Prophet of the Restoration

To Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith is the prophet through whom God restored the fulness of the gospel in the last days, and he is honoured second only to Jesus Christ in the tradition's account of salvation history. They relate that in his First Vision, about 1820, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him not to join any existing church; that the angel Moroni entrusted him with the record he published as the Book of Mormon; that John the Baptist and, later, the apostles Peter, James, and John conferred on him the priesthood authority lost since apostolic times; and that through him God gave the revelations, ordinances, and organization of the restored church.

The tradition credits him with restoring temple worship, the sealing of families for eternity, and the doctrine of the premortal existence and eternal progression of the human soul, and it treasures his teaching that God was once as man is and that faithful men and women may grow toward the divine. These claims are set out here as the tradition itself makes them; they are matters of faith, and the atlas presents them as such rather than as established fact.