Joseph Smith (1) (1805–1844)

Terribly repetitive, racist at it's core, anachronistic, boring, and wholly unoriginal.

It lifts big chunks, word for word, straight out of the KJ Old Testament. What isn't stolen from the Bible seems to be taken from 1. [b:View of the Hebrews 1825: Or the Tribes of Israel in America|981827|View of the Hebrews 1825 Or the Tribes of Israel in America|Ethan Smith|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349044745s/981827.jpg|966716] 2. [b:The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain: From show more June 1812 to February 1815, Written in the Ancient Historical Style: Containing Also, a Sketch of the Late Algerine War ... the Commercial Treaty with Great Britain, and the Treaty...|14219538|The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain From June 1812 to February 1815, Written in the Ancient Historical Style Containing Also, a Sketch of the Late Algerine War ... the Commercial Treaty with Great Britain, and the Treaty...|Gilbert J. Hunt|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349068390s/14219538.jpg|19858281] and 3. [b:The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth|14450358|The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth|Anonymous|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348271326s/14450358.jpg|20092752].

The linguistic, anachronistic, scientific and archaeological evidence against this being an accurate history of the Americas is absolutely staggering. That being said, a lot of people get a lot of hope out of this book, so they must not mind picking the rotten parts to get to a morsel of decency here and there.

p.s. If you absolutely must read it, try to get your hands on the 1st edition text, it's quite a bit different than what is published today. show less

In the family of Mormon revelatory literature, if the Book of Mormon is the flashy older sibling who gets all the attention, then the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) is the quiet younger sibling doing most of the work even though no one outside the family pays any attention.

In my estimation, the D&C is essential reading if you want to grasp the contours of the LDS Church as it exists today. That doesn’t mean it’s light or even riveting reading, unless you’ve always nursed a secret wish show more that the minutes of the deacon board were holy writ requiring study and meditation.

This, of course, is what makes reviews like this hard. From the glowing online reviews of the D&C by Mormons who feel elevated by its contents, I gather I lack the inner witness to vibe with these prophecies, so many of which are fairly pedestrian organizations and reorganizations of Church affairs.

That’s not to say I can’t appreciate the historical drama beneath even the most mundane revelations. The first generation of Mormons were a dynamic bunch devoted to an uphill climb against trenchant opposition, and occasionally against the factionalists and doubters and backsliders in their own midst.

The effort to erect a new (they would say “restored”) Church in the teeth of so much difficulty attracted a stream of revelations to Joseph Smith in the early 1830s, which were collected, published, adjusted, and augmented periodically through the years as the D&C.

This is where you find the distinctive Mormon doctrines and Church polity that we know today. For example, the unique teaching of the celestial, telestial, and terrestrial kingdoms is the fruit of Smith’s labors to translate the Book of Revelation; and baptism for the dead is unfolded in the D&C.

Here you find the teaching that the Father and the Son are flesh and blood, whereas the Holy Spirit is spirit. Here is the resurrection of saved men as angels, the exaltation of the most righteous as gods, the institution of plural marriage by Smith in the 1840s, and its retirement in 1890 by the Church.

The Presidency of the Church is here established, along with the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the bishoprics, and the Aaronic and Melchizedekian priesthoods. The impression I get is that the existence of the LDS Church today is a credit to the attention Smith gave to organizing an institution that could survive his death.

And that leads to another impression I gained; namely, that Joseph Smith himself must have exerted a measure of winsome magnetism to pull this off. Smith demanded a lot of himself and sunk deeply into debt for the sake of the Church, but he likewise demanded a lot of his people.

Much of the D&C is devoted to laying down the law with regard to specific members contributing their wealth to the treasury of the Church, and to upending their lives to send them to Zion in Missouri, or to Kirtland, or on far-flung missions to the “east countries” or to the Lamanites on the American frontier.

Smith must have exerted impressive personal pull to wield such power, greater even than the apostles. In contrast to their light fiscal touch, with which they settled for encouragement or silence when it came to giving, Smith brooked no private property if the LDS Church needed funds badly enough.

Also in contrast to the apostles, who encouraged the early Christians to work quietly and faithfully as members of their local communities, Smith erected barriers to commerce with the “Gentiles” that worked beautifully to section off the LDS Church as a people apart.

In the revelation that any liquid is permissible for communion, the express purpose is to end the necessity for payments to the Church’s enemies for sacramental wine. Medical aid is forbidden if it comes from the Church’s enemies. No one is to become indebted to the Church’s enemies.

Moreover, salvation depends in part on belief in the Book of Mormon and baptism in the Mormon Church. Sacred and secular ordinances thus combine to create a system of belief and practice which seems uncompromisingly exclusive, at least to me.

In fact, the system is so exclusive that it’s hard for me to understand how Mormon missionaries can claim a shared Christianity with someone like me. Seems pretty clear Smith would’ve considered me on the wrong side of the strait gate, stuck in a system of dead works that avails me nothing.

Where my Mormon friends and I might agree is that the D&C is worth your time, although our reasons would differ. A Mormon might consider it a chance for you to receive a testimony of its truth, and I consider it crucial to understand how divergent the LDS Church is from what I consider Christianity. Sure, these motives might be so different as to be oppositional, even confrontational; but in a disagreeable world it’s nice to have at least one point of agreement, so we take what we can get. show less

After chugging down The Book of Mormon and The Doctrine and Covenants, I must say that The Pearl of Great Price was a nice chaser. Clocking in at 61 pages, it took me just under two hours to finish; and it ties off some loose ends that were still dangling in my mind.

This posthumous collection of Joseph Smith’s writings and retranslations of Scripture preserves some of his most spectacular swerves from what you always thought was Christianity. First up is the Book of Moses, a version of the show more opening chapters of Genesis that upends the traditional tale of creation.

God created many worlds other than Earth (1:33-38). Everything that exists he created first in spiritual form before creating its physical avatar (3:5-7; cf. 6:51). Satan fell because he both coveted the title of God’s son and asked for God’s own power to coerce every human into salvation, which would have destroyed man’s sacrosanct free agency (4:1-3; cf. 5:13).

The plot thickens in The Book of Abraham, a rendition of Egyptian papyrus which Smith attributes to Abraham himself. The reason, we’re told, that he left Chaldea in the first place is because of the famine with which God smote the land after a pagan priest tried and failed to sacrifice him (Chapter 1).

Abraham’s story differs in some obvious ways from most versions of Genesis. For example, before he even leaves Chaldea, God is calling him Abraham rather than Abram (1:16). The decision to lie to the Egyptians about Sarai’s identity is not Abraham’s plan, but God’s command (2:22-25).

These differences, though, pale into insignificance next to the expanded account of creation. According to the Book of Abraham, God created souls (“intelligences” or “Gods”) before heaven and Earth (3:22-24). This sounds familiar enough from the Book of Moses.

This, though, is where things get interesting (3:24-28; 4:1). A being “like unto God,” suggests the creation of Earth. Another intelligence, one “like unto the Son of Man,” volunteers to carry out the task: presumably this created being is none other than Jesus.

Also presumably, a second intelligence which belatedly volunteers for the same task (and gets shot down) is Satan, given that he flies into a rage and leads away many others. At this point, the remaining Gods (again presumably, led by Jesus) descend and create the heavens and the Earth.

At this point, if you’re not a Mormon, you might be wondering how anyone can tease out a familial link between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Christianity of any flavor. Their conceptions of God and Jesus alone seem so different as to divide them into wholly adversarial camps.

This is done, I think, from two interlocked foundations. First, we have Joseph Smith’s own history of the visions which launched him onto his sea of prophetic destiny. His account is precise, detailed, and corroborated or affirmed by the testimonies of men like his own father and his confidant and scribe Oliver Cowdery.

If you have a suspicious nature, you might conclude that Smith was a conman leading an assortment of collaborators and dupes. If you’re more kind-hearted, you might think he suffered from a mental illness. If you believe Satan exists, you might excoriate Smith as the founder of a demonic anti-church.

But if you believe Smith was plugged into something both real and divine, then the picture changes radically. He was neither liar, lunatic, nor fiend. Rather, he was the promised prophet “like unto Moses” (Moses 1:41) destined to restore what had been lost.

This is the first foundation on which to build a link between Christianity and Mormonism, and the second both depends on this and answers a major question: why is the Bible so extraordinarily different from key points of Joseph Smith’s revelations?

Moses 1:41 is worth quoting in full at this point: “And in a day when the children of men shall esteem my words as naught and take many of them from the book which thou [Moses] shalt write, behold, I will raise up another [Joseph Smith] like unto thee; and they shall be had again among the children of men—among as many as shall believe.”

The reason, then, that your Bible doesn’t line up with Smith’s prophecies is because wicked men snipped out those sections, leaving only accidental fragments (e.g., “let us [Gods] create man in our image”) of the original truth.

These excisions explain why the name of Jesus is absent from the Old Testament when (according to Moses 6:57; cf. 7:55) both his name and his crucifixion were revealed from the beginning to Adam. Smith restores these mutilated truths as the promised Moses leading a renewed Israel to a new Zion.

This, as I understand the logic of the Pearl of Great Price in conjunction with the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon, is the chain of reasoning by which a Mormon missionary will insist that theirs is the same Christianity as held by the Presbyterians or Methodists down the street – just filled out, corrected, and restored.

Whether or not this chain of reasoning holds water for you turns entirely on your assessment of Joseph Smith: liar, lunatic, fiend, or prophet? One thing is certain: the canonical extrabiblical literature of Mormonism is either truth or the wildest piece of fan fiction ever written. show less

Uncharitably, I can say the Book of Mormon reads like a meme: “I forced an AI to spend 1000 hours reading the Bible and then write a new Bible based on that information.” I found it derivative, repetitive, hackneyed, and nigh unreadable for long boring stretches.

The problem with this assessment is two-fold. First, I don’t want to be uncharitable. Second, this assessment is too lazy. It’s not hard to sit outside and criticize. What I tried to do instead was understand why Mormonism show more caught fire when it did in the way that it did, and I do have some thoughts.

First, there’s a deliberate simplicity to the Book of Mormon. “Plain speaking” recurs often as a mark of the righteous, in contrast to the “priestcrafts” of those who bury the truth in convoluted theologies that bind the laity to a caste of theologians who care nothing for the poor and the downtrodden.

Many “plain spoken” teachings of the book resonate, I suspect, with many an average church-goer today. The fall into sin was not only accounted for in God’s plan, but required because without sin there is no free will — and God would never trammel a man’s free will.

There’s no reason to ask why prophecy and healing and tongues ceased, because they never ceased — God is the same yesterday and today and forever. The revelation of Jesus was not limited to one corner of the globe — salvation is only through the name of Jesus and all have heard his name.

The atonement is not limited but infinite, and guarantees resurrection for all from the first death. We’re responsible to live righteously in this probationary period if we want to escape the second death. There’s an internally logical simplicity to the Book of Mormon that could appeal to someone who’s exhausted by lofty churchmen with their complicated empty words and conceited empty lives.

Also, none of the weird stuff is in the Book of Mormon. Plural marriage is outright condemned in Jacob 2-3 and Ether 10, and is tacitly absent in the social welfare system of Mosiah 21. There’s not a trace of the complicated system of righteous men achieving exaltation to godhood. I assume these were later revelations, but I’m open to correction from someone who knows more than I do.

If you’re not theologically grounded, there isn’t anything freaky here to put your back up. I can understand how the “plain speaking” of the Book of Mormon might appeal as an alternative to crusty orthodoxies that seem more interested in their own power structures than in living like Jesus.

Second, the Book of Mormon is very much a work of its time. Americans were fascinated by the vanished Mound Builders, so the idea of great precursor civilizations was in the air. The agnostic teachings of the false prophet Korihor sound an awful lot like 19th-century scientific materialism.

In the east, the social panic of Anti-Masonry echoes in the secret rites of the Gadianton robbers. In the west, the opening of the hinterlands to settlement provides an obvious escape route for persecuted Mormons in the same way that Lehi and his family fled to the American wilderness ahead of judgment.

I even find theological justification for “management” of Native American populations. In the account of the final triumph of the godless Lamanites over the apostate Nephites, the path to redemption for the Lamanites includes laying aside weapons and forswearing violence.

Since Mormon anthropology considers Native American tribes as degraded remnants of the Lamanites, it’s not difficult to sense the prejudices of expanding white America. Tribes that submit peacefully are on the path to redemption, and those that resist are wicked Lamanites practically begging for conquest.

As I read it, the Book of Mormon appeared at the only time it could have found such explosive success. Rising tensions over slavery threatened the geopolitical order, rising materialism undermined the spiritual order, rising disillusionment with organized religion left people religiously hungry but spiritually adrift, and rising consciousness of extinct civilizations made the discovery of ancient records plausible. If this is right, then the rise of Mormonism is not as hard to understand as it might first appear.

I set out in this review to be charitable, and I’m not sure I succeeded. No doubt, a devout Mormon would consider this nothing but a polite attack on their faith, a reduction of a movement of God to a quirky side effect of social and historical forces.

There’s probably some truth to that. I didn’t finish my reading of the Book of Mormon with an inclination to convert, but I do feel I understand its appeal in its time. Even today, progressive Mormons like fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, who seems to acknowledge the fictional nature of the book’s narrative, considers it a story through which God molds the character of his people.

Given this sort of adaptability in the teeth of advancing knowledge, not to mention Mormonism’s long track record of cohesive community and hard work, I suspect that both the faith and its book will survive for some time regardless of how strange or outdated it appears outside the walls of the temple. show less