The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Beyond its religious functions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintains one of the most extensive institutional archives of any American religious body, systematically collecting documents, correspondence and artifacts connected to its own nineteenth century founding and subsequent history. This archival mission occasionally puts the church in the position of any major historical repository, evaluating and sometimes purchasing documents offered on the open market by dealers and collectors, a role distinct from its doctrinal and pastoral functions and one that briefly intersected with serious criminal fraud in the early 1980s.

That period saw a wave of purported early Mormon documents surface for sale, many through a single dealer, offering tantalising new details about the church's founding that both excited and unsettled church leadership and outside historians alike, since some of the material complicated the traditional founding narrative rather than simply confirming it. The church's acquisitions department evaluated and purchased several of these documents in good faith, standard practice for an archive seeking to preserve historically significant material regardless of whether its contents were comfortable, a policy that proved to have serious consequences once the documents' true origin came to light.

The dealer behind the wave of new documents was Mark Hofmann, whose forgeries were sophisticated enough to fool professional document examiners for years, using period-appropriate paper, ink formulated to mimic period ageing, and content carefully calibrated to seem historically plausible rather than obviously sensational. The Salamander Letter, purchased by the church in 1984 through an intermediary, Steven Christensen, was among his most consequential fabrications specifically because its content, describing Joseph Smith being led to the golden plates by a white salamander rather than an angel, complicated the church's traditional founding account in a way many members and leaders found troubling regardless of the letter's authenticity.

Hofmann's fraud was a financial scheme as much as a historical one, and it collapsed catastrophically in October 1985 when, facing exposure as his forged document sales grew increasingly overextended, he planted pipe bombs that killed Christensen and another man, and was injured by a third bomb apparently intended for himself. The ensuing investigation uncovered his forgery techniques in detail, including anachronistic ink chemistry detectable under close forensic examination, and he pleaded guilty to the murders and to document fraud in 1987. The church retains the Salamander Letter in its archives today explicitly as a forged document and a historical artifact of the Hofmann affair, not as evidence for any claim about Joseph Smith's actual experience.