115 Facts About Joseph Smith

In 1830, Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he described as an English translation of those plates.

Joseph Smith dictated the majority of these in the first-person, saying they were the writings of ancient prophets or expressed the voice of God.

Joseph Smith's followers accepted his teachings as prophetic and revelatory, and several of these texts were canonized by denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement, which continue to treat them as scripture.

Joseph Smith's teachings discuss God's nature, cosmology, family structures, political organization, and religious community and authority.

Joseph Smith was born on December 23,1805, in Vermont, on the border between the villages of South Royalton and Sharon, to Lucy Mack Smith and her husband Joseph Smith Sr.

At the age of seven, Joseph Smith suffered a crippling bone infection and, after receiving surgery, used crutches for three years.

Joseph Smith's parents disagreed about religion, but the family was caught up in this excitement.

Joseph Smith said that, although he had become concerned about the welfare of his soul, he was confused by the claims of competing religious denominations.

Years later, Joseph Smith wrote that he had received a vision that resolved his religious confusion.

Joseph Smith claimed this angel revealed the location of a buried book made of golden plates, as well as other artifacts including a breastplate and a set of interpreters composed of two seer stones set in a frame, which had been hidden in a hill near his home.

Joseph Smith said he attempted to remove the plates the next morning, but was unsuccessful because Moroni returned and prevented him.

Joseph Smith reported that during the next four years he made annual visits to the hill, but, until the fourth and final visit, each time he returned without the plates.

Meanwhile, Joseph Smith's family faced financial hardship, due in part to the death of his oldest brother Alvin, who had assumed a leadership role in the family.

Joseph Smith was said to have an ability to locate lost items by looking into a seer stone, which he used in treasure hunting, including, beginning in 1825, several unsuccessful attempts to find buried treasure sponsored by Josiah Stowell, a wealthy farmer in Chenango County.

When he proposed marriage, her father, Isaac Hale, objected; he believed Joseph Smith had no means to support his daughter.

Later that year, when Joseph Smith promised to abandon treasure seeking, his father-in-law offered to let the couple live on his property in Harmony and help Joseph Smith get started in business.

Joseph Smith made his last visit to the hill shortly after midnight on September 22,1827, taking Emma with him.

Joseph Smith said Moroni commanded him not to show the plates to anyone else, but to translate them and publish their translation.

Joseph Smith said the plates were a religious record of Middle-Eastern indigenous Americans and were engraved in an unknown language, called reformed Egyptian.

Joseph Smith told associates that he was capable of reading and translating them.

Joseph Smith said Anthon initially authenticated the characters and their translation, but then retracted his opinion after learning that Smith claimed to have received the plates from an angel.

Harris persuaded Joseph Smith to let him take 116 pages of manuscript to Palmyra to show a few family members, including his wife.

Joseph Smith was devastated by this loss, especially since it came at the same time as he lost his first son, who died shortly after birth.

Joseph Smith said that as punishment for his having lost the manuscript, Moroni returned, took away the plates, and revoked his ability to translate.

Joseph Smith said that Moroni returned the plates to him in September 1828, and he then dictated some of the book to his wife Emma.

Joseph Smith later claimed that, probably around this time, Peter, James, and John had appeared to him and had ordained him and Cowdery to a higher priesthood.

Joseph Smith's authority was undermined when Cowdery, Hiram Page, and other church members claimed to receive revelations.

Joseph Smith then dispatched Cowdery, Peter Whitmer, and others on a mission to proselytize Native Americans.

When Joseph Smith moved to Kirtland in January 1831, he encountered a religious culture that included enthusiastic demonstrations of spiritual gifts, including fits and trances, rolling on the ground, and speaking in tongues.

Joseph Smith brought the Kirtland congregation under his authority and tamed ecstatic outbursts.

Joseph Smith had promised church elders that in Kirtland they would receive an endowment of heavenly power, and at the June 1831 general conference, he introduced the greater authority of a High Priesthood to the church hierarchy.

Joseph Smith lived there, though he visited Missouri again in early 1832 to prevent a rebellion of prominent church members who believed the church in Missouri was being neglected.

Joseph Smith's trip was hastened by a mob of Ohio residents who were incensed over the church's presence and Joseph Smith's political power.

Joseph Smith advised his followers to bear the violence patiently until after they had been attacked multiple times, after which they could fight back.

Joseph Smith sent two church representatives to petition Missouri governor Daniel Dunklin for protection and support, but Dunklin declined to aid the Mormons.

Joseph Smith gave a revelation announcing that in order to redeem Zion, his followers would have to receive an endowment in the Kirtland Temple.

Joseph Smith encouraged his followers to buy the notes, in which he invested heavily himself.

Joseph Smith was held responsible for the failure, and there were widespread defections from the church, including many of Joseph Smith's closest advisers.

Construction of the Kirtland Temple had only added to the church's debt, and Joseph Smith was hounded by creditors.

Joseph Smith encouraged the settlement of land outside Caldwell County, instituting a settlement in Adam-ondi-Ahman, in Daviess County.

Joseph Smith explicitly approved of the excommunication of these men, who were known collectively as the "dissenters".

Joseph Smith implicitly endorsed this speech, and many non-Mormons understood it to be a thinly veiled threat.

Joseph Smith was immediately brought before a military court, accused of treason, and sentenced to be executed the next morning, but Alexander Doniphan, who was Joseph Smith's former attorney and a brigadier general in the Missouri militia, refused to carry out the order.

Joseph Smith was then sent to a state court for a preliminary hearing, where several of his former allies testified against him.

Illinois then accepted Mormon refugees who gathered along the banks of the Mississippi River, where Joseph Smith purchased high-priced, swampy woodland in the hamlet of Commerce.

Joseph Smith attempted to portray the Mormons as an oppressed minority and unsuccessfully petitioned the federal government for help in obtaining reparations.

Joseph Smith introduced baptism for the dead in 1840, and in 1841 construction began on the Nauvoo Temple as a place for recovering lost ancient knowledge.

An 1841 revelation promised the restoration of the "fullness of the priesthood"; and in May 1842, Joseph Smith inaugurated a revised endowment or "first anointing".

The endowment resembled the rites of Freemasonry that Joseph Smith had observed two months earlier when he had been initiated "at sight" into the Nauvoo Masonic lodge.

For women, Joseph Smith introduced the Relief Society, a service club and sorority within which Joseph Smith predicted women would receive "the keys of the kingdom".

Joseph Smith elaborated on his plan for a Millennial kingdom; no longer envisioning the building of Zion in Nauvoo, he viewed Zion as encompassing all of North and South America, with Mormon settlements being "stakes" of Zion's metaphorical tent.

Joseph Smith introduced the doctrine to a few of his closest associates, including Bennett, who used it as an excuse to seduce numerous women, wed and unwed.

Certain he would be killed if he ever returned to Missouri, Joseph Smith went into hiding twice during the next five months, until the US Attorney for Illinois argued that his extradition would be unconstitutional.

Two law officers arrested Joseph Smith but were intercepted by a party of Mormons before they could reach Missouri.

Joseph Smith was then released on a writ of habeas corpus from the Nauvoo municipal court.

In December 1843, Joseph Smith petitioned Congress to make Nauvoo an independent territory with the right to call out federal troops in its defense.

Joseph Smith then wrote to the leading presidential candidates, asking what they would do to protect the Mormons.

Joseph Smith initially fled across the Mississippi River, but shortly returned and surrendered to Ford.

Conversely, within the Latter Day Saint community, Joseph Smith was viewed as a prophet, martyred to seal the testimony of his faith.

Joseph Smith attracted thousands of devoted followers before his death, and millions in the century that followed.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members consider Joseph Smith the founding prophet of their church.

Meanwhile, Joseph Smith's reputation is ambivalent in the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which never accepted his Nauvoo-era theological innovations, and late-twentieth-century theological changes further separated the denomination's self-identity from Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith's death resulted in a succession crisis within the Latter Day Saint movement.

Joseph Smith had proposed several ways to choose his successor, but never clarified his preference.

Smith's sons Joseph III and David were too young: Joseph was aged 11, and David was born after Smith's death.

Two of Joseph Smith's chosen successors, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, had already left the church.

Joseph Smith withdrew from religion until 1860, when she affiliated with the RLDS Church headed by her son, Joseph III.

Emma maintained her belief that Joseph Smith had been a prophet, and she never repudiated her belief in the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

Cowdery suspected Joseph Smith had engaged in a relationship with Fanny Alger, who worked in the Joseph Smith household as a serving girl.

Joseph Smith did not deny having a relationship, but he insisted that he had never admitted to adultery.

Joseph Smith's first recorded revelation was a rebuke chastising Joseph Smith for having let Martin Harris lose 116 pages of Book of Mormon manuscript.

The character of Moroni, and the angel of the same name who Joseph Smith claimed to have guided him to the golden plates, are considered the same figure.

However, people close to Joseph Smith said that later in the process of dictation, he used a chocolate-colored stone he had found in 1822 that he had used previously for treasure hunting.

Joseph Knight said that Smith saw the words of the translation while, after excluding all light, he gazed at the stone or stones in the bottom of his hat, a process similar to divining the location of treasure.

Sometimes, Joseph Smith concealed the process by raising a curtain or dictating from another room; at other times he dictated in full view of witnesses while the plates lay covered on the table or were hidden elsewhere.

Joseph Smith voiced and promulgated the revelations with confidence, as if he were an Old Testament prophet, and the language of authority in Joseph Smith's revelations appealed to converts.

In June 1830, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation in which Moses narrates a vision in which he sees "worlds without number" and speaks with God about the purpose of creation and the relation of humankind to deity.

Joseph Smith produced a "new translation" of the Bible, not by directly translating from manuscripts in another language, but by amending and appending to a King James Bible in a process which he and Latter Day Saints believed was guided by inspiration; Smith asserted his translation would correct lacuna and restore what the contemporary Bible was missing.

In 1835, Joseph Smith encouraged some Latter Day Saints in Kirtland to purchase rolls of ancient Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibitor.

Joseph Smith said they contained the writings of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph.

Joseph Smith described the revelatory process as having "pure Intelligence" flowing into him.

In 1833, Joseph Smith edited and expanded many of the previous revelations, publishing them as the Book of Commandments, which later became part of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Three months later, Joseph Smith gave a lengthy revelation called the "Olive Leaf" that discussed subjects such as light, truth, intelligence, and sanctification.

Also in 1833, at a time of temperance agitation, Joseph Smith delivered a revelation called the "Word of Wisdom", which counseled a diet of wholesome herbs, fruits, grains and a sparing use of meat.

In 1835, Joseph Smith gave the "great revelation" that organized the priesthood into quorums and councils, and functioned as a complex blueprint for church structure.

Joseph Smith moved away from formal written revelations spoken in God's voice, and instead taught more in sermons, conversations, and letters.

For instance, the doctrines of baptism for the dead and the nature of God were introduced in sermons, and one of Joseph Smith's most famed statements, about there being "no such thing as immaterial matter", was recorded from a casual conversation with a Methodist preacher.

Joseph Smith taught that all existence was material, including a world of "spirit matter" so fine that it was invisible to all but the purest mortal eyes.

However, Terryl Givens and Brian Hauglid argue that although Joseph Smith sometimes spoke of God using trinitarian language, revelations he dictated as early as 1830 described God as an embodied being.

Catholic philosopher Stephen H Webb describes Smith having had a "corporeal and anthropomorphic understanding of God" evinced in his 1830 Book of Moses that described God as a physical being who literally resembles human beings.

Steven C Harper states that because, in the 1830s, Smith privately described to some of his followers his 1820 first vision as a theophany of "two divine, corporeal beings," "its implications for the trinity and materiality of God were asserted that early".

Over time, Joseph Smith widely and clearly articulated a belief that God was an advanced and glorified man, embodied within time and space.

Joseph Smith extended this materialist conception to all existence and taught that "all spirit is matter", meaning that a person's embodiment in flesh was not a sign of fallen carnality, but a divine quality that humans shared with deity.

Joseph Smith said that children who died in their innocence would be guaranteed to rise at the resurrection and receive exaltation.

Apart from those who committed the eternal sin, Joseph Smith taught that even the wicked and disbelieving would achieve a degree of glory in the afterlife.

Joseph Smith taught that the Church of Christ restored through him was a latter-day restoration of the early Christian faith, which had been lost in the Great Apostasy.

At first, Joseph Smith's church had little sense of hierarchy, and his religious authority was derived from his visions and revelations.

For instance, in the early 1830s, Joseph Smith temporarily instituted a form of religious communism, called the United Order, that required Latter Day Saints to give all their property to the church, to be divided among the faithful.

Joseph Smith envisioned that the theocratic institutions he established would have a role in the worldwide political organization of the Millennium.

Joseph Smith taught that the High Priesthood's endowment of heavenly power included the sealing powers of Elijah, allowing High Priests to perform ceremonies with effects that continued after death.

Joseph Smith taught that outside the covenant, marriages were simply matters of contract, and that in the afterlife, individuals who were unmarried or who married outside the covenant would be limited in their progression towards Godhood.

When fully sealed into the covenant, Joseph Smith said that no sin nor blasphemy could keep them from their exaltation in the afterlife.

Once Joseph Smith introduced polygamy, it became part of his "Abrahamic project," in the phrasing of historian Benjamin Park, wherein the solution to humanity's chaos would be found through accepting the divine order of the cosmos, under God's authority, in a "fusion of ecclesiastical and civic authority".

Joseph Smith taught that the highest level of exaltation could be achieved through polygamy, the ultimate manifestation of the New and Everlasting Covenant.

In Joseph Smith's theology, marrying in polygamy made it possible for practitioners to unlearn the Christian tradition which identified the physical body as carnal, and to instead recognize their embodied joy as sacred.

Joseph Smith taught that the practice allowed an individual to transcend the angelic state and become a god, accelerating the expansion of one's heavenly kingdom.

In foreign affairs, Joseph Smith was an expansionist, though he viewed "expansionism as brotherhood" and envisioned expanding the United States with the permission of indigenous peoples and at the request of other sovereign peoples.

In practice, Joseph Smith advocated accepting Texas into the Union, claiming the disputed Oregon country, and someday incorporating Canada and Mexico into the United States.

Joseph Smith opposed imprisonment for debt or as a criminal penalty, recommended abolishing courts-martial for military deserters, and encouraged citizens to petition their state leaders to pardon all convicts.

Joseph Smith suggested that courts instead sentence convicts to labor on public works projects, such as road building, and he argued that providing education would make prisons obsolete.

Joseph Smith advocated capital punishment for public officials who failed to aid people whose constitutional rights had been abridged.

Joseph Smith declared that he would be one of the instruments in fulfilling Nebuchadnezzar's statue vision in the Book of Daniel: that secular government would be destroyed without bloodshed, and would be replaced with a "theodemocratic" Kingdom of God.

Joseph Smith taught that this kingdom would be governed by theocratic principles, but that it would be multi-denominational and democratic, so long as the people chose wisely.

Joseph Smith once said that black people "came into the world as slaves" but that this was a situational condition of enslavement rather than a permanent characteristic, and that black Americans were as capable of education as white Americans.

Joseph Smith and other early Mormons believed racial division was a temporary estrangement of an initially united human family, and they considered Joseph Smith's religious movement a divinely ordained way to restore humanity to its original relationship.