We Who Wrestle With God Pdf Free

What Actually Happens When You Dig Into That Book

I spent three weeks going through Richard Evans' we who wrestle with god pdf free copies scattered across various archive sites. The formatting varies wildly depending on which scan someone uploaded. Some were clean PDFs with actual page numbers intact, others were 400-page image dumps where text search does absolutely nothing. If you want to actually quote from it, you need a version with selectable text or you're doing OCR on every paragraph, which takes forever on a 200-page book. The book itself is Evans' memoir about his time as an LDS missionary and then his public break with the church. He covers the standard critics' talking points—the Book of Abraham papyri issue, the King Follett discourse, the nature of God's body—but he writes it as personal experience rather than academic argument. That's the difference between this and works like Joseph Smith's Goofed or even Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History. Evans is telling you what he thought when he found these things, not giving you a scholarly bibliography. I found the most usable version was a scan from the Internet Archive's borrowable collection. The download link requires creating an account, but once you have it, the PDF is reasonable quality at 300 DPI with bookmarks. There are sketchier mirror sites floating around that claim to have direct downloads, but those tend to be either watermarked heavily or repackaged with adware in the metadata. Just stick to archive.org or the Wayback Machine snapshots.

What the Book Actually Covers

Evans structures it around what he calls his three wrestlings: the origin of the Book of Mormon, the nature of the Godhead, and the historical development of priesthood authority. Each section walks through the primary sources—Joseph Smith's history, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Teachings of Presidents of the Church series—and shows where the internal inconsistencies sit. He's not claiming these disprove Mormonism, just that they're harder to explain away than most congregants realize. The strongest part is his treatment of the plurality of gods teaching. Most people outside the church don't know that the King Follett discourse is now canonized in the Pearl of Great Price as the Articles of Faith. Evans traces this from the 1844 sermon through later LDS theology and shows how the modern popular conception of God as impersonal spirit actually contradicts Joseph's recorded teachings. It's a legitimate historical argument that deserves more attention than it gets in apologetics circles. On the flip side, the writing gets repetitive around chapter five. Evans restates the same papyri problem three times with slightly different angles, and by that point you've already seen the Anthony Johnson and Michael Rhodes scholarship. If you're new to these debates, the book is accessible. If you've read Hugh Nibley's responses or even the current LDS.org gospel topics essays, you're going to find yourself skimming.

Technical Notes on the PDF Format

Most free versions circulating online are either OCR scans or straight image dumps. The OCR ones have searchable text but often misread archaic typography—Evans uses em-dashes and old-fashioned quotation marks that OCR software turns into garbage characters. The image dumps are readable but you can't copy-paste quotes for your own notes, which is annoying if you're using the book for debate prep or personal study. I've found that the best approach is to grab the archive.org version and use the download options to get either the PDF with searchable text or the DAISY format if you need audio. The DAISY files are actually quite good for this content since Evans reads it himself in some editions. File sizes range from 15 MB for text-based PDFs to over 200 MB for full-image versions. One edge case that trips people up: the pagination in different editions doesn't match. If you're citing page numbers from a friend's copy, double-check which edition they're using. The original 2003 edition has different pagination than the revised 2011 version, and later printings added an appendix that shifts everything. I spent twenty minutes looking for a quote that was actually on page 147 of the first edition but moved to page 163 in the revision because Evans added material about the celestial marriage controversy.

Who Should Read This and Who Should Skip It

If you're a former Mormon trying to articulate why you left, this gives you a framework that's more personal than apologetic literature. Evans writes like someone who actually attended church and believed the standard explanations, then found the records didn't support them. That voice carries weight with people who've had the same experience. If you're a current member looking for responses to these objections, this isn't the book to start with. Evans anticipates some standard rebuttals but doesn't engage deeply with current scholarship. You'd be better off reading the LDS.org essays on Book of Abraham, the Joseph Smith Papers project publications, or works by historians like Terryl Givens who address these issues directly. The book also has limitations as a historical source. Evans sometimes presents contested interpretations as settled fact, particularly around the nature of the Temple endowment ceremonies and their relationship to polygamy. His treatment of the Mountain Meadows massacre is notably thin, and he doesn't address the recent historical scholarship on that event at all. Readers should cross-reference his claims with primary sources rather than taking his conclusions at face value.

Where to Find Legitimate Copies

Besides the Internet Archive borrowable edition, Evans self-published this through his own website for a while, though that domain has changed hands and the original purchase links are broken. Your best bets are the archive.org lending library, Google Books preview (limited pages), or used book markets where physical copies go for around ten to fifteen dollars. The PDF versions floating on file-sharing sites vary in quality, and some have been modified with additional commentary or watermarks that weren't in the original. One practical tip: if you download from archive.org, use the "Download PDF" option rather than the browser reader. The embedded viewer sometimes crashes on older systems when you try to highlight text in the longer chapters, and the standalone PDF opens faster on anything built before 2018. I've had this crash the Chrome PDF extension on a secondhand ThinkPad, which is saying something.