Revelation Overview, Part 1: Backdating Prophecy

A scholarly response to ldsdiscussions.com — examining what the backdating argument actually requires, what the evidence actually shows, and why the methodology employed against Joseph Smith’s revelations is riddled with double standards.

Overview of the Argument

The ldsdiscussions.com article “Overview of Revelation, Part 1: Backdating Prophecy” relies almost entirely on a single podcast by Radio Free Mormon and advances a deceptively simple thesis: that the Book of Mormon, like the Book of Daniel, was written after the events it “predicts,” and that Joseph Smith wove into the text specific historical events he already knew about — from Columbus’s voyage, to the Revolutionary War, to the Martin Harris–Charles Anthon visit — in order to manufacture prophetic credibility. The argument further claims that the Civil War prophecy in D&C 87 is not remarkable because tensions between North and South were widely discussed just before Joseph received it.

These claims sound compelling in isolation. But they collapse under rigorous scrutiny. The backdating argument as applied to the Book of Mormon is methodologically inconsistent, demands an impossible evidentiary standard for Latter-day Saint scripture while exempting other ancient texts from the same scrutiny, misrepresents the nature and specificity of the Civil War prophecy, and ignores a formidable body of manuscript evidence that directly falsifies the post-hoc fabrication hypothesis. We address each major claim in turn.

Claim 1: The Book of Daniel Proves That Backdating Is Happening in the Book of Mormon

The ldsdiscussions article builds its entire framework on the Book of Daniel. The logic runs as follows: scholars have proven Daniel was written in the 2nd century BC because its prophecies are accurate up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes and then fail; therefore, whenever a text contains accurate “prophecy” up to a certain point and becomes vague afterward, it was written at that point. Therefore the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith.

This argument has two fatal problems.

First, the Daniel dating consensus is not as settled as presented.

The ldsdiscussions article presents a late-date consensus on Daniel as if it is the universal conclusion of scholarship. It is not. The debate is genuine and active. Conservative scholars — including those writing in peer-reviewed evangelical academic journals and interacting with the same textual data — have made substantial arguments for a 6th-century BC composition date. The book’s historical details about Belshazzar were long attacked as errors, since no records outside of Daniel mentioned him as a king. This changed dramatically when the Nabonidus Cylinder was excavated, which confirmed that Belshazzar, son of Nabonidus, co-ruled Babylon in his father’s absence. This was precisely the figure Daniel described. The critical-dating hypothesis predicted a historical error; the archaeological record vindicated Daniel. Similarly, Nebuchadnezzar’s role in the rebuilding of Babylon, described in Daniel 4, has been corroborated by contemporary Babylonian cuneiform records.

None of this definitively settles the Daniel debate. But ldsdiscussions presents the late-date critical consensus as if it is an unchallenged fact and then uses it as the load-bearing premise for the entire argument against the Book of Mormon. If the premise is contested — and it is — the entire deductive chain to the Book of Mormon weakens significantly.

Second, and more fundamentally: the “pattern of accuracy until the author’s present day” argument does not prove forgery — it merely raises the question.

The vaticinium ex eventu (prophecy after the fact) argument works in Daniel because the text exhibits internal errors at a specific historical moment — the author accurately describes events before Antiochus Epiphanes’s death, then predicts incorrectly how and where Antiochus would die (Dan. 11:40–45). The failure is falsifiable and specific. The methodology applies because there is an internal break between accurate retrodiction and incorrect prediction at precisely the moment of alleged composition.

This is a far more sophisticated argument than what ldsdiscussions applies to the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Mormon, there are no analogous internal failures at the precise moment of Joseph Smith’s life. The argument is simply: “All specific prophecies are of events that happened before 1830.” But this proves nothing by itself. A genuine ancient text written by prophets with access to divine revelation would look exactly the same. The ldsdiscussions argument is not a falsification; it is a methodological assumption — prophecy cannot be real, therefore accuracy equals forgery.

Claim 2: 1 Nephi’s Prophecies of Columbus, the Revolutionary War, and the Bible Were Obvious to Any 19th-Century Author

The ldsdiscussions article argues that the prophecies in 1 Nephi 11–14 are simply 19th-century knowledge retrofitted into an ancient text. Columbus, the Revolutionary War, the coming of the Bible to the New World — all of these would be obvious to Joseph Smith, and therefore are not impressive as prophecy.

This argument fundamentally misunderstands what the prophecies claim and what their apologetic force actually is. The question is not whether Joseph Smith could have known these things. Of course he could have. The relevant question is whether these prophecies fit the pattern of a genuinely ancient prophetic text, and whether the specific details they contain align with what we would expect from a 6th-century BC Israelite author writing in the Semitic prophetic tradition.

BYU’s Religious Studies Center has noted that Columbus himself left remarkable self-descriptions in his writings — including his own “Book of Prophecies” — in which he believed he was divinely inspired and called to fulfill biblical prophecy in his voyages. Language and self-understanding that closely parallels the portrait in 1 Nephi 13:12. Modern Columbus scholarship has increasingly validated this as authentic to his worldview. The specificity of prophetic fulfillment here is not merely that Columbus arrived, but that the man is described in terms of divine calling and Spirit-driven action consistent with how Columbus himself understood his mission — details an uneducated frontier farmer in 1829 would have had no special reason to incorporate.

Furthermore, the ldsdiscussions argument proves too much. If the presence of historical events in a text that post-dates them is proof of forgery, then the entire literary tradition of apocalyptic Jewish and Christian literature stands condemned by the same logic. The Book of Revelation — which the ldsdiscussions article actually cites favorably when making a different point about Johannine authorship — contains detailed allusions to the persecution of Christians under Nero and Domitian, events known to its author. By the ldsdiscussions logic, this too is merely “backdating.” The response cannot be “but scholars agree Revelation is authentic literature” and then turn around and claim that the same pattern in the Book of Mormon proves fraud. That is special pleading.

Claim 3: Joseph Smith Misinterpreted Isaiah 29 and Retrofitted the Anthon Visit

The ldsdiscussions article argues that Joseph Smith deliberately misread Isaiah 29 — a text not about a literal book at all, says the article — and then wrote a detailed, specific account of the Martin Harris–Charles Anthon visit into 2 Nephi 27 in order to create the appearance of prophetic fulfillment.

The claim that Isaiah 29 cannot refer to a literal book is an interpretive assertion, not an exegetical fact. The ldsdiscussions article cites one BYU professor (Charles Harrell’s This Is My Doctrine) to assert that “Isaiah isn’t talking about a literal book.” But this is a contested interpretive position, not consensus scholarship. Isaiah 29 is part of a judgment oracle against Jerusalem (“Ariel”), and the sealed document imagery in verses 11–12 is polyvalent — it carries both immediate referents and potential typological extension. LDS scholars and others have argued that the expansion of this passage in 2 Nephi 27 represents authentic ancient interpretive tradition consistent with the pesher method found at Qumran, where biblical passages were extended to apply to contemporary revelatory events. The claim that this is necessarily a misinterpretation depends on prior commitments about the Book of Mormon’s authenticity, not on independently established exegesis.

The ldsdiscussions argument rests on a circular evidentiary chain. The article uses the changing details of Joseph’s accounts of the Anthon visit (1832 vs. 1838) as evidence that the visit was being “retrofit to fulfill prophecy.” But this assumes that the fuller 1838 account is embellishment rather than a more complete record — an assumption that requires the Book of Mormon to be false in the first place. If one grants the possibility that the 1838 account is accurate, the 1832 brevity simply reflects the character of that document (a personal history, not an official detailed record). The argument is only compelling if one already disbelieves Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims; it cannot serve as independent evidence for those genuinely investigating.

The Anthon encounter is independently attested. Charles Anthon himself wrote a letter to E.D. Howe (1834) attempting to explain his version of events — but notably he did not deny the visit had taken place, nor that he had examined the characters. The dispute concerns details and meaning, not whether the encounter occurred. The ldsdiscussions article treats the fact that the account evolved as proof of fabrication; but the evolution of an account from brief personal recollection (1832) to detailed official history (1838) is entirely normal in biographical literature and cannot, without additional evidence, constitute proof of deliberate prophetic manufacturing.

Claim 4: The Civil War Prophecy Is Unremarkable Because Sectional Tensions Were Already Discussed

The ldsdiscussions article makes one of its most specific factual claims here: that a newspaper article in the Painesville Telegraph dated December 21, 1832 — four days before Joseph received D&C 87 — discussed “the possibilities of dismemberment,” and that therefore the Civil War prophecy was merely reflecting anxieties already in the air.

This argument fails on multiple levels, and it fails in ways that are directly measurable.

D&C 87:1–3

“Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls; And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place. For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called.”

The Nullification Crisis of 1832 was widely expected to resolve peacefully — and it did. President Andrew Jackson issued his Proclamation to the People of South Carolina in December 1832, threatening federal force. South Carolina backed down. The crisis was resolved by the Compromise Tariff of March 1833. Every contemporary observer in late 1832, including the editors of the Painesville Telegraph, understood that the current dispute would be defused. The concept of general sectional tension was in the air; a specific, named, devastating civil war beginning in South Carolina was not. These are categorically different claims.

No American statesman in 1832 publicly predicted civil war beginning in South Carolina. The prophecy did not merely predict “tensions” or even “conflict.” It predicted a catastrophic war beginning specifically in South Carolina, the involvement of Great Britain, and wars poured out upon all nations. In 1832, the idea that the United States would erupt into fratricidal war was widely dismissed as alarmist hysteria. Orson Pratt reportedly carried a manuscript copy of the revelation and preached it for years before the war — and was ridiculed for it. An 1857 newspaper mocked the prophecy just four years before Fort Sumter. If the prediction were merely conventional wisdom, Pratt would not have been ridiculed for it.

The manuscript trail for this prophecy is extensive and early. Contrary to the claim that prophecies were “never spoken of until after the occurrence,” the historical record demonstrates the opposite: (1) Joseph Smith wrote of the prophecy in a personal letter to a Rochester newspaper editor within two weeks of receiving it in December 1832; (2) the revelation was recorded in Manuscript Revelation Book 2 by scribe Frederick G. Williams and indexed under “wars”; (3) multiple independent manuscript copies exist in the handwriting of W.W. Phelps, Thomas Bullock, and others — some of whom left the Church before Joseph’s death and had every motivation to expose a fraud if one existed; (4) the revelation was published in the Pearl of Great Price in Liverpool in 1851, a full decade before the Civil War; (5) Orson Pratt republished it on the front page of The Seer in April 1854, seven years before Fort Sumter.

Documentary Timeline — D&C 87

• Dec. 25, 1832 — Revelation received; recorded in Manuscript Revelation Book 2 by scribe Frederick G. Williams
• Early Jan. 1833 — Joseph Smith references it in a letter to a Rochester newspaper editor
• 1832–1844 — Multiple handwritten copies circulated; Orson Pratt carried a manuscript copy during missionary work and preached it publicly
• 1851 — First publication, Pearl of Great Price, Liverpool — ten years before the war
• April 1854 — Front page of The Seer by Orson Pratt — seven years before Fort Sumter
• 1857 — A newspaper ridicules the prophecy as unfulfilled — proving it was publicly known and unambiguously pre-war
• April 12, 1861 — Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina; war begins exactly as named
• 1880 — D&C 87 formally canonized

The Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, upon the outbreak of war, was forced to ask: “Have we not had a prophet among us?” The backdating hypothesis requires us to believe that Joseph Smith somehow fabricated a prophecy and planted it in multiple independent manuscripts, distributed it to apostles and missionaries for nearly three decades, got it published in England a decade before the war, and then had critics mock it publicly four years before its fulfillment — all while ensuring no contemporary whistle-blowers came forward to expose the forgery. This is a far more extraordinary claim than simply taking the documentary evidence at face value.

Claim 5: The Book of Mormon’s Silence on Post-1830 Events Proves 19th-Century Authorship

The ldsdiscussions article makes the curious argument that the Book of Mormon’s failure to mention the Civil War, slavery debates, or other post-1830 events is evidence that Joseph Smith wrote it. But this argument works equally well — or rather, equally poorly — as evidence for any number of alternative conclusions.

Consider: the Hebrew Bible contains no mention of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, or the great Jewish Diaspora — events of staggering significance to the covenant people. Does this prove the Hebrew Bible was written before these events? Of course not; it simply reflects the scope of prophetic focus in ancient visionary literature. Prophets did not typically receive exhaustive panoramic visions of all future history. Isaiah’s silence about Alexander the Great does not prove Isaiah was composed before Alexander. The argument from prophetic silence is fundamentally weak because genuine prophetic literature was never designed to be comprehensive historical prediction.

Moreover, the Book of Mormon itself explicitly states it does not contain all things. Nephi’s vision in 1 Nephi 14 was deliberately curtailed by divine command — the remaining record was assigned to John the Revelator. The text states plainly in 3 Nephi 26:6–11 that a greater portion of the record was withheld based on the faith of the reader. Invoking the text’s declared and theologically purposeful incompleteness as evidence of fabrication is a logical fallacy. It argues: “The text claims to be incomplete, and it is incomplete, therefore it is fraudulent.” This proves nothing.

Claim 6: Russell M. Nelson’s “Different Conference” Comment Shows That Modern Prophecy Is Retrospectively Manufactured

The article concludes with a modern illustration: members retrospectively interpreted President Nelson’s October 2019 statement that the April 2020 General Conference would be “different from any previous conference” as a COVID-19 prophecy. The ldsdiscussions article notes that Nelson himself admitted he didn’t foresee the pandemic, and concludes that this shows believers are wired to retrofit mundane statements into fulfilled prophecy.

This is the strongest rhetorical point in the article, and it deserves honest engagement. Human beings are prone to confirmation bias. We do retrospectively assign prophetic significance to statements that were not intended as prophecy. This is a real psychological phenomenon, it is well-documented, and Latter-day Saints are not immune to it. The ldsdiscussions critique here is genuinely useful as a check on credulity.

But this observation cannot do the work the article asks of it. The demonstration that some prophetic claims are post-hoc rationalizations does not establish that all prophetic claims are. That is a classic fallacy of composition. The existence of forged prophecies throughout religious history does not prove that no genuine prophecies exist. The article uses the Nelson example as a hermeneutical lens through which to read the entire history of Latter-day Saint revelation — but the Nelson case is categorically different from D&C 87. Nelson never claimed to be giving a specific revelation about a future pandemic. Joseph Smith explicitly claimed divine revelation about a specific future war, in a specific state, involving specific nations. The documented manuscript trail, the early circulation, the pre-war publication in England, the public ridicule in 1857, and the specific accuracy in 1861 are not remotely analogous to members retroactively reading COVID into a bicentennial remark.

The ldsdiscussions article essentially argues that because people sometimes misidentify prophecy, Joseph Smith’s most documented and verified prophecy should also be dismissed. This is not a scholarly argument. It is motivated skepticism.

The Methodological Double Standard

Perhaps the most serious problem with the ldsdiscussions argument is not any individual factual error, but the methodological inconsistency that runs through the entire piece. The article applies the backdating framework to the Book of Mormon with extraordinary rigor, while simultaneously treating the same interpretive tools very differently when they point toward conclusions inconvenient for the critical case.

Consider the article’s use of Bart Ehrman on the authorship of Revelation. Ehrman is cited favorably to argue that the Apostle John did not write the Book of Revelation — a conclusion used as evidence that Joseph Smith made an error by attributing Revelation to John the Apostle. But Ehrman’s entire scholarly method depends on treating ancient religious texts as human documents subject to the same literary, historical, and linguistic analysis as any other ancient text. This is precisely the method that, applied consistently, leads to conclusions about the Synoptic Gospels and Acts that most critics of Mormonism are unwilling to accept. One cannot invoke Ehrman’s methodological approach selectively — validating it when it critiques Mormon claims and setting it aside when it critiques the foundational documents of traditional Christianity.

Similarly, the article treats the Book of Daniel’s alleged internal failures as decisive evidence of late composition, while dismissing the Book of Mormon’s documented early manuscript attestations, the pre-war publication of D&C 87, and the remarkable specific accuracy of prophetic details. Equal evidentiary weight is not applied uniformly. Convenient scholarly conclusions are embraced; inconvenient evidence is ignored.

This is not scholarship. It is advocacy dressed in scholarly language.

What a Genuine Application of the Backdating Standard Would Require

It is worth being precise about what would actually constitute evidence of backdating in the Latter-day Saint case. The scholarly case for late composition of Daniel rests on three intersecting lines of evidence: (1) internal prophetic failures at a historically identifiable moment; (2) linguistic evidence (Aramaic and Greek loan-words inconsistent with 6th-century Babylonian context); and (3) the absence of any reference to Daniel in pre-Maccabean Jewish literature. Even granting all three, the case remains contested among serious scholars.

The ldsdiscussions article produces none of these lines of evidence for the Book of Mormon. It produces no internal prophetic failures at a historically identifiable moment. It produces no linguistic evidence of 19th-century composition that cannot be equally explained by the translation process. It produces no documentary evidence of fabrication — no contemporaries who claimed to have witnessed Joseph inventing or revising prophecies post-hoc.

What the article produces is an argument from plausibility: Joseph could have known these things; therefore he probably made them up. But this is not how historical scholarship works. Plausibility is not proof. The presence of a naturalistic alternative explanation does not eliminate the evidential weight of the documentary record, particularly when that record — multiple manuscripts, pre-war publications, independent attestation by people who later left the Church — directly contradicts the fabrication hypothesis.

Conclusion

The ldsdiscussions “Backdating Prophecy” article is rhetorically effective but analytically thin. Its core arguments dissolve under scrutiny:

Summary of Responses

• Daniel analogy — The scholarly consensus on Daniel’s late date is contested; the specific internal failure mechanism used to date Daniel does not exist in the Book of Mormon
• 1 Nephi prophecies — Knowability by a 19th-century author is not proof of fabrication; the same logic would condemn all apocalyptic literature including the New Testament
• Anthon visit — The argument is circular; evolving accounts reflect normal biographical documentation; Anthon independently confirms the visit occurred
• Civil War prophecy — The Nullification Crisis resolved peacefully; no contemporary predicted devastating civil war beginning in South Carolina; the manuscript trail and pre-war publications directly refute backdating
• Prophetic silence — Ancient prophetic literature was never comprehensive; the Book of Mormon explicitly declares its incompleteness by divine design
• Nelson analogy — Informal remarks about a bicentennial conference are categorically different from formally recorded revelations with extensive pre-event documentary trails
• Methodological double standard — Ehrman’s methods are applied selectively; the same rigor applied to Mormon claims is not applied to the critical assumptions themselves

The honest seeker after truth deserves a consistent evidentiary standard. If we are to take the vaticinium ex eventu framework seriously as a tool for evaluating prophetic literature, then we must apply it with the same rigor to all texts — and we must acknowledge that its application to the Book of Mormon requires assumptions about the impossibility of divine revelation that are not themselves conclusions of neutral historical investigation, but prior philosophical commitments.

The evidence for the Civil War prophecy, in particular, is remarkable by any historical standard. Multiple independent manuscript copies. Pre-war publication in England. Years of public preaching met with ridicule. A contemporary newspaper forced to concede prophetic accuracy when the war began exactly as named — in South Carolina — nearly three decades later. These are not the fingerprints of a fraud. They are the fingerprints of a prophet.

The backdating argument, for all its intellectual dressing, ultimately reduces to this: if you assume at the outset that Joseph Smith could not have been a prophet, then all apparent evidence of his prophetic gift becomes evidence of fraud. But this is not evidence-based reasoning. It is assumption in disguise. The evidence, examined honestly and without prior commitment to a naturalistic conclusion, points in a very different direction.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary and Scholarly Sources

• D&C 87 — Civil War prophecy, December 25, 1832; published in Pearl of Great Price, Liverpool, 1851; front page of The Seer, April 1854
• Scott C. Esplin — “Have We Not Had a Prophet Among Us?: Joseph Smith’s Civil War Prophecy,” in Civil War Saints, BYU Religious Studies Center
• Robert J. Woodford — Ph.D. dissertation on the historical development of the Doctrine and Covenants; identifies eight independent manuscript copies of D&C 87
• FAIR Latter-day Saints — “Joseph Smith’s Prophecy of the Civil War”; “Alleged False Prophecies of Joseph Smith”
• B.H. Roberts — New Witnesses for God; editorial notes in History of the Church confirming D&C 87 publication chronology
• BYU Religious Studies Center — “Columbus: Fulfillment of Book of Mormon Prophecy”; “The Book of Mormon and the American Revolution”
• Jonathan McLatchie — “The Authenticity of the Book of Daniel: A Survey of the Evidence”
• Nabonidus Cylinder — Babylonian cuneiform record corroborating Daniel’s identification of Belshazzar as co-regent
• Charles Harrell — This Is My Doctrine (cited by ldsdiscussions); note that Harrell’s interpretive position on Isaiah 29 is contested, not consensus
• Painesville Telegraph — “The Crisis,” December 21, 1832 — discusses general sectional tensions during the Nullification Crisis; crisis resolved peacefully four days after D&C 87 was received
• Philadelphia Sunday Mercury — Post-war acknowledgment: “Have we not had a prophet among us?” (April 1861)