Joseph Smith Prophet or Pretender

Joseph Smith, Prophet or Pretender? In the second year after our removal to Manchester, New York, there was, in the place where we lived, an unusual excitement on the subject of religion. Great multitudes united themselves to the different religious parties, which created no small stir and division amongst the people. So great were the confusion and strife among the different denominations that it was impossible to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong. While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him."

So I retired to the woods to make the attempt. I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me. And at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction, just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun. It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound.

When the light rested upon me, I saw two personages whose brightness and glory defy all description standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other, "This is my beloved Son. Hear him."

I asked the personages who stood above me in the light which of all the sects was right, for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong and which I should join. 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, that those professors were all corrupt, that they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof. He again forbade me to join with any of them.

And many other things did he say unto me which I cannot write at this time. When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven. What you just heard is Joseph Smith's account of his first vision of the Father and the Son, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints views as Scripture, as part of the Pearl of Great Price, and is in their minds the founding moment in their own history. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons, today have a vigorous mission program and have aggressive growth, although particularly in the US, that has flagged in recent years. Fifty-three percent of Utah residents are Latter-day Saints, and they claim a global membership of sixteen point eight million people.

They have over fifty-four thousand full-time missionaries and have built one hundred seventy temples and over thirty-one thousand wards and branches, or local congregations. And of course, they are also famous for the singing of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So let's take a brief look at the foundational beliefs of the Mormon faith.

For Scripture, they embrace the Bible, quote, as far as it has been translated correctly, as well as the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants. These four together are what they call their four standard works.

In addition to that, they view as Scripture the words of the living prophets, the successors of Joseph Smith in the first presidency of the LDS Church. Any time that they speak in Revelation, that is viewed by them as Scripture, as additional revelation.

In their theology, God, who they call Heavenly Father, without an article, just Heavenly Father, was once a man on another planet and was exalted to godhood by his obedience to his God. There is actually an infinite number of gods in Mormon theology. There's not one God. There is an infinite number of gods. Our God earned his exaltation through faithful obedience to his God. Although exalted, God still has a physical body. And along with his wife, Heavenly Mother, they populate this universe with their spirit children, which would be, of course, all of us. These spirit children begin as intelligences. They are eternal and have no beginning.

Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother together create spirits for the intelligences to inhabit. And then human reproduction on earth makes physical bodies for the spirit children to inhabit. Jesus and Lucifer are both spirit children of Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

Now, Jesus was Heavenly Father's spiritual and physical son. Jesus became a God through exaltation because of his exemplary life on a previous earth. And then he volunteered to become mortal on this earth and accomplish a plan of redemption for humans here.

Now, all humans have the opportunity of being exalted to divine status, becoming gods and goddesses, and they could potentially rule their own universe and populate them with their spirit children. This requires one to undergo endowment and sealing ceremonies under priesthood authority in an LDS temple.

Through sealing and endowment, husbands and wives are sealed to each other for all eternity. Now, the afterlife is divided into four destinations. The highest of these, the celestial kingdom, is where those who are exalted go. And those who have been sealed as husband and wife can become gods and goddesses. Those who were not married but still make it to the celestial kingdom get to be ministering spirits or angels.

Then there are the celestial and terrestrial kingdoms, which are also kingdoms of glory but not kingdoms of exaltation, like the celestial kingdom. And then there is outer darkness, which is the Mormon version of hell. Murderers, adulterers, and some people who leave the Mormon church go there.

Now, in their mind, there is also the opportunity of proxy baptism and ordinances for the dead, which is why Mormons are very much into genealogy, because they want to perform the ordinances of baptism, endowment, and sealing for their dead ancestors in an LDS temple. And then those ancestors in the afterlife have the opportunity to either receive or reject those ordinances done on their behalf. And Mormons are also known for having certain dietary restrictions, such as not drinking coffee, which gives me confidence that Mennonites will never become Mormon in any great numbers.

As we've said, Joseph Smith, Jr., was the founder of the Mormon Church, and any look at Mormon history has to begin with him. So we're going to look at his life a little bit, but we are seriously only going to scratch the surface. There is a lot that is very significant to Mormons, such as Joseph Smith's vision of John the Baptist, his vision of Peter, James, and John, vision of Jesus, Elias, and Elijah, that we're not even going to be able to hardly mention.

But I want to start with this quote from one historian that is very true. "The field of Mormon history is a hall of mirrors full of distorted and incomplete reflections of nearly any event." That is very true. But we're going to start here with our summary of Mormon history. Joseph Smith's family were poor New Englanders.

He was born in Vermont. When he was a boy, they moved to Palmyra, New York, which is sort of north of the Finger Lakes region. His father was a treasure hunter using a dousing rod. Now, one form of dousing that we would be more familiar with would be water witching, but you can actually use dousing to find just about anything. And his father was an adept at the use of dousing to look for hidden treasures. His mother was a palm reader and interpreted dreams about the location of treasure. Now, when we talk about treasure digging, don't imagine the California gold rush, and don't imagine some innocent youthful diversion of a treasure map with some sort of X marks the spot.

This was a real occult activity involving the use of occult tools, like drawing magic circles with magic daggers, even animal sacrifice. And the treasure always seemed to, quote, slip away because the believers in magic believed that this hidden treasure was under the power of some evil spirits. They had to perform the occult activities exactly right, or the evil spirits would have the power to make the treasure slip away through the earth.

This is believed to have been Joseph Smith's father's magic dagger, which they used in their treasure hunting activities. Now, Joseph Smith, Jr., himself learned the use of the dousing rod, but he went further and became an adept at the use of seer stones or peepstone gazing, which involved putting the special seer stone in the hat, looking into the hat, blocking out all the light with your face, and then supposedly seeing visions, which he used to locate lost objects or see the lost treasure and instruct the diggers how to perform the rituals to obtain the treasure. And he got paid for his seeing while everybody else did the actual work, and they got nothing, and he got paid.

It was about this time, while he was involved in all of this, that he supposedly had the first vision, which we discussed at the beginning. This is Joseph Smith's seer stone. It is still kept in the vault of the first presidency of the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was photographed for the first time in this century for the Joseph Smith Papers project. And many Mormons had never even heard of it until it was photographed. It was with this stone that Joseph Smith looked for treasure and also, as we will discuss later, translated the Book of Mormon.

So here's a description of one of these treasure hunts according to one of the Smith's neighbors. "Joseph discovered northwest of my house a chest of gold watches. But as they were in the possession of the evil spirit, it required skill and stratagem to obtain them. Accordingly, orders were given to stick a parcel of large stakes in the ground several rods around in a circular form. This was to be done directly over the spot where the treasures were deposited.

A messenger was then sent to Palmyra to procure a polished sword, after which Samuel F. Lawrence, with a drawn sword in his hand, marched around to guard any assault which his satanic majesty might be disposed to make. Meantime, the rest of the company were busily employed in digging for the watches. But as they worked—sorry, they worked as usual till quite exhausted. But in spite of their brave defender, Lawrence, and their bulwark of stakes, the devil came off victorious and carried away the watches."

But now, Joseph Smith's mother would want us to realize that practicing magic did not make the family lazy. She wrote later in her life that she didn't want her readers to suppose, quote, "that we stopped our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of a brak, drawing magic circles or soothsaying to the neglect of all kinds of business. We never, during our lives, suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation." In other words, they did practice magic, but they were hardworking in spite of it.

On September 21st, 1823, Smith claimed that he had had another vision, a vision of a being clothed in radiant white, who he said was Moroni, a resurrected personage who had been a prophet among the Native Americans centuries before, in the 400s AD.

This messenger told Joseph about a record buried in a hill three miles from his house. This record was, quote, "an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang. It contained the fullness of the everlasting gospel, which had been delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants of North America.

It also contained two stones and silver bows fastened to a breastplate, which Moroni said were the Urim and Thummim, which had been specially prepared for the translation of this record." Although Smith went to the hill the next day, he was not allowed to take the gold plates. He was told to come back the next year on the same day. This he did for four years.

Now, the descendants of the Smith family have preserved three magic parchments owned by Joseph Sr.'s family. One of these parchments was specifically intended to be used in calling up spirits. And several elements of this account of the vision of Angel Moroni bear the marks of an occult worldview and what we would call necromancy, communicating with the spirits of the dead. In fact, the autumn equinox, especially when it occurred, as it did in 1823, on a Sunday night, was believed by the practitioners of magic to be an especially excellent time to call up spirits.

So in the meantime, while Joseph was in this process of coming back and coming back every year to the Hill Cumorah, as he called it, he went to Pennsylvania on a money-digging expedition and ended up standing trial in southern New York for being a disorderly person because that activity was actually illegal.

He also met Emma Hale and eloped with her because her father very much disapproved of his marrying her. Now, the first time that he met his father-in-law after the marriage, this is what happened, as related by one of Joseph's friends who was with him.

Joseph Smith's father-in-law said, "You have stolen my daughter and married her. I had much rather have followed her to her grave. You spend your time in digging for money, pretend to see in a stone, and thus try to deceive people."

Still quoting from the friend, Joseph wept and acknowledged he could not see in a stone now, nor never could, and that his former pretensions in that respect were all false. He then promised to give up his old habits of digging for money and looking into stones.

While Joseph may have stopped digging for money, he certainly did not stop looking into stones.

Finally, on one of his trips to the Hill Cumorah, he alleged or claimed that the Angel Moroni had finally given him possession of the gold plates on which was written the text of the Book of Mormon in a language he called Reformed Egyptian. Of course, there is no such language as Reformed Egyptian, but that's what he claimed. This is what someone imagines the plates may have looked like.

Now, during the time when he was claimed to be translating the Book of Mormon, he made this document called the Characters Document because he misspelled it. He claimed that these are characters that he copied off the plates of the Book of Mormon.

And if you look at it, it is, as one scholar said, not Reformed Egyptian, but deformed English.

It's mostly English characters, numerals, and nonsense squiggles. And you see some English characters sort of tipped on their sides or written backwards and so forth. But that's what he claimed was on the Book of Mormon. Now, when we say that he translated the Book of Mormon, you shouldn't imagine something like this or something like this. But rather, you should imagine this, because this is how he actually translated the Book of Mormon or produced the text of the Book of Mormon.

He used his trusty seer stone, looked in his hat, and claimed to be able to see the text appear before him, which he then dictated to a scribe. His wife, Emma, was his first scribe, followed by a neighboring farmer by the name of Martin Harris. And then tragedy struck. Martin Harris, in order to convince his skeptical wife to end her opposition to the project, convinced Joseph to let him borrow the 116 pages that they had produced.

And then he lost them. This, of course, was a huge problem for Joseph Smith. Of course, Mrs. Harris said that since he was inspired by the spirit to make them in the first place, he could easily just replace the lost pages by inspiration a second time. But of course, he knew he couldn't do that. So he had recourse to what he would have recourse to many times in his life. He claimed to receive a revelation from God forbidding him to retranslate the lost pages. Why? Because evil designing persons, the revelation said, had stolen the manuscript and changed it so that when Joseph Smith perfectly, word for word, reproduced the 116 pages, his enemies would come forward with the fraudulently doctored 116 pages and claim that he was the one who had failed to reproduce the pages perfectly.

Instead, conveniently, some of the plates contained the same history that he had just translated, although from a more spiritual perspective.

Now, how did Joseph Smith translate? He said this to one of his scribes, Oliver Cowdery, "You must study it out in your mind." This, again, is supposedly a revelation. "You must study it out in your mind. Then you must ask me if it be right. And if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you. Therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong." Of course, anybody here who knows more than one language knows that this is absolute nonsense. But now Joseph Smith said this also to Oliver Cowdery, "You have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod, that is, dousing or divining.

Behold, it has told you things. Behold, there is no other power save God that can cause this rod of nature to work in your hands, for it is the work of God."

In 1830, Joseph Smith finished and published the Book of Mormon, and on April 6th, 1830, established what he called the Church of Christ, which eventually became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But not content with translating the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith even laid hands on the Bible itself. He claimed that certain plain and precious things had been eliminated from the Bible fraudulently, and he was going to restore them. This is the very Bible which Joseph Smith and his assistant, Sidney Rigdon, marked up to produce the so-called inspired version that is on display in Kirtland, Ohio.

Now, due to persecution and opposition in Pennsylvania and New York, Smith and his followers decided to move to northern Ohio, to a place called Kirtland, which is now a suburb of Cleveland. Some of his missionaries there had made a lot of converts in the town. There was a Campbellite congregation, which today would be the Church of Christ or Disciples of Christ. And Sidney Rigdon was the pastor. And Sidney Rigdon had embraced the Book of Mormon, and a lot of his followers had accepted Mormon baptism.

Now, Joseph Smith got there, and he found a very charismatic bunch. These people believed in the charismatic gifts and spiritual manifestations. But Joseph Smith was opposed to a lot of what they were into. This is a summary of what he found. He said, "Fawn Brody, historian biographer of Joseph Smith, summarized it this way. There were now about 150 converts in Kirtland, more than twice the number that had followed Smith from New York State. But Joseph was disturbed by the fanaticism that possessed this people. Prayer meetings were punctuated by fits and trances. Converts would roll along the floor to the church door and out onto the frozen ground in a masochistic frenzy. Some would mount stumps to preach to imaginary congregations in unknown tongues.

Others, making apish grimaces, would speed across the fields, returning with revelations that they swore they had copied from pieces of parchment hanging in the night sky. One Mormon, in a fit of spiritual ecstasy, was jumping up and down until he finally hit his head on the rafter, fell on the floor, and passed out cold. When he came to, he described all these wonderful visions he had seen while he was passed out.

One Mormon said that he had seen another Mormon acting like a baboon."

Now, Joseph Smith, while he was opposed to this kind of spiritual manifestation, was certainly not above harnessing it for his own uses, his own purposes.

He intentionally created an atmosphere of expectation of wondrous and miraculous events to appear at the church, to occur at the church's first general conference held in Kirtland in June 1831. He prophesied that some would see the Savior at the conference. And sure enough, one of the elders stood on a bench and loudly exclaimed that he saw the Savior. He and Smith together began ordaining others to the Melchizedek Priesthood. And then, according to an observer, this is what happened.

Another elder moved upon the floor, his legs inclining to a bend, one shoulder elevated above the other, upon which the head seemed disposed to recline. His arms partly extended, his hands partly clenched, his mouth partly open and contracted in the shape of an italic O. His eyes assumed a wild, ferocious cast, and his whole appearance presented a frightful object to the view of the beholder. "Speak, Brother Harvey," said Smith. But Harvey intimated by signs that his power of articulation was in a state of suspense and that he was unable to speak.

Smith learned by the spirit that Harvey was under a diabolical influence and that Satan had bound him, and he commanded the unclean spirit to come out of him. This, Smith declared to be a miracle, and his success in this case encouraged him to work other and different miracles.

Taking the hand of one of the elders in his own, a hand which by accident had been rendered defective, he said, "Brother Murdoch, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to straighten your hand." In the meanwhile, endeavoring to accomplish the work by using his own hand to open the hand of the other.

The effort proved unsuccessful, but he again articulated the same commandment in a more authoritative and louder tone of voice. And while uttering with his tongue, his hands were at work. But after all the exertion of his power, both natural and supernatural, the deficient hand returned to its former position, where it still remains.

One of the elders, who was decrepit in one of his legs, was set upon the floor and commanded in the name of Jesus Christ to walk. He walked a step or two. His faith failed, and he was again compelled to have recourse to his former assistant, his crutch.

A dead body which had been retained above ground two or three days under the expectation that the dead would be raised was insensible to the voice of those who commanded it to awake into life. Under these discouraging circumstances, the horizon of Mormonism gathered darkness, and a storm seemed to hang impending over the church. The gloom of disappointed expectation overspread the countenances of many. What to do after such a depressing general conference when he had promised so many miracles and had such a dismal outcome? Well, it wasn't long before the perfect distraction presented itself: Zion.

Joseph Smith had said that Kirtland, Ohio, was the borders of the promised land, but now Missouri was declared to be Zion itself. He claimed that he had seen a vision of hundreds of converts in Missouri where Oliver Cowdery had already gone to evangelize Indians. And he convinced many of his men to accompany him there to establish Zion. Now, when they got there and found Oliver Cowdery, they found no such thing as hundreds of converts.

But they did decide that Western Missouri was going to be Zion. And Joseph received this revelation, allegedly. "Yea, the word of the Lord concerning his church, for the gathering of his saints to stand upon Mount Zion, which shall be the city of New Jerusalem, which city shall be built beginning at the temple lot, which is appointed by the finger of the Lord in the western boundaries of the state of Missouri and dedicated by the hand of Joseph Smith, Jr. The city New Jerusalem shall be built beginning at the place of the temple, which temple shall be reared in this generation."

Now, there's nothing hard to understand about this revelation. The temple was going to be built on the temple lot, which Joseph Smith had pointed out, in this generation. Now, here's what the temple lot looks like today. The temple was never built and has never been built.

Now, how would Zion be obtained? Of course, people already owned this land. Well, a revelation said this: "For behold, verily I say unto you, the Lord willeth that the disciples and the children of men should open their hearts even to purchase this whole region of country as soon as time will permit. Behold, here is wisdom. Let them do this, lest they receive none inheritance, save it be by the shedding of blood," which turned out, in a way, to be prophetic in itself, "save it be by the shedding of blood." As the Mormons settled in the area, they soon had huge opposition and huge contention between them and the other neighbors.

Now, there were many reasons for this on both sides. But the things about the Mormons, some of the things that the neighbors found it so objectionable were the Mormons were mainly Yankees from New York and so forth. And the Missourians feared that they were abolitionists, which they weren't exactly, and that they were going to bring in a whole bunch of free Black people and just disrupt the racial utopia, slave-holding racial utopia of Missouri.

They also were very disturbed. This, remember, at this time was the border of U.S. territory and Native American-held territory. And the Mormons were actively evangelizing the Indians. And the white settlers were very concerned because the Book of Mormon actually said that in the last days, when the Book of Mormon would come forth, that the Native Americans would embrace Mormonism and would be the Lord's battle axe and weapons of war to exterminate all non-Mormon white people and would receive the North American continent as their own inheritance. Of course, this was disturbing to the white frontiersmen.

And so there was a huge clash and basically open warfare. And it was horrible, the abuses that the Missourians did to the Mormons.

Now, Joseph Smith didn't know exactly how to deal with this problem living back in Kirtland, Ohio. But he claimed to have a revelation that said this: "I have decreed that your brethren, which have been scattered, shall return to the lands of their inheritances and shall build up the waste places of Zion. The redemption of Zion must needs come by power." In other words, physical military force was going to be used to get back the lands that the Missourians had kicked the Mormons out of. So Joseph Smith, armed with this revelation, sought to raise an army.

Now, he was only able to muster about 200 soldiers and got donations of only about $350, which was not enough to finance a military campaign going from Ohio to Missouri. So he mortgaged church property to borrow enough money to run this campaign. And they marched from Ohio all the way to Missouri. And when they got there, the Missourians were, needless to say, not happy to see them. The sheriff met them at the county line and told them in absolutely no uncertain terms that they were not to enter Jackson County.

Well, that very night, Joseph Smith received this revelation: "In consequence of the transgressions of my people, it is expedient in me that mine elders should wait for a little season for the redemption of Zion. This cannot be brought to pass until mine elders are endowed with power from on high. For behold, I have prepared a great endowment and blessing to be poured out upon them in my house, which I have commanded to be built in the land of Kirtland." So in other words, very handily, Joseph Smith got a revelation that very night saying that they were to go all the way back to Kirtland and finish building the temple that they had started.

No redemption of Zion by power. So they went back and they built the temple, which they completed and is still there today. And as promised, they claimed to have all sorts of spiritual manifestations and visions and seeing angels and just all this wonderful stuff. And by the time it was all over, they really felt they had been endowed with power from on high.

But there was a problem. All this community living and military campaigning and temple building came at a cost. And the church was deeply in debt. The temple building alone, they had borrowed about $60,000. And this is in 1830s dollars. They had borrowed about $60,000 just to build the temple. But then the church was in debt. And Joseph Smith personally was in debt. And so what do you do when you're deeply in debt in Ohio in the 1830s?

Well, obviously, you open a bank and print money. That was accepted back then. And so Joseph Smith opened the Kirtland Safety Society Bank to print money and to hopefully get the church out of debt. Oh, but there was one small problem. You did actually have to have state congressional approval for your bank before you started up. And the very day that they got the bills from the printer, that they heard word that the Ohio state legislature had turned down their application to be recognized as a bank. Nothing that a few stamps won't fix. And the Kirtland Safety Society Bank becomes the Kirtland Safety Society and Anti-Banking Company.

Well, despite all the confidence and Mormons going around with huge wads of Kirtland Safety Society cash, the bank failed in three months. Now, this was just before the huge panic of 1837, where the whole nation was gripped by a financial panic and a financial crash because of a lot of activity like this. Small private banks printing up a whole bunch of cash that ends up becoming worthless.

But this crash occurred just before that happened. So gripped in the throes of this financial panic, Kirtland just about descended into chaos. The temple, which had just been the scene of all these wonderful spiritual visions and manifestations and brotherly harmony, now became a scene of actual brawls and fights as people were furious at Joseph Smith over this whole terrible situation. And in addition, the secular government was suing Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon for counterfeiting since, of course, their bills were illegal since they did not have a license to be a bank.

With the portion of his followers in Kirtland who stayed supportive to him, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon fled in the night to Missouri. And there in northern Missouri, he regrouped his followers, the faithful from Kirtland and the remnant from southwestern or west-central Missouri, regrouped them at a place which he called Adom un Dee Amon. In fact, this, Smith said, was the Garden of Eden.

It was literally the place where Adam had dwelt. And that's where he built his new city. And just a little way away, where some Mormons also settled at a place called Far West, he said that was the place where Cain had killed Abel.

Now, the Mormons in northern Missouri were no more able to live peaceably with their neighbors than they had in west-central Missouri. And soon there were accusations and fighting and, yeah, bad language and so forth going both ways. Lyman White, one of the Mormons, denounced non-Mormons as hypocrites, long-faced dupes, devils, infernal hobgoblins and ghosts, and that they ought to be damned and sent to hell where they properly belonged.

Now, Joseph Smith himself joined in the gracious words with this selection: "If the people will let us alone, we will preach the gospel in peace. But if they will come on us to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword. We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Muhammad, whose motto in treating for peace was the Al-Qur'an or the sword. So shall it eventually be with us, Joseph Smith or the sword."

Now, with this kind of fiery rhetoric, obviously, it was not long before there was all-out war. And Adom un Dee Amon was besieged by the Missouri militia. Joseph Smith encouraged his followers with these words: "Before now, men, you fought like devils. But now I want you to fight like angels, for angels can whip devils. And for everyone we lack in number to match the mob, the Lord will send an angel to fight alongside."

Despite the great swelling words of vanity, the very next day, Joseph Smith turned himself in to the authorities. And the Mormons were expelled from Missouri. They regrouped in Iowa and Illinois at a place called Nauvoo. Joseph Smith was imprisoned. And there was a long legal thing, which I won't go into. It's very interesting, but we're not going to take the time. He eventually escaped prison and regrouped his followers on the Mississippi River at a place called Nauvoo, Illinois. The Nauvoo period was when Joseph Smith became his most innovative doctrinally. And the summary of Mormon beliefs, which I gave earlier, most of that is a product of the Nauvoo period. In New York and in Kirtland, Joseph Smith's theology was fairly similar to a standard Protestantism.

I mean, he had the addition of the Book of Mormon and that he was a prophet and receiving revelations and so forth. But the actual theology was a fairly standard kind of a mix of Baptist and Methodist elements. But in Nauvoo is when he totally went off into doctrinal speculations and strange ideas. And that's when we get lots of gods and lots of wives.

In a revelation in 1843, he says, "I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant. And if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned. For no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory." That is the covenant of eternal marriage and plural marriage or polygamy. And Joseph Smith himself married an unknown number of wives, but that exceeded 30. We know that he exceeded 30 wives at least in the Nauvoo period, all the while maintaining publicly that he was not, that he did not believe in polygamy or any of this stuff.

But in secret, he and a few of his closest companions were accumulating wives, many of which were already married to other men. But Joseph Smith made a huge mistake when he proposed marriage to William Law, who was one of his counselors in the first presidency of the church. When William Law found out that Joseph Smith had proposed marriage to his wife, he was absolutely furious. And he left the church. But he did not leave the city of Nauvoo. He rather gathered together a few malcontents from the Mormon church and stayed in the city of Nauvoo, claiming that they were going to restore the Mormon church to its original New York and Kirtland era teachings. They were against the doctrinal innovations of multiple gods, multiple wives, and all this strange Nauvoo theology.

And they were going to make a true Mormon church that taught what it had earlier. And they started a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor, which was going to expose the misdeeds of Joseph Smith and his cronies.

Declaring the newspaper to be a public nuisance, Joseph Smith, as mayor of Nauvoo, ordered the press to be destroyed, the typefied, and the whole operation to be ended. Now, this was too far for the neighbors. There had already been a huge amount of tension between the Mormons and the other settlers in Illinois.

And this was too far. Joseph Smith had trampled on one of the most sacred rights of Americans, the freedom of the press. And Joseph Smith was there was an arrest warrant made out for him. And he finally turned himself in to the authorities and was imprisoned in Carthage, the town just south of Nauvoo, in that jail which you see there. Some of his friends smuggled two handguns into him and the other prisoners, which you see there in the photo. Those are the handguns that were smuggled in.

And after they had been imprisoned there for, I think it was about a week, a mob of angry militiamen stormed the jail, broke in, and killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram. They shot in self-defense and did kill some of their attackers.

On his body, when he died, Joseph Smith had this magic Jupiter talisman. He maintained his beliefs in magic and the occult to his very dying day. Now, he died at the young age of 39 and had never made clear what the succession plan was going to be, who was going to replace Joseph Smith as president of the Latter-day Saints Church. And so after his death, there was a power struggle that's called the succession crisis. There were four main claimants to Joseph Smith's mantle of prophetic authority. But most Mormons accepted Brigham Young's argument that the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, as a group, inherited Joseph Smith's authority and that Joseph Smith, as head of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, would or should act as president of the church.

And he then led most of the Mormons west to Utah, which is why Utah has such a high Mormon population today, because it was mainly settled by Mormons when Brigham Young brought the saints west. Now, there has been a lot of Mormon splitting and splintering. This is a split chart of all the groups that trace their spiritual ancestry back to Joseph Smith. And many of the main branches are following the different claimants at the time of the succession crisis. But most Mormons belong to the main Utah Brigham Church, Brigham Young Church. Now, some of these are very small and have very exotic names. My personal favorite is the Church of Christ with the Elijah Message Assured Way of the Lord Incorporated.

This is their world headquarters. I said some of these groups were very small. But about 97% of people who trace their spiritual heritage back to Joseph Smith are part of the main LDS Mormon church headquartered in Salt Lake City.

So with that summary of Mormon history, let's look a little bit at the Book of Mormon, the main claim to Joseph Smith's prophetic authority. The plot of the Book of Mormon goes like this. The prophet Lehi lived in Jerusalem at the time that the Babylonians were about to take Jerusalem. He was a contemporary of the prophet Jeremiah.

And the Lord revealed to him that he had to leave with his family, leave Jerusalem, because Jerusalem was going to fall to the Babylonians. So with his family and a few others, he left Jerusalem. They built a ship and sailed across the ocean to the Americas. And in the Americas, his descendants found this empty land. And they populated the land with their descendants. His descendants split into two factions, the Lamanites and the Nephites, who were named after the two main leaders among his sons.

The Nephites were righteous and the Lamanites were wicked. And as you could see in the photo there, the Lamanites were dark and the Nephites were white. Yes, the Book of Mormon says that God cursed the Lamanites with a dark skin so that they might not be attractive to his righteous white Nephite people.

Now, the Nephites, like the Israelites, were continually fighting with the wicked Lamanites. And like the Israelites, they went through cycles of apostasy and then repentance and revival and then apostasy again and repentance and revival, just cycling through. It reminds one of the Book of Judges. And there were prophets all throughout history among the Nephites to call them back to God and back to faithful, righteous living.

These prophets kept records written on metal plates of the history of the Nephite people.

Now, the high point of the Book of Mormon comes after Jesus' resurrection in the old world. He came and visited his people in the new world and visited the Nephites and Lamanites. And he preached a sermon in the Nephite temple, which is basically the same as the Sermon on the Mount. And he ordained 12 Nephite disciples and all of this. And the people lived in peace and harmony for a few hundred years after Jesus' visit to them. But eventually, they again split into factions and became wicked and started fighting again.

At that time, the prophet was named Mormon. And he finished the record of the Nephite history. He compiled all the records that had been kept before, made a summary on gold plates, and entrusted them to his son Moroni.

Moroni was a military leader who led the Nephites in their last climactic battle with the Lamanites. And the dark-skinned Lamanites exterminated to a man all of the light-skinned Nephites. The last one was Moroni himself, who buried the record in a hill in upstate New York, just three miles from where the boy Joseph Smith would eventually live. And Moroni, as a resurrected personage, a ministering spirit, for him, apparently, he wasn't married. He couldn't become a god, would appear to Joseph Smith and reveal the existence of the gold plates.

Now, Joseph Smith said this about the Book of Mormon, "I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth and the keystone of our religion. And a man could get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts than by any other book." So the Book of Mormon is not tangential to the Mormon faith. It is the keystone of their religion and the most correct of any book on earth. Now, Mormons will tell you that the Book of Mormon is such wonderful literature. It's just so complex and wonderful and structured and layered and all this stuff that it's impossible that an uneducated farm boy from New York in the 1800s could possibly have faked such a thing.

It's just unimaginable. It must have come from divine inspiration. But a non-Mormon reading the Book of Mormon is more likely to think that it is boring, that it's full of overused phrases like, "And it came to pass." It has abundant grammatical errors, flat characters that are pretty much all the same. You have this stock image of the prophet who's perfectly righteous and all of this. And you have this stock villain who is just the most terrible person you could possibly imagine, has all these flat characters. And it's written in a kind of fake King James style English, as if it was written by somebody who was trying to imitate a biblical sound but did not have the ability to really convincingly imitate the actual grammar and writing style of the King James version of the Bible.

But beyond these surface problems, there are some very serious problems with the Book of Mormon that show that it was actually written by a 19th-century forger, not by anyone in the ancient world named Moroni or Mormon or otherwise.

For instance, we have abundant anachronisms. An anachronism is where you have a piece of literature that claims to be in one age, but it incorporates an element from another age. Like, for example, if there was a the Book of Mormon, for instance, described someone driving around in cars, obviously, that would not fit the ancient world or the 19th century. That would be an anachronism. And the Book of Mormon is full of anachronisms, not cars, but other ones. For example, in Mosiah chapter 4, we have a description of what sounds very much like a Methodist camp meeting, which is very, very much out of place in the supposedly Old Testament setting of the Book of Mormon.

We also have descriptions in the Book of Mormon of a lot of items which we know that the ancient Native Americans never had: metal tools, chariots, horses, et cetera. These things that we know that the ancient inhabitants of the Americas did not have. And yet, it's mentioned in the Book of Mormon, which betrays its origins in the 19th century.

Joseph Smith also misunderstood the nature of Native American earthworks, which was probably one of the main inspirations behind the book. But the earthworks made by Adena and Hopewell cultures of ancient times, we now know are ceremonial earthworks that align with the solstice, sunrise, and sunsets and other astronomical alignments. And we know that it had something to do with their religion. But Joseph Smith, like many people of his time, misunderstood them as military fortifications and included that description in his book in the Book of Mormon, which we now know is incorrect.

We have an Old Testament era prophet in the Book of Mormon quoting the apostle Paul. 1 Nephi chapter 22 says, "For thus saith the prophet, they shall be saved even if it so be as by fire," quoting 1 Corinthians 3:15, which is obviously impossible and betrays the forged nature or fake nature of the Book of Mormon.

We have crosses and crucifixion mentioned in the Book of Mormon. 2 Nephi chapter 9 says, "But behold the righteous, they who have endured the crosses of this world." And 2 Nephi 10, "Christ should come, and they shall crucify him." Now, the problem with this, we as Christians recognize Psalm 22 as a prophecy of the crucifixion of Christ. But what we have in Psalm 22 is a description of crucifixion, the piercing of hands and feet, the thirst, et cetera. We have a vivid description of crucifixion, not naming crucifixion.