The article's hardest charge is that Joseph Smith and other leaders published statements that caused their own members to believe something the leaders knew to be false. That charge is only worth making if each document behind it has been read. This file records exactly which ones were, and which were not.
The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants printed a "Statement on Marriage" as Section 101, at page 251. Its fourth paragraph reads, verbatim from the Joseph Smith Papers transcript, read through bin/jsptext.py on 8 August 2026 and carrying no canceled words:
Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.
Two things matter about this document, and the article states both.
It was published scripture in the Church's own book of revelations, in print from 1835, at the top of the authority ladder. It was still there, unretracted, through the entire Nauvoo period.
And it was written as a denial of exactly the charge that was true. The sentence begins by naming the accusation — "reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy" — and answers it with a declaration of monogamy. Whatever else it is, it is not a general statement of ideals; it is a response to a specific public allegation.
From the Gospel Topics essay "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo," verified word for word on 8 August 2026:
The rumors prompted members and leaders to issue carefully worded denials that denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated "celestial" plural marriage. The statements emphasized that the Church practiced no marital law other than monogamy while implicitly leaving open the possibility that individuals, under direction of God's living prophet, might do so.
This is the strongest single piece of evidence in the article, and it is the Church's own. It concedes the mechanism — statements true on a private reading, false on the reading every hearer would take — and describes it without evaluating it.
Printed in the Deseret News of 20 May 1886, reprinted by Andrew Jenson in The Historical Record 6 (May 1887), and verified there word for word:
Let all the Latter-day Saints know that Joseph Smith, the martyred Prophet, is responsible to God and the world for this doctrine, and let every soul know that he and his brother Hyrum did practice the doctrine in their lifetime, and until their death, notwithstanding their seeming denials as published in the Times and Seasons, and which are so fervently relied upon as evidence against the fact by a certain class of anti-polygamists. Those denials can be explained, and have been, and while they are true in the sense, and for the purpose for which they were designed, they are not denials of plural or celestial marriage as taught by Joseph and Hyrum Smith and practiced at the time by both of them, and many others in prominent standing in the Church.
The value of this passage is that it is an insider's admission, made by a future Church President while an apostle, forty-two years before the Gospel Topics essay said the same thing more gently. He calls them "seeming denials," concedes that Joseph and Hyrum "did practice the doctrine … until their death," and defends the denials as true "in the sense, and for the purpose for which they were designed."
Joseph F. Smith in the same letter dates the private revelation to 1831. That dating rests on Orson Pratt's recollection of what Lyman Johnson had told him, which is hearsay at two removes published more than fifty years after the fact, and the article treats it as such.
"The Voice of Innocence from Nauvoo," drafted by William W. Phelps, amended by Emma Smith, read by her on 9 March 1844 and approved at three further meetings on 9 and 16 March, published in the Nauvoo Neighbor on 20 March 1844 above the names of Emma Smith and Hannah M. Ells. Read in full from the Church Historian's Press edition on 8 August 2026, with the editors' historical introduction.
The third resolution is quoted in full in the article. The editors' own note is the sharper document:
By this point, Emma Smith opposed plural marriage as practiced by her husband and others in Nauvoo. She thus encouraged Relief Society members to follow the published statements of Joseph Smith and the church, as well as her husband's teachings "from the Stand," implying that they should abide by his public remarks against spiritual wifery rather than any private teachings regarding plural marriage.
That is an official Church imprint stating that the president of the Relief Society directed the women of the Church to believe the public teaching rather than the private one.
The editors also record Joseph Smith's own reaction, from his sermon of 26 May 1844: he "never had any fuss with these men until that Female Relief Society brought out the paper against adulterers and adulteresses."
Official Declaration 1, dated 24 September 1890 on Lorenzo Snow's sustaining motion, read in full on 8 August 2026. Its first substantive paragraph is a denial rather than a revelation:
I, therefore, as President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice, and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.
Set against the Church's own later accounting — a non-comprehensive ledger recording twenty-five plural marriages between 17 October 1890 and 8 September 1903, and the concession that "for a time, post-Manifesto plural marriages required the approval of a member of the First Presidency" — this is the same structure as 1842, thirty-four years later.
This list exists so that no reader mistakes the article's reach for more than it is.