Charges Of Suppression Part I

Created: 31 January 2009
Last Updated: 31 January 2009

In this entry Mormanity states “he [Hinckley] acted in good faith to make it available for analysis and evaluation”. This simply is not true.

One of Hofmann’s goals was to demonstrate a lack divine inspiration, but that was not his major objective. Hofmann was annoyed about how his family and church leaders would not talk openly about church history and was convince that the leadership was actively trying to suppress the Church’s history (polygamy specifically). His ultimate trap was to see how the leadership would response to flattering forgeries and unflattering forgeries. Just as he suspected, the flattering forgeries readily announced with fanfare and the unflattering ones were not. He screwed up his experiment up with the Joseph Smith III forgery, but he performed the experiment flawlessly with the Stowell Forgery.

When the $15,000 purchase was to occur ONLY on the condition of confidentiality, Hofmann became giddy because his experiment had proved his hypothesis that the leadership had been behaving disingenuously with regards to its history. For over two years Hinckley sat on the Stowell Forgery to such an extent that none of the other leadership is known to have been aware of it, resulting in Jerry Cahill officially denying its existence. The ONLY reason the purchase was acknowledge and the forgeries existence revealed was because Hofmann broke his promise of confidentiality in order to punish Hinckley for not buying the Salamander letter. Hinckley didn’t buy it because he could not determine if the flamboyant Lyn Jacobs could offer the same confidentiality as Hofmann.

The argument that Hinckley doubted the authenticity of the document and for this reason did not reveal the purchase is also bogus. Authenticate documents verifying the Bainbridge, NY examination occurred more than a decade before the Stowell Forgery and Hofmann deliberately design the Stowell Forgery to be somewhat consistent.

I have pointed out to Mormanity that his statement was made from how he understood that episode in history. In light of how the event actual event occurred that statement should be modified (moderated) in some way. Leaving it the way it is would be a lack of academic honesty and intellectual integrity.