The History of the Latter-day Saint Faith

Joseph Smith was born on 23 December 1805 in Vermont, and his family moved to Palmyra, New York.³ He recalled that in the spring of 1820, at about 14, an unusual religious excitement led him to pray in a grove near his home.¹ There, he wrote, God the Father and Jesus appeared to him, and he was told to join none of the churches.³

The church teaches that priesthood, the authority and power of God, was lost through apostasy.⁴⁵ It holds that John the Baptist conferred the Aaronic Priesthood on Smith and Oliver Cowdery on 15 May 1829. It also holds that Peter, James, and John later conferred the Melchizedek Priesthood, in May or June 1829, a date the two men did not record.⁶

The church holds that Smith and Cowdery organized the Church of Christ on 6 April 1830 in western New York. They ordained each other elders, those present took the sacrament, and the two confirmed those already baptized. No minutes survive, and accounts disagree on whether the meeting was at Fayette or Manchester.⁷

Smith and his scribe Frederick Williams wrote the earliest account of the First Vision about 1832, and Smith gave further accounts in 1835, 1838, and 1842.¹² The 1832 account stresses Smith's search for forgiveness and says the Lord appeared; the 1838 account centers on which church to join and describes two personages.⁸¹

Steven Harper, then a historian at the church's Church History Department, and the Latter-day Saint scholar Richard Bushman read the differences as shifts of emphasis suited to different circumstances. Harper writes that critics read the same differences as an expanding story.⁹⁸¹⁰¹¹ In 1967 Wesley Walters, a Presbyterian minister, argued that Oliver Cowdery's account, published in 1834 and 1835, mentions no vision in 1820 and places the revival in 1823, and that records place it in 1824 and 1825, not 1820. In 1969 Bushman responded that Cowdery's account was secondhand and that records place revivals near Palmyra in 1819 and 1820.¹¹¹⁰

Gregory Prince, a pathologist and the author of Power from on High, a book on the development of the priesthood, is quoted on a University of Virginia site as saying that authority and priesthood developed gradually in Mormon theology, not as thunderbolts but as ideas that acquired meaning and momentum over time¹².¹³

Smith reported that on 21 September 1823 an angel named Moroni told him of a record on gold plates buried in a hill near his home, and that he received the plates on 22 September 1827.³ He said he translated them by the gift and power of God¹⁵. The church's essay says he used the interpreters found with the plates and a seer stone he had used in his youth to look for lost objects and buried treasure.¹⁵

Scribes describe him placing an instrument in a hat and reading aloud the English words that appeared. Almost all of the text was dictated from April to June 1829, chiefly to Cowdery.¹⁵

Three men, Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris, said an angel showed them the plates in June 1829. Eight others said Smith showed them and let them heft the plates. Their statements appeared in the first edition, published in 1830. The church's history says each of the Three left the church, though two returned, and that all three kept affirming their testimony. It says reports of what they said vary in details but are generally consistent.¹⁴¹⁶

Klaus Hansen, in an encyclopedia entry with no date on the page, says modern scholars have rejected the charge of plagiarism and concluded that Smith was the author of the Book of Mormon.¹⁷ Jon Butler, a Yale historian, says almost no archaeological evidence shows that the book's events occurred in America.¹⁸ Terryl Givens, a Latter-day Saint scholar, says that a limited setting for those events removes many objections, that literary patterns such as chiasmus, a reversal of terms across parallel phrases, seem to him to point to an ancient origin, and that unresolved problems remain.¹⁹²⁰²¹

Stephen Burnett, whom the church's witnesses page calls a disaffected member, wrote to Lyman Johnson in 1838 that Martin Harris said in a public meeting that he never saw the plates with his natural eyes, only in vision or imagination, and that the Eight Witnesses never saw them.⁹¹⁴ The church's witnesses page says Burnett took Harris's words to mean that the witnesses saw the plates only in vision, and that Harris felt misrepresented and tried to clarify.¹⁴ Harper responds that such hearsay is unverifiable and that the best evidence is the witnesses' own statements.⁹

The church teaches that God commanded Joseph Smith to institute plural marriage. Its essay says the revelation emerged partly from Smith's study of the Old Testament in 1831, though it was written down only in 1843 as Doctrine and Covenants 132.²⁶³²

Fragmentary evidence, the essay says, suggests a first plural marriage to Fanny Alger in Kirtland in the mid-1830s. The first in Nauvoo came in April 1841, when Smith was sealed to Louisa Beaman. He was also sealed to women already married, and his youngest wife, Helen Mar Kimball, was sealed to him months before her 15th birthday. The essay calls the early record thin and gives no number of wives.³²

Plural marriage was openly practiced from 1852 to 1890. In 1890 church president Wilford Woodruff, feeling inspired, issued the Manifesto, declaring his intent to obey the laws against it. The essay says some marriages continued in Mexico and Canada, and a smaller number in the United States between 1890 and 1904, when the Second Manifesto made new plural marriages punishable by excommunication.²⁶

Sarah Barringer Gordon, a legal historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an Episcopalian, says that before the revelation was written down, Smith began to experiment with different forms of marriage and relationship in an effort to get closer to the divine mandate for human sexual relationships.³³²¹

Federal laws against plural marriage began in 1862, and the Supreme Court upheld them in 1879.²⁶ Gordon, describing the clash that followed, calls the Manifesto a declaration that church leaders understood the law had to be obeyed.³³ She says it is not clear that it was much more than that, but that it was a very important white flag³³ that finally kept Congress from going further.

D. Michael Quinn, a historian whom the church excommunicated in 1993, taught at Brigham Young University, which the church founded, supports, and guides.³⁴³⁵ He writes that church leaders authorized about 250 new plural marriages in the 14 years after the Manifesto while acknowledging only a few.³⁶