Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of An American Prophet By John G. Turner
Yale University Press, 2025
Reviewed by Steven C. Harper
I am an admirer of John Turner—the family man, the disciple of Jesus Christ, and the historian. He does things well. Given his previous books, I expected his biography of Joseph Smith to be well researched and written. It exceeded my expectations, especially in its literary qualities and its respect for Joseph Smith as a revelator. But it also left me with a couple of disappointments. I found it dismissive of the Book of Mormon and too careless in communicating clearly what is known and not known about Joseph Smith’s life, particularly his polygynous and polyandrous relationships.
The book begins with Turner’s provocative assessment of Joseph Smith: “I wouldn’t trust him with my money, my wife, or my daughter” (2). For thirty years I’ve been studying Joseph Smith and the people who chose to trust him with their lives and their fortunes. Reading Rise and Fall with all that in mind proved to be intellectually and spiritually stimulating. It stretched me beyond the usual exercise of reading biography because every page begs the question of Joseph Smith’s trustworthiness. This review is focused on the two best aspects of the book (in my judgment) and the two worst, followed by implications I see in the lives of people who knew Joseph Smith and decided to trust him.
Turner’s biography is very well written. The composition and style are lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy. Chapters were carefully constructed. Paragraphs are precise. The transition sentences are especially good. And the pacing of the book is near perfect. Its literary grace belies the massive amount of hard historical work that informs it. Fawn Brodie’s and Richard Bushman’s biographies of Joseph are stylistically good. Turner’s is better.
Turner’s biography will replace Brodie’s as the interpretation of Joseph Smith favored by people who would not trust him with their money or their relatives. But Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith is more careful and balanced. It sacrifices the pacing at which Turner excels, but at 376 pages of text, Rise and Fall sacrifices some of the even-handed analysis of the raw materials of history at which Bushman (561 pages of text) excels.
Turner overclaims sometimes, neglecting to differentiate between what is known and unknown. In other words, he presumes to know the unknown and tells it to readers matter-of-factly: “Emma never reflected at length on the unusual courtship or elopement” (35), and “Eliza never discussed her marriages in as much detail as her sister” (312).
This pattern is especially problematic when it comes to Joseph Smith’s polygynous and polyandrous relationships, where Turner is aware that there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. “Any historian writing about Joseph’s polygamy has to admit a significant degree of uncertainty,” he writes (255, emphasis added). Speaking of Emma and Joseph in 1842–1843, he adds, “No” (here it would be more precise to add the qualifier known) “sources document their private discussion of the subject during these months” (296). Turner accurately reports that “There is no record of how Joseph introduced the doctrine to Emma” (310) and that “there is no way to know” (316) whether Helen Kimball’s relationship with Joseph included sex.
He is right about all of that. What Emma and Joseph Smith knew and said to each other on this subject and others throughout their marriage is almost all unknown. Yet Turner presumes to know that “Joseph certainly did not broach the subject with Emma” (255, emphatic adverb is original; emphasis added). Turner’s tendency to state the unknown as fact reflects a certainty heuristic, where confidence is mistaken for accuracy—a cognitive bias described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. That kind of overclaiming is common in historical writing, but it is not history. Much better is the modesty Turner exhibits when he does not presume a complete or certain answer to, “What, if anything, did she know about her husband’s polygamy” as of April 1842? (276).
Turner interprets Joseph Smith’s relationship with Fanny Alger as an adulterous “dalliance” (255). He rejects sources that say it was a sealing in favor of Oliver Cowdery’s reference to it as a “filthy affair” (187–88). Unlike Bushman, Turner does not tell the whole story of the exchange between Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith over the adultery accusation, which ended with Joseph denying he was guilty of adultery and Cowdery conceding that point. Turner notes that as early as the 1830 Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith was thinking about polygynous relationships in ancient Israel, condemning adultery while leaving room for divine sanction, but concludes that Joseph only claimed divine sanction to justify his later polyandrous and polygynous relationships.
Before I read Turner’s biography, I expected that he would qualify Joseph Smith’s revelations. It would have been accurate and understandable for him to say, for instance, that Joseph Smith said that he and Oliver Cowdery experienced a series of visions together, of Jesus, then Moses, Elias, and Elijah. But Turner follows Bushman’s way of relating “events as the participants themselves experienced them.” For example, Turner writes, “They saw Jesus Christ standing atop the pulpit in front of them,” and “the Savior told the two men that they should rejoice,” and “Joseph and Oliver then saw Moses, Elias, and Elijah” (183). Bushman explained that “insofar as the revelations were a reality to them, I have treated them as real in this narrative,” and generally speaking, Turner does too.
The way Turner presents the Book of Mormon translation process is the exception to this rule. Turner rejects the evidence left by those who said Joseph translated the Book of Mormon without the use of books or manuscripts. “Joseph consulted the King James Bible during the translation,” Turner asserts. All the eyewitnesses of translation ascribed the phenomenon to revelation, whereas people who did not watch Joseph Smith translate concluded that “plagiarism from the Old and New Testaments” was the only possible option (67). Turner favors the interpretation of those who did not witness the translation.
He interprets the evidence to mean “that Joseph did not have golden plates” (40). Turner grants that the people closest to Joseph believed he had plates but says that because “he did not show his family and friends the plates, there aren’t witnesses in the ordinary sense of the term” (40). Knowing that Turner knows the historical record well, I initially thought he meant that as of 1827, Joseph had not shown the plates to anyone. Page 39 reads, “Other men stated that they experienced visions of the plates, but Joseph never let anyone examine them in an ordinary way.” I assumed that the never in that sentence was an overclaim that meant Joseph had not yet let anyone examine them, and that in a subsequent chapter, in chronological order, Turner would tell me about the Book of Mormon witnesses, eight of whom said Joseph put the plates into their hands to heft. But I was misreading and misunderstanding.
Turner meant that Joseph never showed anyone the plates—never ever. He simply dismisses the historical record related to the eight witnesses with the word ordinary. All of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon plates only saw them in extraordinary ways, so not really. Turner shores up that interpretation by adding that Joseph was known to be playful and wanted to make good on his reputation as a treasure seer. He was, therefore, inclined to deceive and capable of convincing friends and relatives that they hefted ancient gold plates when, in fact, they did not (40).
That reading of the evidence left by eyewitnesses of the translation process, and by Book of Mormon witnesses, and by the people who witnessed them bearing witness to the Book of Mormon, does not comport with what they thought they experienced. In response to her father’s criticism of the Book of Mormon, Rebecca Swain Williams wrote him a letter that countered what she regarded as his misinformation. “I have heard the same storry from several of the family and from the three witnesses themselves. I heard them declair in publeck meeting that they saw an Holly Angel come down from heaven and brought the plaits and laid them before their eyes and told them that those was the plaits that Joseph Smith was translation the Book of Mormon from[.] they are men of good character.” The body of evidence Rebecca’s letter exemplifies defies a facile distinction between ordinary and extraordinary.
In this evidence, moreover, women including Rebecca, Ann Marsh Abbot, Sally Parker, and others decide for themselves whether they will trust Joseph Smith. In Sally’s case, one of the evidences on which she based her faith in the Book of Mormon came from hearing Hyrum Smith, one of the eight witnesses, testify that “he had seen the plates with his eyes and handled them with his hands.”
In addition, William McLellin wrote a manuscript about his personal experiences with the three and eight witnesses of the Book of Mormon. In it he recounted the ways they affirmed their experiences to him in the crucible of Missouri mob violence in 1833. “What will I do,” he asked, “with a such a cloud of faithful witnesses, bearing such a rational and yet solemn testimony?” Turner’s analysis in Rise and Fall does not adequately answer that question.
There is evidence for ancient Israelites and a historical Jesus, Turner argues, but no evidence for a historical Lehi or ancient American Book of Mormon sites. Granted, but that clouds the issue. Ancient Israelites and a historical Jesus are ordinary. But the Bible’s claims that God inscribed stone tablets with his finger and sent his divine Son to bring eternal life are extraordinary indeed. There is more historical evidence for Book of Mormon plates than for tablets inscribed with the ten commandments. And not a shred of ordinary evidence exists for a virgin-born and resurrected Son of God. Here is the point, paraphrased using the words Turner used to dismiss the Book of Mormon witnesses: People stated that they experienced the risen Savior, but Jesus never let anyone handle his resurrected body in an ordinary way.
So what Turner is rejecting, really, is “the disintegration of sacred distance” Joseph Smith effected. This rejection, moreover, seems rooted not in the evidence itself but in what Turner is willing to consider as possible. It seems unlikely, in other words, that his conclusion would change if more letters from Rebecca Swain Williams and Sally Parker, or more manuscripts by William McLellin, were discovered tomorrow, all affirming what they and others are already well documented to have said and believed: that Joseph Smith showed multiple witnesses actual golden plates in an ordinary way. Nor would it likely change any committed Christian’s faith if one hundred out of one hundred historians surveyed only accepted the historical Jesus, not the Son of God. It is not seeric objects, angels, or visions per se that Turner finds unbelievable. It is “seeing visions in the age of railways.” Rise and Fall’s arbitrary use of ordinary and extraordinary keeps the sacred past intact while rejecting Joseph Smith’s disruption of it.
Turner also cites DNA studies, anachronisms, and lack of archaeological evidence to mean that the Book of Mormon is fiction, and “not good fiction” at that, then citing Mark Twain’s funny but dismissive quips (67). “The simplest conclusion,” Turner writes, “is that Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon” (68). My critique here is not that Turner doesn’t come to the same conclusion I do about Book of Mormon authorship. The critique is that regardless of who wrote it, twenty-four-year-old Joseph Smith gave the world a book that Turner does not adequately explain or appreciate, not even in superlative but ultimately empty explanations, including “an incredibly unlikely achievement,” “a stunning display of American audacity,” “chutzpah,” and respectable “native genius” (68).
To be sure, Turner is not as dismissive as Alexander Campbell, whom he quotes describing Joseph “as ignorant and as impudent a knave as ever wrote a book” (129). Contra Campbell, who dismissed the Book of Mormon as a hodgepodge of nineteenth-century American theological conversations, Turner grants that “some of the Book of Mormon’s most arresting ideas lay well beyond the intra-Protestant debates of the early nineteenth century” (69). Yet, like Campbell, Turner does not take the Book of Mormon—and therefore Joseph Smith—seriously enough to understand them on their own terms.
Campbell faulted the Book of Mormon for anachronistically featuring Christian Jews, believers that the Son of God would be born of a virgin named Mary in the future. The book’s stated intent was lost on him. The Book of Mormon exists, its title page reads, to convince everyone that the God of Abraham is the babe of Bethlehem—that Jews were Christians who lost Christ, and that the Book of Mormon restores what was lost. Turner missed this too.
In summarizing the Book of Mormon, Turner writes, “Lehi has a vision of Jesus Christ descending from heaven. . . . Jesus gives Lehi a book . . .” (64, emphasis added), but, importantly, the Book of Mormon does not specify that Lehi saw Jesus, only a messianic figure. In the Book of Mormon, Lehi and his family only learn that Jesus is Christ as the book goes on. They recover by revelation the lost knowledge that the Messiah they anticipate is/will be a babe born of a virgin named Mary. First Nephi is expertly structured to feature this revelation at its heart and high point. “I looked and beheld the virgin again,” Nephi declares at the midpoint of 1 Nephi, “bearing a child in her arms. And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father” (1 Ne. 11:20–21).
The entire Book of Mormon then features that revelation over and over and over. For example, King Benjamin prophesies, “he shall be called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary,” adding that “he cometh unto his own, that salvation might come,” and that he would be considered a mere mortal by those who “shall scourge him, and shall crucify him.” King Benjamin adds, “And he shall rise the third day from the dead” (Mosiah 3:8–10). Abinadi, Alma, Samuel, and others all explicitly declare the same message. Then the risen Savior himself affirms, “I am Jesus Christ . . . I am the God of Israel” (3 Ne. 11:10, 14). The Book of Mormon concludes with Moroni’s declaration that believers are sanctified “through the shedding of the blood of Christ” (Moro. 10:33).
The Book of Mormon and Alexander Campbell talked past each other. Campbell assumed that because everyone knows that people who lived before Jesus knew nothing of Jesus, the Book of Mormon is anachronistic. The Book of Mormon reads that because everyone (Campbell, for example) thinks they know that people who lived before Jesus knew nothing of Jesus, it has come forth to educate them otherwise. Jacob might wonder how Campbell completely missed his point. “For this intent have we written these things,” Jacob writes, “that they may know that we knew of Christ, and we had a hope of his glory many hundred years before his coming; and not only we ourselves had a hope of his glory, but also all the holy prophets which were before us. Behold, they worshiped the Father in his name” (Jacob 4:4–5).
Then the next chapter, Jacob 5, features an extended olive tree allegory, which Turner attributes to Joseph Smith, who did not borrow it from the Bible or any other known source, and who never cultivated, or even saw, an olive tree, and who, two years later, left us samples of his own composition in the broken sentences of his first journal entries and the rough prose of his earliest autobiography. In one way or another, the Book of Mormon came out of Joseph Smith’s mouth and onto the page via Oliver Cowdery’s pen and into print on Egbert Grandin’s press before Joseph Smith was twenty-five years old. “Joseph deceived his family, friends, supporters, and readers,” as Turner understatedly argues, or God worked through him (68). Either way, Rise and Fall does not adequately account for the intent, content, and design of the Book of Mormon, and therefore not for what the original edition called its author and proprietor.
It is understandable that John Turner and other people, then and now, do not trust Joseph Smith and that many people wonder how and why anyone trusted him then or trusts him now. So it is worthwhile to wonder how and why some good and faithful Christian souls trusted him, and not blindly. I mean the people who knew him, knew full well what Turner aptly calls his “flaws” (2), and chose to trust him with their money—Edward Partridge and Newel Whitney among them. These men were older and wiser than Joseph, more experienced money and property managers, as he and they well knew. At great cost, they followed Joseph’s revelations that commanded them to disrupt their enterprises, move, and consecrate their lives and fortunes to Zion. So did the Knight and Whitmer families. So did Martin Harris and many others. What accounts for that?
The trust in Joseph Smith’s revelations that required financial sacrifices was nothing compared to the July 1843 revelation on marriage. It makes the hard sayings of Jesus’s bread of life discourse seem comparatively mild. Who can accept it? Well, the impressive list includes women and men who were not inclined to follow or submit to a sexual predator. First and foremost, it includes Emma Hale. It includes Lydia Partridge and her daughters Eliza and Emily. It includes Elizabeth Ann Whitney and her daughter, Sarah; Vilate Kimball, and her daughter Helen. It includes Zina Diantha Huntington and Eliza Roxcy Snow. It includes Sarah Granger Kimball, who refused a polyandrous sealing to Joseph Smith without losing trust in him or his revelations. They knew him in ways a biographer cannot. Their choice to trust him matters when one weighs him in the balance.
Even so, one can understand the choice to not trust Joseph Smith. He empathized with it himself: “I dont blame you,” Joseph said just two months before he was murdered, “for not believi[n]g my histo[r]y had I not expeind [experienced] by it [I] could not believe it myself.” Turner’s Rise and Fall is a learned and welcome perspective and a remarkable contribution to what I hope will continue to be a growing number of Joseph Smith biographies. Turner’s will likely age well among them. It represents an immense amount of skillful historical and literary work that treats its subject seriously and rigorously. It adds to my admiration for its author.
