Introduction and Episode Overview

Chris Thomas [00:00:01] Hello, I'm Chris Thomas here in the beautiful Mormon Story studios with my good friend Dr. John Dehlin for part two of our conversation with Sandra Tanner on the various people she has known. In our first conversation we talked about a variety of folk in the young family.

Chris Thomas [00:00:22] We also talked about all the people that Sandra and Gerald met through James Wardle, spending a fair amount of time talking about James himself. We then ended up with a section on media from going from Wallace Turner to John de Lynn. And we took a break. We didn't know that it was going to be a three month break, but we, we took a break and we are picking things back up. I have worn the same shirt to cause problems for people who are picking up part two to think that it happened all in real time. So it's good to, good to have you, Sandra back with us.

Sandra Tanner [00:01:04] Yeah.

Chris Thomas [00:01:04] And we are going to pick up this conversation now. I want to talk first, Sandra, about people you have known who turned out not to be quite who they seemed to be. And there are several people on this list. But the first person I want to talk about is a person named Steve Mayfield or Stan Fields. Tell us about him.

Figures Who Were Not Who They Seemed

Sandra Tanner [00:01:33] Well, Stephen Mayfield is known around Salt Lake and the Mormon history community as someone that shows up at Sunstone or different Mormon history events taking pictures. He's always doing photographs of everybody and that's the way most people know him.

Sandra Tanner [00:01:55] However, back in the, what would it have been, late 70s, he had written to us under an assumed name when he lived out in California. At the time he was a file clerk for the FBI and I think had aspirations of being James Bond or, I don't know, anyways, working for the FBI and having some cool job as a sideline.

Sandra Tanner [00:02:32] He started collecting photographs of people and files on different people involved in the Mormon history debate. Truth claim group of people. But he wrote to us as is under this name, Stan Fields. And he was presenting himself to different Christian groups that did literature on Mormonism as someone who was like fellow believing in Jesus thought Mormonism was false and we need to evangelize these people. And he tried to ingratiate himself to different people in ministry.

Sandra Tanner [00:03:19] And in fact, at one point I believe he was trying to get Ed Decker to take him on as state coordinator of Saints Alive for Utah. And he would come into the bookstore at different times, ask Dan Fields and talk to me about my lectures I'd give at different Christian churches on the differences between Mormonism and Christianity. And he would go to those lectures and then he would come in and talk to me about what I presented and all of it done as though he were someone on the same theological plane and the same view of Mormonism and wanting to do something to help the Mormons see they've been deceived.

Sandra Tanner [00:04:09] Well, he was always asking for photocopies, things that I would mention in a talk or that we would print in an article. We would do articles that. Photographs of things that the average person wouldn't have asked for a photocopy of.

Sandra Tanner [00:04:30] I mean minutiae. And one day Gerald said to me, are you sure about this guy? He asks for stuff that no one else asks for. Like he's trying to document everything we say, not like just someone that would normally be interested and want to have a copy on hand to show someone or something.

Sandra Tanner [00:04:54] It was too detailed for a normal person's kind of interest. Oh no, Gerald. I'd say, no, no, Stan's just thorough. He just likes to have copy of everything. Gerald's like, I don't know, it just doesn't hit right. Well, one day Stan had been into the little bookstore in our front room parlor and some people came in that news Dan as Stephen.

Sandra Tanner [00:05:27] And Stephen just turned his back to these people that came into the bookstore at that point and like he's reading a book over in the corner away from them and so no one brought up anything about him standing there or something. And then different people left and then he left.

Sandra Tanner [00:05:47] Well, anyways, later Gerald was talking with Mike Marquardt who's done a lot of research on Mormonism and published on it and was a friend of ours and several other like minded people studying, like Wes Walters and Grant Heward and Gerald and Mike were talking and I don't remember just how it came up, but they got talking about this fellow that had been in the bookstore that day and Gerald called him Steve.

Sandra Tanner [00:06:21] No, Gerald called him Stan. And Mike says, no, his name's Steven. And Gerald says, no, that guy that was in the bookstore was Stan. And well, Mike says, well, I don't know what he told you his name is, but his name is Steven Mayfield. And that's how Gerald figured out that this guy was going by a false name.

Sandra Tanner [00:06:45] Well, we knew that he'd been in deep contact with Ed Decker, who at the time I believe was up in Washington. And Gerald contacted Ed Decker, who was former Mormon and written stuff on Mormonism, did the God Makers and all that stuff and said, what do you know about this guy? Well, he didn't know any more than we did. And then Gerald found out that, that Stephen Mayfield worked for the church.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:20] So Ed came to town. I don't remember what the situation, why he was in town. But anyways, Gerald and Ed Decker decided to just go up to the church office building where Stephen worked and just confront him. So they went right up the church office building, went right into the office where he works. And so, well, hello, you know, I assume you're not Stan Fields.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:48] And so then Stephen admitted, well, yeah, he'd got under this false name and he had been doing all this research, but he had some way of just trying to brush it all off as well. He was just trying to get information on people and didn't know if people had talked to him, if they knew who he really was and that he was Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [00:08:09] And in fact, at one point I asked Stephen, I said, stephen, what did you ever learn in all your talks with me that I wouldn't have just freely told you if you'd have just come in and said who you were?

Sandra Tanner [00:08:24] And he told me, well, I know that now that you would have told me the same thing. But I didn't know that at the time. I figured you would misrepresent things to me. So I felt I had to use a false name to get the real story.

Sandra Tanner [00:08:39] Well, anyways, I told Stephen he's welcome to come in the bookstore anytime he wants as long as he comes in in his real name. But it caused quite a stir in the Christian community because of finding out that Stephen was posing under this other name, posing as a born again Christian, wanting to infiltrate into the Christian community to find out what everyone's doing on Mormonism through the underground and not being straightforward about it.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:12] But we wrote a little pamphlet on him and we went on being casual acquaintances, friends. And Stephen continued up until this year, coming into the bookstore whenever we put out anything new to pick it up.

Chris Thomas [00:09:28] Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [00:09:29] Yeah, it's been funny relationship through the

Chris Thomas [00:09:32] years, but yeah, well, that's a remarkable story. And the fact that you still see him occasionally.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:41] Yeah. And he still takes pictures of everybody. He goes to Mormon history, to everything it takes. Well, he boasted at one time that he had the largest collection of photographs on all the important people involved in Mormon controversy, history, you know, political public life out there. He had the large. He said he had the largest file on Sonia Johnson. And some people might not know who she was, but she was a famous ex Mormon way back when on women's rights and gay issues and stuff like that. And so he had the biggest file on her. I think he's given his photo library I think he's given that to byu, to their library. But it would be interesting to see who Ollie photographed.

Chris Thomas [00:10:36] And does he still work for the church office?

Sandra Tanner [00:10:39] No, no, he quit his job at that time, I think. No, he's worked for years for the Salt Lake City Police. I believe it was. He was their photographer. He would go out and film all the crime scenes.

Chris Thomas [00:10:53] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:10:54] So he made a career out of photography.

Chris Thomas [00:10:56] Apparently so. Another person who seems to have even

Sandra Tanner [00:11:00] a more

Chris Thomas [00:11:03] kind of complicated past is DJ Nelson. Tell us about DJ Nelson.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:11] Back in the 60s, when the church announced that they had acquired these papyri from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, it threw everybody into a career of trying to figure out Egyptian stuff. And the church was having Nibley write articles for over a year. He did a series of articles in the improvement era on the Book of Abraham issue and whether the papyri helped support their claims for the Book of Abraham. And of course, we were doing our side to try to show none of it made any sense. And they had no real answers for the Book of Abraham problem.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:00] We had published the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar. In fact, we did that before they announced the papyri find in the Metropolitan, which had got us started on all of that. Gerald had made little file cards to learn Egyptian so he could study the papyri, trying to figure out what it was all about.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:22] And we had this Mormon guy contact us who was D.J. nelson. And he told us that he had been in touch with the church and with Hugh Nibley. He was the BYU professor that the church looked to for all the big articles answering the problems of why the papyri don't match Joseph Smith's translation.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:51] He had been in touch with Nibley and had sent Nibley some of his work on Egyptian material. Enough that Nibley, who had only had a few classes in Egyptian, trusted that Nelson knew what he's talking about. And Nibley gave a letter, sent a letter to.

Sandra Tanner [00:13:18] Was it N. Eldon Tanner? I think it was to give Nelson a copy of the papyri photos and they were going to work together on Book of Abraham stuff. But then as the studies went along, according to Nelson, he could see it wasn't going the way the church was going to be happy that he was going to have to say that the papyri don't have anything to do with Abraham.

Sandra Tanner [00:13:46] And he didn't feel that they would publish his research. So he came to us with his photographs and not photographs. He didn't give us photographs of the papyri, but photographs of the line drawings he had done of the different Egyptian characters and figures and things that translation work he had done and wanting to know if we wanted to publish it. So it was quite an odd conversation because at the time he was presenting himself as a Mormon who believed the Book of Mormon but realized the Book of Abraham didn't make it as a historical translation or document.

Sandra Tanner [00:14:26] So it was this odd situation where you got this Mormon coming to us that didn't think the BYU would print his research and so turned to the anti Mormons of the community to print it. Well, Gerald had studied enough Egyptian at that time that he felt that he could kind of test Nelson on some of his knowledge to see how much the guy really understood. Not that Gerald knew that much, but. But he knew more than the average guy on the street.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:00] And so he talked to Nelson about different things that he had been looking at. And Nelson seemed knowledgeable on the things they discussed. So Gerald felt he could trust him on his work on Egyptian. So then we made an agreement with him to print several pamphlets that he did and this Goddess and him and all kind of discussions and rebuttals on.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:35] Can anyone really read the Egyptian? Can anyone really say that it came from the papyri, that the Book of Abraham came from it? The whole argument of the Book of Abraham stuff in the 1970, 72, 73 time period.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:54] And when Nelson first came to us, while he presented himself as having done documentaries and different film things on nature and travel and all these things that put him in more of a professional light, he was not saying he had a degree in Egyptology.

Sandra Tanner [00:16:19] It was presented more as a personal study of his. But then we started hearing from people that he was claiming to have a PhD that he hadn't claimed in the beginning. So then we got concerned and when we started looking into what he claimed for his education, things started to go south pretty quick. And we realized things, names of places he was using as credentials were diploma mills or didn't exist.

Sandra Tanner [00:16:53] And so we wrote him and told him we had to break our printing relationship with him, that it didn't look like he was what he claimed to be. And we were parting company. Well, at the same time we had this Mormon couple in Arizona, Bob and Rosemary Brown, that did these volumes, they Lie in Wait to Deceive, that were exposes of Walter Martin and Ed Decker and us and DJ Nelson.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:26] And they did. I don't know, was it four, five volumes, taking us all to task. But they have this big thing about Nelson being a deceiver and Claiming a degree he didn't have and then taking us to task that we were putting forward this phony guy with these phony credentials. And that was our big defense on our literature on the Book of Abraham.

Sandra Tanner [00:18:00] And we felt they mischaracterized the whole situation. I mean, he didn't claim to have a degree when he first came to us. But what we kept trying to point out to people was what Nelson said about the papyri wasn't wrong.

Sandra Tanner [00:18:18] Everyone agreed with what he was. I shouldn't say everyone, most of the people agreed with what Nelson said about the papyri and about the Egyptian translation, that it doesn't agree with Joseph's Book of Abraham. The problem was that he claimed a degree he didn't have, not that he was putting out phony information about Egyptian.

Chris Thomas [00:18:41] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:18:42] So that got to be a big kerfuffle on all that. But we parted company, and then the more we looked into it all, it. It got worse when it came out all of the deception he had used of trying to promote himself as a much more important world traveler and field worker in Egyptian. And it was much more grandiose than we had realized. So he was very flamboyant, gifted guy that just made all kind of stuff up. Yet he really did know about Egyptian. And that's why Nipoli gave him a letter to take to. I believe it was Tanner in the first Presidency to get photos of the Book of Abraham.

Sandra Tanner [00:19:36] I mean, the papyri that purport to be the Book of Abraham, because Nibley was taken in by his ability that he seemed to know what he was talking about. So it was quite a period of time on DJ Nelson and his pamphlets that we published.

Chris Thomas [00:19:56] Right. Oh, and though this isn't the focus of what we're talking about here, I recall that Gerald's work on Egyptology and the Book of Abraham and all of that business turns out to be appreciated by no less a scholar than Robert Rittner in some of the Mormon stories interviews that were done on Book of Abraham, which is just remarkable.

Sandra Tanner [00:20:30] Yeah, yeah. Geraldine Grant did an article in one of the earliest issues of Dialogue, a journal of Mormon thought on the Book of Abraham when the papyri first came out, where they dissected how Joseph Smith had borrowed Egyptian writing from one of the facsimiles to put into filling in spaces on facsimile number three, the hypocephalous disc, the round disk. And it had empty space, spaces evidently where the text had been lost. And so Joseph takes writing from the small sense and text and places it into the hypocephalus to make the circle complete.

Sandra Tanner [00:21:17] But Joseph doesn't know what he's doing. And he puts hieratic text upside down and backwards into the fill in spaces, which obviously anyone that could read Egyptian would know. You couldn't do that. You couldn't mix erratic with hieroglyphic. Not only that, have it upside down and backwards just to make it all look pretty. So you had everything complete. And I tell people it's like if you had a book and someone had ripped out half a page lengthwise out of a book, you could go to another English book and rip out half a page and glue it in there. And yeah, you'd have a complete page.

Sandra Tanner [00:21:56] But if you put the English text upside down next to a column that was right side up, anyone looking at it would know you couldn't read English or you would have never put the second column upside down. So how does Joseph take text from another papyri and put it upside down next to this other piece if he could read any of it? Because you know, it can't read that way.

Chris Thomas [00:22:24] Right, Right. Well, my head just kind of spins on. Gerald's delving into all of that and the analysis that turns out to be pretty good as time passes.

Sandra Tanner [00:22:39] Right.

Mark Hofmann and Kerry Boren

Chris Thomas [00:22:40] Well, the next person in this category of folk who weren't quite who they seem to be is a person that you and Dr. John Dehlin have talked about for hours on end, and that is Mark Hoffman. There's plenty of your thoughts on Mark, but just kind of to, to, to peg him in this list. How would you describe him in terms of similarities and differences? Similarities, Two differences from a variety of folk who just kind of stumbled in the bookstore. Was he kind of invisible? Was he. Did he raise questions that were different than the kind of folk that, that you encounter on a daily basis?

Sandra Tanner [00:23:42] He was very nondescript, very bland, not someone you would remember kind of friendly. So which was why he was successful, because people didn't pay enough attention to him, remember him enough that they were suspicious of him. He was low key, but he could talk to you about church history. But it was all in just a normal level of someone reading church history, a normal discussion on the deeper problem areas of those things.

Chris Thomas [00:24:27] And do you remember a time when it kind of clicked that he was kind of at a different level, or you kind of took notice of him in the sea of people that come through the door of the bookshop?

Sandra Tanner [00:24:44] Well, when he started coming up in the newspaper of having different finds and that. So then we realized where he fit in this whole document stuff of the new things that were coming out into the public forum at that time. And so then we could pigeonhole him into this role of someone that was out doing document hunting and finding things.

Chris Thomas [00:25:10] And kind of. Last question about Hoffman. Given all the hours of interviews about that, It's not like you were just, you know, you've only met once or twice. I mean, it was a rather long relationship. Is that true?

Sandra Tanner [00:25:35] Well, it wasn't. We weren't deeply associated with him and not deep friends, but he would stop in on a fairly often basis and he would talk about different things that had come out in the media of late, of his fines or someone else's fines. And so it didn't strike me as unusual on his knowledge or his discussion of these things. It was only in retrospect that I realized, oh, wait a minute, he was asking. Well, he was on the track of trying to find something that was written by Joseph Smith or Hyrum Smith or some different person like that.

Sandra Tanner [00:26:19] And then he'd have a question like, wow, I heard a rumor that there was this or that document floating around or. Or some family had a treasure trove of some letters or something from some famous early Mormon. Now, if I get a chance to go see those, is there anything in particular I should keep in mind so that I can be sure they're genuine letters and that, you know, and he'd give you some example. And I'd say, well, you'd want to check when that person was in town in that place because the Mormons were moving around enough that you could probably figure out where he should be living at that time.

Sandra Tanner [00:27:03] And so you'd want to check on. We would just talk about different things he could do to test if something's authentic. And you look back on it and you think, wait a minute, I'm helping him write a document.

Sandra Tanner [00:27:16] He's trying to figure out what things would historian look for to try to test my documents. So he's trying to factor in the, you know, well, did. Did a lot of people not realize so and so had gone on a mission at that time or was in Washington D.C. at that time or something, you know, that it was kind of questions that you could look back on and say, yeah, that gave him all the ideas of things. He ought to be sure not make those mistakes in his forgeries.

Chris Thomas [00:27:56] Right. And to kind of close out this little section, the final person, I wanted to ask you to just say a word or two. About is Kerry Boren, whom you seem to have had an interesting visit in the state penitentiary.

Sandra Tanner [00:28:20] Well, Kerry Rosboren was in prison, as I recall, for, I believe, killing his wife or claim or was charged with it. But he had. He had done some research on early Utah Mormon stuff and he had written a book on gold mines in Utah or something. I can't remember now what it was, but he had written us that he had some special information that was pertinent to our research on this whole area and that would want to know about this.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:02] So we thought, oh, well, okay, who knows what he's got? So we made arrangements to go see him at the state prison, which was an experience just going to the prison. But so we sat down and talked with him for, I don't know, hour or two, quite a while about his research and his take on Hoffman's documents and different things.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:30] But by the time we were through, we were kind of leery of anything that he would come forward with that. It sounded like he just had his own agenda, was make up his own set of stuff that he probably was no more reliable than anybody else out there trying to fool the public. So our. Our one meeting at the state prison.

Chris Thomas [00:29:59] So now a lot of. Some of these stories at any rate are in the biography written by Ron. Yeah, and Ron Huggins. And so for folk who are interested in following up on some of this, that's one of the places the Mormon stories video as well. We haven't talked about everyone, but it seems to me that you have lived with the possibility of encountering people who would try to be using you in a way that would reflect badly or poorly upon you as a ministry in the ways that we've kind of alluded to. How did you guys. How did you guys navigate having an openness to people on the one hand and knowing on the other hand that there are folk who aren't quite who they seem to be.

Developing Discernment Around Deceptive Sources

Sandra Tanner [00:31:11] Right. Well, you do a lot of praying, a lot of discussion between us, a lot of sharing of notes of trying because we, we knew we had to have discernment because there were people that were obviously not our friends who were trying to spy on us and collect information.

Sandra Tanner [00:31:40] One guy, I don't even know if Ron May mentioned him in the book, but there was this one fellow that was connected with Farron Farms crowd that had tried to date our oldest daughter. And this would have been around the 1980 time frame.

Sandra Tanner [00:32:03] We had run a little article in our newsletter about our oldest daughter going on a summer mission to the Philippines, and trying to raise support for her to do this summer mission trip. And so this fellow had seen that and contacted us and wanted to meet April. She just sounded like such a sweet girl and blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, I don't know if she want to have any contact with you, but I can pass it on to her, you know. Well, anyway, so she goes out on a date with this fellow who was single at the time, but then along the evening, he starts asking questions about her parents.

Sandra Tanner [00:32:41] And she realizes, oh, wait a minute, are you just trying to find out dirt on my parents? You know, that's it, we're done. Take me home. You know, I. I got my own problems with my folks, but I'm not dishing out dirt on them to some stranger, you know, And.

Sandra Tanner [00:32:59] But he ends up involved in fair and farm stuff. And for years after that, even after he got married. But every once in a while he'd send a, like, Christmas card, a birthday card to April, ask how she's doing, and it just made her so mad because she felt used, you know, that he had presented himself as someone that genuinely was interested in meeting her, but really wanted to just use her to get dirt on her parents.

Sandra Tanner [00:33:31] So those kind of things make you a little leery of the public, so you have to get a little bit thicker skin. And we got to be a little more careful on this. One fellow had approached us about, oh, his mother would just love to have something to do. She didn't need a job, but she'd just love to have something to occupy her time in that she'd love to come down and help in the bookstore. Would we like to have her come and help?

Sandra Tanner [00:34:04] And it just seemed unnatural. We thought, there's something off. And so then we find out later, no, the guy's really a Mormon and he's trying to get his mom into volunteering or some working in the bookstore. So. And these are all, I'm sure, just amateurish events. I don't pin them on the Mormon Church. That's a big conspiracy. But we just were aware that there were individuals out there that would just love to get some sort of dirt on us to bring us down.

Sandra Tanner [00:34:43] So you try to stay friendly with people, but there is a certain reserve of you have to be careful how close you get to people until you really are confident, because there are some dishonest ones or maybe ones that didn't intend harm, but you could see potentially could have been,

Chris Thomas [00:35:06] that's right. A colleague of mine, he moved to town to become the dean of the seminary, and we're in the same town as our denominational headquarters. And somebody from the headquarters building saw him one day and said, how are things going over at the seminary? And he said, oh, they're going really well. He said, oh, come on, don't you trust me? Tell me the truth. He said, how long have I known you? He said, six months. He said, I trust you. About six months worth. Yes. You have to discern your way through that, don't you?

Sandra Tanner [00:35:38] Right.

Wes Walters and His Contributions to Mormon Studies

Chris Thomas [00:35:39] Well, I want us to shift gears to talk about another kind of set of folk and to begin with, somebody that is both known and unknown in many ways in Mormon studies circles. And that's Wes Walters. And if you would, as much as you can, Sandra, and as I'll allow you to try to pick up with where you meet Wes and what he's up to, and we'll just kind of make our way through his career and the variety of people that he's had an impact on, etc.

Sandra Tanner [00:36:25] Okay. In about the 1961, 62 time frame, we're going to reaching back here in our memory, Wes, we didn't know him. He shows up at our door. I can't remember if he may have written us a letter first that he was going to be in town and wanted to meet us. Anyways, he comes to our house, we don't really know him at all, and he tells us he's out here. From where would he have been living at that point? Anyways, he'd pastored in New York and I think in Ohio and then down into Illinois.

Sandra Tanner [00:37:09] And because of the locations he had pastored at, he had got an interest in Mormonism. And then I think it was Christianity Today magazine. Some friend of his had gone to work there, and so they were interested in doing something on Mormonism. So they asked Wes if he would do a little piece on Mormonism. Since he had pastored in these areas, he must know something about it. And so Wes had written up this small article which launched him into years of research on Mormonism.

Sandra Tanner [00:37:49] And I assume he must have heard about us from Pauline Hancock, the lady that pastored the little Church of Christ that believed the Book of Mormon in independence, and from James Wardle, the reorganized LDS barber in Salt Lake City, who knew Pauline.

Sandra Tanner [00:38:08] And anyways, I think they were the ones that must have told us about us. So he stopped by in either 61 or 62. It would have been early 62, because it was before we gave up the Book of Mormon, which we gave up in the fall of 62.

Sandra Tanner [00:38:25] So he shows up at our little wood frame house. We were living on center street, and we have a long talk about Mormonism and Joseph Smith's vision and early history and all these things. And then about our meeting Pauline and our journey out of Mormonism and. And still believe in the book of Mormon and all those things. And when he left on his way out the door, he says, well, I think you guys really are Christians. You really seem to believe in Jesus.

Sandra Tanner [00:39:00] I just can't understand why you still believe the book of Mormon. And so we stayed friends that summer. I believe it was. I was when I probably read mt Lamb's book, the golden bible, which was the final blow to me believing the book of Mormon, which we gave up in the fall of 62.

Sandra Tanner [00:39:28] And. Where was I going with that? With mt Lamb, okay, with Wesley. So we stayed friends with Wes. And through the period of the little church in Missouri, Pauline Hancock had died. What in what have been in 62 was that that same year she had died before we gave up the book of Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [00:40:09] But we stayed in contact with a little group in Missouri, and we stayed in contact with Wes. Wes became another one of those hubs, like James Wardle, where people doing research crossed his path. And so you have Mike Marquardt going out to meet Wes and coming under some of his tutelage. Dan Vogel ends up contacting with Wes and exchanging a lot of research material, and I'm sure a number of other ones did as well. Wes was always mentoring someone, reading their manuscripts, helping them with areas that they needed to look into further.

Sandra Tanner [00:40:57] Wes was probably would have made a great teacher. Probably was a real good pastor too. But he loved to try to help people make sure their book was as good as it could be. And so then he and Mike Marquardt end up doing the book inventing Mormonism together, published by signature books, which is about Joseph Smith's early life and the development of Joseph's life before he starts a church, which incorporates a lot of Wes's research on the 1826 trial document of Joseph Smith and the revival dates, because Joseph Smith's story puts the revival that caused him to go into the woods to pray what church to join.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:43] Joseph puts the date in 1820. And Wes said it couldn't have happened that year. There wasn't a revival in Palmyra that would have caused that kind of upheaval to where the churches were all arguing with each other who would get the converts, which is the way Joseph paints the picture.

Sandra Tanner [00:42:01] So Wes, through The years was a great friend to us. And when he would come to town, a bunch of us would get together around the kitchen table and swap research and stories. Wes was very formative for us in helping us on just so many. Just basic writing things that had we gone to college, we would have learned.

Sandra Tanner [00:42:37] And so he was a big mentor for us to improve on our own research and writing, putting it together in ways that help people see the problem.

Chris Thomas [00:42:52] Right. And. And Wes. And I think we may have a picture of Wes. Wes is. He does a Master of Theology degree. And for those not familiar with kind of Protestant ordination sorts of requirements, the standard theological degree for ordination is a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology is like a fourth year master's. And his thesis, which you guys published, was on the Book of Mormon in the Old Testament, right?

Sandra Tanner [00:43:27] Yes.

Chris Thomas [00:43:27] Which was and is a rather significant piece of work. And so he had quite an impact there. And he seems to have been a very generous person. I was talking with Dan Vogel, who told me that Wes bought him a computer as Dan had come out to visit to stay with him for a while or something. And in order to facilitate his research, Wes had gifted him this computer. And the way Dan talked just had really warm things to say about Wes Walters.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:15] Yes, I think he was kind of the father figure for many of us at that time period in the 70s and 80s on taking young scholars serious, offering suggestions for the research to do in different areas, and was just such a great addition to the think pool around all things Mormon, the early Mormon history, to challenge us all to think further and than what others had done before, to ask bigger questions, deeper questions, to look further into the story areas that people had just never even questioned before.

Sandra Tanner [00:45:08] Who would have thought about checking revivals in 1820? Who would have gone around all the churches to check their attendance records when they had revivals, to go through the early newspapers at the time to figure out who reported a revival in the neighborhood, what did the membership record show after someone had special meetings? Did people get joining churches to where the ministers would have been arguing over who gets the converts? So Wes just thought of questions the rest of us just hadn't come along on.

Sandra Tanner [00:45:44] Consequently, he did major research and was an important person in that time period of Mormonism in raising new areas of research that needed to be done. He was just so significant at the time.

Chris Thomas [00:46:00] And his work on the whole revival business continues to be a touchstone.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:06] Yes.

Chris Thomas [00:46:07] As that issue gets revisited.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:09] Yes.

Chris Thomas [00:46:10] In various ways. What kind of. What was his temperament? What kind of person Was Wes.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:19] Wes was quite a eclectic guy. He was an artist. And so when he would give sermons, like when he would come out to Salt Lake, sometimes we would have him speak at our church where we attend. And he would do these pictures with chalk art.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:41] And they would. When you shown those, what nightlight, whatever you call to make the chalk glow, whatever. But he would do these pictures like of Noah's ark or something, and then shine the light on it and you realize he had done a whole rainbow on there that you hadn't even realized. And I mean, he just was very creative artist.

Sandra Tanner [00:47:09] In fact, when he came one year around Christmas time and saw our meager church display for the front of the church for Christmas, he sent out this whole felt cut out of the nativity scene. There was a big navy blue felt background that went clear across the back of the church with all the white figures in silhouette form of the Nativity scene all up on there that we used for years in an old. The church now is gone that we even had that in as well as the felt display. But he just had all sorts of different talents than just his research.

Sandra Tanner [00:48:07] He was a fun person to be around. He did magic tricks. Like when he would stay with us, he'd do little hand magic tricks at the dinner table with the kids. And we were so poor at that time. And he would just every once in a while he'd send out five or ten dollars for us to take the kids out to get ice cream.

Sandra Tanner [00:48:30] He just was very thoughtful person that way. And his wife was a lovely person. But Wes had a deformed, elongated heart valve. And he knew he had heart problems. Had trouble with heart, with blood clots, had to wear these elastic stockings. He was a tall, thin guy, like some basketball players have had these kind of problems too. It's something to do with the tall, lanky form.

Sandra Tanner [00:48:57] They can have these malfunctioning heart valves. They collapse in on the opening or something. And the blood chamber lets the blood flow in anyways. He always knew he had this heart problem. Well, he had, I believe it was three children at college age die from this heart defect.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:23] And one son that they knew had the defect had surgery and lived through it. One son didn't have it. But that's what Wes died of was this heart defect where the chamber just collapses and your heart quits working.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:40] So it was sad that he died younger than he probably would have otherwise. He was pretty healthy guy, but very giving, very open. Would help anyone with research and open his files. But he was not a filer him and Gerald kind of came from the same cut of cloth. I guess when we went out to visit Wes at his place, walking into his study was like going into a hoarder's den.

Sandra Tanner [00:50:16] You had stacks of books and papers and this little rabbit trail through all this stuff and you can't touch anything, you know, don't move anything because he knows where stuff's at. But you think, how can this mind that has all of these details, all this great research he does, and, and here's this.

Sandra Tanner [00:50:43] Stacks of stuff all over. You wonder how he ever finds anything. But I guess he, he had a good enough memory, knew it was in the stacks, I guess.

Chris Thomas [00:50:50] And so it seems that his work on Mormon studies was a real, just kind of labor of love.

Sandra Tanner [00:51:02] Yes.

Chris Thomas [00:51:03] Because it didn't fit in his necessarily with his pastoral duties.

Sandra Tanner [00:51:09] No. Much to his poor wife's dismay, summer vacations meant going to New York and her trying to entertain kids while he's in the New York Public Library basement going through old documents or up in Norwich, New York trying to find the 1826 trial documents in the musty old basement of Norwich County Jail. And you know, it had to be hard having kids with Wes because I'm sure he was a lot of fun on vacations because Wes was just a great guy with kids. However, vacations meant part of it was going to be him doing research.

Chris Thomas [00:51:54] Right, Right. That sounds a little too familiar to me. We better move on to the next person. Any, any follow ups there, John, with Wes?

Walters and the Joseph Smith Trial Evidence

John Dehlin [00:52:07] Well, is it overstating it to. To say that we wouldn't have the evidence that Joseph Smith was actually put on trial for his treasure digging and ruled guilty of. Of glass licking or scrying if it weren't for Wes Walters. Is that, Am I overstating?

Sandra Tanner [00:52:31] No.

John Dehlin [00:52:31] His contribution.

Sandra Tanner [00:52:32] If he had not found the document that year, I'm sure it would have been destroyed by the next year. The documents at that point were being just stored in this basement of this old jail where it was damp and moist. And when he and his friend Fred Pofferill that had helped him with going through the documents in this basement jail of the jail, they were all damp and when they took the document out, it had water stains on it. And they were sure had it been left there another year it would have been so waterlogged it would have destroyed them. And that undoing the bundles that they probably the next, by the next year would have probably just disintegrated when you had opened them.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:25] And you probably would have had hardly Anything salvageable from them. So I think that it was providential. God directed that he found the documents at that time so that they were preserved. And that's why when you look at the document of 1826 bill from Judge Neely and who's the constable?

Sandra Tanner [00:53:51] I can't remember the constable's name. Dzang or something. Anyways, when you look at their document, you can see the water stains on the. I believe it's the right side of the documents. It's darker there and you can see the stain. That's where it would have been wet. And so had they not been preserved when they would have been, all of that would have just been disintegrated.

John Dehlin [00:54:15] Yeah. So to me that seems highly significant. It if you were to stack rank the top five issues that people investigating the church regarding its veracity or its truth claims, you know, the first vision would be one. So his, you know, his, his establishing that the, the religious fervor that would have led to the, you know, basically what's in the 1938, not 1838 first vision account, Wes Walters providing the information that would, that would challenge that, that official first vision narrative, plus the court documents regarding the scrying. Those are two very, very highly significant finds.

Sandra Tanner [00:55:01] Right.

John Dehlin [00:55:02] Within the top five issues that, that cause people to question. Are there any other kind of major finds like that that we would associate with Wes Walters?

Sandra Tanner [00:55:15] Well, I mean part of the research he was doing there was knowing what to look for to go around to the churches to run down where churches would have deposited their documents that would preserve the attendance records and the revival attendance records, baptisms and all of this because churches back then recorded all that sort of stuff. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they were stored in the place where they were recorded. They may have been moved from a diocese holding place to some other building or district or something. And so Wes had the knowledge and the sense of intuitively figuring out where to try to run down those kind of records to be able to go back and check the churches for any statistics that could be found.

Sandra Tanner [00:56:21] He just knew to ask those kind of questions. I think that from a Mormon perspective, Mormons wouldn't have had enough of a concept of how churches kept records at that time to have even known where to go look or what questions to ask. I think it really took a minister that had a church connection back to one of the churches that was talked about. I mean, Wes was Presbyterian. That's one of the churches Joseph Smith talks about. So he just comes from a background that would have made him more informed on how to go about doing that research.

Chris Thomas [00:56:59] Well, and the research skills he picked up in his theological training also would lead to certain kinds of questioning. You don't just take things at face value. You dig deeper to see if what somebody's saying or what is received as truth actually lines up with the evidence.

Sandra Tanner [00:57:23] Right. Well, we know Fawn Brody when she first wrote Mormon, her no Man Knows My History that's published about the 1945 time frame. And she knew there was some kind of problem with the first vision, that there was not enough documentation for things there. But she couldn't figure out what all the problems were. But she raised the issue that there was missing information here. We should be looking at this more closely. So she set in motion Wes research in a sense that she opened the discussion of. We can't just take Joseph at his word. We've got to go back and look at the documents of the time period and see how much of this story really checks out. Wes had the skills to know what to be looking for, to check out the story.

John Dehlin [00:58:30] Yeah. So as I'm just perusing his listing of publications on Amazon, there's use of the Old Testament in the Book of Mormon, which, which you referenced earlier today, Chris. There is the Human Origins of the Book of Mormon, which doesn't seem to be a full length book, but it seems to be sort of a, a pamphlet. So he's challenging Book of Mormon historicity. There, There is New Light on Mormon Origins from the Palmyra New York Revival.

John Dehlin [00:59:00] There's Joseph Smith's Bainbridge Court Trials. And From Occult to Cult with Joseph Smith Jr. There's a. There's at least one dialogue publication. Then there's Joseph Smith's First Vision, Confirming Evidences and Contemporary Accounts. And then there's also Joseph Smith among the Egyptians, An Examination of the Source of Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham. So he. And then I think that that, that kind of summarizes. Oh, and there's new light on Joseph Smith's first vision.

John Dehlin [00:59:38] And, and, and then there's Mormonism Exposed. And then finally there's the book you referenced earlier today that I Book purchased recently. Inventing Mormonism Tradition and the Historical Record.

Sandra Tanner [00:59:52] Right.

John Dehlin [00:59:52] That's a, that's a really significant record. And you could even say, I mean, you know, we always like to reference you, Sandra, as one of the shoulders that we kind of all in, in the modern era kind of stand upon. Is it safe to say that you stood on the shoulders of. Of Wesley Walters? Is that overstating it?

Sandra Tanner [01:00:11] No, I mean, we were already doing our thing when Wes starts doing his.

John Dehlin [01:00:17] Okay, so you were contemporaries, more contemporaries.

Sandra Tanner [01:00:21] But he brought in the professionalism that we needed to learn. He brought in research ideas that we were not privy to and he asked questions that we had not thought of asking. So yes, we stand on Wes research and on his shoulders and well, everyone does. For the first vision for Joseph Smith's early life, we all are indebted to West Walter's research on the 1820 revival claim and what he was doing in the 20s, his activity in treasure digging, use of his stone for finding treasure and those things. I mean, it was pivotal to establishing that for Wes to find the documentation he did.

John Dehlin [01:01:16] And then Chris, one of the things I love most in life is having misperceptions corrected. And I love to hear that. It was part of Wes Walters training, theological training to value evidence and truth and accurate history. That's not to say I didn't think that Christian pastors cared about truth or evidence. Of course there's variability there. And I've known you long enough to know that certainly your, your, your, your faith and your training inform a love for accurate, truthful, evidence based history. But I love to hear that that would have been part of his formal training that actually shaped his commitment to history and evidence and truth. Because that, that, that, that isn't like short term memory, front load perception of how I think about, you know, how I, how I think about, you know, sort of that, that sort of. What's it called again? The training. The theological.

Chris Thomas [01:02:21] Theological training.

John Dehlin [01:02:22] Yeah, yeah, that's, that's great to hear.

Sandra Tanner [01:02:25] Well, I think when we see different little pamphlets, we think of some amateur pastor or Bible student writing some little tract on Mormonism and feeling that they had just read an hour's worth of stuff the week before on Mormonism, decided to write a little tract or something, you know, instead of seeing that when Wes is approaching these studies, this is college level investigation and research, not just some pastor with a sideline hobby that's just writing an uninformed quick piece. He's coming from a very studied, informed investigative journalism approach.

John Dehlin [01:03:13] Maybe not even college level, but postgraduate level.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:16] Yeah, right. Excuse me.

Chris Thomas [01:03:17] Yeah, maybe. You know, I work with students all the time and one of the things that is hard for them but, but they have to learn is you can't just cite some authority and that wins the day because I always say, well, are they right? What's the evidence for that particular position? And that sounds a lot to me like what was going on with Wes and the revival things.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:47] Oh yeah, he's right. Back to the original sources.

Chris Thomas [01:03:49] That's right.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:50] Getting asthma attacks, going through basements full of dusty, old damp documents.

John Dehlin [01:03:57] I mean, I think there's a perception in maybe some secular circles that to be Christian means, or to be a religious believer in any way means you don't necessarily value evidence.

Chris Thomas [01:04:09] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:04:09] But what maybe, if I can summarize what I was awkwardly trying to say previously is it wasn't just that he valued evidence, it was his theological training that informed his valuing of evidence, which is a beautiful thing to hear.

Chris Thomas [01:04:24] Yeah, I think so. And I think Sandra is right. It's that kind of convergence of being a church person and knowing the kinds of things to look for.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:34] Yeah.

Chris Thomas [01:04:35] Even in addition to, you know, the formal kind of theological training. I think he was. I think it was a. It was a fortuitous conversion.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:44] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:04:45] Convergence.

Chris Thomas [01:04:46] Convergence, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:47] Yeah, that's great.

Chris Thomas [01:04:48] Well, you never know, John. Freudian slip. So, yeah. No, now you're going to regret you asked me, so thanks, Sandra. You know, it struck me for a long time that Wes is not gotten the kind of attention that he deserves.

Sandra Tanner [01:05:08] Right.

Chris Thomas [01:05:08] And appreciate John, you help leading us through that litany of what he has done. I mean, there's so many in the first part of this interview that that was done. John at one point said, I never will get to meet von Brody and went down this little list. But I've met Sandra Tanner. Well, you know, I'll never get to meet Wes Walters. And as a seminary graduate, I would have loved that conversation.

Sandra Tanner [01:05:37] You would have loved talking with him.

M. T. Lamb, Mike Marquardt, and Dan Vogel

Chris Thomas [01:05:39] When Sandra and I were sitting in the car just a few minutes this afternoon, I asked her, would you have liked to have met Mt Lamb? And she said, oh yeah, you know, doing the kind of thing he was doing in the 1880s that was so public, etc.

John Dehlin [01:05:59] Well, do our viewers listeners know who that is?

Sandra Tanner [01:06:02] Mt Lamb was a pastor here in Salt Lake City. Was he at the Baptist church?

Chris Thomas [01:06:09] I don't recall. It sounds right.

Sandra Tanner [01:06:11] Anyways, he was a pastor here in Salt Lake and he gave a series of lectures on the Book of Mormon that became the book the golden bible. And as far as I know, I think it's the first book that actually takes the book of Mormon itself seriously enough to do a critique of it and not just a hit and run of a list of a few things that someone might quickly perceive as problems for the Book of Mormon, but to seriously look at the content and analyze the storyline and the People involved, the social and cultural traits and things that are portrayed in the book.

Sandra Tanner [01:06:57] And to look at it from an internal perspective of does this sound like real history? Does this sound like Jewish Christians here in the New World? And so it was amazing for its time to be such a serious examination of the Book of Mormon for itself, not just dealing with Mormonism or Joseph Smith, but actually looking at the content of the book.

John Dehlin [01:07:22] Yeah.

Chris Thomas [01:07:23] And in the first part of our interview, Sandra talked a little bit about the role of that book in her conversion.

Sandra Tanner [01:07:30] Right, right. That was my final blow for giving up the Book of Mormon, was seriously thinking about the points that Lamb brought up of problems for the Book of Mormon to be a historical artifact.

Chris Thomas [01:07:47] Well, Sandra, let's move somebody you've mentioned two or three times now, Mike Marquardt. Okay, let's talk about him just a little bit. Tell us who he is. And I know for a while, at any rate, you guys were living in each other's pockets, as it were. He and Gerald working on all kinds of things together.

Sandra Tanner [01:08:09] Yeah. Mike had converted to Mormonism in the Bay Area. And when would that have been? In the late 60s. I'm not sure the time frame. And we meet him 1970 or somewhere in that kind of time frame. And Mike was on his way out of belief in Mormonism and starting into research. And James Wardle comes into this picture.

Chris Thomas [01:08:58] Of course he does.

Sandra Tanner [01:09:00] All roads lead to James and Grant Hewitt, who's James Wardle's mailman. And anyways, everyone gets to know each other so that Mike and Gerald start sharing notes all the time. And there for a while, it seemed like Mike and Gerald were on the phone for hours at a time, day after day, comparing notes and research they were doing.

Sandra Tanner [01:09:35] And Mike formed a very deep friendship with Wes Walters. And Wes was a good mentor to Mike in helping him on launching him into research as well. And then as the years progressed and Mike started doing more research, Mike mentioned to Gerald that he was getting to know some of the Mormon historians, and different ones were willing to talk with him and share research information and things, as long as they felt comfortable that it wasn't something he would just automatically pass to Gerald, because I figured it would end up on the front page of the newsletter.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:24] So then Mike told Gerald he was going to have to make a decision if he wanted to go down that route to have access to information from the Mormon community, that there had to be seen less of a conduit of information from Mike to Gerald.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:46] So then they didn't talk as much on the phone. And I mean, they still did, but there just wasn't as close of connection as there had been before. And Gerald told him, great, if you can get information without sharing it with me, then go get it. Someone needs to get it whether it comes to me or not. And so Mike has developed friendships with all sorts of Mormon scholars and has gone on to do a lot of research on his own. Mike has done some wonderful research and continues to this day to keep doing more.

Sandra Tanner [01:11:28] But he was another mailman like Grant Hewitt. So it's just a collection of young people that all congregated around curiosity about the origins of Mormonism. And from that we see all, you know, Dan Vogel, Brent Metcalf, Mike Marquardt, Gerald Grant Heward, all these different people start picking up the research on stuff.

Sandra Tanner [01:12:05] And I'm sure it had to cause some concern in the church historians office that you have outsiders challenging what the Church is saying. And not just amateur hit and run three page pamphlets by someone who hasn't really studied Mormonism. These are guys that are really delving in to figure out the footnotes and the stuff behind the scenes to figure out how the story really came together.

Sandra Tanner [01:12:37] So it's been wonderful to see this growing body of serious scholarship with a more critical eye, not just accepting what the Church put out as the official narrative, but realizing the story was deeper than the church narrative that they were giving out, that that was a sugar coated history and that there was more to tell. And here we all are 60 years later and everyone has a whole half a room with bookshelves full of stuff that's come out in my lifetime of all these different scholars that have risen up to give us this bigger picture of how Mormonism started, what informed Joseph Smith. It's been an exciting ride and to see all of the things that have been able to be uncovered and written about in the last 60 years.

Chris Thomas [01:13:34] You know, in my work on the Book of Mormon, I said that Book of Mormon scholarship at that point at any rate was what I called amateurish in the Olympian sense. It might be the best people in the world on it, but it wasn't too many people's day jobs. Yeah, right. To do Book of Mormon scholarship or to do Mormon history.

Sandra Tanner [01:14:03] Right.

Chris Thomas [01:14:03] And. And that seems to especially be the case as we're looking at this period. Right. Where you have. And of course I think we've mentioned that that Wes had quite an influence on Mike as well.

Sandra Tanner [01:14:18] You're right, absolutely.

Chris Thomas [01:14:21] Since we're in this vein, why don't we talk about Dan a little bit. Dan Vogel, when did you do you call? When Dan first stumbled into your bookshop? As he told me the story, he knew you were close to the ballpark. And when they got to Salt Lake, they found their way to the ballpark.

Sandra Tanner [01:14:41] Yes. Yeah, you just have to drive around the ballpark parameter long enough to someone tells you, well, you look for the bookstore across the street from the ballpark. Well, you know, that's a big block you got to go around to get all the different sides of the ballpark to figure out where this store is. Yes. So Dan comes on the scene around the 1980 time frame. Is that sound right?

Chris Thomas [01:15:17] Sounds about right, yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:15:20] And there's another guy that figures out about Wes Walters and he starts looking into all these same areas and then launches into his own research on asking questions that people hadn't really thought about. His book Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, where he goes through and researches, well, what books were there at the time talking about the American Indian and how many were there? What kind of knowledge could Joseph have had about the American Indian?

Sandra Tanner [01:15:57] And so Dan does this great little book looking into Indian mound stories and myths and in the Ohio area of the American Indian. And then he has all these lists of books that were done before Joseph Smith publishes the Book of Mormon that talk about similar themes as the Book of Mormon. So you have books that talk about the American Indian being from Israelites in the lost tribes or something. And was there a more advanced civilization here before the American Indians that the pilgrims encountered?

Sandra Tanner [01:16:49] Did they have elephants, talking about stone foxes and all these different elements that we see in the Book of Mormon? Where did the ideas come from? And he shows all these different books that were available at the time that would have talked of these things.

Sandra Tanner [01:17:06] Now, that doesn't mean Joseph Smith had to read them all, but it shows that it was all in the air. It's just like, I don't know how much you would have had to have read on flying saucers and visits to Mars to have certain ideas in your mind without you needing to have read all the different science fiction literature on voyages to Mars or Martians having almond shaped eyes and all this kind of stuff, but there's certain amount of that stuff that's just in a communal discussion of things.

Chris Thomas [01:17:40] And as I understand it from Dan, his. Your influence in his life began in England on his mission.

Sandra Tanner [01:17:48] Oh yeah, him and Brent Metcalf and Mark Hoffman. Mark Hoffman, yeah. All over there in England.

Chris Thomas [01:17:55] I mean, there was a particular Elam pastor, wasn't there? Pentecostal. Was it Hewitt or something like that?

Sandra Tanner [01:18:05] That doesn't sound right. There was.

Chris Thomas [01:18:11] That had a lot of your publications,

Sandra Tanner [01:18:15] Pastor, that had our material and his name is in the back of my brain and I can't bring it forward. But he had challenged the Mormon missionaries with his knowledge of things, of problem areas of Mormon history. And so I think both Dan and Brandt had run into this guy, if I recall. Right. And anyways had been an influence in them seeking us out. As the one that said I caused them all kind of problems on their mission. And Brent, I know, used to talk about that kind of thing, but he was going to get to the bottom of the whole thing and provide the answers. And the rest of the story is Brent ended up losing his testimony. But so yeah.

Chris Thomas [01:19:19] Do you remember the first time you met Brent? Did he just turn up at the.

Sandra Tanner [01:19:24] He came. Well, I'm not sure it's the first time I met him. The first time I remember meeting him, he came into the bookstore. He had a certain presence of confidence,

Chris Thomas [01:19:42] a robust self confidence.

Sandra Tanner [01:19:44] Yes, yes. He was in control and he knew it all. And he had read all the books and we were all wet and he was setting out to be the next answer man for all things Mormon to show that the Tanner didn't know what they were talking about. A very, very confident guy. I mean, extremely. And then he got this night job as a

John Dehlin [01:20:14] security.

Sandra Tanner [01:20:15] Security guy for the Mormons at the Temple Square, I think it was. And he used that night shift to read all the critical stuff on Mormonism. And it was astounding to me within just a relatively short period of time, how quickly he caught up on all the research that had been going on in the last 10, 20 years.

Sandra Tanner [01:20:38] And he was so informed he could come in and talk to me like someone that had studied for the last 10 years. He must really be a fast reader and absorbs everything because I was really impressed with how quickly he absorbed what the issues were.

Sandra Tanner [01:20:56] But over the time you get this, what mellowing of the defensiveness of Mormonism's got all the answers kind of thing into more serious discussions about the extent of the problems. And those discussions got more to where the depth of the problems were bigger than any emphasis on the truthfulness of Mormonism.

Sandra Tanner [01:21:27] But he stayed convinced on Mark Hoffman. I mean, at the time of Mark Hoffman bombings, Mark and the different guys around Mark, like Brent Metcalf and Kurt Bench and different ones were so convinced that Mark was authentic and truthful. They just couldn't imagine that he could be this crook making up false documents and that he would kill people. Well, I didn't believe it. I didn't think he could kill people. But it was looking kind of sketchy on his document dealing. But these guys were just convinced till the very bitter end, till it was proven to them that his documents were forgeries. Which shows you how good a salesman Mark Hoffman was, because Brent is very bright, he's a very good researcher.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:26] He knows his Mormon history, and it's. It's surprising how Mark was able to fool him. But, yeah, we saw Brent changed from a cocky returned missionary into a serious historian.

Chris Thomas [01:22:45] And you've had a relationship with Brent for the years?

Sandra Tanner [01:22:50] Yeah. For all these years, yes.

Stan Larsen, D. Michael Quinn, and Mormon Scholars

Chris Thomas [01:22:53] Well, let's. Let's talk about Stan Larsen.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:57] Okay. Stan Larsen, there's another guy, was out in England, not on a mission, but he went out there to study. Oh, funny one on Stan. When he was at byu, he was doing a study on the different editions of the Book of Mormon and things. Well, we had done our book, 3913 Changes in the Book of Mormon.

Chris Thomas [01:23:19] Yes.

Sandra Tanner [01:23:20] Where I had laboriously gone through the 1830 Book of Mormon and Gerald and I reading back and forth to each other, trying to go through and mark all of the changes between the 1830 and the then what had been the 1967 printing of the Book of Mormon, Something that way. And I had tried to count them up. That's why you get this crazy number, 3913 changes. And. Stan was at BYU and he bought a copy from us, and one day he brought it back and he said, the count isn't right. There's more than that in the changes, and you didn't catch them all. And so he wanted to know if he could get his money back

John Dehlin [01:24:27] and

Sandra Tanner [01:24:28] bring his book back. Well, at the time, we had sold out on 3,000 changes. We didn't have any in print at that particular point when he brought his book back. And I think we were charging all of $5 or something for the book at the time. I mean, it wasn't much. It might have been eight, I don't know. It was just a small amount of money for it. And it was out of print. And I said, oh, sure, I'll buy it back from you. So I give him this money. He goes off happy. I turn around and sell it for twice that much to some other guy that wanted one because it was out of print. So worked for me. I thought, sure, give me your money back. But Stan ended up. I don't remember what his Degree was in New Testament studies of some sort.

Chris Thomas [01:25:24] He was a PhD in New Testament.

Sandra Tanner [01:25:26] Yeah. And he ends up working for the LDS Church in the language department in. He does this study on the King James Version of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew and how the King James Sermon on the Mount Matthew text seems to be what was used in the Book of Mormon when Jesus comes to the Americas supposedly right after his crucifixion and gives them the Sermon on the Mount.

Chris Thomas [01:26:01] Third Nephi.

Sandra Tanner [01:26:02] Yeah, right, in third Nephi. And so Stan did this great study on the dependency of the Book of Mormon on the King James Bible, Matthew account of the Sermon on the Mount. And that got him in a whole lot of problem. Eventually the church forced him to resign, that otherwise they would fire him and that if he resigned they would give him a severance package, but otherwise he'd get nothing. So he took the retirement package because he had to. He had a young family and everything. And eventually then got a job at the University of Utah in Special Collections as the manuscript librarian or something that way. So it wasn't the career path he had hoped for, but he worked there, I believe, till his retirement. Real nice guy, very honest, straightforward fellow.

Chris Thomas [01:27:06] Did you guys consult any with him on the Thomas Ferguson Project where he. Oh, I've forgotten the name of the. The volume.

Sandra Tanner [01:27:21] Oh,

Chris Thomas [01:27:25] in compiling those letters and such.

Sandra Tanner [01:27:27] Oh, yeah. Stan Larsen got interested in the Fergus. Well, we had printed a little pamphlet about Ferguson's giving up belief in the book Mormon's Historicity. And I think we had indicated there's some letters out there showing that he didn't believe it. And so Stan got interested in trying to collect any other letters that might be out there from Stan, from Ferguson that would show this moving away from the historicity of the Book of Mormon. And so he ended up doing a book. What was the name of the book?

Chris Thomas [01:28:13] I can't remember at the moment. It's got golden plates in the title or something, doesn't it?

Sandra Tanner [01:28:18] Quest for the Gold Plates.

Chris Thomas [01:28:20] Quest for the Gold Plates, yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:28:22] Yeah. That's an interesting book. It is about his research on Ferguson's journey out of orthodoxy into his unbelief, but of his personal promoting people staying in the church and come to view the church as a great club, if you viewed it like a fraternal organization or something, that you could find a lot of community and supportive other reasons to be at the church that didn't include Joseph Smith being a prophet, that it was a great place to be.

Chris Thomas [01:29:01] Kind of a cultural phenomenon.

Sandra Tanner [01:29:03] Yes. And promoted that kind of an approach to Mormonism. And so he probably helped a lot of people navigate some kind of activity level where they could stay in the good graces of their family without having to directly declare that they no longer believed any of it. But Stan's book was helpful and encouraging to a lot of people that were struggling at the time to understand that other people have gone through this, lived through it, and negotiated some kind of family relations and to see how Ferguson went through all of that. But it was something that his family never did fully accept. His son always insisted his dad had not given up the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:30:01] Can I just. Can I just share a tiny little story?

Sandra Tanner [01:30:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:30:04] I got into this Thomas Ferguson, Stan Larsen stuff, I don't know, a year or two ago, and I wanted to know if Stan Larsen was still alive. So I put out a call, and sure enough, he's still alive, and he's living up kind of far west, Salt Lake City. And I wanted to find him. So I, like, found. And I found out that he had been a listener to Mormon stories and had donated at one point. So I. I went. I took the address that was, like, on his donation, and I drove out and found his house and just showed up and. And talked to him for, I don't know, 20 or 30 minutes outside his house.

Sandra Tanner [01:30:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:30:46] And yeah, he's still. He's still out there, at least last time I checked. And I. Yeah, I have a brief recorded conversation with him.

Chris Thomas [01:30:54] Oh, great.

Sandra Tanner [01:30:55] Yep. Good.

Chris Thomas [01:30:58] Indeed. That's one of the folk I'd like to have a conversation with.

John Dehlin [01:31:00] Yes. Last I checked, he was still around. He was not. For family reasons, he was not eager to come on the podcast.

Chris Thomas [01:31:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:11] But little Stan Larsen story.

Chris Thomas [01:31:13] Thanks for that.

John Dehlin [01:31:14] Yeah.

Chris Thomas [01:31:15] Yeah, a couple of quick Mike. Mike Quinn interactions. Michael Quinn. Well, one which you know, was from him and one that you suspect was with him.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:33] Well, the. Mike Quinn gave a talk on being a Mormon historian, and I don't remember the time frame that. In the 80s. I'm not sure when that was. And he'd given it in a public setting, and a friend of ours had written and asked him for a copy of the talk, and he had sent it out.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:01] And the different things we knew about the public nature of the talk and him disseminating copies of it around, Gerald felt this had put it in the public domain. And so he printed up the talk because it was our understanding it was not going to be printed or made available.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:21] And so Gerald felt that the talk was important to where things were at in Mormon history at the time. So we printed it up. And I think Mike always held a certain disdain for us because of printing his talk.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:43] He then later did his own printing of the talk where he had somewhat updated some things in the talk and put it into him a better form and did his own publication of the talk. But I thought it was an important talk at the time where it was

Chris Thomas [01:33:04] a pretty fiery response to some speech by general authority at byu, as I recall.

Sandra Tanner [01:33:14] Yeah, I don't remember enough about it at this point.

John Dehlin [01:33:16] Wasn't that the boy, Kit Packer? The mantle is greater than the intellect.

Chris Thomas [01:33:20] I think it was. I think it was. That's my memory anyway.

Sandra Tanner [01:33:23] Yeah, I don't remember.

John Dehlin [01:33:25] We're all rusty.

Chris Thomas [01:33:28] And so was the doctor Clandestine stuff before this lecture that he gave.

John Dehlin [01:33:37] Yeah, the clandestine stuff was in the late seventies.

Sandra Tanner [01:33:40] Was it?

John Dehlin [01:33:40] Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:33:41] I don't know. I can't remember the dates on that for sure.

John Dehlin [01:33:45] I. I wouldn't. I tracked down. I bought a pamphlet. I went and bought the pamphlet. I've got the Dr. Clandestine pamphlet. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely 70s.

Sandra Tanner [01:33:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a crazy thing. Where we had been hammering the church on all these historical problems. Well, in other people too. And so the church feels. I mean, the guys in the historian's office feel, well, we could answer a lot of the stuff the Tanner are cranking out if we just didn't have our hands tied.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:16] But the church historians were afraid of writing any kind of rebuttal against our Mormonism book or the type of research we were doing, because they had to concede part of the problems that we were bringing up. So you could only give a half of an excuse for the problem. Like if I say to someone, joseph Smith rewrote his revelations, and your defense is, yeah, but it was only half of them. Well, that's not the kind of answers the church was looking for from their historians. They wanted the historian to come back and say, no, there'd never been any changes. Not that there was only half the problem you think it is.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:04] So they did this anonymous response to us and had this cloak and dagger story where a bunch of pamphlets were dropped off at a storage locker and a key given to Sam Weller's bookstore where they could retrieve this anonymous historian's response to our material, where the historian admits, yes, there are problems, but they aren't as bad as the Tanner and make them sound. And we have half an answer to most of this stuff. And it may not be as strong as you hoped it was, but There is some kind of answer we can give to this. Well, the church leaders, the historians knew the church leaders would not be happy with this.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:50] They wanted a much more firm, straightfor forward, yes or no kind of defense, not something that was conceding there were problems. And so that's why they had to do it in this crazy anonymous way of this storage locker and selling the books through Sam Weller's bookstore, because then they hoped that the church leaders wouldn't come back at the church historians for conceding too much to the Tanner.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:24] So every time our name comes up to anybody, the first thing they roll out is this anonymous historian's attack on us. But the funny thing is, I don't know how many of the Mormons have actually read the response to understand it because it doesn't answer as thoroughly as the Mormon gives the impression that they think it does. So I think it's kind of funny when they think that's the big solution.

Chris Thomas [01:36:52] And there was this rather widespread rumor that Michael Quinn was involved in this.

Sandra Tanner [01:37:01] Yes. And Gerald did a big research on trying to figure it out, reading his thesis and different papers he gave. And one of the things that led Gerald the beginning to suspect Quinn was his use of Latin phrases, which most people don't, even though they may know them, they don't usually put them in their defenses. And so when he starts talking about post hoc, ergo, proctor hoc or whatever, Cheryl thought that sounds an awful lot like his thesis.

Chris Thomas [01:37:33] Gotcha. Before we take a short break, I want to go through about three names here, some just kind of quick responses. I've always been curious as to how much contact you may or may not have had with Fawn Brody.

Fawn Brodie and Relationships with LDS Intellectuals

Sandra Tanner [01:37:54] Not a lot. We had exchanged little letters back and forth. I had have sometimes someone write me and ask me some question about her book or about her. And I wrote her, I think, through her publisher, a couple of different times when someone asked me a particular question or I would forward someone's letter onto her.

Sandra Tanner [01:38:18] And then she had had a little interchange with Gerald on his work on the Oliver Cowdery defense in a rehearsal of my grounds from separating myself from the Latter Day Saint Church, a supposed pamphlet Cowdery should have written in 1839 in Norton, Ohio.

Sandra Tanner [01:38:43] And Gerald had done a lot of research and figured out the pamphlet had to have been an invention done maybe around 1900. And Fawn Brody referenced it. And she had written Gerald that she thought he was wrong, that she still accepted the pamphlet as authentic. So did Juanita Brooks, a historian on the Mountain Meadow Massacre. Both women had contacted us that they felt Gerald was wrong on the Cowdery defense. They still thought it was genuine. But in today's world, I think most historians concede that, yeah, it looks like the Cowder defense is a late invention not written by Cowdery.

Chris Thomas [01:39:27] Now, obviously, Brody was a major influence on your life. What was that like to have that kind of pushback?

Sandra Tanner [01:39:37] Gerald was confident enough in his research that he just felt, well, they're too set in their opinion, that they just can't imagine that they had missed it, that they would have seen through it if it was really that obvious that it was a forgery. But once Gerald had done his research, his mind was pretty much set. So he wasn't intimidated. He just felt like, well, they're too set in their ways. They can't admit that someone new to the scene could figure something out that they didn't see.

Chris Thomas [01:40:12] And similar question with Juanita Brooks.

Sandra Tanner [01:40:15] Well, it's the same thing. We didn't have much contact with Juanita Brooks. In fact, that was kind of a surprise when she gave push back on that. But I think it's the same thing again. They were the experts in their fields in the areas they're writing on. And we were just two dumb kids coming up through the ranks that didn't even know how to do proper spelling and grammar. So how could we possibly have found something that important that they would not have sensed or seen or asked questions about?

Chris Thomas [01:40:52] And kind of a transitional figure here. Tell us about your relationship with Kurt Bench.

Sandra Tanner [01:41:02] Well, actually, very little Kurt Bench, who became a friend of Mark Hoffman's at the time of the Mark Hoffman thing. He was the Deseret Book, Special Collections or Rare Book Guy, and True Believing Mormon. And so we didn't have contact with him in that early phase. It was, I mean, other than by someone mentioning him between us or something. But not direct contact with Kurt until after the Hoffman thing was over. And then we got to know him through his. When he set up his own bookstore and got to know him more there. But Kurt always had a more believer stance than a number of the other people writing on Mormon history. And always. There was a little tension because of his believing status with us. And he was always cordial in that. But there was not any kind of close bonding in friendship. It was just very professional.

Chris Thomas [01:42:24] And then would buy 1830 editions from you.

Sandra Tanner [01:42:27] And would buy 1830 Book of Mormons from me. Yes, I had come in possession of two 1830 book Mormons in those years and sold them both to him.

Chris Thomas [01:42:45] The last time I saw Kurt, I dropped by the office. I can't even remember. It was shortly before his passing. And he said, come back here in my office and let me show you something. And it was a framed matted copy of Oath of a Freeman.

John Dehlin [01:43:09] Oh.

Chris Thomas [01:43:10] With all of your signatures.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:12] Oh, wow.

Chris Thomas [01:43:13] Around on the matting. And he seemed very proud of that.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:17] Oh, well, yeah. That's quite an accomplishment.

Chris Thomas [01:43:20] Yeah. Well, Sandra, let's take a short break and we will come back and talk about some folk that people may be surprised that you knew.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:29] Oh, okay.

Chris Thomas [01:43:32] So we're going to take a short break and be right back.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:34] All right.

Chris Thomas [01:43:35] Well, we're back after our short break and I want to talk, first of all, Sandra, about Peter Bart. Tell us about Peter Bart and how you and Gerald figure into his literary work.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:50] Peter Bart was an author back in the, I don't know what, 80s, 1980 time period, but he did a novel on this guy that gets into investigating Mormon polygamy culture. I mean, current modern day Mormon polygamy and that. And so he has this novel about this guy that gets too much involved in the research of all this. He ends up getting killed, and his wife then ends up moving to California and becoming a schoolteacher. But when you read it, it's obviously modeled on Gerald and I and the assumption that if Gerald got killed or something, that I would just move to California and pick up a career in teaching.

Sandra Tanner [01:44:42] So he never mentions our name or anything, but it's obvious when you read them, if you know the Mark Hoffman time period and our thing with the Howard Hughes will and all the different stuff we got into investigating in that. And you can see that this guy was using Gerald as his model for this detective in this story.

Chris Thomas [01:45:02] Well, that's a novel idea that Gerald's a detective.

Sandra Tanner [01:45:06] Yes.

Chris Thomas [01:45:06] Right. I mean, he could. He could sniff things out.

Sandra Tanner [01:45:10] Right.

Engaging with Institute Teachers and Church Educators

Chris Thomas [01:45:10] One of the things that, Sandra, that it seems to me that most people have no idea about your life is how well and often, how well you got on with and how often you met with different people involved in the church education program, particularly the institutes, and that there's been an assumption from that I've. I've stumbled across that the kind of reluctance to engage the Tanner that emerged at a certain point and only has more recently started to thaw was how it was from the beginning.

Chris Thomas [01:45:58] But as I understand some of your publications were used at the U in the institute and that you've had a variety of conversations with institute teachers over the years. And so talk to us a little bit about some of the following folk, and I'll just throw them out there and you can talk about them however you like. T. Edgar Lyons is one of the names. Lowell Binion, Sterling McMurran, Reed Durham and Max Port.

John Dehlin [01:46:33] Take one at a time.

Chris Thomas [01:46:34] Yeah, that's fine.

John Dehlin [01:46:35] Okay, who's first?

Chris Thomas [01:46:37] T. Edgar Lyon.

Sandra Tanner [01:46:38] Okay. T. Edgar Lyon was involved in the seminary and institute program. And in fact, some of my paperwork is signed by Tiagarlain. And I can't remember now if it was seminary or institute or when I was a pledge master in Lambda Delta Sigma.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:00] But we encountered each other back when I was a believing Mormon down in Southern California. But I didn't connect the dots. When I came to Salt Lake when Gerald and I were married and we started getting into our writing. And then we ended up getting to know some of the institute guys at the University of Utah.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:27] And it wasn't until way after those years that looking back on my papers from when I was in seminary and institute, that I realized, oh, my goodness, I knew T. Edgar Lyon way back then and didn't connect it later when I met him, that it was the same guy that I had a little bit of involvement with back in those earlier days before I got married.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:58] But Tiger Lyon was a real nice guy, and he came to the bookstore when it was in our parlor, in our house quite a number of times. He got involved in the Nauvoo Restoration, and he stopped in regularly and we would have nice conversations.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:22] So it was kind of funny. But in the 60s and early 70s, we had institute people contact us regularly and have discussions with them. But you get into the 70s and you start having pushback from the church higher ups that the Institute had to go under more scrutiny and us them kind of mentality that things started to get more distant. But one of the fellows associated with Tiager Lyon was Reed Durham, who was the Institute director at the University of Utah Institute of Religion.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:18] And Reed, and who was another one, Dale La Cheminate might have been at that time. I can't remember who all was on staff then, but in the late 60s, early 70s, we had quite a bit of contact with different guys from the Institute throughout, through the Book of Abraham, explosion of research, first vision stuff and all those things.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:51] Reed Durham used to order like a dozen copies of our Mormonism book for a special class he had at the Institute up there that was for advanced studies on Mormon history. And you had to pass some sort of a verbal test discussion with him to show that you had enough knowledge on Mormonism. That you wouldn't go into shock when you heard certain problem areas mentioned.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:23] So if you passed and you knew enough Mormon history already and were still staying Mormon, then you could take Reid's class and you use Shadow or reality. And I think I've mentioned before on here that when I got my first check from the church, officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, signed by David O. McKay or whoever was president at the time, that I wanted to frame it, but we were too poor to do that. We had to cash the check. But yeah, we actually sold books to the Institute of Religion at that time. So there was more openness then.

Chris Thomas [01:51:03] So is it fair to say that Shadow and Reality was the first version of the Gospel topics essays?

Sandra Tanner [01:51:09] Yeah, it might have been, I don't know. But Reed Durham got in Trouble in about 1972 or three when he gave the presidential address at the Mormon History Association. I believe it was on Is There no Help for the Widow's Son? Where he talked about the influence of Masonry on the temple ritual. And that got some of the higher ups pretty concerned. When they heard that and read his talk, they felt that he was being too speculative and raising problem areas that could trouble the youth. And so they kind of put the kibosh on this open history and Reid was forced out of his position and sent up to Logan, I believe, to teach or something, and they kind of shut him down as a historian. Reid was a real nice guy. He didn't agree with us, but he was a very nice guy.

Chris Thomas [01:52:09] What were your conversations like? I mean, give us a little taste

Sandra Tanner [01:52:14] of that, okay, Book of Abraham stuff. He would go on and on about Nibley's latest stuff on the temple ritual stemming from Egyptian religious rites and marriage for eternity and progression to godhood. And he'd make all these Egyptian connections on everything, trying to get the Book of Abraham as some sort of inspired document. I told him one day, I said, reid, you could make all the connections you want to the Egyptian religion and all their pagan gods. I could be okay with that. Just don't tell me it's Christian.

Sandra Tanner [01:52:50] That's my problem here. But Reid was a real nice fellow and I felt bad that he got in trouble for his talk, which I thought was an important talk on that connection. We know more now than we did then about the Masonic influence on Joseph Smith, but those were important talks that were given at that time. So there was more openness.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:19] And it seemed like mid-70s things got real tight. The church had some sort of knee jerk reaction to the historians were getting too far ahead of themselves and going out on their own to tell all the family secrets. And that's one thing to do it in house, in the back office, but you don't publish it in magazines or make big talks at some big gathering and embarrass the church on who Joseph Smith really was.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:54] So there was a pullback on any contact with those guys. So it fizzled out right after Reid's talk in 73, I think was a year that he gave that talk.

Chris Thomas [01:54:13] Was Max Perkin part of that group?

Sandra Tanner [01:54:16] Max was at the, I believe at the Institute at the same time there was. They had a number of fellows that were quite good scholars at the Institute at that time that were doing a lot of good research, but they were also getting in trouble for doing straightforward history and not enough of sugarcoating it to make it look more faith promoting in the telling of the stories. So, and I forget when Arrington, the church historian, was going to do his, what, 16 volume history of the church,

John Dehlin [01:54:56] I was going to mention that. So when, when I was at byu, I took an honors colloquium class by, by Ted Lyon, the son of T. Edgar Lyon. And that's when I learned about his dad. And my understanding is he was like the assistant to Leonard Arrington at the University of Utah Institute for a long, long time before, you know, Bennion and Lyon got in trouble. And that was all, you know, parallel to the Leonard Arrington administration. But when Arrington was going to do that sesquicentennial, was it 15 or 10 different volumes of church history to cover? Basically, generally, I think it was more than a dozen.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:42] I don't remember so many volumes.

John Dehlin [01:55:44] T. Edgarlein was going to write the. The book on Nauvoo. That was his assignment. Lamontolis did Latin America, the Church in Latin America, and Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Early Mormonism was. He was assigned that book for that, for that series. But yeah, eventually Bennion and Lyon were kind of. Were kind of exiled, just like. Just like Arrington eventually was and Quinn as well.

Sandra Tanner [01:56:16] Yeah, and Max Parkin did his thesis. I think it was Conflict at Kirtland. And that was an important thesis on problems at that time. Although he certainly was not writing anything to be an argument against Mormonism. It was very straightforward in listing problems that the Mormons initiated, not just what the Gentiles might have done bad against the Mormons. And that was upsetting to people that there was any indication that Mormons could have brought on some of their Pushback in the communities by the Mormons actions or the Mormon police or rhetoric or whatever. So there was this whole group at the institute there at the U of U that were seen as a worry of too much attention being paid to the details and not enough attention given to faith promoting stories.

John Dehlin [01:57:21] I don't want you to lose your thought, but I have a quick question. So in your book and I'll just give a plug to it. Ronald Huggins book lighthouse on page 197. This ties into Arrington and Quinn. It says a senior project by Richard Stephen Marshall, a student at the University of Utah, submitted by the previous May inadvertently shed some light on the booklet. And when we're talking about the booklet, we're talking about the, the Dr. Clandestine pamphlet authored as we now know by Michael Quinn, authored anonymously by Michael Quinn, called Gerald and Sandra Tanner's Distorted View of Mormonism A Response to Mormonism Shadow and Reality.

John Dehlin [01:58:09] So that's the pamphlet that Leonard Arrington and Michael Quinn put together to respond to your, your and Gerald's historical book. But it says here that, that Richard Stephen Marshall in a senior project at the University of Utah submitted a paper called the New Mormon History and that it included several interviews with Mormon historians and others, including you and Gerald as part of the project. And he also talks about Reed Durham there. But that paper, I went back and read that paper. Have you ever that, Chris?

Chris Thomas [01:58:46] Oh, the, the, the, the, the thesis

John Dehlin [01:58:49] paper, the New Mormon History.

Chris Thomas [01:58:51] No, I don't think I have it.

John Dehlin [01:58:53] It's a really interesting and important paper because it basically, in my view, it basically predicts what ends up happening. Which is, which is that kind of the Church opens up, the Church tries to be honest with its history, but then the brethren are starting to get uncomfortable with it and it kind of for it sort of prophesies basically about the ultimate demise of the, of the Church history department of Leonard Arrington and how the Church will probably regret being so open and transparent with its history.

Sandra Tanner [01:59:29] Yeah, a real prophet.

Chris Thomas [01:59:30] And say that one more time.

John Dehlin [01:59:32] The, it's, it's a, it's called the New Mormon History. It was a thesis paper written by Richard Stephen Marshall and you can find it online and download it as a, as a PhD, as a, as a, as a thesis. Like a bachelor's degree, almost like an honors thesis, but you can get it from the U of you.

Chris Thomas [01:59:54] Okay, great.

John Dehlin [01:59:55] But I was just gonna ask if you remember that. That thesis and the trouble that it caused.

Sandra Tanner [02:00:03] Yes, vaguely, but I don't remember the paper. I believe I read parts of it with Gerald, but I can't pull up in my memory what was in it. I just. I remember discussing it.

John Dehlin [02:00:20] Yeah. Okay. Well, I. I read it and it's fascinating and I'm gonna send it to you both.

Chris Thomas [02:00:25] Okay, great.

John Dehlin [02:00:26] Okay, great.

Chris Thomas [02:00:27] Yeah, thanks so much.

John Dehlin [02:00:28] I promise you'll value that.

Sandra Tanner [02:00:29] Chris.

Chris Thomas [02:00:30] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sandra, you.

John Dehlin [02:00:33] And I cut you off when you were going to say something. I don't know if you.

Chris Thomas [02:00:36] Okay, just moving along. Any, any comments on Sterling McMurran?

Sandra Tanner [02:00:45] He wrote a great booklet, Theological. What was it? Theologicals Examination of the Mormon Theology or something. But his booklet, we sold it at the bookstore for years. Theological foundation of Mormon Doctrine or something like that. And it was very good because although Sterling McMurran did not. Was a Mormon, but he did not believe Mormon doctrine and he didn't believe Christian doctrine, but he understood it. He had studied enough to know the language of both sides and did a very good job of articulating how the Mormons misuse words about God like being omnipotent and omniscient, and how like Bruce McConkie and LeGrand Richards and Joseph Fielding Smith, all the guys that young Mormons read back in, when I was a young person, that the church apologists threw around Christian terms without understanding their meaning.

Sandra Tanner [02:02:07] And this raised confusion with the outside world who assumed the Mormons knew what the words meant. But McMurran does a good job of showing the contrast between the two theological positions, that the Mormon God had none of the qualities that they kept using the phrases about, and that it was a very total different view of God than the standard Christian position.

Sandra Tanner [02:02:34] And I found his book to be extremely helpful for me as a young person coming out of Mormonism, to have a better understanding of why Christians had such a pushback against Mormon doctrine. And for years I recommended it to pastors when they came into town that you want to understand the differences, you really need to read McMurran's book on Mormon theology because he understood how different the definitions were between the two systems.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:07] So he did a great service, I think, to helping facilitate informed discussion so that you didn't talk past each other because you thought the other one understood the word in the same way that you used it.

Chris Thomas [02:03:25] What. What was lost to you and Gerald, when the, when the conversations were forced to stop with some of the people in higher education that you had these conversations with over the years? What was that like from your.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:53] Well, we didn't have as much personal knowledge or idea where thought was moving amongst the historians, how they were viewing the ongoing deeper research into the historical questions. And so there was more adversarial feeling between the camps and less of knowing one another so that you had a better understanding of why they held so strongly to this or that position. So it, it made it a little harder in writing and delineating the positions and things when you didn't know personally people's real views and they had to write things that sounded more faith promoting than maybe they would have written otherwise. So it just lessened the real dialogue.

The Mormon History Association and Closing Reflections

Chris Thomas [02:04:58] And let me ask one other question before we talk about a very interesting meeting you were invited to.

Sandra Tanner [02:05:07] Okay.

Chris Thomas [02:05:08] Are there, since things are starting to thaw a little bit and I'm not asking you to name any names, but are there people making contact with you for these kinds of conversations these days?

Sandra Tanner [02:05:28] Well, I don't know if I'd say conversations, but when I go to the Mormon History association, for instance, I mean people talk to me now and I, I would be comfortable sitting and talking with any of them. And I've had times when I've sat next to one of the church, different leading writers on church history or whatever and have them make some little aside to me about someone's talk that I sit there and I think, oh wow, that had never said to that to me 20 years ago, you know, I mean just a frank kind of, you know. Well that's a real joke, you know that with guys making a defense on something that they know isn't defensible.

Sandra Tanner [02:06:14] Well, I won't name names. I was sitting next to a Mormon historian and we were listening this some years ago. We were listening to, I think it was Brian Hale talking about how many wives Joseph really had sex with or something.

Sandra Tanner [02:06:31] And this Mormon man made some quip about Hale had mentioned, well, there's only evidence or there's only anecdotal stuff about Joseph having consummated his marriages with 10 women. I think it was something like that in the comment. And this historian just leans over and kind of whispers in my ear, well, how many do we need? You know, And I thought, oh, okay, that was a little more frank than I was expecting from a Mormon historian, but. And that wasn't my cousin.

Chris Thomas [02:07:17] Right. Just for the record.

Sandra Tanner [02:07:19] Right. Sorry Mark, I didn't know. I'm not, I'm not trying to impinge your reputation. It wasn't Mark. But anyways, so yeah, things are more relaxed and like even to make that comment to, to be able to say that with the sense that I wasn't going to go immediately put that in the front page of the newsletter, Mormon historian XYZ thought it was funny, you know, on the comment about how many wives Joseph had sex with. But so, yeah, there's a more openness, more trust that I'm a little more discreet than making a screaming headline about some comment someone made.

Chris Thomas [02:08:05] What do you think Gerald would have made of this beginning of a thaw?

Sandra Tanner [02:08:13] I don't know that he would have had as much patience to wait. He was a little more black and white in his thinking. And I think he would have still been troubled too much by the fact that people still were hanging on to belief in areas where he felt it was so obvious that you should have given that position up by now. So I'm not sure that he would have felt as comfortable sitting in that room.

Chris Thomas [02:08:45] Gotcha. So, okay, I want us to kind of land the plane with this. With this story. You were invited to a meeting that consisted of a lot of Institute personnel.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:02] Yes.

Chris Thomas [02:09:03] Tell us that story. Set it up for us. Tell us all about it as kind of an example of the conversations that were going on.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:13] Okay. Back in. This would have had to have been in the late 60s, early 70s, and it's before Reed Durham loses his position as director of the Institute. So in that. Sometime in the five years before that period, and I couldn't give you a year on it right now, but somebody from the Salt Lake University of Utah Institute asked me if I would be willing to come to a sort of fireside up on the east side in one of the homes owned by one of the Institute teachers and speak to a bunch of the Church Institute guys. And I believe their wives were there. And there were quite a number.

Sandra Tanner [02:10:01] There had to be more than the Institute guys there. There was quite a number of people at this gathering in this home. And that kind of took me back. Well, yeah, I guess I could come talk to him about what are we talking about? And they. We want you to come. We want you to tell us why you can't believe Mormonism anymore. Lay out your case for why you think that it is not verifiable or true or authentic. Whatever. Sure. Okay. So I go to this meeting, and, I mean, there was crowded.

Sandra Tanner [02:10:47] I don't know how many people were there, but it was a larger front room and crowded with people. And so there's a. There's people sitting close to me in this room, like a guy sitting on a stool or something, like a footstool or something that he's sitting to the side of me. And. But there's People all around in this room.

Sandra Tanner [02:11:08] And so the question is put to me, lay out your case for why you don't believe Mormonism meets this truth claims. Okay. So I start out with the problems of the. I don't know if I would have focused so much on the treasure digging, but I was. I went into the problems for the First Vision and the early period of the startup Mormonism, lack of priesthood, the changing of the revelations, and how I'd studied all those things and went into some of the problems up through Nauvoo and polygamy. And I don't remember what all I covered, but I know I focused a lot on First Vision problems, the kind of stuff that Wes had done all his research on, First Vision, the revival stuff.

Sandra Tanner [02:12:13] And I probably went into some on the Book of Abraham because it would have been in that time period. So I must have been talking about that as well. So. And the book Mormon. Oh, yeah, that was another big one. Why I felt the Book of Mormon couldn't be the historical book that it claimed to be and explaining how we'd come to the point of giving it up and all. And I went through this whole litany of my problems.

Sandra Tanner [02:12:38] Oh, so we get through with me laying this all out. And I don't know how long it took, but it was a while I got through. And so then someone says, oh, okay, well, that was really interesting. Now tell us what you think we should believe.

Sandra Tanner [02:12:59] What is your version of Christianity then? What would you tell people was the answer to life and the problems of the world and everything? I hadn't really seen that one coming. So I'm sitting there trying to think through how to explain to this group of Mormon Church historians my take on the atonement and what Christ means outside of Mormon ritual, outside of Mormon temple experience.

Sandra Tanner [02:13:42] And so I tried to. And they asked a couple of questions along the way. It wasn't to me just straight talking. They, you know, would keep asking, well, what about this? What about this? And so we finally got to the point of what's the capsule of Christian belief and what's center core?

Sandra Tanner [02:14:06] So I'm trying to think through, as best I could to explain to them the concept of the atonement and forgiveness through Christ, that everything was tied up in the atonement, that it wasn't a matter of ritual or temple marriage or of course we'll be with our families. That's all of our hope. But it doesn't require a temple ritual and that our being there is all of grace. It's not A matter of a checklist. And I tried to think of ways that I could explain the importance of Christ to a Christian that showed it to be the sum total of the Christian message and that it didn't include all of this legalistic trappings of Mormon ritual and performance based belief system.

Sandra Tanner [02:15:03] And I tried to think of every way I could say it so that I didn't get trapped in the definition problem like Sterling McMurran's thing on talking about how they don't understand what Christians mean by one God, whose the ultimate truth, the only reality in the universe kind of thing, you know. So I'm trying to explain how Jesus is everything you need and that's enough and all.

Sandra Tanner [02:15:27] And so when I got through with this, this fellow that's sitting on the stool next to me, he looked at me with this quizzical look on his face and he says, well, all we'd have left is be Jesus.

Sandra Tanner [02:15:41] And I didn't know whether to laugh or what. You know, I'm sitting there thinking, well, yeah, that's the point. Yes, that's the message. Christ is the answer. You don't need all this other stuff. Life's a lot more simple.

Sandra Tanner [02:16:01] It's not a checklist. It's a submission to serve God, to love others, accept Christ's atonement and just follow him. But it just was, it struck me as funny sitting there that to these people in this room, to have a relationship with Christ seemed so empty, so much of a letdown that. You mean there's no exaltation, there is no eternal progression and we don't get to have worlds?

Sandra Tanner [02:16:37] No, it's a lot simpler than that. So, yes, that's my one and only time of talking to a whole assembly of LDS Institute teachers.

Chris Thomas [02:16:50] And no doubt the environment was charged, but it sounds like it was pretty amiable.

Sandra Tanner [02:16:58] Yes, it was. Yes, everything ended on a good note. When I left, everything was fine. Everyone shook my hand and thanked me for coming. And so yeah, it was amiable. They just had never had someone sit down and just lay it all out to them.

Chris Thomas [02:17:13] Right. Oh well, Sandra, thank you for coming.

Sandra Tanner [02:17:17] Yes.

Chris Thomas [02:17:17] And being part of these, these conversations that John has recorded that we have many, many of these and you know, we've covered a lot of ground.

Sandra Tanner [02:17:31] Yes.

Chris Thomas [02:17:32] And I really appreciate you being so generous with your time. And Dr. John Dehlin, thank you for making all this possible.

John Dehlin [02:17:40] Thank you, Chris Thomas, you're a credit to our broader community.

Chris Thomas [02:17:45] Oh, thank you very much. And so thank you for joining us today and thank you for participating at least by hearing this conversation.

John Dehlin [02:17:57] And, Sandra, all we ask for is 20 more years from you.

Chris Thomas [02:18:00] Me, too.

Sandra Tanner [02:18:01] That's all I'm asking.

John Dehlin [02:18:03] I'm so happy when I tell other 80 year olds that they're like, no, I'm done. And you're like, give me 20 more. I love that. All right.

Sandra Tanner [02:18:13] Thank you.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.