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Joseph Smith, originally Joseph Smith, Jr., (born December 23, 1805, Sharon, Vermont, U.South.—died June 27, 1844, Carthage, Illinois), American prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Early years

Smith came from an unremarkable New England family. His grandfather, Asael Smith, lost most of his property in Topsfield, Massachusetts, during the economic downturn of the 1780s and eventually moved to Vermont, where Smith's male parent, Joseph Smith, Sr., established himself as a farmer. Subsequently the birth of Joseph Smith, Jr., a serial of crop failures forced the family to move to Palmyra, New York. His mother, Lucy Mack, came from a Connecticut family that had disengaged from conventional Congregationalism and leaned toward Seekerism, a movement that looked for a new revelation to restore truthful Christianity. Although privately religious, the family rarely attended church building, and afterwards they moved to Palmyra they became involved in magic and treasure-seeking. Lucy Smith attended Presbyterian meetings, just her hubby refused to accompany her, and Joseph, Jr., remained at home with his begetter.

Religious differences within the family and over religious revivals in the Palmyra area left Smith perplexed almost where to find a church. When he was 14, he prayed for assist, and, according to his ain business relationship, God and Jesus appeared to him. In respond to his question about which was the right church, they told him that all the churches were wrong. Although a local minister to whom he related the vision dismissed it as a delusion, Smith continued to believe in its authenticity. In 1823 he received another revelation: while praying for forgiveness, he afterward reported, an angel calling himself Moroni appeared in his bedroom and told him about a set of golden plates containing a record of the ancient inhabitants of America. Smith found the plates buried in a rock box not far from his male parent's farm. Four years later, the angel permitted him to remove the plates and instructed him to translate the characters engraved on their surfaces with the assist of special stones called "interpreters." Smith insisted that he did not compose the volume but just "translated" it under divine guidance. Completing the work in less than 90 days, he published it in March 1830 as a 588-page volume called the Book of Mormon.

Joseph Smith and Moroni
Moroni delivering the *Book of Mormon* to Joseph Smith, lithograph, 1886.
Everett Collection Historical/Alamy

The Volume of Mormon told the 1,000-year history of the Israelites, who were led from Jerusalem to a promised state in the Western Hemisphere. In their new habitation, they built a civilization, fought wars, heard the word of prophets, and received a visit from Christ later on his resurrection. The book resembled the Bible in its length and complication and in its segmentation into books named for private prophets. According to the book itself, 1 of the prophets, a full general named Mormon, abridged and assembled the records of his people, engraving the history on gold plates. After, about 400 ce, the record keepers, known equally Nephites, were wiped out by their enemies, the Lamanites, presumably the ancestors of the American Indians.

Emergence of the church building

Establishment of settlements and persecution

On April 6, 1830, Smith organized a few dozen believers into a church. From and then on, his great project was to assemble people into settlements, called "cities of Zion," where they would find refuge from the calamities of the last days. Male converts were ordained and sent out to make more converts, a missionary program that resulted in tens of thousands of conversions by the terminate of Smith's life. Members of the church building, known every bit Saints, gathered starting time at Independence, Missouri, on the western edge of American settlement. When other settlers constitute their presence intolerable, the Saints were forced to move to other counties in the state. Meanwhile, Smith moved his family unit to another gathering place in Kirtland, Ohio, virtually Cleveland.

None of these communities survived, however, because the faithful were expelled equally soon as their increasing numbers threatened to give them political command of the towns in which they settled. Non-Mormons tolerated a handful of "religious fanatics" in their midst simply found dominance by them to be unbearable. Smith fled Kirtland for Far West, Missouri, in 1838, merely opposition arose once more. In 1838, facing expulsion for a third time, Smith tried to defend the church building with artillery. In response, local Missourians rose up in wrath, and the governor ordered that the Mormons be driven out of the country or, where that was non possible, exterminated. In November 1838 Smith was imprisoned on charges of robbery, arson, and treason, and he probably would have been executed had he not escaped and fled to Illinois.

The Mormons came together in the nearly abandoned town of Commerce on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Renaming the site Nauvoo (a Hebrew word pregnant "Beautiful Place"), Smith built his most successful settlement, complete with a temple (finished only afterward Smith'south expiry) on a bluff overlooking the town. Attracting converts from Europe as well as the United States, Nauvoo grew to rival Chicago equally the largest city in the state.

Teachings

His followers believed that Smith's actions were directed past revelation. When questions arose, he would call upon God and dictate words in the voice of the Lord. Sometimes the revelations gave practical instructions; others explained the nature of heaven or the responsibilities of the priesthood. All Smith's revelations were advisedly recorded and preserved. In 1835 Smith published the outset 65 revelations in a volume titled the Book of Commandments, after called the Doctrine and Covenants. While assertive in the Bible, like all Christians, Smith broke its monopoly on the word of God. The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants were added to the catechism of scripture, and Smith spoke as if more than revelations and translations would accrue in the future.

Smith's teachings departed from conventional Christian traditions by incorporating sure practices from the Hebrew Bible (see likewise Old Testament). The temples he built (in Smith's lifetime, 2 were erected and two more were planned) were modeled on the temples of ancient Israel. He appointed his male person followers to priesthoods, named for the biblical figures Melchizedek and Aaron, that were overseen past the office of loftier priest. In the temples, he instituted rituals of washing and anointing taken from instructions in the Book of Exodus for consecrating priests. Justifying the practice of polygamy by reference to the precedent of Abraham, the first of the Hebrew patriarchs, Smith was "sealed" (the ceremony that binds men and women in marriage for eternity) to about xxx wives, though no known children came from these unions. As in the Bible, men took the leading roles in church building affairs, only past the stop of his life Smith taught that men and women were redeemed together through eternal marriage. At the heart of his teachings was a confidence in the spiritual potential of common people. He believed that every man could be a priest and that everyone had in him the possibility of the divine. The purpose of the temple rituals was to give people the noesis they needed to enter God's presence and to become like God.

Grapheme and concluding years

Smith was not a polished preacher. It was the originality of his views, an outsider commented, that made his discourse fascinating. Absolutely resolute in all of his projects, he never became discouraged, fifty-fifty nether the most trying circumstances. Nor did people of college social continuing intimidate him; he appeared to recollect of himself equally the equal of anyone, as demonstrated when he ran for president of the U.s.a. in 1844.

He married Emma Unhurt in 1827, when he was 21 years old and she was 22. The couple adopted twins and had ix biological children, five of whom died in infancy. Their devotion to each other was sorely tried by the practice of polygamy. Emma believed in her husband's calling but could non bide additional wives. She remained faithful to him to the cease, yet, and after his death wore a lock of his hair on her person.

When dissenters published a reform paper in Nauvoo that Smith felt disturbed the peace, he ordered it suppressed. Meanwhile, non-Mormon hostility in the surrounding county had been growing for the usual reasons, and, when the press was closed, irate local citizens brought charges of promoting riot against Smith and his blood brother Hyrum. The 2 were taken to Carthage, the county seat, for a hearing, and, while imprisoned, they were shot past a mob on June 27, 1844. The leadership of the church then cruel to Brigham Young, who defended himself to perpetuating Smith's teachings and program. After the faithful left Nauvoo in 1846, they migrated to Utah, where they constructed Salt Lake City on a pattern laid down by Joseph Smith for the cities of Zion.

Richard Fifty. Bushman