A point-by-point Mormonism Explained Response
On May 1, 2026, the Daily Wire published a piece by Catholic apologist Matt Fradd titled “7 Reasons Joseph Smith Was A False Prophet.” Fradd opens by telling his Latter-day Saint readers that he is not attacking them — that he loves them, but loves the truth more. We take him at his word, and we offer this response in the same spirit.
Fradd raises seven arguments. None of them is new. They are seven of the most common criticisms made against Joseph Smith over the last fifty years, repeated by figures from Walter Martin to Sandra Tanner to the writers of the CES Letter. Fradd compresses them well, but compression has a cost: each argument is more complicated than his framing suggests, and each one has a serious answer.
What follows takes Fradd’s seven reasons in his exact order and exact wording. For each, we first restate his argument fairly and at length — so any reader, including those who have not read the original piece, can engage the actual claim. Then we offer a substantive response drawing on official Gospel Topics Essays published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and on Latter-day Saint scholarship at Scripture Central. At the end, we point to a more comprehensive companion resource that addresses six additional common criticisms Fradd does not raise.
Reason #1: False Prophecies That Didn’t Come True
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd opens with what he calls one of the easiest tests of a prophet — Deuteronomy 18:20–22, which states that if a prophet’s words do not come to pass, the prophet has not spoken for God. He applies this test to Joseph Smith’s 1842 publication of the Book of Abraham, which Joseph claimed to have translated from Egyptian papyri he had purchased. Fradd notes that scholars could not read Egyptian in Joseph’s day but can now, and that modern Egyptologists who have examined the surviving papyri have demonstrated that Joseph’s specific identifications are wrong. The figure Joseph called “King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head” is, on the actual papyri, the goddess Isis, with the characters above identifying her as “Isis the great, the god’s mother.” The figure Joseph identified as Abraham is the god Osiris. The figure Joseph identified as a slave is the god Anubis. Fradd concludes that a prophet’s words have to match reality, and Joseph’s, in this case, do not.
Mormonism Explained Response
The Book of Abraham is not a conventional translation, and Joseph Smith never claimed it was. He claimed no expertise in Egyptian or any other ancient language. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham” addresses this directly: Joseph described himself as one of “the weak things of the world,” called to deliver words sent from heaven. The book came, as Joseph and the Church teach, by the gift and power of God. The test of that gift is not whether it would have satisfied a 19th-century Egyptologist but whether it accurately conveys ancient truth.
What Fradd does not mention is that the surviving fragments are almost certainly not the source. Eyewitnesses to Joseph’s papyri described “a long roll” or multiple “rolls” of papyrus. The fragments returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 represent only a small portion of what Joseph possessed; the rest were dispersed after his death and most likely perished in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The Church itself acknowledges that the relationship between the surviving fragments and the published Book of Abraham “is largely a matter of conjecture.” Treating the surviving Books of Breathings as definitive proof of mistranslation requires ignoring this gap in the record.
What Fradd also does not mention is what the Book of Abraham contains that Joseph could not have known in 1842. The text describes religiously sanctioned human sacrifice in Abraham’s Chaldea — now corroborated by Egyptological research on capital punishment in that era. It mentions “the plain of Olishem” — not in the Bible, but corresponding to a town “Ulisum” identified through 20th-century inscriptions. It names the deity Elkenah — not in the Bible, but now identified among Mesopotamian gods. Abraham 3:22–23 contains a chiastic structure characteristic of ancient Near Eastern poetry, not 19th-century American prose. Ancient Egyptian and Jewish sources discovered only in the 20th century depict Abraham teaching astronomy to Egyptians, being delivered from sacrifice by an angel, and even appearing in connection with an illustration similar to Facsimile 1. None of this was available to Joseph Smith in 1842.
Finally, the Deuteronomy 18 test does not apply here in the way Fradd suggests. Deuteronomy 18 condemns predictions that fail to come to pass. The Book of Abraham is not a predictive prophecy; it is a translated narrative. By the same standard, the King James translators would also be “false prophets” for the many translation choices later Hebraists have revised. The test is misapplied to the case at hand.
Reason #2: Contradicting Revelations
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd’s second argument concerns the most foundational of all questions: who God is. He cites the Book of Mormon, where the prophet Amulek answers “No” to the question of whether there is more than one God. He then cites Joseph’s later teachings — that “the Gods organized and formed the heavens and the earth,” that righteous Mormons “shall be gods” with “all power” from “everlasting to everlasting,” and that God Himself was once a man who became divine. Fradd characterizes this as a huge change in foundational beliefs and argues that a true prophet’s message should be consistent — especially regarding who God is. He concludes that the contradictions raise serious doubts about Joseph’s claims to divine revelation.
Mormonism Explained Response
The apparent contradiction dissolves once Latter-day Saint theology is understood on its own terms rather than through Trinitarian assumptions. Latter-day Saints affirm both that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God — perfectly unified in purpose, will, mind, and love — and that they are three distinct divine persons. This is the same tension the historic Christian creeds attempt to resolve through the language of one substance and three persons. Latter-day Saints articulate it differently, but they are not claiming three competing deities.
When Amulek answers “No” in Alma 11, he is responding to the specific question Zeezrom posed: is there more than one true God to whom worship is owed? His answer is the answer of biblical monotheism. There is one God of this earth — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in perfect oneness. The Book of Mormon repeatedly affirms this, including 3 Nephi 11, where the resurrected Christ declares that He, the Father, and the Holy Ghost are one. Latter-day Saint scholars including Blake Ostler have demonstrated that the Book of Mormon and Joseph’s later revelations have always carefully balanced the unity of the Godhead with the distinctness of the divine persons.
When the King Follett Discourse and the Book of Abraham use the language of “the Gods” organizing the world, they are using language consistent with Genesis 1, where the underlying Hebrew uses the plural noun Elohim. When Doctrine and Covenants 132 promises that the righteous “shall be gods,” it is recovering an early Christian doctrine called theosis — taught by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Basil the Great, and still central in Eastern Orthodoxy today. (We address this more fully under Reason #7.)
Joseph Smith addressed this charge directly in his last public sermon before his martyrdom. He stated that he had always preached the plurality of Gods — that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three distinct personages — and that his teaching had been consistent for fifteen years. The historical record bears him out. What looks like contradiction to a Trinitarian reader is, on Latter-day Saint terms, the deepening of doctrine that was always there in seed form. Progressive revelation is itself a biblical pattern. The doctrine of God in Genesis is not the doctrine of God in Isaiah; the doctrine of God in Isaiah is not the full doctrine revealed in the Gospel of John. If the biblical revelation of God unfolded across centuries, it is no scandal that a restoration prophet’s revelations unfolded across years.
Reason #3: The Book of Mormon’s Historical Problems
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd argues that the Book of Mormon claims to tell the history of ancient American civilizations — the Nephites and Lamanites — who came from Jerusalem. The problem, he says, is that there is zero archaeological evidence for these civilizations. No cities, no artifacts, nothing. Fradd anticipates the objection that there is also limited archaeological evidence for the Exodus, but he distinguishes the cases: he argues that there is at least some evidence for the Exodus, including Egyptian records of Semitic peoples and archaeological findings in the Sinai. With the Book of Mormon, by contrast, he claims we have entire civilizations supposedly existing for thousands of years and leaving behind no trace. If these civilizations were real, he concludes, we would expect to find something. We find nothing. That is, in his view, a major problem.
Mormonism Explained Response
The claim that there is no archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon misunderstands what the book actually claims. The Book of Mormon does not describe the entirety of pre-Columbian America. It describes a limited geographic area — most plausibly somewhere in Mesoamerica — and a particular religious lineage within a much larger ancient population. Its concluding battles describe regional warfare in a specific location, not the destruction of an entire continent. The expectation that we should find labeled “Nephite” cities is the wrong expectation.
When the question is reframed correctly — does the Book of Mormon’s depicted ancient Mesoamerica match what we now know of ancient Mesoamerica? — the answer changes dramatically. The Book of Mormon describes Nephite cities defended by ditches and earthen embankments. When this was first challenged, Mesoamerican archaeology had no record of such fortifications. Excavations at Becán in modern Campeche revealed a massive ditch-and-embankment fortification system dating to Book of Mormon times, with comparable systems documented at Tikal and elsewhere.
The Book of Mormon describes the use of cement to build houses and even cities. Cement use exploded in central Mexico around 100 BC — a fact entirely unknown to anyone in 1830. The Book of Mormon describes population movements from a southern land to a northern land. Linguists and archaeologists have now traced precisely such migrations through the spread of the Uto-Aztecan language family from the Valley of Mexico northward into the American Southwest, exactly the opposite of the Bering-Strait-southward consensus of Joseph Smith’s day. The Book of Mormon’s mention of metallurgy was once treated as a clear anachronism. Industrial-scale iron-ore working sites have since been documented at San Lorenzo in Veracruz and at Mirador and Amatal in Chiapas.
Writing systems, calendrical systems, complex political and religious institutions, monumental architecture, large-scale warfare, and social stratification — all of which the Book of Mormon describes — are now known features of ancient Mesoamerica. None of them were known features in 1830. The Latter-day Saint Mesoamerican archaeologist John E. Clark has summed up the trajectory: the Book of Mormon looks better with age.
Fradd also applies a double standard. He grants that biblical archaeology, including for the Exodus, can be inconclusive yet still consistent with biblical history. The same epistemological generosity should be extended to the Book of Mormon. Most biblical cities cannot be definitively identified either; that does not falsify the Bible. Archaeology cannot prove the truthfulness of any scripture, and it cannot disprove it either. What archaeology can do is establish whether a text is plausible as an ancient document. By that test, the Book of Mormon performs far better than Fradd’s framing suggests.
Reason #4: Fabrication & Plagiarism
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd’s fourth argument is that the Book of Mormon mirrors Joseph Smith’s time and place. He notes that many books in the early 19th century, and in Joseph’s region, theorized that American Indians had come from Israel. He further claims that Joseph lifted entire sections from the King James Bible, even copying King James translation errors into his “ancient” text. This, Fradd argues, is not the behavior of a divinely inspired prophet; it is the behavior of someone fabricating a religious document.
Mormonism Explained Response
The most commonly cited version of this argument focuses on Ethan Smith’s 1823 book View of the Hebrews, which argued that American Indians were descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel. It is among the weakest of all the proposed sources. There is no documentary evidence that Joseph Smith had ever read or handled it before the Book of Mormon was published. None of Joseph’s many contemporary critics — who searched aggressively for any plausible source — ever proposed View of the Hebrews. The theory was first floated in 1903, more than seven decades after the Book of Mormon was published. And in 1842, Joseph Smith himself, as editor of the Times and Seasons, openly republished a quotation from View of the Hebrews. Plagiarists do not advertise their sources.
The substantive comparison is even less favorable. View of the Hebrews argues that American Indians are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel; the Book of Mormon explicitly says they are not, identifying its main lineage as descendants of Joseph through Manasseh and stating that the lost tribes are located elsewhere. View of the Hebrews makes the Mohawk a vestige of the tribe of Levi; the Book of Mormon contains nothing of the kind. The lists of “unparallels” between the two books run for pages in Latter-day Saint scholarship.
The presence of King James phrasing in the Book of Mormon is well-known and has a faithful explanation. The Lord Himself has explained, through Joseph, that revelation comes to His servants “after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24). For early American readers, the language of Scripture was the language of the King James Bible. When the Hebrew prophets quoted in the Book of Mormon — principally Isaiah — appeared in the translation, the natural scriptural register for them was the King James register.
But the Book of Mormon also diverges from the King James in significant places, sometimes preserving readings closer to the Greek Septuagint or the Dead Sea Scrolls. The famous 2 Nephi 12:16 contains both “ships of Tarshish” (preserved in the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the King James) and “ships of the sea” (preserved in the Greek Septuagint), reading as if it preserves an older text from which both later versions descend. Royal Skousen’s decades of textual study have shown that the Book of Mormon’s Isaiah is not a simple copy of the King James. It is a complex text whose textual history is still being worked out.
One additional voice is worth registering before this section closes — a voice from outside the discipline of historical scholarship but with direct relevance to the historiographical pattern just described. In a 2009 General Conference address titled “Safety for the Soul,” senior Latter-day Saint Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland addressed the source-theory genealogy specifically:
Failed theories about its origins have been born and parroted and have died — from Ethan Smith to Solomon Spaulding to deranged paranoid to cunning genius. None of these frankly pathetic answers for this book has ever withstood examination.
Holland’s framing is theological rather than strictly historical. The framing of this section has been historical. But on the historical specifics, his characterization tracks with what the documentary record shows: each successive source theory — View of the Hebrews, the Spaulding manuscript, post-traumatic invention, deliberate forgery — has been advanced, examined, and found wanting. Holland names the pattern. The historical record confirms it.
The Book of Mormon also contains features no 19th-century forger could plausibly have produced: complex chiastic structures, Hebraic idioms (the construct state, cognate accusatives, conditional “if-and” constructions), specifically Semitic name patterns, internal consistency across hundreds of named characters and locations, and intricate political and religious institutions. These are not the fingerprints of a plagiarist; they are the fingerprints of an ancient text.
Reason #5: Joseph Smith’s Dubious Character
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd’s fifth argument focuses on what he calls moral inconsistencies in Joseph Smith’s life. He notes that Joseph secretly practiced polygamy and married — and, in his framing, slept with — teenage girls, claiming he was divinely commanded to do so. Fradd argues that this violated Christian principles of marriage and morality. A true prophet, he contends, should be held to a high standard of holiness and integrity, but Joseph’s life was filled with moral failures. Fradd anticipates the objection that polygamy appears in the Old Testament, but argues that Old Testament polygamy is descriptive, not prescriptive, and that the New Testament makes monogamy the only expected and permitted form of marriage.
Mormonism Explained Response
Plural marriage is the most difficult chapter in early Latter-day Saint history. The Church has not hidden it. Its Gospel Topics Essay “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo” and the related essays discuss it openly and at length. A serious response does not require minimizing the difficulty; it requires placing it in proper context.
First, the standing law of the Lord regarding marriage is monogamy. The Book of Mormon, in Jacob 2, makes this explicit. God’s default standard for His covenant people is one man and one woman. The same passage allows for one exception — when the Lord Himself commands otherwise, to “raise up seed” unto Him. The biblical pattern is the same. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon practiced plural marriage. The New Testament does not so much abolish polygamy as it addresses a Greco-Roman context where monogamy was already the cultural norm. Latter-day Saints do not claim polygamy is the ideal, only that the Lord — as He has done before in scripture — commanded it for a season and then commanded its end.
Second, Joseph Smith did not enter plural marriage easily or eagerly. By his own report and the consistent testimony of those closest to him, he received the revelation in 1831, hesitated for years, and proceeded only after the appearance of an angel commanded him to obey. The angel appeared three times between 1834 and 1842, the third time with a drawn sword and a warning of destruction unless Joseph went forward. This is not the profile of a man fabricating a doctrine for his own gratification. It is the profile of a reluctant prophet receiving a commandment he did not want.
Third, Fradd’s “teenage girls” framing requires careful context. Most of the women sealed to Joseph Smith were between twenty and forty at the time of their sealings. The youngest, Helen Mar Kimball, was sealed to him at fourteen, several months before her fifteenth birthday. Marriage at such ages, while inappropriate by today’s standards, was legal in that era and was not regarded as scandalous by Helen Mar’s parents — Heber C. and Vilate Kimball — who consented willingly. Helen herself spoke of the sealing as “for eternity alone,” suggesting the relationship was not a sexual one. After Joseph’s death she became one of the most articulate defenders of him and of plural marriage. The historical record consistently shows that the women sealed to Joseph were not victims; the great majority remained committed Latter-day Saints and defended Joseph for the rest of their lives.
Fourth, secrecy in early plural marriage was a practical necessity, not a sign of guilt. Plural marriage was illegal in the United States and was deeply foreign to the surrounding culture. Public disclosure would have brought immediate persecution, prosecution, and likely the destruction of the Church itself — fears amply justified by what eventually happened in the federal anti-polygamy campaigns of the 1880s.
Plural marriage was, in Joseph Smith’s own words, the hardest trial the Saints would ever face. But difficult is not the same as immoral, and unfamiliar is not the same as wicked. The biblical patriarchs whose plural marriages God blessed were not “immoral” by the standard of their commandment; neither was Joseph Smith by the standard of his.
Reason #6: Contradictions in the First Vision Accounts
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd’s sixth argument concerns Joseph Smith’s First Vision, which Fradd correctly identifies as foundational to the Latter-day Saint faith. He argues that Joseph left multiple versions of this event that contradict each other. In the earliest version, Fradd notes, Joseph said he saw only one figure, “the Lord.” In later versions, Joseph claimed he saw God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate beings. Fradd argues that if the vision were a true, divine encounter, it would not make sense for there to be conflicting stories about such a pivotal moment. The discrepancies, in his view, suggest that Joseph fabricated or embellished the experience over time.
Mormonism Explained Response
The Church has openly published all four firsthand First Vision accounts and addressed Fradd’s exact argument directly. Its Gospel Topics Essay “First Vision Accounts” treats the question and provides full historical documentation. Joseph Smith left four accounts in his own hand or dictated to his scribes — dated 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842 — plus several secondhand accounts recorded by contemporaries. The Church has made all of them publicly available.
Three of the four firsthand accounts — 1835, 1838, and 1842 — clearly describe two divine personages. The 1835 account explicitly describes one personage appearing first, followed shortly by another. The 1838 account, canonized as Joseph Smith—History, names them as “two Personages,” one of whom introduced the other as “My Beloved Son.” The 1842 Wentworth letter, written for a non-LDS editor, describes “two glorious personages.” The supposed contradiction reduces to a single account: 1832.
The 1832 account is in fact ambiguous, not contradictory. Joseph’s words are: “the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” That phrasing can plausibly be read in two ways: as describing two beings (one who “opened the heavens” and another who appeared), both called “the Lord,” which is consistent with the later accounts in which the Father introduces the Son who then speaks; or as a brief, personal recollection concentrating on the Savior’s message of forgiveness. In neither reading does it deny that two beings appeared. It simply emphasizes the part of the experience Joseph judged most relevant in 1832: his sins forgiven by the Savior.
Differences across accounts of the same event are normal historical evidence, not signs of fabrication. The Apostle Paul described his vision on the road to Damascus three times in the Book of Acts — each time with different details, different emphases, even different audible reports. The Synoptic Gospels record the Resurrection with notable variations. By the standard Fradd applies to Joseph Smith, Paul should be a false apostle and the Gospels should be discredited. Historians do not work that way. They expect that significant experiences are remembered and retold differently in different settings, and they treat such variation as evidence of authentic memory rather than evidence of invention.
What the four accounts have in common is also worth noting. In every account, Joseph is a young man in a state of religious confusion. In every account, he goes to a secluded place to pray. In every account, he experiences a powerful manifestation of God in answer to that prayer. In every account, he comes away changed. The deep structure of the experience is constant across more than a decade of retelling.
Reason #7: The Problem of Polytheism
Fradd’s Argument: Fradd’s final argument is that Joseph Smith taught a doctrine fundamentally incompatible with biblical monotheism. He notes Joseph’s teachings that God was once a man who became God, that humans can become gods in the same way, and that there are many gods in existence. He cites the King Follett Discourse, in which Joseph said that God “was once as we are now” and that humans must learn how to become gods themselves. Fradd argues that this is not the eternal, uncreated Creator of biblical monotheism but a being who progressed to divinity. He cites Isaiah 44:6 — “I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God” — and concludes that Joseph’s teaching of eternal progression to godhood is not just unbiblical but a complete departure from the Christian understanding of God’s nature. Any prophet who teaches something so fundamentally opposed to Scripture, Fradd concludes, cannot be a true prophet of God.
Mormonism Explained Response
The doctrine that human beings have a divine nature and a divine destiny was widespread in early Christianity, long before Joseph Smith. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay “Becoming Like God” documents this in detail. Irenaeus, the late-second-century bishop and disciple of Polycarp (himself a disciple of the Apostle John), wrote that Jesus Christ became what we are so that He might bring us to be what He is Himself. Clement of Alexandria wrote that the Word of God became man so that man might learn how to become God. Basil the Great spoke of being made God as the highest of human destinies. Modern Orthodox scholars describe the “ubiquity” of the doctrine of deification in the first centuries of Christian history. Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the three great branches of Christianity, retains this doctrine — called theosis — as a central tenet to this day. The teaching that humans can become like God is not a Latter-day Saint invention; it is the recovery of an ancient Christian truth.
The biblical foundation is also stronger than Fradd suggests. Genesis describes humans as created in God’s image and likeness. Psalm 82 declares, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High” — a passage Jesus Himself appealed to in John 10 to defend His own divine claims. Second Peter 1:4 promises believers that they may be “partakers of the divine nature.” Romans 8 says we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. Revelation 3:21 promises that those who overcome will sit with Christ on His throne, even as He overcame and sits with the Father on His. Matthew 5:48 commands disciples to be perfect, even as the Father is perfect. These are not isolated metaphors. They are a thread running through the entire New Testament.
Latter-day Saints are not polytheists in the pagan sense. The Becoming Like God essay states this directly: Latter-day Saints worship one God and only one God. Their exalted future relationship with Him will not change His identity as their Father and their God. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost remain the one God to whom worship is owed. The doctrine of deification does not produce competing pantheons; it produces a family of redeemed children sharing in the glory of the one God who is their Father.
Isaiah 44:6, on which Fradd leans, is best read in the context of Isaiah’s polemic against the dead idols of the surrounding nations. Isaiah’s argument is not against the existence of divine sons of God (a category the Old Testament accepts in passages like Job 1 and Psalm 82); his argument is that there is no other true God to whom worship is owed. Latter-day Saints affirm exactly that.
The doctrine that God was once as we are now — the Lorenzo Snow couplet to which Fradd alludes — is not a canonized creedal formula. The Church has explicitly noted that little has been revealed about the first half of the couplet, and consequently little is taught. President Gordon B. Hinckley, when asked about it by a national reporter, openly acknowledged that this gets into deep theology Latter-day Saints do not fully understand. The core claim is the one Joseph made central in his last great sermon: that human beings have a divine nature, that the Atonement of Jesus Christ makes possible their growth into the fullness of God’s glory, and that this is the consummation of God’s love for His children. Far from being a departure from Christianity, this is the heart of what the early Christians believed the gospel was for.
Where to Go From Here
These seven responses are exactly that — responses. Each one has more to say. And they are not, in any case, the whole landscape of common criticism. There are six more arguments that Matt Fradd does not raise but that critics commonly do — about DNA evidence and Native American ancestry, anachronisms like horses and steel, the seer stone translation method, Joseph’s early money digging and the 1826 trial, the Kinderhook plates hoax, and Masonic parallels in the temple endowment. We have addressed all thirteen of the most common criticisms in our comprehensive companion resource.
For the full treatment, drawing exclusively on official Church publications and on Latter-day Saint scholarship at Scripture Central, see our complete article: Seven Common Criticisms of Joseph Smith — A Comprehensive Mormonism Explained Response. It runs about 10,000 words, treats all thirteen criticisms in the same format used here, and identifies each named critic and documents each answer to its primary sources.
Matt Fradd invited his readers to investigate the issues for themselves. We agree. Read the Gospel Topics Essays at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Read the scholarship at ScriptureCentral.org. And then, as Moroni invited at the close of the Book of Mormon, ask God in faith whether these things are true. That invitation is the deepest claim Joseph Smith ever made — and it remains open to anyone willing to test it.
About the author: Todd Noall is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Mormonism Explained, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to defending Latter-day Saints and Christians against misinformation and media bias.