Person

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1844) founded the Latter-day Saint movement. He reported that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him as a youth in western New York, that an angel named Moroni later led him to buried gold plates, and that he translated those plates by divine power as the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. In the same year he organized the church now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Over the next fourteen years he led his followers from New York to Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, added a large body of revelations and new scripture, introduced temple ordinances and plural marriage, and taught a doctrine of God sharply different from historic Christianity. He was killed by a mob at Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844.

Latter-day Saints honour him as the prophet through whom God restored the true church. Historic Christianity, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike, judges that he was not a true prophet, on the tests Scripture itself gives. This page sets out his life as fairly as the record allows, then the Christian assessment. For the movement and its doctrines see Mormonism; for the side-by-side comparison of the two doctrines of God see Mormonism vs the Christian God.

Life

Vermont and Palmyra

1805, born December 23 in Sharon, Vermont, to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith, a farming family of modest means
About 1816, after several crop failures the family moved to Palmyra in western New York, later farming in neighbouring Manchester. The region was swept by revival preaching so often that it was later called the "burned-over district"
Mid-1820s, Smith worked at times as a treasure seeker using a seer stone. His own canonical history acknowledges that he was hired by Josiah Stowell to dig for a reported silver mine, and in 1826 he was brought before a justice in Chenango County, New York, on a complaint connected with this work. Latter-day Saint historians now discuss this background openly
1827, married Emma Hale in January

The First Vision and its accounts

Smith dated his first vision to the spring of 1820, when he was about fourteen and troubled over which church to join. He went to pray in the woods near his home. The records of that experience differ, and the differences are a real part of the history:

1832 account, written partly in Smith's own hand, the earliest surviving. It describes a young man seeking forgiveness of his sins, and "the Lord" appearing to him and forgiving them. It gives his age as in his sixteenth year and mentions only one divine visitor. It was not widely known until the 1960s
1835 account, recorded in his journal from a conversation with a visitor. It describes a pillar of fire, one personage and then another, and many angels
1838 account, dictated for his official history, published in 1842 and later canonized in the Pearl of Great Price as "Joseph Smith-History." This is the version Latter-day Saints know: two personages, the Father and the Son, with the Father introducing the Son, and the instruction to join none of the existing churches because all had gone astray
1842, a shorter summary in a letter to the Chicago editor John Wentworth, the same letter that contains the thirteen Articles of Faith

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acknowledges these accounts and their differences in its own essay "First Vision Accounts." Its view is that each account was written for a different audience and stresses different elements, much as the three accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts 9, 22 and 26 differ in detail. Critics answer that the differences are not only of emphasis but of substance: who appeared, how many appeared, and what was said.

Moroni, the plates and the Book of Mormon

1823, Smith reported that an angel named Moroni appeared to him on the night of September 21 and told him of a record engraved on gold plates buried in a hill near his home
1827, he reported receiving the plates in September
1828-1829, he dictated the translation to scribes, chiefly Martin Harris, Emma Smith and Oliver Cowdery. Witnesses describe him dictating with his face in a hat containing a seer stone, a method the church's essay "Book of Mormon Translation" now describes. In 1828 Harris lost the first 116 manuscript pages
1829, eleven men signed statements printed in the book: the Three Witnesses (Cowdery, David Whitmer and Harris), who testified to seeing the plates shown by an angel, and the Eight Witnesses, who testified to handling them
1830, the Book of Mormon was published in Palmyra in March, printed by E. B. Grandin and paid for by Harris, who mortgaged his farm. It presents itself as a record of Israelite peoples in the ancient Americas, ending with the visit of the risen Christ to them

The church organized, 1830

On April 6, 1830, Smith and a small group formally organized the Church of Christ in Fayette, New York. The name was later expanded, and since 1838 the church has used the name The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith was recognized as its first elder, and a revelation given that day called him a seer, a translator and a prophet. His revelations were gathered in the Book of Commandments (1833) and then the Doctrine and Covenants (1835).

Kirtland, Ohio

From 1831 the church's main body gathered at Kirtland, Ohio. There Smith organized the priesthood offices, called the first Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (1835) and built the Kirtland Temple, dedicated in 1836. In 1837 a church-sponsored financial institution, the Kirtland Safety Society, failed in a national banking panic. The collapse cost many members their savings and led to serious dissent, and in January 1838 Smith left Kirtland for Missouri.

Missouri

In 1831 Smith designated Jackson County, Missouri, around Independence, as the site of Zion, the gathering place of the saints and the location of a future temple. Settlers drove the Latter-day Saints out of Jackson County in 1833. After they regathered in northern Missouri, conflict with their neighbours escalated into open violence in 1838. Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an executive order on October 27, 1838, declaring that the Mormons must be treated as enemies and expelled or exterminated, and on October 30 a militia killed more than a dozen Latter-day Saints at Haun's Mill. Smith surrendered and spent the winter of 1838-1839 imprisoned in Liberty Jail, from which he wrote letters later canonized in part. The church was expelled from the state.

Nauvoo, Illinois

From 1839 the Latter-day Saints built the city of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River. It grew quickly, received a liberal city charter, and had its own militia, the Nauvoo Legion. Smith served as mayor and as lieutenant general of the Legion. In Nauvoo he introduced the endowment and other temple ordinances, baptism for the dead, and the doctrine of eternal marriage. In 1844 he announced a campaign for President of the United States.

Plural marriage

Smith introduced plural marriage privately, first in Kirtland and then more widely in Nauvoo, to a small circle of trusted followers. The revelation on the subject, now Doctrine and Covenants 132, was recorded in July 1843. The practice was kept secret and publicly denied in his lifetime, and his wife Emma opposed it. The church's own essay "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo" states that he married many women, estimated at between thirty and forty, that some of these wives were already married to other men, and that one, Helen Mar Kimball, was married to him several months before her fifteenth birthday. The church practiced plural marriage openly from 1852 and ended new plural marriages with the Manifesto of 1890.

The King Follett discourse, 1844

On April 7, 1844, at a church conference in Nauvoo, Smith preached a funeral sermon for a member named King Follett. It is the fullest statement of his late theology. He taught that God the Father was once a man as we are now and became an exalted being, that human beings may progress to become like him, and that the human spirit and the elements of matter are eternal and were organized rather than created from nothing. The fifth church president, Lorenzo Snow, later summed up this teaching in a well-known couplet, discussed in Mormonism.

The Book of Abraham and the papyri

In 1835 the church bought several Egyptian mummies and papyrus scrolls from a travelling exhibitor, Michael Chandler, in Kirtland. Smith said one scroll contained writings of the patriarch Abraham. His translation, with three facsimile illustrations, was published in 1842 and is now part of the Pearl of Great Price. It includes teachings on the pre-mortal existence of spirits and a plurality of gods in the creation.

The papyri were thought lost, possibly in the Chicago fire of 1871. In 1966 fragments were found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and were given to the church in 1967. Egyptologists, Latter-day Saint and not, identify them as ordinary Egyptian funerary texts of the Ptolemaic or Roman period, including a Book of Breathings belonging to a priest named Hor and fragments of the Book of the Dead. The source of Facsimile 1 is among them. The church's essay "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham" accepts that the surviving fragments do not contain the text of the Book of Abraham. It offers two possibilities: that the relevant part of the scrolls is lost, or that the papyri served as a catalyst for revelation rather than as a source Smith translated in the ordinary sense.

Death at Carthage, 1844

In June 1844 dissenters in Nauvoo published one issue of a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, attacking Smith, including over plural marriage. The city council, with Smith as mayor, declared the paper a public nuisance, and the press was destroyed. Charges of riot followed, then a charge of treason against the state of Illinois. Smith and his brother Hyrum surrendered and were held in the jail at Carthage. On June 27, 1844, an armed mob with blackened faces stormed the jail. Hyrum was shot and killed. Joseph fired a pistol that had been smuggled in to him, was shot, and fell from an upper window, dying at the age of thirty-eight. John Taylor was badly wounded, and Willard Richards escaped almost unhurt.

After his death

A succession crisis followed. Most Latter-day Saints followed Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve, who led the migration to the Salt Lake Valley from 1846. Others followed different claimants, and in 1860 Smith's son Joseph Smith III became president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now called the Community of Christ.

See this page's graph and discover linked topics

His teachings

Restoration. The church Christ founded fell into apostasy after the apostles, and God restored it through Smith, including priesthood authority conferred by heavenly messengers
An open canon. God continues to reveal scripture. The Bible is accepted "as far as it is translated correctly," alongside the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. See Canon for the historic Christian view
God. In his mature teaching, the Father has a body of flesh and bones, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are three distinct beings united in purpose, and God was once a man who became exalted. See Trinity and Classical Theism for the historic Christian doctrine he departed from
Humanity. Human spirits existed before birth, and the faithful may progress to exaltation, becoming like God
Creation. Matter is eternal and was organized, not created from nothing. Compare Creatio ex Nihilo
Ordinances. Temple ordinances, including eternal marriage and baptism for the dead, are necessary for the highest degree of salvation. Compare Sola Fide
Zion. The gathering of a holy community in preparation for Christ's return, centred on Independence, Missouri

How Latter-day Saints regard him

For Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith is the prophet of the Restoration, the first in an unbroken line of living prophets. Members commonly bear testimony that he was a prophet of God, and the church teaches that this testimony comes through prayer and the witness of the Holy Ghost, following the promise in Moroni 10:4-5. A tribute written after his death and canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants says that he "has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it" (Doctrine and Covenants 135:3). The hymn "Praise to the Man" by W. W. Phelps is sung in his memory.

Latter-day Saint scholarship engages the hard questions directly. The Joseph Smith Papers project publishes his surviving documents in full, including the variant First Vision accounts. Richard Bushman's biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005) is a believing historian's portrait that does not avoid the treasure seeking, the Kirtland bank or plural marriage. The church's Gospel Topics essays address the translation method, the Book of Abraham and plural marriage. Christians who engage Latter-day Saints should know this material, and should not present it as hidden.

The Christian assessment

Christians do not judge Smith by his sincerity, his courage or the devotion of those who follow him. Many Latter-day Saints are morally serious, generous and devout. The question is whether he spoke for God, and Scripture gives tests for that question. The posture is the same as across the World Religions cluster: firm on the claims, gentle with the person.

Test 1: Does what the prophet says come to pass?

But the prophet, that shall speak a word presumptuously in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if thou say in thy heart, How shall we know the word which Jehovah hath not spoken? when a prophet speaketh in the name of Jehovah, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jehovah hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not be afraid of him. (Deuteronomy 18:20-22, ASV)

This test works in one direction. A failed prediction shows that a word did not come from God. A fulfilled one does not by itself prove that it did.

The case most often raised is a September 1832 revelation, now Doctrine and Covenants 84, which said that a temple would be built in Zion, at Independence, Missouri, in that generation. No such temple was built. Latter-day Saints answer from a later revelation (Doctrine and Covenants 124) that when enemies prevent the saints from completing a commanded work, God accepts their effort and does not require it of them. Christians reply that Deuteronomy's test concerns whether the predicted thing comes to pass, and that a prediction which can always be reclassified as conditional after the fact cannot be tested at all. Latter-day Saints in turn point to the December 1832 revelation on war, now Doctrine and Covenants 87, which foretold war beginning in South Carolina, as a fulfilled prophecy of the Civil War. For how the codex weighs fulfilled prophecy, see Biblical Prophecy and Argument from Prophecy Fulfillment.

Test 2: Does the prophet lead to another God?

Deuteronomy 13 adds a second test that a sign cannot override:

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. (Deuteronomy 13:1-3, KJV)

This is the decisive test, because it does not depend on predictions. The God of the King Follett discourse is an exalted man, one of many gods. The God of Israel says otherwise:

Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. (Isaiah 43:10, ASV)

Isaiah 44:6 says the same: besides him there is no God. Latter-day Saint scholars point to the divine council passages of the Hebrew Bible, such as Psalm 82, as precedent for plural divine beings. The codex answers that reading in OT Polytheism Objection: the council's members are created beings under the one uncreated God, not men who became gods. The full comparison is at Mormonism vs the Christian God.

Test 3: Is it the gospel the apostles preached?

Smith's restoration began, on his account, with heavenly visitors and an angel bearing a new record. Paul anticipated exactly that kind of claim:

But though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. (Galatians 1:8, ASV)

Latter-day Saints answer that Smith restored the apostolic gospel rather than adding a different one. The question then becomes concrete: is the gospel of the apostles one in which God was once a man and the faithful may become gods through temple ordinances? The New Testament's answer is the one-God faith of Israel, centred on the eternal Son who became flesh. See Gospel, Trinity and Canon on the faith "once for all delivered" (Jude 3).

Test 4: Can the claims be checked?

Christianity rests its case on public, checkable events, above all the Resurrection of Jesus. Smith's claims also include checkable parts, and Falsifiability Across Worldviews treats them in that light:

The Book of Abraham. This is the one case where the source Smith said he translated survives. Egyptologists read it as a funerary text unrelated to Abraham. The catalyst theory gives up the claim that he translated it in the ordinary sense, which is how he presented it
The Book of Mormon's history. Its peoples, cities, animals and metals have not been found in the archaeological record of the ancient Americas, and genetic studies trace Native American ancestry to Asia. Latter-day Saint scholars propose a limited geography model and argue that absence of evidence is not decisive. See Book of Mormon and Mormonism
The First Vision accounts. Variation in detail is normal in honest testimony, as the codex argues for the Gospels themselves. But the earliest account names one divine visitor and the canonical one two, and the doctrine of God that later rested on the canonical version, a Father and Son who are separate embodied beings, is exactly the point on which the accounts diverge

What his death shows

Smith's followers regard his death as a martyrdom. It shows that he believed in his mission strongly enough to face real danger. It does not show that his claims were true, any more than the deaths of sincere adherents of other faiths prove theirs. The Christian argument from the apostles' willingness to die is narrower: they were in a position to know whether they had seen the risen Jesus, and they did not die for a revelation received privately. See Christ vs Other Religion-Founders, which sets Smith beside Muhammad, the Buddha and others, and Liar Lunatic or Lord.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

Francis Beckwith, The new Mormon challenge (2002). Open Library

Common questions this page answers

Q: Who was Joseph Smith?

Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1844) founded the Latter-day Saint movement. He reported a vision of God the Father and Jesus Christ in 1820, published the Book of Mormon in 1830, organized the church the same year, and led it through Ohio, Missouri and Illinois until he was killed by a mob at Carthage, Illinois, in 1844.

Q: Why are there different accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision?

Smith described the vision several times, in 1832, 1835, 1838 and 1842. The earliest mentions one divine visitor, "the Lord," and focuses on forgiveness; the canonical 1838 account describes the Father and the Son. The Latter-day Saint church acknowledges the accounts and explains the differences as differing emphases, while critics argue that the identity and number of the visitors is a difference of substance.

Q: Was Joseph Smith a true prophet according to the Bible?

Historic Christianity says no. Deuteronomy 13 says a prophet who leads people to other gods is false even if his signs come to pass, and Smith's late teaching that God was once a man and that people may become gods conflicts with Isaiah 43:10 and 44:6. Christians also point to unfulfilled predictions under Deuteronomy 18 and to Galatians 1:8 on an angel bringing another gospel.

Q: What happened with the Book of Abraham papyri?

Smith said papyri bought in 1835 contained the writings of Abraham. Fragments rediscovered in 1966 are identified by Egyptologists as standard Egyptian funerary texts. The Latter-day Saint church accepts that the surviving fragments do not contain the Book of Abraham and suggests either a lost portion or that the papyri prompted revelation rather than being translated in the ordinary sense.

Q: How did Joseph Smith die?

He was killed on June 27, 1844, when an armed mob stormed the jail at Carthage, Illinois, where he and his brother Hyrum were being held after the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor press. Hyrum was killed too. Latter-day Saints regard Joseph as a martyr.

Q: Did Joseph Smith practice polygamy?

Yes. The Latter-day Saint church's own essay states that he married many women, estimated at between thirty and forty, including some already married to other men and one who was fourteen. The practice was kept private and publicly denied in his lifetime, and the church ended new plural marriages in 1890.