Where we are
The Pearl of Great Price ends not with a vision or a creation account but with a list — thirteen short sentences a thirty-six-year-old Joseph Smith dashed off in a letter. In 1842 a Chicago newspaper editor named John Wentworth asked for a sketch of what the Latter-day Saints actually believed, and Joseph, near the end of a long letter, distilled the faith into thirteen plain statements. They were never meant to be a complete theology, and they aren't one. But they have a clarity that has worn well, and the Church later canonized them — so the book that opened with God weeping over Enoch's world closes with a young prophet telling a stranger, in the simplest possible terms, what his people believe.
For our purposes there's something fitting about ending the whole study here, because two of these thirteen sentences are the doctrinal warrant for everything we've been doing across this overhaul — reading the old apocryphal books alongside the restored scripture. So this last essay will do two things: walk the architecture of the thirteen, and then, at the close, gather what the whole journey through Moses and Abraham has shown, and let the Articles of Faith name the method that made it possible.
The architecture of the thirteen
They aren't a random list; they're built. Read in order, they move from God outward to the world.
The first three are the gospel's foundation: the Godhead — "God, the Eternal Father, and… His Son, Jesus Christ, and… the Holy Ghost" (1), three distinct beings, exactly the two-Personage truth the First Vision restored; the Atonement, that through it "all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel" (3); and the crucial correction of Article 2 — "men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression." That second article quietly undoes centuries of inherited-guilt theology and sets the Restoration's whole optimistic anthropology: you answer for what you do, and the Fall, as the Book of Moses taught us, was a step toward growth, not a stain you're born owing.
The next two get practical: the first principles and ordinances — faith, repentance, baptism, the laying on of hands for the Holy Ghost (4) — and the matter of authority: "a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on of hands, by those who are in authority" (5). No self-appointment; the priesthood comes the way it came to Aaron, and to Joseph and Oliver under John the Baptist's hands.
Articles 6 and 7 describe the living Church: organized "after the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church" — apostles, prophets, the lot (6) — with the same spiritual gifts: "tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing" (7). The ancient church, restored, not reinvented.
And then the heart of it for us — Articles 8 and 9, on scripture and revelation, which I'll come back to in a moment. After them, Article 10 is the great hope: the literal gathering of Israel, the building of Zion, the return of the lost tribes, Christ's personal reign — the whole sweep of Enoch's vision in Moses 7, compressed to a sentence. Articles 11 and 12 turn to how Saints live among others: freedom of conscience for everyone — "let them worship how, where, or what they may" (11) — and honest citizenship, "subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates" (12). And then the thirteenth, which is less a doctrine than a disposition, and which turns out to be the key to the whole book.
The two articles that made this study possible (8–9)
We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. — Article of Faith 8
We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. — Article of Faith 9
Here is the doctrinal foundation under this entire overhaul. Article 8 makes a careful, generous claim: the Bible is the word of God — as far as it is translated correctly. That qualifier isn't a slight on scripture; it's an honest acknowledgment that texts get copied, translated, and edited across millennia, and that things get lost along the way. Which is exactly what we kept finding: the prologue Genesis lost (Moses 1), the agent of creation edited out (Moses 2), the council before the world (Abraham 3). The Restoration's premise is that scripture can be recovered because it was, in places, lost.
And Article 9 throws the canon open: God "will yet reveal many great and important things." The heavens are not closed. Revelation is the standing posture of an Endless God toward his children — which is the very doctrine Moses 1:4 gave us ("my works are without end, and also my words, for they never cease"). A church that believes Article 9 cannot treat scripture as a sealed museum. It expects more.
The method, named one last time
So let me state the method plainly, here at the close, because the Articles of Faith are where it belongs. Across these essays I've laid the old books — the Book of Giants, the Apocalypse of Abraham, Jubilees, 1 and 2 Enoch, the Life of Adam and Eve — beside the restored scripture, the way Jonah Barnes does in The Lost Gems of Genesis, to see what they share. And every time, I've held to one rule, which is just the Articles of Faith worked out in practice:
- What is canon — Moses, Abraham, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants — is the word of God and binding.
- What is the Church's settled position I've tried to mark as such, and to cite.
- What is an old book — apocrypha or pseudepigrapha — I've named, dated, and treated as an illuminating witness, never as authority. The Church takes no official stand on these texts. They are old neighbors who remember the same story, and D&C 91 is our license to listen to them by the Spirit.
That guardrail isn't a disclaimer bolted onto the work. It is the work. It's Article 8's "as far as it is translated correctly" applied to the whole library of ancient writing — keep the gems, leave the dross, and never confuse the neighbor's memory with the word of God.
What the journey showed (a gathering)
And now, the close — the convergences, gathered, with the honesty that made them worth gathering. Across the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham, the restored text kept landing on details preserved in ancient books Joseph Smith could not have read.
The strongest sit in the Enoch and Abraham material. In Moses 6–7, the man who comes to question the prophet Enoch is named Mahijah / Mahujah — and in the Book of Giants, buried at Qumran and not read again until 1948, the messenger sent to Enoch is named Mahaway: same name, same role, same prophet, in a scroll that was in the ground for nineteen centuries. In Abraham 3, the prophet is caught up into the heavens, shown the ordered cosmos, the pre-existent souls, and the fall of the rebel — the exact structure of the Apocalypse of Abraham, which had no English translation until 1918. In Moses 3 and Abraham 5, Eden is a temple and Adam its priest, the very reading Jubilees preserved (no English until 1888).
And I've tried just as hard to mark the honest limits, because the limits are what make the rest believable. Where Joseph could have known a source — 1 Enoch in Laurence's 1821 English, the Apocrypha in his family Bible, the idol-smashing Abraham legend in the 1840 Jasher — I've said so, and called it resonance, not proof. Where the famous apocryphal reading was wrong, the Restoration corrected it rather than copying it: Moses 8 keeps the giants and the Flood but rejects 1 Enoch's angels-breeding-monsters. And where the restored text's most precious page has no ancient parallel at all — the weeping God of Moses 7 — I've said that too, and let it stand as pure gift.
Put it all together and a shape emerges that is hard to explain by an unlettered farm boy's imagination. Where he had no access, the texts converge inexplicably. Where he had access, he discriminated rather than borrowed. Where the old world had forgotten entirely, he restored something new. That is not the footprint of a man mining books. It is, I'd suggest, exactly what you would expect to find if a real prophet were restoring a real lost record — which is the claim Joseph Smith—History makes, and which the man himself made.
How this chapter — and this book — changes the reader
The Articles of Faith end on a disposition rather than a doctrine, and it's the right place to end the whole Pearl of Great Price:
If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things. — Article of Faith 13
"We seek after these things." That sentence is the seeking heart that the whole Restoration began with — a boy who sought wisdom in a grove (Joseph Smith—History), a patriarch who sought the blessings of the fathers (Abraham 1), an Enoch who sought to build Zion. And it's the spirit of this entire study, too. Reading the old books alongside the scripture, keeping the gems and leaving the dross, refusing both credulous belief and reflexive dismissal — that is Article 13. We sought after the true things wherever they were preserved, because the God of Article 9 is still revealing, and the truth he has scattered through the old writings is worth the patient sifting.
So the book closes where it opened. Moses 1 began with a prophet on a mountain, shown the cosmos and told "this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." The Articles of Faith end with thirteen plain sentences and a seeking heart. Between them stands the whole restored story — the Creation and the Fall, Enoch's weeping God and Abraham's council of the Gods, the boy in the grove and the angel at the bedside — and through all of it, again and again, the old buried books quietly nodding along. The Pearl of Great Price asks only what Article 13 asks: that we keep seeking after the things that are true, and lovely, and of good report. The seeking is the discipleship. And the God who gives liberally, and upbraideth not, is still on the other side of the question.