The "Book of Lehi"/Author information

==

Questions

== Mr. Nemelka claims to have been commanded to translate the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon, as well as the lost 116 pages. What can you tell me about this?

Answer

As part of his 'prophetic call,' Nemelka produced what he claims is a translation of the lost 116 pages, or "Book of Lehi." This portion of Mormon's abridgement (from Lehi to King Benjamin, roughly) was lost by Martin Harris after the manuscript was loaned to him by Joseph Smith (See D&C 3, D&C 10).

History of the author

Interested readers should consult the article below, which discusses Nemelka's history and tactics:

• Ben Fulton, "True Believer," Salt Lake City Weekly (27 December 2001) on-line off-site
• Stephen Dark, "Sealed Fate," Salt Lake City Weekly (26 January 2011). off-site

First Article

The first article makes the following claims:

Biographical dates of interest for Christopher Nemelka

• 1980 - Nemelka graduates from high school
• Summer 1984 - Nemelka claims that as an employee of LDS Church security, he was in the Salt Lake Temple. He reports there being called as a prophet.
• 1986 - Nemelka divorces from first wife, Paula Blades. They have two children.
• 1987 - date upon which Nemelka alleges he received the plates from Joseph Smith [this date comes from the second article; see below]
• June 1991 - Ex-wife's family gets Nemelka's two children placed under care of Montana's Division of Family services; Nemelka takes one child unlawfully, and is charged with kidnapping. He eventually returns the child, who returns to his mother's custody, and charges are dropped.
• 1993 - Nemelka divorces from second wife, Jackie Stoll. He eventually finishes "the sealed portion," and markets it to some LDS fundamentalist groups. This leads to marriage with two plural wives, who also eventually leave him.
• 1996 - Vicky Prunty, one of the plural wives, cuts ties from Nemelka.
• Fall 2000 - Nemelka tells LDS member Christine Marie that he is an atheist; they later begin dating, and Nemelka announces that this was only a test. He tells Marie that he is a prophet, called to translate the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon. She eventually gives him at least $5000.
• March 2001 - After visiting the home of an ex-wife, Nemelka sentenced to one year in the Salt Lake County jail for violating a restraining order.
• 20 April 2001 - Nemelka reports receiving a revelation in jail instructing him to take a plural wife
• 21 December 2001 - Interview with Salt Lake City Weekly published, in which he admits to forging the Sealed Portion, lying, and exploiting the religious hopes of others (see quotes below).
• March 2002 - scheduled release from prison for violation of restraining order.
• Mr. Nemelka was also excommunicated on an unspecified date for writing a paper about LDS temple ceremonies.

The second article added:

He says that in 1987, Joseph Smith gave him the plates of the sealed portion, along with the Urim and Thummim—intergalactic cell phones, Nemelka says, that receive text from advanced beings in another solar system—with which Smith translated the Book of Mormon.

Nemelka says he spent the next few years running from this responsibility, including a period as a fugitive from the law in 1991 after kidnapping one of his first two children. After he was convicted of several protective-order violations against one of his former partners, Nemelka violated his probation and was sent to jail in 2001 for a year by 3rd District Court Judge Denise Lindberg. When Nemelka’s attorney, Ed Brass, motioned for her to review her sentence, she refused, writing, “Mr. Nemelka continues to victimize others, manipulate and misrepresent facts, and in other ways demonstrates that he does not merit the privilege of probation.”

Nemelka fled to California in 2002 with an outstanding arrest warrant hanging over him. Three years later, he returned to Utah after Judge Royal Hansen inherited his case from Lindberg and closed it.

Of his checkered past, Nemelka now says he wants “society” to give him “a mulligan.” ^[1]

The first article also provided the following quotations which it attributes directly to Nemelka:

Quotes from Nemelka

• "What I did do was I deceived her [Christine Marie] religiously. I played with her religious beliefs and mind, which I do not think a person should do..."
• "My whole purpose, though, was to write the sealed portion. Get the sealed portion done. Sell it to the church. My whole idea was to sell it to the LDS church. I was going to sell it to them, because all the Mormons are looking for the sealed portion to come back. I thought I had a good talent for writing. I was going to write it up and sell it to them. They could do with it what they wanted. They probably would have kept it off the market."
• "I set about in my own mischievous and arrogant way, of which I’m not proud of now, to prove that a person could actually write scripture and present it to people who were looking for certain scripture...I was playing on the belief that LDS people have that one day the gold plates would be returned and the sealed portion would be translated. Basically, I set about to write a fictitious version of the sealed portion as I thought Joseph Smith would have written it had he continued to perpetuate his translation of the gold plates. Much to the chagrin of the LDS church and others, what I wrote was indeed well versed and quite appropriate for the scripture I was trying to portray. Anybody who reads it would just be totally amazed."
• “My true intent was to somehow perpetuate a religion that would be based on true Christian principals of Christ-like love...Where I made my greatest mistake, for which I’m now extremely sorry for, is that I used deception to perpetuate what I proposed as the truth, assuming at the time that Joseph Smith had done the same thing.”
• “See, when I did that thing with the fundamentalist group, there were people who wanted to kill me. They were so mad. When I came out and told these other polygamists, fundamentalist guys, that I had really written the sealed portion, that I had done it just to show people that it could be done—they were very upset.”
• “When I deal with people, I am amazed at the ignorance and stupidity of most. People are so easily manipulated and deceived. Knowing this has made me a near master of manipulation. I try only to use this art, however, to help people. Sometimes the things I do seem terrible at the time, but usually the manipulation works to accomplish that which I intended.”
• “Yeah that’s, that’s all bull****,” Nemelka said from jail. “All the revelations are bull****, of course. I made ‘em up.” ^[2]
• “I’m even glad you’re doing the article, in a way...I am, so that the sealed portion will never go anywhere. There’s a lot to it, a lot more than what you’ve got. In the wrong hands it could really wreak havoc on a Mormon church, which I don’t want to do.”

Second Article

A varied and changing story

Stephen Dark's 2011 article noted:

Try to find the “truth” about Nemelka’s journey, however, and you can end up buried under the weighty tomes he has published with the help of followers and a daily blog drenched in smiley-face icons and Mormon mysticism, from which he pontificates and rails against those he calls his enemies and supporters alike. Then there’s the welter of court filings documenting Nemelka’s criminal history and highly litigious personality, which also illustrate, among other things, his contradictory claims over the years as to the origins of his translation....Nemelka acknowledges that unless you accept he’s a messenger for advanced beings, then he’s either “delusional,” a genius who “can write these books,” or “the devil is inspiring me.”

In a 2001 City Weekly cover story called “True Believer” by former editor Ben Fulton, Nemelka, at the time in jail, admitted to inventing rather than translating the sealed portion. He subsequently recanted his jail statements to Fulton, saying they were made to placate 3rd District Court Judge Denise Lindberg, who he claimed was persecuting him.

Lindberg was not the only judge unimpressed by Nemelka. In a scathing Aug. 1, 2007, decision, 3rd District Court Judge Stephen Henroid contrasted Nemelka’s aspiration “to be among the working poor” with the situation of the nine children he fathered with four women. “Respondent has a history of living off the support of others and apparently thinks his example is good enough for his children,” Henroid wrote in his ruling. He concluded, “His failure to pay even the nominal child support he owes, and condemning his children to live in poverty, is reprehensible.” While Nemelka disputes he is responsible for nine children, citing four having been adopted and two who were emancipated, he declares that “no judge, no state, no government official has the right to tell me what job I have to do. If I want to raise my kids in poverty”—as part of their education, he adds—“that’s my choice.”

Nemelka’s brother Joel sees Christopher’s aspirations in a darker light. Christopher “doesn’t want to go out as a footnote,” he says, and “couldn’t stand to live like I do, earning money, taking care of his kids. To me, ego drives it all.”

As a former acolyte, Idaho-based Sue Kammerman offers an equally critical perspective. “I believed with all of my heart and soul that he was a ‘true prophet,’” she wrote in an e-mail to Nemelka and City Weekly. She helped publish most of the books he is linked to. “I was as devoted and as loyal a ‘follower’ (for lack of a better word) that Christopher had,” she noted in the same e-mail. But while Nemelka’s initial message, as she understood it, had been to “love one another,” after a while, it devolved into “tests,” conducted by Nemelka to protect his work from those he claimed might betray it. “Mind games,” “white lies,” and “drama … drama … drama. That is how I would describe the 4 years of my knowing Christopher Nemelka,” Kammerman wrote. He turned his message into “book upon book … page upon page … of do I dare say … ‘bullshit.’ ”

“Tests” Nemelka has employed include requests for money. In 2005, he says, he decided to test those “who wanted to help” his work, by telling them “to send me what you think this work is worth.” He then sent the money back with interest. Two years later, in a September 2007 e-mail, Nemelka again asked for money, saying it would be a one-time request. Harry Dschaak, who says he was an inner circle member for 4 years until he and his family were effectively blacklisted by Nemelka, recalls how he and other members of the inner circle went through a “month of hell,” trying to decide whether Nemelka meant it or not. “You’d feel like your whole soul was at stake as you weighed those kind of challenges and asked yourself, ‘Do I believe this work is true or not?’ ” he says now. Nemelka used the money he raised to buy a recreational vehicle. He declines to comment on a second e-mail City Weekly has seen, allegedly sent out a month later, where he mourned for those who had not given funds “because of their doubts in me,” and with whom “I, personally, can have nothing further to do with.”

Later Developments

Since his release from prison, the Salt Lake City Weekly reports that Mr. Nemelka has resumed his prophetic claims and is again insisting that the "sealed portion" is a true prophetic translation. He insists that his confession for the newspaper interview was all a lie to deceive the judge in charge of his case:

I knew I had to portray something to [Judge] Lindberg that would appease her personal opinion that I thought I was "above her law", and more especially, above the laws of the powerful LDS Church to which she belonged. With her legal power, she could have easily had me confined to a mental institution, if she actual thought I was serious about my calling as the revelator of the sealed portion of the plates of Mormon. I was in her grasp and I wanted out.

The conclusion I came up with was simple: Lie to Ben Fulton and get him to write something that would impress Lindberg into thinking that I was done with The Sealed Portion and would have nothing further to do with it in the future...Everything I said to [reporter] Ben Fulton of The City Weekly was an attempted manipulation to attempt to ease the mind of Judge Denise Lindberg...^[3]

In 2007, Nemelka sued the Church, Jeffrey R. Holland, M. Russell Ballard, and others for "Assault, Libel, and Slander." The suit was dismissed two days later.^[4] As Stephen Dark described the matter in 2011:

Nemelka was mired in a series of legal battles largely of his own making. In 2007, following instructions, he says, from his immortal mentors, he filed 11 lawsuits, targeting past critics including Judge Lindberg, a psychologist, former plural wives and even several of his own siblings who had, he alleged, slandered him....

Nemelka filed a motion seeking a judge who was not LDS to hear his cases. Judge Paul Maughan, in a July 13, 2007 ruling—while noting that Nemelka’s motion to exclude LDS-member judges would disqualify “a substantial percentage of the 3rd District bench”—denied it. Several months later, after Maughan was assigned Nemelka’s lawsuit against the LDS Church, he recused himself, citing “personal and familial relationships” with one or more of the defendants.

When, on Nov. 2, 2007, 3rd District Court Judge Constandinos “Deno” Himonas heard initial pleadings from Nemelka, who represented himself, and the church’s lawyers, Himonas raised the allegation that Nemelka was a “deceiver” with regard to his claims he had translated the sealed portion.

“I could prove without a doubt to the court, to the jury that in fact I had that calling, just like Joseph Smith did, no difference,” Nemelka said. Taggart recalls she and other supporters in the courtroom, “held our breath, hoping the judge would say, ‘Yes, prove it to us,’ allow us to see how Chris would have proved that, have the record before us.” But they were disappointed. The court didn’t want to look at the issue, Nemelka said, and “I don’t want to go there.”

After just over an hour of legal arguments, Himonas abruptly ended Nemelka’s lawsuit, dismissing all charges against the defendants.

Of his motivation for the lawsuits, Nemelka later indicated:

Nemelka says he’s rather a messenger for “advanced beings from another planet,” even though he’s issued several prophecies. Those same beings, he says, told him to sue his critics in 2007, something he’s told those who believe in him they shouldn’t do. “I have to disregard all rules of humanity,” he says, laughing. “I’m the ultimate hypocrite. I’m under mandate to violate every gospel of Christ that I perpetuate.”^[5]

== Notes ==

1. [note]  Stephen Dark, "Sealed Fate," Salt Lake City Weekly (26 January 2011). off-site
2. [note]  Salt Lake City Weekly (27 Dec 2001) (obscenity present in original).
3. [note]  The Sealed Portion Website, "Questions," last accessed 5 July 2005. off-site
4. [note]  "Nemelka v. Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. et al," news.justia.com (last accessed 12 October 2008) off-site
5. [note]  Stephen Dark, "Sealed Fate," Salt Lake City Weekly (26 January 2011). off-site