Revelation Overview, Part 2: Joseph Smith's Revelations

A scholarly examination of the claims made against Joseph Smith's prophetic revelations — addressing failed prophecy arguments, conditional revelation, the Civil War prophecy, and the evidential pattern of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Overview and Methodology

The ldsdiscussions.com overview on Joseph Smith's revelations advances a sweeping thesis: that Joseph Smith manufactured divine revelations as a tool of social manipulation — to fund his projects, coerce polygamous marriages, and escape difficult circumstances. The author concludes that a pattern of “failed prophecies” seals the case, citing Deuteronomy 18:22 as the operative standard.

This response does not ask readers to accept everything Joseph Smith taught uncritically. It asks for something more modest: intellectual consistency. The same evidentiary standards that ldsdiscussions applies to Joseph Smith must be applied to the Hebrew prophets it implicitly defends. When those standards are applied consistently, the argument collapses. Furthermore, the specific “failed prophecy” claims examined here either misrepresent the textual evidence, ignore the principle of conditional prophecy that runs throughout both Old and New Testaments, or depend on selective quotation that strips the revelatory context entirely.

We will address each claim in turn, following a consistent methodological framework before turning to positive evidence for the authenticity of Joseph Smith's revelations.

I. The Deuteronomy Standard: A Double-Edged Sword

The ldsdiscussions overview makes Deuteronomy 18:21–22 the cornerstone of its critique: if a prophecy does not come to pass, the prophet is false. This sounds straightforward. It is not. Applied consistently to the Hebrew Bible, this same standard would require us to reject nearly every writing prophet in the Old Testament canon.

Consider the evidence:

Prophetic “Failures” in the Hebrew Bible

• Ezekiel 26:7–14 — Nebuchadrezzar would completely destroy Tyre and leave it bare as a rock. He besieged it for 13 years without capturing the island city.
• Ezekiel 29:19–20 — Egypt would be given to Nebuchadrezzar as wages for his failed Tyre campaign. The expected conquest never materialized.
• Isaiah 17:1 — Damascus would “cease from being a city” and become “a ruinous heap.” Damascus remained inhabited and is the world's oldest continuously inhabited city.
• Jonah 3:4 — “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Nineveh was not overthrown — the people repented and God relented.
• Jeremiah 34:4–5 — Zedekiah would “die in peace.” He watched his sons executed, was blinded, and died in Babylonian captivity (Jeremiah 52:10–11).

No serious biblical scholar concludes from these examples that Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jonah, or Jeremiah were false prophets. Why not? Because the same interpretive frameworks that resolve these apparent failures — conditionality, rhetorical hyperbole, partial fulfillment, eschatological deferral — are precisely the frameworks that LDS apologists apply to Joseph Smith, and which ldsdiscussions dismisses as “disingenuous.”

The critical double standard is this: ldsdiscussions invokes Deuteronomy 18:22 as an absolute disqualifier for Joseph Smith while using sophisticated interpretive frameworks to preserve the prophetic status of canonical biblical figures. Intellectual honesty requires consistency. Either the same hermeneutical tools that exonerate Ezekiel apply to Joseph Smith, or we must apply the same literalist standard to both — in which case a large portion of the Hebrew prophetic tradition collapses along with the attack on Joseph Smith.

II. The Framework for Evaluating Prophecy

Before examining specific prophecies, we need a principled framework. FAIR Latter-day Saints has articulated a six-step process that scholarly critics of any prophetic tradition — not just LDS — routinely employ:

1. Source Authenticity

Several of the most dramatic alleged failures rest on third-hand or late accounts. The moon-inhabitants claim, for instance, derives from an 1881 journal entry by Oliver Huntington citing Philo Dibble's recollection of something Joseph allegedly said — a triple-hearsay account recorded nearly fifty years after the fact. Primary documents must take precedence over late, secondhand summaries.

2. Was the Statement Actually Presented as Divine Revelation?

Joseph Smith himself taught that “a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such.” Personal opinions, speculative comments, and pastoral counsel are categorically different from formal revelations presented in the name of the Lord. The Doctrine and Covenants itself distinguishes between revelations given “in the name of the Lord” and Joseph's own reflections and instructions.

3. Accurate Representation

Critics frequently quote prophecies partially, omitting qualifications that are integral to the text's meaning. As we will demonstrate below with D&C 130, the very passage ldsdiscussions uses to allege a specific prediction of Christ's return in 1891 explicitly contains Joseph's own statement of uncertainty about what the revelation meant.

4. The Conditional Nature of Prophecy

This is the most important principle and the most frequently ignored. God's explicit statement of how prophecy operates appears in Jeremiah 18:7–10:

Jeremiah 18:7–10

“At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them.”

Conditionality is not an apologetic invention. It is the biblical theology of prophecy, stated explicitly by God through Jeremiah. When critics demand that every prophecy fulfill unconditionally or be branded as false, they are imposing a standard that the Bible itself rejects. The question is never simply “did this happen?” but “were the conditions met under which it was to happen?”

III. The Civil War Prophecy (D&C 87): A Case for Authentic Revelation

Before examining the alleged failures, it is essential to establish what genuine prophetic success looks like. D&C 87, received December 25, 1832, is among the most remarkable predictive revelations in American religious history.

Doctrine & Covenants 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, and they will also call upon other nations, in order to defend themselves against other nations; and then war shall be poured out upon all nations.”

Pre-War Documentation

The documentary record establishing that this revelation predates the Civil War is extensive and unimpeachable:

Documentary Evidence

• 1832 — Revelation received and recorded. Multiple manuscript copies in handwriting of men who later left the Church — providing disinterested corroboration.
• 1851 — Published in the Pearl of Great Price (Liverpool). A full decade before the Civil War.
• 1854 — Orson Pratt published the full prophecy on the front page of The Seer, seven years before Fort Sumter. Pratt reported being “laughed to scorn” when preaching about it.
• 1857 — A newspaper article dismissed the prophecy, stating “I see no chance of its verification.” Four years later, Fort Sumter fell.
• 1861 — A Philadelphia newspaper reprinted the 1832 revelation when war broke out, asking: “Have we not had a prophet among us?”

The “Common Knowledge” Objection Refuted

Critics sometimes argue that in 1832, during the Nullification Crisis, predicting Southern rebellion was merely “common knowledge.” This argument fails on multiple grounds.

First, the Nullification Crisis of 1832 was a tariff dispute, not a slavery conflict. The crisis was resolved peacefully by early 1833. President Jackson used military authority to preserve the Union without a shot fired. For the next 28 years, no commentator or political analyst predicted that South Carolina would be the specific flashpoint of a catastrophic civil war over slavery. The revelation was specific — it named the state, identified the cause as “the slave question,” and forecast a North-South division that was not a commonplace prediction in 1832.

Second, the prophecy's specifics went far beyond political analysis. It predicted that the Southern States would seek the military aid of Great Britain — something that nearly materialized when Britain came within weeks of formally recognizing the Confederacy in late 1862, a consideration entirely absent from 1832 political discourse. It predicted wars “poured out upon all nations,” a scope that extends far beyond any sectional conflict one might have anticipated from the Nullification controversy.

Third, historian Donald Q. Cannon has carefully demonstrated that the prophecy's documentary record — manuscript copies in multiple hands, pre-war publications, contemporary missionary preaching met with mockery — places the predictive claim securely before any possible post-hoc fabrication. The scorn with which it was received before the Civil War is itself powerful evidence that it was not simply a reflection of common expectation.

IV. Responding to the Specific “Failed Prophecy” Claims

1. The Second Coming in 1891 (D&C 130)

The ldsdiscussions overview cites a statement from a February 1835 meeting where Joseph Smith said the coming of the Lord was “nigh, even fifty-six years” away — placing it in 1891 — and presents this as a failed prophecy. The D&C 130 passage (recorded April 2, 1843) is also brought in. But the full text of D&C 130:14–17 tells an entirely different story:

Doctrine & Covenants 130:14–17

“I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following: Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this subject. I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face. I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time.”

Joseph himself, in the very same record, states he could not determine whether the “seeing” referred to the Millennium, a prior appearing, or his own death. He concludes with an expression of personal belief about the earliest possible date — not a revelatory declaration. This is not a prophecy of the Second Coming date. It is a record of a private prayer, a conditional personal response, and acknowledged uncertainty about its meaning. Presenting it as a failed prophecy of the Second Coming in 1891 requires ignoring what Joseph actually wrote. Furthermore, in 1844 Joseph explicitly stated Christ would not return within forty years and condemned those who claimed to know the precise timing as “false teachers.”

2. The Overthrow of the United States Government

The 1843 statement about the U.S. government being “utterly overthrown and wasted” is presented as a categorical failed prophecy. But Joseph's own language is unmistakably conditional: “unless the United States redress the wrongs committed upon the Saints in the state of Missouri… the government will be utterly overthrown.”

ldsdiscussions acknowledges the conditional language but then treats it as meaningless because the condition was “never met.” But this is precisely backwards. If conditionality is acknowledged, then the absence of overthrow does not falsify the prophecy — it demonstrates that the specified condition was not activated in the manner Joseph described, or that divine patience extended the opportunity for repentance. This is the identical interpretive move applied to Jonah's prophecy against Nineveh: the city was not destroyed because conditions changed. No serious critic of the Hebrew Bible considers Jonah a false prophet for that reason. The standard must be applied consistently.

3. The Temple in Missouri “In This Generation” (D&C 84)

D&C 84:4–5 states that the New Jerusalem temple “shall be reared in this generation.” This is treated as Joseph's most definitive failed prophecy. Several important considerations are omitted from the ldsdiscussions account.

First, D&C 124:49–51 contains an explicit divine explanation for why the Missouri temple was not built:

Doctrine & Covenants 124:49–51

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, that when I give a commandment to any of the sons of men to do a work unto my name, and those sons of men go with all their might and with all they have to perform that work, and cease not their diligence, and their enemies come upon them and hinder them from performing that work, behold, it behooveth me to require that work no more at the hands of those sons of men, but to accept of their offerings… Therefore, for this cause have I accepted the offerings of those whom I commanded to build up a city and a house unto my name, in Jackson county, Missouri, and were hindered by their enemies.”

This is not a retroactive apologetic patch. It is a formal theological principle embedded in the canon itself, directly consistent with the Jeremiah 18 framework: divine commands are contingent on the cooperation of human agency. The Saints were violently expelled from Missouri by mobs and state militia. Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an Extermination Order in October 1838 — a legally authorized directive to kill or drive Church members from the state. These are undisputed historical facts. Under the conditional-prophecy framework that the Bible itself establishes, the failure to build was not Joseph's prophetic error; it was the outcome of organized violent opposition that made fulfillment physically impossible.

Second, the word “generation” in both biblical and early American usage frequently carried eschatological weight beyond a single lifespan. Jesus used the same term in Matthew 24:34 (“this generation shall not pass away”), a verse that has generated centuries of scholarly debate about its referent. The simplistic literalism applied to D&C 84 is conspicuously absent when critics deal with Matthew 24.

4. David W. Patten's Mission (D&C 114)

D&C 114 records a calling for David Patten to serve a mission “next spring.” Patten died in October 1838 before the mission could begin. ldsdiscussions treats this as a prophetic failure. But the text is a calling, not a prediction of Patten's survival or longevity. Mission calls do not guarantee the immortality of the recipient. The parallel is direct: Jesus called Judas Iscariot as one of the Twelve, and Peter was called to a mission he would eventually fulfill through martyrdom. Neither is regarded as evidence that Jesus was a false prophet. Callings are expressions of divine intention, not unconditional guarantees of specific outcomes independent of a recipient's life circumstances or the hostile actions of others.

5. The Salem Revelation (D&C 111)

D&C 111 promises “much treasure in this city” during the Saints' visit to Salem, Massachusetts. The ldsdiscussions presentation treats this as a straightforward failed prophecy of literal buried treasure. But the text explicitly has a dual referent: God says he has “much treasure in this city” and also “many people in this city, whom I will gather out in due time for the benefit of Zion, through your instrumentality.” The “treasure” includes both material and spiritual dimensions — a reading consistent with how prophetic literature in both Testaments routinely uses material imagery to convey spiritual realities. Salem did produce converts. Whether the language of “treasure” was intended literally, spiritually, or both is precisely the interpretive question the text does not decisively resolve in the critics' favor.

6. “Pestilence, Hail, Famine, and Earthquake” (Letter to N.E. Seaton, 1833)

The 1833 letter predicts “pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquake will sweep the wicked of this generation from off the face of the land.” ldsdiscussions argues that applying the Civil War to this text is dishonest because the text specifies natural disasters, not war. This is a fair textual observation about one element. However, the broader argument fails on genre grounds. The combination of earthquake, pestilence, famine, and sword as interlocking symbols of divine judgment is a standard device throughout prophetic literature — Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation all use this cluster as a rhetorical complex, not as a literal checklist of sequential natural events. The ldsdiscussions critique demands a hyper-literal reading of Joseph Smith's prophetic language that it would never apply to the Hebrew prophets who pioneered the same genre.

V. The “Manipulation” Thesis Examined

A substantial portion of the ldsdiscussions overview argues that Joseph Smith's revelations followed a predictable self-serving pattern: he received convenient revelations whenever he needed money, needed an escape from difficulty, or wanted to secure compliance. This argument has surface plausibility and deserves serious engagement.

The Problem of Selection Bias

The “pattern” argument is constructed by selecting revelations that can be given a self-serving gloss and ignoring those that cannot. Joseph Smith received revelations that demanded enormous personal sacrifice from himself: revelations commanding him to move his family repeatedly across hostile terrain, to endure imprisonment without retaliation, to forgive enemies, and to submit to public humiliation. D&C 121–122, dictated from Liberty Jail, commands Joseph to endure unjust suffering and promises him nothing but eventual vindication after years of persecution — hardly the output of a manipulator optimizing for personal benefit. A genuine pattern argument must account for the full corpus, not a curated selection.

The Challenge to Write a Revelation

ldsdiscussions dismisses the Saints account of William McLellin's failed attempt to write a revelation as a rigged experiment. But this dismissal undermines its own premise. If producing Joseph's revelatory style were simply a matter of charismatic imitation — something any sufficiently clever person could replicate — then McLellin, who was educated, literate, intimately familiar with Joseph's revelatory voice, and surrounded by believers primed to receive something convincing, should have succeeded. His acknowledged failure, documented even in his own subsequent accounts after he left the Church, is not easily explained by the rigged-experiment hypothesis. Enemies of Joseph Smith had every incentive to demonstrate that his revelations could be replicated. None succeeded in convincing those who knew the original corpus.

The Wendy Nelson Misreading

The overview leans heavily on Wendy Nelson's statement that her husband was “unleashed” to do what he came to earth to do, treating it as a confession that modern prophets operate purely from personal desire. This misreads both the statement and the LDS theology of revelation. Latter-day Saint doctrine has never claimed that prophets receive new verbal revelations on every decision. Joseph Smith himself taught that most prophetic governance occurs through study, inspired judgment, and the Spirit — not through dictated voice-of-God revelations. The Wendy Nelson quote describes a prophet acting on his accumulated spiritual preparation and sense of divine calling, which is entirely consistent with how Latter-day Saints understand prophetic leadership. The statement proves nothing about whether Joseph Smith received genuine revelations in the 1830s.

VI. The “Incorrect Revelations” Claims

Elias and Elijah: Two Distinct Figures

ldsdiscussions claims that “Elias” and “Elijah” are simply the Greek and Hebrew forms of the same name, and therefore Joseph's vision of two distinct beings in the Kirtland Temple reveals an ignorant error. This argument ignores substantive New Testament evidence.

In Matthew 11:14, Jesus identifies John the Baptist as “Elias which was for to come.” Yet Elijah (Elias) also appears separately and distinctly at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:3). This double function — Elias as a forerunner type or office fulfilled by different individuals at different times — reflects genuine New Testament usage, not Mormon invention. D&C 27:6–7 specifically identifies Elias as an individual who appeared to Abraham, consistent with the forerunner role. The Latter-day Saint theological distinction between Elias and Elijah is a defensible exegetical position grounded in New Testament usage. The claim that Joseph Smith's vision represents naive ignorance actually reveals the critic's unfamiliarity with the complexity of New Testament Elijah/Elias typology.

D&C 132 and the Command to Abraham

ldsdiscussions argues that D&C 132:34–35, which states God commanded Abraham to take Hagar, contradicts Genesis, where it was Sarah's initiative. This is a legitimate textual tension, but not a simple factual error. Jewish midrashic tradition and early Christian commentary both interpreted the Hagar narrative in ways that attributed divine permission or implicit command behind Sarah's initiative. Genesis 16:2 presents Sarah's proposal as the vehicle through which a divine purpose (the birth of Ishmael and the blessing of many nations) was accomplished. D&C 132's language reflects the theological interpretation that God's providential purpose operated through the event, not a claim that God bypassed Sarah's agency entirely. The assertion of a clear factual error requires a degree of hermeneutical certainty about the Genesis text that contemporary biblical scholarship does not support.

VII. The Positive Evidential Case

A purely defensive response would be incomplete. There is substantial positive evidence for the authenticity of Joseph Smith's revelatory corpus that the ldsdiscussions overview does not engage.

The Joseph Smith Papers: Extraordinary Transparency

The Joseph Smith Papers Project — a rigorous, multi-volume scholarly publication by the Church Historian's Office — has made essentially every primary document from Joseph Smith's lifetime publicly available in fully annotated critical editions. This level of historical transparency is extraordinary among religious organizations. Rather than suppressing difficult documents, the Church has published them in full. The papers demonstrate that the revelatory process was contemporaneous, witnessed by multiple independent observers, and documented in handwriting by individuals — including men who later left or opposed the Church — who never denied that the revelations were produced in the manner described.

Fulfilled Prophecies: The Positive Record

Notable Fulfilled Prophecies

• Stephen A. Douglas (1843) — Joseph prophesied that Douglas, if he turned against the Saints after rising to national prominence, would feel the hand of the Almighty upon him. The prophecy was published in the Deseret News in September 1856 — nearly a year before Douglas turned against the Church, and four years before his failed presidential campaign and early death in 1861 at age 48.
• The Rocky Mountains (1842) — Joseph foretold the Saints would be driven to the Rocky Mountains and become a great people. Recorded in multiple diaries before Joseph's death and before any westward migration was planned or politically contemplated.
• The Spread of the Church (D&C 1:30; 65:2) — Joseph prophesied the restored gospel would spread to every nation. The Church today has over 17 million members in 195 countries, with temples on every inhabited continent.
• Civil War (D&C 87, 1832) — Specific geographic origin, cause, belligerent parties, international dimension, and catastrophic scale — all published before the war, received with mockery, confirmed in detail by events.

Ancient Parallels Unavailable to Joseph Smith

The Interpreter Foundation and other scholarly bodies have produced extensive peer-reviewed analysis examining Hebraic, ancient Near Eastern, and early Jewish/Christian parallels embedded in Joseph Smith's revelatory output. These include structural and thematic connections to documents that had not been discovered, translated, or published in Joseph's lifetime. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, and numerous ancient pseudepigraphical texts were unknown in the 1830s. Yet Joseph's revelations contain theological concepts, narrative structures, and covenantal forms that scholarship has since identified as authentically ancient. These are not the hallmarks of a clever improviser working from available sources. They are the kinds of connections that accumulate when a text engages authentically with a deep prophetic and covenantal tradition.

VIII. Conclusion

The ldsdiscussions overview asks a fundamentally good question: how should we evaluate the revelations of Joseph Smith? The answer it provides, however, is methodologically inconsistent, selectively applied, and dependent in several key instances on misreadings of the actual texts.

A consistent methodology requires applying to Joseph Smith the same interpretive frameworks applied to the Hebrew prophets: conditionality, source criticism, contextual completeness, and positive evidential accounting. When those standards are applied uniformly, the alleged “failed prophecy” case is far weaker than presented, while the positive evidential case — anchored by the Civil War prophecy's extraordinary documentary record and the fulfilled predictions of Stephen A. Douglas and the Rocky Mountain gathering — is far stronger than the overview acknowledges.

The argument from Deuteronomy 18:22 cuts in every direction. Applied to Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jonah, and Jeremiah with the same literalist rigor the overview applies to Joseph Smith, the Hebrew prophetic canon does not survive. ldsdiscussions never grapples with this problem because to do so would be to acknowledge that the standard it invokes against Joseph Smith is not a neutral evidentiary tool — it is a double standard applied selectively to reach a predetermined conclusion.

Joseph Smith's revelatory corpus is complex, historically situated, and in some respects genuinely difficult. But difficulty is not falsification. The specific arguments raised by ldsdiscussions, examined carefully and held to consistent standards, do not establish that Joseph Smith was a false prophet. They establish that his revelations are subject to the same interpretive challenges that attend all prophetic literature — and that those challenges have always been part of what it means to take prophecy seriously.

Sources and Further Study

Primary and Scholarly References

• FAIR Latter-day Saints — Alleged False Prophecies of Joseph Smith; Joseph Smith's Civil War Prophecy (fairlatterdaysaints.org)
• Donald Q. Cannon — “Have We Not Had a Prophet Among Us?”: Joseph Smith's Civil War Prophecy, in Civil War Saints, Religious Studies Center, BYU
• Doctrine and Covenants Central — Historical Context and Background of D&C 87
• Joseph Smith Papers Project — Revelation Book 1; Minute Book 1 (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
• The Interpreter Foundation — Scholarly peer-reviewed journal, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship
• Harvard Theological Review — Joseph Smith's Revision of the Bible: Fraudulent, Pathologic, or Prophetic? (Cambridge University Press)
• FAIR Latter-day Saints Conference (2014) — The Story Behind the Revelations: Using the Joseph Smith Papers to Better Understand the Doctrine and Covenants