Justified True Belief

(●) A poor New York farm boy who said God had spoken to him, and who left behind a second scripture, a new priesthood, and the most successful new religion ever founded on American soil. + In 1830 a twenty-four-year-old with almost no schooling put a 588-page book on sale in a Palmyra, New York, bookshop. He said an angel had shown him where it was buried, and that he had translated it from gold plates by the gift and power of God. The book was the Book of Mormon. Fourteen years later he was dead, shot by a mob in an Illinois jail, and the church he had organized with six members had tens of thousands. Today the movement that traces itself to him counts members in the millions across every continent. For a Christian reader he matters for a simple reason. Joseph Smith is the most successful claim of new revelation in the modern West, and the claim is made in Christian terms: he did not offer a rival to Jesus but a restoration of what Jesus had started and the world had lost. A man who says the church lost something is a harder case than a man who says there was never anything there to lose, and a more useful one, because answering him means saying out loud what Christians usually leave assumed. How do you tell a prophet from a man who sincerely believes he is one? Why does the Bible stop where it stops? What is the word "God" actually supposed to mean? One fact tends to stay with a reader. Eleven men signed statements, printed at the back of the first edition, saying they had seen the plates, and several of them later quarreled with him, were thrown out of his church, or left it in disgust. Not one of the eleven ever denied the testimony. What that proves is a genuine question, and it is one of the reasons his story refuses to go quiet.

(●) 1805 AD: Born in a rented Vermont farmhouse, into a family that kept moving because the land kept failing. + Joseph Smith Jr. was born on 23 December 1805 at Sharon, in Windsor County, Vermont, the fifth of eleven children born to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. They were tenant farmers on land they did not own, and they moved roughly every other year: a failed venture selling ginseng root, a bad harvest, a debt called in. Lucy was the devout one, drawn to the revival preaching of the day; her husband kept his distance from the churches and had visionary dreams he told the family about at breakfast. When Joseph was about seven a typhoid epidemic swept the Connecticut River valley and left him with an infection in the bone of his left leg. A surgeon from the new medical school at Dartmouth, Nathan Smith, was doing an operation almost nobody else in America would attempt: cutting down to the bone and chiseling away the diseased part rather than taking the whole leg off. There was no anesthesia in 1813. His mother later wrote that the boy refused the brandy they offered him, would not be tied down, and asked her to leave the room so she would not have to watch. He kept the leg and limped for the rest of his life. In 1816 the weather itself turned against New England. A volcano on the other side of the world had thrown enough ash into the air to chill the whole northern hemisphere, and there was frost in June and killing cold in August; people called it the year without a summer. The Smiths lost their crop, gave up on Vermont, and went west to Palmyra in the burned-over district of upstate New York, so called because revival had swept through it so often that there seemed to be nothing left to burn.

(●) 1820 AD: At fourteen he went into the woods to ask God which church was right, and came out saying he had been answered. + Palmyra was full of preachers, and they did not agree. Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians were all working the same farm families, and the Smith household split: Lucy and three of the children joined the Presbyterians, Joseph stayed out. He said later that the noise of it was what drove him. He read a line in the letter of James about asking God for wisdom, took it at face value, and went into a stand of trees near the farm to pray. What he said happened there is the founding story of his movement. A pillar of light came down, and in it two persons stood above him in the air; one pointed to the other and named him. He asked which of the churches he should join and was told to join none of them. He was fourteen, or close to it, and nobody believed him. A Methodist preacher he told it to said visions had ceased with the apostles. Two things have to be said straight out. The first is that Joseph told the story more than once over the years, and the tellings are not identical. The earliest written version, from 1832, is a private account in his own hand, mostly about forgiveness of sins, and in it the Lord appears alone. The 1838 telling, the one his church later canonized, is the fuller one, with two persons and the question about the churches. The second thing is simpler, and it cuts both ways. Nothing in the historical record can confirm or deny what happened in a stand of trees with no other witness. That is not a slur on him. It is the shape of the evidence, and an honest reader has to start from it rather than around it.

(●) 1823 AD: An angel named Moroni told him about gold buried in a nearby hill, then made him wait four years for it, and in those years he eloped with a bride whose father wanted nothing to do with him. + On the night of 21 September 1823, he said, a messenger in white stood at the foot of his bed and told him about a record written on gold plates, buried in a hill a few miles from the farm, containing the history of the former inhabitants of America. The messenger gave his name as Moroni. Joseph went to the hill the next day, found the place, and was told he could not have the plates yet. He went back on the same date every year for four years. Those four years were hard ones. His oldest brother Alvin, the steady one everybody leaned on, died in November 1823 at twenty-five. Money was short, and Joseph took work that has followed his reputation ever since: hunting for buried Spanish treasure for a farmer named Josiah Stowell, using a smooth brown stone he would put in his hat and look at in the dark. Treasure-seeking of this kind was ordinary in rural New York and perfectly illegal, and in March 1826 he was hauled before a court in Bainbridge over it. His own church now says plainly that he used that same seer stone for much of the translating that came later. At Harmony, Pennsylvania, on the Stowell job, he met Emma Hale, a tall, educated schoolteacher a year and a half older than he was. Her father Isaac thought him a shiftless money-digger and refused consent, so on 18 January 1827 the two of them eloped to South Bainbridge and were married. That September, on the fourth anniversary of the first visit, he said he was finally allowed to take the plates home.

(●) 1830 AD: He dictated a 588-page scripture in under three months, and eleven days after it went on sale he organized a church. + The first attempt went badly. Martin Harris, a prosperous Palmyra farmer who had staked money on the project, begged to take the first 116 pages of manuscript home to show his skeptical wife. The pages vanished and were never seen again, and Joseph did not try to reproduce them. The work that survived was done at speed. A young schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery arrived in April 1829 and took dictation, and the bulk of the Book of Mormon was finished by the end of June: roughly three months for a book the length of a long novel, dictated aloud, with no notes in front of him and, by the account of the scribes, almost nothing read back or gone over twice. Whatever a reader concludes about where the words came from, the way they came out belongs to the case and is not a detail to wave off. Getting it printed took a mortgage. Egbert B. Grandin of Palmyra agreed to run five thousand copies for three thousand dollars, and Martin Harris put up 151 acres of his farm as security in August 1829; he sold the land to pay the debt two years later. The book went on sale at Grandin’s bookstore on 26 March 1830. On 6 April, in a farmhouse in Fayette, New York, Joseph organized the Church of Christ with six formal members in the room. He was twenty-four.

(●) 1831 AD: Ohio and then Missouri gave him a temple, a bank that collapsed, and a governor’s written order to drive his people out of the state. + He moved the church west to Kirtland, Ohio, in the winter of 1831, and for seven years Kirtland was the closest thing to a settled home he ever had. Converts poured in. He dictated revelation after revelation, most of them gathered into the book now called the Doctrine and Covenants, and he set the Saints, which is what his followers called themselves, to building a temple they could barely afford, dedicated in March 1836. Money was the wound. The Kirtland Safety Society, the bank he and his associates founded in 1837, was refused a charter, issued notes anyway, and failed inside a year in the middle of a national panic. Members who lost savings turned on him, and in January 1838 he left Ohio at night, ahead of his creditors and his critics. Missouri was worse. The Saints had been trying to settle there since 1831 and had already been driven out of one county. Their neighbors, mostly Southerners, saw an organized bloc of Northern newcomers who voted together, traded together, and said God had given them the land. Both sides armed. In October 1838, after a skirmish in which the state militia took losses, Governor Lilburn Boggs signed an order stating that the Mormons must be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state. Three days later a mob attacked a settlement at Haun’s Mill and killed seventeen people, including a boy of ten shot in the head at close range. Joseph surrendered and spent the winter in an unheated basement cell at Liberty, Missouri, on charges that never came to trial, while his people fled across the frozen Mississippi into Illinois. The letters he wrote from that cell are the best writing of his life, and the parts of them his church later canonized are the parts that sound least like a prophet and most like a man at the end of his rope, asking how long God intends to look on and do nothing.

(●) 1839 AD: He built Nauvoo out of a swamp, and there he taught that God had once been a man, the doctrine that finally set his movement outside historic Christianity. + Allowed to escape his guards in April 1839, he rejoined the refugees at a malarial bend in the Mississippi called Commerce, Illinois, renamed it Nauvoo, and drained the swamp. Within five years it held something like twelve thousand people, which made it a rival to Chicago in the same years, with its own charter, its own courts, and its own uniformed militia of some twenty-five hundred men under his command as lieutenant general. Nauvoo is where the teaching changed. In the Ohio years he had preached a restored New Testament church; in Illinois he began to preach a restored universe. God had once been a man. Matter was eternal, and spirit was simply a finer kind of matter. A marriage sealed by the right authority, meaning bound by a priesthood rite rather than only by a county clerk, did not end at death, and the faithful were on their way to godhood themselves. He introduced temple ordinances, ordinance being his word for a formal rite of the church, among them a baptism in which a living member stands in the water on behalf of someone already dead. And in secret, beginning in the early 1840s, he took plural wives: the practice was denied in public while it was being taught in private, and the revelation commanding it was written down on 12 July 1843 partly to persuade Emma, who did not want it and never made peace with it. The last year was a spiral. He announced himself a candidate for President of the United States in January 1844, ran a city where he was mayor and judge, and in April a secret council of fifty, organized to govern the kingdom of God on earth, received him as its prophet, priest and king. Dissenters inside his own church, appalled at the plural marriages, founded a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, and printed one issue naming what he was doing. On 10 June 1844 the city council declared the paper a nuisance and Joseph, as mayor, ordered the press destroyed. It was the decision that killed him: destroying a press turned every editor in Illinois against him overnight, and it gave the state a charge it could make stick.

(●) 1844 AD: He surrendered on the governor’s promise of protection, and a mob shot him in the Carthage jail at thirty-eight. + Charged with riot and then with treason, Joseph first crossed the river to flee west, then turned back when Nauvoo accused him of abandoning them. Governor Thomas Ford pledged his safety. On 24 June 1844, riding toward Carthage to give himself up, he told the men with him that he was going like a lamb to the slaughter. He was held with his brother Hyrum, John Taylor and Willard Richards in an upstairs room of the Carthage jail. On the afternoon of 27 June the militia guarding the building stood aside and a mob with blackened faces came up the stairs and fired through the door. Hyrum was hit in the face and died at once. Joseph emptied a small pistol a friend had smuggled in, wounding three men, then went for the window and was shot as he reached it. He fell to the ground outside and died there. He was thirty-eight; Hyrum was forty-four. The killing did not do what the killers expected. Within three years Brigham Young had taken the main body of the Saints across the plains to the Great Salt Lake, and the movement that Illinois thought it had beheaded grew faster in the West than it ever had in the East. Emma stayed behind in Nauvoo with her children, never followed Brigham Young, and denied to the end of her life that her husband had practiced plural marriage; her son led the smaller church that grew up around that denial.

What He Taught

(T1) The churches had all gone wrong, so what was needed was not reform but restoration. + Imagine a family recipe that has been copied by hand for sixty generations. Every copyist meant well, and the cake still comes out of the oven, but somewhere along the line the yeast dropped out and nobody noticed. You can argue about the wording forever, or you can go and find the original. That is the difference between reformation and restoration, and it is the hinge of everything Joseph Smith taught. Luther and Calvin had argued that the medieval church needed correcting, and they went back to the Bible to correct it. Joseph went much further. He taught that the authority to act for God, what he called the priesthood, had been taken off the earth entirely when the apostles died, so that for seventeen centuries there had been no valid baptism anywhere and no church that God recognized. Reformers were rearranging furniture in a house with no foundation. What was required was for heaven to hand the authority back, and he said heaven had handed it back to him in person. John the Baptist came first, in May 1829. Peter, James and John came not long after, on a date he never fixed. Each of them, he said, laid hands on his head in the woods along the Susquehanna, which is the old gesture by which an office is passed from one man to the next. Everything else he taught rests on that claim. A revelation he dictated in November 1831 called the body he had organized "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:30). The same claim explains the tone of the response. A Baptist can argue with a Methodist about baptism. Neither of them can concede to Joseph Smith without conceding that their own baptism was empty water and that Christ had let his church die.

(Q) "I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight." + Source: Joseph Smith, History, in the Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City, 1913 printing), the passage numbered 1:19 since the verses were added in 1902. This is the answer he said he received in the grove at fourteen. The word "creeds" is doing real work: he is not condemning individual believers but the formal statements of faith, Nicaea and Chalcedon and their Protestant descendants, by which the churches had defined God and Christ (T4).

(T2) The canon is not closed, and God still speaks through a living prophet. + Ask most Christians why there is no twenty-eighth book of the New Testament and you will get a pause. The answer is there, but it is rarely on the tip of the tongue, and Joseph Smith is the reason a great many pastors learned to give it. Canon is the church’s word for the list of books it receives as Scripture, from a Greek word meaning a measuring rod. Joseph denied there was any rod. God had spoken to Abraham and Moses and Paul, and the notion that he had fallen silent afterwards struck him as an insult dressed up as reverence. So he produced more: the Book of Mormon first, then a steady stream of revelations delivered in the first person, as though God were dictating, which were gathered and printed as the Doctrine and Covenants in 1835. In 1842 he wrote out thirteen short statements of belief for a Chicago newspaper editor, the articles of faith, and two of them carry the point in a sentence each: the eighth calls the Bible the word of God "as far as it is translated correctly," and the ninth promises more to come. Christians have never denied that God can speak. The disagreement is about whether he has bound himself not to add, and about what happens to a faith that can always be topped up. Scripture itself puts the weight on the other foot: the letter of Jude tells its readers to "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), and Hebrews frames the coming of the Son as God’s last word rather than his latest one (Hebrews 1:1-2).

(Q) "Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written." + Source: Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 29:10, in the text as divided into verses since 1879. God is answering a people who say they have a Bible and want no more of one. The passage is the Book of Mormon’s defense of its own existence, written into the book itself, and it is the verse a Latter-day Saint missionary reaches for first at a doorstep.

(T3) A reader can know a book is true by praying about it and feeling the answer. + Picture a young man at a kitchen table with two missionaries across from him and the book open in front of him. He has read the chapters they left him. Now they ask him to set it down, kneel, and ask God whether it is true. Every argument about the Book of Mormon arrives at that table sooner or later, and what happens there is worth understanding rather than dismissing, because it is the reason the historical objections often land with so little force. The book closes with an invitation. Read it, then ask God whether it is true, and God will tell you by the Holy Ghost. A revelation of 1829 describes what the telling feels like: study it out in your mind, ask, and if it is right your bosom will burn within you. The believer is not asked to weigh evidence about Mesoamerican archaeology. The believer is asked to pray, and the confirming feeling is itself the evidence, which is why a missionary who has been handed a list of scholarly problems can answer, sincerely, that he knows. There is something genuinely Christian nearby. Paul writes that the Spirit bears witness with our spirit, and no believer of any tradition comes to faith by argument alone. The difficulty is that a feeling cannot check itself. Sincere people in mutually exclusive religions report the same inner confirmation, so the feeling cannot be what decides between them, and Scripture itself keeps sending readers back to something outside their own hearts: the Bereans were called noble for going to the text to see whether Paul’s preaching held up (Acts 17:11), and Moses gave Israel a test a prophet could fail in public, namely whether the thing he predicted actually happened (Deuteronomy 18:22).

(Q) "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost." + Source: Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4, in the text as divided into verses since 1879. The last chapter of the book, spoken by the same Moroni who Joseph said appeared to him at seventeen. Latter-day Saints call it simply "Moroni’s promise," and it is recited to investigators at the end of almost every missionary lesson.

(T4) God was once a man like us, and men and women may become gods. + On 7 April 1844, at a conference held in the open air at Nauvoo, Joseph preached a funeral sermon for a member named King Follett who had been crushed by a falling bucket of rock in a well. It is the most important sermon he ever gave, and it was delivered less than three months before his death. What he told that crowd was that we have the whole question upside down. God is not a being of a different order from us. God is an exalted man, exalted meaning raised into the glory of godhood, with a body of flesh and bone, who once lived a mortal life on an earth of his own as Jesus did, and who progressed to what he now is. The plan for us, he said, runs along that same road. Two further teachings lean on that one. The first is that spirit is not immaterial after all. Spirit is matter, only finer than anything we can handle, so that the word "immaterial" names nothing at all. The second is that human beings were not made out of nothing either. Something in us, which he called the intelligence, is as old as God and was never created. This is the point at which the argument stops being a family quarrel. Christians across every tradition, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike, confess one God who is not a member of a class of gods, who did not become God, and who made everything there is out of nothing. When Isaiah has God say "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (Isaiah 43:10), and "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (Isaiah 44:6), he is ruling out precisely the picture the King Follett sermon paints. Joseph knew that, and said so: his God was a man, and the creeds that said otherwise were the abomination of (T1).

(Q) "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret." + Source: Joseph Smith, the King Follett discourse, 7 April 1844, as reported in Times and Seasons 5, no. 15 (15 August 1844), and carried in the longer amalgamated text at History of the Church, volume 6, page 305. No manuscript in his own hand survives. The Times and Seasons text was put together by his clerk Thomas Bullock from his own longhand notes and William Clayton’s, and the fuller version printed later was amalgamated from four listeners’ reports, which is why careful writers describe it as a report of the sermon rather than a transcript. The doctrine is not in doubt: he restated it in plainer words in the same sermon, saying that God "was once a man like us."

(T5) Marriage sealed by the right authority lasts forever, and for a few in Nauvoo that meant plural marriage. + Stand at a wedding and listen to the vow. Until death us do part: the promise has an end date built into it, and Jesus said as much when the Sadducees tried to trap him with a woman who had outlived seven husbands. In the resurrection, he told them, people neither marry nor are given in marriage (Matthew 22:30). Joseph taught the opposite, and taught it as good news. A marriage performed by ordinary civil authority does end at the grave. A marriage sealed by the restored priesthood does not. Sealing was his word for a binding made by that authority and meant to hold on the far side of death, and what it binds is a whole household: husband, wife and children go on as a family forever, so that exaltation, the climb toward godhood in (T4), turns out to be a family business rather than a solitary one. For Latter-day Saints this is the warm center of the whole system, and it is why their temples matter so much to them. The same revelation that promised eternal families commanded plural marriage, and the honest account of what followed is an unpleasant one. His own church now puts the number of women sealed to him at somewhere between thirty and forty. Some were teenagers, the youngest sealed to him a few months short of her fifteenth birthday. Twelve to fourteen were already married to other men, and at least one of those husbands was away preaching on his instructions at the time. He denied the practice publicly while it was going on, and the revelation of 12 July 1843 was dictated in part as a warning to Emma, promising destruction if she would not accept it. Latter-day Saints answer that he obeyed a hard command against his own wishes, and his own accounts say he resisted it. The command remains one he alone reported receiving, in the one area where a man has the most to gain by mishearing God.

(Q) "Then shall they be Gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them." + Source: Doctrine and Covenants, section 132, verse 20 (Liverpool, 1879 edition), from the revelation on marriage recorded at Nauvoo on 12 July 1843. The promise held out to those who marry under the new and everlasting covenant. The sentence joins the two halves of his late teaching in one breath: eternal marriage in (T5) is the road, and becoming gods in (T4) is the destination.

(Q) "I am going like a lamb to the slaughter, but I am calm as a summer’s morning; I have a conscience void of offense toward God, and toward all men; if they take my life I shall die an innocent man." + Source: Joseph Smith, 24 June 1844, on the road to Carthage, in History of the Church, volume 6, page 555; John Taylor’s account of the same words is canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 135:4. Said to the men riding with him after he had turned back to surrender. Four men who heard him wrote it down and no two agree on the wording, which is why the sentence comes down in several forms; all of them carry the same thing. He went on in the same breath to say that his blood would cry from the ground for vengeance, and that it would be said of him that he was murdered in cold blood. Whatever a reader makes of the rest, he went to Carthage believing he would not come back, and he went anyway. His followers have read the sentence as a martyr’s; his critics as a showman’s last performance. Both readings have to account for the fact that he was right about what was waiting.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Alexander Campbell answered inside a year, and put his finger on the sorest spot in the book. + Alexander Campbell was the leading restorationist preacher in America and had spent his life arguing that the churches should go back to the New Testament and drop everything added since. He was, in other words, the man with the most to lose from a rival restoration, and he read the Book of Mormon with the attention of someone who took the genre seriously. His review appeared in February 1831, less than a year after the book went on sale, and came out as a pamphlet called Delusions the following year. His central observation was not about gold plates or angels. It was that the book knew too much about 1820s New York. Ancient Hebrews sailing to America in 600 BC were made to settle, in advance and by name, every argument that was dividing Campbell’s own neighbors: infant baptism, the Trinity, ordination, the call to the ministry, republican government, even freemasonry. A genuinely ancient text does not have opinions about the controversies of the century that discovers it. He noticed the smaller things too, the kind that betray a modern hand: John baptizing at a village called Bethabara, Jesus born at Jerusalem, and Nephi carrying a compass across the ocean eighteen centuries before Europe had one. Nearly two hundred years of argument have added a great deal of detail on both sides, but Campbell set the shape of the case in 1831 and it has not really changed.

(Q) "This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years." + Source: Alexander Campbell, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1832), page 13. Campbell goes on to list seventeen controversies the book settles, from infant baptism to who may baptize, and then adds freemasonry, republican government and the rights of man. "Stone spectacles" refers to the interpreters Joseph said came with the plates, which he called the Urim and Thummim after the instrument of the Israelite priesthood.

(†) Answering him forced American Christians to say out loud what they had only assumed. + There is a kind of doctrine that a church holds without ever needing to defend, the way a family knows where the spare key is without discussing it. Three of those came up for discussion because of Joseph Smith, and American Protestantism came out of the nineteenth century holding them consciously rather than by habit. The first was the canon. Congregations that had never once been asked why the New Testament stops at Revelation had to learn an answer, and the answer the churches gave was that the apostles were witnesses to something that happened, so their generation could not be repeated: the faith was "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), and a book about Christ written by someone who never met him is a different kind of thing from a letter by someone who did. The second was the doctrine of God. Nothing sharpens a definition like a live alternative, and a church down the road teaching that God had once been a man made the difference between the Creator and the creature into a sentence people could actually say (Isaiah 44:6; 1 Timothy 2:5). The third was the test of a prophet. Joseph’s own scripture invited it: he told his followers to try him. Deuteronomy gives the standard, that a prediction which fails was not from God (Deuteronomy 18:22), and Jesus gives the other, that a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16). Those two tests, applied evenhandedly, are still the whole of the argument, and they are the reason a conversation with a missionary on a doorstep is worth having rather than avoiding.

(†) Historians stopped calling him a simple fraud, and the harder verdict is the more interesting one. + For a century the standard non-Mormon account was that Joseph Smith was a confidence man who made it up. The book that ended the easy version of that story was written by a critic. Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History was published in 1945, and its author was a woman raised in the faith who was excommunicated the following May for apostasy, the charge a church brings against a member who has turned against its teaching. Her conclusion was that he had begun as a fraud and grown into something he half believed himself, and no serious reader has been able to go back to the flat account since. The modern conversation is stranger and more useful. Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, published in 2005 by a believing Latter-day Saint who is also a Columbia historian, laid out the treasure-digging, the failed bank and the plural marriages without flinching, and it is now cited by his critics as often as by his church. The church itself published a series of essays between 2013 and 2015 conceding in its own voice what its critics had said for generations: the seer stone in the hat, the thirty to forty wives, the fourteen-year-old bride, and the plain fact that the Egyptian papyri Joseph translated as the Book of Abraham are ordinary funeral texts. For a Christian reader the lesson is a warning rather than a trophy. The question was never whether Joseph Smith was clever or sincere; a man can be both and still be wrong about God. It is whether a new gospel arrived, and Paul settled the terms of that question in advance: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:8).

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the being of God, a second canon, a translation that can be checked, and the marriages he concealed. + He kept the words of Christian faith and changed what they name, which is why the parting is best taken one place at a time rather than waved at in general. There are four places. - What God is. The whole of Christian faith rests on a Creator who is not one of us and never was. Joseph taught a God who was once a mortal man and progressed to godhood, and the exaltation of human beings into gods of their own. Isaiah closes that door in as many words: "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me." (Isaiah 43:10). This is not a denominational quarrel, the sort Christians can hold in common charity; it is the difference between worshiping the Maker and worshiping a senior member of the same species. - A second canon. He did not correct the Bible, he supplemented it, and then supplemented the supplement. The trouble with an open canon is not that God is too small to speak again but that a faith which can always be added to has no fixed point from which to judge the next addition. Jude asks readers to "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), and Paul says a contrary gospel is to be rejected even if an angel brings it (Galatians 1:8), which is the exact form Joseph’s own claim took. - A translation that can be checked. This is the one place where his method left a testable trace. In 1835 he bought some Egyptian papyri from a traveling showman and published a translation of them as the Book of Abraham, which his church still prints as scripture. The scrolls were assumed lost until fragments turned up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and came back to the church in 1967. Egyptologists read them: they are standard funerary texts buried with mummies, dating from long after Abraham, and they say nothing about him. The church’s own Gospel Topics essay on the translation and historicity of the Book of Abraham grants that "the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham." A gift of translation is exactly the kind of claim that can be tested, and on the one occasion it could be, it failed. - The marriages. Plural marriage is not by itself a disqualification; Abraham and David had more than one wife and Scripture records it without applauding it. What sits badly is the manner. He denied in public what he was doing in private, married a dozen or more women who already had husbands, one of them away preaching at his direction, married girls of fourteen and sixteen, and delivered the command in a revelation that threatened his wife with destruction if she refused. Jesus offered a test for cases like this one, and it is a test about conduct rather than doctrine: "You will recognize them by their fruits." (Matthew 7:16). None of this makes him a small man or his followers foolish. He answered a real hunger with real conviction, and the people who followed him into a Missouri winter were not simpletons. But the gospel he restored is not the gospel the apostles preached, and on the being of God the two cannot both be true.