CES Letter Answers

Appearance

Conclusion ​

You've reached the end. If you came in through the introduction, you've now had thirteen sections to test the pattern that piece named: a true-sounding statement, the disqualifying context omitted, an implication that feels stronger than the evidence actually carries. The work of this site has been to refuse the shortcut and put the missing context back in front of you, claim by claim.

The CES Letter ends differently. Its Conclusion does not introduce new evidence; it does not cite a single faithful scholar; it does not engage a single primary historical source. What it does is convert the cumulative reading experience into a verdict and pivot to a poem.[1] The pain it expresses is real. The pivot is also doing work the prior pages did not — asking the reader to mistake an emotional terminus for an argumentative one.

A note on posture: I'm a believing Latter-day Saint, and the scholars I lean on most — Bushman, Hardy, Welch, Skousen, Givens, Mason, Halverson — are themselves believing Latter-day Saints. The argument is not that their faith vouches for the truth of the claims; it's that any responsible engagement of these questions has to engage what they argue, and the easy disqualifier ("they just don't know better") doesn't apply to scholars publishing peer-reviewed work in their fields. You are evaluating one framing against another — not framing against bare truth.

How the CES Letter's Conclusion Actually Works ​

The Conclusion (PDF pp. 126–129) is structurally distinct from every prior section. The topical chapters at least pretend to deliver evidence. The Conclusion delivers rhetoric.

The truncated epigraph ​

The Conclusion opens with a block quote attributed to President Joseph Fielding Smith:

"Mormonism, as it is called, must stand or fall on the story of Joseph Smith. He was either a Prophet of God, divinely called, properly appointed and commissioned or he was one of the biggest frauds this world has ever seen. There is no middle ground. If Joseph was a deceiver, who willfully attempted to mislead people, then he should be exposed, his claims should be refuted, and his doctrines shown to be false…"[2]

Runnells's ellipsis cuts the passage off at exactly the moment Smith resolves the dichotomy. The actual continuation reads: "There is no possibility of his being deceived, and on this issue we are ready to make our stand. I maintain that Joseph Smith was all that he claimed to be… No imposter could have accomplished so great and wonderful a work."[3] The reader inherits Smith's framing without inheriting his conclusion. The "no middle ground" frame seems to come from the Church itself — but only because the Church's own resolution has been edited out.

The dichotomy is still worth taking seriously. The Book of Mormon is either an ancient document mediated through a young farm boy with no plausible naturalistic origin, or Joseph's prophetic credibility goes with it. Stephen Smoot's Et Incarnatus Est (2018) accepts the dichotomy on its own terms and argues that the "Inspired Fiction" middle position is unavailable.[4] Same dichotomy, opposite verdict. That is the engagement Runnells does not have.

The "alien and foreign" frame ​

The Conclusion's emotional center of gravity is the charge that apologetic Mormonism is "alien and foreign to the Chapel Mormonism" Runnells grew up in.[5] The lived experience this gestures at is real. Many members did grow up without hearing about seer stones, multiple First Vision accounts, Joseph Smith's polyandry, or the fuller history of the priesthood ban. The pain of late discovery is real, and Uchtdorf said so from the General Conference pulpit in 2013: "In nearly 200 years of Church history—along with an uninterrupted line of inspired, honorable, and divine events—there have been some things said and done that could cause people to question."[6] The descriptive claim is conceded by the apostolic voice itself.

But the inference Runnells draws does not follow. The Church that publishes the Saints volumes, hosts the Joseph Smith Papers, and has produced a series of Gospel Topics Essays on plural marriage, the seer stone, the priesthood ban, Book of Abraham translation, and First Vision accounts — that Church is the institutional Church.[7][8] Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling, Givens's By the Hand of Mormon, Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon, Harper's First Vision — these are not the apologetic margin.[9][10][11] They are exactly what the institution has been pointing members toward for two decades. The "Chapel Mormonism vs. Internet Mormonism" dichotomy treats correlation-era curriculum as the real Mormonism and any institutional update as evidence of dishonesty. The trajectory of the last twenty years runs the opposite direction.

The Gish Gallop on page 128 ​

The Conclusion's longest passage is a cascade of more than a dozen rhetorical questions on p. 128, each compressing a topical chapter into a single mockable line.[12] Daniel Peterson's 2014 FAIR address identified the structure by name, citing Jeff Lindsay's earlier formulation: "The 'big list' is loaded with barbed questions that weren't written in search of a real answer."[13] Each compressed question asserts a contested claim as already-settled, pre-loads the answer with mockery, and stacks at speed sufficient to prevent thoughtful pause. None of the questions are sourced in the Conclusion itself; each implicitly cites back to Runnells's own earlier sections. If those chapters have been answered — and the body of this site argues claim by claim that they have been — the cascade has no independent foundation to fall back to.

The right response is to engage one or two at depth and decline to play the volume game.

Take the seer-stone-in-hat. Runnells frames the dictation method as falsifying the translation product because the instrument resembles Joseph's earlier treasure-seeking. That's a textbook genetic fallacy — the surface-resemblance of an instrument cannot determine the truth of what's produced through it. The Book of Mormon's authenticity is measured by what came out, sustained across the dictation period, in the form of the text. Full case at Book of Mormon Translation.

Or take the Min / Facsimile 2 mockery, the cascade's most charged item. Runnells reads the iconographic source of Facsimile 2 — figure 7's apparent connection to the Egyptian god Min — as falsifying Joseph's theological reinterpretation. The same logical move would invalidate every religious tradition that absorbed and reinterpreted prior iconography: Christianity reinterprets Roman imagery, Judaism reinterprets Canaanite imagery. Source-iconography does not falsify reinterpretation. Full case at Book of Abraham → Facsimiles. Both examples illustrate the same problem: compressed surface-resemblance does not engage what is actually being claimed.

The rigged definition of "delusion" ​

After the cascade comes the verdict:

"Faith is believing and hoping when there is little evidence for or against something. Delusion is believing when there is an abundance of evidence against something."[14]

The definitional move is the trick. Runnells defines "delusion" to fit the conclusion he wants, then asserts (without showing) that the Church faces "an abundance of evidence against." If the prior chapters do land, the definition converts disagreement into pathology. If they don't, the definition simply re-asserts the case under medical-sounding language. The reader who finishes the Letter and remains believing is, by construction, deluded — not by evidence the Letter delivers, but by the definition itself.

The pivot to grief ​

The Conclusion's last move is the closing poem, "The Journey." Three stanzas of childhood faith giving way to an adult realization that the heavens are now charted "by my own hand."[15] It is the most graceful page in the document. It also performs a specific function: the reader's last cognitive act is not to evaluate a claim but to feel one. The pain expressed deserves the same respect any honest faith-loss does. What it does not deserve is to be confused with an argument.

The Honest Cumulative-Doubt Argument ​

The polemical version of Runnells's argument is intellectually thin. The honest version is much stronger — and the honest version is articulated, in slightly different forms, by faithful scholars themselves.

The honest version goes something like this. I have read the topical responses. Some are genuinely good. The DNA argument has a coherent answer. The witnesses' lifelong adherence is real. Nahom is a striking pre-attestation. But each individual response is plausible enough to keep me from leaving over that one issue, and yet when I lay out twenty issues — each requiring some interpretive expansion beyond the plain reading I grew up with — I start to feel that the cumulative interpretive load is itself the evidence.

This is the steelman. It is recognizable in the work of Patrick Mason, the Givenses, James Faulconer, and Jared Halverson — every one a faithful Latter-day Saint scholar.[16][17][18] Mason's Planted is built around the recognition that the post-internet faith crisis is typically not caused by a single revealed fact but by exactly the cumulative weight Runnells's argument is gesturing at. Givens, in "Letter to a Doubter," puts it directly: "There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore more deliberate and laden with more personal vulnerability and investment."[19]

The descriptive claim is conceded. The CES Letter also landed in a specific window — the late-2000s reorganization of FARMS into the Maxwell Institute, before the Gospel Topics Essays began appearing in 2013 — when the Church was still figuring out how to do post-internet history publicly. The retention pressures of that window are real and not reducible to the Letter being right. The Church has substantially closed that window since.

Where I have to concede more directly: the Book of Abraham ​

If the cumulative-distance argument lands its strongest single punch anywhere, it lands on the Book of Abraham.

What the consensus of Egyptologists — including faithful Latter-day Saints like John Gee and Kerry Muhlestein — has demonstrated is that the surviving Joseph Smith Papyri are not, in the linguistic sense, the source of the published Book of Abraham. The hieroglyphs on the recovered fragments translate as funerary text. That much is settled.

What remains genuinely unsettled is what to make of it. Multiple faithful scholarly frameworks are in active engagement — strict catalyst, modified catalyst (revelation prompted by the papyri, with editorial harmonization to the surviving vignettes), missing-scroll, and Semitic adaptation among them. The topical page on the papyri takes the modified-catalyst lane and engages the genuinely hard documentary findings of Brian Hauglid's 2020 work, including narrow textual dependency between Abraham 1:1–3 and the Egyptian Alphabet documents. None of these frameworks reads "translation" the way the 1830s-Joseph claim ("I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics") originally read on its plain surface.

This is real interpretive expansion beyond Joseph's first-person framing — exactly what the steelman is naming. I find the modified-catalyst reading plausible enough to hold. I also recognize this is the place where the cumulative-distance argument has its strongest single example. The full engagement is at Book of Abraham; a topical-page redirect would be dishonest if I pretended the question were resolved. It is not.

The DNA and pre-Columbian archaeology questions also resist clean answers. Joseph Smith's biographical record contains genuinely difficult episodes that resist a Sunday-school portrait. The retention crisis is real and not solely caused by the CES Letter.

What the steelman cannot deliver is that disaffiliation is the only honest conclusion from the same data. The same primary-source engagement produces honest re-engagement in the opposite direction in many cases. Bushman's Joseph Smith's Gold Plates (Oxford, 2023), Givens's By the Hand of Mormon, Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon, Mason's Planted — every one wrote for this same demographic.[20] The judgment about whether the cumulative weight cuts toward doubt or faith is a judgment about how to weight interpretive expansions, not one delivered by the evidence alone.

What the Body of This Site Has Demonstrated ​

Across thirteen sections, when the CES Letter's claims are engaged carefully, a consistent pattern emerges. Compressed numbers count something other than what the framing suggests. Maps turn out to be loose sound-alikes that fail their own screens. Borrowed authority truncates what the authority actually said. Quotations from primary documents drop the disqualifying half. The pattern recurs because it is doing the persuasive work the underlying evidence does not.

What does not fail under examination is a small set of evidentiary clusters.

The translation feat ​

By Welch's reconstruction — drawing on Emma Smith's and David Whitmer's accounts of the timing — roughly 269,510 words were dictated in approximately 60 working days, by a young man with three years of formal schooling, with no notes, no outline, and no evidence of revision to earlier sections as later ones were dictated.[21]

The eyewitness pattern converges across decades from witnesses with diverging institutional loyalties. Emma Smith, by 1879 estranged from the Brighamite Church and under no incentive to defend Joseph:

"In writing for your father I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us… He had neither manuscript nor book to read from… your father would dictate to me hour after hour; and when returning after meals, or after interruptions, he could at once begin where he had left off."[22]

David Whitmer described the immediate-verification loop — scribe writes, reads back, Joseph confirms.[23] Oliver Cowdery's most reliably-attested testimony about the dictation comes from his October 21, 1848 address at Council Bluffs, recorded in Reuben Miller's journal: "I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon (save a few pages) as it fell from the lips of the Prophet as he translated it by the gift and power of God…"[24]

Royal Skousen's three-decade Critical Text Project has documented manuscript-error patterns consistent with dictation rather than composition. The Coriantumr/Coriantummer pattern is the clearest example: Cowdery first wrote Coriantummer phonetically, then crossed it out and wrote Coriantumr. Skousen's argument is precise: "no matter how slowly or carefully Joseph Smith might have repronounced Coriantumr, it would have been impossible for him to have indicated that there was no vowel between the m and r at the end of the name except by actually spelling out the separate letters."[25] The example is evidence of tight letter-by-letter dictation control — Joseph specifying spellings he could not have known on his own for words his Hebraist grammar would not have predicted.

Critics have engaged the dictation-pace argument at length. Solomon Spalding, Sidney Rigdon, deranged-paranoid, savant-genius — each fails on at least one of four constraints (pace, no-revision pattern, witness convergence, manuscript phonetic-error and tight-control patterns). The structural argument is not that no naturalistic theory has been proposed; it's that no proposed theory has cleared all four constraints at once.

Chiasmus and what is inside the text ​

In August 1967, John W. Welch — then a 21-year-old missionary in Regensburg, Germany — found chiastic structures in Mosiah 5 and Mosiah 3 within a week of attending a lecture on biblical Hebrew style. His resulting BYU Studies article is the foundational publication of Book of Mormon chiasmus scholarship.[26] Alma 36 — a 30-verse chiastic first-person account of Alma the Younger's conversion that opens and closes with "give ear to my words" and centers on Alma's cry to Jesus Christ for mercy — registers in Boyd and Farrell Edwards's 2004 statistical analysis at below 1 in 5,000 by their most stringent 8-element criterion.[27]

Critical-side scholarship has pushed back. Earl Wunderli's 2005 Dialogue response argued that the Edwards methodology is loose enough that similar significance levels can be found in random English text.[28] Wunderli is right that some "chiasmus" claims are over-claimed. The honest faithful reply is that what's load-bearing is not Alma 36 alone but the density of structurally complex parallelism Donald Parry catalogs across the entire text — climactic, inverted, alternating — combined with the asymmetry that Joseph's own 1832 history shows essentially none of it.[29][30] Alma 36 survives Wunderli's filters, and the cumulative pattern is harder to dismiss than any single chapter.

The witnesses pattern ​

The Three Witnesses (Cowdery, Whitmer, Harris) were all eventually estranged from Joseph; all three were excommunicated; all three lived for years outside the Church. None recanted the testimony of the plates and the angelic witness.[31] David Whitmer in 1887 — outside the Brighamite Church and writing partly in critique of it — restated his witness throughout An Address to All Believers in Christ, separable from his Brighamite-leadership critique.[23:1] Even Dan Vogel — the most prominent academic critic of the Book of Mormon's authenticity, in Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (2004) — acknowledges the witnesses' sincerity while constructing a naturalistic explanation.[32] The pattern across the 60+ years Anderson catalogs is sustained adherence through estrangement, excommunication, and death.

The First Vision evidentiary pattern ​

Steven C. Harper's First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (Oxford, 2019) analyzes all nine surviving accounts through cognitive memory science.[11:1] The findings invert what the CES Letter's First Vision section claims:

  • The variation pattern matches genuine recollection. Fabricated accounts add detail over time. Genuine accounts vary in which details are recalled. The First Vision accounts pattern matches the latter.
  • Embellishment runs the wrong direction. The 1835 account adds "many angels"; the 1838 official account drops them. Power-base-building does not remove supernatural witnesses.
  • The 1832 private journal serves no institutional purpose. Personal anguish over sin in a private journal is not the burial Joseph would choose if inventing a vision to gain followers.
  • Hostile newspapers reported the vision claim before Joseph wrote it down. The Painesville Telegraph (Nov 16, 1830) and Palmyra Reflector notices predate Joseph's earliest surviving private articulation.[33]

The CES Letter's compressed version — that the variation falsifies the vision — inverts what the cognitive-memory evidence shows.

The apostolic record ​

The affirmative case is reinforced by the modern apostolic record. In 2000, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve issued The Living Christ — a fifteen-apostle joint signed witness.[34] In 2009, Holland's "Safety for the Soul" engaged the cumulative case for the Book of Mormon directly. In 2020, the Bicentennial Proclamation affirmed the Restoration's foundational claims.[35]

What the apostolic record demonstrates is theological coherence under sustained pressure. The Restoration's load-bearing core — Christ, continuing revelation, the Book of Mormon as scripture — has held through 195 years of internal schism, external critique, and cultural pressure. The Church has updated its understanding on practices and historical-method specifics that proved more contingent than they first appeared (priesthood ban reasoning, polygamy practice, Book of Abraham translation framing, seer-stone integration into curriculum). The honest version distinguishes the doctrinal core from the broader set of associated claims, and earns more credibility for drawing the distinction than for collapsing it.

What "Delusion" Cannot Mean ​

Return to the verdict: "Delusion is believing when there is an abundance of evidence against something."[14:1] The intellectual life of faithful Mormonism is not an abundance of evidence against. It is, in significant measure, the exact intellectual life Runnells's framing forecloses — and the way to demonstrate that is not to recite credentials but to engage what the work actually argues.

Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling is the standard scholarly biography of Joseph Smith. Its argumentative move is the documentary-historical method applied without smoothing: every difficult biographical episode (Martin Harris losing the 116 pages, Joseph's polyandrous marriages, the Kirtland banking failure, the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor) is engaged on the documentary record, not omitted. The faithful reading emerges through engagement with those episodes, not by avoiding them.[9:1]

Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon argues from literary structure: the Book of Mormon's three primary narrators (Nephi, Mormon, Moroni) have distinct literary voices, distinct theological emphases, and distinct narrative purposes. The single-author hypothesis must explain how a young farm boy producing 269,510 words in 60 days simultaneously sustained three coherent authorial voices that critics had not noticed for nearly two centuries.[36]

Givens's "Letter to a Doubter" argues for the philosophical legitimacy of doubt itself — that genuine faith requires the live possibility of disbelief, and that the Restoration's evidentiary balance is itself a feature of how religious knowledge is structured.[19:1]

Welch and Skousen argue from textual structure: chiasmus, parallelism, manuscript phonetics, tight-control dictation — features of the text that sit awkwardly on any single-author 1820s-frontier hypothesis.

Credentials disqualify a particular lazy reply ("the people who reach the faithful conclusion just don't know better"); they do not settle questions. What matters is what the arguments do — and they are checkable against primary sources, peer-reviewed responses, and the broader scholarly literature. To call the position these scholars have reached "delusion" is to assert a verdict the evidence does not deliver.

Honoring the Pain ​

The closing pages of the CES Letter are not an argument. They are grief, expressed gracefully:

"The past year was the worst year of my life. I experienced a betrayal, loss, and sadness unlike anything I've ever known."[37]

That sentence deserves the same respect any honest faith-loss does. The specific shape of it deserves naming, not just sympathy: the disaffiliate's grief is in part the experience of having invested earnest belief and now feeling betrayed by what they encountered — I trusted a tradition that didn't tell me everything; I now distrust the institution; I now distrust my prior religious experience as evidence of anything. That is a real and distinct loss, and it is not dispositive about the truth claims, but it is not nothing.

The faithful pastoral response is not a sermon at the doubter. It is to recognize that faith crisis, engaged rather than feared, can produce deeper post-crisis faith. Halverson's "creation, fall, atonement" framework treats the crisis itself as sacred space — the fall of the inherited childhood frame is what makes the atonement of an integrated adult faith possible.[18:1] Holland's 2013 "Lord, I Believe" offered the right pastoral note: hold the ground of the faith you do have while you continue to engage honest questions.[38]

One framing question deserves direct engagement before we close. The CES Letter presents itself as the questions of a sincere believer who lost faith because the apologetic encounter destroyed his testimony. Steven Harper's 2024 FAIR address documents that this framing is contested by the contemporaneous record — Reddit posts, pseudonymous critical activity, a disaffiliation timeline that appears to substantially predate the Letter's stated framing.[39] Contesting the framing of one document does not void the same trajectory for every honest disaffiliate; many readers have lived exactly the experience Runnells's framing claims. But the response on this site is to the document's arguments, not to its biographical framing — and a reader weighing whether the document is a sincere truth-seeker's questions or a more curated rhetorical product deserves to know that the question is documented.

Where I Land ​

The path doesn't have to end where the CES Letter says it ends.

The body of this site has gone through the document section by section. What has emerged is not a clean rebuttal of every claim — some questions remain hard, and the body of this site says so where they do — but a recognizable pattern. The compressed numbers, the truncated quotes, the loose maps, the Gish Gallop, the rigged definitions — these recur because they are doing the persuasive work the underlying evidence does not. When the missing context is restored, the implications shrink.

What does not shrink is the affirmative case as the historical record actually documents it:

  • The Book of Mormon's text was produced, on the well-documented witness accounts and Welch's reconstruction, in roughly 60 working days at approximately 269,510 words. The eyewitnesses describe a process incompatible with covert authorship.
  • Skousen's manuscript work documents tight-control dictation that no proposed naturalistic theory has accounted for under all the relevant constraints simultaneously.
  • The text contains chiasmus dense enough to register at sub-1-in-5,000 statistical significance for Alma 36 — and Parry's wider catalog of Hebraic structures is harder to dismiss than any single chapter.
  • Eleven named witnesses sustained their testimony through estrangement, excommunication, and death.
  • Nine First Vision accounts pattern-match genuine recollection rather than fabrication.
  • The Book of Mormon's text has stood unchanged in its substance through 195 years of revision, scholarly engagement, and hostile attempts to find Joseph's sources or naturalistic precursors.

I am a believing Latter-day Saint. The people I cite are mostly other believing Latter-day Saints, and that is the design — there is no neutral interpretive stance from which to evaluate religious truth claims, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. What I owe a thoughtful reader is what I owed at the introduction: real engagement with the strongest critical positions, faithful representation of what the sources actually say, and acknowledgment of where the questions are genuinely hard. The Book of Abraham is one such place.

When the questions get genuinely hard, here is where I keep landing. The Book of Mormon exists. It was produced in the manner described above. Holland in 2009 — endorsing his great-grandfather George Cannon's earlier formulation — captured the structural argument I find I cannot get past: "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so."[40] That line is preached, not argued. The argument under it is the structural one above: the Book of Mormon's existence under the constraints documented is a fact the Letter never engages, and any honest reckoning with the Restoration has to reckon with what is there before it pronounces what is not.

If you have come to this page through the CES Letter, you are not alone. The path through is not to ignore what's hard. It is to insist that the evidence be read at its full length, in full context, with the strongest version of every argument represented honestly. That is what this site has tried to do. It is not a finished project. It is a starting place.

A Note from the Author ​

I'm Landon — a believing Latter-day Saint, honest about that posture. Where the evidence is messy I have tried to say so. Where it is strong I have not pretended otherwise. I have never met Jeremy Runnells. He comes across in interviews as a sincere person, and the response on this site is to the document, not to him.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," pp. 126–129. The Conclusion contains no scholarly source citations: its footnotes consist of the truncated Joseph Fielding Smith epigraph, hyperlinks back to Runnells's own earlier topical sections, a citation to D&C 93:36, the Eliza R. Snow hymn "Do What Is Right," and the attribution for the closing poem. ↩︎

  2. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 126, citing Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation 1:188. Runnells's quote extends through "his doctrines shown to be false…" before truncating with the ellipsis that excises the resolution that follows. ↩︎

  3. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, ed. Bruce R. McConkie (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954), 1:188. The full passage continues past Runnells's ellipsis: "…for the doctrines of an imposter cannot be made to harmonize in all particulars with divine truth…There is no possibility of his being deceived, and on this issue we are ready to make our stand. I maintain that Joseph Smith was all that he claimed to be…No imposter could have accomplished so great and wonderful a work." Documented in Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 67," FAIR (3 August 2022). https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2022/08/03/33167 ↩︎

  4. Stephen O. Smoot, "Et Incarnatus Est: The Imperative for Book of Mormon Historicity," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 30 (2018): 125–162. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/et-incarnatus-est-the-imperative-for-book-of-mormon-historicity — Smoot accepts the "no middle ground" dichotomy and argues at length that the Inspired Fiction position is unavailable. The Holland passage Smoot quotes (originally from Holland's foreword to the 2002 Madsen festschrift To Be Learned Is Good If) reads in full: "Joseph Smith must be accepted either as a prophet of God or else as a charlatan of the first order, but no one should tolerate any ludicrous, even laughable middle ground about the wonderful contours of a young boy's imagination or his remarkable facility for turning a literary phrase." Smoot represents one influential faithful position; inspired-fiction defenders inside Mormon Studies (Blake Ostler, Brant Gardner, Dan Belnap on different readings) make the question more contested than Smoot's framing suggests. ↩︎

  5. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 127. ↩︎

  6. Dieter F. Uchtdorf, "Come, Join With Us," October 2013 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2013/10/come-join-with-us — verbatim transcript: "in nearly 200 years of Church history—along with an uninterrupted line of inspired, honorable, and divine events—there have been some things said and done that could cause people to question." Source of the well-known counsel to "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith." ↩︎

  7. Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2018–). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/saints-v1 — official multi-volume narrative history written by professional historians; engages seer stones, plural marriage, multiple First Vision accounts, and the financial difficulties of early Church leaders. ↩︎

  8. "Gospel Topics Essays," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013–. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays — official essays on plural marriage, race and the priesthood, the translation and historicity of the Book of Abraham, the Book of Mormon translation, First Vision accounts, and other historically contested topics. ↩︎

  9. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/96541/joseph-smith-by-richard-l-bushman/ — Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University and a faithful Latter-day Saint; the standard scholarly biography of Joseph Smith. ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The gold-standard academic-press treatment of the Book of Mormon's reception and historicity. ↩︎

  11. Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Harper is editor of BYU Studies Quarterly and a BYU church history professor; analyzes all nine surviving First Vision accounts using cognitive memory science. ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 128. A cascade of more than a dozen rhetorical questions stacked across five paragraphs, each compressing a topical chapter into a single mockable line. None are sourced in the Conclusion itself; each implicitly refers back to Runnells's earlier topical sections. ↩︎

  13. Daniel C. Peterson, "Some Reflections on That Letter to a CES Director," 2014 FAIR Conference. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2014/reflections-letter-ces-director — Peterson is the founding president of the Interpreter Foundation and BYU emeritus professor of Islamic studies. Peterson identifies the Letter's structure as a "big list" Gish Gallop, citing Jeff Lindsay's earlier formulation. ↩︎

  14. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 128. ↩︎ ↩︎

  15. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 129. The closing poem "The Journey" runs three stanzas; the final stanza ends with "the chart drafted by my own hand." ↩︎

  16. Patrick Q. Mason, Planted: Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute / Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016). https://mi.byu.edu/planted — Mason holds the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Planted engages the post-internet faith-crisis pattern as a real phenomenon requiring direct pastoral engagement. ↩︎

  17. James E. Faulconer, Faith, Philosophy, Scripture (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/33/ — Faulconer is a faithful BYU philosopher. The volume's framing line: "The confidence of my faith, a confidence that came by revelation, has allowed me to hear the questions of philosophy without fear." ↩︎

  18. Jared Halverson, "Don't Let a Good Faith Crisis Go to Waste," Restore Conference (15 January 2023), published by Faith Matters. https://www.faithmatters.org/p/jared-halverson-dont-let-a-good-faith — Halverson is a BYU religion professor with a PhD in American religious history from Vanderbilt. His "creation, fall, atonement" framework treats faith crisis as developmental sacred space rather than as moral failure. ↩︎ ↩︎

  19. Terryl L. Givens, "Letter to a Doubter," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 4 (2013): 131–146. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/letter-to-a-doubter/ — central framing: "There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore more deliberate and laden with more personal vulnerability and investment." ↩︎ ↩︎

  20. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). Bushman's most recent scholarly engagement, written from inside the same Latter-day Saint scholarly tradition that engages cumulative doubt directly. ↩︎

  21. "Why Is the Timing of the Book of Mormon's Translation So Marvelous?" Scripture Central KnoWhy, citing John W. Welch's calculation of approximately 60 working days; total Book of Mormon word count 269,510. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-is-the-timing-of-the-book-of-mormons-translation-so-marvelous — Welch's reconstruction draws on Emma Smith's 1879 testimony and David Whitmer's accounts of the translation timeline (April 7 – June 30, 1829, minus interruptions). The 60-day figure is a reconstruction from indirect timing evidence, not a contemporaneous record; the witness statements are the load-bearing evidence. ↩︎

  22. Emma Smith, "Last Testimony of Sister Emma," interview by Joseph Smith III, The Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289–290. Compiled with other primary statements at Witnesses of the Book of Mormon: https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/other-witnesses/emma-hale-smith/statements/ ↩︎

  23. David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, Missouri: self-published, 1887). https://archive.org/details/anaddresstoallb00whitgoog/ — Whitmer's restated testimony of his witness experience runs throughout the pamphlet, separable from his Brighamite-leadership critique. ↩︎ ↩︎

  24. Reuben Miller's record of Oliver Cowdery's 21 October 1848 address at Council Bluffs, Iowa, first published as "Last Days of Oliver Cowdery," Deseret News (13 April 1859). The full passage: "I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon (save a few pages) as it fell from the lips of the Prophet as he translated it by the gift and power of God by means of the Urim and Thummim, or as it is called by that book, holy interpreters. I beheld with my eyes and handled with my hands the gold plates from which it was translated. I also saw with my eyes and handled with my hands the holy interpreters… That book is true." The 1848 reaffirmation came nearly a decade after Cowdery's 1838 excommunication and shortly before his return to the Church. Compiled with other primary statements at Witnesses of the Book of Mormon: https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/three-witnesses/oliver-cowdery/statements/ ↩︎

  25. Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 22–31. https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/how-joseph-smith-translated-book-mormon-evidence-original-manuscript — Skousen is professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University; the Critical Text Project (begun 1988) is the definitive scholarly examination of the Book of Mormon's textual history. Skousen argues the Coriantummer/Coriantumr correction demonstrates tight letter-by-letter dictation control, not merely free phonetic transmission. ↩︎

  26. John W. Welch, "Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon," BYU Studies 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 69–84. The foundational article on Book of Mormon chiasmus scholarship; Welch's discovery is dated August 16, 1967, in Regensburg, Germany. Welch holds a J.D. from Duke University and is the founder of FARMS. ↩︎

  27. Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards, "Does Chiasmus Appear in the Book of Mormon by Chance?" BYU Studies 43, no. 2 (2004): 103–130. The strongest 8-element test on Alma 36 yields probability of accidental composition below approximately 1 in 5,000. ↩︎

  28. Earl M. Wunderli, "Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 97–112. Critical-side engagement arguing that the Edwards methodology is loose enough that similar significance levels can be detected in random English texts. ↩︎

  29. Donald W. Parry, The Book of Mormon Text Reformatted According to Parallelistic Patterns (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1992; revised editions). Comprehensive catalog of inverted parallelism, climactic parallelism, and other Hebraic structures throughout the Book of Mormon text — 490 pages of structural analysis. ↩︎

  30. Stanford Carmack, "The Implications of Past-Tense Syntax in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 14 (2015): 119–186; and "Joseph Smith Read the Words," Interpreter 18 (2016): 41–64. Joseph Smith's own 1832 history (available at the Joseph Smith Papers — anyone can verify the absence of chiastic structure by inspection) uses 19th-century American English grammar; the Book of Mormon's text contains pre-King-James-era English grammar that Joseph's personal writing never displays. ↩︎

  31. Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981). Anderson documents over 200 separate testimony statements from the Book of Mormon witnesses and their close associates over their lifetimes. ↩︎

  32. Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004). The most prominent academic critic of the Book of Mormon's authenticity; Vogel's "pious deceiver" thesis acknowledges the witnesses' subjective sincerity while constructing a naturalistic explanation. ↩︎

  33. "The Golden Bible," Painesville Telegraph, November 16, 1830; "Gold Bible" series, Palmyra Reflector, January–March 1831. Hostile contemporaneous press notices reporting the gold-plates / vision claim before Joseph's earliest surviving private articulation in 1832. ↩︎

  34. "The Living Christ: The Testimony of the Apostles," First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, January 1, 2000. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-living-christ-the-testimony-of-the-apostles/the-living-christ-the-testimony-of-the-apostles — fifteen-apostle joint signed witness statement. ↩︎

  35. "The Restoration of the Fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: A Bicentennial Proclamation to the World," First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles, April 5, 2020. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2020/05/the-restoration-of-the-fulness-of-the-gospel-of-jesus-christ-a-bicentennial-proclamation-to-the-world — issued on the bicentennial of the First Vision. ↩︎

  36. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hardy holds a PhD from Yale University and is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. ↩︎

  37. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 129. ↩︎

  38. Jeffrey R. Holland, "Lord, I Believe," April 2013 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2013/04/lord-i-believe — pastoral counsel on holding the ground of faith one already has while continuing to engage honest questions. ↩︎

  39. Steven C. Harper, "CES Letters: What Do You Know and How Do You Know It?," 2024 FAIR Conference (released on YouTube as "The TRUTH about the CES Letter"). Harper documents the contemporaneous record (Reddit posts, the "Kolobot" pseudonymous critical activity, disaffiliation timeline) that contests the Letter's "sincere truth-seeker" framing. The content of the Letter's arguments stands or falls on the merits regardless of biographical framing. ↩︎

  40. Jeffrey R. Holland, "Safety for the Soul," October 2009 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2009/10/safety-for-the-soul — Holland surveys the failed naturalistic theories of Book of Mormon origin and endorses his great-grandfather George Cannon's earlier formulation as his closing line: "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it, unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so." Cannon — the Welsh-American carpenter who first read the Book of Mormon to George Q. Cannon's family — is the line's original author; Holland endorses it from the General Conference pulpit as inherited family witness. ↩︎

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