the Sunday School version and the documentary record became visible to everyone at once. The shock a member feels on first reading the CES Letter is very often not shock at evidence of fraud — it is shock at discovering that the story was more complicated than he was taught, delivered by someone who framed that complexity as betrayal.

The Church’s response to that problem has been substantial and is worth knowing: the Gospel Topics Essays, the Joseph Smith Papers Project publishing the documents in full, the Saints history written without the varnish. Those are the actions of an institution correcting a curricular failure, not concealing a crime. But the correction came after the wound, and the CES Letter got there first. That is the honest account of the timing, and it is developed further on Church History and Selective Disclosure.

What Reach Does and Does Not Prove

The letter’s circulation is frequently cited as though it were corroboration — a document read by that many people must be saying something undeniable. It is worth being careful here in both directions.

Reach measures distribution. It measures how cheap a file is to forward, how large the platforms were, how well the framing traveled, and how little stood in the way. It does not measure whether a claim survives examination, and no serious person on either side should treat it as if it did. Widely-read documents have been right and widely-read documents have been wrong, and the download count never distinguished them.

The reverse is also true, and matters more for anyone reading this in distress: the fact that a document spread for structural reasons does not mean its questions are empty. Some of them are good questions. They are asked and answered, one at a time, across this site.

Sources for this page

Further Study

Verdict

Established: The CES Letter’s reach is explained by its timing, not its originality. Free distribution at unprecedented scale, the dissolution of FARMS in 2010, the Gospel Topics Essays arriving six months too late, and a framing that let the document travel through believing networks — four conditions that will not recur together, and that older versions of the same arguments never enjoyed.

Conceded, and it matters: The opening was partly of the Church’s own making. A curriculum that told the simple version left members unprepared for the documentary one, and the correction — the essays, the Joseph Smith Papers, Saints — came after the damage rather than before it. Anyone who felt blindsided in 2013 had a legitimate grievance about how he learned it, whatever he concludes about what he learned.

What it changes for you: Download counts are not evidence. That a document reached you does not mean it survived scrutiny before it did — it means it was easy to send. The scrutiny is still yours to apply, and the material for applying it now exists in a way it did not when the letter was written.