I was recently spammed by an Evangelical Protestant posing as a concerned Christian who was simply asking long-standing question about "Mormonism" that they had. The question was about why Gordon B. Hinckley could be fooled by the Mark Hofmann’s forgeries if he were a prophet of God. The Protestant then threw in a few standard proof-texts for sola scriptura, including 1 John 4:1. It was obvious he did not bother to actually find any answers to this long-standing “issue” he had as such has been long-answered by Latter-day Saint apologists for decades now. The fatal flaw of his question is the a priori assumption that a prophet cannot be fooled by someone. The problem is that, if this Protestant were to be consistent, he would have to jettison the Bible as it gives examples of (true) prophets falling for less elaborate hoaxes, such as Joshua and the Gibeonties (Josh 9) and the unnamed prophet who, as a result of his being hoodwinked by the older prophet, was killed by a lion in 1 Kgs 13 (an act of divine judgement).
LDS apologist, Jeff Lindsay, answers this question more fully on his LDS FAQ page, Questions about Joseph Smith and Modern Prophets; instead of re-inventing the wheel about this issue, I will reproduce what Jeff wrote:
If Gordon B. Hinckley is a prophet, why was he fooled by the fraudulent Salamander Letter and other fake documents from Mark Hofmann?
I'll first deal with the generic issue of fallible prophets before discussing the Salamander Letter and Mark Hofmann. For detailed information on this topic, see the book, Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hoffman Case by Richard E. Turley, Jr. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992), much of which can be read online at Google Books). Also see Wikipedia's article, "Salamander letter," which contains the transcript of the letter.
The Generic Issue
The premise of the question about Gordon B. Hinckley, and many related questions about other prophets, is that a prophet should continually act under direct guidance from God so that nobody could ever deceive him and that no mistakes could ever be made. However, there is no Biblical basis for such a belief. Prophets are mortal men who have been ordained and chosen by God to be a mouthpiece for revelation and guidance, but that revelation only comes when God wills it, making it somewhat sporadic in both ancient and modern times. There is no expectation that every act, every decision, and every purchase by a prophet will be divinely and infallibly guided. As Joseph Smith said, "a prophet is only a prophet when acting as such." Critics of the Church say this is a cop out, but it is true and Biblical.
The Bible gives examples of prophets and apostles who were mortal and fallible, with obvious mistakes having been made by Jonah (shirking his duty), Moses (not circumcising his son), and Peter (denying Christ three times). But can real prophets be fooled by deceivers? Certainly. Joshua was fooled by the men of Gibeon, who came in disguise as if from a distant country when they were locals who normally would have been treated as enemies. In that story, given in Joshua 9:3-27, Joshua was deceived. He was a prophet, but he fell for the trick of the Gibeonites.
An even more dramatic example of a prophet being deceived, and of the mistakes that prophets can make, is given in 1 Kings 13. In that chapter, we read of a man of God with prophetic power and the gift of healing who was given an assignment by God and who was told by God not to eat or drink in that place. After having performed a great miracle, another "old prophet" wanted to meet the man of God and have the man of God eat and drink at his house. To achieve his vain desire, the old prophet told a lie, saying that an angel of God had told the old prophet that the man of God was indeed to come eat and drink after all. Sadly, the man of God - a powerful prophet - believed the lie. He was deceived (1 Kings 13:18 - though the Joseph Smith Translation has a notable difference by having the old prophet not telling a lie). He joined the old prophet at his home where he ate and drank, disobeying the instructions he had received from God. God then gave a revelation to the old prophet - the one who had lied! - saying that the man of God would be punished for his disobedience, that "thy carcase shall not come unto the sepulchre of thy fathers" (1 Kings 13:21,22). That prophecy was fulfilled as the man of God was killed by a lion on the way home. It seems pretty harsh to me, and anti-LDS critics would delight in attacking this story if it were in the Book of Mormon, but the story does illustrate that prophets can be deceived (and that they can sin - though I hope the old prophet repented in great sorrow). We do not believe that prophets are infallible - and neither do they. But we trust the Lord's promise that He will not let His properly chosen and anointed Prophet to lead the Church astray.
As a final example of prophets not receiving direct revelation for everything they do and say, in one of Paul's discussions of marriage in the New Testament, he speaks of an issue for which he had received "no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment" (1 Cor. 7:25-28). This seems to indicate that Paul was just giving his best judgment but did not feel that he had direct revelation from God on the topic. This passage made it into sacred scripture. Surely there were many other things Paul did, said, and even purchased that were not guided by infallible, direct revelation from God. But when God chose to give revelation to Paul, then he was acting as a true prophet and those revelations can be trusted (to the extent that they have been properly preserved and translated in our modern Bibles).
Gordon B. Hinckley and the Salamander Letter
Gordon B. Hinckley, before being made Prophet of the Church, was involved in purchasing some documents from Mark Hofmann, a documents dealer who sold the Church several counterfeit historical documents. Gordon B. Hinckley at that time was an Apostle serving in the First Presidency while the Prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, was ill. While Elder Hinckley never said the documents were authentic, it seems clear that he did not immediately and prophetically recognize that they were forged, otherwise the Church might not have shown interest in them (although keeping them out of the hands of vocal enemies of the Church may have been wise in any case). While President Hinckley (then Apostle Hinckley) expressed his doubts about the authenticity of the controversial Salamander letter, many people, including FBI documents experts and historians, believed that some of Hoffman's forged documents were authentic, and this may have influenced his actions. Some of those documents challenged some LDS views about Joseph Smith and played into the hands of critics.
In 1980, President Hinckley met Mark Hofmann, then a university student who claimed to have found an old Bible with a paper that appeared to be the original paper with characters copied by Joseph Smith from the gold plates and given to Martin Harris for examination by Charles Anthon. Though now known to be fraudulent, like many other documents from Hofmann, it was a convincing forgery. Shortly thereafter, Hofmann claimed to have found a record of Joseph Smith's blessing to his son, Joseph Smith III, in which he blessed the eleven-year-old boy to be the "successor to the Presidency of the High Priesthood," which some interpreted to mean that the son would be the next prophet. This letter appeared to strengthen the claims of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a small church which claims that descendants of Joseph Smith should be rightful heirs to the office of President and which rejects Temple work and much of what makes Latter-day Saints different from Protestants). The Joseph Smith III blessing seemed to challenge established LDS doctrines of succession of the Presidency, but President Hinckley (then Elder Hinckley) firmly maintained those principles as being revealed and correct. As a gesture of goodwill, that troublesome document, rather than being suppressed or destroyed, was publicly given to the Reorganized Church. This has been an important pattern in the Church: we make important documents available, documents like those from Hoffman or the Book of Abraham fragments. We publish them and encourage discussion. We don't run from the truth.
Other Hofmann documents proved troublesome or unflattering to the Church, but none more so than the famous Salamander Letter. Elder Hinckley saw this on Jan. 3, 1984. It appeared to be a letter from Martin Harris to W.W. Phelps which described how Joseph received the gold plates. Apparently contradicting the official LDS account about the appearance of the Angel Moroni, the letter from Harris claimed that a spirit transfigured himself from a white salamander, and suggested that folk magic and treasure hunting was involved in Joseph's acquisition of the golden plates, resonating strongly with popular anti-LDS allegations about Joseph Smith.
Interestingly, the letter could be interpreted in terms of American frontier culture and figurative ways of expression to still accord with the LDS view, but it was also fodder for the enemies of the Church who claimed that it disproved the whole Book of Mormon. This and most of the other troubling documents from Hofmann were made public, though not necessarily with great eagerness! President Hinckley affirmed that "We have nothing to hide" (Sheri L. Dew, The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley, Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996, p. 427). The document was a forgery, but appeared to be authentic. President Hinckley's explanation that accompanied the printing of the full letter in the Church News (April 1985, the same month that the Church officially acquired the letter) said, "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. It is, however, an interesting document of the times" (S.L. Dew, The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley, p. 428). President Hinckley affirmed that the letter did not undermine the Church or Church history. He remained confident and firm in his stance, in spite of the heavy assault of the media and critics of the Church. He said the Church "will weather every storm that beats against it. It will outlast every critic who rises to mock it. It carries the name of Him whose it is, even the Lord Jesus Christ" (Church News, June 30, 1985, as cited by Dew, p. 428). Those were prophetic words.
On October 15, 1985, two LDS people in Salt Lake were killed by separate bombs. The next day, a bomb exploded in Mark Hofmann's car near Church headquarters as he was getting in the vehicle. Hofmann was not killed. Hofmann had been injured by one of his own bombs, a bomb meant for someone else as part of Hofmann's desperate plan to save his neck, to cover his tracks, and to continue perpetrating fraud. The accidental and non-fatal explosion of Hofmann's bomb in his car proved to be key to revealing the truth behind the Hofmann fraud. In February of 1986 he was charged with 28 criminal charges, including two counts of murder. Extensive and even brilliant investigative work was needed to establish the case against Hofmann and to prove that he had forged documents. One key was a forensic scientist discovering an ultraviolet visualization technique that helped detect evidence of forgery in Hofmann's work, which was generally too sophisticated for previously known methods to crack. Eleven months after being charged, the case against Hofmann was very strong and Hofmann pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He also boasted of fooling Church leaders with his forged documents, including the Salamander Letter, the Joseph Smith III blessing, and the Anthon transcript (Dew, p. 431). Hofmann would have liked to bring down the Church (while making a lot of money), but his plans came to nothing.
What does all this say about modern prophets? The business decision to buy the controversial documents - one of the hundreds of business decisions made each month by Church administrators during that time - perhaps did not receive direct guidance from the Lord. Certainly the Lord did not reveal to Elder Hinckley that the documents were fraudulent. But I think the Lord did see, in His own dramatic way, that those damaging documents were revealed as frauds, though the faith of many was tried in the process. The way the truth was revealed was much more convincing and effective than if a Church leader had declared that the damaging and "authenticated" documents were fraudulent. Such claims would have been ridiculed and may have even hindered the objective investigation into the possibility of forgery by Hofmann. It was a great relief, certainly, to learn that the troubling documents were brilliantly executed frauds and that Hofmann and others had been trying (and still try) to use those fraudulent documents to harm the Church.
Critics still charge that the Church was guilty of suppression of documents. In fact, the Church showed remarkable openness in allowing the documents to be published and even in giving one important document to a competing organization. John Tvedtnes commented on the alleged cover up in an article in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1994, pp. 204 ff, which is a review of Jerald and Sandra Tanner's work, Answering Mormon Scholars: A Response to Criticism of the Book "Covering Up the Black Hole in the Book of Mormon". I quote from page 211:
In their discussion of the Hofmann affair, the Tanners repeat what they have long asserted - that the LDS Church is "suppressing" documents it does not want made public by placing them in the First Presidency's vault (p. 24). But placing an historical document in a safe place hardly implies suppression. 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. 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! They were their guardian, just as the Church is the guardian of many documents. Recent history has shown us how people like the Tanners misuse such documents -- sometimes literally publishing what does not belong to them -- to promote their own ends. Consequently, one is not surprised when the Tanners, unable to obtain documents they want, accuse the Church of suppression. . . .
Strangely, the minutes the Tanners quote from a meeting of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve (p. 31), rather than suggesting a cover-up, indicate that the Church was going to publicly announce the acquisition; clearly, this does not support Hofmann's story [of a Church cover up].
The Salamander Letter incident was a difficult and tragic episode in Church history, one that warns us of the lengths that enemies of Christ and of His Church will go to in their desire to destroy. Let us be careful about imposing non-Biblical standards for prophets. The truth about the Hofmann documents was revealed, but not in the way critics demand. There is no reason to reject Gordon B. Hinckley as the Lord's prophet because he allowed the Church to buy documents that were forged. Joshua and other prophets have been fooled by less sophisticated frauds. If you reject him by that standard, prophets of the Bible also must be rejected.
Addendum: Paul Albers offered me his perspective on this matter in e-mail from March 20, 2003, quoted with permission:
Gordon B. Hinckley never came out and endorsed those documents as authentic. That is something simply assumed due to the fact that he purchased them. That assumption is not justified.
Every statement he made about them was a qualified statement that falls short of endorsing them as correct. He said things like "experts say they are authentic." He didn't say that he agrees with their evaluation and, in fact, regarding the JSIII document, he did say that being a fraud was not ruled out, but that there is no evidence of that so far (this is all going by memory).
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 and the church would have a false charge hanging over its head with no way to bring the truth to light to the world. . . .
The proof is in the pudding: the actions of GBH and the Church lead to the exposure of a fraud and murderer and kept the Church from falling into the trap laid for it.
Update: More on Alleged Suppression and the Stowell Letter
Some critics continue to make much out of the alleged suppression by the Church of a forged letter from Joseph Smith to Josiah Stowell. One of several forgeries by Mark Hoffman, this was less damaging than the Salamander letter, but did add new material to implicate Joseph in folk magic. With highly controversial historical documents, there is a case for taking time to verify authenticity before publishing. A year or two of good-faith investigation is not tantamount to suppression. The documents in question were being studied by experts. Questions about suppression of documents may have been stirred in part by a denial by an LDS spokesman that the Church had the Stowell document, rapidly followed by a subsequent correction from President Hinckley that the document was in possession of the Church. Rather than evidence of deception and false denial, what happened was very likely an innocent mistake. See Chapter 5, "Salamander Letter," in Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hoffman Case by Richard E. Turley, Jr. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1992), esp. pp. 88-102, online at Google Books).
Yes, the document was sensitive. President Hinckley purchased it in 1984 and kept it in the First Presidency vault. Several experts were engaged to examine the document and verify its authenticity. In 1985, while both the Salamander letter and the Stowell letter were being studied for authenticity, rumors of the existence of the Stowell letter spread, a Church employee, Jerry Cahill, was asked by a reporter if the Church's Historical Department had the letter. Based on what he knew via his boss, Richard Lindsay, from President Hinckley, the Historical Department did not have the letter, and he said so. He apparently had not heard that the First Presidency, not the Historical Department, had the letter. At this time, President Hinckley was preparing a press release to clarify this when major stories broke in the media before the press release was issued. Richard Turley argues that Jerry Cahill's statement was an innocent mistake and plans were obviously in place to discuss the document more fully, though authentication was not complete. The draft press release that President Hinckley prepared on Aug. 23, 1984, contained this statement:
I am advised that question are being raised concerning the location of a letter presumably written in 1825 by Joseph Smith to Josiah Stowell, typescripts of which I am told are now in circulation.
In response to queries, personnel of the Historical Department of the Church have indicated that they do not have the letter. This is true. I have it. I handled the purchase when it was brought to me by a dealer and put it in the vault adjacent to my office pending the time when we may have studied it to determine its authenticity. Meanwhile I would assume that no reputable scholar would draw conclusions concerning it and no journalist of integrity would wish to publish it. (Turley, Victims, pp. 91-92).
Unfortunately, before this was finalized and released, on Saturday, August 25, 1984, the Los Angeles Times ran a major story about the Stowell letter and the Salamander letter and apparently obviated the planned press release. Meanwhile, Jerry Cahill wasn't informed that the Church had the Stowell document and would later again deny Church ownership, based on what he understood earlier--even though a BYU Professor, Marvin Hill, had publicly discussed the Stowell letter in March 1985 (Turley, p. 101).
Cahill was wrong, but unwittingly so. The responses to his earlier inquiries had led him to genuinely believe that the church did not have the letter.
By Friday, May 3, Hinckley became aware that Cahill's public denials about the church owning the letter and invited Cahill to his office to discuss the matter. Hinckley informed Cahill that the church did in fact own the document. The two men decided to discuss the matter with Cahill's supervisor, Richard Lindsay. . . . They settled on having Cahill write a letter correcting his earlier statements. (Turley, p. 101.)
Later that week the Church would publish photographs and a transcript of the Stowell letter with a cautious statement. It appeared authentic, but there was still room for debate and several reasons why some felt it was not. We now know it was a forgery.
You can call these events whatever you want, but I suggest that the most reasonable and charitable approach is to see them as a good-faith effort to understand and authenticate a controversial document, rather than a conspiracy to forever suppress.
If suppression were the name of the game, one would have expected strenuous efforts to suppress the much more controversial Salamander letter. However, the history of the events surrounding that document support no such conspiracy. The Church actually declined to purchase it when offered the document in 1984 and published the full text in April 1985, after it was donated to the Church by Steven Christensen. President Gordon B. Hinckley first saw the Salamander Letter in Jan. 1984, after which he wrote this in his journal:
We have nothing to hide. Our enemies will try to make much of this letter, but any fair-minded individual who will read it in terms of the time it was written and the language of the day will not see it as detrimental to the history of those events connected with the restoration of the gospel. [Gordon B. Hinckley Journal, 10 February 1984, as cited by FAIRMormon.org in their article, "Mark Hofmann/Church reaction to forgeries".]