Masonry and the Temple: A Response to LDS Discussions’ Critique of the “Now You Know” Video

The LDS Discussions blog argues that the Church’s 2019 “Now You Know” video on Joseph Smith and Freemasonry is dishonest and evasive. This response examines every substantive claim—historically, textually, and theologically—and shows that the weight of evidence points to a very different conclusion.

I. The Timeline Problem Is Not What LDS Discussions Claims

LDS Discussions frames the Masonry–endowment relationship entirely around a single damaging timeline: Joseph Smith was initiated as a Freemason on March 15, 1842, and introduced the Nauvoo endowment roughly seven weeks later on May 4, 1842. The implied logic is simple: proximity equals causation. Short gap + striking surface similarities = plagiarism.

This argument fails because it truncates a decade of prior revelatory development. Consider what Joseph Smith had already produced before he ever set foot in a Masonic lodge:

• 1830–1831: The Book of Moses (Joseph Smith Translation) contains the central narrative backbone of the endowment—the Creation, the Fall, the Garden, covenants of obedience and consecration, and the role of Satan as the deceiver. These elements are structurally and thematically present in the endowment and are absent from Masonic ritual.
• 1832: D&C 88 outlines washings and anointings as preparatory ordinances. D&C 76 presents the three degrees of glory—a theological architecture entirely alien to Freemasonry.
• 1835: Joseph taught eternal marriage principles to William Phelps and others. The sealing theology that undergirds the endowment’s purpose is wholly absent from Masonry.
• 1836: The Kirtland Temple ceremonies—washings, anointings, and prayer circles—were performed. This predates Nauvoo and Joseph’s Masonic initiation by six years.
• January 19, 1841: D&C 124 explicitly commands the building of the Nauvoo Temple and describes washings, anointings, and “ordinances” to be performed therein—fifteen months before Joseph became a Mason.

The revelatory architecture of the endowment was already substantially in place before March 1842. LDS Discussions never engages this documented timeline. To say Joseph “created the endowment ceremony from the Masonic ceremony” is to ignore a decade of prior scriptural and ecclesiastical development.

II. The Eddington Study: What the Quantitative Evidence Actually Shows

The most decisive empirical challenge to the “Joseph copied Masonry” thesis comes from recent rigorous scholarship that critics have not addressed. In 2025, David Eddington published “A Textual Comparison of Masonic Rites and the LDS Temple Endowment” in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (Volume 66). Rather than relying on impressionistic lists of alleged parallels, Eddington applied three independent quantitative methods:

1. Named entity and props comparison: Cataloguing participants, ceremonial objects, and clothing across both rites.
2. Conceptual line-by-line analysis: Parsing 448 discrete sentences from the endowment and identifying thematic parallels in Masonic text.
3. N-gram textual analysis: Comparing vocabulary and 2–5 word sequences across four texts: the endowment, the Masonic rite, the Pearl of Great Price creation accounts, and the Odd Fellows rite.

The results are striking:

Conceptual overlap between the endowment and Masonic rites: 10–17% at maximum; dropping to 9.7% after removing duplicates and tenuous similarities; and 8.3% when comparing against the modern (2023) endowment ceremony. The endowment shares only 10.8% of vocabulary with Masonic texts—but shares 18.4% with the Pearl of Great Price. By contrast, the Masonic rite shares 24.7% vocabulary with the Odd Fellows rite, a secular fraternal organization with no claim of ancient origin.

What does this mean? The endowment is textually and conceptually closer to the Pearl of Great Price—Joseph’s scriptural translations from the early 1830s—than it is to the Masonic rite. The Masonic rite, in turn, shares more vocabulary with a nineteenth-century secular fraternal organization than with the endowment. If plagiarism were driving the endowment’s structure, we would expect the inverse pattern.

Furthermore, Eddington demonstrates that many of the supposed similarities no longer exist in the current (post-1990) endowment, indicating that the points of convergence were peripheral and transient rather than structural and essential. LDS Discussions’ critique never distinguishes between elements that remain in the endowment today and those that were removed—a methodological failure that distorts the entire analysis.

David Eddington, “A Textual Comparison of Masonic Rites and the LDS Temple Endowment,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 66 (2025). interpreterfoundation.org

III. Ancient Origins: The Argument LDS Discussions Cannot Refute

LDS Discussions’ most confident historical claim is this: “The Masonic ceremony did not begin until medieval Europe, and Solomon’s Temple was about animal sacrifice and had nothing to do with the Masons or LDS endowment ceremony.” This assertion is historically inaccurate in the way it frames the question, and it fundamentally misunderstands the apologetic position it claims to refute.

The LDS apologetic position is not that Masonry descended intact from Solomon’s Temple. The position—held by Joseph Smith himself, by early members, and by modern scholars like Hugh Nibley, Matthew B. Brown, and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw—is that both Masonry and the endowment share common ancient sources, with Masonry representing a corrupted and fragmentary descendant of genuinely ancient initiatory traditions.

The Ancient Near Eastern Evidence

Bradshaw’s systematic analysis in “Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances” (Interpreter) identifies seven major endowment components with documented pre-Masonic ancient parallels. None of these seven elements can be traced to Masonic sources; all seven trace to biblical, ancient Near Eastern, or early Christian sources:

1. Creation narrative framework: Babylonian and ancient Near Eastern kingship rituals consistently began with recitations of creation. The Babylonian akītu festival is an attested example dating to at least 1800 BCE.
2. Sacred garden symbolism: The Mari Investiture Panel (ca. 1800 BCE) depicts sacred gardens with central trees and woven partitions structurally parallel to Eden’s narrative role in the endowment.
3. Guardians and sacred-space progression: Cherubim stationed at thresholds appear across Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Israelite temple contexts, functioning as gatekeepers of sacred space.
4. Covenant structure: The sequence of covenants—obedience, sacrifice, gospel, chastity, consecration—is reflected in the ancient covenant formulary identified by biblical scholars Jon Levenson and Klaus Baltzer, unknown to Joseph Smith’s contemporaries.
5. Priestly clothing changes: Ancient Israelite priests changed garments as they progressed through increasingly sacred chambers, mirroring the progression in Adam and Eve’s clothing transitions in the endowment narrative.
6. Keywords and sacred names: Ancient temple practice employed verbal passwords to unlock access to sacred precincts—documented in the Eleusinian mysteries, Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” and early Christian catechesis.
7. Handclasps and sacred gestures: Raised-hand oath-taking and handclasp investiture appear throughout ancient Near Eastern royal investiture scenes and biblical narratives centuries before operative Masonry existed.

Bradshaw’s conclusion is explicit: all seven elements trace to ancient sources, none to Freemasonry. This is not a faith claim; it is a finding of comparative religious history. The question for skeptics is not whether these ancient parallels exist—they do—but how to account for them.

Hugh Nibley, drawing on decades of Egyptological and Semitics scholarship, described ancient temple practices as “a primordial revealed religion that has passed through alternate phases of apostasy and restoration which have left the world littered with the fragments of the original structure.” This framing is not merely pious language—it is a research program. Margaret Barker, an independent non-LDS scholar of Second Temple Judaism, reached strikingly convergent conclusions: that creation theology, angelic mediation, and covenant-making are authentic ancient temple elements that survived in fragmentary form in various traditions, including Masonry.

LDS Discussions’ response to the ancient origins argument is to collapse it into a strawman: “the Masonic ceremony did not begin until medieval Europe.” This misses the point entirely. No serious LDS scholar claims Masonry is ancient in origin. The claim is that ancient initiatory traditions—documented in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, and early Christianity—fragmented over millennia, and both Masonry and the Latter-day Saint endowment represent derivations from that common ancient source, one corrupted and one restored.

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, “Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. interpreterfoundation.org

IV. The Early Member Quotes: What They Actually Prove

LDS Discussions presents a series of quotations from early Latter-day Saints—Heber C. Kimball, Benjamin F. Johnson, Joseph Fielding, Franklin D. Richards—to argue that early members believed the Masonic ceremony had ancient origins traceable to Solomon’s Temple, and that Joseph Smith taught this. The blog then argues that since this claim is historically false (Masonry did not originate in Solomon’s Temple era), the whole framework collapses.

There are two decisive problems with this argument.

First, the quotes do not say what LDS Discussions needs them to say. Read carefully, the early members consistently distinguished between Masonry as a corrupted remnant and the endowment as the restored original. Heber C. Kimball: “The Masonry of today is received from the apostasy.” Benjamin F. Johnson reported Joseph saying that “Freemasonry, as at present, was the apostate endowments.” Joseph Fielding wrote that Masonry had been “a stepping stone or preparation for something else, the true origin of Masonry.” These are not testimonies that Masonry and the endowment share the same Solomonic origin. They are testimonies that Masonry is a degraded echo of something ancient and true, which Joseph was restoring in a purified form. That is entirely consistent with modern scholarship demonstrating Masonic rites share common ancient initiatory traditions.

Second, these quotes are consistent with modern scholarly findings. The argument that various ancient initiatory traditions fragmented and were partially preserved (and corrupted) in traditions including Masonry is not unique to LDS apologetics. It reflects mainstream scholarship in the history of religions. The early Saints’ conviction that the endowment was the authentic original—of which Masonry was a shadow—is precisely what Bradshaw’s ancient-source analysis corroborates.

LDS Discussions builds a large portion of its critique on the premise that these early member statements prove the church’s current position is dishonest. In fact, the current position—that Masonry and the endowment share ancient roots rather than that Joseph copied Masonry—is more consistent with what the early Saints actually wrote than the critique implies.

V. The Scaffold Theory: Joseph’s Use of Masonic Forms as Pedagogical Vessels

Even granting that Joseph Smith did adopt certain Masonic forms—the ritual structure, some gestures, some vocabulary—as a teaching framework, this is not equivalent to the charge of fabrication. The scaffold theory, articulated by multiple LDS scholars and tacitly acknowledged in the Church’s video, holds that Joseph used Masonic ritual as a pedagogical scaffold: a vessel already familiar to many Nauvoo members that could carry the revealed content of the endowment in a comprehensible form.

This is not an unusual mechanism of revelation. The New Testament authors used Greek philosophical vocabulary (logos, pneuma) to articulate Jewish theological content. Paul borrowed the structural language of Hellenistic mystery initiation to explain baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Book of Mormon employs King James biblical idiom not because it was translated from seventeenth-century English, but because that idiom was the recognized sacred register of its audience. Revelation consistently works within, not around, the cultural frameworks of its recipients.

The question is therefore not whether revealed content can use existing cultural forms—it demonstrably can, across all major religious traditions. The question is whether the content of the endowment is distinctively ancient and not derivable from Masonic sources. Eddington’s quantitative analysis and Bradshaw’s comparative study both answer: yes, the content is distinctively ancient and non-Masonic.

LDS Discussions never engages the scaffold theory on its own terms. The blog treats the presence of Masonic forms as proof that the content is derived. This is a non sequitur. Form and content are analytically distinct, and the entire scholarly debate turns on precisely that distinction.

VI. The Parallel-Elements List: Fewer Than Claimed, Less Significant Than Claimed

LDS Discussions enumerates a list of specific parallels to demonstrate that Joseph “lifted” the endowment from Masonry. Each item requires scrutiny.

Washing and Anointing

Ritual washing and anointing appear in Exodus 29 and Leviticus 8—the consecration of Aaron and his sons as priests. They are attested in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greek sacred contexts. Their presence in Masonry is the fragment; their presence in the endowment is the restoration. The LDS Kirtland Temple used these ordinances in 1836, six years before Joseph’s Masonic initiation.

The New Name

The bestowal of a sacred new name is documented in Revelation 2:17 (“a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it”), in ancient Egyptian initiation texts, and in early Christian baptismal practice. Masonry’s use of a new name draws from this same ancient well, not the reverse.

Signs, Tokens, and Grips

Handclasp investiture as a sign of covenant and authority appears in ancient Mesopotamian royal ceremony, in biblical oath-making, and in early Christian representations of the dexiosis (right-hand covenant act). These are ancient forms, not Masonic inventions. By Eddington’s analysis, handclasp elements constitute part of the narrow overlap between the two ceremonies—and both derive from documented ancient precedents.

The Five Points of Fellowship and Penalty Oaths

Both the five points of fellowship and the penalty oaths were removed from the endowment in 1990. This is the most powerful single data point against the “systematic copying” thesis: if these elements were revealed core content, they would not be removable. Their removal demonstrates precisely what the scaffold theory predicts—they were peripheral pedagogical forms that could be discarded when no longer serving their teaching purpose. LDS Discussions presents their former presence as proof of plagiarism, but their removal reveals their disposable, non-essential character. Core revealed content does not get quietly removed after 148 years.

Symbols: Beehive, All-Seeing Eye, Sun, Moon, and Stars

These symbols are among the most widely shared in human religious and civic history. The beehive appears in ancient Near Eastern iconography as a symbol of divine order and communal purpose. The all-seeing eye is found in Egyptian, early Christian, and Enlightenment-era iconography predating operative Masonry. Celestial bodies—sun, moon, stars—appear throughout biblical cosmological imagery (Genesis 1; Revelation 12; 1 Corinthians 15:41). Their presence in both Masonry and the LDS temple is evidence of common antiquity, not mutual borrowing.

The Veil

The temple veil is theologically the most significant element of the endowment, and it is among the most thoroughly ancient. The veil of the Tabernacle and Temple in Exodus, Leviticus, and Hebrews 10:19–20 is explicitly the threshold between human and divine space. The endowment’s veil ceremony draws on this Israelite temple theology with a richness and doctrinal coherence that has no parallel in Masonic rite.

In each case the pattern is identical: the element has well-documented ancient origins predating operative Masonry by centuries or millennia. The question of whether Joseph copied from Masonry or restored from ancient sources cannot be settled by listing surface similarities—it requires the kind of rigorous quantitative and comparative analysis Eddington and Bradshaw have independently provided, and both arrive at the same answer.

VII. What the Church’s Video Gets Right—and What It Could Have Said More Fully

LDS Discussions characterizes the Church’s video as fundamentally dishonest. This charge does not survive examination. The video states:

“The temple ceremony was not an imitation or copy of masonry. It was revelation from God. Yes, the presentation methods may have parallels to Masonic ritual, but the content of the instruction, the covenants, and truths introduced by Joseph Smith as part of the endowment, were revealed to him prior to his encounter with masonry.”

This is accurate. The distinction between presentation methods and covenantal content is exactly the distinction Bradshaw, Eddington, and FAIR Mormon draw. The video accurately states that early Latter-day Saints noticed “common characteristics” and “concluded the temple ceremony was of divine origin”—which is precisely what the early member quotes demonstrate when read carefully.

Could the video have gone further? Yes. A fuller treatment would have engaged the ancient-origins evidence, cited D&C 124 (January 1841) to demonstrate the endowment’s pre-Masonic revelatory foundation, and referenced the quantitative textual work now available. Brevity in a short-form video is not dishonesty; it is a constraint of the medium.

LDS Discussions conflates “incomplete” with “deceptive”—a conflation that its own quoted definition of honesty does not support, since the video makes no false statements. Ironically, it is LDS Discussions that is incomplete: the blog never mentions D&C 124, never engages the ancient-origins scholarship of Nibley, Bradshaw, or Barker, and never cites or responds to the Eddington quantitative analysis. The charge of selective presentation applies with far greater force to the critique than to the video being critiqued.

VIII. The Polygamy Connection: Motive Arguments Are Not Textual Evidence

LDS Discussions argues that the real purpose of the endowment’s Masonic secrecy was to conceal plural marriage. This is a motive argument, not a historical or textual argument. Even if it were true that the endowment’s secrecy partly served to provide cover for plural marriage among an inner circle, this would not tell us anything about whether the endowment itself was plagiarized from Masonry. These are analytically separate questions.

The argument also proves too much. By the same logic, one could argue that the Catholic seal of confession was designed to conceal clerical wrongdoing—without thereby proving that auricular confession is not theologically ancient. Imputed motive does not establish textual derivation. LDS Discussions bundles the motive argument with the origins question precisely because the origins question is harder to win on the evidence.

IX. The Broader Pattern Argument: Cultural Context Is Not Disqualifying

The blog’s concluding argument is that because almost everything Joseph Smith produced can be traced to ideas of his time—the Book of Mormon, the Word of Wisdom, the three degrees of glory from Swedenborg, the priesthood structure from Rigdon—we should conclude it was all of human origin.

This argument carries a hidden and unexamined premise: that genuine revelation must produce ideas with no cultural antecedents. But this is not what any major religious tradition claims. The Law of Moses drew on ancient Near Eastern legal traditions. The Sermon on the Mount echoes wisdom literature. The Gospel of John uses Greek philosophical categories. Paul’s letters are steeped in Hellenistic rhetoric. No serious theologian takes any of this as evidence against the New Testament’s divine character.

The relevant question is not “did this idea exist in Joseph’s cultural environment?” but rather: does the specific configuration of ideas in the endowment—their internal coherence, their convergence with ancient Near Eastern temple theology independently discovered by modern scholars, their theological comprehensiveness, and the fruits they produce—point toward a transcendent source? Eddington’s analysis shows the endowment is more like Joseph’s scriptural translations of the early 1830s than like the Masonic rite. Bradshaw’s analysis shows the endowment’s structural elements map onto ancient Near Eastern temple practice in ways that were undiscoverable from Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century environment. That convergence is not proof of divine origin, but it is powerful evidence that the “Joseph copied his culture” argument cannot account for.

X. Conclusion: What an Honest Assessment Requires

LDS Discussions’ critique of the “Now You Know” video rests on four main pillars: (1) the seven-week timeline proves derivation; (2) the specific parallels prove systematic copying; (3) the early member quotes prove the founding claim was historically false; and (4) the broader cultural parallels prove Joseph was simply a product of his time. Each pillar is deficient.

The timeline ignores a decade of prior revelatory development culminating in D&C 124 (January 1841). The parallels are quantitatively far smaller (8.3–17%) than critics imply, and the endowment has greater textual affinity with Joseph’s 1830s scriptural translations than with Masonic texts. The early member quotes describe Masonry as a corrupted echo of something ancient and true—which is consistent with both the Church’s current position and modern comparative scholarship. The cultural-parallels argument fails to account for the endowment’s convergence with ancient Near Eastern temple theology that was inaccessible in Joseph’s environment.

None of this means the Masonry–endowment relationship is unimportant or that all questions are resolved. Joseph clearly encountered Masonic ritual and was influenced by it in some presentational respects. The seven-week gap is historically real. These are legitimate subjects for careful inquiry. What the evidence does not support is the conclusion that the endowment was fabricated from Masonic materials—a conclusion that requires ignoring the prior revelatory record, misrepresenting the quantitative textual evidence, and dismissing the ancient-origins scholarship without engagement.

The “Now You Know” video is not dishonest. It correctly identifies the endowment’s covenantal content as prior to and distinct from Masonry. What a fuller treatment—such as this response provides—adds is the evidentiary case: the pre-Masonic revelatory timeline, the Eddington quantitative analysis demonstrating 9.7–17% overlap, and the Bradshaw and Nibley ancient Near Eastern scholarship that roots the endowment in a tradition far older than operative Freemasonry.

That is the complete picture. LDS Discussions withholds it from its own readers while accusing the Church of doing exactly that.

Sources and Further Reading

David Eddington, “A Textual Comparison of Masonic Rites and the LDS Temple Endowment,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 66 (2025). interpreterfoundation.org

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, “Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. interpreterfoundation.org

Kyler Rasmussen, “Interpreting Interpreter: A Masonic Endowment?” Interpreter Foundation. interpreterfoundation.org

FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Relationship between the Temple Endowment and Freemasonry.” fairlatterdaysaints.org

Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/FARMS, 1992).

Matthew B. Brown, The Gate of Heaven: Insights on the Doctrines and Symbols of the Temple (American Fork: Covenant Communications, 1999).

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Joseph Smith and Masonry: Now You Know” (December 2019). YouTube

LDS Discussions, “About That New Masonry and the Temple Video.” ldsdiscussions.com