Appearance
Conclusion
The CES Letter raises real questions. Some of them are hard. This site has taken them seriously — section by section, source by source — because they deserve serious answers.
If you've read through the sections that matter most to you, you've seen what the evidence looks like when the missing context is supplied. The question now is what it all adds up to.
The keystone held
The CES Letter opens its Book of Mormon section with "sudden death" framing — President Benson calling it "the keystone," Elder Holland calling it "a sudden death proposition."[1] The Conclusion doubles down: Joseph Smith was "either a Prophet of God...or one of the biggest frauds this world has ever seen. There is no middle ground."[2]
Accept the framing.
The Book of Mormon was dictated in roughly 60 working days. No notes. No outline. No manuscripts present. Joseph's face was in a hat looking at a seer stone while scribes wrote. Emma said he had "neither manuscript nor book to read from."[3] Oliver Cowdery didn't purchase a Bible until months after the translation was finished.[4]
The text that came out of that process contains 337 proper names, three separate calendar systems, 550+ internally consistent geographic references — dictated orally, without maps. The original manuscript shows errors from hearing, not reading.[5]
And the evidence has only moved in one direction since 1830. Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts discovered in 1947 confirmed Book of Mormon Isaiah readings that diverge from the King James Bible.[6] Three votive altars bearing the name NHM — dating to Lehi's lifetime — were found exactly where the Book of Mormon's travel narrative requires.[7] LiDAR revealed 60,000 previously unknown structures in Guatemala's Mirador Basin in 2018. Stanford Carmack identified grammatical structures in the text that predate the KJV and were extinct by 1829 — patterns Joseph's own writing never uses.[8]
Of 226 anachronism claims tracked across 1,000+ critical publications since 1830, only 9.3% remain unconfirmed as of 2024. Cement, barley, steel swords, large-scale fortifications — all once called impossible, all now confirmed. The trend line runs one way across 190 years.[9]
The CES Letter needs the Book of Mormon to fall. It didn't.
No naturalistic theory works
No proposed explanation simultaneously accounts for the 60-day dictation with no notes, 550+ internally consistent geographic references, pre-KJV English grammar, Hebraisms invisible to English readers, Dead Sea Scroll confirmations, the Arabian trail, and a manuscript whose errors come from hearing, not reading.
The CES Letter gestures at View of the Hebrews, The Late War, and The First Book of Napoleon as potential sources. These are contradictory theories — Joseph couldn't have plagiarized all three simultaneously. The letter never commits to one because none work alone.
When you need three mutually exclusive explanations for the same book, you don't have an explanation. You have a problem.
Eleven men who never recanted
Over 200 documented witness accounts exist for the Book of Mormon.[10] Eleven named men put their names to a public declaration. Three of them were excommunicated, had personal grievances with Joseph Smith, and had every incentive to recant. None did — across 50 years.
The Eight Witnesses described a physical object handled in broad daylight. No vision language. No ambiguity. Even prominent critic Dan Vogel acknowledges the witnesses were sincere.
The best-documented theophany in history
Nine accounts of the First Vision survive from Joseph Smith's lifetime — more than exist for Moses at the burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, or Isaiah's temple vision.[11]
The 1835 account drops angels from the 1832 account — the opposite of what fabrication produces. Cognitive memory research confirms the variation pattern matches genuine recollection, not embellishment.
Hostile newspapers reported angelic ordination claims in 1830 — 18 months before the CES Letter's alleged earliest date for priesthood restoration accounts. Oliver Cowdery maintained his priesthood restoration testimony through a decade of excommunication.
What "dozens of serious issues" turned out to be
The Introduction identified the CES Letter's core method: state something true-sounding, leave out the context that would reframe it, and let the reader's imagination close the gap.
That pattern ran through every section.
"100,000 changes" that turn out to be punctuation and spelling. A place-name map built on selective sound-alikes. A "smoking gun" papyrus that represents 2.5% of the original collection. A list of anachronisms where 90% have been confirmed over time. Expert quotes from 1912 presented as current scholarship. A Kinderhook "translation" that traces to a posthumous editorial conversion of someone else's journal entry.
The CES Letter's conclusion frames this as "dozens of serious issues."[12] But section by section, what looked like dozens of independent problems turned out to be the same handful of patterns repeated: missing context, frozen scholarship, straw man premises, and volume masking thin evidence.
The accumulation strategy depends on speed. Stack enough concerns fast enough and even a sharp reader won't stop to check each one.
This site slowed down and checked. Thirteen sections. Every major claim. The pattern broke every time.
A note from the author
My name is Landon, and I wrote in the Introduction that I'm analytical by nature — I don't think questions are a failure of faith. I still believe that. More so now, having spent months in the primary sources.
I understand the pain the CES Letter describes. The feeling of "I was lied to" is real for people who grew up without hearing about seer stones, or plural marriage, or the different First Vision accounts.
Correlation-era materials did underemphasize difficult history. That was a mistake, and the Church has spent the last two decades correcting it — Joseph Smith Papers, Gospel Topics Essays, Saints volumes, the seer stone photo published in the Ensign. The trajectory is unmistakable.
But here's what I found when I went looking: the evidence doesn't say what the CES Letter needs it to say.
The Book of Mormon's existence is still unexplained by any naturalistic theory. The witnesses still held. The First Vision accounts still held. The system self-corrected where it needed to. Hard questions remain — some of them genuinely hard — but the foundation didn't crack.
The CES Letter's conclusion ends with a poem about lost faith. I don't mock that. The pain is real. But the path doesn't have to end where the CES Letter says it does — because the evidence doesn't end where the CES Letter stops quoting it.
If you're here because the CES Letter shook you, you're not alone. Keep studying. Follow the footnotes. Read the primary sources yourself. The truth isn't fragile — it holds up under scrutiny. That's the whole point.
Bottom line: The CES Letter staked everything on the claim that the evidence, examined honestly, destroys faith. This site examined the evidence. It doesn't.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," p. 8, quoting President Ezra Taft Benson ("the keystone of our testimony") and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland ("a sudden death proposition"). ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 126, quoting Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, p. 188: "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." ↩︎
Emma Smith, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879. Published in Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289-290. ↩︎
Oliver Cowdery's Bible was purchased from the Palmyra bookseller E.B. Grandin on October 8, 1829. The Book of Mormon translation was completed by late June 1829. See Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 27. ↩︎
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 ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, "The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon," FARMS Preliminary Report (1981). Analyzed 234 variants: 59 favor BOM, 126 neutral, 49 favor KJV. ↩︎
Warren P. Aston, "The Origins of the Nihm Tribal Name," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 10, no. 1 (2001): 34-43. Three votive altars bearing NHM were found at the Bar'an temple near Marib, Yemen, dating to the 7th-8th century BC. ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "How Joseph Smith's Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History," Interpreter 25 (2017). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar-evidence-from-the-1832-history ↩︎
Matthew Roper, "Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter (2025). Of 226 tracked claims: 91.2% unconfirmed in 1844, 9.3% unconfirmed by 2024. ↩︎
Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981). Anderson documented over 200 separate accounts from the witnesses and their associates. ↩︎
Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Harper analyzes all surviving accounts using cognitive memory science. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Conclusion," p. 129. "There are just way too many problems. We're not just talking about one issue here. We're talking about dozens of serious issues that undermine the very foundation of the LDS Church and its truth claims." ↩︎