Charges Of Suppresion Part II

Created: 11 February 2009
Last Updated: 03 August 2009

It should be noted that the entire entry forgets to mention the smoking gun of suppression, the Stowell Forgery (see my previous entry). So the entire entry is a really a red herring.


In the entry Mormanity quotes a fellow apologist.

“But placing an historical document in a safe place hardly implies suppression.”

From dictionary.com this is the definition of to suppress: "to withhold from disclosure or publication (truth, evidence, a book, names, etc.)." So placing the document in a safe place without revealing the document’s existence or contents is the very definition of suppression. Merely placing the documents in a safe place may not indicate suppression but forgetting to tell people about it, its contents, and denying its existence does.

“Burning the document would be a safer way of getting rid of negative evidence. Placing it in a vault only preserves it for future use.”

Once again this is what I call the fallacy of a viable option. Mark Hofmann had a copy of the document and the banking records to indicate that $15,000 was paid for it and his eventual plee bargain required him to answer questions in a deposition. Had the Church destroyed the document the Church would have been caught red hand destroying documents. The safest way to suppress the document was to lock it away without telling anyone. Is this fallacy of necessity (suppression necessitates burning the document) or is there a better description?

Even moderating the statement with 'surest' instead of 'safest' is undesirable. The earliest and best manuscripts of the certain New Testament books do not contain certain words or verses that later copies do. So if one can prove the original was destroyed and produce a copy of what the original supposedly contained, that copy could contain fabricated content even more salacious than the original. In the end the 'safest' solution is to keep the document and not tell anyone about it. This is exactly what occurred with the Stowell Forgery. Had Hofmann not exposed Hinckley we would have never known that the document had been suppressed. What else has been suppressed that we do not know about?


“We have the example of the Joseph Smith papyri, which lay for decades in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, only to be brought to the Church's attention by a professor doing research there. Yet no one has accused the Metropolitan of "suppressing" these documents!”

This is what is called a false analogy. If the Joseph Smith papyri validated Mormon claims, the Metropolitan Museum knew this, and withheld them then one would have a valid analogy. It was an insignificant find to Egyptology. When the Museum realized it was not just any papyri, but papyri of interest to the LDS Church, they let the LDS Church have it for a donation presumed to be its financial worth. The Museum did not forget to tell people about it or deny its existence.

“By purchasing those documents, GBH kept control of them within the Church. If they became the property of enemies of the Church, then they would NEVER have been tested well enough to show them as fakes.”

This simple is not true. Hofmann documents could have been subpoena wherever they may have gone.