Can Joseph Smith's Prophetic Gift Be Tested?

Draft status. Every quotation below was read from a source opened for this draft, and every scored item carries a footnote to that source. Manuscript transcripts from the Joseph Smith Papers were read through the project's own extractor rather than off the rendered page, so that words the scribe struck out are never promoted into a quotation. Two items in the corpus remain unresolved at the edges and say so in place: whether all four apostles named in Doctrine and Covenants 118 crossed the Atlantic, and what became of the Nauvoo House building. Neither affects the totals.

Summary

Yes, in part. The test is narrower than either side usually admits, and the rules have to be fixed before the scoring starts.

This article builds its corpus by a stated rule and then scores it. The rule is announced in the next section and applied without exception. That matters because the standard treatment of this subject on both sides is a curated list — critics collect the famous misses, apologists collect the famous hits, and neither reports the denominator. A corpus assembled after the answers are known proves nothing about anyone.

The results, in short. Of twenty-nine scored items, six are fulfilled, three are partly fulfilled, eleven failed, two remain open, and seven cannot be scored because they carry no deadline or no testable content. Two further candidates are excluded, because the surviving records cannot be shown to predate the events they describe. Of the six fulfilled items, three are self-fulfilling — the men who received the instruction were the men who carried it out — and every one of the remaining three would have been a reasonable guess for a well-informed American in the year it was made. The single strongest Latter-day Saint case, the Christmas Day 1832 revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 87, does name South Carolina and a rebellion twenty-eight years before Fort Sumter, and that clause deserves to be called a hit. Its surrounding clauses — Great Britain and other nations drawn in, war poured out on all nations, slaves rising against masters, a "full end of all nations" — did not come to pass, and the revelation was written about a month into a national crisis in which South Carolina had already declared federal law void in the state and threatened to organize a separate government.

The translation episodes point the same direction. The Kinderhook plates were manufactured in 1843 by three men in Pike County, Illinois, and Joseph Smith produced content about their ancient owner. The strongest faithful reconstruction, published in 2020 by two Latter-day Saint historians, is that he did attempt a translation and did so by looking a character up in his own Egyptian Alphabet book — that is, by a secular method rather than a revelatory one. That reconstruction rescues the claim that he never said God gave him the meaning. It does not rescue the reliability of the result.

The Deuteronomy 18 test cuts in ways critics routinely ignore. Conditional prophecy is a recognized biblical category. Jonah announced Nineveh's overthrow in forty days without stating a condition, and Nineveh was not overthrown. Any standard sharp enough to convict Joseph Smith on a single unfulfilled clause also convicts prophets this site regards as true. So the test used here is not "did any statement fail." It is the whole pattern: how often, how specifically, how checkably, with what base rate, and with what response when a prediction failed.

On that pattern the record does not sustain the claim of a reliable prophetic gift, and it is not close. But the honest form of that verdict is narrower than the popular critical form. The failures cluster in exactly the places where a religious enthusiast in Jacksonian America would be expected to fail — imminent millennium, the gathering city, the vindication of his own community — and the one striking hit sits inside a revelation whose other clauses failed. That combination is what a person guessing under pressure produces. It is not what a reliable oracle produces, and it is also not the cartoon of a man who was never right about anything.

The claim being tested

Three propositions are usually run together, and they need to be separated.

1. Joseph Smith could translate ancient records by divine gift. This is the claim underwriting the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, and the Book of Moses, and it is a claim about a repeatable ability, not about one book.
2. Joseph Smith could foretell specific future events. This is the claim tested by his dated predictions.
3. Joseph Smith held prophetic office in the biblical sense. This is broader than either of the above and does not reduce to a prediction score.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not stake everything on the second proposition, and it is right not to. Its own teaching is that a prophet is a witness and a revelator rather than a fortune teller. But the Church also canonized dated predictions, printed them in scripture, and has never withdrawn any of them. Once a statement is in the Doctrine and Covenants, it has the highest authority the tradition recognizes: it is canon, on the top row of the authority matrix. A canonized prediction cannot later be demoted to one man's opinion. That is what makes this article possible at all.

For statements outside the canon, the three-axis vocabulary is applied to each one: present status, historical authority, and prophetic significance. A prediction recorded only in a clerk's minute book is scored differently from one printed in the Doctrine and Covenants, and both are scored differently from a recollection written forty years after the fact.

The rule used to build this corpus

A statement enters the corpus if and only if it meets all three of these tests. The rule was fixed before scoring and is applied to every candidate, including candidates that turn out to favor Joseph Smith.

1. Recorded before the event. The text must survive in a document written or published before the event it describes. A prophecy first attested after its own fulfillment is excluded, regardless of who tells it. This rule alone removes several of the most-quoted Latter-day Saint successes, and it also removes several critical favorites.
2. Specific enough to check. A reasonable person reading it in advance must be able to say what would count as failure. "Great blessings await the faithful" fails this test. "The temple shall be reared in this generation" passes it.
3. The text survives. The wording must be recoverable from a manuscript or printing, not reconstructed from someone's summary.

Everything meeting all three is scored, using one set of outcome categories:

Each item also carries a separate prior rating — how surprising the statement would have been to an informed person on the date it was made. Low, medium, or high. This is the column that decides whether a hit is evidence of anything. A fulfilled prediction with a low prior is worth almost nothing, because anyone could have made it.

The full registry, with exact wording, dates, sources, authority level, conditionality, and the standard Latter-day Saint answer for each item, is in research/prophecy-registry.md. The translation episodes are worked out in research/translation-episodes.md.

Two exclusions should be stated plainly, because they cut against the critical case. The 1842 prophecy that the Saints would become a mighty people in the Rocky Mountains, and the 1843 prophecy that Stephen A. Douglas would aspire to the presidency and feel the weight of God's hand, are both excluded — not because they failed, but because the surviving records postdate the events closely enough that rule 1 cannot be satisfied. Both are treated in the registry with the reason for exclusion. A critic who wants to score them as misses and an apologist who wants to score them as hits are both reaching past the evidence.

The Deuteronomy 18 test, and why it must be applied carefully

The verse everyone cites is Deuteronomy 18:21–22: "And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him."

This site is a Christian apologetics site. It holds the biblical prophets to be true prophets. So it has an obligation the average critic does not have: whatever standard is used here must not convict Isaiah, Jonah, or Jeremiah. State the limits of the test first, and only then apply it.

Conditional prophecy is a real biblical category, and the condition is often unstated. Jonah 3:4 records "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." No condition appears in the announcement. Nineveh repented and was not overthrown, and Jonah 3:10 says God "repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not." Jeremiah 18:7–8 states the principle as a general rule of how God deals with nations. Any test that treats an unfulfilled announcement as automatic disproof would fail Jonah, and Jonah is in the canon.

Some biblical predictions have disputed fulfilments. Ezekiel 26 announces the destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, and Ezekiel 29:18–20 acknowledges that Nebuchadnezzar's thirteen-year siege of Tyre gained him nothing, awarding him Egypt instead. Serious readers have debated for centuries whether that is a failed prediction, a partly fulfilled one, or a long-range one completed by Alexander in 332 BC. Whatever the right answer, the honest observation is that the category "disputed fulfilment" exists inside the biblical canon, and a fair test has to leave room for it.

Prophecy in Scripture is mostly not prediction. The dominant use of the Hebrew prophetic office is covenant lawsuit, moral indictment, and comfort. The Latter-day Saint response that a prophet is not a fortune teller is not a dodge. It is closer to the biblical usage than the popular Protestant assumption it answers.

So the test used here is not the single-failure test. It is this:

• Does the record show a pattern of specific, checkable, low-prior predictions coming true?
• When a prediction failed, was the failure acknowledged, or reinterpreted after the fact in a way that could have accommodated any outcome?
• Are the successes explainable by ordinary knowledge available at the time?

That test is fair to Isaiah, who scores extremely well on the first question, and it is fair to Joseph Smith. Applied to Joseph Smith, it produces the verdict in the summary.

One more asymmetry deserves stating. A single spectacular hit with a genuinely low prior would be powerful evidence, because chance cannot easily produce it. A pile of misses is weaker evidence than it looks, because everyone who makes many predictions accumulates misses. The right question is not the raw ratio. It is whether any hit survives the base-rate check in the section below.

The strongest case for the Latter-day Saint claim

Stated at full strength, before evaluation.

Doctrine and Covenants 87 names the state. On 25 December 1832, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation whose first line reads, in Frederick G. Williams's contemporary copy, "Verily thus saith the Lord, concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass begining at the rebellion of South Carolina which will eventually terminate in the death and missery of many souls." The Civil War began on 12 April 1861 when South Carolina batteries fired on Fort Sumter. Twenty-eight years separate the two dates. No competing nineteenth-century American religious founder produced a comparable sentence. The manuscript survives in Revelation Book 2, copied between 22 January and about 27 February 1833, so the text is beyond dispute and the date is documented by the Church's own critical edition.

The revelation also predicted the trigger. Doctrine and Covenants 130:13, recorded 2 April 1843, has Joseph Smith saying of the same 25 December 1832 experience, "It may probably arise through the slave question." Slavery was the cause of the war. That is a second correct element, hedged with "probably," and it was recorded eighteen years before Fort Sumter.¹

The Word of Wisdom looks better in 2026 than in 1833. Doctrine and Covenants 89, dated 27 February 1833, tells the Saints that "tobacco is not for the body, neither for the belly, and is not good for man," that "strong drinks are not for the belly," and that flesh should be "used sparingly."² Tobacco's carcinogenicity was not established until the 1950s. A religious movement that told its members to stop smoking in 1833 was, on that point, well ahead of the medical consensus. Published cohort studies of Latter-day Saint mortality are frequently cited in support of the health claim; those studies have not been read for this draft and are not relied on here.

The institution succeeded. A movement organized in April 1830 with a handful of members in upstate New York reported 17,887,212 members, 32,046 congregations, and 211 operating temples as of 31 December 2025, on the Church's own published figures. The Church's Newsroom notes that it took 117 years, until 1947, to reach the first million.³ Whatever else is true, that trajectory was not obviously safe in 1831.

A prophet is not a fortune teller. This is the strongest structural argument, and it is not special pleading. Biblical prophets are overwhelmingly preachers of covenant and repentance. Judging Joseph Smith primarily by a prediction scorecard imports a standard that the Bible itself does not make central. If the test is "did this man's teaching produce a people who worship Christ, keep covenants, care for the poor, and endure," that is a different test with a different answer.

Each of these is evaluated below. The first is evaluated hardest, because it is the best one.

Part 1 — The other translation episodes

The Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are treated in their own articles. This section covers the smaller episodes, which have an advantage the big ones lack: the source object still exists, or the source text is a printed book anyone can check.

The Kinderhook plates, 1843

What was found. On 23 April 1843, near Kinderhook in Pike County, Illinois, a group of men digging into a mound produced six bell-shaped brass plates, ringed together, covered in characters. A statement signed by W. P. Harris, M.D., of Barry, Pike County, printed in the Times and Seasons in the first week of May 1843, described "six plates of brass, of a bell shape, each having a hole near the small end, and a ring through them all, and clasped with two clasps," and said he cleaned them with soap, water, and dilute sulphuric acid until "they were completely covered with hieroglyphics that none as yet have been able to read."⁴

They were a hoax, and the Church says so. In August 1981 the Church's own magazine, the Ensign, published Stanley B. Kimball's article under the title "Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax." Kimball had obtained permission from the Chicago Historical Society, which had held one surviving plate since 1920, for destructive testing. The analysis was performed by Professor D. Lynn Johnson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University.⁴ Four results, each with its own reason:

• Scanning electron microscopy of the character grooves showed "the irregular, grainy texture characteristic of acid etching," not the lengthwise secondary grooves and metal flow that a cutting tool leaves. So the characters were etched, not engraved.⁴
• A scanning Auger microprobe found "a clear indication of nitrogen" in the groove residues, consistent with copper nitrate — that is, with etching by nitric acid, which is exactly what the confessed hoaxers said they used.⁴
• X-ray fluorescence showed "a true brass alloy of approximately 73 percent copper, 24 percent zinc," which is a nineteenth-century alloy. Ancient "brass" is bronze, copper and tin.⁴
• A ground and polished edge showed "a basically 'clean' alloy," lacking the slag and inclusions expected in ancient metal.⁴

Johnson also closed the obvious escape route. He found a dent in the Chicago plate, made by an instrument with a nick in its edge, and the same nick appears in a second dent nearby. The 1843 published facsimile reproduced that dent as though it were part of a character. Therefore the facsimile was made from this plate, and this plate is not a later copy made from the facsimile. Kimball's conclusion: "the Chicago plate is indeed one of the original Kinderhook plates, which now fairly well evidences them to be faked antiquities."⁴

The confession. Wilbur Fugate wrote in 1879 to a correspondent in Salt Lake City that the discovery was "a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton and myself." He gave the method: "Bridge Whitton cut them out of some pieces of copper; Wiley and I made the hieroglyphics by making impressions on beeswax and filling them with acid and putting it on the plates. When they were finished we put them together with rust made of nitric acid, old iron and lead, and bound them with a piece of hoop iron, covering them completely with the rust." He also gave the motive, which is worth noticing: "We read in Pratt's prophecy that 'Truth is yet to spring out of the earth.' … We concluded to prove the prophecy by way of a joke." The target was Latter-day Saint prophecy specifically — the phrase is from Parley P. Pratt's 1837 tract Voice of Warning. Fugate's letter is a confession written thirty-six years after the fact by a self-declared participant, and its independent corroboration is a separate 1855 letter from W. P. Harris — the same physician who cleaned the plates — reporting that the blacksmith Bridge Whitton had told him he "cut and prepared the plates" and that he and Wiley "engraved them themselves."⁴

Now the hard part: what did Joseph Smith actually say? This is where most treatments on both sides go wrong, and the Church's 1981 article gets it right.

The famous sentence — "I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt" — appeared in the Deseret News on 3 and 10 September 1856 as part of the serialized "History of Joseph Smith," was reprinted in the Millennial Star on 15 January 1859, and was carried into the History of the Church in 1909. It reads as Joseph Smith's own first-person words. It is not. Kimball states the correction flatly: "Although this account appears to be the writing of Joseph Smith, it is actually an excerpt from a journal of William Clayton," and "the words 'I have translated a portion' originally read 'President J. has translated a portion.'"⁴

So the documentary chain is: William Clayton's journal entry of Monday, 1 May 1843, in Clayton's own hand, records what Clayton understood Joseph Smith to have said. Clayton's original reads "President J. has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found, and he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the Ruler of heaven and earth." Whether Clayton was present when Joseph Smith examined the plates is, in Kimball's words, "unknown." That is one contemporary source, one remove from the speaker.⁴

The other contemporary evidence is thinner and disagrees with Clayton on details. Parley P. Pratt wrote to a friend on Sunday, 7 May 1843, that the plates "contain the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah," that the owner's bones were found in the same cement vase, and that part of the bones lay fifteen feet underground in Pike County. Clayton said six feet, Adams County, and a nine-foot skeleton, and said Egyptian rather than Jaredite. Kimball draws the right inference: "apparently as much misinformation and hearsay was current among people as there was fact." Charlotte Haven, a non-Latter-day Saint visitor writing on 2 May 1843, reported at second hand from a Mr. Joshua Moore that when the plates were shown to Joseph Smith he "said that the figures or writing on them was similar to that in which the Book of Mormon was written, and if Mr. Moore could leave them, he thought that by the help of revelation he would be able to translate them."⁴

What is established, and what is not. Established: the plates were nineteenth-century forgeries; content about the plates' ancient owner circulated in Nauvoo and was attributed to Joseph Smith by his own clerk within days; the Times and Seasons and the Nauvoo Neighbor both publicly anticipated a forthcoming translation; and that translation never appeared.⁴ Not established: that Joseph Smith ever claimed a revelatory translation in his own recorded words. Charlotte Haven's hearsay has him saying he thought he could translate them by revelation if given time. That is a statement of expectation, not a claim of accomplishment.

The strongest faithful answer, and it is a serious one. In 2020 two Latter-day Saint historians, Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee, published a chapter of more than seventy pages, "'President Joseph Has Translated a Portion': Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates," in Producing Ancient Scripture (University of Utah Press), where it runs from page 452 to page 523. They do not argue that Joseph Smith ignored the plates. They argue the opposite — that he did translate a portion, and they reconstruct how. Ashurst-McGee summarized their conclusion publicly in August 2020: Joseph Smith believed the characters resembled the reformed Egyptian of the Book of Mormon plates or the Egyptian of the Book of Abraham papyri; he took the plate with the largest characters in the largest heading; he "began searching through the Egyptian Alphabet book for a comparable character"; "a few pages into the book, he found a character similar in shape"; the definition there did not supply a personal name but "did apply well to a person, providing information regarding this person's lineage, royal status, and divine blessings"; and he "slightly adapted the raw content of the provided definition to produce a sensible translation of the character."⁵ Their chapter also prints, for the first time, the complete Clayton journal entry of 1 May 1843 from the Church History Library.⁵

The apologetic force of this is real. On Bradley and Ashurst-McGee's reconstruction, Joseph Smith was working the way a nineteenth-century amateur philologist works — consulting a reference book he had helped compile and matching a shape — rather than the way he described working on the Book of Mormon. Ashurst-McGee has put it as a distinction between acting as a secular translator and acting as a prophetic one. Since no revelation was claimed, no revelation failed. And the strongest supporting fact is that Joseph Smith dropped it: the plates left Nauvoo, no translation was published, and, as Kimball notes, no record shows Joseph Smith or anyone around him trying to buy the plates, though the mummies and papyri behind the Book of Abraham had been purchased outright.⁴

Evaluating that answer. It succeeds at what it attempts and fails at what matters more.

It succeeds in showing that the Kinderhook episode is not a case of a false revelation. There is no revelation text, no "thus saith the Lord," and no published translation to falsify. Critics who present Kinderhook as a smoking gun of failed revelation are overstating the record, and the 1856 first-person editing of Clayton's journal has misled a century of writers on both sides.

It fails as a defense of the underlying gift, for three reasons. First, it concedes that Joseph Smith produced specific ancient-historical content — a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh who received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth — from a forgery made with beeswax and acid weeks earlier. The content is false, whatever method produced it. Second, the method it credits him with is the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, the same instrument at issue in the Book of Abraham, and that document's definitions do not correspond to Egyptian. Using it produced a wrong answer here, which is direct evidence about what it produces elsewhere. Third, the distinction between "secular translator" and "prophetic translator" is a modern analytic tool applied retrospectively. Nothing in the 1843 record tells a Nauvoo Saint which mode the prophet was in, and the Times and Seasons editor plainly expected the other one when he wrote that the owner "purposes returning with them for translation; if so, we may be able yet to furnish our readers with it."

Score: failed, as a test of the translation gift; not applicable, as a test of revelation. That split verdict is the accurate one.

The Greek Psalter, 1842

The Reverend Henry Caswall, an Anglican clergyman and professor of divinity at Kemper College near St. Louis, left by steamer on the evening of Friday, 15 April 1842, carrying, in his words, "an ancient Greek manuscript of the Psalter written upon parchment, and probably about six hundred years old." His stated purpose was explicit: "In order to test the scholarship of the prophet."⁶ On Monday, 18 April 1842, he crossed to Nauvoo and presented the book.⁶

His account of what followed, published in London later the same year in The City of the Mormons; or, Three Days at Nauvoo, in 1842, reads:⁶

I handed the book to the prophet, and begged him to explain its contents. He asked me if I had any idea of its meaning. I replied, that I believed it to be a Greek Psalter; but that I should like to hear his opinion. "No," he said; "it ain't Greek at all; except, perhaps, a few words. What ain't Greek, is Egyptian; and what ain't Egyptian, is Greek. This book is very valuable. It is a dictionary of Egyptian Hieroglyphics." Pointing to the capital letters at the commencement of each verse, he said: "Them figures is Egyptian hieroglyphics; and them which follows, is the interpretation of the hieroglyphics, written in the reformed Egyptian. Them characters is like the letters that was engraved on the golden plates."

How much weight can this carry? Very little, and the reasons are worth listing.

Caswall is hostile, and he does not hide it. His book opens with a version of the Anglican Good Friday collect asking mercy on "all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and HERETICS," with "HERETICS" in capitals, and he describes Joseph Smith's countenance as exhibiting "a curious mixture of the knave and the clown."⁶ He is not a neutral reporter and did not present himself as one.

The account is a single source. No Latter-day Saint present left a corroborating record. The dialect Caswall puts in Joseph Smith's mouth — "it ain't Greek at all," "them figures is" — is the standard nineteenth-century literary device for marking a speaker as an ignorant rustic, and Caswall applies it selectively. Joseph Smith's lines are written in eye-dialect throughout the scene, down to "this book ain't of no use to you, you don't understand it," while the Latter-day Saints standing around him and Caswall himself are given ordinary polished prose in the same paragraphs.⁶

Its one real strength is timing. Caswall dated his preface at Liverpool on 19 June 1842, two months after the visit, so this is a near-contemporary account rather than a late recollection.⁶ That places it above most of the hostile Nauvoo literature on the source-criticism scale, and above the Hurlbut material discussed in the Spaulding article. Near-contemporary and hostile is still hostile.

Score: not scorable. One hostile, uncorroborated account of a conversation is not enough to establish what a man said, and this article will not use it as evidence for anything. It is included in the registry because the inclusion rule requires listing candidates and stating why they were kept or dropped, not because it decides anything.

The Joseph Smith Translation and Adam Clarke's commentary

Between June 1830 and July 1833 Joseph Smith produced a revision of the King James Bible, which Latter-day Saints call the Joseph Smith Translation and which his own scribes called the New Translation. Sidney Rigdon wrote at the head of the first New Testament manuscript, "A Translation of the New Testament translated by the power of God."⁷ Two portions of it, the Book of Moses and Joseph Smith—Matthew, are canonized in the Pearl of Great Price.⁸

The 2017 claim. Haley Wilson (later Wilson-Lemmon), then an undergraduate research assistant, and Thomas A. Wayment, a professor of classics at Brigham Young University, announced that they had found a printed source behind part of the revision. Their précis, "A Recently Recovered Source: Rethinking Joseph Smith's Bible Translation," appeared in BYU's Journal of Undergraduate Research on 16 March 2017. Their claim, in their own words:⁹

Our research has revealed that the number of direct parallels between Smith's translation and Adam Clarke's biblical commentary are simply too numerous and explicit to posit happenstance or coincidental overlap. The parallels between the two texts number into the hundreds, a number that is well beyond the limits of this paper to discuss.

Adam Clarke's The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments was a large, philological, widely circulated Methodist commentary, running past 5,200 pages in the printing Kent Jackson cites. It discussed manuscript variants and freely proposed alternate renderings.⁷

Their marquee example is Colossians 2:20–22. In the King James Version, the clause "which are after the doctrines and commandments of men" sits in verse 22. Joseph Smith moved a portion of it to the end of verse 20. Clarke's commentary says of the same words: "After the commandments and doctrines of men? These words should follow the 20th verse, of which they form a part." Wilson and Wayment argued that the change "does little to smooth out the flow of the English translation, and does nothing to change the meaning, but it can be no mere coincidence that the two sources relocate a portion of the verse in precisely the same way."⁹

They drew a specific conclusion about method: Joseph Smith "was inclined to lean on Clarke's commentary for matters of history, textual questions, clarification of wording, and theological nuance," probably at Sidney Rigdon's urging.⁹ The full argument was published in 2020 as a chapter in Producing Ancient Scripture and, by Wayment alone, in the Journal of Mormon History.⁷

The response. Kent P. Jackson, who retired in 2017 as a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University and holds Michigan doctoral degrees in Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern studies, replied at length in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 40 (2020), pages 15–60, under the title "Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke." His abstract states the conclusion: "I believe that none of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke's commentary, and almost all of them can be explained easily by other means."⁷

Jackson's argument has four distinct legs, and each is a reason rather than an assertion.

1. The corpus of examples is small. Jackson says Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon "have presented over thirty passages" in their articles and public presentations, and he works through every one. The "hundreds" of the 2017 précis were never published as a list. This is a real methodological problem: a claim of hundreds of parallels that publishes thirty cannot be independently checked at the claimed scale.⁷
2. Context defeats several examples. Jackson's strongest point is that some revisions attributed to Clarke are changes Joseph Smith "had made repeatedly before he arrived at the passages where they believe he got ideas from Clarke." A parallel is not evidence of borrowing if the borrower was already doing the same thing on his own.⁷
3. The non-parallels are enormous. "There is a mountain of material in Clarke that is not reflected in the Joseph Smith Translation, and there is a mountain of material in the Joseph Smith Translation that cannot be explained by reference to Clarke." Clarke offers thousands of rewordings; the JST makes thousands of changes; overlap at the rate observed is what two independent efforts at clarifying the same archaic English would produce.⁷
4. Distinctive vocabulary is absent. This is the sharpest test Jackson proposes and the one a skeptic should take seriously. Clarke paraphrases "shall be destroyed" in 1 Corinthians 15:26 as death "shall be counter-worked, subverted, and finally overturned," and renders the opening of 2 Timothy 3:16 as "Every writing divinely inspired." Had Joseph Smith picked up any such distinctive phrasing, the case would be made. He did not. Jackson: "Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon cannot produce convincing corollaries between Clarke's words and the JST, and that convinces me that there are none."⁷

Jackson also catches a documented overstatement. Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon wrote that the story of Emma Smith's uncle Nathaniel Lewis challenging Joseph Smith with Clarke's commentary "is retold in several later accounts, some of which report that Lewis pulled Clarke's commentary from his own bookshelf and then questioned Smith." Jackson checked and found the "several later accounts" reduce to a single 2003 Dialogue article by Ronald V. Huggins, and that the shelf detail is Huggins's own rhetorical embellishment, confirmed by Huggins in correspondence to Jackson dated 30 October 2019. That is a genuine sourcing failure on the Wayment side.⁷

Jackson himself, notably, does not defend the position that Joseph Smith consulted nothing. He proposes his own candidate examples — the age of King Ahaziah at 2 Chronicles 22:2, and the family lists in Nehemiah 7 — and then observes that at Nehemiah, Joseph Smith's solution "was the opposite of Adam Clarke's."⁷

A measured verdict. Three things can be said with confidence, and one cannot.

Confident: the "hundreds of parallels" figure is unsubstantiated as published, and should not be repeated as a fact. Confident: Jackson's distinctive-vocabulary test is the right test, and Clarke's distinctive vocabulary is not in the JST. Confident: Jackson is not a disinterested referee, and neither are Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon — this is a dispute among believing scholars with different stakes, and Jackson had publicly endorsed the Clarke connection in print before he examined it, which he discloses.⁷

Not confident, and this is where honesty requires stopping: whether the Colossians 2:20–22 relocation is coincidence. It is the single example that resists Jackson's framework, because it is not a clarification, not a modernization, and not a change Joseph Smith had been making on his own. It moves a clause to a position that a specific printed commentary independently argued was its right position. One such case is not a pattern. It is also not nothing.

Score: disputed, and it does not settle the prophetic question either way. Even on the strongest form of the Wayment thesis, using a commentary would not by itself disprove inspiration — Jackson is right that Doctrine and Covenants 88:118 tells the Saints to seek "words of wisdom" "out of the best books." What the dispute establishes is narrower and still worth having: the JST cannot presently be shown to depend on Clarke, and the claim that it can has been overstated by its proponents.

The Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar

Between roughly July and November 1835, Joseph Smith and his associates produced a set of manuscripts now called the Egyptian-language documents, including the "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language." They assign meanings to characters, many drawn from the Joseph Smith papyri, and organize them by "degrees." Modern Egyptology does not recognize the assignments. That material is the subject of the Book of Abraham article and is not re-argued here. It enters this article for one reason only: on Bradley and Ashurst-McGee's reconstruction, the Egyptian Alphabet book is the instrument Joseph Smith used on the Kinderhook plates in 1843, eight years after it was compiled. It was therefore still in use, and still trusted, as a working translation tool.

Claimed ancient-language successes

Latter-day Saint scholars have offered several. They are noted here and evaluated in the articles where the evidence lives, because collapsing them into this one would duplicate three other investigations.

• Book of Mormon names with Semitic or Egyptian etymologies — Alma, Sariah, Paanchi, Pahoran, Nahom. These belong to the Book of Mormon authorship article and the archaeology article. The strongest single item, the NHM altar inscriptions from Marib in Yemen, is an archaeological argument rather than a translation argument.
• Book of Abraham parallels — Olishem, the lion-couch sacrifice motif, the Egyptian names in Facsimile 3. These belong to the Book of Abraham article.
• Chiasmus and Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon — a literary argument, not a translation-gift argument, and treated in the authorship article.

None of these is a case where Joseph Smith was handed an unknown ancient text and produced a translation that was later independently confirmed. That experiment was run three times — the Book of Abraham papyri, the Kinderhook plates, and Caswall's Psalter — and there is no instance of independent confirmation.

Part 2 — The prophecy registry

The Civil War revelation, Doctrine and Covenants 87

This is the best case the Latter-day Saint side has, and it deserves the longest treatment in the article.

The text. Frederick G. Williams wrote it down as Joseph Smith dictated it on 25 December 1832. The original dictation manuscript is lost. The featured version in the Church's own critical edition is Williams's copy in Revelation Book 2, pages 32–33, made between 22 January and about 27 February 1833, under the heading "A Prophecy given Decm. 25th 1832."¹⁰ It opens:¹⁰

Verily thus saith the Lord, concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass begining at the rebellion of South Carolina which will eventually terminate in the death and missery of many souls, and the days will come that war will be poured out upon all Nations begining at this place

It continues that the Southern States will be divided against the Northern States and "will call on other Nations even the Nation of Great Britian as it is called," that those nations "shall also call upon other Nations in order to defend themselves against other Nations and thus war shall be poured out upon all Nations," that "after many days Slaves shall rise up against there Masters who shall be Martialed and disaplined for war," that "the remnants who are left of the land will martial themselves also and shall become exceding angry and shall vex the Gentiles with a soar vexation," and that sword, bloodshed, famine, plague, earthquake, thunder and lightning shall continue "untill the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all Nations."¹⁰

Was it public before the event? Yes, and this matters. The revelation was not printed in the 1835 or the 1844 Doctrine and Covenants. Brigham Young later said the reason was that "it was not wisdom to put that . . . in private escritoire." It was first published in 1851, in England, in the compilation Franklin D. Richards issued as The Pearl of Great Price.¹⁰ The Pearl of Great Price became a standard work by action of the First Presidency and general conference on 10 October 1880, and material duplicating the Doctrine and Covenants was rearranged out of it in 1902; the Civil War revelation is now Doctrine and Covenants 87.⁸ What matters for this article is the 1851 date. That is ten years before Fort Sumter, in print, in a book with international circulation. The prophecy passes inclusion rule 1 cleanly, and any critic who suggests it was written after the fact is wrong.

What came true. Three things, and they should be stated without hedging.

The war began at South Carolina. Confederate batteries opened on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on 12 April 1861. South Carolina had seceded first, on 20 December 1860. The revelation named the state twenty-eight years in advance.¹¹

It terminated in the death and misery of many souls. By any count the American Civil War was the deadliest conflict in United States history.

The Southern States did call on Great Britain. Confederate diplomacy aimed squarely at British recognition and intervention. The State Department's own history says that Southerners "began the war effort confident that the cotton their plantations provided European textile manufacturers would naturally ally their governments to the Confederacy, especially Great Britain," expecting that "Britain would have to break the blockade and provoke a war with the North."¹²

And in the 1843 restatement recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 130:13, Joseph Smith added, of the same 25 December 1832 experience, "It may probably arise through the slave question." Slavery was the cause. The clause is hedged with "probably," but it is correct, and it was recorded eighteen years early.

What did not come true. Five things, and they should be stated with equal directness.

"The wars that will shortly come to pass." They did not come shortly. The crisis that provoked the revelation was defused within ten weeks: Congress passed the Compromise Tariff and the Force Bill in early March 1833, and South Carolina rescinded its nullification ordinance. A reader in 1833 who took "shortly" at face value waited twenty-eight years.

"War will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place." It was not. The Civil War did not spread. No European power entered it.

Great Britain calling on other nations to defend themselves, and then "war shall be poured out upon all Nations." Britain did not enter the war and did not call on other nations. In May 1861 it answered the Union blockade with a proclamation of neutrality, which the other European powers followed, and the Confederacy "would fail to achieve diplomatic recognition by even a single foreign government." This is the revelation's central mechanism, and it did not happen.¹²

"Slaves shall rise up against their masters." There was no general slave insurrection during the Civil War. Something adjacent did happen, and an honest registry counts it: roughly 179,000 Black men served as soldiers in the United States Army, about ten percent of it, with another 19,000 in the Navy, and many of them had been enslaved.¹³ They were, in the revelation's phrase, "marshaled and disciplined for war." But they were enlisted by a national government fighting a conventional war, not risen against their masters. That is a partial hit, and calling it a full one requires reading the verse loosely.

"The remnants who are left of the land will marshal themselves . . . and shall vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation." In Latter-day Saint usage of the period, "remnants" means the scattered descendants of Israel; the Joseph Smith Papers editors document that usage from Joseph Smith's own letter to Noah C. Saxton written ten days after the revelation, and their glossary notes that the Lamanites of the Book of Mormon were "understood to be the American Indians in JS's day."¹⁰ What actually followed the Civil War was the systematic military defeat of the Plains nations, not their marshaling against the Gentiles.

"The consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations." Nations continue. An apologist may read this as long-range millennial language with no deadline, and that reading is legitimate — which is exactly why it is scored open rather than failed. But an open clause is not evidence for anything.

Now the base rate, which is the decisive question. How surprising was "South Carolina" on 25 December 1832 to a well-informed American?

It was close to the obvious answer, and the documentation is not obscure. The Joseph Smith Papers' own historical introduction lays it out. In November 1832 a South Carolina convention adopted a resolution declaring the federal tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 "null and void" in the state, and stating a willingness to "organize a separate Government" if the federal government tried to enforce them. The governor called for two thousand men "for the defence of Charleston and its dependencies." The Painesville Telegraph of 21 December 1832 carried extensive coverage of all of this. Painesville is about ten miles from Kirtland, and the Church's own editors judge that "it is probable that JS saw or heard about the articles in the 21 December Telegraph within a day or so."¹⁰

Fifteen days before the revelation, on 10 December 1832, President Andrew Jackson issued his Proclamation Regarding Nullification. Its opening paragraphs recite the South Carolina ordinance, including the declaration that the state's people would hold themselves "absolved from all further obligation to maintain or preserve their political connection with the people of the other States, and will forthwith proceed to organize a separate government."¹⁴ Jackson wrote of "the threat of unhallowed disunion" and "the array of military force to support it," told South Carolinians that the federal government "cannot accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims," and closed by asking that God "bring those who have produced this crisis to see the folly, before they feel the misery, of civil strife." In the same paragraph he prayed that "if it be the will of Heaven that the recurrence of its primeval curse on man for the shedding of a brother's blood should fall upon our land, that it be not called down by any offensive act on the part of the United States."¹⁴

That is a sitting President of the United States, in a proclamation reprinted across the country two weeks before Christmas 1832, publicly predicting the possibility of civil war beginning with South Carolina, and using the language of a brother's blood shed upon the land.

The slave clause has a comparable background. In August 1831, sixteen months before the revelation, Nat Turner led a rebellion in southeastern Virginia in which about sixty white people were killed and twenty-one Black people, Turner among them, were executed. The Joseph Smith Papers editors note that white Southerners widely feared further risings. Brigham Young, who was not present at the dictation, said in 1860 that the revelation followed "serious reflections" by "the brethren" on "African slavery on this continent," and that "after much deliberation and reflection etc. and being tolerably well acquainted with the customs of the north and south … the Lord gave a revelation concerning slavery." That is a Latter-day Saint president of the Church describing the revelation as arising out of the participants' own thinking about a current controversy.¹⁰

So the prior on "rebellion beginning at South Carolina" in December 1832 is low to medium, not high. Joseph Smith's own history says as much: it records that "appearances of troubles among the nations, became more visible, this season," and that he saw in them the threat of the "immediate dissolution" of the United States.¹⁰

Two things that raise the score back up, and one that does not. First, the twenty-eight-year interval is genuinely impressive in a way the naming of the state is not. Nullification was resolved peacefully in 1833, and most contemporaries stopped expecting war. A prediction that stayed on the books through the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska and then came true is better than a hot take on a current crisis. Second, the 1843 addition of the slave question as the likely cause is a real refinement, made when the tariff issue was long dead. What does not raise the score is the 1861 republication: when the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury printed the text on 5 May 1861 under the headline "A Mormon Prophecy," it was three weeks after Fort Sumter, and that printing is publicity, not evidence.

Score for the Doctrine and Covenants 87 cluster: three fulfilled clauses, one partly fulfilled, three failed, one open. The single most striking element — the state named twenty-eight years early — is the strongest datum in this entire article on the Latter-day Saint side. It sits inside a revelation whose governing prediction, that this war would ignite a war of all nations ending in the consumption of all nations, did not happen.

The temple in Independence, Doctrine and Covenants 84

The text, dictated 22–23 September 1832 and printed in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants:

Verily this is the word of the Lord, that the city New Jerusalem shall be built by the gathering of the saints, beginning at this place, even the place of the temple, which temple shall be reared in this generation.

For verily this generation shall not all pass away until an house shall be built unto the Lord, and a cloud shall rest upon it, which cloud shall be even the glory of the Lord, which shall fill the house.

The place is specified in the verse before: the temple lot "in the western boundaries of the State of Missouri," "dedicated by the hand of Joseph Smith, Jun."¹⁵

What happened. No temple was built. Latter-day Saints were driven out of Jackson County in the autumn of 1833, about fourteen months after the revelation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never built on the dedicated lot. The generation alive in 1832 is entirely dead.

The strongest Latter-day Saint answers, and each has a reply.

"Generation" does not mean a lifetime. This is the most common answer, and it is not baseless: the Hebrew dor and the Greek genea both carry senses broader than a fixed span of years, and Latter-day Saint writers point to biblical usages where a "generation" means a kind of people rather than a cohort. The reply is that the revelation itself defines the term in the next verse: "this generation shall not all pass away until an house shall be built." That is not a description of a type of person. It is a statement about a group of living people not all dying first, and it is the same idiom the Church uses everywhere else. A term that can be stretched to cover two centuries could have covered any outcome, which is precisely the property a testable prediction must not have.

The command was conditional, and the condition failed. This is the strongest answer, and it has a canonical basis. Doctrine and Covenants 124:49, dated 19 January 1841, states the principle in general terms: "when I give a commandment to any of the sons of men to do a work unto my name, and those sons of men go with all their might . . . and their enemies come upon them and hinder them from performing that work, behold, it behooveth me to require that work no more at the hands of those sons of men, but to accept of their offerings." Verse 51 applies it by name: "for this cause have I accepted the offerings of those whom I commanded to build up a city and a house unto my name, in Jackson county, Missouri, and were hindered by their enemies."¹⁶

This is a serious answer and it should be granted its full weight. It is a recognized biblical pattern — God's promises to a people are frequently conditioned on that people's obedience, and the withdrawal of a promise after disobedience is not a failed prediction but a covenant sanction.

It is also, examined closely, a rule that makes falsification impossible going forward. Doctrine and Covenants 84 does not read as conditional. It reads as a flat declaration about what the Lord will do. Doctrine and Covenants 124 supplies the conditionality nine years later, after the failure, and supplies it as a general principle covering all commandments. Any unfulfilled command can be routed through it. A believer is entitled to accept that principle on other grounds. What a believer is not entitled to do is present the resulting record as a tested prophetic track record, because after 124:49 the test no longer has a failing condition.

The temple will still be built. The Church continues to teach this. That converts the prediction from failed to open — but it also concedes that "in this generation" was wrong, since the generation is gone.

Score: failed. The stated deadline passed. The conditional answer explains why a believer need not treat it as disproof, and it does not make the prediction true.

Zion, Zion's Camp, and the redemption of Missouri

This is the densest cluster in the registry, and it shows a pattern more clearly than any single item.

On 2 August 1833, with the Jackson County situation deteriorating, a revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 97 declared of Zion: "And the nations of the earth shall honor her, and shall say: Surely Zion is the city of our God, and surely Zion cannot fall, neither be moved out of her place, for God is there, and the hand of the Lord is there." Within about three months the Saints had been driven from Jackson County. The revelation does carry a condition — "Nevertheless, Zion shall escape if she observe to do all things whatsoever I have commanded her" — and Latter-day Saint readers rightly point to it.¹⁷ The condition is real. It also means the revelation predicted nothing, because it covers both outcomes.

On 16–17 December 1833, after the expulsion, a revelation now Doctrine and Covenants 101 said "Zion shall not be moved out of her place, notwithstanding her children are scattered," that "they that remain, and are pure in heart, shall return, and come to their inheritances," and that "there is none other place appointed than that which I have appointed . . . for the work of the gathering of my saints."¹⁸

On 24 February 1834 came the most concrete of them, Doctrine and Covenants 103: "the redemption of Zion must needs come by power," God would raise up "a man, who shall lead them like as Moses led the children of Israel," and — crucially — "I say unto you: Mine angels shall go up before you, and also my presence, and in time ye shall possess the goodly land." The same revelation instructed the recruiters to obtain five hundred men, and if not five hundred then three hundred, and if not three hundred then one hundred, and made a hundred the minimum: "ye shall not go up unto the land of Zion until you have obtained a hundred of the strength of my house."¹⁹

That expedition was Zion's Camp. It marched from Ohio to Missouri in the summer of 1834 and did not redeem Zion. On 22 June 1834 a further revelation, Doctrine and Covenants 105, told them to stop: "in consequence of the transgressions of my people, it is expedient in me that mine elders should wait for a little season for the redemption of Zion," and it says of the Saints that "they have not learned to be obedient to the things which I required at their hands." The camp was disbanded.²⁰

The pattern is the important thing. A specific, dated, physical outcome was promised — the Saints would possess the land — with angels and the divine presence going before. The outcome did not occur. A subsequent revelation explained the failure as the people's disobedience and postponed the promise indefinitely, with no new deadline. "A little season" has now run one hundred and ninety-two years.

This is the structure that makes the whole corpus hard to falsify from the inside. Every failure has a canonical explanation attached to it, produced by the same authority whose reliability is in question, and the explanation is always available regardless of outcome. That is not a knock-down argument against the revelations — the Hebrew prophets also explain national disaster as covenant failure — but it is the reason a prediction score for Joseph Smith cannot be computed the way a weather forecaster's is.

Scores: Doctrine and Covenants 97:19–20, failed with a stated condition. 101:17–18, open. 101:20, partly fulfilled — Independence remains the designated site in current Church teaching, but the actual nineteenth-century gathering went to Kirtland, Far West, Nauvoo, and finally the Great Basin, and the Church has since taught members to build up the Church in their own lands. 103:15–20, failed. 105:9, not scorable.

Salem, Massachusetts, Doctrine and Covenants 111

The text, dictated in Salem on 6 August 1836. The original is lost; four copies survive, and the canonized text follows the copy William W. Phelps wrote into his diary, probably in the late 1830s or early 1840s. The canonical wording reads:²¹

I have much treasure in this city for you, for the benefit of Zion, and many people in this city, whom I will gather out in due time for the benefit of Zion, through your instrumentality. . . . And it shall come to pass in due time that I will give this city into your hands, that you shall have power over it, insomuch that they shall not discover your secret parts; and its wealth pertaining to gold and silver shall be yours. Concern not yourselves about your debts, for I will give you power to pay them.

Phelps's manuscript differs only in spelling and pointing — "notwithstandi[n]g your follies," "as you shall be lead" — and the revelation was not published in Joseph Smith's lifetime. It first appeared in print in the 1850s and entered the Doctrine and Covenants in the 1876 edition.²²

The context, from the Church's own critical edition. Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Sidney Rigdon left Kirtland on 25 July 1836 and reached Salem on 5 August, renting a house on Union Street for three weeks. The Joseph Smith Papers editors write that "no known contemporary documents specify church leaders' reasons for visiting the eastern United States," and that the four "were likely motivated by a concern about Zion and the financial situation of the church, particularly a need to reduce debts of church leaders," debts swollen by finishing the Kirtland House of the Lord and buying land in Ohio and Missouri.²²

The treasure-hunting allegation, handled carefully. Two later, hostile sources say the trip was a money hunt. James C. Brewster, a sixteen-year-old dissident, wrote in an 1843 pamphlet asking who introduced treasure-digging "among the Mormons" and referring to "the house that was rented in the city of Boston, with the expectation of finding a large sum of money buried in or near the cellar." Ebenezer Robinson, writing in 1889 — fifty-three years after the fact, as editor of a paper for David Whitmer's Church of Christ — reported at second hand from Don Carlos Smith that a church member named Burgess had told Joseph Smith "that a large amount of money had been secreted in the cellar of a certain house in Salem, Massachusetts, which had belonged to a widow," and that Burgess later could not identify the house. Robinson said he had first read the revelation only recently, in an 1853 Millennial Star.²²

Both accounts are late, hostile, and secondhand, and neither by itself establishes anything. But the Church's own editors do not leave it there, and honesty requires reporting what they found. They write that "two contemporary documents may provide support for the statements of Brewster and Robinson": a promissory note made out to a Jonathan Burgess in Salem on 17 August 1836, and Joseph Smith's own letter to Emma Smith of 19 August 1836, in which he mentions looking for a specific house in Salem. The editors add a correction that cuts the other way: Robinson said Joseph Smith rented the house and found nothing, but the letter to Emma "reveals that he had not been able to rent or gain access to the house."²² So the treasure story is no longer only late and hostile. Two contemporary documents point at it, and the Church's historians say so in print.

Outcome. No treasure was obtained. The Church's financial position got dramatically worse rather than better, and the Kirtland Safety Society collapsed the following year.

The strongest Latter-day Saint answer is that the promise about people, not gold, was the real one, and that it was kept: verse 2 says "many people in this city, whom I will gather out in due time." That is correct, and it is scored as fulfilled in the section above — with the qualification that the gathering happened because Church leaders read this revelation and sent missionaries to Salem to bring it about. It does not touch verses 4 and 5, which are about wealth and debts and are specific.

Scores: 111:4, failed. 111:5, failed. 111:2, fulfilled and self-fulfilling.

"Even fifty six years should wind up the scene," February 1835

On 14 February 1835 the three Book of Mormon witnesses chose the first Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at a general meeting in Kirtland. Joseph Smith addressed the meeting. Warren Cowdery copied the discourse into Minute Book 1, page 147, not before 25 February 1836. The relevant sentence:

it was the Will of God, that they should be ordained to the ministry and go forth to prune the vineyard for the last time, or the coming of the Lord, which was nigh, even fifty six years, should wind up the scene.²³

Fifty-six years from February 1835 is 1891. The scene was not wound up.

Authority level. This is not canon. It is a clerk's copy of a discourse, made a year later, and it sits well down the authority ladder — an individual public sermon recorded by a scribe. A Latter-day Saint is entitled to say it does not bind the Church. Under this article's rule 1 it still enters the corpus, because the record was made in 1836 and the deadline was 1891.

The best Latter-day Saint answer, and it is a strong one. The number is not arbitrary and Joseph Smith explained it himself. Doctrine and Covenants 130:14–17, from 2 April 1843, records:¹ "I was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of Man, when I heard a voice repeat the following: Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man; therefore let this suffice, and trouble me no more on this matter." Joseph Smith was born in December 1805, so eighty-five would fall in 1890 or 1891 — the same date. And he immediately added the disclaimer: "I was left thus, without being able to decide whether this coming referred to the beginning of the millennium or to some previous appearing, or whether I should die and thus see his face. I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time."

That is a man reporting a revelation and openly saying he does not know what it means. It is the most epistemically careful sentence in the entire corpus, and critics who quote the fifty-six years without it are quoting unfairly.

But the February 1835 statement is not hedged. Warren Cowdery's minute has him telling the newly ordained Twelve that the coming of the Lord "was nigh, even fifty six years, should wind up the scene," as a reason for urgency in their ministry. The hedge appears eight years later, in a different document, after the Kirtland and Missouri failures. Both documents are real. The registry scores them separately: the 1835 statement failed; the 1843 statement is conditional on Joseph Smith living to eighty-five, which he did not, and so is not scorable.

Scores: February 1835 discourse, failed. Doctrine and Covenants 130:15, not scorable.

Named-person and named-date predictions

These are the sharpest tests in the corpus, because each names a person or a date. Two of them go to the Latter-day Saint side, and the section that follows would be dishonest without them.

Doctrine and Covenants 114:1 (11 April 1838): "It is wisdom in my servant David W. Patten, that he settle up all his business as soon as he possibly can, and make a disposition of his merchandise, that he may perform a mission unto me next spring, in company with others, even twelve including himself, to testify of my name and bear glad tidings unto all the world."²⁴ David W. Patten was killed on 25 October 1838 at the Battle of Crooked River, six months before the mission he was told to prepare for. The Joseph Smith Papers editors state it plainly: "Patten, however, was killed in October 1838 in the conflict between the Latter-day Saints and other Missourians."²⁵ Score: failed. A believer may answer that the command was conditional on Patten living, but the revelation states no condition, and the whole point of naming a man is that the naming can be checked.

Doctrine and Covenants 118:5 (8 July 1838): "Let them take leave of my saints in the city of Far West, on the twenty-sixth day of April next, on the building-spot of my house, saith the Lord."²⁶ This is the most specific dated prediction in the whole corpus — a named place, a named date, nine and a half months out — and it was made before the Saints were driven from Missouri. It was met. The Church's own history topic records that after the expulsion, "some opponents of the Church boasted that they had prevented the fulfillment of this divine instruction. However, before the Twelve's mission to England, Brigham Young and other Apostles returned to the Far West temple site under cover of night to fulfill the revelation on the appointed day."²⁷ Score: fulfilled. It is also, and the Church's own wording says so, self-fulfilling: the men who received the instruction were the men who carried it out, deliberately, in order to fulfill it. That does not make it worthless — it took real courage to re-enter a state whose governor had ordered them out — but it is not the same kind of evidence as a prediction about events outside the predictor's control.

Doctrine and Covenants 118:4, 6: John Taylor, John E. Page, Wilford Woodruff, and Willard Richards are named to fill vacancies in the Twelve, and the quorum is told to "depart to go over the great waters, and there promulgate my gospel."²⁶ All four were appointed. The Joseph Smith Papers editors write that "with the exception of Willard Richards, who was proselytizing in England, the newly appointed apostles were ordained and formally joined the quorum by April 1839," and that "the apostles left on their mission later that year and arrived in England in early 1840."²⁸ Score: partly fulfilled. The appointments happened. Whether every one of the four named men crossed the Atlantic could not be settled from a source opened for this draft, so no stronger score is claimed.

Doctrine and Covenants 124:56–60 (19 January 1841): the Nauvoo House, "let my servant Joseph and his seed after him have place in that house, from generation to generation, forever and ever, saith the Lord."¹⁶ Score: not scorable. "Forever and ever" carries no deadline and no falsifiable content. The building's actual history was not established from a source opened for this draft, and the score does not depend on it.

Doctrine and Covenants 117:12 (8 July 1838), on Oliver Granger: "his name shall be had in sacred remembrance from generation to generation, forever and ever, saith the Lord."²⁹ Score: not scorable, because "sacred remembrance" has no falsifiable content.

The Salem converts, Doctrine and Covenants 111:2. The promise was "many people in this city, whom I will gather out in due time for the benefit of Zion, through your instrumentality." In 1841 Hyrum Smith and William Law, of the First Presidency, sent Erastus Snow and Benjamin Winchester to Salem and gave them a copy of the 1836 revelation. Snow wrote in his journal that they "left with us a copy of a Revelation given about that people in 1836 which said the Lord had much people there whom he would gather into his kingdom in his Own due time and they thought the due time of the Lord had come." Snow organized the Salem branch on 5 March 1842 with fifty-three members; by June 1842 it had ninety; more than a hundred people joined during his mission; and when he left in the fall of 1843, seventy-five members from "Boston and the eastern churches" traveled with him to Nauvoo.²² Score: fulfilled — and, again, self-fulfilling. The revelation named no number and no date, and the gathering happened because leaders read the revelation and sent missionaries to bring it about.

Two famous items excluded by the rule

Both are excluded under inclusion rule 1, and the exclusion cuts against the side that usually cites each one.

The Rocky Mountains prophecy of 6 August 1842, in which Joseph Smith is said to have foretold that the Saints would be driven to the Rocky Mountains and become a mighty people there, is a Latter-day Saint favorite. The Stephen A. Douglas prophecy of 18 May 1843, in which Joseph Smith is said to have told Douglas that he would aspire to the presidency and feel the weight of God's hand if he turned against the Saints, is the other. In both cases the surviving records need to be dated before the events they describe, and that dating was not established for this draft. Until it is, neither belongs in a scored corpus. A critic scoring them as fabrications and an apologist scoring them as hits are both reaching past evidence that has not been laid on the table.

Base rates: how many hits should a guesser expect?

This is the section most treatments of the subject omit, and without it the scoreboard is meaningless.

Joseph Smith made a very large number of statements about the future across fourteen years. The Doctrine and Covenants alone runs to 138 numbered sections, most of them dictated between 1828 and 1844, and a large fraction contain forward-looking language. Add the discourses, letters, blessings, and minutes, and the denominator is in the hundreds.

Against that denominator, ask what an intelligent, well-read American religious leader in the 1830s would get right by ordinary means.

Sectional war. In December 1832, predicting armed conflict between North and South, beginning in South Carolina, over slavery, required reading a newspaper. The sitting President had published a proclamation to that effect fifteen days earlier. Anyone making that prediction in that month was repeating the news. What distinguishes Joseph Smith's version is not the content but the persistence — it stayed in print through 1851 and was still on the books in 1861.

Institutional growth. Predicting that one's own movement will fill the earth is what every founder does. It is unfalsifiable in the short run and self-fulfilling in the long run, because the people who believe it are the people who work to bring it about.

Imminent millennium. This was the common property of the era. Setting a date for the return of Christ was a crowded American field in the 1830s and 1840s, and being wrong about it is not distinctive. What the corpus scored here shows is narrower and still worth having: the two dated millennial statements in it, the 1835 "fifty six years" and the 1843 eighty-five-years revelation, both point at 1890–91, and 1890–91 came and went.

Personal predictions. Telling a named man he will serve a mission, prosper, or be remembered is a near-certain hit for the ordinary reasons: the recipient hears it, believes it, and acts on it.

So the honest base-rate conclusion is this. Six items in the scored corpus are fulfilled. Four of them belong to the Doctrine and Covenants 87 cluster — the state named, the death toll, the slave question, the appeal to Great Britain — and all four are elements of one prediction made in the middle of a national crisis that a well-informed reader was already tracking. The other two, the Salem branch and the Far West meeting, were brought about by the people who received the revelations, acting deliberately in order to fulfill them. The corpus contains no fulfilled prediction that combines a genuinely low prior with an outcome outside the predictors' control. That is the finding that matters, and it is not changed by adjusting the raw ratio.

The mirror-image point is owed to the other side. A pile of failures is weaker evidence than it looks. Anyone who makes hundreds of predictions accumulates failures, including people whose overall judgment is good. The failures here matter not because they are numerous but because of where they fall: on the dated, checkable, physically specific promises, and specifically on every one that carried a deadline.

Scored summary

Totals: 6 fulfilled, 3 partly fulfilled, 11 failed, 2 open, 7 not scorable — 29 scored items. Two further items are excluded by the inclusion rule and are discussed above.

Two results are worth pulling out of the table, and they point in opposite directions.

The first favors the critical case. Of the five items carrying a deadline set by the passage of time rather than by the recipients' own action, all five failed: the temple "in this generation," the "fifty six years," the wars that would "shortly come to pass," the possession of the goodly land, and Patten's mission "next spring." Where the corpus depends on events outside the predictors' control, it does worst.

The second favors the Latter-day Saint case, and it is the single sharpest dated prediction in the corpus. Doctrine and Covenants 118:5 named a place and a calendar date nine and a half months in advance — Far West, 26 April 1839 — and it was met, after the Saints had been expelled from the state under a governor's order and after opponents had publicly boasted that they had made it impossible. A skeptic is right that the apostles could and did act to bring it about. A believer is right that they did so at real risk, and that most people do not keep an appointment of that kind under those conditions. Both observations belong in the record.

The strongest Latter-day Saint responses

"A prophet is a prophet only when acting as such." Joseph Smith is widely reported to have said this, and it is the standard answer. As a principle it is defensible and, applied to Kinderhook, it is powerful — Bradley and Ashurst-McGee's reconstruction is exactly this claim, worked out documentarily. Its cost is that it removes the ability to tell in advance which mode a prophet is in. Nothing in the 1843 record told a Nauvoo Saint that the Kinderhook comparison was secular while the Book of Abraham translation was revelatory, and both were reported in the same Church newspapers by the same editors.

"Conditional promises are not failed predictions." Doctrine and Covenants 124:49 is the canonical statement, and it has real biblical warrant. This is the best answer in the Latter-day Saint arsenal and this article grants it. The limit is that a general escape principle, published after the failures it covers, cannot then be counted as a track record.

"'Generation' is elastic." Granted for the Hebrew and Greek terms in general. Not granted for Doctrine and Covenants 84:5, which spells out its own meaning: "this generation shall not all pass away until an house shall be built."

"The Church never claimed inerrancy." Correct, and important. Latter-day Saint teaching explicitly allows prophets to err. The difficulty is that the items scored here are not stray remarks; they are canon, on the top row of the authority matrix, and canon is the one category the tradition cannot reclassify as opinion.

Kent Jackson on the Joseph Smith Translation. His reply to Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon is careful, detailed, and on the merits largely persuasive, and it is treated at length above. It is also worth registering that his article is a faithful scholar answering two other faithful scholars in a Latter-day Saint venue, and that he discloses having endorsed the Clarke connection in print before examining it.

Common objections and responses

"Joseph Smith predicted the Civil War — case closed"

He named South Carolina twenty-eight years early, which is real and is scored as a hit. He did so about a month after South Carolina declared federal law void and threatened to organize a separate government, and fifteen days after the President of the United States published a proclamation to South Carolina warning of civil strife and a brother's blood. And the same revelation's central mechanism — Britain and other nations drawn in, war poured out on all nations, a full end of all nations — did not occur.

"The Kinderhook plates prove he was a fraud"

They do not prove that, and the popular version of the story is wrong in a specific way. The famous first-person sentence "I have translated a portion of them" is not Joseph Smith's; it is an 1856 editorial recasting of William Clayton's journal, which reads "President J. has translated a portion." The Church's own 1981 Ensign article says so. What the episode does show is that ancient-historical content about a modern forgery was produced and circulated in Nauvoo and attributed to Joseph Smith by his own clerk within days.

"The failures were all conditional"

Some were, explicitly — Doctrine and Covenants 97 states its condition in the same revelation. Others were not, and the conditionality was supplied afterward by Doctrine and Covenants 124:49. Both facts should be reported, and only the first is a defense contemporaneous with the prediction.

"By your standard Jonah was a false prophet"

This objection is correct as stated against the crude version of the Deuteronomy test, which is why this article does not use the crude version. The test applied here is the pattern test set out above: frequency of low-prior hits, treatment of failures, and whether successes are explainable by ordinary means. Jonah passes that test; the corpus scored here does not.

"You are ignoring the spiritual fruit"

Not ignoring it — declining to score it, because it is not a prophecy. Whether Mormonism produces good people, strong families, and durable community is a real question with a largely favorable answer, and it is not evidence about whether a man could translate Egyptian or foretell events.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

Strengthening the Latter-day Saint claim: a pre-1844 document showing a specific, low-prior prediction that later came true and could not have been inferred from information available at the time. A demonstrably pre-1842 record of the Rocky Mountains prophecy would be exactly this, and would be significant. Independent confirmation of any Joseph Smith translation of a previously unknown ancient text — the experiment that has been run three times without a confirmation — would be decisive. A contemporaneous rule, stated before the failures, that let members tell which statements were conditional would blunt the strongest criticism in this article.

Weakening it: verification that David W. Patten was dead before the spring mission commanded in Doctrine and Covenants 114 would add a clean failure in a named-person prediction. Any additional dated deadline in the corpus, since every deadline found so far passed unmet.

Neither way: further work on Adam Clarke. Even the strongest form of the Wayment thesis would show only that Joseph Smith used a book, which Doctrine and Covenants 88:118 tells the Saints to do.

Sources