But he came to specialise in making historic documents for an expanding young church that was horribly short on historic artefacts of its own. Hofmann, under the guise of an antiquarian and collector, would uncover increasingly remarkable discoveries supposedly written by the founders of Mormonism themselves. And these he would sell to a grateful church to display.
After that, he began forging documents that were more undermining of church doctrine, with an eye of having these bought too — except this time definitely not for display.
It all went wrong and when it did, Hofmann blew up one associate and another’s wife with pipe bombs, killing both, and then managed to blow himself up as well, though not fatally. Thirty-five years later, he is still in prison.
The Netflix series is disappointing because it is far more interested in the murders than the forgeries. Anyone can kill other people – not many can create a 19th century letter from the mother of the (very unminor) prophet, Joseph Smith. And I am far more gripped by the way in which the Mormon church was fooled, partly because it so wanted to be. And that thought reminded me of something I read in National Geographic magazine almost exactly a year ago. This was a story that linked to the Dead Sea Scrolls and concerned the new Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, an enormous and rather beautiful building just south of the Smithsonian museums and galleries. When the billionaire animating spirit behind the Museum project, an Evangelical multi-millionaire called Steve Green (the president of the Hobby Lobby chain), was beginning to create a collection, he cast his net enthusiastically to catch biblical artefacts. Much of the material he bought was good, but some of it was looted in Iraq and some of it was even stolen from Oxford by the disgraced papyrus expert Professor Dirk Obbink.
Among the early treasures were 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, supposedly kept in a Zurich vault by the family of Khalil Eskander Shahin, the original middleman for the 1947 Bedouin finders of the scrolls. But three years ago, after suspicions were raised about the authenticity of the pieces, the museum itself initiated an inquiry led by an art fraud investigator called Colette Loll. Her team reported last year that all the fragments were fake, as was – almost certainly – anything that was not part of the original trove.
Someone made a lot of money out of someone else’s desire for artefacts. And, as I rediscovered when rereading during lockdown Robert Harris’s wonderful book on the Hitler diaries fraud, it is amazing what supposedly intelligent people will be led to believe.
As Loll herself said, “When you have a deceiver and a believer, it’s an intimate dance.” Even so, when it comes to the minor prophets, I’m hopeful.
