Salamander Letter - LDS Purchase and Publicity

LDS Purchase and Publicity

The letter was initially offered to Don Schmidt of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) Church Historical Department on January 3, 1984, by Lyn Jacobs, who wanted to trade it for a $10 Mormon gold piece. Jacobs told Schmidt that he got the letter from a collector in the east, referred by Mark Hofmann. Jacobs later changed his offer to a trade for a copy of A Book of Commandments. This offer was also rejected. Jacobs also suggested that Brent Ashworth might have an interest in it, although Hofmann had already showed a transcript of it to him and he had declared it to be fake. The contents of the letter also seemed too similar to Howe's Mormonism Unvailed (sic) to others in the church Historical Department. The letter was also offered to other interested parties, including prominent critics of the Mormonism Jerrald and Sandra Tanner, who expressed doubts as to its authenticity. A deal with the LDS Church was never reached. Hofmann finally sold the letter to Steven F. Christensen on January 6, 1984 for $40,000. Christensen wanted to try to authenticate it and then donate it to the LDS Church. In a Church news release on April 28, 1985 he stated; “No one, of course, can be certain that Martin Harris wrote the document. However, at this point we accept the judgment of the examiner that there is no indication that it is a forgery. This does not preclude the possibility that it may have been forged at a time when the Church had many enemies.”

The LDS church publicly released the contents of the Salamander Letter in April 1985. At about this same time, the church also released a letter to its high school seminary program, suggesting that seminary teachers not encourage debate about the Salamander Letter, but that they should tactfully answer genuine questions on the subject. FARMS (a research group composed of LDS scholars, but which at the time had no formal connection to the LDS church) published several articles which examined the Salamander Letter, such as "Why Might a Person in 1830 Connect an Angel With a Salamander?"