Cover image via Gospel Media Library.
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Ed., Joseph Smith: A Life Lived in Crescendo, (Orem, UT: Interpreter Foundation & Eborn Books, 2024), 2 vols., 1086 pp.
Every four years, the study emphasis for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints turns to the Doctrine & Covenants and Church history. 2025 is such a year. In addition, it is 20 years since Richard L. Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, (hereafter “RSR”) was published, providing a serious, full-length biography of the Prophet from a major US publisher.
When RSR was published, the Joseph Smith Papers Project was just beginning. The published volumes of that project are now complete, with the twenty-eighth print volume being released in 2023 and subsequent electronic volumes still to come. Bushman was able to benefit from the project, which was in its early stages. “I have been given access to the materials as they have been assembled.”
For me, RSR is the authoritative biography of the Prophet to date. Bushman provides references to the positive and antagonistic accounts of Joseph’s history and the events in his life and that of the Saints and lets the reader determine how to weigh them for their own opinions; but he does so as a believer, not a skeptic. Of course, there are many other biographies and reports to come, especially now that the Papers, with their annotations and resources, are available.
I’m currently working my way through Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of An American Prophet by John G. Turner which will be released in June. Although he is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Turner is no stranger to the history and beliefs of the Restored Church. In 2012, he published a biography of Brigham Young and in 2016, he followed that with a book on the place of Jesus Christ in Latter-day Saint worship through the Church’s history. Turner attempts to present these subjects as an objective non-believer. Turner was interviewed as part of the Interpreter Foundation’s “docudrama” on the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. It will be interesting to see his approach to the questions raised by Joseph’s life and actions and which are central to any study of the Prophet’s life. Thus far, I’m having mixed feelings about his effort on Joseph. A project that is farther off is Richard Turley’s Joseph the Prophet, which was commissioned by the First Presidency in 2023 at the completion of the published Joseph Smith Papers project. I’m anxious for that one as well.
One passage of RSR has resonated with me since I first read it:
In a log schoolhouse on a hill in a forested countryside, plain people of little education and much zeal sit before him [Joseph] on slab benches. He is one of them, an ordinary man among ordinary men. He speaks of his visions and their possibilities trying to invest them with power and intelligence beyond his capacity to describe. They listen transfixed, puzzled and sometimes fearful. They know a power beyond the ordinary plays around them. They want to grasp it and make it their own. Can they break mountains and divide the seas? Can they put the armies of nations at defiance? Sometimes they are uncertain. Sometimes they burn with perfect certainty. They feel their lives are being elevated, their persons empowered. The concerns of farms, shops, and families drop away, and they dedicate their lives to the work.
Bushman was describing a point early in Joseph’s ministry in 1831. Joseph had only recently translated the Book of Moses and was working on his translation of the Bible. As history has shown, Joseph himself came to an understanding of his visions and revelations as his life progressed. Moroni’s initial visit showed him the whereabouts of the plates, but it immediately quoted Malachi’s prophecy of Elijah. In fact:
Young Joseph probably did not understand this scripture [Malachi 4] on the night of Moroni’s visit, but he became fully aware of its importance through subsequent revelations and divine instruction from the God of Heaven as he pondered over the years the meaning of Moroni’s words regarding Elijah and the temple. By the time he died, Elijah and the temple stood at the pinnacle of Joseph’s thoughts and teachings.
That’s just one of countless examples of Joseph learning “line upon line, precept upon precept” throughout his life. By the end, Joseph’s teachings were coming fast and were so much broader and deeper than when he started that it makes the title of a new collection of essays about Joseph Smith’s life near its end so appropriate. They reached their apex when Joseph rode from Nauvoo to Carthage. Joseph Smith: A Life Lived in Crescendo, is a two volume book available in hardcover (in full color), paperback and in e-book, pdf format. For ease of reference, going forward I’ll refer to it as Crescendo and provide page numbers for quotes in parenthesis.
The theme of the book, as the title indicates, is that, as Joseph’s life drew to a close, the most important doctrines revealed to the Saints were coming forth in more detail and fulness. The book is edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, who is no stranger to these pages.
Jeff is the Vice President of the Interpreter Foundation and is in charge of various projects, with most of his time being taken up on some video histories of the rise of the Restored Church in Africa (where he and his wife have served as missionaries). In the Fall of 2020 and Spring of 2021, Jeff was one of the primary organizers of a couple of academic conferences on the Book of Moses. He was co-editor of a two-volume collection of the proceedings called Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses. While Crescendo is also a two-volume collection of essays, it has a different origin.
Crescendo had its beginnings from “a virtual fireside series in anticipation of the 2021 ‘Come Follow Me’ curriculum on the Doctrine & Covenants.” (vii). Its purpose, “was to enrich individual and family scripture study during the period of relative isolation imposed by the COVID pandemic.” (vii). The first fireside was given June 27, 2020 and then presented weekly from October 17 through November 28. The recordings of these firesides can be found on the Interpreter Foundation website. The essays in the books are these presentations which have been revised and expanded for publication along with several reprints of articles and chapters from other scholarship on Joseph Smith and his teachings.
The two volumes contain 20 essays on various aspects of the last part of Joseph Smith’s life. With the index at the end, it’s almost 1100 pages. The contributors have spent years focusing on the areas they write about. In addition to the original fireside presentations, articles have been updated (often in significant and original ways) and reprinted from BYU Studies, the Interpreter Foundation Journal, Oxford University Press, BYU’s Religious Educator, and even the 2024 October General Conference of the Church. As for the concluding essay, its a previously unpublished work by the late Hugh Nibley called, “A Simple Inventory of Joseph Smith’s Contributions”; which, in true Nibley fashion, is anything but “simple”.
The first volume contains articles on the doctrinal innovations and teachings revealed through Joseph Smith in his later years and the second volume primarily concerns the martyrdom, the succession and various breakoffs from the Church after Joseph’s murder. The book is introduced by Richard Turley, who (as mentioned earlier) has been commissioned by the First Presidency and the Twelve to write an official biography of Joseph Smith. He’s followed by Elder Kyle S. McKay’s General Conference address from the October 2024, Saturday Evening Session, titled “The Man Who Communed With Jehovah.” Elder McKay’s keynote position in this volume is even more notable since he is currently the Church Historian and Recorder and Executive Director of the Church History Department.
Following these two relatively brief contributions, the next 20 are more substantive in nature. In “Now That We Have the Words of Joseph Smith, How Shall We Then Begin to Understand Them?”, Jeff acknowledges that we have “unparalleled ease of access to the original manuscripts of the history, translations, revelations and teachings of Joseph Smith” (7). He then identifies 12 challenges to our ability to understand and provides solutions to meeting those challenges. Nine of them are “opportunities”, as Jeff describes them, to overcome “interpretive” obstacles, such as our lack of familiarity with scriptures and their symbols, or reading skills. Three have to do with historiographical issues such as the frequent changes in those who reported on Joseph’s teachings, and the variety and complexity of the original sources themselves. For example, on this last point, a new resource has recently been published identifying the original sources of the classic reference, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, edited by Joseph Fielding Smith in 1938. This new volume compares passages from Teachings with the original sources in the Joseph Smith Papers in parallel columns, along with other commentary.
Once this beginning foundation is laid, the rest of the essays in the first section deal with “Doctrinal Developments in Nauvoo”. R. Devan Jensen, Michael A. Goodman, and Barbara Morgan Gardner show how Joseph Smith’s understanding of the eternal family progressed (pp. 45-74). Terryl Givens expands on Joseph’s understanding of the nature of pre-existence (pp.75-122), by presenting his findings in one of his Foundations of Mormon Thought volumes from Oxford University Press.
Alexander Baugh reports on the revelations about baptisms for the dead and its development (pp. 123-145), which is updated from his essay contribution to a volume in honor of Richard O. Cowan. Then Jeff Bradshaw expands on Joseph’s 21 May 1843 discourse on the “More Sure Word of Prophecy” (pp. 147-240). The section is concluded with James Faulconer and Susannah Morrison providing an overview of Joseph’s most famous sermon, the King Follett Discourse (pp. 241-283).
The second section provides articles on the temple, the priesthood and Relief Society. The first article is an original exploration of the restoration of the Melchizedek Priesthood by John S. Thompson (pp. 267-338). That’s followed by Jeff Bradshaw’s review of “The Revelatory Origins of Temple Ordinances” (pp. 339-426). Tangential to the temple ordinances is Brian C. Hales’ answering questions and discussing D&C Section 132 (pp. 427-456). Rachel Cope reaffirms the importance of the history of the Relief Society (pp. 457-470) and Lisa Olsen Tait presents on the relationship of women with the priesthood, beginning with the words of President Nelson (pp. 471-505). Jacob D. Hawkins and Matthew J. Grow conclude the section (and the volume) with a short article (original to this volume) on the historical and religious significance of the “Red Brick Store”, which was recently acquired by the Church in its 2024 purchase of various historical sites and artifacts from the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church). The store was the site of the first endowment presentations led by Joseph Smith (pp. 507-535).
The second volume has two sections. The first focuses on the martyrdom. Joseph Smith’s path to the Carthage jail was a legal one, which is described in detail by Joseph I. Bentley (pp. 539-624). John W. Welch then expands on his 2018 BYU Studies article about Joseph and Hyrum’s trip across the Mississippi right before their arrest in order to obtain legal representation (pp. 625-683). The section concludes with a detailed story of the events at Carthage by R. Jean Addams (pp. 685-741). The final section concerns the succession. The first article is by Ronald K. Esplin, who greatly expands his previous work on the succession to show that the Twelve Apostles were given the keys to lead the Church in an ongoing fashion which continues to the present day (pp. 745-882). Jeff Bradshaw then analyzes the firsthand accounts of Joseph’s transfer of the keys to the apostles and weighs their credibility (pp. 883-976). R. Jean Addams then provides a brief overview of the major “expressions” of those groups who recognize Joseph Smith as the founder of the Restoration (there are about 150 of them) (pp. 977-1050). Hugh Nibley’s previously unpublished summary of Joseph’s contributions is a fitting capstone to the volume (pp. 1051-1076). We owe this inclusion to the efforts of Stephen T. Whitlock, who discovered this manuscript in Nibley’s papers at BYU and then drafted the initial footnotes (which were then subjected to the Interpreter Foundation’s rigorous fact-checking—as were all of the other notes in this collection).
As with all such collections, each reader will find some articles more to their liking than others, and with this wide variety, there is something to please everyone. Unlike in many other compilations, I loved (a word I use sparingly when it comes to books on Joseph Smith) every one of these efforts, but the most valuable for me was the article by Ron Esplin, who has not received enough recognition (probably intentional) for his contributions to our knowledge of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. In the early 1990s, it was Esplin who approached Richard Bushman and asked, “if I would write a biography of Joseph Smith. Although I had vaguely considered such a study, it was not until Esplin made this proposal that I decided to begin the work. The book [Rough Stone Rolling] would not be without him.” “From 2002 to 2012, he was the Managing Editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. Today, he is a general editor of the Joseph Smith papers and is also the Director of the Brigham Young Center, dedicated to making available the papers of Brigham Young and information about his life and times.” (848) Esplin is bookending his career as the General Editor (along with Dean Jesse) of the Brigham Young Journals, the first volume of which was published in 2023.
Esplin’s 1981 article on the Twelve Apostles’ succession following the murder of Joseph Smith is a classic. In this contribution, Esplin expands and adds to his findings with the research that has come to light in the more than 40 years since he first wrote on the topic:
My central understanding of the succession of 1844 has not changed since my earlier study, but today we can add important new details that flesh out the story. My focus will be on priesthood keys and how Joseph Smith not only conveyed to Brigham Young and the Twelve “all the keys I have received,” but how he prepared them with the instruction—especially pertaining to temple ordinances—to see that the Saints received the blessings and benefit of those keys even if it be in his absence. We will see that Joseph Smith made these preparations in part because he understood that his own time was short and that it was essential to put in place others with the authority and training to see that the temple, the ordinances, and the Restoration would advance in his absence (748).
Joseph’s urgency passed to Brigham, who carried an additional charge from Joseph to, “organize and systematize all these ceremonies,” because they were “not arranged perfectly”. It is thought that an important reason for the construction of the St. George Temple in the final years of Brigham’s life was his realization that the Salt Lake Temple would not be completed in his lifetime and his assignment from Joseph about the ordinances. Joseph also had stressed that the ordinances were to be given in dedicated temples.
I’ve researched and written about many of these topics. Although I used many of them in their original state, I have appreciated the work and diligence of the authors in making these articles in their new form available. They provide priceless insights and information that increased my appreciation for Joseph and the revealed doctrines he left behind. Jeff and those in the acknowledgements have put aside their own projects and taken time from their families to provide us with these details about the Prophet’s life and I’m grateful to each of them. When taken as a whole, these volumes show how broad Joseph’s contributions were at the apex of his life. At the time he sent to Carthage, his life literally had reached its crescendo. This book presents a resounding chorus to his efforts.
* Terry L. Hutchinson is a practicing attorney with an interest in Latter-day Saint history and doctrine. He is the co-author, with Grant R. Gifford, of The Temple: Pathway to Heaven. He is married to the former JeNée Gifford and they have five children and eight grandchildren. Since 1994, he has produced a twice-daily book review show on KDXU Radio in St. George, Utah. He co-hosts monthly on the Interpreter Radio broadcasts and recently ended two terms as an elected School Board member in St. George, Utah.
