Reading the Letter

Where the CES Letter Came From

Almost nothing in the CES Letter is new. Knowing where each claim originated tells you something useful: most of them were answered in print years before the letter was written.

The CES Letter reads as discovery. One man, sitting down with the internet, finding things nobody told him. That framing is a large part of why it lands — it invites the reader to feel that a curtain has just been pulled back for the first time.

The documentary record is more ordinary. The concerns in the letter have a traceable lineage, most of it decades old, and the published answers to them are frequently older than the letter itself. This page lays out that lineage and the public timeline of the document’s composition. It does not attempt to judge anyone’s sincerity, and we would ask you not to read it that way.

The Sources Behind the Claims

Three bodies of material account for the great majority of the letter’s content.

Gerald and Sandra Tanner

From the 1960s onward, through Modern Microfilm and later Utah Lighthouse Ministry, the Tanners assembled and republished the standard catalogue of documentary objections to Latter-day Saint origins — the multiple First Vision accounts, the Book of Abraham papyri, the changes between the 1830 Book of Mormon and later editions, the polygamy denials, the Book of Commandments revisions. Nearly every documentary argument in the CES Letter appears in their material first, in some cases half a century earlier.

Grant Palmer

Palmer’s An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins (2002) gathered many of the same arguments into a single accessible volume written from inside the Church Educational System. It was reviewed at length by scholars associated with the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies in 2004 and 2005 — that is, roughly eight years before the CES Letter was drafted. The relevance is not that Palmer was refuted to everyone’s satisfaction; it is that the exchange happened, in public, and is available to anyone who wants to read both sides.

MormonThink

By the early 2010s, MormonThink had become the principal online aggregation point for these arguments, organized topically and formatted for quick reading. It is also where the CES Letter was subsequently hosted and promoted. The organizational structure of the letter — topic headings, compressed summaries, rapid succession — closely resembles the aggregator format it grew out of.

Why Provenance Matters

Being old does not make an argument wrong. Let us say that plainly, because the opposite claim gets made too often in defenses of the Church and it is a bad argument. If the Tanners raised a real problem in 1965, it is still a real problem in 2013 and it is still a real problem today. Age is not a refutation.

What provenance actually gives you is more practical, and better. It means the answers already exist.

When a claim has been in circulation for fifty years, it has been examined by people who spent careers on it. The papyri question has an Egyptological literature. The First Vision accounts have a documentary literature. The Book of Abraham facsimiles have been argued over by specialists on both sides. A reader who encounters one of these for the first time in an eighty-page PDF may reasonably feel that nobody has ever addressed it. Someone has — usually at length, and usually decades ago.

The CES Letter generally does not tell you this. It presents each item as an open wound rather than as one side of a long-running scholarly exchange. That omission is what makes a settled dispute feel like a fresh revelation.

The Public Timeline

Michael W. Peterson and Jacob Z. Hess published a sixty-eight page investigation of the letter’s composition in August 2024, drawing on Jeremy Runnells’ own public postings. The dates below are as reported in that work and in the summaries of it published by Maurine Proctor and by C.D. Cunningham. We present them as a chronology of public statements, and we draw no conclusion from them about what anyone was feeling or intending.

Date Reported event
February 2012 Begins reading critical material — Grant Palmer, the Tanners, MormonThink.
July 2012 Creates the Reddit account u/kolobot, used to post critically about the Church.
10 October 2012 Publishes “An Open Letter to Quentin L. Cook,” framed as assertions rather than questions.
November 2012 States publicly that he had left the Church “a few months ago.”
March 2013 Contact with a CES director follows a grandfather’s concern; a draft is posted to r/exmormon for feedback before being sent.
April 2013 The letter is released and published online.
2015 Formally withdraws Church membership.

One detail from this chronology bears directly on how the document should be read. The draft was circulated for feedback to an audience of former members before it was sent to the CES director. Whatever else that indicates, it means the letter was written with more than one reader in view, and that the version the director received had already been shaped by responses from people who had left the faith. That is a fact about the document’s composition, and it is relevant to interpreting it, in the same way that knowing an open letter was written for publication is relevant to reading it.

What We Are Not Saying

Several things do not follow from any of the above, and we want to be explicit about them.

  • Not that the claims are false because of who first made them. Where an argument came from has no bearing on whether it is sound. Each one is answered on its merits elsewhere on this site.
  • Not that the author was insincere. We have no access to anyone’s interior life and no interest in speculating about it. People leave faith for real reasons, and pain is not a rhetorical strategy.
  • Not that the questions should not have been asked. They should have been. That they had already been asked and answered many times is a fact about the literature, not a criticism of anyone who did not know it.

The one thing that does follow is worth carrying with you: if you are reading the CES Letter and feeling that these problems have never been confronted, that feeling is not accurate. They have been confronted continuously, for sixty years, by people on both sides who knew the material far better than a summary can convey. You are joining a conversation already in progress, not discovering an unexamined scandal.

A Note on These Sources

The chronology above comes from a report we have not independently verified against the original postings. It is careful work by named authors who cite their evidence, and we link it below so you can check it yourself — which is the standard we would want applied to anything on this site. Where we could not confirm a specific quotation in a primary source, we have left it out rather than repeat it. Read the report and judge it directly.

Sources for this page

Further Study

Verdict

Established: The CES Letter is a compilation, not an investigation. Its documentary claims trace to the Tanners, to Grant Palmer, and to MormonThink, and in most cases the scholarly exchange over them predates the letter by years or decades. The document’s public chronology — critical posting from mid-2012, a draft circulated to former members before it was sent — is a matter of record.

Conceded: None of this touches whether the claims are true. An argument does not become weaker because someone made it first, and we will not treat provenance as a substitute for an answer. The answers are on the other pages.

What it changes for you: You are not looking at an unanswered indictment. You are looking at one side of a sixty-year argument, summarized without the other side. The rest of that argument is available, and you are entitled to all of it before you decide anything.