Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844) was the American religious founder whose revelations and translations, beginning with the Book of Mormon in 1830, gave rise to the Latter Day Saint movement, the largest branch of which is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. \nIn the Raëlian canon, Smith is named once, by Raël in his own commentary voice, among the envoys of the creators whose return with the Elohim Raëlians await (LWTE-3:27).\n He appears in none of the dictated Messages, is not among those seated at Yahweh's table, and is given no place in any numbered sequence.
\nSmith was named for his father, Joseph Smith Sr., and signed himself \"Joseph Smith Jr.\" in early documents. His followers came to call him \"the Prophet Joseph\" and \"the Seer.\" The popular name of the movement, \"Mormon,\" comes from the Book of Mormon, which takes its title from the ancient prophet-historian who, in the book's own account, abridged its records. The church he organized in 1830 as the Church of Christ took its present name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in 1838.
\nThe canon uses neither the church's name nor \"Latter-day Saints.\" The first Message speaks of \"the Mormons\" (TBWTT-5:54), and Raël's commentary names \"Joseph Smith\" (LWTE-3:27). This entry uses the scholarly terms \"Latter Day Saint movement\" for the movement as a whole and \"Latter-day Saint\" or \"LDS\" for the Utah church and its scripture.
\nThe standard scholarly biography is Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005) by Richard Lyman Bushman, historian of the United States at Columbia University and himself a Latter-day Saint, who treats the contested episodes at length.[8]\n Smith was born on 23 December 1805 in Sharon, Vermont, to a farming family whose crop failures and financial reverses took them to the region of Palmyra and Manchester, in western New York, in 1816. The area was swept by competing revivals. Smith later described a vision in which he sought guidance on which church to join. The earliest written account dates from 1832 and the one later canonized from 1838, and the accounts differ in detail, a divergence Bushman treats at length.
\nSmith reported that in September 1823 an angel directed him to a buried record engraved on golden plates, which he said he received in 1827 and translated \"by the gift and power of God.\" The resulting Book of Mormon was published at Palmyra in March 1830, and on 6 April 1830 he organized the Church of Christ.[6]\n Smith's later narratives name the angel Moroni. The corpus records the name as part of Smith's account and identifies the figure with nothing in the canon.
\nThe church moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831, with settlements in Missouri, and after violent expulsion from Missouri in 1838–39 to Nauvoo, Illinois. Smith's revelations were collected first as the Book of Commandments (1833) and then as the Doctrine and Covenants (1835); the documentary edition of the Joseph Smith Papers shows the texts being revised between manuscript and print.[10]\n In 1835 the church acquired Egyptian papyri and mummies from a traveling exhibitor, and Smith produced from them the Book of Abraham, published in 1842. In Nauvoo he introduced temple ordinances and, privately, plural marriage. In June 1844, after the Nauvoo city council, with Smith as mayor, ordered the destruction of a dissident newspaper's press, he was jailed at Carthage, Illinois, where a mob killed him and his brother Hyrum on 27 June. The succession dispute that followed divided the movement; the majority followed Brigham Young to the Great Basin.
\nJan Shipps, historian of American religion at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and a non-Mormon scholar of the tradition, argues in Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (1985) that Smith's movement is best understood as a new religious tradition, related to Christianity much as early Christianity was related to Judaism.[9]\n
\nThe passage is in the third book, Let's Welcome the Extraterrestrials (1979), in the chapter \"An Atheist Religion,\" where Raël argues that Raëlism is a religion although it has no god. The book collects his answers to readers' questions and his own essays. The corpus treats this commentary voice as canon and marks every use of it as Raël's, distinct from the Messages dictated to him.
\nEven if the Raelians do not believe in a \"God\", they still recognize Jesus as a messenger sent by our creators, just as they do Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, and all the other great prophets who have lived on this Earth, and await their return in the company of the Elohim as the scriptures have predicted.\n
This is the only place in the three canonical books where Smith is named. Twice elsewhere in the same book Raël names the messengers who will accompany the Elohim to the Embassy, and neither list includes Smith: \"the ancient messengers: Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed\" (LWTE-1:87), and \"the great prophets, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and others\" (LWTE-3:82).[1]\n
\nIn the second Message, Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975), Yahweh presents those seated at a meal on the planet of the Eternals: Jesus, Moses, Elijah, \"the one whom, on Earth, one remembers under the name of Buddha,\" and Mohammed, among \"the forty or so\" representatives of \"the religions created following our contacts on the Earth\" (ETTMTTP-2:62–64). Smith is not among them. The same Message's list of Raël's predecessors in \"the line of the prophets\" names Moses, Ezekiel, Elijah, Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha (ETTMTTP-3:257), and Smith is not among them either.[2]\n The canon gives no roster of the forty and no order among them, and the corpus neither seats Smith at the table nor assigns him a number.
\nThe tradition he founded, by contrast, is named in a dictated Message. \nIn the first Message the Elohim list \"the Buddhist religion, the Islamic, the Mormons\" among the religions \"that testify in a more or less obscure way to our work\" (TBWTT-5:54), as part of the canon's account of itself as the demystified common source of the existing religions.\n[3]\n This account of the Mormons is the canon's, and it carries no claim that Latter-day Saints accept it.
\n\nPer the canon, the prophets of the world's traditions were operational interlocutors between the Elohim and particular peoples and eras: contacted, briefed and tasked, each delivering the message in the register his era and culture could carry.\n By naming Smith with Jesus, Moses, Buddha and Mohammed among those recognized as messengers \"sent by our creators,\" Raël places him in that role (see Prophet). The canon says nothing about how or when Smith was contacted, or what he was given to deliver, and the corpus makes no reading of the golden plates, the angel of Smith's accounts or the personages of his visions in those terms. The naming is canon in Raël's commentary voice and is labelled as his throughout this entry.
\nScripture produced by Smith in the 1830s and 1840s contains four features that bear comparison with the canon. Doctrine and Covenants 130, recorded in 1843, states that \"the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's; the Son also\" (D&C 130:22). The Book of Abraham's creation account, a reworking of Genesis 1, has a plural agent: \"they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth\" (Abraham 4:1). The 1832 vision recorded as D&C 76 speaks of the worlds that \"are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof\" (D&C 76:24). And the Book of Abraham names a governing star \"nearest unto the throne of God\": \"the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me\" (Abraham 3:2–3).[5]\n[4]\n
\n\nThese features resemble the canon's mortal, embodied, plural creators (\"We are men like you,\" TBWTT-1:53), its chain of created creators, and its plurality of created humanities. The corpus records the resemblance as resemblance only: it claims no dependence in either direction, no identity of referents, and no evidence for the authenticity of the founding of Smith's church.\n Kolob is not identified with the star of the Elohim's world, and neither Moroni nor the personages of Smith's visions are identified with the Elohim or their emissaries.
\nThe difference is preserved. In Latter-day Saint theology the embodied Father, the Godhead, exaltation and salvation belong to a theistic and soteriological system: God is worshipped, and the human goal is salvation and exaltation in his presence. The canon is explicitly atheist. It denies any supernatural God, its creators are mortal men of another planet, and Raël calls the movement an atheist religion in the chapter of that name. The resemblance holds at the level of features and does not reach the structure of either system.
\nVoice weight. Smith is named only in Raël's 1979 commentary and in no dictated Message. On a strict reading his naming carries the reporter's authority, not the Message's, and should not be read as a revelation-level designation.
\nThe lists follow the audience. A deflationary reading holds that the canon's named lists track the religious map of its audience and record no independent fact about the figures, the same objection that applies to the prophetic sequence as a whole. A related objection holds that prophet sequences are developments internal to the traditions, and that the canon generalizes a pattern they built for their own reasons. Susan J. Palmer, the sociologist of religion whose fieldwork monograph Aliens Adored (2004) is the principal academic account of the Raëlian movement, provides the context in which such readings are argued.[12]\n
\nMilieu. Speculation about a plurality of inhabited worlds was current in European and American religious and popular-astronomical writing well before 1830 (see Cosmic Pluralism). On this view the LDS doctrine of many worlds can be explained from Smith's milieu without positing any special source. No milieu study is yet registered among the corpus's sources.
\nPapyri provenance. Some of the papyri associated with the Book of Abraham survived and were rediscovered in 1966. Egyptologists who have examined the surviving fragments identify them as ordinary Egyptian funerary texts. If so, the Kolob material is Smith's own composition and carries no external weight. The corpus has not yet registered an Egyptological edition of the fragments, and this objection is recorded at that standing.
\nRestorationist development. The embodied God and the plural Gods may have developed from Smith's literal reading of the Bible, including the plural of Genesis 1:26 (\"Let us make man in our image\"), within his own theological trajectory, which Bushman's biography follows in detail.[7]\n[8]\n On that reading the resemblance is a shared literalism without shared content: the canon reads the same plural literally (see Plurality of Gods), which would account for the overlap.
\nThe critical biography. Fawn M. Brodie, a biographer later on the history faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, published No Man Knows My History in 1945, a biography that treated Smith's revelations as his own creation and explained them from his environment and personality. Her book set the terms of the naturalistic reading that later scholarship, Bushman's included, has engaged and revised.[11]\n
\nThe tradition's own voice. For Latter-day Saints, Smith is the prophet of the restoration of the gospel, and his revelations are scripture received from God. The canon's account of him as an envoy of mortal creators, like its account of the Mormons as one of the traditions that testify obscurely to the Elohim's work, is the canon's and not the tradition's, and the corpus records it as such.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["Joseph Smith Jr.","the Prophet Joseph Smith (Latter-day Saint usage)","Joseph the Seer (Latter-day Saint usage)"],"category":"Theology & Traditions","claim_type":"direct","core_claim_ids":["woh-claim-0077","woh-claim-0079","woh-claim-0027","woh-claim-0038"],"core_versions":{"woh-claim-0027":"0.1.0","woh-claim-0038":"0.1.1","woh-claim-0077":"0.1.0","woh-claim-0079":"0.1.1"},"editorial_pass":"2026-05","entry_type":"biographical","infobox":{"birth":"23 December 1805, Sharon, Vermont","canon_status":"Named by Raël, in his own commentary voice, among the envoys of the creators whose return with the Elohim Raëlians await (LWTE-3:27). Named in no dictated Message; not placed at Yahweh's table; given no number in any sequence","death":"27 June 1844, Carthage, Illinois, killed by a mob at Carthage Jail","founded":"The Church of Christ, organized 6 April 1830 in New York; later The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints","principal_scripture":"The Book of Mormon (1830); revelations collected as the Doctrine and Covenants (1835); the Book of Abraham (1842)","tradition_in_canon":"'The Mormons' are named in the first Message among the traditions that testify to the creators' work (TBWTT-5:54)","type":"American religious founder; prophet of the Latter Day Saint movement"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","references":[{"id":"lets-welcome-the-extraterrestrials","locator":"LWTE-3:27, in the chapter 'An Atheist Religion' (Raël's commentary voice): Joseph Smith named among the messengers of the creators; LWTE-1:87 and LWTE-3:82 (the lists of the messengers expected at the embassy, which do not name him)"},{"id":"extraterrestrials-took-me-to-their-planet","locator":"ETTMTTP-2:62–64 (the table scene, where Smith is not named); ETTMTTP-3:257 (the line of the prophets, where Smith is not named)"},{"id":"the-book-which-tells-the-truth","locator":"TBWTT-1:53 ('We are men like you'); TBWTT-5:54 ('the Mormons' among the traditions that testify)"},{"id":"book-of-abraham","locator":"Abraham 3:2–3 (Kolob, 'nearest unto the throne of God'); Abraham 4:1 ('they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth')"},{"id":"doctrine-and-covenants","locator":"D&C 76:24 (the worlds created and their inhabitants); D&C 130:22 (the Father's body of flesh and bones)"},{"id":"book-of-mormon","locator":"the 1830 first edition, published at Palmyra, New York"},{"id":"genesis","locator":"Genesis 1:26 — the plural self-address, 'Let us make man in our image'"},{"id":"bushman-rough-stone-rolling","locator":"Bushman's account of Smith's life, the divergent First Vision accounts, and the development of his theology and of the Book of Abraham"},{"id":"mormonism-the-story-of-a-new-religious-tradition","locator":"Shipps on Mormonism as a new religious tradition studied in its own terms"},{"id":"joseph-smith-papers-manuscript-revelation-books","locator":"the documentary record of the revelations and their revision between manuscript and print"},{"author":"Fawn M. Brodie","date":"1945","title":"No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith"},{"id":"aliens-adored","locator":"Palmer's academic account of the Raëlian movement and its prophetology"}],"same_as":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q42904","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith","https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Smith-American-religious-leader-1805-1844"],"see_also":[{"description":"Who names Smith among the envoys of the creators, in his own commentary voice.","path":"wiki/rael","title":"Raël"},{"description":"The canon's definition of the prophet as a contacted, briefed and tasked interlocutor.","path":"wiki/prophet","title":"Prophet"},{"description":"The long tradition of many inhabited worlds, current well before 1830, on which the milieu objection rests.","path":"wiki/cosmic-pluralism","title":"Cosmic Pluralism"},{"description":"The plural creators of Genesis 1, which both the canon and Smith's later scripture read literally.","path":"wiki/plurality-of-gods","title":"Plurality of Gods"},{"description":"The canon's mortal, embodied, plural creators, whom some features of Smith's cosmology resemble.","path":"wiki/elohim","title":"Elohim"},{"description":"Where the canon expects the Elohim to come with the ancient messengers.","path":"wiki/embassy","title":"Embassy"},{"description":"Named first in the list in which Raël names Smith.","path":"wiki/jesus","title":"Jesus"},{"description":"Named with Smith in Raël's list, and seated at Yahweh's table in the dictated Message.","path":"wiki/buddha","title":"Buddha"}]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/joseph-smith/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/joseph-smith/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "rael", "title": "Raël", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/rael/" },{"slug": "prophet", "title": "Prophet", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/prophet/" },{"slug": "cosmic-pluralism", "title": "Cosmic Pluralism", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/cosmic-pluralism/" },{"slug": "plurality-of-gods", "title": "Plurality of Gods", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/plurality-of-gods/" },{"slug": "elohim", "title": "Elohim", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/elohim/" },{"slug": "embassy", "title": "Embassy", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/embassy/" },{"slug": "jesus", "title": "Jesus", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/jesus/" },{"slug": "buddha", "title": "Buddha", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/buddha/" }] } }