Church History

Cover image via ChurchofJesusChrist.org.

Bound within the January 1972 issue of the youth magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then called “The New Era,” was a flexible plastic record that could be played on a phonograph.  It contained a testimony from President Wilford Woodruff, recorded by him roughly a year and a half before his death in 1898 at the age of ninety-one.

I was about to put in my mission papers at the time, and I still remember how thrilling it was to see that little plastic record and to listen to it.  I was simply stunned to hear the voice of a man who, as an adult—and, in fact, as an ordained apostle—had known the Prophet Joseph Smith personally and well.  I still find that amazing.  But I’ve also come to appreciate, much more than I did as a teenager, the actual content of what President Woodruff had to say.  It’s remarkable and very important.  Here are his words:

“I bear my testimony that in the early spring of 1844, in Nauvoo, the Prophet Joseph Smith called the Twelve Apostles together and he delivered unto them the ordinances of the church and kingdom of God; and all the keys and powers that God had bestowed upon him, he sealed upon our heads, and he told us that we must round up our shoulders and bear off this kingdom, or we would be damned. I am the only man now living in the flesh who heard that testimony from his mouth, and I know that it was true by the power of God manifest to him. At that meeting he stood on his feet for about three hours and taught us the things of the kingdom. His face was as clear as amber, and he was covered with a power that I had never seen in any man in the flesh before.

“I bear testimony that Joseph Smith was the author of the endowments as received by the Latter-day Saints. I received my own endowments under his hands and direction, and I know they are true principles. I not only received my own endowments under his hands, but I bear my testimony that Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards, George A. Smith, John Taylor and other brethren received their endowments under the hands and direction of the Prophet Joseph; and also my wife Phoebe, Bathsheba Smith, Leonora Taylor, Mary Smith and others whose names I cannot recall now.

“The Prophet Joseph laid down his life for the word of God and testimony of Jesus Christ, and he will be crowned as a martyr in the presence of God and the Lamb.

In all his testimonies to us the power of God was visibly manifest with the Prophet Joseph.

“This is my testimony, spoken by myself into a talking machine on this the 19th day of March, 1897, in the 91st year of my age.

“Wilford Woodruff.”

Such a testimony, from a man who was closely associated with Joseph Smith in the leadership of the Church, carries a great deal of weight with me.

So do some of the details of what he had to say.

President Woodruff bore testimony of the “endowments” that he and others had received from Joseph Smith.  This was enormously important to him.  He had, for example, sometimes led ceremonies in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City after it was built in 1855; from 1867 into 1868, he had officiated there every Saturday in both sealings and endowments.

He had presided over the St. George Utah Temple from its dedication in 1877 until 1884. This was not only the first temple to have been dedicated after the migration of the Saints to the Rocky Mountain West but the first in which the ordinances of the endowment were performed for the dead as well as for the living. Under the direction of Brigham Young, he set about to standardize the ceremonies—with the help of John D. T. McAllister, his first counselor and eventually the second president of the temple, he committed the ordinances to writing—and delivered numerous sermons to encourage a broader understanding of temple work.  In February 1877, he received a revelation indicating that church members could act as proxies in the temple not only for their own relatives, but for anyone they could identify by name.

In September 1877, President Woodruff indicated that he had been visited by the departed spirits of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and by others of the American Founding Fathers.  Accordingly, although proxy baptisms for many of the Founding Fathers had been performed previously in Nauvoo and in the Endowment House, vicarious endowments for these men were done in the St. George Temple.

In 1894, under President Woodruff’s direction, the Genealogical Society of Utah was established.  It was the forerunner of the Church’s Family History Department and FamilySearch, the largest genealogical organization in the world.  So, it’s not surprising that, given the chance, he testified of the “endowments.”

President Woodruff’s recollection of the pivotal meeting in which Joseph Smith gave his “final charge” to the Twelve is also interesting:  The Prophet’s face, he testified, “was as clear as amber, and he was covered with a power that I had never seen in any man in the flesh before.”  Many other contemporaries are on record as testifying to the illumination or transparency that would come upon the Prophet while he was receiving revelation.  It’s difficult not to think, in this context, of biblical testimony that Moses’s face shone when he descended from Mt. Sinai with the tablets of the Law (Exodus 34:29-35) and that Christ’s face “did shine as the sun” on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 17:2-3; Luke 9:29-31).

But I want to focus here upon President Woodruff’s vitally important testimony that, in Nauvoo in the early spring of 1844, Joseph Smith called the Twelve Apostles together and bestowed upon them the keys of the Kingdom.  This fact is of pivotal importance in understanding what happened after Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered while imprisoned in the jail at Carthage, Illinois.  It is essential for understanding the assumption of Church leadership by the Quorum of the Twelve the following August.

Like the ancient apostles in the time of Jesus, who—so says the New Testament gospels—were repeatedly warned by the Savior that he would soon depart from them, the Twelve in 1844 had been warned of Joseph’s pending departure.  But they weren’t ready to be deprived of the leader who had called their quorum into existence and who had transformed their lives.  His personality was too vivid; his teachings were essential to them; his absence was unthinkable.  And then he was gone.

On 27 June 1844, the day that Joseph and Hyrum were killed, Brigham Young was in Boston.  Without knowing why, he felt himself overcome by a deep and dark depression.  It wasn’t until 16 July, nearly three weeks later, that he received detailed confirmation of the martyrdom.

“The first thing that I thought of,” he remembered later, “was whether Joseph had taken the keys with him from the earth.  Brother Orson Pratt sat at my left; we were both leaning back in our chairs.  Bringing my hand down on my knee, I said, ‘the keys of the Kingdom are right here with the Church’” (Comprehensive History of the Church 4:213)

It is because of those keys, bestowed upon Brigham Young and the Twelve in the early spring of 1844 and transmitted from them down to the apostles of our own day, that we are authorized to build genuine temples to the Most High God in which the ordinances of salvation and exaltation can be administered.  Without those keys, we could not receive our endowments or be sealed to our loved ones.  We could not perform ordinances on behalf of our kindred dead. All those who have died without receiving the fulness of the Gospel, without having received baptism from an authorized officiator, would be in eternal jeopardy.

The medieval Italian Catholic poet Dante Alighieri provides an idea in his Divine Comedy of just what that jeopardy entailed throughout most of Christian history:

Upon entering (fictionally) into the next world, he was astonished by what he saw:  “I should never have believed,” he wrote in his Inferno, “that death could have unmade so many souls.”^[ Strikingly, despite his obvious admiration for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the great Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, and the chivalrous Muslim military hero Saladin, Dante felt obliged to place them all in Hell. Even his deeply-admired guide, companion and “kindly master,” the Roman poet Virgil, was eternally barred from heaven.  Virgil explains the reason to Dante as follows:

“I’d have you know, before you go ahead,
they did not sin; and yet, though they have merits,
that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism,
the portal of the faith that you embrace.
And if they lived before Christianity,
they did not worship God in fitting ways;
and of such spirits I myself am one.
For these defects, and for no other evil,
we now are lost and punished just with this:
we have no hope and yet we live in longing.”  (Inferno 4:33-41)

The importance of the keys of priesthood authority cannot be overstated.  Especially in this great period of temple-building.  It is, therefore, a wonderful thing, and perhaps not coincidental, that we still possess a recording of the voice of Wilford Woodruff testifying to that all-important transmission of authority—“the only man now living in the flesh,” he could say in 1891, who was present when Joseph Smith “called the Twelve Apostles together and . . . delivered unto them the ordinances of the church and kingdom of God; and all the keys and powers that God had bestowed upon him.”

**

Wilford Woodruff will play a prominent role—along with his fellow apostles George A. Smith and Heber C. Kimball—in the forthcoming Interpreter Foundation film Six Days in August (https://witnessesfilm.com).  For dramatic purposes, those three will largely represent the other members of their quorum.  Brigham Young, of course, will be the central focus.

The Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation is currently spearheading an effort to make the voluminous surviving records relating to President Woodruff publicly available:  https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org.

The background of the Woodruff recording is given in Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and Stephen H. Smoot, “Wilford Woodruff’s 1897 Testimony,” in Banner of the Gospel: Wilford Woodruff, ed. Alexander L. Baugh and Susan Easton Black (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2010), 327–64.

Ronald K. Esplin’s research on the topic continues, and more is forthcoming, but perhaps the best single treatment thus far, the essential discussion, of Joseph Smith’s conferral of leadership and priesthood keys upon the apostles is Esplin’s article “Joseph, Brigham and the Twelve: A Succession of Continuity,” BYU Studies 21/3 (1981), which is available online at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol21/iss3/5/.

Members of the Twelve recounted their reception of the keys of priesthood authority from Joseph Smith on multiple occasions.   But Dennison Lott Harris is important as the only independent—that is, the only non-apostolic—witness to the events immediately surrounding Joseph Smith’s “Last Charge” to the Twelve, as the Prophet prepared to “roll the kingdom off [his] shoulders” onto theirs. His story is documented in Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris: Owner of the First Copy of the Book of Mormon, Witness of the “Last Charge” of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2023).

For some additional thoughts on priesthood authority, see Daniel C. Peterson, “Who Holds the Keys?” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 61 (2024): vii-xx (https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/who-holds-the-keys/).