Books that Illuminate the Prophet Joseph
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin

The bicentennial of Joseph Smith’s birth is now behind us, but I would like to call readers’ attention to three relatively recent books that discuss the Prophet’s character and mission. Good books deserve audiences, and the Latter-day Saints deserve good books.  (I’ll probably mention some others in the future.)

Mark L. McConkie’s  Remembering Joseph: Personal Recollections of Those Who Knew the Prophet Joseph Smith (Deseret Book, 2003) is a substantial collection of anecdotes and recollections of the Prophet Joseph Smith from people who knew him personally.  It draws on more than 800 sources, including previously unpublished nineteenth century journals, to create a picture not only of Joseph’s physical appearance but of his temperament, manner of daily life, and character.  The book is organized into six chapters, covering such topics as “The Character and Personality of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” “The Gifts of the Spirit” (including accounts of little known prophecies, miraculous healings, and spiritual discernment), “Joseph Smith and the Scriptures,” “The Ordinances of the Church,” “Historical Items,” and, in an introductory chapter, a judicious discussion of “The Problems and Promise of Historical Memories.”  A treasure trove of interesting materials, Remembering Joseph can profitably be read straight through, browsed, or used as a reference work.  The printed book is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing thousands of additional stories and quotations.

John W. Welch and Erick B. Carlson’s Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820-1844 (Brigham Young University Press and Deseret Book, 2005), an anthology of important articles and yet more important primary sources, will strengthen the faith of believing Latter-day Saint readers and even inspire them.  On the other hand, it will challenge any unbelievers who honestly confront the data it contains. 

Two articles, written respectively by Dean Jessee and by James Allen and John Welch, carefully examine the earliest accounts of the First Vision, demonstrating that those documents tell a deeply harmonious story.  Professor Welch then considers, with meticulous attention to detail, the data relevant to “The Miraculous Translation of the Book of Mormon,” concluding that the English text of that ancient record was produced at a stunningly rapid — and, one might plausibly argue, a humanly inexplicable — pace. 

Brian Q. Cannon and the BYU Studies staff gather and discuss seventy contemporary documents relating to the restoration of the priesthood, and Alexander Baugh treats Joseph Smith’s seventy-six documented visions.  Steven Harper considers six eyewitness accounts of the pentecostal manifestations that attended the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, and Lynne Watkins Jorgensen discusses an impressive one hundred and twenty-one individual testimonies — which she justly terms “a collective spiritual witness” — of the famous descent of the mantle of the martyred Joseph Smith on his successor Brigham Young in August 1844.  (Readers interested in that event may also enjoy Robert C. Mouritsen’s rather difficult to obtain 2004 book — first published in 1974 — Mantle: Windy Day in August, at Nauvoo.) 

Closing with a selection of early documents relating to other key events in formative Latter-day Saint history, Opening the Heavens is an indispensable book. Along with a very small shelf including such earlier volumes as Richard L. Anderson’s classic Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses, this book presents information that should be considered by anyone seriously concerned with the truth of the claims of Mormonism.  Attempts to dismiss crucial elements of the Restoration as merely metaphorical, imaginary, or subjective are blocked by these powerful reminders that those events occurred in the real, material world and that they are attested to by abundant historical documentation.

Finally, Richard Lyman Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) is probably not the first book that I would choose to hand to a new investigator — although, with some, it just might work.    

Professor Bushman, a former stake president and current patriarch as well as Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Emeritus, at Columbia University in New York City, portrays a very human Joseph Smith yet one that he and we can continue to revere as a prophet of God.  One of his challenges with the biography was to speak to a non-Mormon audience in terms that they could accept, avoiding none of the problem areas, while remaining true to his own convictions as a believer.  With some members of the Church worrying that he has made the Prophet too much like us mortals, and many critics of the Church complaining that his book is nothing more than an apologetic whitewash, my sense is that Professor Bushman has walked an impossibly thin line about as well as anyone is likely to do.