I am in the final stages of a new Joseph Smith biography for Yale University Press, but two decades ago, I began research on a biography of Brigham Young. I had the time of my life coming to the Church History Library and making my way through what seemed like the endless boxes and microfilm reels that contain Young’s papers.
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As a research subject, Brigham Young pretty much wore me out. He lived such a long and controversial life, and there were so many tough questions to answer:
- What were the key spiritual experiences that attracted Young to the early Church of Christ?
- What factors led Young and his associates to restrict Black Latter-day Saints from the priesthood and temple ordinances?
- Did Young either order or obstruct investigations into the Mountain Meadows Massacre?
There were certain other questions that I did not need to answer in what became Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. Those questions pertained to Joseph Smith:
- Did Joseph Smith see and hear God the Father and Jesus Christ in or around the year 1820?
- Did Joseph Smith possess golden plates?
- Is the Book of Mormon an ancient record?
- And precisely what motivated Joseph Smith to be sealed to so many women, and what was the nature of those relationships?
Those questions didn’t matter for a biography of Brigham Young.
Whether or not Smith actually possessed golden plates, Young accepted the divinity of the Book of Mormon. No matter what motivated Smith to introduce plural marriage, once Brigham Young accepted the teaching, he pursued it wholeheartedly.
And no matter the nature of Smith’s plural marriages, it was up to Brigham Young and other Latter-day Saints to figure out how to live it out after the founding prophet’s death.
He continued to fascinate and sometimes astonish me.
Therefore, I mostly left those questions alone when writing about Brigham Young, and I did the same when I wrote a book about the role of Jesus Christ in Latter-day Saint thought and devotion.
“I Kept Coming Back to Joseph Smith”
After finishing that second book, I planned to stop writing Mormon History, but it proved difficult and ultimately impossible. The Joseph Smith Papers kept bringing out richly annotated volumes. New sources, like the Council of Fifty minutes, became available.
There is also a community of historians—academic historians but also many others—engaged in creative and thorough scholarship, not just on Smith but on the global history of the many movements that trace their origins to his career.
So, even though I segued into other writing projects, I kept coming back to Joseph Smith. Several years ago, I decided to write my own biography of Smith. It seemed a propitious time. The Joseph Smith Papers project was nearing completion, and the relevant sources were readily available.
And the subject—he continued to fascinate and sometimes astonish me.
Readers of From the Desk surely need no convincing on this point. Joseph Smith published what his followers regarded as scripture, gathered large communities in several places, introduced rituals that remain sacred to people around the world and married more than thirty women. Is there a more remarkable life in nineteenth-century America?
Smith piqued my curiosity in many other ways. Here are just a few examples.
Lost Ten Tribes
In the summer of 1840, Joseph Smith gradually introduced the doctrine of baptism for the dead. Along the way, he theorized about what Phebe Woodruff—wife of apostle Wilford Woodruff—termed “strange things” and “strong meat.”
For instance, Smith suggested that the ten “lost” tribes of Israel had been removed from the earth, along with a large portion of the planet. At Christ’s Second Coming, the lost tribes and the missing chunk of the earth would return, and the earth would be “reeling to and fro like a drunken man.”
The allusion is to the Book of Isaiah (24:20), which Smith had referred to in his early revelations.
Paul’s Death
That summer, Joseph Smith also engaged a passage in First Corinthians, in which Paul comments that he “die[s] daily.” In the same passage, Paul refers to having “fought with beasts at Ephesus.”
What did Paul mean by saying that he died daily? Surely he didn’t mean he experienced death on a daily basis? Perhaps he referred to acts of self-abnegation or to his willingness to risk his life for the gospel’s sake? Some ancient and modern commentators concluded that Paul had contended against actual beasts, perhaps in the arena, though other interpreters speculated that the “beasts” were Paul’s human opponents, or demons.
Smith put the above two verses together and suggested that “the beasts that he fought with at Ephesus often killed him and he came to life again.” I asked some friends in New Testament studies, and they underscored the originality of Joseph Smith’s interpretation.
Lesser-known Joseph Smith Stories That Fascinate Me
I don’t think the lost tribes left the earth on a chunk of the planet, and it seems unlikely that Paul came back to life after repeated grisly deaths. But these sermon topics point to both the significance of the Bible in Smith’s life and the creativity with which he approached biblical texts throughout his prophetic career.
I love these brief windows into the corners of Joseph Smith’s mind. Moreover, they weren’t random musings.
Joseph Smith wasn’t a systematic theologian.
In the summer and fall of 1840, disease ravaged Nauvoo’s population. The Saints endured the deaths of Edward Partridge and Seymour Brunson. The Woodruffs lost a two-year-old daughter, Sarah Emma. Phebe Woodruff took comfort from Smith’s explication of scripture. “Why may not our little Sarah be raised to life again?” she wondered.
Joseph Smith wasn’t a systematic theologian. After the Book of Mormon, Smith struggled to find the time or concentration to stick with any translation project or other intellectual exercise for very long. He wasn’t an intellect like Jonathan Edwards, who could spend thirteen hours a day writing sermons and books.
Unlike Jonathan Edwards, Smith was sociable, gregarious, and physical, and those aspects of his personality also fascinate me.
June 1843 arrest
One image that has stuck with me is of Joseph Smith’s defiant attitude during and after his June 1843 arrest on charges stemming from the 1838 Missouri War. Missouri officials sought Smith’s extradition, which Smith regarded as a probable death sentence.
Lawmen surprised Smith in Lee County, Illinois, where the prophet and his wife, Emma Hale Smith, were visiting her relatives. Smith attempted to flee, but the lawmen—Joseph J. Reynolds of Jackson County, Missouri, and Harmon T. Wilson of Hancock County, Illinois—stopped him by threatening to shoot him if he resisted. Reynolds and Wilson brought their prisoner to a hotel in Dixon, Illinois.
Their goal was to spirit him across the Mississippi River as quickly as possible and get him onto Missouri soil.
But they weren’t quick enough.
Joseph’s associates sent an attorney to the hotel, but Reynolds shut the door in his face. “God damn you, I will shoot you,” he yelled at Smith when the prophet protested. Smith ripped open his shirt and told Reynolds to “shoot away.”
A crowd eventually persuaded Reynolds to back down from an attempted extradition that more closely resembled a kidnapping than a legal procedure.
But here is a window into another aspect of Joseph Smith’s personality. Smith was a sometimes fiery physical presence. He loved to wrestle and excelled at “pulling up sticks,” another popular physical contest at the time. On occasion, Smith got into fistfights, which he usually won.
1843 altercation with Walter Bagby
Just a few weeks after a Nauvoo court freed Joseph Smith after his arrest at the hands of Reynolds and Wilson, Smith tangled with Walter Bagby, the Hancock County tax collector. The altercation stemmed from a dispute over property taxes.
On August 1, 1843, Bagby approached Smith’s carriage as the prophet arrived at the temple. Smith accused Bagby of abusing the citizens of Nauvoo, and Bagby called Smith a liar.
Joseph climbed down out of his buggy.
Bagby picked up a stone.
According to his own admission, Smith then seized Bagby by the throat “to choke him off.” The prophet apparently struck Bagby several times.
After Daniel H. Wells separated Smith and Bagby, Smith told Wells—a justice of the peace—to fine him for the assault. Wells declined to do so, so Smith went to see Newel K. Whitney, another justice of the peace.
Smith didn’t make this task easy.
Whitney apparently did as Smith requested, and the prophet paid the fine for his transgression. That outcome didn’t satisfy Bagby, one of the leaders of the anti-Mormon movement that caused Smith and the Saints so much trouble in the months ahead.
I probably wouldn’t have put the above story together without the indefatigable research of the Joseph Smith Papers project, whose Legal Papers series summarizes the case. The episode brings together several aspects of Joseph’s personality: bravado, defiance, occasional tempestuousness, and a splash of humor. Choke and punch an antagonist, but pay the fine immediately.
These are among the many lesser-known episodes that have kept Joseph Smith fascinating to me. As scholars have explored Smith’s life with granular detail, we know more—and want to know even more.
“No man knows [his] history”
Joseph Smith didn’t make this task easy. As prior biographers have noted, Smith kept many things to himself. “No man knows my history,” the prophet commented shortly before his murder, a phrase that Fawn Brodie used to title her portrait of Smith.
“The reality exists,” Ronald Barney cautions in his Joseph Smith: History, Methods, and Memory, “that Joseph Smith never desired to be completely known.”
Smith gradually talked more about his youthful religious experiences but was circumspect about other key moments in his life. When Hyrum Smith suggested that his brother share “information of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon,” Joseph responded “that it was not intended to tell the world all the particulars.”
Joseph Smith did talk at length in private about plural marriage, but even his best-informed associates only knew a portion of his activities and motivations.
In his public comments, Smith was rarely given to introspection. Any biographer, then, has to wrestle with the irony that despite the mountain of information that exists about Joseph Smith, that mountain obscures as much as it reveals.
Joseph Smith’s life burst with kinetic energy.
My forthcoming Joseph Smith biography
Unlike in my prior books, I cannot simply set aside or work around the key questions surrounding Joseph Smith’s life:
- Did he have visions of deity?
- Did he obtain golden plates?
- Did he translate a historical record?
- What were his motivations for pursuing plural marriages?
These and many other questions blend matters of faith and history. One cannot penetrate to the marrow of another individual’s religious experience, and one cannot confidently assess a biographical subject’s sincerity on every matter.
Still, I see it as the responsibility of any Joseph Smith biographer to give his or her thoughts on these questions while recognizing both the epistemological and evidentiary challenges that surround them.
But one must also nod to those challenges without letting them overwhelm a biography. Joseph Smith’s life burst with kinetic energy: new doctrines, new rituals, new challenges. When Smith encountered setbacks or failures, he usually responded with a bigger and more grandiose plan. By the end of his life, he juggled a welter of ecclesiastical, civic, military, and personal responsibilities.
A biography of Joseph Smith should crackle with the energy and dynamism that characterized his life, which means that one cannot narrate everything. I didn’t think I would ever undertake a project as fun as my biography of Brigham Young. But I was wrong.
I loved writing Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, which Yale University Press will publish in Summer of 2025.
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About the Scholar
John G. Turner is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University. He was drawn to history in part to better understand the institutions that shaped his Presbyterian religious culture. Turner has authored several notable historical works, including Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography, and They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. His forthcoming Joseph Smith biography will be published by Yale University Press under the title, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.
Further Reading
- American Prophet: John Turner’s Joseph Smith Biography
- Who Was the Early Mormon Jesus?
- The Latest Joseph Smith Scholarship
- Reflections on Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet
- American Moses: The Story of Leonard Arrington’s Brigham Young Biography
- In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents of Joseph Smith’s Wives
John Turner Joseph Smith Biography Resources
- What’s in John Turner’s Joseph Smith Biography? (From the Desk)
- Why This Non-Latter-Day Saint Professor, Biographer Calls the Joseph Smith Papers a ‘Researcher’s Dream’ (Church News)
- Why Joseph Smith Matters (Marginalia Review of Books)
- Coming Soon: Two New Joseph Smith Biographies (Salt Lake Tribune)
- Joseph Smith and the Book of Abraham (Anxious Bench)
John Turner Books
- Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (Preorder)
- Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Link)
- The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Link)
- Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945 (Link)
- Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (Link)
- They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty (Link)
Citation Information
This post was originally published on July 28, 2024. The most recent update on November 4, 2024 includes new resources, relevant links, and an improved online reading experience.
One reply on ““Strange Things” and “Strong Meat”: John Turner’s Journey with Joseph Smith”
Can’t wait to read it!! Thanks John.