1. Richard L. Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981); see also Richard L. Anderson, “Attempts to Redefine the Experience of the Eight Witnesses,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 18–31.

2. For example, see Dan Peterson, review of Mormonism, by Kurt Van Gorden, FARMS Review 8, no. 1 (1996): 95–103; Scott Faulring, “The Return of Oliver Cowdery,” in Oliver Cowdery: Scribe, Elder, Witness (Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2006): 321–62. Both of these articles and more are available at maxwellinstitute.byu.edu.

3. Dan Vogel, “The Validity of the Witnesses’ Testimonies,” in American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon, ed. Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 79–121.

4. Stan Larsen and Samuel J. Passey, eds., The William E. McLellin Papers, 1854–1880 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2007), 522.

5. Jan Shipps and John W. Welch, eds., The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831–1836 (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 29.

6. Shipps and Welch, Journals of William E. McLellin, 33.

7. Shipps and Welch, Journals of William E. McLellin, 79–84.

8. Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, eds., The Joseph Smith Papers: Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839 (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 268.

9. D. Michael Quinn, “‘My Eyes Were Holden in Those Days’: A Study of Selective Memory,” in Larsen and Passey, William E. McLellin Papers, 59–82.

10. Shipps and Welch’s volume won the Steven F. Christensen Best Documentary Award from the Mormon History Association.

11. Larsen and Passey, William E. McLellin Papers, 253–55.

12. Larsen and Passey, William E. McLellin Papers, xvi.

13. The edge of page 167 was damaged after this transcript was made.

14. Jessee, Ashurst-McGee, and Jensen, Joseph Smith Papers: Journals, Volume 1, lxii–lxiv; Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford and Steven C. Harper, The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Transcriptions, Manuscript Revelation Books (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2009): xxxiv–xxxv.

15. McLellin titled this notebook W. E. McLellan’s Book. McLellin himself wrote his name with variant spellings.

16. Joseph Smith Jr. died in Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, and Oliver Cowdery died in Richmond, Missouri, on March 3, 1850. Martin Harris and David Whitmer were the two witnesses of the Book of Mormon plates still alive when McLellin wrote. Harris and Whitmer died on July 10, 1875, and January 25, 1888, respectively. Jessee, Ashurst-McGee, and Jensen, Joseph Smith Papers: Journals, Volume 1, 405, 412, 446.

17. Harris was most likely eighty-eight at the time of McLellin’s writing.

18. John Whitmer was the last surviving of the additional eight witnesses to the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. He died at Far West, Missouri, on July 11, 1878. Jessee, Ashurst-McGee, and Jensen, Joseph Smith Papers: Journals, Volume 1, 447.

Three Witnesses