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Education is fundamental in Mormonism. Joseph Smith studied Hebrew, and established a School of the Prophets and the University of Nauvoo. Print culture was central to the Mormon church, and early leaders like Orson Pratt and Parley Pratt laid the foundations for an intellectual tradition. Early Mormon intellectual culture was capacious enough to accommodate Darwin and evolution, though that would change.

Joseph Smith was a young seeker in an age of religious awakening. He claimed he was visited by God and Christ in response to his spiritual quest for truth as a 14 year old, but his religious career began in earnest when he asserted he was the divinely appointed translator of sacred records delivered to him by an angel of God named Moroni seven years later. Assisted – in the face of growing opposition – by family, friends, and a well‐to‐do farmer, Martin Harris, Smith produced a translation from gold plates attested by 11 witnesses using Urim and Thummim (a seer stone and/or sacred “interpreters”). The concrete tangibility of the plates and accompanying holy relics, and the alleged historicity of the history he translated, made his claims especially audacious and resistant to dismissal as a subjective religious experience.

As scholars of the American religious past and present continue to move away from the consensus model, in which the upstart Latter-day Saint tradition had no real fit, and embrace conflict, contact, and other methodologies, Joseph Smith is beginning to get a new hearing in scholarly surveys, monographs, textbooks, and articles. The rationale behind this collection is that the day has come when the founder of Mormonism and his prominent role in American history and religious thought can not be denied. The attention paid to Smith’s teachings, charismatic ministry, and religion-making imagination now extends to scholars in American history, religious studies, sociology, biblical studies, Christian philosophy, Literature, and the Humanities--all of whom are represented in this collection. It is our intent to reflect in these pages the wide-ranging interest in Joseph Smith that the commemorative conferences only suggested.

In the context of 19th‐century American millennialism, many early converts to Mormonism heralded the Book of Mormon as a sign of the end times. In an era of many prophets and visionaries, the Book of Mormon was offered as tangible proof that Joseph was an authentic prophet. Joseph Smith's emphatic literalism and appeal to physical and historical evidence made him both more threatening and more attractive than a Jacob Boehme or an Emanuel Swedenborg. The story of angels, seer stones, and gold plates, thus displaced a focus on the Book of Mormon's content, for both critics and believers.

Returning home from his British mission, Pratt experienced the dramatic doctrinal changes of the Nauvoo period. The burgeoning Nauvoo economy led to success with a store and the construction of a large brick home. Introduced to plural marriage, Pratt and his wife Mary Ann accepted the practice. In July 1843, Pratt married his first plural wife, Elizabeth Brotherton. During 1843-1844, Pratt was initiated into the new temple rituals, participated in the religious/political Council of Fifty, wrote several theologically significant essays, and served a mission to the eastern states to promote Joseph Smith’s campaign for the U. S. presidency.

Though Nauvoo was abandoned by most Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century, Emma Smith, the widow of Church founder Joseph Smith, and her children remained in the city, maintaining a Mormon presence in western Illinois. This chapter examines the rise of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Community of Christ), founded by Smith’s children, and their use of family and historic sites in Nauvoo in the early twentieth century. It discusses the transformation of these sites from family residences to religious tourism centers used to proselytize people to the faith. It also introduces the competing views of Mormonism that developed between the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church.

German idealists such as Friedrich Schelling and theologians such as Wilhelm Benecke and Julius Müller build on Kant's foundation of preexistence as a basis for freedom. Joseph Smith makes Mormonism (Latter-day Saints) the only Christian denomination to embrace preexistence. Edward Beecher gives the doctrine its fullest exposition ever.

This chapter recounts the story of Joseph Smith's death in 1844 at the hands of a vigilante mob. It describes the myriad ways Mormons used martyrdom images to describe Smith's death and his ongoing involvement as an angelic benefactor on behalf of the church. The chapter helps to situate Mormon oaths of vengeance within a view of divine retribution and details Mormon martyrdom rhetoric before Smith's death. It also recounts the conflicts between Smith's church heirs and his family over his physical relics and his legacy.

This chapter discusses Joseph Smith’s First Vision and his vision of the angel and the gold plates. Some historians have argued that he transformed his tale of treasure guarded by a ghost or spirit into a religious account of an ancient record delivered by the angel Moroni. Alan Taylor and others have contended, however, that treasure-seeking itself was rich with Christian symbols and that Joseph’s activities as a village seer led naturally to his role as a prophet. Lucy Mack Smith’s history gives the best account of Joseph’s life from 1820 to 1826. Affidavits from Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed are also included.

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints has no professional theologians or clergy, so its beliefs are not always easy for outsiders to discern and discuss. The most controversial Mormon beliefs concern its depiction of God as eternally bodied. This means that on a metaphysical plain, Mormons are resolutely materialistic. This chapter proposes that Heavenly Flesh Christology can put Mormon metaphysics on a solid Christological ground while also opening the way for creedal theologians to learn from and appropriate Mormon metaphysics. This chapter examines the origins of Mormon materialism in the writings of Joseph Smith and investigates the relationship between Mormon materialism and hermeticism. It also discusses the work of Truman Madsen and the multiverse theory of Kirk Hagen.

This chapter addresses the radiant body of early Mormon theology. It takes up Joseph Smith’s many imaginings of the character and fate of embodied life and reads polygamy as a sort of culminating fabulation in his cosmological vision, one that looks to write out, in the language of quotidian life, his vision of exaltation, humans-become-gods, and divinizing flesh.

In 1835, Joseph Smith acquired four mummies and a trove of papyri from an antiquities dealer. He claimed that the papyri included a narrative of the patriarch Abraham, and over the following years he translated the Book of Abraham. It describes a creation presided over by “gods” and details a premortal council in which human “intelligences” are present and a Savior is chosen. Controversy over Smith’s “translation” erupted almost immediately and reignited in 1967 when some of the original papyri were made public. Egyptologists identify those fragments as Egyptian funerary documents, unrelated to Smith’s Book of Abraham chronologically or thematically. Some Latter-day Saint apologists disagree, finding the Egypticity of Smith’s narrative credible. Other apologists agree that his work fails as translation in the conventional sense but succeeds as genuinely inspired scripture.

Jane Manning’s first job in Nauvoo, Illinois, was as a servant in Joseph and Emma Smith’s Mansion House, where she had access to many aspects of Mormonism that were otherwise tightly controlled. While doing the laundry, she later said, she went into a trance-like state in which the Holy Spirit told her about temple rituals. Manning learned about the LDS practice of polygamy from some of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Joseph Smith’s mother allowed Manning to handle objects she said were the Urim and Thummim, seerstones Smith used as conduits for divine communication. According to her later statements, the Smiths also offered to adopt Manning as a child. This offer may have been motivated by Manning’s fatherlessness, a problematic state in the strongly patriarchal religion that may also have motivated her reception of a patriarchal blessing. This period in her life ended decisively with Joseph Smith’s 1844 murder.

This chapter examines the place of martyrology and ritualized cursing in Mormon apocalypticism. With the assassinations of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith in 1844, the Saints came to believe that the United States had sealed its doom. John the Revelator’s image of martyrs pleading for God to avenge their murders became a prominent element in Mormon apocalypticism. The Mormons fled Nauvoo and eventually the nation itself in order to distance themselves from their persecutors, but also to escape the very land that had been primed for judgment. Before departing, through verbal, written, and other ritualized means, the Saints cursed those complicit in their persecution.

In 1823, Joseph Smith (1805–44), a farmer and treasure seeker in Upstate New York, had a vision in which a personage told him of ancient golden plates buried in a hillside, which Mormons claim he recovered, translated, and published as the Book of Mormon (1830) and which led to the founding of a restored church (1830). The revelation to Smith that Mormons now refer to as “D&C 3,” that is, the third revelation in the current edition of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' canonized Doctrine and Covenants, provides our first direct window into the emergence of early Mormonism. Although there is evidence to suggest that Smith received what he and others viewed as revelations prior to this one, this is the first revelation that was written down at about the time it was received. This chapter centers on that revelation, using it to reconstruct not only the event itself but the events that led up to and followed from it, as they likely appeared to those who were involved at the time.

Scripture is a function of the ways in which texts become sacred through their employment or status in a religious community. To understand a scripture, one must understand the ways in which that work has exerted its authority over the lives of believers. The Book of Mormon has served in a variety of roles, for both detractors and believers, which have shifted over the years. Four principal roles have been: 1) sacred sign of the last days, and of Joseph Smith's divine calling; 2) a factual account of the pre‐Columbian peopling of the Western hemisphere by Israelite migrations around 600 bc; 3) the imaginative creation of a nineteenth‐century religion maker; and 4) a new American Bible. The unprecedented growth of this potentially new world religion is making an understanding of its core scripture increasingly imperative.