Mark Hofmann and Prophetic Discernment

Church leaders were deceived by the most accomplished document forger in American history — and so were the rare-document market, the Library of Congress, and the country’s foremost forgery examiners. The real question is not whether the deception happened. It is what the gift of discernment actually is, and whether the scriptures Jeremy claims to defend describe the lie-detector he needs them to describe.

The CES Letter Claim

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter points to the Mark Hofmann affair to press the question of prophetic discernment: if the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve truly possess that gift, how could a forger, con man, and eventual murderer deal with them face to face and deceive them with fabricated documents — without the Brethren ever discerning the fraud that was unfolding under their own watch and stewardship? A real gift of discernment, the argument runs, should have exposed him.

Give this its strongest form, because it deserves one. The sharpest version is not merely “leaders bought a fake.” It is this: leaders met Hofmann face to face, acquired his forgeries for the Church archive, and in one case an Apostle — Dallin H. Oaks — publicly offered a faithful reading of the forged “salamander letter” as genuine history. If the gift of discernment means anything, shouldn’t it fire in the presence of a forger and murderer? This page answers that question, not a softer one.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Standing at the Hofmann case, Jeremy faced two roads, and took the simpler one.

The path he chose — discernment as a fraud alarm. On this reading, a prophet is a supernatural lie-detector: put a forged document or a wicked man in the room, and the gift should ring like a smoke alarm. It never rang, therefore the gift is not real, therefore the men are not prophets. It is clean, it is fast, and it needs no history and no scripture — only the assumption that discernment means on-demand omniscience.

The path he ignored — discernment as the scriptures actually describe it. This road is harder, because it requires reading the very biblical prophets Jeremy is implicitly holding up as the gold standard. When you do, you find the gift is Spirit-directed spiritual insight given for the edification and protection of the covenant community — not a forensic guarantee that no one will ever fool a prophet with fabricated evidence. On this road, prophets God unmistakably called were fooled by exactly this kind of deception, again and again, and remained His prophets.

The second road is better supported for a reason a doubter should sit with: it is built from the biblical text, while the first is built from a definition Jeremy supplied himself. He measured Latter-day Saint prophets against a standard the Bible never sets for its own prophets. That is the fork — and the rest of this page walks the road he did not.

Response

1. Everyone Was Deceived — Including the People Whose Only Job Was to Catch Him

Mark Hofmann is regularly described as the most skilled forger in American history. He did not fool the credulous. He fooled the professionals whose entire vocation was to detect exactly what he was doing:

  • Charles Hamilton — often called the foremost forgery detector in the United States — authenticated Hofmann material and later admitted he had been fooled, calling Hofmann the greatest forger the country had ever produced.
  • The Library of Congress and the rare-book world came within a step of buying his forged “Oath of a Freeman” for a fortune; it passed the examinations it was given.
  • Forensic ink and paper analysis — the hard-science tests, run in professional laboratories — certified his aged inks and period paper as genuine. He had reverse-engineered the chemistry.
  • The national documents market — seasoned dealers, auction houses, and collectors who handle forgery as a daily occupational hazard — bought and sold his work as authentic.

Hold that against the CES Letter’s standard. Jeremy demands that Gordon B. Hinckley detect, by spiritual gift alone, a forgery that the nation’s leading forgery expert certified as real and that laboratory chemistry pronounced genuine. That is not a test of prophethood; it is a test no human being on earth passed — applied to exactly one institution and no other. When the same standard convicts the most advanced forensic examiners in the country and acquits no one, it is not measuring discernment. It is special pleading dressed as analysis.

2. What the Gift of Discernment Actually Is — in the Scriptures Jeremy Is Standing On

The whole argument rides on one unexamined premise: that the gift of discernment is an always-on fraud alarm. Scripture says otherwise. The Lord’s own description of spiritual gifts is that they are “given for the benefit of those who love me and keep all my commandments, and him that seeketh so to do; that all may be benefited” (D&C 46:9). Gifts serve the edification and salvation of the Saints under the Spirit’s direction. They are not an omniscience overlay that a prophet wears into every meeting, transaction, and handshake of his administrative life.

Critics who press this point usually cite the verse that actually names the gift: “And to others the discerning of spirits” (D&C 46:23). So meet the strongest form head-on. Notice first what the object of the gift is: spirits — the discerning of persons’ hearts, motives, and the spirit that animates them — not the forensic dating of ink and rag paper. A forged document has no spirit to discern; it is a chemistry problem, and the entire scientific apparatus built to solve chemistry problems failed it too. And notice how carefully the revelation apportions the gifts: “to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God” (D&C 46:11), and “To some is given one, and to some is given another” (D&C 46:12) — a whole litany of distinct gifts distributed among distinct people, with the discerning of spirits named as just one of them. The text plainly says not every servant is given this particular gift, still less that it operates as a continuous scan of every artifact placed before a man who holds it. Even read at full strength, the verse critics quote describes a Spirit-given insight into spirits, granted as God distributes it — not a standing guarantee against expertly manufactured evidence.

Now read the biblical prophets by Jeremy’s own standard — the standard he needs to be true.

Joshua and the Gibeonites. A neighboring people wanted a treaty Israel was forbidden to give. So they forged their appearance: worn-out sacks, cracked wineskins, patched sandals, and moldy bread, staging a deception to look like travelers from a distant land (Joshua 9:4–6). It worked. The leaders of Israel “took of their victuals, and asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord” (Joshua 9:14), and swore a covenant they could not break. This is a fabricated-evidence con — a forgery in cloth and crumbs rather than ink and paper — and it fooled Joshua, the successor of Moses. Scripture reports it plainly and never suggests it unmakes him as a prophet.

Samuel at the house of Jesse. Sent to anoint a king, the great seer looked on Eliab, the tall and impressive eldest son, and concluded, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before him.” He was wrong. The Lord told him otherwise: “Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature… for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:6–7). Even Samuel could not read a man’s heart by natural sight. Discernment came only when the Spirit gave it — not before, and not on demand.

Nathan and the temple. When David proposed to build the temple, the prophet Nathan answered from his own good judgment: “Do all that is in thine heart; for the Lord is with thee” (2 Samuel 7:3). That same night the word of the Lord came to him and reversed the counsel. A true prophet spoke wisely but humanly, and revelation arrived afterward, not automatically. This is precisely how the gift works — Spirit-directed, not Spirit-saturated at every moment.

Three prophets no believer would dare call false — each fooled by deception, mistaken appearance, or their own honest judgment, precisely where Jeremy insists a real prophet cannot be. The gift is real. It is simply not the machine his argument requires. For the fuller pattern of how prophets can be genuinely called and still speak and act as men, see Prophets Don’t Have to Be Perfect and the scriptural test in The Test of a Prophet.

3. The Hardest Piece: An Apostle Reinterpreted the Forgery

Here is the part critics press hardest, and it should not be dodged. At a 1985 Church Educational System symposium, Elder Dallin H. Oaks discussed the “salamander letter” — a Hofmann forgery, then accepted as genuine by the document market and the great majority of scholars who had examined it — and observed that in early-nineteenth-century usage the word “salamander” could denote a mythical fire-dwelling spirit-being, so that even this strange-sounding document need not contradict Joseph Smith’s account of a heavenly messenger. Critics read this as an Apostle spinning a fake into faith-promoting history.

Look closely at what actually happened. At that moment the letter had been authenticated by the document market and had not yet been unmasked; the forensic exposure came later, driven by police investigation after Hofmann’s bombs killed two people. Elder Oaks was doing what a careful scholar does with a source the market and most examiners had certified: testing whether a hostile-sounding artifact truly undermined the Restoration, and finding — through defensible historical-linguistic analysis of period usage — that it did not. When the forgery was later exposed, the analysis simply became moot; the letter was evidence of nothing at all.

Here the sharpest critics raise their best objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Jerald and Sandra Tanner — among the most prominent critics of the Church — publicly questioned the salamander letter as a probable fake in 1984, well before the forensic exposure and before the murders. The critics’ own tell it plainly: prominent opponents of the Church, claiming no gift of discernment whatsoever, out-guessed the apostles. Does that not prove the point? It does not, and the reason is exactly what the gift is and is not. The Tanners did not detect a forgery by a spiritual endowment; they detected it by suspicion of provenance. Hofmann’s salamander letter was almost too convenient for their own thesis — it made early Mormonism look like folk magic — and yet its sudden appearance, its perfect fit, and Hofmann’s pattern of producing exactly the documents the market wanted set off their instinct for a plant. That instinct is a researcher’s virtue, and they deserve credit for it. But notice what it actually is: a habit of doubting anything whose chain of custody is thin. Reflexive hostility toward a too-good-to-be-true artifact is not the gift of discerning spirits; it is ordinary source-critical skepticism, and it cuts both ways — the same reflex leads critics to reject authentic favorable evidence just as fast. A stopped clock that distrusts every document is right about the forged ones; it is not exercising a spiritual gift, and it would have “discerned” the genuine documents in the same archive as fakes too. The apostles were not competing in a game of provenance-suspicion and losing. They were doing archival stewardship — trusting the same forensic chemistry and expert authentication the Tanners themselves could not have overturned, and did not overturn. Being right about one forgery, for reasons that had nothing to do with discerning spirits, is not the counter-example Jeremy needs.

So weigh the two readings honestly. The critic’s reading requires that an Apostle’s good-faith engagement with evidence the market and the forensic laboratories had certified as authentic be counted as a prophetic failure. The fair reading is that a leader met apparent evidence with intellectual honesty rather than panic or suppression. And notice what the episode does not show: no Apostle declared by revelation that the forgery was scripture, canonized it, or bound the Saints to believe it. It was weighed as historical evidence and set aside when the evidence collapsed — honesty operating exactly where a con man engineered it to be exploited.

4. President Hinckley Never Claimed the Revelation Jeremy Says He Should Have

Gordon B. Hinckley, then in the First Presidency, dealt personally with Hofmann over several document acquisitions. His documented posture is the opposite of the omniscient claim the CES Letter puts in his mouth. He never announced that revelation had authenticated the documents. He deferred to the experts whose profession was authentication — the same channel any honest person would use — and he made no supernatural claim about them at all.

This is the quiet fact that dissolves the argument. You cannot indict a man for a failed revelation he never claimed to receive. Jeremy’s case only works if leaders had asserted, “God told us these are genuine.” They asserted no such thing. Acquiring documents of apparent historical value, verified by the world’s experts, is ordinary archival stewardship — not a prophetic pronouncement. The scandal exists only after you first invent a claim the prophet declined to make.

5. The Standard Would Also Condemn the Original Twelve

Jeremy’s exact charge is a failure to detect — an enemy operating “right under their noses” and never spotted. So take the charge on its own terms, and apply it to the original Apostles, the very men who hold the office Jeremy invokes. Judas Iscariot walked with the Twelve for the whole of the ministry — kept the common purse, heard every private teaching, witnessed the miracles — and not one of the other eleven ever discerned the traitor beside them. When Jesus said plainly at supper, “One of you shall betray me,” the Apostles did not knowingly turn on Judas; each asked, “Lord, is it I?” (Matthew 26:21–22). Even after Jesus identified the man with the morsel of bread, the record is explicit that the disciples still did not understand what was happening or why Judas rose and left (John 13:26–30). Here is a failure to detect an enemy in their midst that is total, prolonged, and located precisely in the apostolic office — exactly the failure the CES Letter treats as fatal.

And the one man at that table who did discern Judas shows why detection was never the point. Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him (John 6:64) — and chose not to expose him to the Twelve or remove him from their company. Perfect discernment did not translate into public unmasking, because the gift exists to serve God’s purposes, not to satisfy an observer’s demand that every deceiver be named on sight. So the case cuts against Jeremy at both ends: where prophets lacked the detection he demands (the eleven), scripture never unmakes them; and where discernment was perfect (the Lord), it still did not produce the exposure he assumes it must.

This is the whole biblical pattern of how God works through mortal servants — from Abraham, who out of fear twice called Sarah his sister, to Peter, who denied Christ three times within hours of vowing he never would. Human vulnerability has never been the disqualification. The calling and the covenants are.

6. What the Case Actually Shows

Strip away the framing and look at the events. Hofmann was not exposed by a rival’s prophecy or a skeptic’s superior spiritual gift. He was exposed the way forgers always are: by police work and forensic chemistry, after his own pipe bombs killed Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets on October 15, 1985. He was arrested in early 1986 and pleaded guilty in January 1987. No one in this story detected the forgeries by any gift, spiritual or scientific, until the murders forced the investigation that unraveled him. The failure of detection was universal — which is exactly why singling out the prophets proves nothing about prophecy.

Afterward the Church tightened its acquisition and provenance standards so informal channels could not be exploited that way again. Honest institutions learn. The Hofmann affair is a story of a brilliant, murderous con man who fooled a nation of experts — not a story of prophets caught pretending to a power they had claimed and did not have. For the wider question of prophets speaking and acting as men, see The Pattern of Prophecy — When Prophets Err, and for Joseph Smith’s record specifically, Joseph Smith’s Prophecies — Did They Fail?

Further Study

Verdict

Resolved. The core charge collapses under its own standard. The gift of discernment, as the scriptures Jeremy relies on actually define it, is Spirit-directed insight for the good of the Saints — not an on-demand fraud alarm. Joshua, Samuel, and Nathan were each fooled or mistaken exactly where the CES Letter says a true prophet cannot be, and the original Twelve lived for years beside Judas without ever detecting the enemy in their midst. Church leaders claimed no revelation authenticating Hofmann’s forgeries; they trusted the same experts the whole world trusted — and those experts, the best forgery detectors alive, were fooled too. Applied evenly, the standard indicts no prophet; applied to prophets alone, it is special pleading.

Genuinely and mildly open. A believer can still wish the outcome had been different — that some flash of inspiration had spared the Church the embarrassment and, far more painfully, spared two innocent people their lives. Scripture does not promise that, and the Lord plainly allows His servants to walk by the same evidence the rest of us do. Where exactly the Spirit will and will not intervene in a leader’s ordinary judgment is a real mystery, and an honest one. But a mystery about when God grants discernment is a very different thing from proof that the gift is fraudulent — and only the second would touch the claims of latter-day prophecy. Jeremy needed the second. He proved, at most, the first.