Was Joseph Smith a False Prophet?

Part One: The Seven Standard Arguments

1. The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian Papyri

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Robert K. Ritner (Egyptologist), Charles M. Larson (By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus), Stephen E. Thompson, Sandra and Jerald Tanner (Utah Lighthouse Ministry), and many evangelical writers.

Critics argue that the Book of Abraham represents the clearest possible test case of Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims and the clearest possible failure. Joseph claimed in 1842 to translate Egyptian papyri he had purchased from a traveling antiquities dealer, identifying them as the writings of Abraham. He published explanations of three accompanying illustrations (the “facsimiles”) and named the figures and characters in them. When the papyri were rediscovered in 1966 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and returned to the Church, professional Egyptologists translated them and concluded they were ordinary funerary texts — Books of Breathings dating from roughly 300 BC to AD 100, having no connection whatsoever to Abraham. Critics charge that Joseph’s specific identifications of the figures (the goddess Isis identified as a king; Osiris identified as Abraham; Anubis identified as a slave) are demonstrably wrong, and that this constitutes a falsifiable claim Joseph’s translation has failed.

Mormonism Explained Response

First, the Book of Abraham is not a conventional translation, and Joseph Smith never claimed it was. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham” addresses this directly. Joseph Smith claimed no expertise in any ancient language. He described himself as one of “the weak things of the world,” called to deliver words sent from heaven. The Lord told him during the translation of the Book of Mormon that what came forth would not be his own work but God’s. The same applies to the Book of Abraham. By the gift and power of God, Joseph received knowledge about Abraham. The test of that knowledge is not whether it would have satisfied a 19th-century Egyptologist but whether it accurately conveys ancient truth. By that test, the book performs remarkably well.

Second, the surviving fragments are almost certainly not the source. Eyewitnesses to Joseph’s papyri described “a long roll” or multiple “rolls” of papyrus. The eleven fragments returned by the Metropolitan Museum represent only a fraction of what Joseph possessed. The rest were dispersed after Joseph’s 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.” Critics who present the surviving Books of Breathings as definitive proof of mistranslation are presenting an argument from absence.

Third, Egyptologists themselves are not unanimous. Robert Ritner, the late University of Chicago Egyptologist whose critiques are most often cited, was one voice among several. Latter-day Saint Egyptologists John Gee and Michael Rhodes have published detailed studies arguing that the facsimile interpretations contain authentic ancient elements. Ancient Egyptian images were frequently reused, repurposed, and reinterpreted across centuries — a documented pattern in Egyptian funerary literature. An illustration originally connected to Abraham could have been adapted into a later Book of Breathings; conversely, an unconnected illustration could, by revelation, illuminate Abraham’s story.

Fourth — and most decisively — the Book of Abraham contains striking ancient confirmations 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 (work published by Kerry Muhlestein and others). 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.

Fifth, the Deuteronomy 18 “false prophecy” test does not apply. 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 critics apply to Joseph Smith, the King James translators would also be “false prophets” for the many translation choices later Hebraists have revised. The standard is misapplied to the case at hand.

2. Alleged Contradictions in Revelations About God

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Walter Martin (The Kingdom of the Cults), Bill McKeever (Mormonism Research Ministry), Ed Decker (The God Makers), Hank Hanegraaff (the Bible Answer Man), and most evangelical countercult writers.

Critics argue that Joseph Smith taught radically inconsistent doctrines about the most foundational of all questions: who God is. They cite Alma 11 in the Book of Mormon, where the prophet Amulek answers “No” to the question of whether there is more than one God. They cite the same book’s other strict-monotheist passages. Yet they then point to Joseph’s later revelations and sermons — the King Follett Discourse, the Book of Abraham creation account, Doctrine and Covenants 132 — which describe “the Gods” organizing creation, the righteous becoming gods themselves, and God Himself as a being who once was as we are now. Walter Martin and others argue that this represents a complete doctrinal revolution and that a true prophet would not contradict himself on the very nature of God.

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” to Zeezrom in Alma 11, he is responding to a specific question: 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 oneness, including 3 Nephi 11, where the resurrected Christ declares that He, the Father, and the Holy Ghost are one. Scripture Central scholars including Blake Ostler have demonstrated that the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s later revelations have always carefully balanced the unity of the Godhead with the distinctness of the divine persons. The pattern is not contradiction but progressive clarification.

When the King Follett Discourse and the Book of Abraham use the language of “the Gods” organizing the world, or when Doctrine and Covenants 132 promises that the righteous “shall be gods,” they are speaking of two distinct things. The first is consistent with the plural noun Elohim in Genesis 1, where Hebrew scholars have long observed that “God created” is, in the underlying text, a plural form. The second is the doctrine of deification or theosis, which we treat in detail under Point 7.

Joseph Smith himself 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 on the matter had been consistent for fifteen years. The historical record bears this out. Scripture Central scholars Bruening and Paulsen have shown in detail that the supposed “early modalism” Walter Martin and others claim to find in Joseph’s earliest teachings is a misreading. Joseph’s doctrine of God deepened across his ministry; it did not reverse itself.

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, where Jesus prays to the Father as a distinct person and declares that He and the Father are one. If the biblical revelation of God unfolded across centuries, it is no scandal that a restoration prophet’s revelations unfolded across years.

3. Archaeology and the Book of Mormon

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Michael Coe (Yale Mesoamerican archaeologist, in his 1973 Dialogue interview), Thomas Stuart Ferguson (formerly LDS, founder of the New World Archaeological Foundation, who lost faith late in life), Sandra Tanner, John Ankerberg and John Weldon.

Critics argue that the Book of Mormon claims a thousand-year history of two great civilizations — the Nephites and the Lamanites — culminating in a final battle in which hundreds of thousands died. Such civilizations should have left massive archaeological footprints. Yet, critics charge, no Mesoamerican city, artifact, inscription, or skeleton has ever been positively identified with the Book of Mormon. Michael Coe, perhaps the most cited Mesoamerican archaeologist on this subject, said in his 1973 Dialogue interview that no respectable Mesoamerican specialist views the Book of Mormon as historical. Thomas Stuart Ferguson, who founded the New World Archaeological Foundation specifically to find Book of Mormon evidence, ultimately concluded the search had failed and lost faith in the book’s historicity.

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 claim to 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 Becan 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.

Thomas Stuart Ferguson’s loss of faith is sometimes presented as decisive testimony against the book. It is worth noting that his approach was searching for a specific Book of Mormon city by name and giving up when he could not produce it. Most scholars, Latter-day Saint and otherwise, would say that is not how archaeology actually works on any ancient text. Most biblical cities cannot be definitively identified either; that does not falsify the Bible.

Critics also apply a double standard. They grant that biblical archaeology — including for the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, and the United Monarchy — can be inconclusive yet still consistent with biblical history. The same epistemological generosity should be extended to the Book of Mormon. 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 its critics suggest.

4. Alleged Fabrication and Plagiarism

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Fawn Brodie (No Man Knows My History, 1945), David Persuitte (Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon), I. Woodbridge Riley (the original 1903 proponent), Sandra Tanner, and many evangelical writers. B. H. Roberts, a faithful Latter-day Saint General Authority, raised the question seriously in his private studies and is sometimes invoked by critics.

Critics argue that the Book of Mormon is unmistakably a 19th-century product. They point to Ethan Smith’s 1823 book View of the Hebrews, which argued that American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel and was published in Vermont near Joseph Smith’s birthplace. They point to the Solomon Spaulding Manuscript theory, which dominated 19th-century critiques. They point to the Book of Mormon’s extensive use of King James phrasing, including King James translation errors imported into a supposedly ancient text. Fawn Brodie’s 1945 biography No Man Knows My History argued that all the materials of the Book of Mormon were available in Joseph Smith’s environment. Fradd makes the same case in compressed form.

Mormonism Explained Response

The Spaulding theory is dead, and the View of the Hebrews theory is among the weakest of all the proposed sources. When the Spaulding manuscript was rediscovered in 1884, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints published it precisely so that anyone could compare it with the Book of Mormon. The comparison ended the theory. View of the Hebrews fares no better. 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 — proposed View of the Hebrews. The theory was first floated by I. Woodbridge Riley 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 to the plagiarism theory. 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. View of the Hebrews makes much of supposed Israelite battle amulets; the Book of Mormon’s many battle scenes contain no such fetish. Scripture Central scholar John Gee and others have catalogued page after page of these “unparallels.”

1933. H. Roberts, the Latter-day Saint General Authority who studied the two books most rigorously and most candidly, is sometimes presented by critics as a closeted doubter. The historical record is otherwise. Roberts treated his study as an exercise in playing devil’s advocate; he never concluded that Joseph Smith had used View of the Hebrews; and his faith in the Book of Mormon as ancient scripture remained unshaken until his death in 1933. From 1922 to 1933, his service to the Church was uninterrupted, and he repeatedly testified of the Book of Mormon’s truthfulness.

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 Smith, 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 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 and whose variants are difficult to explain on the assumption of a 19th-century forger sitting at a desk with a King James open in front of him.

The Book of Mormon also contains features no 19th-century forger could plausibly have produced: complex chiastic structures, Hebraic idioms (such as the construct state, cognate accusatives, and conditional “if-and” constructions), specifically Semitic name patterns, internal consistency across hundreds of named characters and locations, and intricate political and religious institutions. These features are not what a plagiarist produces; they are what an ancient text contains.

5. Joseph Smith’s Character and Plural Marriage

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Sandra and Jerald Tanner, Fawn Brodie, John Dehlin (Mormon Stories podcast), Jeremy Runnells (CES Letter), Todd Compton (whose 1997 In Sacred Loneliness, although not anti-LDS, is heavily cited by critics), and many evangelical writers.

Critics argue that Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage is morally disqualifying. They note that he practiced it in secret while publicly denying it; that he was sealed to women including some in their teens; that several of those women were already married to other men (so-called “polyandry”); that he told some women they had been divinely commanded to marry him under threat of an angel with a drawn sword; and that his wife Emma was not always informed of these marriages. Fradd grants that polygamy appears in the Old Testament but argues it is descriptive, not prescriptive, and that the New Testament permits only monogamy. Sandra Tanner and others argue further that Joseph used his prophetic claims as cover for his own desires.

Mormonism Explained Response

Plural marriage is genuinely the most difficult chapter in early Latter-day Saint history. The Church has not tried to hide it. Its Gospel Topics Essays “Plural Marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”, “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo,” “Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah,” and “The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage” discuss it openly and at length. A serious response does not require minimizing the difficulty; it requires placing the difficulty 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 through the 1890 Manifesto.

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, the “teenage girls” claim 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, publishing her own pamphlets in the 1880s. The historical record consistently shows that the women sealed to Joseph Smith were not victims; the great majority of them remained committed Latter-day Saints, traveled west with the Saints, and defended Joseph and the practice for the rest of their lives.

Fourth, the so-called polyandrous sealings have plausible non-sexual explanations. Joseph was sealed to a number of women who were already married to other men. Several of these women themselves stated that the sealings were “for eternity alone.” Possible explanations include Joseph’s reluctance to enter ordinary plural marriages because of Emma’s pain; the use of sealing as a method of linking families together for eternity (a function later fulfilled by ordinary temple sealings to one’s birth family); and the desire of women in unhappy marriages to non-LDS or former LDS men to be sealed for eternity to a faithful priesthood holder. In Nauvoo, most of these women continued to live with their first husbands during Joseph’s lifetime, and complaints from those first husbands are virtually absent from the documentary record.

Fifth, secrecy was a practical necessity, not a sign of guilt. Plural marriage was illegal in the United States and deeply foreign to 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. Joseph’s discretion mirrors the Lord’s repeated counsel throughout scripture to withhold sacred matters from those who would profane them.

Plural marriage was, in Joseph Smith’s own words, the hardest trial the Saints would ever face. The Church has neither hidden that fact nor pretended it was easy. 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 standards of their commandment; neither was Joseph Smith by the standards of his.

6. The First Vision Accounts

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Wesley P. Walters (1969 Dialogue article), Fawn Brodie, Sandra Tanner, Grant Palmer (An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, 2002), Dan Vogel (Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, 2004), H. Michael Marquardt, and many evangelical writers.

Critics make two related arguments. The first, advanced principally by Methodist minister Wesley Walters in 1969, is that Joseph Smith’s reported revival of 1820 in Palmyra, New York, did not actually occur — that documentary evidence locates the major Palmyra revival in 1824-25 instead. If the revival is misdated, Walters argued, the religious anxieties Joseph reports must be fabricated. The second argument, made by many writers including Fradd, Brodie, Palmer, and Vogel, is that Joseph’s four firsthand accounts of the First Vision contradict each other. The 1832 account, they argue, describes only one heavenly being. The later accounts describe two — God the Father and Jesus Christ. For an event so foundational, this kind of embellishment over time, critics argue, suggests the story grew rather than was remembered.

Mormonism Explained Response

The Church has openly published all four firsthand First Vision accounts and addressed both arguments directly. Its Gospel Topics Essay “First Vision Accounts” treats the Walters and Brodie arguments 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.

On the Walters revival argument: Walters and his successors located a major revival in Palmyra in 1824-25 and concluded there was no such revival in 1819-20. But careful historical work by Latter-day Saint scholars Milton Backman and Richard Bushman has documented substantial religious activity in Joseph’s region in 1819 and 1820, including a Methodist camp meeting in Palmyra in June 1818, a Methodist assembly at Vienna in summer 1819, and the journals of Methodist itinerant preacher Reverend George Lane describing religious fervor in the area in both 1819 and 1820. Joseph’s own description was of “unusual religious excitement” in the broader region, not specifically in Palmyra town, and his own family was religiously divided in those years. Even Walters and Bushman ultimately came to agree that Joseph’s religious awakening could plausibly have begun with a Methodist camp meeting somewhere along the road to Vienna, providing a real “seed” for the later vision.

On the multiple-accounts argument: 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 critics apply to Joseph Smith, Paul should be a false apostle and the Gospels should be discredited. Historians do not work that way. They expect significant experiences to be remembered and retold differently in different settings, and they treat such variation as evidence of authentic memory rather than evidence of invention.

It is also worth observing what the four accounts have in common. 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. The variations in detail are precisely what one would expect from a genuine recollection retold to different audiences across more than a decade.

7. The Doctrine of Becoming Like God

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Matt Fradd, Walter Martin, Bill McKeever, Ed Decker, Hank Hanegraaff, James White, and most evangelical countercult writers.

Critics argue that Joseph Smith taught a doctrine fundamentally incompatible with biblical monotheism: 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. Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults, the most influential evangelical countercult work of the 20th century, treats this doctrine as the decisive evidence that Latter-day Saints are not Christian. Critics cite Isaiah 44:6 — “I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God” — and argue that Joseph’s doctrine is a complete departure from Christian belief and disqualifies him as a prophet.

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. The Orthodox theologian Norman Russell describes 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 critics acknowledge. 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. Becoming Like God 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 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. They do not worship multiple Gods. They worship one God, in three Persons, who has invited them into the divine family.

The doctrine that God was once as we are now — the Lorenzo Snow couplet to which critics often allude — 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 Latter-day Saint claim is the one Joseph Smith 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.

8. DNA and the Book of Mormon

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Simon Southerton (Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church, 2004), Thomas W. Murphy (“Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics”), Sandra Tanner, Jeremy Runnells (CES Letter).

Critics argue that modern DNA science has falsified the Book of Mormon’s account of Israelite origins for Native Americans. Population genetic studies of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups consistently show Native Americans descending from Asian ancestors who crossed the Bering Strait. No Middle Eastern or Israelite genetic signature has been identified. Simon Southerton, an Australian ex-LDS molecular biologist, made this argument the centerpiece of his 2004 book. Thomas Murphy, an anthropologist who faced Church discipline for his arguments, took the position that Lamanite identity “lacks verifiable biological or historical underpinnings.” Critics charge that the Church’s prior introduction to the Book of Mormon, describing Lamanites as the “principal ancestors” of American Indians, has been scientifically refuted.

Mormonism Explained Response

The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies” addresses this argument directly and at length. Several points emerge from that essay and from the work of Latter-day Saint geneticists Ugo Perego and Jayne Ekins, both of whom have professional credentials in population genetics.

First, the argument depends on a hemispheric reading of the Book of Mormon that the text does not require. If the Book of Mormon describes a small group of immigrants entering an already populated continent in a limited geographic area, then the genetic signature of those immigrants would be expected to diffuse and recede over thousands of years. In 2006, the Church updated the introduction to the Book of Mormon to describe Lamanites as “among the ancestors” of American Indians rather than “the principal ancestors” — a clarification that reflects the scholarly consensus on limited geography rather than a retreat under fire.

Second, population genetics is not designed to detect what critics expect it to detect. The genetic markers used in these studies — mitochondrial haplogroups and Y-chromosome haplogroups — trace only the strict maternal line and the strict paternal line. They are blind to the vast majority of an individual’s actual ancestors. After roughly 25 generations (about 600 years), the ancestral lines that are not strictly mother-of-mother or father-of-father simply disappear from these markers, even though those ancestors really existed and contributed real genetic material to the descendants. Founder effects, genetic drift, and population bottlenecks compound the problem. A small founding population entering a large existing population can leave detectable Y or mtDNA signatures only with great difficulty after thousands of years.

Third, no one knows what “Israelite DNA from 600 BC” actually looks like. We have no preserved genetic samples from the Israelite tribe of Manasseh in the seventh century BC. Modern Jewish populations have absorbed thousands of years of admixture with the populations among whom they have lived. Comparing modern Native American haplogroups to modern Jewish haplogroups and concluding that no ancient Israelite migration occurred is comparing two unknowns to each other.

Critics also point to the studies of Murphy and Southerton themselves, but these were not designed to test Book of Mormon historicity. They were designed to study Native American origins broadly. The conclusion that Native Americans descend predominantly from Asian populations is uncontroversial and was never disputed by Latter-day Saint scholars. The unwarranted leap is from “predominantly Asian” to “no Israelite component at all,” which the genetic methods used cannot support.

9. Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Sandra and Jerald Tanner, Michael Coe, John Ankerberg and John Weldon, Bill McKeever, Jeremy Runnells (CES Letter), and many evangelical writers.

Critics argue that the Book of Mormon describes plants, animals, and technologies that did not exist in pre-Columbian America. The list typically includes: horses, oxen, cattle, asses, sheep, goats, swine, elephants, chariots, steel, iron, wheat, barley, silk, and linen. Each of these, critics argue, is a telltale fingerprint of a 19th-century author projecting his familiar world backward into a fabricated ancient setting.

Mormonism Explained Response

The anachronism argument has been one of the most significant areas of vindication for the Book of Mormon over the past century. Several alleged anachronisms have been resolved as scholarship has progressed.

Horses. For most of the 20th century, the consensus was that horses became extinct in the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene (around 10,000 BC) and were not reintroduced until Spanish contact. A 2022 study by an international team of scientists published in the Texas Journal of Science presented radiocarbon-dated horse specimens recovered from stratified contexts at Rancho Carabanchel near Cedral, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Several of the specimens dated to Book of Mormon times — including samples from the mid-second millennium BC (consistent with Jaredite-era references in Ether 9:19), the sixth or fifth century BC (consistent with Lehi’s arrival in 1 Nephi 18:25), and the first century AD (consistent with 3 Nephi 3:22 and 6:1). The bones belonged to extinct North American horse species (Equus mexicanus and Equus conversidens), ruling out Spanish contamination. The evidence is not yet conclusive but is strongly suggestive that horses survived in pockets later than previously believed.

Steel and iron. Pre-Columbian iron-ore working sites have been documented at San Lorenzo in Veracruz and at Mirador Plumajillo and Amatal in Chiapas. Olmec iron-ore beads have been studied archaeometrically. The presence of metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is no longer disputed.

Barley. Pre-Columbian domesticated barley has been confirmed in the American Southwest and elsewhere — another item once dismissed as a fingerprint of fraud, now confirmed as historical.

Wheat, sheep, cattle, swine. These remain disputed. Two faithful interpretive options exist. The first is loanshifting: the ancient peoples of the Book of Mormon may have applied their inherited Old World terms to similar but distinct New World species, just as the Spanish did when they encountered the New World (calling the bison a “cow,” the tapir a “buffalo,” and so on). The second is translator anachronism: as Latter-day Saint scholar Brant Gardner has noted, the King James Version of the Bible itself contains anachronisms (such as “candles” used for oil lamps that long predate the invention of candles). These appear only in translation, not in the original text. The same may be true of certain animal and plant terms in the Book of Mormon’s English.

The Latter-day Saint Mesoamerican archaeologist John E. Clark has summarized the trajectory: “the Book of Mormon looks better with age.” Many of the anachronisms confidently asserted in 1830 are no longer anachronisms in 2026. Hugh Nibley once observed that every paradox and anomaly in scholarship is really a broad hint that new knowledge is awaiting discovery. The history of Book of Mormon “anachronisms” vindicates that observation.

10. The Seer Stone and the Translation Method

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Grant Palmer (An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, 2002), Sandra and Jerald Tanner, Dan Vogel, John Dehlin, Jeremy Runnells (CES Letter).

Critics make two related charges. The first is that the Church for many decades suppressed the actual method of the Book of Mormon translation. Official Church artwork through the late 20th century depicted Joseph Smith translating directly from the gold plates, sometimes with the Urim and Thummim. But the historical record from witnesses including Emma Smith, David Whitmer, Martin Harris, and others describes Joseph putting his face into a hat with a seer stone inside, while the plates often lay covered nearby or were not even in the room. Grant Palmer’s An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins drew widespread attention to this discrepancy. The second charge is that the seer stone Joseph used to translate was the same stone he had used as a teenager to look for buried treasure — implying, critics argue, that the Book of Mormon emerged from a folk-magic worldview rather than divine revelation.

Mormonism Explained Response

The Church has been transparent about both the method and the seer stone. The Gospel Topics Essay “Book of Mormon Translation” describes the seer stone use openly. In 2015, the Church published photographs of the actual brown seer stone Joseph used, in the Joseph Smith Papers volume Documents 5 and in Ensign magazine. There is no concealment to expose. There is ongoing public scholarship by Latter-day Saint historians including Michael MacKay, Gerrit Dirkmaat, and Mark Ashurst-McGee. The picture critics treat as a Church secret is, in fact, the picture the Church itself has published.

The translation method does not affect the truthfulness of what was translated. Ancient prophets received revelation through unusual means: Aaron’s rod that budded, the biblical Urim and Thummim worn by the high priest, dreams, visions, the casting of lots, the bronze serpent lifted by Moses. The Book of Mormon itself prophesies in Alma 37 of “my servant Gazelem, a stone” — Latter-day Saints have long understood this as a prefiguring of Joseph Smith’s translation instruments. The hat blocked ambient light so Joseph could see the words appearing in the stone. Witnesses describe him dictating word for word, often spelling out unfamiliar names character by character, with the scribe reading back what was written before the next phrase appeared. Royal Skousen’s textual analysis of the original manuscript confirms the dictation pattern.

The fact that Joseph used the same kind of instrument for treasure-seeking and for translation is not embarrassing; it is meaningful. Joseph Smith was, by his own description, a young man living in a culture where seer stones were widely used and respected. Mark Ashurst-McGee, the most thorough modern scholar of Joseph’s youth, describes Joseph’s trajectory as that of a “village seer” who used his spiritual gift initially to search for lost objects and legendary treasures, who was then “called and nurtured by God” and “repurposed his gifts to bless people” through the Restoration. President Dallin H. Oaks has publicly endorsed this developmental reading. The same gift used in immature ways in Joseph’s youth became, under God’s tutelage, the means of bringing forth the Book of Mormon. That is not a scandal — it is a pattern of grace.

Critics sometimes treat the seer stone as proof of fraud. But fraud requires concealment, and Joseph never concealed it. He acknowledged his early treasure-seeking work in his 1838 history. His mother, Lucy Mack Smith, described it. His scribes described the translation method openly to anyone who asked. The story critics treat as a buried scandal is in fact a story Joseph and the Church have always told — sometimes more prominently, sometimes less, but never hidden.

11. Money Digging and the 1826 Trial

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Fawn Brodie, Dan Vogel, Sandra and Jerald Tanner, D. Michael Quinn (Early Mormonism and the Magic World View), Grant Palmer.

Critics argue that Joseph Smith was a money-digger before he claimed to be a prophet. He used his seer stone to look for buried treasure, working for Josiah Stowell on a Spanish silver mine expedition near the Pennsylvania border. In March 1826, he was brought before a court in South Bainbridge, New York, on a “disorderly person” charge. Critics — most prominently Fawn Brodie — have argued that this proves Joseph was a charlatan well before any prophetic claims. Dan Vogel’s biography reads Joseph’s whole prophetic career through the lens of his earlier treasure-seeking, treating the religious project as a continuation of the magical one.

Mormonism Explained Response

Joseph Smith never hid this part of his history. His own canonized history (Joseph Smith—History 1:56) describes his hire by Josiah Stowell to assist in searching for the Spanish silver mine. In an 1838 question-and-answer exchange, Joseph was asked directly, “Was not Joe Smith a money-digger?” His answer: “Yes, but it was never a very profitable job for him, as he only got fourteen dollars a month for it.” His mother Lucy described the same events. There is no concealment for critics to expose.

Treasure-seeking was widespread in early 19th-century rural New York culture. Folk practices involving seer stones, divining rods, and treasure-guardian lore were common across the burned-over district. The Smith family’s involvement was, by the standards of their neighbors, unremarkable. Richard Lyman Bushman’s biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling places Joseph’s early activities in their actual cultural context — in which they look much less unusual than critics make them appear.

Josiah Stowell — the man supposedly defrauded — testified in Joseph’s favor. Stowell’s nephew Peter Bridgeman brought the 1826 charge, believing his uncle was being scammed. But Stowell himself, who had worked alongside Joseph for several months and had every opportunity to judge his character, testified at the trial that Joseph genuinely had the gift of seership and that Stowell had “the most implicit faith in Prisoners skill.” Stowell would later become an early supporter of the Restoration, would defend Joseph again at an 1830 trial, and would be one of the first non-family members to handle the gold plates. The man who knew the situation best did not believe he had been defrauded.

Joseph was acquitted, not convicted. Legal historian Gordon A. Madsen, working from recently recovered original court documents, has demonstrated that Joseph was found guilty of no crime at the 1826 hearing. Critics have for decades presented the trial as a conviction; the documentary record contradicts this.

More fundamentally, the seer-stone gift Joseph used as a teenager looking for treasure became — under God’s direction — the instrument of the Book of Mormon translation. That is not embarrassment; that is what God does with imperfect human gifts. Joseph progressed. The trajectory of his life was not from honest skeptic to clever fraud but from village seer to prophet of God. His critics know only the first chapter and call it the whole book.

12. The Kinderhook Plates

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Walter Martin, Sandra and Jerald Tanner, Bill McKeever, Ed Decker, Jeremy Runnells (CES Letter).

In April 1843, a man named Robert Wiley produced six brass bell-shaped plates, supposedly excavated from a burial mound at Kinderhook, Illinois. The plates were brought to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo. According to a subsequently published History of the Church entry — written in the first person as “I have translated a portion” — Joseph translated part of the plates and identified them as the record of a Jaredite. In 1980, chemical analysis conclusively proved the plates were a 19th-century hoax: their etching pattern, alloy composition, and creation by acid bath were inconsistent with any ancient origin. Critics charge that Joseph fell for an obvious forgery, definitively proving his “translation gift” was bogus.

Mormonism Explained Response

The first-person History of the Church statement is not actually Joseph Smith’s. Stanley B. Kimball’s research, originally published in the Improvement Era in 1981, established this clearly. The published statement “I have translated a portion” was created by editing William Clayton’s third-person journal entry — “President J. has translated a portion” — into first person. This editorial change was made years after Joseph’s death, when his journal materials were being reformatted into the History of the Church. The resulting first-person statement was carried into the official History of the Church in 1909 and has been mistakenly cited ever since. Joseph Smith himself never wrote “I have translated a portion” of the Kinderhook plates.

What Joseph actually did with the plates was minimal. Historians Mark Ashurst-McGee and Don Bradley have analyzed the documentary record carefully. The “portion” Clayton and Parley P. Pratt mentioned appears to derive from a single boat-shaped character on one of the plates that vaguely resembled a character in Joseph’s earlier Egyptian Alphabet documents. Joseph attempted ordinary character-comparison — the sort of thing he had done with the Book of Abraham preliminary papers — and found a single tentative correspondence. He never produced a sustained translation. He never claimed revelatory knowledge of the plates’ contents. He never sought to acquire the plates. He never published a “Book of Kinderhook.”

Joseph’s restraint with the Kinderhook plates is actually evidence for, not against, his prophetic gift. A charlatan would have produced a translation. Robert Wiley and his accomplices openly admitted later that they had created the plates specifically to bait Joseph into a public translation that would discredit him. Their trap failed. Joseph’s revelatory gift, as the Lord exercised it, did not produce a translation of a forged record. The Kinderhook plates were not “of ancient date,” so the gift did not function. As Scripture Central scholars have noted, the same pattern appears in the Book of Mormon itself: when the Jaredite plates were brought to King Mosiah, his gift of seership translated them precisely because they were genuine. The Kinderhook story is consistent with — not contrary to — the Latter-day Saint understanding of how Joseph’s gift worked.

Critics frequently treat the Kinderhook plates as the smoking gun. The historical record, carefully read, places the gun in Wiley’s hand, not Joseph’s. The trap was set; it caught no one. That is the actual historical fact.

13. Masonic Influence on the Temple Endowment

The Common Critique

Critics commonly making this argument: Ed Decker (The God Makers), Walter Martin, Sandra and Jerald Tanner, Bill McKeever, Jeremy Runnells (CES Letter), and many evangelical writers.

Joseph Smith was initiated as a Freemason in March 1842. Less than two months later, on May 4, 1842, he introduced the temple endowment to nine close associates in Nauvoo — all of whom were also Masons. The endowment ritual contains striking surface similarities to Masonic initiation ritual: handshakes, signs, tokens, ritualized clothing, an oath of secrecy, and certain dramatic motifs. Critics — Ed Decker’s The God Makers being perhaps the most widely circulated example — argue that Joseph lifted the endowment from Masonry, and that the timing makes the borrowing undeniable.

Mormonism Explained Response

The timing is real, and Latter-day Saints have not denied it. The conclusion drawn from it is the problem. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw’s 2022 book Freemasonry and the Origins of Latter-day Saint Temple Ordinances, reviewed approvingly at Scripture Central, makes the substantive case in detail. Bradshaw’s thesis is that the doctrinal architecture of the endowment was revealed to Joseph Smith more than a decade before he encountered Masonry, traceable through three principal lines: the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible (early 1830s), the oath and covenant of the priesthood (Doctrine and Covenants 84, 1832), and the Kirtland Temple ordinances (1836). The endowment of 1842 was the unfolding of these earlier revelations into ritual form, not a fresh import from Masonic ritual.

Both Freemasonry and the Latter-day Saint endowment may share common ancient roots. Hugh Nibley devoted decades of scholarship to documenting fragments of ancient temple traditions preserved in many later sources, including Masonic ritual, Gnostic texts, Egyptian funerary literature, Eastern Orthodox liturgy, and rabbinic sources. The Latter-day Saint claim is not that the endowment is identical to Masonic ritual; the claim is that it is the restoration of the original temple ordinances, of which Masonry retains some echoes through medieval craft guild traditions that may go back, in part, to Solomon’s Temple. As the Encyclopedia of Mormonism puts it: few of the supposed source fragments were actually available in Joseph Smith’s day, and those fragments do not come together by themselves to make a whole. The completeness and coherence of the endowment as it stands cannot be explained by 19th-century borrowing.

The substantive content of the endowment has no Masonic parallel. What the endowment actually teaches — the creation, the fall, the plan of salvation, the role of Jesus Christ as Redeemer, the covenants of the gospel, the sealing of families for eternity — has no counterpart in Masonic ritual. Masonry is a fraternal organization with allegorical lessons drawn from the building of Solomon’s Temple. The endowment is a complete ordinance of salvation centered in Christ. Surface similarities in the form of handshakes and signs do not extend to the substance of what is taught and covenanted.

Joseph Smith himself reportedly told Heber C. Kimball that Masonry was a corrupted relic of priesthood ordinances, not the source of them. Whether or not that statement has been preserved with perfect accuracy, it captures the actual Latter-day Saint position. The endowment did not come from Masonry. The endowment and Masonry both contain, in different proportions and with different completeness, fragments of something much older.

These are some of the most common questions readers ask about Joseph Smith. Each answer is brief by design — for fuller treatment, follow the links to the relevant sections above or to the cited primary sources.