Mormonism Explained
What Did Brigham Young Teach? Every Contested Claim
Adam–God. Blood atonement. The priesthood ban. An inhabited sun. “Only polygamists become Gods.” Critics keep the list; this page keeps the ledger — every contested teaching, quoted from the primary record, run through the Church’s own published test, and classified: canonized, current, superseded, disavowed, or one man’s opinion.
The Short Answer
Did Brigham Young teach false doctrine?
He taught for thirty years, nearly daily, mostly the gospel of Jesus Christ — and some of what he said was wrong, and the Church itself has said so. That double sentence is the honest summary, and this page holds both halves at once. The serious items are real: he developed the Adam–God theory, which a later prophet denounced by name; he preached blood-atonement rhetoric the Church has rejected; he instituted the priesthood and temple ban whose justifying theories the Church has formally disavowed. The shock-quote items are also real, and different in kind: an inhabited sun (“I rather think it is”) was a hedged musing that matched the astronomy of his century; the “only men who become Gods... enter into polygamy” line carries, in its own next sentence, a condition critics omit — the condemnation falls on those who refused an offered commandment — and the practice it assumed was formally ended in 1890. Run every item through the Church’s published standard — canon by common consent, consistent current teaching, formal declaration — and the pattern is not chaos but a distribution: the gravest teachings were corrected by the system itself, the sensational ones were never doctrine at all, and the core he actually taught daily — Christ, the Atonement, temple covenants, the gathering, the embrace of all truth — is the part still standing. Prophets erring and being corrected is not a Latter-day Saint embarrassment; it is the Bible’s own portrait of the office, from Peter down. This page shows every row of the ledger, including the ones that sting — and including the conduct charges, from the missionary’s wife to the Mountain Meadows book, held to the same evidentiary bar as everything else.
Key Takeaways
- The list is real, and we publish it. Every contested teaching appears below, quoted from the primary record — JD citations included — nothing paraphrased from memory, nothing omitted for comfort.
- The verdicts are not ours. Each item is classified by the Church’s own published standard: is it canon, is it consistently taught today, was it formally declared, was it ever binding?
- The serious items were corrected by the system. Adam–God: denounced by name by a later prophet (1976). Race teachings: disavowed by name (2013). The ban: ended by revelation (1978). The corrections are the standard working — not the standard failing.
- The shock quotes were never doctrine. The inhabited sun was a hedged musing that matched Herschel’s astronomy; the polygamy-exaltation line carries its own overlooked condition and was superseded in 1890.
- Apostolic error has a biblical precedent — starting with a fisherman. Peter came untrained from his nets (“unlearned and ignorant men” — Acts 4:13); Brigham from a carpenter’s bench with eleven days of schooling. Both erred; both were corrected; both kept the calling.
The Critics’ Reading
“The list of Brigham Young’s false teachings speaks for itself” The compilation case: stack the worst quotes end to end and the office is discredited — a prophet this often wrong is no prophet, and the church that followed him inherits the wreckage.
The Ledger’s Reading
“Classify every row and a pattern appears — correction, not concealment” The same list, run through the published test: the grave items were formally corrected, the sensational ones never rose to doctrine, the daily teaching was Christ — and the distribution is the story the compilation hides.
A list proves a man said things. A ledger shows what the Church did about them — and that is the actual question.
Every row primary-cited. Verdicts by the Church’s own test.
Before the List, the Denominator
Thirty Years of Preaching: the Base Rate
Start with who he was before any of it — because the origin is half the explanation. Brigham Young was born in 1801 in Whitingham, Vermont, the ninth of eleven children of a poor farming family; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen; and his formal schooling totaled, by his own account, about eleven days. At sixteen he was apprenticed in Auburn, New York, as a carpenter, painter, and glazier — a skilled one, whose mantelpieces and furniture survive in New York homes today. A Methodist seeker, he would not be rushed: when the Book of Mormon reached his family in 1830, he refused to join on his relatives’ enthusiasm — “I examined the matter studiously for two years,” he later said — and was finally baptized in April 1832 in the millstream behind his own carpentry shop. His wife died of consumption that September. Three years later, with no theological training of any kind, the carpenter was ordained an apostle. Hold that sequence next to the New Testament’s and the pattern is unmistakable: the Lord called Peter from his nets, Matthew from the tax booth, and Brigham from the workbench — men with callings instead of credentials. It explains the record below — the idiom, the improvisation, the reasoning out loud: not a theologian’s precision but a convert’s fire, thinking with his hands in public.
He led the Church from 1844 (formally from 1847) until his death in 1877, and preached, by the era’s habit, nearly every Sabbath and at every settlement he visited — a public teaching corpus spanning three decades, hundreds of discourses in the Journal of Discourses alone, and thousands more unrecorded. The overwhelming substance of it is unremarkable to critics precisely because it is unquotable as scandal: the Atonement of Jesus Christ, faith, repentance, the temple and its covenants, the gathering of Israel, honest dealing, education — his 1870 declaration that the gospel “embraces all truth” was the theme of the very discourse critics mine for the inhabited sun. He organized the exodus that saved the church, colonized hundreds of settlements, founded the institutions Utah still runs on, and administered the temple ordinances Latter-day Saints regard as his ministry’s core. None of that excuses an error; it establishes the denominator — and a compilation of a man’s worst sentences from thirty years of daily speaking is a numerator with the denominator deleted. This page restores it, then examines every row without flinching.
The Instrument, Ancient and Modern
The Standard: Peter, and the Modern Apostles’ Test
Every verdict below rests on a standard, so the standard comes first — and it is not ours, and not new. Begin with what the first apostles were: Peter was a fisherman, called from his nets with no training and nothing but the desire to follow — the Jerusalem council sized up him and John in a sentence scripture kept: “unlearned and ignorant men... they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). The carpenter of Mendon fits the pattern exactly — and the pattern includes the errors. In Matthew 16, this same fisherman receives revelation from the Father — “flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee” (v. 17) — and six verses later rebukes Christ for teaching He must suffer and die, earning the Gospels’ harshest reply: “Get thee behind me, Satan” (v. 23). The chief apostle, wrong about the Atonement itself, moments after revelation — and he kept the keys, preached Pentecost, and led the church. Nor was Peter the exception among the Twelve; he was the type. James and John — fishermen, the “sons of thunder” — asked to call fire down on a village (Luke 9:54) and maneuvered for the chief seats, setting the ten quarreling (Mark 10:35–41). Thomas refused the Resurrection until he touched the wounds (John 20:25). The whole quorum disputed who was greatest at the Last Supper itself (Luke 22:24), slept through Gethsemane, and “all forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50). Paul and Barnabas parted in a contention “so sharp” (Acts 15:39); Peter erred again at Antioch, corrected “to the face” (Galatians 2:11). The New Testament did not sanitize its apostles; it canonized their corrections alongside their callings — and that is the office Brigham Young held, and the standard for reading his record.
The modern apostles state the same standard as a working test. Elder D. Todd Christofferson, in general conference: it should be remembered that not every statement by a Church leader constitutes doctrine — “a statement made by one leader on a single occasion” often represents personal, though considered, opinion, not binding on the whole Church. Elder Neil L. Andersen, six months later, gave the positive form: true doctrine is taught by all fifteen apostles over time — it is “not hidden in an obscure paragraph of one talk.” And President Dieter F. Uchtdorf said the quiet part in conference plainly: there have been times when “leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes.” Add the mechanism — canonization by common consent, plus the united teaching of the First Presidency and Twelve — and the four-gate test used on every row below is complete. It classifies the inhabited sun as opinion, the Adam–God theory as repudiated, and “worlds without number” as canonized: teeth in every direction, the only kind of test worth publishing.
The Ledger, Part I — the Five Serious Items
These five carry the real weight of the criticism; each has a full Mormonism Explained investigation behind it. The ledger states the teaching, the citation, the verdict, and where the deep-dive lives.
Teaching
What he said / did (primary record)
Verdict
Repudiated by name — Pres. Kimball, 1976: “We denounce that theory”
Teaching
What he said / did (primary record)
Verdict
Rejected — the Church formally rejects the idea; rhetoric-vs-practice examined in the study
Teaching
What he said / did (primary record)
Verdict
Disavowed by name — Race and the Priesthood essay (2013): all such theories disavowed
Teaching
What he said / did (primary record)
Verdict
Ended by revelation — Official Declaration 2 (1978); its justifications disavowed (2013)
Teaching
What he said / did (primary record)
Verdict
Personal opinion — never canonized, never curriculum; the era’s mainstream astronomy
Read the verdict column top to bottom and notice what the compilation framing conceals: the gravest items on the list were formally corrected by the Church itself — denounced by name, disavowed by name, ended by canonized revelation. Critics present the list as what Mormonism is hiding. The verdicts are published on the Church’s own website — and the corpus math runs the same direction: of the more than 1,500 of his sermons that were recorded, roughly twenty, by one count, touch the Adam–God theory at all; even his most developed speculation was a sliver of what he preached. A cover-up does not issue formal disavowals; a living canon does. The one item on this table that was never corrected is the one that never needed to be — a musing that no one was ever asked to believe. That asymmetry, between what required repudiation and what required nothing, is the ledger’s first lesson.
The Ledger, Part II — the Rest of the List
“The only men who become Gods... are those who enter into polygamy” (JD 11:269, Aug. 1866). The most-quoted line in the critics’ set, and the fullest lesson in reading the record. The quote is real. Its own next sentence — omitted in nearly every critical use — supplies the condition: others attain glory but cannot reign as kings, “because they had blessings offered unto them, and they refused to accept them.” The condemnation falls on refusing an offered commandment, not on monogamy as such — and a modern retranscription of the discourse from the stenographer’s original shorthand shows Young twice conditioning the expectation on a people having the privilege to practice. Taught while plural marriage was commanded, it was superseded when the commandment was withdrawn (Official Declaration 1, 1890); no prophet since has taught polygamy as required for exaltation, and current doctrine ties exaltation to the covenant of marriage — monogamy the standard.
Interracial-marriage rhetoric, including “death on the spot” (JD 10:110, 1863). The harshest sentence in the racial corpus — treated in full, with the entire register of statements, in the race cluster. Disavowed with the rest of the race teachings.
“Sermons as scripture” (JD 13:95, 1870). Young occasionally spoke expansively of his preaching’s authority — and answered the claim himself: Elder Christofferson recounts an occasion when Brigham Young told the Saints that what they had heard him preach that morning was the mind of man, and that the Lord would now speak. The Church’s mechanism — canonization by common consent — never adopted the claim; and the Church’s own historians have since shown the Journal of Discourses is not even a reliable transcript: comparing George D. Watt’s original Pitman shorthand to the published sermons, they found the printed texts “differ significantly from what speakers actually said” — words added, questions recast as statements, whole passages with no basis in the shorthand. Never canonized, and demonstrably altered in publication.
Alleged false prophecies. A family of claims, mostly conditional counsel or era-bound expectation read as prophecy; each candidate requires its own primary-text verification, and none was canonized.
The Other Side of the Ledger — What He Taught That Stood
A ledger that only ever lists errors is not a ledger — it is a prosecution. Set the contested rows beside the control group: what Brigham Young taught that the Church still teaches and still does.
Teaching
The Record
Verdict
Canonized practice — current
Teaching
The Record
Verdict
Current — the Church’s core work
Teaching
The Record
Verdict
Current teaching
Teaching
The Record
Verdict
Canonized — the gospel itself
These rows are not decoration; they are the control group. A test that only ever returns “opinion” for embarrassments would be an escape hatch. This one returns canonized where the record earns it, disavowed where the Church said so, and opinion where nothing was ever binding — the full instrument, applied without a thumb on the scale.
The Ledger, Drawn
The Distribution — What the Verdicts Show
Where Every Contested Item Lands — the Verdict Distribution
Canonized / Current
4 — succession · temple work · all-truth education · the daily gospel
Official Position
1 — the ban’s end: Official Declaration 2, canonized 1978
Superseded / Disavowed
5 — Adam–God · blood atonement · race teachings · the ban · JD as scripture
Personal Opinion
3 — sun/moon · sermons-as-scripture · false-prophecy family
The pattern: the grave items were formally corrected. The sensational ones were never doctrine.
Every red-letter verdict was issued by the Church itself — denounced by name (1976), ended by revelation (1978), disavowed by name (2013), superseded by declaration (1890). A concealment operation does not publish its own corrections. A living canon does.
All five destinations are populated— which is the point. A ledger where every row lands at “opinion” would be apologetics; one where every row lands red would be an attack page. The honest distribution is the signature of an investigation — the same standard as the mixed verdicts across every study on this site.
The Four Gates Every Row Was Run Through
1 · In the canon, by common consent?
2 · Taught consistently by all 15, today?
3 · Formal First Presidency declaration?
4 · Ever binding — curriculum, required?
The full instrument, with worked examples across our library, classifies every contested teaching this site publishes the same way.
The standard precedes the controversy:the gates come from the Church’s own published statements on what constitutes doctrine (Newsroom 2007; Christofferson 2012; Andersen 2012) — not from a defense built after the fact.
Beyond Teachings — Held to the Same Bar
The Conduct Charges: the Missionary’s Wife, and the Lee Book
“He sent men on missions and then married their wives.” The claim circulates as a pattern; the record contains an anchor case — Henry Jacobs and Zina Diantha Huntington — and the documented chronology runs in the opposite order from the accusation. Zina, already sealed to Joseph Smith for eternity in 1841, was sealed to Brigham Young for time in the Nauvoo Temple on February 2, 1846 — with Henry Jacobs present as a witness, the temple sealing record noting that he expressed his willingness. The couple then left Nauvoo together five days later; Henry cared for Zina across Iowa, where their second son was born in March. The mission call to England came in May 1846 — three months after the sealing, not before it, in an era when mission calls were the constant lot of active elders (Henry had already served roughly eight missions since 1839). Zina entered Brigham’s household only after Henry had departed and her father had died that August; and she bore no child with Brigham until after Henry’s return. Zina’s own testimony, late in life: “the marriage was unhappy and we parted.” The lurid version — Brigham announcing before hundreds that Zina was now his — traces to a single hostile memoir (William Hall) that no contemporary diarist corroborates. So the claim, as circulated, is chronologically false in its anchor case, and no documented pattern of mission-then-marriage exists. What honestly remains is real and should be said plainly: a living man’s wife was sealed to another man under a marital theology that is genuinely strange to modern eyes; the Jacobs marriage ended by ecclesiastical understanding, not civil divorce; and Henry’s letters show a man who grieved.
The 1877 book: Mormonism Unveiled, “the confessions of John D. Lee.” The volume — often brandished as Brigham Young’s indictment — requires exactly the source discipline this page applies everywhere else. What it is: John D. Lee’s life story and confession, dictated to and edited by his defense attorney, William W. Bishop, in the window between Lee’s conviction for the Mountain Meadows Massacre and his 1877 execution — then published commercially, packaged with a sensational “complete life of Brigham Young” and marketed on its exposé value. Multiple versions of Lee’s final statement exist, and historians note Bishop’s editorial hand in the published text; even the book’s own preface is the attorney’s framing, not Lee’s voice. That does not make it worthless — scholars use it, cautiously, as one witness among the many records of the massacre era — but it makes it a lawyer-edited, posthumous, for-profit memoir, precisely the class of source this page declined to accept for the moon-people story, and the same bar applies here.
The scope line, stated plainly so no one mistakes it for evasion: Mountain Meadows was an atrocity; the massacre of the Baker–Fancher company is the darkest event in Latter-day Saint history; and this page’s only claim about it is that a teachings ledger is the wrong instrument for it. The full study is queued, and this page will link it on publication.
Steelmanning the Compilation
The Strongest Objection
The serious critic grants the method and turns it around: fine — run the test; but look at what it took. A theory about the identity of God Almighty, preached by the prophet for years, requiring a formal denunciation a century later. A racial theology, taught from the pulpit, requiring a canonized revelation and then a named disavowal to root out — after a hundred and twenty-six years. Rhetoric about atoning blood that had to be officially rejected. If the office carried real revelatory protection, the critic argues, it should not generate errors of this magnitude in the first place; a “self-correcting system” that takes twelve decades to correct is indistinguishable from an ordinary human institution slowly bowing to social pressure — and the retrospective test, however published, is cold comfort to the generations who lived under the uncorrected teaching. The list is not the problem, says the strong critic. The half-life of the list is.
The answer has to concede the real weight before it answers, so: the durations are real, the generations who lived under the ban were really harmed, and this site’s race-cluster studies say so without qualification. Three things remain true after the concession.
Three Things That Remain True
The objection assumes a promise the faith never made.
The Latter-day Saint claim is not that prophets cannot err or that the church at any moment is error-free; it is that God works through fallible servants and that the canon and the keys persist through the errors — the same claim the Bible makes for a church whose chief apostle was called “Satan” by the Lord he served and whose Gentile question took decades and a public confrontation to settle. Scripture’s own correction half-lives are not short.
Direction matters as much as duration.
An ordinary institution bowing to pressure preserves its founders’ honor and quietly deletes; this one canonized a reversal (1978), published the disavowal by name (2013), and put the primary documents — Journal of Discourses included — in its own digital library where every quote on this page can be checked. That is not the behavior of concealment; it is the behavior of an institution that believes its canon can survive its history.
The test’s verdicts are doing real work in both directions.
The same instrument that lets a Latter-day Saint decline the Adam–God theory as repudiated obligates them to own the ban as the Church’s act, not a rogue opinion. What remains after all three is a genuine question of faith the ledger cannot settle: whether a God who tolerates that much error in His servants is the God of the Bible. The believer answers yes and points to Peter. The critic answers no. But that question — not the list — is the real disagreement, and it should be argued honestly, on that ground.
The Honest Answer
So — What Did Brigham Young Teach?
Mostly, the gospel of Jesus Christ, for thirty years — and among it, real errors, the gravest of which the Church itself has formally corrected, and the loudest of which were never doctrine at all. The ledger classifies every contested row by the Church’s own published test, and the distribution is the finding: canonized where the record earns it, disavowed where the Church said so, opinion where nothing ever bound anyone — with the conduct charges held to the same evidentiary bar and the hardest event in the history routed to its own full investigation. The one-sentence version: the list proves Brigham Young was a fallible man; the ledger shows he served inside a system with a living canon — and the difference between those two findings is the whole argument.
Our Editorial Standard, Shown
The Nine-Principle Review: How This Article Was Stress-Tested
The four-gate test classifies the claims. This second instrument reviews the article itself against nine principles drawn from the published teachings of the Church’s prophets and apostles. On a compilation page, the eighth principle — owning every fact, including the ones that sting — is the load-bearing wall.
Principle
The Test
How This Article Passes
Principle
The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
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The Test
How This Article Passes
Principles drawn from published teachings including: D. Todd Christofferson, “The Doctrine of Christ” (Apr. 2012); Neil L. Andersen, “Trial of Your Faith” (Oct. 2012); Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Come, Join with Us” (Oct. 2013); Dale G. Renlund, “Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny” (Apr. 2022); Russell M. Nelson, “Hear Him” (Apr. 2020) — all available at churchofjesuschrist.org. The same nine-point review is applied to every doctrine article we publish.
At a Glance
Quick Answers
Did Brigham Young teach false doctrine?
He taught some things that were wrong — and the Church itself formally corrected the gravest of them: denounced (1976), ended by revelation (1978), disavowed by name (2013).
Yes — and the Church said so
Did he teach the Adam–God theory?
Yes (JD 1:50, 1852). President Kimball denounced it by name in 1976.
Taught — then repudiated
Did he say only polygamists become Gods?
Yes (JD 11:269) — with a next sentence critics omit: the condemnation is for refusing an offered commandment. Superseded by Official Declaration 1 (1890).
Real quote — read its own context
Did he send men on missions and marry their wives?
The anchor case runs the other way: the sealing (Feb 1846, husband witnessing) came three months before the mission call (May 1846). No documented pattern exists.
The timeline is backwards
Is the Journal of Discourses scripture?
No — a commercially published, stenographic sermon series, never canonized. Doctrine is canon by common consent plus consistent apostolic teaching.
Never canonized
Was everything else he taught fine, then?
No — the ledger shows five destinations populated, from canonized to disavowed. The honest distribution, not a clean bill, is the finding.
A distribution, not a verdict
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn’t “it was never doctrine” just an escape hatch?
Not when the same test convicts: it classifies Adam–God as repudiated, the race teachings as disavowed, and the ban as the Church’s own act requiring canonized reversal — verdicts against the comfortable reading. It returns “opinion” only where nothing was ever binding and “canonized” where the record earns it: all five destinations populated — a standard, not a hatch.
Did Brigham Young take Henry Jacobs’ wife?
The documented sequence: Zina Huntington, sealed to Joseph Smith in 1841, was sealed to Brigham Young for time on February 2, 1846, with Henry Jacobs present as witness — the sealing record notes his expressed willingness. The couple traveled west together afterward; the mission call came three months later; Zina joined Brigham’s household only after Henry departed and her father died; her own summary: the marriage “was unhappy and we parted.” The era’s marital theology is genuinely hard, and our polygamy histories treat it in full — but the “mission first, wife after” version reverses the record.
Should I trust Mormonism Unveiled (the John D. Lee book)?
Read it as historians do: a significant but compromised source — dictated to and edited by Lee’s attorney between conviction and execution, published for profit with a sensational Brigham Young exposé attached, with multiple versions of the final statement in the record. Where it touches teachings, see our blood-atonement study; the Mountain Meadows Massacre itself deserves and will receive its own full investigation rather than a margin note here.
What did Brigham Young teach that Latter-day Saints still follow?
The succession order of the Twelve, governing every transition since 1847; the temple work that is the Church’s core ministry; education as religious duty — the root of three universities; and, overwhelmingly, for thirty years — faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, and the Atonement. The contested rows are real; they were never the curriculum.
From the DMs: The Harder Questions, Answered
The objections readers actually send in, put at full strength.
“The Church’s own manual changed Brigham’s ’wives’ to ’[wife]’ — you people whitewash him and always have.”
Verdict: That edit happened, it was a poor choice — and the Church has since published the whole record itself.
The 1997 Teachings of Presidents manual did silently singularize a quotation — a poor editorial call, fairly criticized; even a doctrine-not-history curriculum should not alter quotes. But the trajectory since runs opposite to whitewash: the Church published the plural-marriage Gospel Topics essays (2013–14) and posted the primary records in its own digital library. This page quotes the raw JD, not the manual. Judge the charge by where the record lives today: on the accused’s own servers, in full.
“Adam–God wasn’t a stray comment — he taught it for years and said God revealed it. Your ’opinion’ framework can’t hold it.”
Verdict: Correct — which is why this page doesn’t classify it as opinion.
The ledger puts Adam–God in the most serious tier short of canon: a developed teaching, pressed by a prophet, that the Church later had to repudiate by name — the tier that proves the framework has a category for exactly this case. The honest reading is neither “just an opinion” nor “secret doctrine still lurking”: a prophet advanced a theory, the body of the Church never canonized it, contemporaries including Orson Pratt resisted it openly, and a successor holding the same keys denounced it from the same pulpit. Two facts complicate even the confident critical version: the surviving records split — some have Young certain, others guessing at what he believed true — and scholars who try to reconstruct a coherent doctrine from the reported statements conclude they cannot; the record is as defective as the theory. The system’s full weight — resistance, non-canonization, repudiation — is the answer.
“You put Mountain Meadows out of scope because you can’t defend it. Convenient.”
Verdict: It is out of scope because it is an event, not a teaching — and it is getting the full investigation, not a footnote.
Compressing the massacre into one ledger row would be the actual evasion — the subject deserves the modern documentary scholarship at full length. This page states plainly that Mountain Meadows was an atrocity, the darkest event in Latter-day Saint history; it classifies the Lee book honestly; the complete study is queued. Scoping a subject to the instrument that can handle it is rigor; burying it in a margin would be the convenience.
Sources
- Journal of Discourses 1:50; 4:53–54; 10:110; 11:266–272; 13:95; 13:271 — the primary sermon record for every ledger row (never canonized).
- Spencer W. Kimball, “Our Own Liahona” (Nov. 1976) — the repudiation by name; Official Declarations 1 (1890) & 2 (1978); “Race and the Priesthood” (2013). churchofjesuschrist.org
- Matthew 16:16–23; Acts 10; Galatians 2:11–14 — the New Testament record of apostolic revelation and error (KJV). churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures
- Christofferson, “The Doctrine of Christ” (Apr. 2012); Andersen, “Trial of Your Faith” (Oct. 2012); Uchtdorf, “Come, Join with Us” (Oct. 2013) — the modern apostles’ published test. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference
- Nauvoo Temple sealing record #142 (Feb. 2, 1846), Henry Jacobs witnessing; Zina D. H. Young interview (1898); Jacobs letters (1846); Church History Topics, “Zina D. H. Young”. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics
- Gospel Topics Essays: “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo”; “Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah”. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays
- John D. Lee (ed. W. W. Bishop), Mormonism Unveiled (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand & Co., 1877) — the lawyer-edited, posthumous confessions; classified in §06.
- Carruth, “Preached vs. Published” (Church History Dept., 2020); Dirkmaat & Carruth, “The Prophets Have Spoken, but What Did They Say?”, BYU Studies 54:4 — the shorthand-vs-published JD scholarship. history.churchofjesuschrist.org · byustudies.byu.edu