Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith was born on 23 December 1805 in Sharon, Vermont, the fourth of eleven children in a poor farming family that moved, when he was a boy, to the neighbourhood of Palmyra in western New York. He grew up amid the intense revivalism of the "burned-over district," and from about 1820 he reported visionary experiences, later including the visits of an angel named Moroni and the recovery of golden plates that he published as the Book of Mormon in 1830. That same year he organized a church and began to gather followers, moving the community first to Kirtland, Ohio, and then to Missouri, dictating along the way a stream of revelations that were collected as the Doctrine and Covenants and undertaking a fresh "translation" of the Bible.

Conflict with neighbours pursued the Saints from Ohio to Missouri, from which they were violently expelled, and on to Illinois, where they built the city of Nauvoo and Smith served as mayor and militia commander. There he introduced temple ordinances and, privately, plural marriage. In 1844 he announced a campaign for the United States presidency; that spring, after the destruction of a dissident newspaper press led to his arrest, he was held at Carthage, where on 27 June an armed mob stormed the jail and killed him and his brother Hyrum.

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.

Joseph Smith is a well-documented historical person, and modern scholarship has produced a large critical literature about him, anchored by Richard Bushman's biography Rough Stone Rolling and by the ongoing Joseph Smith Papers project. Historians situate his early life in the folk culture of treasure-seeking and seer stones common in his time and place, a background the church's own Gospel Topics essays now discuss openly, including his use of a seer stone in producing the Book of Mormon. His career was marked by controversy that continues to be studied: the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society bank in 1837, the bitter conflicts in Missouri, the secretive introduction of plural marriage at Nauvoo, and disputes over the Book of Abraham, which he presented as a translation of Egyptian papyri that Egyptologists read differently.

Assessments of him diverge sharply, from prophet to gifted religious innovator to fraud, and the sources, many of them partisan, for or against, rarely settle the question of his sincerity. What is not in dispute is his historical importance: from his work issued a scripture, a church, and a religious tradition that now counts millions of adherents worldwide. The atlas records the documented life and the range of interpretation without adjudicating his prophetic claims.