William McLellin: The Excommunicated Apostle Who Never Stopped Testifying of the Book of Mormon

William E. McLellin was called as one of the original twelve apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1835. He was excommunicated in 1838. He spent the rest of his life outside the Church — and yet, until the day he died, he never once denied the Book of Mormon.

McLellin was a highly intelligent man, described by those who knew him as intensely rigorous about getting at the truth. In the early years of the Church, he made it his personal mission to interview the Book of Mormon witnesses — not as a believer seeking reassurance, but as a careful investigator seeking to verify what they claimed. He documented his findings in detail.

Between January 1871 and January 1872 — more than 30 years after his excommunication — McLellin wrote a lengthy reminiscence of his investigations. The document was published as 'William E. McLellin's Lost Manuscript,' edited by Mitchell K. Schaefer (Eborn Books, 2012).

In it he records what happened to Hiram Page — one of the Eight Witnesses — during the 1833 Jackson County mob violence:

'While the mob was raging in Jackson Co. Mo. in 1833 some young men ran down Hiram Page in the woods, one of the eight witnesses, and commenced beating and pounding him with whips and clubs. He begged, but there was no mercy... They said he was a Mormon, and they meant to beat him to death! But finally one then said to him, If you will deny that book, we will let you go. Said he, How can I deny what I know to be true? Then they pounded him again. When they thought he was about to breathe his last, they said to him, Now what do you think of your God, when he don't save you? Well said he, I believe in God. Well, said one of the most intelligent among them, I believe the fool will stick to it though we kill him. Let us let him go. But his life was nearly run out. He was confined to his bed for a length of time. So much for a man who knows for himself. Knowledge is beyond faith or doubt. It is positive certainty.'

McLellin also records visiting John Whitmer — the last surviving of the Eight Witnesses — in 1869, when Whitmer was 68 years old:

'In company with a friend, I visited one of the eight witnesses in 1869 — the only one who is now alive, and he bore a very lucid and rational testimony, and gave us many interesting particulars. He was a young man when he had those testimonies. He was then sixty-eight years old, and still he is firm in his faith. Now I would ask what will I do with such a cloud of faithful witnesses, bearing such a rational and yet solemn testimony? These men while in the prime of life, saw the vision of the angel, and bore their testimony to all people. And eight men saw the plates, and handled them. Hence, these men all knew the things they declared to be positively true. And that too while they were young, and now when old they declare the same things.'

What makes McLellin's testimony particularly powerful is its source. He had every worldly reason to recant. He had been cast out. He harbored grievances against Church leadership. He spent decades entirely outside the Church. And yet his painstaking, first-person investigations led him to a conclusion he could never abandon: the Book of Mormon witnesses were telling the truth. His own commentary — 'Knowledge is beyond faith or doubt. It is positive certainty' — reflects not a man swept up in religious enthusiasm, but a skeptical investigator who could not honestly deny what he had witnessed and verified.