To understand Joseph, you have to understand that he never asked for any of it — and that once it was given, he could not let it go.
The Boy in the Grove
He was fourteen years old. Read that sentence again before reading anything else. He had walked a quarter mile from his father's log house, he had knelt down in a stand of trees that had not yet been named anything, and what he had on his mind was not theology. He wanted to know which church to join. James 1:5 had told him to ask. He asked.
What happened next is the founding scene of everything he ever became, and the great difficulty of reading him faithfully is that almost everyone who comes to the scene already knows what it produced. We come to the grove with the Restoration in our pocket — temples, scriptures, the priesthood, two centuries of saints — and we read it backward into a fourteen-year-old's first conversation with God. We have to put that down. The boy in the grove did not know any of it. He saw a pillar of light descend, and in that light he saw the Father and the Son, and he was told that the creeds of his day were an abomination to the Lord and that he was to join none of them. He stood up and walked home. And then for three years almost nothing happened.
That silence is the first thing about Joseph that scripture readers tend to skip. Three years. From fourteen to seventeen. Long enough that the boy began to wonder whether the vision had been some kind of waking mistake. Long enough that he "frequently fell into many foolish errors, and displayed the weakness of youth, and the foibles of human nature" — his own words, written later (JS-H 1:28) with the honesty of a man who refused to varnish his record. He was not a saint waiting in serene confidence for the next chapter. He was a teenager confused by his own life, gradually growing into a kind of God who would not leave him alone.
The Translator Who Could Barely Read
When Moroni came in 1823, what he brought with him was a problem of scale.
This is the part of Joseph's life that the secular accounts cannot account for. He had three years of formal schooling. He could write a letter, but his spelling betrays him at every turn — Emmy for Emma, cours for course, whrought for wrought. His own mother said he was the least bookish of her children. And into the hands of this twenty-three-year-old who could barely compose a sentence on his own, a record was placed of a thousand-year civilization — its kings and prophets, its wars and conversions, its temple theology, its allegories of the olive tree, its 142 distinct Hebrew names appearing for the first time in any English text, its chiastic structures Joseph could not have known existed, its embedded prophecies of the gathering and the latter days. He sat down beside Oliver Cowdery and the book came forth at a pace, by careful reconstruction of the surviving manuscript, of roughly seven manuscript pages per day, for sixty-five working days, with no notes, no rewrites, no second drafts, and almost no punctuation that he himself supplied. Whatever else you believe about how the Book of Mormon came forth, you do not have to be a Latter-day Saint to know that something happened in that room that is not explained by Joseph Smith having read books.
He never claimed it was his book. That is one of the cleanest tests of his prophethood: the man who would later announce the King Follett Discourse, who would tell the Saints they could become as God is, who would translate the Egyptian papyri and produce the Book of Abraham, who would receive the order of the priesthood and the patriarchal blessing and the sealing keys — that man, when asked about the Book of Mormon, would only say, I was the translator. The book was someone else's. He was the conduit. He never put a comma between himself and the prophets he was relaying.
The Theologian Who Did Not Know He Was a Theologian
What Joseph did over the next fourteen years is the densest theological production in the history of American religion, and he produced it almost incidentally, on the run, between persecutions, while his children died, while his enemies plotted his death, while he was trying to build a city.
Look at what came out of his mouth. The Father and the Son have bodies of flesh and bone. The Spirit was always with man and matter is co-eternal. There are three kingdoms of glory and the lowest of them exceeds all understanding. Intelligence was not created and cannot be created. God Himself was once as man now is. The dead can be sealed to the living. The whole human family can be bound together up to Adam by ordinances performed in temples not yet built. The veil between the worlds is thinner than we suppose, and the work of the next world is the same as the work of this one — the redemption of the dead.
There is no system in this. There is no professorial framework, no introductory volume, no apologetic treatise. The doctrines come down in pieces — in revelations, in sermons, in scraps of conversation that scribes wrote down later. He never sat down and wrote a theology. He simply spoke what was given him, and after he was dead the saints opened the drawer and found themselves in possession of a body of doctrine larger than the entire Reformation had produced. The mistake people make with Joseph is to read him as a thinker reaching for a system. He was not a thinker reaching. He was a man holding still while heaven dictated.
The Cost
And we have not yet talked about what it cost him.
His firstborn died at birth. The twins died at birth. The adopted Murdock baby died days after the Hiram mob dragged Joseph out of the house in his nightshirt and dipped him in tar. Another son died at fourteen months. A stillborn son in Nauvoo. Six of his own children dead before they were two — the man preached the salvation of little children with the authority of someone who had needed to believe it himself. He lost his oldest brother Alvin to a botched dose of calomel in 1823 and spent the rest of his life trying to figure out, doctrinally, where Alvin had gone. The doctrine of salvation for the dead has, in its very origin, the face of Alvin Smith standing behind it.
He was tarred and feathered. He was beaten. He was jailed without trial in Liberty Jail through the worst winter Missouri had on record, in a fourteen-foot-square dungeon with a four-foot ceiling, on a diet that included human flesh from his guards' boasts about Mormons they had butchered. He came out of that dungeon and the words he dictated in it — peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment — are the most-quoted comfort in the modern church (D&C 121:7). The men who recite it should know what room it was spoken from.
He was driven out of New York. He was driven out of Ohio. He was driven out of Missouri. By the time the saints reached Nauvoo, he had been on the run for a decade. He laid out a city of twelve thousand in a swamp and drained it with his own hands. He built a temple he never lived to dedicate. He buried friends and children and brothers. And on June 24, 1844, knowing what was waiting at Carthage, he turned back toward it and said, I am going like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am calm as a summer's morning. I have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward all men (D&C 135:4).
He was thirty-eight years old.
What He Did Not Have
The thing readers most often miss about Joseph is what he did not have, and what the absence reveals.
He did not have a system. He did not have a school. He did not have a library, a denomination, a teacher, a creed, a confessor. He did not have a single living mentor in the faith he was restoring. When he had a question about an angel he had to wait for the angel to come back. When he had a question about Melchizedek's order he had to receive Melchizedek's order. He had no one to consult above him for the entirety of his ministry, and the lonelier consequence of that is not power but solitude. He often did not know what was coming next. He repeatedly confessed his own weakness — in the revelations themselves, more bluntly than the saints have ever wanted to admit. I, the Lord, was angry with him, D&C 3 says of him. He did not erase the rebuke. He printed it.
He was not the polished priest of an established tradition. He was a young man from the frontier who got handed something larger than himself and never pretended otherwise. I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain, he said once, in one of the most self-revealing passages in his sermons, and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else. He never claimed to be polished. He claimed to be sent. The two are not the same thing, and the church he founded has gotten itself into the most trouble historically when it has tried to confuse them.
The Choice Seer
The Book of Mormon names him. Twice. Lehi, blessing Joseph his son in 2 Nephi 3, prophesies a "choice seer" who will be raised up out of the loins of Joseph the son of Jacob, who will be like unto Moses, who will be "esteemed highly," whose name will be Joseph, called after the name of his father. The detail goes further: the seer will be "great like unto Moses, whom I have said I would raise up unto you, to deliver my people, O house of Israel" (2 Nephi 3:9). This is not a vague gesture. It is a named prophecy of a specific man with a specific name, recorded six hundred years before Christ and translated by the very man it points to — translated, that is, before the man translating it knew he was the man it pointed to. He read his own name into his own future as he turned the pages.
There is something almost gentle about that. He did not announce himself. The book announced him. And he received the announcement the way he received everything: as a stewardship rather than a credit. He did not write behold, I am he. He wrote it down and kept translating.
What He Said Yes To
It would be easy — and the world has tried — to read Joseph as a man who reached. He did not reach. He answered. From the moment he walked out of the grove until the moment he stepped into Carthage, he was responding to something that had taken hold of him first. He did not invent the First Vision; he saw it. He did not invent the Book of Mormon; he translated it. He did not invent the priesthood; it was conferred upon him under the hands of resurrected men. He did not invent the temple; the order of it was shown to him. His whole prophetic life is a sequence of yes — yes to the angel, yes to the plates, yes to the river where John the Baptist came, yes to Hiram and the tar, yes to Liberty Jail, yes to Nauvoo, yes to the brother he loved walking into Carthage at his side.
And when, at the end, he understood that the price was going to be his own life, he said yes to that too. The lamb to the slaughter is not a phrase he reached for. It is a phrase that had been waiting for him, since Isaiah, and he stepped into it because there was nothing else to do.
He never asked to be the Choice Seer. He was the one who said yes when the seership came down. The work he restored is larger than any single life — and that is precisely the witness his life gives. The Restoration was not the achievement of Joseph Smith. The Restoration came through him.