Joseph Smith (1805-1844)

Birth and family

Joseph Smith Jr. was born on 23 December 1805 at Sharon, Vermont, the fifth of the eleven children borne by Joseph Smith Sr., an itinerant farmer and occasional treasure-seeker, and Lucy Mack Smith, daughter of a New Hampshire farmer — and the fourth of the nine who survived infancy^[2]. At about the age of seven, Joseph underwent a painful operation on his leg to treat a bone infection; he refused the alcohol and the restraints offered to him to endure the pain, and had to walk with crutches for some three years^[3]. In 1816, after several harvests ruined by poor weather in Vermont — 1816 is known worldwide as the “Year Without a Summer”, a consequence of the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 — the family travelled nearly 480 kilometres westward and settled near Palmyra, then Manchester, in New York State^[4].

In 1823, Joseph’s elder brother Alvin died at twenty-five from mercury poisoning following a medical treatment of the time — a bereavement the Smith family later linked, in their recollections, to the period when Joseph began receiving his first visions^[5]. The region where Joseph grew up was then swept by a succession of Protestant “revivals” so intense that the historian Whitney R. Cross nicknamed it the Burned-over District, as Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and communalist sects fought over souls there^[6]. Added to this was a widespread popular culture of magic and divination by seer stone, in which the Smith family was deeply immersed.

Treasure-hunting and the 1826 trial

In the 1820s, Joseph Smith Jr. was locally known as a “glass-looker”: for payment, he offered to locate buried treasure with the aid of a seer stone placed in a hat. On 20 March 1826, at South Bainbridge (New York State), he appeared before a judge on a charge of being a “disorderly person” for this practice; the exact outcome of the trial remains debated among historians, but the Church itself now officially acknowledges that the proceedings took place, on its institutional website^[7]. This biographical detail, long played down, matters for what follows: it was by this same method — face buried in a hat around a stone — that Smith would dictate the text of the Book of Mormon three years later. For a full examination of the sources and of the historiographical controversy on this point, see The Mormons.

Marriage to Emma Hale

On 18 January 1827, Joseph Smith married Emma Hale, daughter of a Harmony (Pennsylvania) farmer with whom he had lodged during a treasure-hunting expedition. Emma’s father, hostile to the union because of Joseph’s reputation as a “glass-looker”, refused his consent; the two young people eloped and married without his approval, before settling for a time at Harmony^[8]. Emma Hale Smith would remain, until Joseph’s death, a front-row witness to every major episode of his religious life — including, as we shall see, the most painful disagreement of their union: the introduction of plural marriage.

The First Vision and the angel Moroni

According to Mormonism’s canonical account, published in its most developed form in 1838, Joseph Smith — troubled by rivalry between Protestant denominations — withdrew in prayer into a wood near the family farm in the spring of 1820 and there received a visit from the Father and the Son, who told him that no existing Church held the truth^[9]. Seven years later, in the night of 21–22 September 1827, he claimed to receive from an angel named Moroni, on a neighbouring hill called Cumorah, a set of gold plates engraved in “reformed Egyptian”, containing the religious history of ancient Hebrew inhabitants of America. These two founding narratives — of which there are in fact several successive and divergent versions written by Smith himself between 1832 and 1842 — are examined in detail, with a full textual comparison of the variants, in the article The Mormons.

The translation and publication of the Book of Mormon

Between 1827 and 1829, Smith dictated the text of the Book of Mormon to several successive scribes — Emma herself at first, then above all Oliver Cowdery — by placing a seer stone in a hat and reading aloud the words that appeared to him, his face buried to block out the light; a method the Church has officially acknowledged since 2013 in a doctrinal essay published on its institutional website^[10]. The manuscript was completed around 1 July 1829 and the book, printed at Palmyra by Egbert B. Grandin, went on sale on 26 March 1830^[11]. The doctrinal content and the archaeological and linguistic problems raised by this text are treated in detail in The Mormons; this article focuses on what the publication changed in Smith’s life: overnight, it made him a public religious figure, surrounded by a first circle of convinced disciples — the future “Three Witnesses” and “Eight Witnesses” of the book.

The founding of the Church, 6 April 1830

On 6 April 1830, at Fayette (Seneca County, New York State), Joseph Smith formally organized the Church of Christ — it would take its definitive name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1838 — with six founding members, in accordance with a New York State legal requirement on the incorporation of religious societies^[12]. The community grew rapidly: by the autumn of 1830, missionaries left to evangelize Canada and then the Native American tribes of Ohio, where they converted en masse the congregation of the Campbellite pastor Sidney Rigdon, who became one of Smith’s closest collaborators. It was in Ohio, at Kirtland, that the young Church soon moved its centre.

Settlement in Ohio and the first temple

From January 1831, Smith transferred his Church’s headquarters to Kirtland, Ohio, where the Campbellite community converted by Rigdon provided a first nucleus of several hundred faithful. The town became a permanent building site: between 1833 and 1836 the Saints built the first Mormon temple there, dedicated on 27 March 1836, financed largely by donations and loans taken out by the community itself. In parallel, Smith began teaching privately, from 1831, the first elements of what would become the doctrine of plural marriage — several years before its public revelation of 1843^[13].

The Kirtland Safety Society: a banking collapse

In 1836–1837, Smith organized a community bank, the Kirtland Safety Society, to finance the expansion of the town and the Church. The institution collapsed within barely a month, a victim both of the national financial panic of 1837 and of the absence of a legal banking charter from the State of Ohio; Smith and Rigdon were prosecuted for operating an illegal bank, found guilty and fined^[14]. The bankruptcy ruined many of the faithful, provoked the first great wave of defections and civil suits against Smith, and forced him, with Rigdon, to flee Kirtland hastily in early 1838 for the new Mormon colony in Missouri, where some of the Saints had already settled since 1831 in the hope of building “New Zion” there^[15].

Fanny Alger: the first plural marriage

It was also during the Kirtland period, around 1833, that Smith contracted what Mormon historians now regard as his first plural marriage: with Fanny Alger, a young domestic servant employed in the Smith household, then aged about sixteen or seventeen^[16]. The episode, revealed by rumours that contributed to the break between Smith and his former counsellor Oliver Cowdery — who would publicly describe the affair as a “dirty, nasty, filthy affair” — remains surrounded by documentary uncertainty as to its exact nature, but the Mormon historian Todd Compton, in his reference study of Smith’s plural wives, treats it as the starting point of the practice^[17]. The doctrine of plural marriage would only be codified by an official “revelation” a decade later, at Nauvoo.

Far West and rising tensions

A refugee in Missouri from early 1838, Smith established his Church’s new headquarters at Far West, in Caldwell County, where several thousand Saints had already gathered since 1831 with a view to building “Zion” there. Tensions with Missouri’s non-Mormon settlers, already acute since 1833 in the neighbouring county of Jackson, degenerated in the summer of 1838: on 6 August, an election-day brawl at Gallatin between Mormons and county residents triggered what historiography calls the 1838 Mormon War^[18]. A clandestine Mormon militia, the “Danites”, formed to intimidate internal dissidents and defend the Mormon colonies against the Missouri militias.

The extermination order and the Haun’s Mill massacre

On 27 October 1838, following the Battle of Crooked River, Missouri governor Lilburn W. Boggs signed Executive Order 44, remembered by history as the “extermination order”: in it he declared that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace”^[19]. Three days later, on 30 October 1838, a militia of non-Mormon settlers attacked the small Mormon hamlet of Haun’s Mill, killing seventeen men and boys, including some unarmed men inside a blacksmith’s shop where they had taken refuge^[20]. This order of Governor Boggs would only be formally rescinded by the State of Missouri in 1976, under Governor Christopher Bond, who described it as contrary to constitutional rights to life, liberty, property and religious freedom^[21].

Four months in Liberty Jail

On 31 October 1838, the Mormon forces capitulated. Smith was brought before a court-martial, accused of treason, and a summary execution was considered for a time before being set aside by a general who refused to comply. He then spent the winter of 1838–1839 — some four months — imprisoned with several companions in the small Liberty Jail (Clay County), a cramped stone dungeon where he wrote several letters that would later be incorporated, as revelations, into the canonical collection Doctrine and Covenants. He escaped from the guard transferring him from one county to another on 16 April 1839 — released from Liberty on 6 April for a hearing at Gallatin, he gave his escort the slip en route to Boone County — probably with the tacit connivance of the sheriff and the guards in charge of his transport, and rejoined the Saints who had begun fleeing Missouri en masse for Illinois^[22].

The founding of a quasi-autonomous city

In 1839, Smith bought marshy land along the Mississippi in the village of Commerce (Illinois), which he renamed Nauvoo — a word he presented as derived from Hebrew and meaning “beauty”. On 16 December 1840, Illinois governor Thomas Carlin approved an exceptionally broad municipal charter, voted by a bipartisan majority of the State legislature — Whigs and Democrats together, including a young deputy named Abraham Lincoln — which gave Nauvoo its own militia (the Nauvoo Legion), its own municipal courts and wide administrative autonomy^[23]. On 4 February 1841, Smith received the rank of lieutenant-general at the head of this militia — the highest military rank in the whole State of Illinois, which no other American officer then surpassed^[24]. Within a few years, Nauvoo became one of the few Illinois cities endowed with such a legal status, alongside Chicago, Alton, Galena, Quincy and Springfield, carried by a constant influx of converts from the United States and, increasingly, from Great Britain thanks to missions organized from 1837–1840^[25].

Freemasonry and the birth of the temple endowment

On 15 October 1841, the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Illinois issued a dispensation authorizing the creation of a lodge at Nauvoo, which held its first meeting on 29 December 1841. Joseph Smith was initiated as an apprentice there on 15 March 1842, then received his Fellow Craft and Master Mason degrees the very next day, an exceptionally rapid progression by ordinary Masonic standards^[26]. Barely six weeks later, in early May 1842, Smith introduced for the first time the ceremony of the temple endowment, a ritual of sacred investiture intended for his closest faithful. The Mormon historian Richard L. Bushman, author of the reference biography of Smith, notes that portions of the temple ritual echo elements of the Masonic ceremonial Smith had just observed, and quotes a remark attributed to Smith that Freemasonry had been “taken from the priesthood but has become degenerated”, while retaining authentic elements^[27]. Mormonism nevertheless reinterprets these borrowed symbols — aprons, ritual gestures, passwords — within a theological framework entirely distinct from the original Masonic symbolism.

The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian papyri

In July 1835, Smith bought from an itinerant dealer, Michael Chandler, a lot of Egyptian papyri accompanied by several mummies, which he presented as containing “the writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt”. The text he derived from them, published in 1842 then canonized in 1880 as the Book of Abraham, became one of the most contested pieces of the Mormon canon: the papyri recovered in 1967 were identified by Egyptologists, including Mormon ones, as ordinary Egyptian funerary texts dating from about fifty years before our era, with no connection to Abraham. The full examination of this Egyptological case, with quotations from specialists and the Church’s own official acknowledgement of the problem since 2014, appears in the article The Mormons.

The revelation on plural marriage

On 12 July 1843, at Nauvoo, Smith dictated to his scribe William Clayton the text that would become section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants: a “revelation” giving theological codification to the practice of plural marriage, already exercised in secret for some ten years, and ordering Emma Smith by name to accept it under pain of grave spiritual consequences^[28]. The text was only read to the Church’s High Council the following month and remained hidden from the rest of the faithful; Emma herself, according to Clayton’s later testimony, is said to have eventually burned the original manuscript in a gesture of refusal^[29].

Smith’s plural marriage involved, according to the most rigorous estimate established by the historian Todd Compton from the available documentary sources, thirty-three distinct women between 1833 and 1844 — a figure confirmed in its order of magnitude by the Church’s official doctrinal essay published in 2014, which acknowledges between thirty and forty plural wives^[30]. Among them were several women already civilly married to other men (so-called “polyandrous” marriage), as well as Helen Mar Kimball, daughter of the apostle Heber C. Kimball, married in May 1843 when she was not yet fifteen — the Church itself officially acknowledges, in the same 2014 essay, that such a marriage “would be inappropriate by today’s standards”, while describing it as legal for the time^[31].

This practice remained secret from the immense majority of the Saints of Nauvoo, including for several years after Smith’s death; its public exposure by dissidents in 1844 directly precipitated the crisis that would lead to his death.

The Council of Fifty and “Prophet, Priest and King”

On 11 March 1844, Smith organized a secret political body, the Council of Fifty, charged in his view with preparing on earth a “political kingdom of God” in anticipation of Christ’s return. On 11 April 1844, this Council voted to recognize Smith as “Prophet, Priest and King”, the assembly undertaking to “receive from this time henceforth and forever, Joseph Smith, as their Prophet, Priest & King, and uphold him in that capacity in which God has anointed him”^[32]. This theocratic dimension, long concealed from the Church’s public archives and revealed only by the belated publication of the Council’s minutes, clarifies the exact nature of Smith’s political project in the last months of his life: a theodemocracy in which religious and civil authority merged entirely in his person.

Candidacy for the presidency of the United States

In February 1844, after writing unsuccessfully to the leading declared presidential candidates asking them to pledge to protect the rights of the Latter-day Saints, Smith stood himself for the highest office. His platform, published as General Smith’s Views on the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, proposed notably the abolition of slavery financed by the sale of federal lands, the closing of prisons in favour of public works, a reduction in the number of representatives in Congress, and a new national bank charter^[33]. More than three hundred electoral missionaries criss-crossed the country for his campaign, and a newspaper, the Prophet, was launched in New York to support it. Smith himself explained his candidacy in these terms:

“I would not have suffered my name to have been used by my friends on any wise as president of the United States, or candidate for that office, if I and my friends could have had the privilege of enjoying our religious and civil rights as American citizens.” — Joseph Smith, quoted in the official history of his 1844 presidential campaign^[34]

The campaign came to an abrupt end with his death, four months before the November 1844 election; historians often regard him as the first candidate in an American presidential election to have been assassinated in the course of the campaign.

The King Follett Discourse

On 7 April 1844, two and a half months before his death, Smith delivered before some twenty thousand people, on the occasion of a funeral sermon for one of his own, one of his most systematic discourses: the King Follett Discourse, in which he taught that God himself “was once as we are now” and that the faithful may learn “to be Gods yourselves”^[35]. This text, which breaks head-on with the classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity and of divine transcendence, is the subject of a full theological and philosophical examination in the Ignispedia article Why Could There Not Be Several Gods?.

The dissident newspaper destroyed

On 7 June 1844, a group of Mormon dissidents led by William Law, a former counsellor of Smith excommunicated a few weeks earlier for rejecting the doctrine of plural marriage, published at Nauvoo a single issue of a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, which publicly exposed the secret practice of polygamy and accused Smith of theocratic drift. On 10 June 1844, at 6:30 p.m., the Nauvoo city council, on Smith’s own motion as mayor, declared the newspaper a “public nuisance” and ordered the city marshal to destroy its press. That same evening, around 8 p.m., a hundred men of the Nauvoo Legion effectively destroyed the press and burned the remaining copies^[36]. This decision, devoid of any real legal foundation according to later historical analysis — the destruction of a press, even one deemed libellous, had no basis in 1844 Illinois law — triggered an explosion of indignation in the non-Mormon regional press and earned Smith an indictment for inciting riot^[37].

Martial law and surrender at Carthage

Faced with the threat of armed intervention from neighbouring counties, Smith declared martial law at Nauvoo on 18 June 1844 and mobilized the Legion. Under pressure from the governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford, who guaranteed his protection, Smith finally surrendered on 25 June 1844 at Carthage, seat of Hancock County, where he and his brother Hyrum were jailed — the initial charges of inciting riot being reclassified as treason, a charge that precluded any release on bail.

27 June 1844: death at Carthage

On 27 June 1844, in the late afternoon, a mob of some two hundred armed men, their faces blackened with gunpowder, stormed Carthage Jail, then guarded by a handful of militiamen who offered only token resistance. The eyewitness Willard Richards, one of the two companions present in the cell with Smith and the apostle John Taylor, wrote the next day an account published in the Church’s newspaper under the title Two Minutes in Jail:

“A shower of musket balls were thrown up the stairway against the door of the prison in the second story, followed by many rapid footsteps. […] A ball was sent through the door which hit Hyrum on the side of his nose, when he fell backwards, extended at length, without moving his feet.” — Willard Richards, Two Minutes in Jail, Times and Seasons, vol. 5, 1 August 1844, p. 598^[38]

Hyrum cried out “I am a dead man” before expiring on the spot. Joseph, who had received from a visitor a concealed six-shooter, fired three shots at his assailants before the weapon jammed, wounding three men in the mob. Then attempting to flee through the second-storey window, he was struck by several bullets:

“[Joseph] attempted, as the last resort, to leap the same window from whence Mr. Taylor fell, when two balls pierced him from the door, and one entered his right breast from without, and he fell outward, exclaiming, Oh Lord, my God! […] He fell on his left side a dead man.” — Willard Richards, Two Minutes in Jail, Times and Seasons, vol. 5, 1 August 1844, p. 598^[39]

The apostle John Taylor, riddled with four bullets, survived his wounds and would become in 1880 the third president of the Church; Willard Richards emerged from the room without a single wound, a bullet having only grazed his ear — a fact Mormon tradition interprets as providential^[40]. Five men were later indicted for the murder, but all were acquitted by a local non-Mormon jury.

Sidney Rigdon against the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Smith’s death, with no clearly designated successor, opened an immediate crisis of legitimacy. Sidney Rigdon, former counsellor in the First Presidency, returned to Nauvoo on 3 August 1844 and claimed the very next day, before some six thousand faithful, the authority of “guardian” of the Church, presenting himself as the man whom “the ancient prophets had sung”^[41]. Brigham Young, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, learned of Smith’s death on 16 July 1844 while on mission in New Hampshire; he returned to Nauvoo in early August with the conviction that the apostolic authority of the Quorum of the Twelve, not that of an isolated counsellor, must now govern the Church^[42].

The assembly of 8 August 1844 and Joseph’s “mantle”

On 8 August 1844, a double assembly settled the question before several thousand Saints gathered at Nauvoo. Young directly interrupted Rigdon’s attempt to have his own recognition put to the vote, then delivered in the afternoon a long discourse affirming that the Twelve Apostles hold “the keys of the Kingdom for the whole world”^[43]. According to Mormon tradition, more than a hundred witnesses then claimed to have perceived, in Young’s voice or silhouette, something of Joseph Smith’s own “mantle” — a phenomenon the historian Richard Van Wagoner judges to be without “a shred of irrefutable contemporary evidence” of a supernatural manifestation, seeing in it rather the effect of Young’s charismatic presence and of the strategic choice of the moment^[44]. The assembly voted massively in favour of the Twelve Apostles, setting Rigdon aside; he would shortly afterwards found his own dissident movement in Pennsylvania.

The rival Churches

Emma Smith herself, in deep and long-standing disagreement with the practice of plural marriage, which she never accepted, refused to follow Brigham Young and the migration to Utah. She remained at Nauvoo, remarried civilly in December 1847 to a non-Mormon, Lewis C. Bidamon, and supported in 1860 the founding by her eldest son, Joseph Smith III, of a “New Organization” explicitly rejecting polygamy, which would become — under the name Community of Christ — the second major branch of Joseph Smith’s legacy^[45]. Emma died at Nauvoo on 30 April 1879, aged seventy-four^[46].

Two opposing historiographical readings

The intellectual posterity of Joseph Smith remains deeply divided. The historian Fawn M. Brodie, in her pioneering biography No Man Knows My History (1945), describes him as a man endowed with a powerful imagination, who is said to have ended by convincing himself of the truth of his own religious staging — not a cynical impostor, but a “mythographer” progressively absorbed by his own narrative; the work, ill received by the Mormon institution, hastened its author’s excommunication^[47]. Conversely, Richard L. Bushman, a practising Mormon and historian at Columbia University, offers in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005) — regarded as the reference academic biography on the subject — a more sympathetic reading that takes Smith’s religious sincerity seriously while documenting without indulgence the most difficult episodes of his life, notably polygamy and the Carthage episode^[48].

What the man leaves behind

Charismatic, self-taught, endowed with an exceptional political and organizational sense for a man without formal education, Joseph Smith built in fourteen years a religion that today counts more than seventeen and a half million claimed members across the world^[49]. But the same man also practised polygamy in secret with dozens of women, some of them minors by today’s standards and others already married; went bankrupt in an irregular bank that ruined hundreds of converted families; ordered the illegal destruction of a dissident press; and concentrated on his sole person, in the last months of his life, an absolute religious, political and military authority, to the point of being proclaimed “King” by a secret council. This tension between the scale of his religious charisma and the gravity of his documented acts runs through the whole of historiography, Mormon historiography included, since the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers.

What can be acknowledged in his journey

An honest Catholic reading of Joseph Smith’s career cannot ignore what it reveals of a genuine religious thirst in a young man of the American Second Great Awakening — disoriented by the sterile competition of the Protestant denominations of his time and sincerely seeking a stable spiritual authority — a sentiment the Catholic Church understands all the better in that it has always taught the necessary unity of the Church founded by Christ. The missionary zeal of the Latter-day Saints, their family and community discipline, and the sincere concern of many of them for a demanding religious life deserve to be acknowledged, without thereby erasing the considerable doctrinal and historical problems raised by the figure of their founder.

A prophetism that reopens the closed canon of Revelation

The most radically problematic point of Joseph Smith’s legacy, from the Catholic standpoint, is not first this or that questionable biographical episode, but the very claim underlying them: that of having received, eighteen centuries after the death of the last apostle, a new normative public revelation completing and correcting the existing Scriptures. The Catholic Church teaches on the contrary that public Revelation ended with the death of the last apostle and that “no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ”^[50]. The Second Vatican Council, in the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, solemnly recalls that “we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ”^[51]. A prophetism claiming a reopened canon and a continuing authority of revelation, such as that instituted by Smith and perpetuated by his successors, thus stands in frontal opposition to this central doctrine — and finds itself, on this precise point, in a situation structurally analogous to that of other continuous-revelation movements examined elsewhere in Ignispedia, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Mormon baptism declared invalid

This doctrinal divergence did not remain a mere theoretical observation. On 5 June 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the signature of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and with the approval of Saint John Paul II, examined the question of the validity of baptism conferred by the Church founded by Joseph Smith and answered in the negative^[52]. This decision, exceptional in the recent history of interreligious dialogue, rests not on a mere disagreement of sensibility, but on the conviction that Mormonism, despite its borrowing of Christian vocabulary, professes a God, a Christ and a Trinity substantially different from those of the apostolic faith — as the future Cardinal Luis Ladaria clarified in his official commentary on the decision^[53]. The full theological examination of this question — the nature of God according to Smith, the plurality of divinities, the exaltation of the faithful into gods — is the subject of the articles The Mormons and Why Could There Not Be Several Gods?.

A judgment distinguishing the person from the work

The Catholic Church has never had to pronounce a formal doctrinal judgment on the very person of Joseph Smith — unlike the great 16th-century reformers such as Martin Luther or John Calvin, whose theses were the subject of explicit conciliar condemnations at the Council of Trent. Smith’s case is of another nature: it is not an internal reform of historical Christianity contesting this or that point of Catholic doctrine, but the founding, out of nothing, of a new revelation allegedly received outside any continuity with the Scripture and Tradition received from the undivided Church of the first centuries. It is precisely this observation that led the Holy See, not to describe Mormonism as a misunderstood Christian “heresy”, but to treat it — in the very words of Cardinal Ladaria — as a new religion using borrowed vocabulary to express a faith foreign to the Revelation received from the Apostles^[54].

• The Mormons — the full doctrinal and apologetic examination of the Church founded by Joseph Smith: nature of God, canon of Scripture, Book of Abraham, complete Catholic response.
• Why Could There Not Be Several Gods? — the philosophical and theological examination of the Mormon doctrine of the plurality of gods taught in the King Follett Discourse.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses — another 19th-century American movement founded on the claim of continuing revelation and a reopened canon.
• Answers to Protestantism — a Catholic synthesis on the authority of Scripture and Tradition in the face of claims to normative private revelation.
• Sola Scriptura — the Protestant principle of the exclusive authority of Scripture, which Mormonism’s reopened canon goes beyond and contradicts in its own way.
• Martin Luther (1483–1546) — for comparison between the nature of an internal reform of historical Christianity and the founding of a new religion.
• John Calvin (1509–1564) — another great figure of 16th-century doctrinal rupture, with a theological trajectory very different from Smith’s.