The Story of Joseph Smith

A Boy with a Question

In 1820, in the small town of Palmyra, New York, a fourteen-year-old boy named Joseph Smith was caught in the middle of something he couldn’t resolve on his own.

Religious revivals were sweeping western New York like wildfire. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians — every denomination was holding meetings, making passionate appeals, and each one claiming to be the true church of Christ. Joseph’s own family was divided. His mother and some of his siblings leaned toward Presbyterianism. Others attended different meetings. The noise of competing claims was everywhere.

Joseph was earnest about his soul. He wanted to know which church was right — not as an academic exercise, but because he genuinely wanted to serve God and be saved. He attended different meetings. He listened. He compared. And the more he listened, the more confused he became. Every minister seemed confident. Every church had its proof texts. And they contradicted each other.

Then he read a passage of scripture that changed the course of history.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

— James 1:5

It struck him with a force he had never felt before. The answer was so simple it was almost absurd: if you don’t know, ask God. Not a minister. Not a book of theology. God himself. And the promise was plain — God would answer, liberally, without reproach.

Joseph decided to do what no one around him was doing. He decided to ask.

The Sacred Grove

On a spring morning in 1820, Joseph walked into a grove of trees near his family’s farm. He found a quiet spot. He knelt down. And for the first time in his life, he attempted to pray vocally, out loud, to God.

What happened next nearly destroyed him before it saved him.

The moment he began to pray, a thick darkness seized him. It was not ordinary darkness — it was a force, pressing on him, binding his tongue, filling him with despair. He felt as though he would be consumed. He later described it as the power of some actual being from the unseen world. He exerted all his power to call upon God, and at the very moment he was ready to sink into despair and abandon himself to destruction —

A pillar of light descended from heaven.

It rested on him, and when it did, the darkness fled. Standing above him in the light were two personages, their brightness and glory beyond description. One of them called Joseph by name, pointed to the other, and said:

God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith in person. The boy asked which of all the churches he should join. The answer was direct: he should join none of them. They had all gone astray. The creeds that men professed were an abomination. The fullness of the gospel was not on the earth — but it would be restored, and Joseph would be the instrument.

He was fourteen years old.

The Years of Preparation

When Joseph returned home from the grove, he told his mother he had learned that Presbyterianism was not true. He later shared his experience with a local Methodist minister — a man Joseph had some confidence in. The minister’s response was swift and dismissive. He told Joseph the whole thing was of the devil, that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days, and that all such things had ceased with the apostles.

The persecution began immediately. Joseph was astonished. He was a boy of no consequence — obscure, poor, unknown. Yet his simple testimony that he had seen a vision stirred up intense hostility from people who professed to love God. He later reflected on the irony: they treated him the way the religious leaders of Jerusalem had treated the apostle Paul.

But Joseph would not deny what he had seen. He wrote:

I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying — I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth?

— Joseph Smith—History 1:25

For three years, Joseph waited. He worked on the family farm. He grew up. He made the kinds of mistakes any young man makes, and he felt the weight of his own imperfections. Then, on the night of September 21, 1823, everything changed again.

As Joseph prayed in his room, a light appeared. A figure stood in the air beside his bed, clothed in brilliant white. The messenger introduced himself as Moroni — an ancient prophet who had lived on the American continent centuries ago. He told Joseph that a record was deposited in a nearby hill, written on gold plates, containing the fullness of the gospel as delivered by Christ to the ancient inhabitants of the Americas. Buried with the plates were two stones set in silver bows — the Urim and Thummim — prepared by God for the purpose of translation.

Moroni returned two more times that night, each time repeating the message with additional detail. The next day, Joseph visited the Hill Cumorah and saw the plates. But he was told he could not take them yet. For four years — 1823 to 1827 — Joseph returned to the hill annually, being instructed and prepared for the work ahead.

God does not rush. He was shaping the instrument before handing him the work.

The Translation

On September 22, 1827, Joseph finally received the gold plates from Moroni. The moment he had them, attempts to steal them began. He hid them repeatedly. He moved from Palmyra to Harmony, Pennsylvania, seeking enough peace to begin the work of translation.

His wife, Emma, served as his first scribe. She sat on one side of a curtain while Joseph, using the Urim and Thummim and later a seer stone, dictated the translation. Emma later testified that Joseph could barely compose a well-worded letter, let alone produce the text that came through him. He did not use notes. He did not reference other books. When they stopped for the day and resumed the next, he would pick up exactly where he had left off without reviewing what had already been written.

In April 1829, a young schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery arrived and became the primary scribe. What followed was one of the most remarkable feats in literary history. Between April and June of 1829, Joseph dictated the bulk of the Book of Mormon — 531 pages in approximately 65 working days.

The Book of Mormon was published in March 1830. It stands today as either the most elaborate fraud in history or exactly what Joseph said it was: a sacred record, translated by the gift and power of God.

The Restoration of Authority

While translating the Book of Mormon, Joseph and Oliver came across passages about baptism. They wanted to know more. On May 15, 1829, they went into the woods along the Susquehanna River to pray.

A messenger descended from heaven. He identified himself as John the Baptist, acting under the direction of Peter, James, and John. He laid his hands on Joseph’s head and on Oliver’s head and conferred upon them the Aaronic Priesthood — the authority to baptize and administer the preparatory ordinances of the gospel. Joseph and Oliver immediately baptized each other in the river.

Upon you my fellow servants, in the name of Messiah, I confer the Priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins.

— Doctrine and Covenants 13:1

Shortly afterward — the exact date is not recorded, but sometime in late May or June 1829 — Peter, James, and John themselves appeared to Joseph and Oliver and conferred the Melchizedek Priesthood. This is the higher priesthood, the authority to lay on hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost, to organize the Church, to administer all the ordinances of salvation.

Think about what this means. The authority to act in God’s name had been absent from the earth for nearly 1,800 years. It was not passed down through institutional succession. It was not claimed by scholarly consensus. It was restored by the very men who held it in the New Testament, descending from heaven to confer it in person, with names, with dates, and with witnesses.

The Church Organized

On April 6, 1830, in a small log cabin in Fayette, New York, the Church of Jesus Christ was formally organized. There were six members.

Six people. A farmhouse. No building fund. No seminary. No political connections. No wealth. Just a group of believers who had witnessed miracles, received priesthood authority from heaven, and held in their hands a new volume of scripture that testified of Jesus Christ.

The stone cut without hands had begun to roll.

In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed.

— Daniel 2:44

The Cost of the Calling

From that day forward, Joseph Smith’s life was one of relentless persecution. There was never a season of peace. There was never a time when he could simply live and lead and breathe.

In 1832, a mob dragged him from his home in the middle of the night. They stripped him, beat him, and covered his body in hot tar and feathers. His adopted infant son, exposed to the cold that night, died shortly afterward. The next morning, still raw and blistered, Joseph preached a sermon. Some of the men who had tarred him sat in the congregation.

The Saints were driven from New York to Kirtland, Ohio. From Ohio to Independence, Missouri. From Independence to Far West. In each place, mobs and local governments conspired against them. In Missouri, Governor Lilburn Boggs issued Executive Order 44 — an extermination order that literally authorized the killing or expulsion of every Latter-day Saint in the state. Men, women, and children were driven from their homes in the dead of winter.

Joseph was arrested on fabricated charges and thrown into Liberty Jail. For months, he and his companions endured a dungeon with a ceiling so low they could not stand upright, food so foul they could barely eat it, and temperatures so brutal that survival itself was uncertain. From that jail, in the depths of despair, Joseph cried out to God:

O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place? How long shall thy hand be stayed, and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people and of thy servants, and thine ear be penetrated with their cries?

— Doctrine and Covenants 121:1–3

And God answered. In one of the most tender revelations in all of scripture, the Lord told Joseph:

My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high.

— Doctrine and Covenants 121:7–8

Joseph endured. The Saints fled Missouri and built a new city on the banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois. They called it Nauvoo — the beautiful. Within a few years it became one of the largest cities in Illinois, complete with a magnificent temple rising on the bluff above the river. But the peace did not last. It never did.

Through all of it — the beatings, the betrayals, the imprisonment, the death of his children, the exile of his people — Joseph never recanted. Not once. He never said it was a fabrication. He never sought to save himself by denying what he had seen, what he had been commanded to do, and who had called him.

Carthage

By June 1844, tensions had reached a breaking point. Political enemies, dissenters from within the Church, and hostile neighbors had conspired to destroy Joseph. He was charged with inciting a riot — a pretense — and agreed to surrender himself to authorities in Carthage, Illinois. He knew what awaited him there.

As he rode toward Carthage, he paused and looked back at the city of Nauvoo — the temple, the homes, the people he loved. He said:

Joseph and his brother Hyrum were held in Carthage Jail. On the afternoon of June 27, 1844, a mob of approximately 150 men with blackened faces stormed the jail. They rushed up the stairway.

Hyrum was shot first. A ball struck him in the face. He fell, saying, “I am a dead man.” Joseph rushed to his brother. There was nothing to be done. Hyrum was gone.

Joseph went to the window. Shots were coming from both the doorway and the outside. He was struck by multiple balls. He fell from the second- story window.

Joseph Smith was dead. He was thirty-eight years old.

The Testimony That Sealed It

Months before his death, Joseph Smith made a declaration that has echoed through every generation since. Read it slowly. Let the weight of it settle:

That was not the boast of a con man. That was the testimony of a prophet who knew exactly what God had called him to do, who knew it would cost him everything, and who declared it anyway.

He Was Right

Joseph Smith made that declaration when the Church had a handful of members, no money, no political power, and enemies on every side. The world expected it to die with him.

It did not die.

Today, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has over 17 million members in more than 195 countries and territories. There are temples on every inhabited continent. Over 50,000 missionaries serve at any given time. The Book of Mormon has been translated into over 115 languages. The standard of truth has gone forth — boldly, nobly, and independent — exactly as Joseph declared it would.

No unhallowed hand has stopped it. Not the mobs. Not the extermination order. Not the murder of the prophet himself. Not 200 years of criticism, ridicule, and opposition. The stone cut without hands continues to roll, and it will not be stopped until the Great Jehovah says the work is done.

Joseph Smith was either a fraud or a prophet. There is no middle ground. Frauds do not produce books that outlast centuries. Frauds do not build institutions that span the globe. Frauds do not go to their deaths calm as a summer’s morning for a lie they invented.

He was right.