greg smith wrote:To answer a few of the questions in bulk:
* as I understand it, Hamblin's letter did not provoke the response being written. From what I was told, some anti-Mormons were making great hay out of the letter somewhere, some local leader wrote SLC to ask if this letter was indeed church doctrine (him having never heard this), and Watson indicated that the First Presidency wished to clarify his original letter. So, I _think_ Hamblin just received a copy of a letter that had already been sent.
* no, I do not have a copy of the Hamblin query letter; as I said, I don't think it impacted the letter's text since that had been written in response to a different issue.
* Sorenson was at FARMS (now the Maxwell Institute). Copies were made of the letter to Hamblin and circulated among a few FARMS folk when it came over the wire. Sorenson's interest in Book of Mormon geography made him something who obviously would have an interest in such things. Sorenson just handed his files over en masse when the MI moved to different digs on BYU, and they hadn't been sorted through until recently, upon which the letter turned up.
* Sorenson was one of the first serious treatments of Book of Mormon geo based on the text. If you haven't read him (start with Mormon's Map, then Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon) then you are about 30 years behind the times in LDS apologetics and scholarly discussion about such matters. Much of his work is available at the MI site (http://mi.byu.edu).
Don't hold me to all this until I see the letter, but I'm about 95% sure I have the story straight.
GLS
I was going to wait until he posted the letter to FAIR, but I cannot help but weigh in on this. Given what he's said here---and notwithstanding his final "Don't hold me to all this" caveat---this is a powderkeg. For starters, this is the first time I think any of us has heard the story that the letter just sort of "appeared" in response to anti-Mormon criticism. In fact, I seem to recall being told repeatedly by the apologists that the Brethren/FP are virtually oblivious to what the antis are up to. (DCP has said something to that effect many, many times.) Secondly, I am fairly certain that Prof. Peterson has always maintained that Hamblin's copy was the *only* one in existence. I don't know how this will play out, but as of right now, the apologists don't have their stories straight.