New joseph smith biography

So, my impression is that Joseph F. Smith is best known among members of the Church of Jesus Christ first for being the son of Hyrum Smith, second for the stories of him crossing the plains as a child, and third probably for his missionary experiences in Hawaii. Since you have asked, however, I will try. The title is from a letter that Joseph F. I was most surprised by how much he felt like an outsider within the Latter-day Saint leadership, even as a member of the First Presidency.

His entire life, he thought of himself as being treated as a second class citizen by Church leaders. There was some small amount of truth in this perception, but not much. His experiences in Hawaii were far more complex than is often discussed. This is especially true of his first mission there. He was very frank in his journals about his view of most Hawaiians as dirty, ignorant, lazy, and full of disease.

Some of that was tempered over the years as he visited, but some of it was not. Smith was a violent man. That is beyond dispute. Even in the rough and tumble world of the American West in the 19th-century, he was known to be unusually prone to violence. His first marriage, to his cousin Levira Smith, devolved into a toxic relationship in which Joseph F.

Smith beat her and said incredibly cruel things to her. Later in his life, in the s, he severely beat his neighbor. Those are the only clear accounts of his violence, although I am certain there were more. He simply could not, or would not, control his rage when something triggered it. He could be as loving and tender as he could be heartless and cruel.

He had an especially soft spot for children. He was as free with his emotions of sadness and grief as he was with those of anger. Young was holding a prayer circle, and when he finished, he simply said that he had decided to call Joseph Fielding Smith to the First Presidency. I argue in the book that the timing suggests that this may have been done in response to the sons of Joseph Smith, who were now part of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and were planning to come to Utah.

Smith certainly respected Brigham Young and sustained him as a prophet. I would describe their relationship as professional, but they seemed to exist in two separate worlds, with surprisingly little interaction. Well we know that he had one. Unlike his journals, which were pretty banal and matter of fact, his letters are where he reveals his true feelings and thoughts.

One interesting thing is that he insisted that all who wrote him provide dates on the letters themselves. He often got mail in big batches and some of his family members never dated their letters, so he had to try and figure out what order to put them in. It drove him insane and he gave the family pretty good tongue lashings about it.

He also chided them if they sent short letters rather than waiting until they had new joseph smith biography to write. He was always mindful of the cost of postage. Those are things that are mostly about his attitude toward letters, but if people want to know all of the interesting things he included in the letters, they will have to read the book!

The short answer, and probably the best one, is that he dealt with tragic losses of loved ones from the dawn of his memory. Starting with his father when he was 5, his mother a few short years later, and not ending until the loss of his son Hyrum when Joseph F. Smith was almost 80 the last year of his life. He lost 12 children in between.

Smith took the death of his children harder than the average man during the 19th century. At least, he was far more prone to express his intense, almost savage, grief at these losses than his contemporaries. He thought much more deeply about a family-centered heaven than any Latter-day Saint Church leader had before. So, I think that the revelation on the redemption of the dead came to him drop by painful drop over a long lifetime of suffering.

Staff and volunteers of the Family History Department are also contributing their skills in local research and building databases to help answer important questions. Professors from BYU have joined seasoned legal scholars and interns from the J. The biography will rely on the research of these and other scholars, who are expected to generate a number of publications with detailed findings on which the biography can then rely.

The biography itself will be written as a narrative for a general audience and is expected to garner a wide readership. President Oaks, who served for 20 years as an apostolic advisor in Church history matters, spoke at length in his keynote address on the origins of the Joseph Smith Papers project, new joseph smith biography makes this new biography possible.

As a boy, Joseph Smith had not done so. His formal education was limited, paper was expensive and it was not customary for poor farm boys in the United States to keep journals. That is why we lack contemporaneous accounts of his earliest visions. Though the Prophet made many efforts during his life to keep records, his history was far from finished when he was martyred on June 27, Other efforts were valuable but limited.

By NovemberJosiah Stowell could no longer afford to continue searching for buried treasure; Smith traveled to Colesville, New Yorkfor a few months to work for Joseph Knight Sr. There are reports that Smith directed further excavations on Knight's property and at other locations around Colesville. While Smith was working as a treasure hunter, he was also frequently occupied with another more religious matter: acquiring a set of golden plates he said were deposited, along with other artifacts, in a prominent hill near his home.

In Smith's own account datedhe stated that an angel visited him on the night of September 21, The term 'Urim and Thummim' was not initially used by Smith and his associates prior to aroundinstead referring to the device as 'interpreters' or 'spectacles'. Smith said he had two more encounters with the messenger that night and an additional encounter the next morning, after which he told his father [ 86 ] and soon thereafter the rest of his family, who believed his story, but generally kept it within the family.

Thus, on September 22,a day listed in local almanacs as the autumn equinoxSmith said that he went to a prominent hill near his home, and found the location of the artifacts. InSmith stated that this location was shown to him in a vision while he conversed with Moroni. The plates, according to Smith, were inside a covered stone box.

However, Smith stated he was unable to obtain the plates at his first visit. According to an account by Willard Chasethe angel gave Smith a strict set of "commandments" which he was to follow in order to obtain the plates. Among these requirements, according to Chase, was that Smith must approach the site "dressed in black clothes, and riding a black horse with a switch tail, and demand the book in a certain name, and after obtaining it, he must go directly away, and neither lay it down nor look behind him".

When Smith arrived at the place where the plates were supposed to be, he reportedly took the plates from the stone box they were in and set them down on the ground nearby, looking to see if there were other items in the box that would "be of some pecuniary advantage to him". Thus, Smith said the angel directed him to return the next year on September 22,with the "right person", whom the angel reportedly said was his brother Alvin.

Once again, the angel reportedly told Smith that he must return the next year with the "right person", the identity of whom the angel would not say. Later, Smith reportedly determined by looking into his seer stone that the "right person" was Emma Hale Smithhis future wife. Just days prior to the day Smith said he was to meet with the angel on September 22,Smith's treasure-seeking associate, Josiah Stowell, and Joseph Knight Sr.

Over the next few days, Smith took a well-digging job in nearby Macedon to obtain money to buy a solid lockable chest in which he said he would put the plates. They were filled with engravings, in Ancient Egyptian characters and bound together in a volume, as the leaves of a book with three rings running through the whole. The volume was something near six inches in thickness, a part of which was sealed.

The characters on the unsealed part were small, and beautifully engraved. The whole book exhibited many marks of antiquity in its construction and much skill in the art of engraving. Smith refused to allow anyone, including his family, to view the plates directly. Some people, however, were allowed to heft them or feel them through a cloth. Joseph Smith's intention was to write the Book of Mormon which he would then publish.

To do so, however, he needed an investment of money, and at the time he was penniless. Harris had apparently been a close confidant of the Smith family since at least[ ] and he may have heard about Smith's attempts to obtain the plates from the angel even earlier from Smith Sr. The money provided by Harris was enough to pay all of Smith's debts in Palmyra, and for him to travel with Emma and all of their belongings to Harmony Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.

In early Octoberthey moved to Harmony. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Childhood [ edit ]. Religious background [ edit ]. First Vision [ edit ]. Main article: First Vision. Treasure hunting [ edit ]. Marriage to Emma Hale [ edit ].

Moroni and the golden plates [ edit ]. Main articles: Golden plates and Angel Moroni.

New joseph smith biography

Move to Harmony Township, Pennsylvania [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Archived from the original on October 21, Retrieved Journal of Mormon History. JSTOR Two of the Smiths' children died in infancy. Hillpp. Joseph Smith: The First Mormon 1st ed. Garden City, N. ISBN X. Inthe two Josephs and Hyrum Smith worked on a farm owned by one Jeremiah Hurlburt, but the relationship ended with each party suing the other.

Manchester was part of Farmington until The log house was built just outside their property in the town of Palmyra. Lucy thought it the result of a dose of Mercury I chlorideor calomel, given for "bilious fever" after he ate green turnips.