── Lights & Perfections · Source Bibliography ──
The Hurlbut Affidavits
The 1834 affidavits against Joseph Smith and his family — who collected them, what they claim, and why the documentary and scholarly record finds them unreliable. The sources, with honest status.
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How to read this. This page lists the primary documents and the scholarship behind the rebuttal — not an attack on the man who collected the affidavits, but an examination of the affidavits themselves. Each source is flagged honestly: the hostile primary documents under examination, the official documentary record, peer-reviewed scholarship, external and critical (non–Latter-day Saint) voices, and topical reference works. The case rests on what the documents say and contradict — and it does not depend on excluding the historians who read them differently.
● Primary document ● Hostile source under examination ● Joseph Smith Papers / Church source ● Peer-reviewed scholarship ● External / non-LDS & critical scholar ● Apologetic / topical reference
Primary document
Hostile source (under examination)
Joseph Smith Papers / Church source
Peer-reviewed scholarship
External / non-LDS & critical scholar
Apologetic / topical reference
I
The documents under examination
What is actually being weighedEvery one of these affidavits reaches us through a single 1834 book. The originals are lost — they survive nowhere except as the hostile publisher chose to print them.
Hostile primaryMormonism Unvailed (1834)
Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio: 1834)
The first anti-Mormon book. It printed Hurlbut's collected affidavits — Hurlbut's own disreputable name kept off the title page — and launched the Spalding–Rigdon authorship theory. The affidavits are not known to exist anywhere else.
Overview & full text →
Hostile primaryThe affidavits themselves
A group "Palmyra" statement (~62 signers), a "Manchester" statement (11 signers), and ~10 individual depositions, dated November–December 1833
The charges are uniform — lazy, intemperate, money-diggers, visionary
. The original signed documents have never been located; we read them only as Howe set them in type.
Primary · replyJoseph Smith's response
Joseph Smith, letter, Messenger and Advocate (Dec. 1834)
Joseph answered publicly and on the record — admitting youthful "levity" but denying he had ever "been guilty of wronging or injuring any man or society of men."
II
The collector & the documentary record
Who gathered the affidavits, and howA recently-excommunicated former elder, paid by an anti-Mormon committee, who was bound over by a court for threatening Joseph Smith's life.
Joseph Smith PapersDoctor Philastus Hurlbut (biography)
The Joseph Smith Papers, "Doctor Philastus Hurlbut"
"Doctor" was his given name, not a title. Baptized 1832/33, ordained an elder by Sidney Rigdon (1833), excommunicated June 1833, then "employed by citizens of Geauga Co., Ohio, to collect information about [the] Smith family and origin of [the] Book of Mormon."
josephsmithpapers.org →
Church trial recordThe excommunication record (Minute Book 1)
Minute Book 1, Kirtland high council (Joseph Smith Papers)
The Church's own trial record settles a common misstatement. On June 3, 1833 a Kirtland council excommunicated Hurlbut for
un-Christian conduct with the female sex while on a mission to the east
— a sexual-immorality charge,
not "profanity." Reinstated June 21 on a show of penitence, he was cut off again two days later (June 23) after witnesses reported he had bragged he
deceived Joseph Smith and the council.
josephsmithpapers.org →
Joseph Smith PapersWinning Against Hurlbut's Assault in 1834
David W. Grua, in Sustaining the Law: Joseph Smith's Legal Encounters (BYU Studies)
Hurlbut vowed to
wash his hands in Joseph Smith's blood
; on 9 April 1834 the court found Joseph "had ground to fear" Hurlbut "would wound, beat or kill him, or destroy his property," and bound him over to keep the peace. Joseph: it was
in answer to our prayer.
byustudies.byu.edu →
III
The foundational reappraisal
The historians who actually weighed the affidavitsRead closely, the statements prove to be orchestrated, self-contradictory, and contradicted by the better-informed witnesses.
Peer-reviewedJoseph Smith's New York Reputation Reappraised
Richard Lloyd Anderson, BYU Studies 10:3 (1970), 283–314
The forensic study. Laid the group Palmyra statement beside Parley Chase's "independent" one and found the identical outline, point for point —
Hurlbut composed both.
Only 72 of ~2,000 area men signed (one-half of one percent); the file is
diatribes, not evaluations.
byustudies.byu.edu →
Peer-reviewedThe witnesses who actually knew them
Richard Lloyd Anderson, same study (Saunders via the Kelley / Mather interviews)
The better informed the witness, the more affirmative his views.
Lifelong neighbor Orlando Saunders: They were very good people. Young Joe worked for me; he was a good worker… I always thought them honest.
For every hostile signature, ~3× as many favorable recollections were left out.
Scholarly exchange…Reputation Reexamined (review)
Richard Lloyd Anderson, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 3 (1991), responding to Rodger I. Anderson
The published back-and-forth defending the 1970 reappraisal against a later critic — the affidavit-reliability question argued in full.
scholarsarchive.byu.edu →
Church magazineJoseph Smith's Reputation Among Historians
Dean C. Jessee, Ensign (Sept. 1979)
Summarizes Anderson for a general audience: from their "similar word usage and organization… the mind of the crusading Hurlbut was superimposed over all that had been written" — and Hurlbut "very possibly fabricated some of the information."
churchofjesuschrist.org →
IV
The Spalding theory — and its collapse
The same book's other chargeThat the Book of Mormon was plagiarized from Solomon Spalding's unpublished romance — a theory that died when Spalding's actual manuscript was found.
InterpreterWhy the theory existed (Witnesses Insights, Ep. 9)
Gerrit Dirkmaat, The Interpreter Foundation
Critics could not credibly say Joseph wrote the book —
have you read literally anything else he wrote? Because he clearly didn't.
So they needed an author to pin it on, and Spalding — dead since 1816 — was the convenient one:
it's always best to blame it on someone who's dead.
interpreterfoundation.org →
RSC · BYUWhat is "Manuscript Found"?
Rex C. Reeve Jr., Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University
Spalding's manuscript was rediscovered in 1884 (L. L. Rice, Honolulu) and given to Oberlin College. It contains "not a single Book of Mormon proper name," does not imitate the King James style, and never uses "it came to pass."
rsc.byu.edu →
Non-LDS examiners"No resemblance… in general or detail"
L. L. Rice & James Fairchild (Oberlin College president), 1884–85; Lance D. Chase, Encyclopedia of Mormonism
Neither examiner was a Latter-day Saint. Comparing the Spalding manuscript with the Book of Mormon they "could detect
no resemblance between the two, in general or detail
" — collapsing a half-century-old theory.
Oberlin College Archives →
V
The "money-digging" charge & the folk-magic world
The affidavits' favorite charge, weighed honestlyThe most colorful accusation — that the Smiths were superstitious "money-diggers" — is also the most revealing. Set against the documented folk culture of the time, it shows the Smiths shared their neighbors' world; it does not establish theft or fraud, and it never touches the Book of Mormon. Here the file is weighed on its own terms, critical historians included.
Hostile primaryWilliam Stafford's affidavit — the black sheep
William Stafford, sworn statement (8 Dec. 1833), in Mormonism Unvailed (1834), 238–39
The source of the famous sheep story. Stafford swore young Joseph had located treasure obtainable only by cutting a black sheep's throat and leading it
around a circle while bleeding
to appease the guardian spirit, his own share to be
four fold.
Note what it does
not say: he
let them have
the sheep out of curiosity — not that it was stolen — and the rite
did not have the desired effect.
fairlatterdaysaints.org →
Primary testimonyThe son's denial — Dr. John Stafford (1881)
Dr. John Stafford (William's son), interview with William H. Kelley, 1881
The affiant's own son, raised in the household, doubted the family's signature anecdote: They never stole one, I am sure… I don't think it is true; I would have heard more about it.
He doubted his father was even present, and called young Joseph a real clever, jovial boy.
Hostile · laterThe family split — Deming's "Naked Truths" (1888)
Arthur B. Deming, Naked Truths About Mormonism (1888)
The sharpened, "they stole sheep" versions come not from John Stafford but from later, hostile statements by nephews (Christopher and Cornelius Stafford). The Stafford family is literally split — the son doubts it, the nephews embellish it — which is precisely why historians handle the cluster with care.
External · academicThe era's supernatural economy
Alan Taylor, "The Early Republic's Supernatural Economy," American Quarterly 38 (1986); D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1987/1998)
Treasure-seeking with seer-stones, divining rods, magic circles, and guardian spirits appeased by sacrificing a black animal was a documented, widespread folk practice across the 1820s Northeast. The black-sheep ritual is culturally typical — not bizarre, and not invented from scratch.
Scholarship"Little stigma" — the money-digging culture
Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005)
The standard biography places money-digging in context: Bushman likens the era's attitude to modern attitudes toward gambling, or buying a lottery ticket
— common, and carrying little stigma. Admitting one furnished a sheep for a treasure-dig cost a neighbor essentially nothing — which is why the "criterion of embarrassment" does not bite here.
Critical historianEven the face-value reading
Dan Vogel (critical historian), Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (2004)
Vogel — no apologist — takes such accounts largely at face value as genuine folk magic, and uses them to map the Smiths' digging sites. Granting the sheep story entirely still only shows the Smiths shared their neighbors' folk world. (A late recollection — Wallace Miner, 1932 — even has Joseph paying for the sheep with hand-made sap buckets: an honest debt, not a theft. Suggestive, not solid.)
VI
The wider context of anti-Mormonism
The headwater of a genreThe Hurlbut affidavits stand at the source of an unusually vast — and recognizably formulaic — hostile literature.
External · Oxford UPAmerica's most vilified homegrown faith
Patrick Q. Mason, The Mormon Menace (Oxford University Press, 2011)
A credentialed, non-apologetic historian's framing: in the nineteenth century Mormonism was
America's most vilified homegrown faith.
global.oup.com →
ReferenceAnti-Mormon Publications
William O. Nelson, Encyclopedia of Mormonism (Macmillan, 1992)
At least
1,931 anti-Mormon books, pamphlets, and tracts were published in English between 1830 and 1989;
few other religious groups in the United States have been subjected to such sustained, vitriolic criticism and hostility.
eom.byu.edu →
LDS scholarshipSounding Brass
Hugh Nibley, Sounding Brass (1962); repr. in Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass, Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 11 (1991)
The classic dissection of the anti-Mormon genre — so formulaic Nibley wrote its satirical rulebook, "How to Write an Anti-Mormon Book: A Handbook for Beginners." Of the sworn charge that the Smiths bragged of their skill at lying: Skillful liars don't boast about it.
VII
Topical reference & further reading
Accessible summariesConvenient gatherings of the documentary record, with the original affidavit wording and the contradictions laid out.
TopicalThe Hurlbut affidavits (FAIR)
FAIR (fairlatterdaysaints.org)
Documents the coordinated wording, the three witnesses who "went together to make their depositions" and whose testimony bore "a remarkable similarity," the unique "as good as Jesus Christ" claim, and the internal contradictions (Stafford vs. Ingersoll).
fairlatterdaysaints.org →
TopicalMormonism Unvailed (FAIR)
FAIR (fairlatterdaysaints.org)
On the book and the affidavits' self-refuting charges: the "lazy money-diggers" who cleared sixty acres of timber and tapped ~1,500 maples, and who kept Presbyterian membership until 1830.
fairlatterdaysaints.org →
Scripture CentralWhy Did Joseph Smith File a Legal Complaint against Hurlbut?
Scripture Central, KnoWhy #616 (2021)
A concise treatment of the 1834 case and Hurlbut's death threat, corroborating the affidavits' hostile origin.
scripturecentral.org →
The affidavits have been quoted for nearly two centuries — but they have never survived a careful reading. One paid collector behind a dozen "independent" names; sworn statements that contradict each other and the documentary record; a witness list curated to convict, with the friendly majority left on the floor. Even granted in full, their best charges describe a young man's frontier folk-religion, not a crime. They were, in Nibley's phrase, diatribes, not evaluations. And for all their venom, they aimed at the translator — and never once touched the translation.