Most of the members of the Smith family soon joined the Presbyterian church, but young Joseph remained undecided. His argument was that all the strife and tension among the various denominations made him question which denomination was right. It was this conflict that set the stage for Joseph's alleged first vision.

In 1820 Joseph allegedly received a vision that became the basis for the founding of the Mormon Church:

I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight; that those professors were all corrupt, that, "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof."

Joseph then recounts a second vision he had on September 21, 1823, in which he claims:

I had a second vision. A personage appeared at my bedside who was glorious beyond description. He said that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God, and that his name was Moroni, that God had a work for me to do, and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds and tongues.

He told me that a book had been deposited, written on golden plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and containing "the fullness of the everlasting Gospel" as delivered by the Saviour to the ancient inhabitants of this land. He also said that there were two stones in silver bows -and these stones, fastened in a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummin -deposited with the plates, adding that God had prepared these stones for the purpose of translating this book.

I was shown exactly where the plates had been deposited. That same night the heavenly messenger appeared again twice, each time repeating the same message. The next day I went to a hill outside the village where we lived [now called the Hill Cumorah] and found the golden plate deposited in a stone box with the Urim and Thummin and the breastplate.

I was not permitted to take them out at this time, however, but was told by the angel, who had reappeared, that I should come back to this place every year at this time for the next four years. Finally, however, on September 22, 1827, 1 was given the plates by the heavenly messenger with the instructions to keep them carefully until he, the angel, should call for them again.

Joseph then moved to his father-in-law's house in Harmony, Pennsylvania, where, with supposedly divine help, he began to copy the characters off the plates and translate them. The publication of the translation of the plates was financed by a New York farmer named Martin Harris who was told by Smith that the writing on the plates was "reformed Egyptian." The translation was finally completed and placed on sale on March 26, 1830.

A little over a week later, on April 6, 1830, at Fayette, New York, "the church of Christ" was officially organized with six members. The name was eventually changed to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The number of members increased rapidly and a group of them moved to Kirtland, Ohio (near present-day Cleveland). It was here that Joseph supervised the first printing of the divine revelations he had received.

First known as the Book of Commandments, the work has undergone significant and numerous changes and now constitutes one of the Mormon sacred works, retitled Doctrine and Covenants. Smith also worked on a revision ("divinely aided") of the King James Version of the Bible.

Although the Mormon church began to grow in numbers while expanding westward, it was not without persecution. Battles were fought between Mormons and their non-Mormon counterparts in Far West, Missouri, a town founded by the Mormons. Here Smith was imprisoned along with some other Mormon leaders.

After escaping, he and his followers moved to Illinois to a town Smith named Nauvoo, where he organized a small army and gave himself the title of Lieutenant-General. During this time, the Mormons were busily constructing a temple and evangelizing the populace.

When a local paper, the Nauvoo Expositor, began publishing anti-Mormon material, Smith ordered the press destroyed and every copy of the paper burned. This act led to Smith's arrest and imprisonment. Released and then rearrested, Smith was taken to jail in Carthage, Illinois, along with his brother Hyrum.

On June 27, 1844, a mob of about 200 people, their faces blackened to avoid recognition, stormed the jail and shot and killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Joseph did not die without a fight. According to the church's own account he shot several of the mob members with a gun he had (see History of the Church, 6:617-18). The Mormons, however, considered Joseph Smith a martyr for the cause.

After the death of Joseph Smith the leadership went to Brigham Young, the President of the Twelve Apostles, who convinced the great majority of Mormons that he was the rightful successor.

Young led the group westward in a journey which saw many hardships including Indian attacks, exposure and internal strife. On July 24, 1847, they arrived at Salt Lake Valley in Utah which became the headquarters of the Mormon church. By the time of Young's death in 1877, the members numbered approximately 150,000. Today, the church has more than four million members worldwide.

The Claims of Mormonism

With one "Special Revelation" the Mormon Church expects its intended converts to accept the totally unsupported testimony of a fifteen year-old boy that nobody ever preached Jesus Christ's gospel from the close of the apostolic age until the "Restoration" through Joseph Smith, Jr., beginning in 1820! We are asked to believe that the church fathers for the first five centuries did not proclaim the true gospel-that Origen, Justin, Iraneaus, Jerome, Eusebius, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and then later Thomas Aquinas, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Tyndale, Wycliffe, Knox, Wesley, Whitefield, and a vast army of faithful servants of Jesus Christ all failed where Joseph Smith, Jr., was to succeed!

With one dogmatic assertion, Joseph pronounced everybody wrong, all Christian theology an abomination, and all professing Christians corrupt -- all in the name of God! How strange for this to be presented as restored Christianity, when Jesus Christ specifically promised that "the gates of Hell" would not prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18)! In Mormonism we find God contradicting this statement in a vision to Joseph Smith, Jr., some eighteen centuries later!

The Mormons make the claim that they are the "restored church of Jesus Christ" but the facts totally discount their claim.

The Mormon Church has four accepted sacred works: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price. The present prophet's words are also a source of authority.

The Mormon articles of faith read: "We believe the Bible to be the Word of God in so far as it is translated correctly." 11 The Book of Mormon claims that a correct translation of the Bible is impossible since the Catholic Church has taken away from the Word of God "many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away. And all this have they done that they might pervert the right ways of the Lord" (1 Nephi 13:26b,27).

Thus the Mormons put more trust in the other three sacred books than they do in the Bible. This opens the door for the Mormons to add their new non-biblical teachings by claiming they were doctrines deliberately removed by the Catholic Church.

The Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon is also considered inspired: "We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the Word of God." 11 The Book of Mormon is supposedly an account of the original inhabitants of America to whom Christ appeared after His resurrection.

Doctrine and Covenants

Doctrine and Covenants is a record of 136 revelations revealing some of Mormonism's distinctive doctrines such as baptism for the dead and celestial marriage.

The Pearl of Great Price

The Pearl of Great Price contains the Book of Moses, which is roughly equivalent to the first six chapters of Genesis, and The Book of Abraham, a translation of an Egyptian Papyrus that later proved to be fraudulent. It also contains an extract from Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible, extracts from the History of Joseph Smith, which is his autobiography, and the Articles of Faith.

The Living Prophets

The "living prophet" also occupies an important part in present-day Mormonism. Ezra Taft Benson, President of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, said in a speech on February 26, 1980, at Brigham Young University, that the living prophet (head of the church) is "more vital to us than the standard works." This echoed what was given to the ward teachers (similar to Christian Education adult teachers) in 1945.

Any Latter-Day Saint who denounces or opposes, whether actively or otherwise, any plan or doctrine advocated by the prophets, seers, and revelators of the church is cultivating the spirit of apostasy.... Lucifer.. . wins a great victory when he can get members of the church to speak against their leaders and to do their own thinking...

The Bible contradicts the Mormon reliance on multiple contradictory revelations. While the Mormon scriptures contradict each other and the Bible, the Bible never contradicts itself and the God of the Bible never contradicts Himself. Hebrews 1:1-3 tells us where our knowledge of God comes from:

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Any message that purports to be from God must agree with the message already brought by Jesus Christ in fulfillment of the Old Testament (Luke 24:27). Eternal life comes from the works and gifts of Jesus Christ, not from Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, or any other false Mormon prophet (John 20:31). Proverbs 30:5,6 warns those who try to add to God's Word, saying, "Every word of God is tested; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him. Do not add to His words lest He reprove you, and you be proved a liar."

Mormon Doctrine

GOD

The Mormon doctrine of God is contradictory to what the Bible teaches. The Mormons believe in many gods and teach that God himself was once a man. Moreover, Mormon males have the possibility of attaining godhood. Joseph Smith made this clear in The King Follett Discourse:

God was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.... I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in a form like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form of a man.

I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see.

It is the first principle of the gospel to know for certainty the character of God and to know that we may converse with him as one man with another, and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ did.

Here then, is eternal life -to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you (pp. 8-10).

Lorenzo Snow repeated Joseph Smith's words about the Mormon idea of God:

Smith's teaching on the nature of God not only contradicts the Bible; it also contradicts the Book of Mormon!

See also Alma 11:21,22; 2 Nephi 11:7; 31:21; 3 Nephi 11:27,36; Mosiah 15:1-5; 16:15, all in the Book of Mormon.

The Bible repeatedly affirms that there is only one true God. Isaiah 43:10 emphatically declares, "You are My witnesses, declares the Lord, and My servant whom I have chosen, in order that you may know and believe Me, and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, and there will be none after me."

In the New Testament we are assured that though there are false gods and idols worshipped by men, they are worthless: "We know there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one" (1 Corinthians 8:4).

JESUS CHRIST

The Mormon Church teaches that Jesus Christ was a pre-existent spirit like the rest of us. Even though we are all literally brothers and sisters of Jesus, He is set apart from the rest of us by being the firstborn of God's spirit-children.

Contrary to Mormon theology, Jesus Christ is the unique Son of God. John 1:14 declares that He "became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." Jesus Christ reflected the power of God while on earth that no other man could ever achieve; "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (Colossians 1:15).

MAN

According to Mormonism, man is a pre-existent soul who takes his body at birth in this world.

To think that we can one day be God like Jesus Christ and the Father is blasphemous.

The Book of Mormon and Archaeology

Mormon scholars can be frustrated and embarrassed understandably when they realize that after all the years of work by archaeologists, both Mormon and others:

Dr. Gleason Archer has done an excellent job in listing a few of the anachronisms and historical inaccuracies in the Mormon scriptures:

In 1 Nephi 2:5-8, it is stated that the river Laman emptied into the Red Sea. Yet neither in historic nor prehistoric times has there been any river in Arabia at all that emptied into the Red Sea. Apart from an ancient canal which once connected the Nile with the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and certain wadis which showed occasional rainfall in ancient times, there were no streams of any kind emptying into the Red Sea on the western shore above the southern border of Egypt....

According to Alma 7:10, Jesus was to be born at Jerusalem (rather than in Bethlehem, as recorded in Luke 2:4 and predicted in Micah 5:2)....

Alma 46:15 indicates that believers were called "Christians" back in 73 BC rather than at Antioch as Acts 11:26 informs us. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have been labeled Christian so many decades before Christ was even born.

Helaman 12:25,26, allegedly written in 6 BC, quotes John 5:29 as a prior written source, introducing it by the words, "We read." It is difficult to see how a quotation could be cited from a written source not composed until eight or nine decades after 6 BC . . .

Even more remarkable is the abundance of parallels of word-for-word quotations from the New Testament which are found in the Book of Mormon, which was allegedly in the possession of the Nephites back in 600 BC Jerald and Sandra Tanner have listed no less than 400 clear examples out of a much larger number that could be adduced; and these serve to establish beyond all question that the author of the Book of Mormon was actually well acquainted with the New Testament, and specifically the KJV of 1611....

Most interesting is the recently exposed fraud of the so-called Book of Abraham, part of the Mormon scripture known as The Pearl of Great Price. This was assertedly translated from an ancient Egyptian papyrus found in the mummy wrappings of certain mummies which had been acquired by a certain Michael H. Chandler.

In 1835 Joseph Smith became very much interested in these papyrus leaves, which he first saw in Kirtland, Ohio, on July 3, and arranged for the purchase of both mummies and manuscripts. Believing he had divinely received the gift of interpreting ancient Egyptian, he was delighted to find that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham himself, whose signature he had personally inscribed in the Egyptian language.

In 1842, Smith published his translation under the title, "The Book of Abraham" in Times and Seasons. He even included two drawings of the pictures or vignettes appearing in the manuscript, and interpreted the meaning of these illustrations: Abraham sitting upon the throne of Pharaoh and the serpent with walking legs who tempted Eve in Eden.

For many years this collection of papyri was lost, but somehow they (or else a duplicate set of them from ancient times) were presented to the Mormon Church by the Metropolitan Art Museum of New York City on November 27, 1967. This made the translation skill of Joseph Smith susceptible to objective verification.

The unhappy result was that earlier negative verdicts of scholars like Theodule Devaria of the Louvre, and Samuel A. B. Mercer of Western Theological Seminary, and James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago, and W. F. Flinders Petrie of London University (who had all been shown Smith's facsimiles) were clearly upheld by a multitude of present-day Egyptologists.

Their finding was that not a single word of Joseph Smith's alleged translation bore any resemblance to the contents of this document.

When all the evidence is considered, the Mormon claim to be the restoration of Jesus Christ's church falls to the ground. We have taken up the challenge of Brigham Young who said, "Take up the Bible, compare the religion of the Latter-Day Saints with it, and see if it will stand the test."

Orson Pratt echoed the same sentiment, "Convince us of our errors of Doctrine, if we have any, by reason, by logical arguments, or by the Word of God and we will ever be grateful for the information and you will ever have the pleasing reflections that you have been instruments in the hands of God of redeeming your fellow beings."

Our conclusion is that when Mormonism is weighed in the balances it is found wanting.