New biographies acquaint another generation with the Prophet Joseph Smith.
I have always fervently admired Joseph Smith. I’d love to someday shake his hand and “know ‘Brother Joseph’ again (Hymns, no. 27). Meanwhile, commemorations of the Prophet’s 200th birthday evoked a number of fine books about his life and accomplishments, helping us get better acquainted with him, if at a two-century remove.
In six short, engaging chapters, Steven C. Harper (BA ’94), BYU assistant professor of Church history and doctrine, recounts Joseph Smith’s remarkable story, from the First Vision to the founding of the Church. In Joseph the Seer (Harper Publishing; 79 pp.; $14.99) Harper says his purpose is “to help readers safely across the divide between simplified literature on Joseph Smith and scholarly literature that can be frustrating to read” (p. xi). An editor of the Papers of Joseph Smith, Harper gathers little-known insights about the Prophet Joseph’s early life.
Chad M. Orton (BA ’85) and William W. Slaughter (BA ’74), both archivists and photo historians in the Church History Department, extend our understanding of the Prophet in Joseph Smith’s America: His Life and Times (Deseret Book; 234 pp.; $32.95). They place him, through text and photographs, in his cultural, social, historical, literary, and political contexts—from his birth year (1805) to the year of his death (1844). More than 150 fascinating photographs enrich this enjoyable book.
In Joseph: Exploring the Life and Ministry of the Prophet (Deseret Book; 448 pp.; $23.95), editors Susan Easton Black (BA ’66), BYU professor of Church history and doctrine, and Andrew C. Skinner, director of BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, present 39 very readable chapters by 33 Latter-day Saint scholars. Together the chapters form a biography of the Prophet Joseph Smith and a history of the founding of the Church. Michael M. Hunter (BA ’97) and his associates at BYU Broadcasting produced the engrossing companion television serial, Joseph, in which many of the scholars perform ably as interlocutors.
The crowning literary event of the Joseph Smith bicentennial is a definitive biography of the Prophet: Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Alfred A. Knopf; 740 pp.; $35), by Richard L. Bushman, with the assistance of Jed L. Woodworth (BS ’94). Bushman’s momentous accomplishment will enable the world to know Brother Joseph for the first time, and from something like an objective (if faithful) point of view. Without saying so, Bushman affirms what Latter-day Saints know in their bones—that Joseph Smith was God’s prophet, seer, revelator, and restorer.
In this biography, Bushman writes as one having authority and as one of the scribes. Bushman, who currently serves in the Church as a stake patriarch, is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University and has taught history at BYU, Boston University, and the University of Delaware. His several books on American history include Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984), which garnered the Evans Biography Award.
Bushman says his intention in Rough Stone Rolling is “to imagine [Joseph] as fully as the records allow” (p. xx). Unlike biographers from Alexander Campbell to Fawn M. Brodie to Dan Vogel, Bushman takes Joseph at his word, assuming that he was called by God to be a prophet, and that, therefore, “the signal feature of his life was his sense of being guided by revelation” (p. xxi). Bushman says these revelations “came to [Joseph] as experiential facts” (p. xxi). Joseph ever maintained the assertion he made following his First Vision: “I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it” (JS–H 1:25). “To get inside the movement,” writes Bushman, “we have to think of Smith as the early Mormons thought of him and as he thought of himself—as a revelator” (p. xxi).
Joseph’s biography, as Bushman develops it, is the story of his growth as a revelator, begun with the First Vision, continued as he becomes aware of his gift through experimentation with seer stones, and refined in his use of the Urim and Thummim in translating the Book of Mormon as Joseph gradually becomes the prophet who spoke the words of God through direct revelation. Bushman asserts that Joseph “found his prophetic voice” in 1828 (p. 69), after the fiasco of losing the 116 manuscript pages, when Joseph received D&C 3—apparently “the first revelation written by the Prophet” (p. 68). That revelation was spoken in the prophetic voice that would characterize Joseph’s revelations: “Behold, thou art Joseph, and thou wast chosen to do the work of the Lord, but because of transgression, if thou art not aware thou wilt fall” (D&C 3:9).
Upon recognizing himself as a prophet, Joseph became aware that his “true history began,” writes Bushman, “with his search for a church and his plea for forgiveness”; this search led to the First Vision and the visits of Moroni, “the cardinal events of his boyhood” (p. 69); these events, in turn, led to Joseph’s translation of the Book of Mormon, the founding of the Church, the revelation of priesthoods and Church government, the gathering of Israel, the sealing and temple ordinances, the establishment of Zion, translations of the Books of Abraham and Moses, and revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants. These unfolding revelations formulated the Restoration, shaped and unified the fledgling Church, kept it intact through serious schisms, and have continued through the present to bind and secure the developing global Church of Jesus Christ.
Bushman traces in Joseph’s translations of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, and the Book of Moses the Prophet’s growing confidence in his revelatory power. Bushman’s unapologetic discussion and incisive explication of the Book of Mormon and his summary of the case for its ancient origins provide, I believe, the most compelling treatment of that book yet, with the exception of Terryl L. Givens’ (BA ’81) remarkable By the Hand of Mormon.
For the legion of LDS reclining-chair historians, there may be little new data in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. But for those who stay the course, Bushman’s winnowing and sifting and ordering of the mass of data is impressive, enlightening, and faith promoting. For some the book may be disconcerting, especially for those whose faith requires them to keep the puts-one-pant-leg-on-at-a-time humanness (and, yes, the plural marriages) of their leaders at a safe and undetailed historical remove.
There is no question about it—Bushman’s Joseph Smith is a great but complex man whose remarkable vision of what God wanted him to do engendered an infectious confidence, faith, and loyalty in his followers. He was a man who, despite his human flaws and mistakes, was ardently believed and beloved by thousands of followers and by those nearest him, including his parents, brothers and sisters, and his wife Emma.
Bushman’s Joseph was a remarkable work-in-progress, a dynamic, generous, spiritual, and charismatic man. His vision was so supernal and encompassing that it sometimes made him impatient with people and events that attempted to divert him from his single-minded mission.
Joseph’s unique and wonderful story is one of transformation from plowboy to “a prophet of puzzling complexity” (p. 143). Bushman admits that he is still nonplussed about how such an unremarkable boy became such a remarkable man.“Even [Joseph] could not reconcile what he had become with what he had been. Near the end of his life, he said he could not fault the skeptics for their disbelief: ‘If I had not experienced what I have, I should not have believed it myself’ ” (p. 143).
Joseph Smith’s accomplishments are astonishing. But, Bushman writes, he “did not take credit for his achievements. All he could speak of were his ‘marvilous experience.’ Perhaps his signal trait was trust in his own inspiration,” his revelations. “He knew he was no more than a rough stone cut from a Vermont hillside. . . . It was his calling and accomplishment, as Joseph himself put it, to ‘lay a foundation that will revolutionize the world’” (p. 561).
Hail to the Prophet
Richard H. Cracroft is the Nan Osmond Grass Professor in English emeritus.
Scholarly Considerations of the Prophet
Throughout the bicentennial year of Joseph Smith’s birth in 2005, scholars from many different religious and cultural backgrounds gathered to discuss the Prophet’s legacy at symposia in various parts of the world, including Taipei, Taiwan; Sydney, Australia; and Washington, D.C. Text from “The Worlds of Joseph Smith,” a conference held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is now available through BYU Studies.
At the “Worlds of Joseph Smith” conference, scholars considered how Joseph Smith was influenced by and, in turn, influenced various realms—historical, religious, and social. Presenters examined Joseph Smith as a man of the early 19th century, as a translator and transmitter of lost “worlds,” as a religious reformer, and as the architect of an ever-expanding community unified by a distinct spiritual identity. The conference papers are collected in a special edition of BYU Studies, released this spring. They can also be purchased in a hardback volume, The Worlds of Joseph Smith: A Bicentennial Conference at the Library of Congress, at the BYU Bookstore.
