CES Letter Answers

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Polyandry ​

The claim:

"Polyandry: Of those 34 women, 11 of them were married women of other living men. Among them being Apostle Orson Hyde, who was sent on his mission to dedicate Palestine when Joseph secretly married his wife, Marinda Hyde. Church Historian Elder Marlin K. Jensen and unofficial apologists like FairMormon do not dispute the polyandry."[1]

The Letter opens its entire Polygamy | Polyandry section with a 2010 quote from a sitting LDS Church Historian:

"So, the question of Polyandry. Polygamy is when a man has multiple wives. Polyandry is when a man marries another man's wife. Joseph did both."

— Elder Marlin K. Jensen, Swedish Rescue Fireside, 28 November 2010[1:1]

For more than a century the strongest case for sexual polyandry had a single name attached to it: Josephine Lyon. Sylvia Sessions, on her deathbed in 1882, told Josephine she was "the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith." If that was true, here was the documented child the predatory reading needed. In 2016 a peer-reviewed autosomal DNA analysis tested the question directly and matched Josephine to Sylvia's legal husband, Windsor Lyon. Joseph was excluded.[2] The best single piece of evidence the critical narrative ever had came apart under genetics. It is worth starting there, because it sets the pattern for nearly everything else in this section: a claim that sounds airtight in one sentence dissolves when the actual record is examined.

This article is about the polyandrous-sealings cluster specifically: the eleven (or so) cases in which Joseph Smith was sealed to a woman who already had a living legal husband. The broader marriage counts, ages, public denials, and Helen Mar Kimball question are addressed in Joseph Smith's Marriages; the textual analysis of the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) section 132 is in D&C 132 Contradictions. The CES Letter weaves all three threads together. Here, the polyandry-specific question gets disentangled from the others and engaged on its own terms.

Almost everything turns on one word, "polyandry," and the connotations modern English loads onto it. In ordinary usage, polyandry means a woman maintains concurrent sexual marriages with multiple husbands. Read that way, the case looks like systemic predation: Joseph "marrying another man's wife" while the legal husband is shipped off to Palestine, the wife continuing to live with her first husband as a cover, an apostle's spouse stolen during a mission. That is the picture the CES Letter wants the reader to leave with.

It cracks the moment the documentary record is taken case by case. The husbands' religious status varied dramatically: non-member, excommunicated, apostate, faithful. Some welcomed the sealing; some did not know about it. The women did not move into Joseph's household, did not bear his children (DNA excludes him across the tested candidates), and described their own sealings in a vocabulary the CES Letter never quotes: "for eternity alone." The most rigorous critical biographer of Joseph's wives, Todd Compton, and the most rigorous unbelieving Joseph Smith biographer, Dan Vogel, both agree in their published exchanges with Brian Hales that no solid documentary evidence of polyandrous sexuality exists in any specific case.[3] Where serious apologetic and serious critical scholarship converge, the answer is the same: Joseph's sealings to legally married women were not what the modern word "polyandry" implies.

That convergence does not close the moral question. The most sophisticated current critical reading is Cheryl L. Bruno's edited volume Secret Covenants (2024), with contributions from Compton, Tensmeyer, Don Bradley, Susan Staker, and others. It grants the no-sexual-polyandry empirical floor and shifts the weight to systematic concealment. Joseph sealed himself to other men's wives in secret, kept those sealings hidden from some of those husbands and from his own legal wife Emma in nearly all cases, and embedded the practice in a developing Nauvoo culture of secret councils: the Anointed Quorum from May 1842, the Council of Fifty from March 1844, the temple endowment being administered privately to a small inner circle.[4] A faithful response to this article's case has to engage that case too, and it does, in a dedicated section below. The empirical finding does not erase the moral question. What it does is swap out the CES Letter's framing, Joseph as systematic sexual predator, for a different and harder one: Joseph as a prophet whose sealing theology required forms of secrecy whose moral cost the contextual defense reduces but does not eliminate.

Context and background ​

The sealings ​

Standard scholarly counts of Joseph Smith's "polyandrous" sealings run from eleven (Bushman, and Compton's narrower count) to fourteen (Hales's broader count, including disputed cases like Esther Dutcher). The variance is bookkeeping: whether to count proxy sealings performed posthumously, late affidavits with thin contemporaneous corroboration, and one or two cases where the sealing itself is contested. Eleven is the figure the CES Letter uses and the figure most apologetic and critical sources treat as the documented core.[5][6][7]

The eleven, with the date or date-range each is conventionally assigned, are: Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris (~1838, contested), Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs (October 27, 1841), Presendia Lathrop Huntington Buell (December 11, 1841), Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner (early 1842), Patty Bartlett Sessions (March 9, 1842), Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde (April 1842 or May 1843), Elizabeth Davis Goldsmith Brackenbury Durfee (1842), Sarah Kingsley Cleveland (~June 1842), Sylvia Sessions Lyon (between November 19, 1842 and May 18, 1843), Ruth Vose Sayers (February 1843), and Elvira Annie Cowles Holmes (date contested).[8][6:1]

Why the term "polyandry" is contested ​

In standard modern English, polyandry means a woman concurrently and conjugally married to multiple husbands. In the technical Mormon-history literature, the term is used more loosely: a woman sealed to a second man while a first husband is still living, regardless of whether the sealing involved cohabitation or sexual relations. Brian Hales prefers the more cumbersome but more accurate "consecutive marriage," or "sealing to a legally married woman," precisely because the documented pattern is not concurrent sexual marriage.[5:1][9]

The CES Letter exploits the gap between the two usages. It uses "polyandry" in the broad sense Jensen used (the form, a man sealed to another man's wife) and then layers on the substance of the narrow modern sense, concurrent sexual marriage, to characterize what those sealings were. The Jensen quote does rhetorical work for the section because it sounds like a Church official conceding the narrow sense. In context, Jensen was clarifying vocabulary before answering the substantive question, and his colleague Richard E. Turley acknowledged the topic's complexity and pointed toward the institutional engagement that the 2014 Gospel Topics Essay would later articulate.[10] (Jensen actually used the more technical word polygyny in the fireside; the CES Letter renders it polygamy. Both mean one man with multiple wives, so the vocabulary point is unchanged.)

The eternity-only sealing category ​

Most of these sealings were described by the participants as "for eternity alone," a distinct theological category in Joseph's developing sealing theology. D&C 132, dictated July 12, 1843, distinguishes sealings "for time" from sealings "for eternity," treating them as separate covenants with separate eligibility rules and separate consequences (vv. 7, 15–18, 19, 26).[11] Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, one of Joseph's wives who was not in a polyandrous sealing, used the same language in her 1881 autobiographical poem about her own 1843 sealing: "I thought through this life my time will be my own / The step I now am taking's for eternity alone."[12] Zina Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, in her 1898 statement, was emphatic that she was sealed to Joseph "for eternity" only.[13] The category was not invented after the fact to handle a Joseph Smith problem. It persisted into Utah-era practice and was performed by Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Wilford Woodruff for decades.[8:1]

It was theologically real to Joseph, but it was inconsistently articulated in the 1842–1843 documentary record, a tension the article engages in detail below.[14] So the position taken here is the weaker, defensible one. The category was attested explicitly in some specific cases (Ruth Vose Sayers being the cleanest) but was not uniformly named across all eleven. What can be claimed is this: no documented case shows conjugal relations, and the cases where the framework is explicitly attested support eternity-only.

The lack of children ​

One of the most powerful empirical findings of the past two decades is that no biological child of Joseph Smith from any of the polyandrous sealings, or from any plural marriage at all, has been identified. Population geneticist Ugo Perego, working with autosomal DNA from candidate descendants, has tested every historically attributed candidate for whom living-descendant material was available. Six historical candidates have been DNA-tested; three were children of polyandrous-sealings women: Oliver Buell (son of Presendia Buell), Zebulon Jacobs (son of Zina Huntington Jacobs), and Josephine Lyon (daughter of Sylvia Sessions Lyon). All three trace to the legal husband, not to Joseph.[2:1][15]

The DNA-tested candidates do not exhaust every name the historical literature has floated. Additional possibilities, such as the rumored Eliza Snow miscarriage and others discussed in Compton and Bradley/Woodward, cannot be tested because no candidate descendant material exists. But the six tested candidates include every case for which testable descendant material was available, and they include the strongest pre-2016 case, Josephine Lyon.[2:2] Suppose Joseph had been carrying on concurrent sexual marriages with eleven married women across roughly two and a half years (October 1841 through May 1843). The absence of any documented or DNA-confirmed biological child fits the eternity-only, non-conjugal hypothesis and cuts against the systematic-sexual-polyandry one. The fertility computation that would convert this into a strict statistical claim is not in the documentary record, and several of the women were past peak fertility: Patty Sessions was about 47 at sealing, Sarah Cleveland about 54, Elizabeth Durfee about 50. The DNA record does not, by itself, prove no conjugal contact ever occurred. It does decisively eliminate the strongest single empirical claim the critical narrative had: that Sylvia Sessions's deathbed statement was evidence Joseph had fathered Josephine.

The eleven cases, by husband's religious status ​

The CES Letter presents the eleven as a single undifferentiated category. The documentary record subdivides them by the husband's religious posture, the variable that most affects how each sealing should be read.

WifeHusbandHusband's statusSealing date
Lucinda HarrisGeorge W. HarrisLDS, faithful at sealing date; later apostate~1838 (proxy 1846); evidence contested[16]
Zina JacobsHenry B. JacobsLDS, faithfulOctober 27, 1841[17][18]
Presendia BuellNorman BuellDisaffected since 1839 (per Presendia's own account)[19]December 11, 1841[19:1]
Mary E. R. LightnerAdam LightnerNon-LDS (aware/consenting)early 1842[20]
Patty SessionsDavid SessionsLDS, faithfulMarch 9, 1842[21]
Marinda HydeOrson HydeLDS apostle, on Palestine mission Apr 1840–Dec 1842April 1842 OR May 1843[22]
Elizabeth DurfeeJabez DurfeeLDS (status disputed)1842[23]
Sarah ClevelandJohn ClevelandNon-LDS (Swedenborgian)~June 1842[24]
Sylvia LyonWindsor LyonLDS, excommunicated November 1842between Nov 19, 1842 and May 18, 1843[25]
Ruth SayersEdward SayersNon-LDS (initiated request)February 1843[26]
Elvira HolmesJonathan HolmesLDS, faithful (close friend of Joseph)June 1, 1843 (date contested)[27]

Three husbands were non-LDS, two were disaffected or excommunicated, and six were faithful Latter-day Saints at the time of the sealing. The most documented cases (Sayers, Lightner, Cleveland, Buell, Lyon) involved non-member or out-of-Church husbands, for whom an eternal sealing of the wife to a Latter-day Saint man fit naturally into the developing 1841–43 sealing theology without disturbing the existing legal marriage. The harder cases (Sessions, Hyde, Holmes, Jacobs, the contested Harris) involved faithful LDS husbands whose situations have to be reconstructed individually.

The husbands' actions on the documentary record vary, but a pattern emerges that does not fit the wife-stealing framing:

  • Edward Sayers (non-member): explicitly initiated the sealing request.[26:1][28]
  • Adam Lightner (non-member): refused to testify against Joseph during persecution, "sacrificed his property" rather than betray him.[20:1]
  • Henry Jacobs (LDS, faithful): later wrote, "I have no feelings against [Brigham] nor never had"; signed a slip preserved in the Salt Lake Temple agreeing his civil marriage was "for time only."[17:1][18:1]
  • Jonathan Holmes (LDS, faithful, close friend of Joseph): served as pall-bearer at Joseph's funeral; after Joseph's death, stood proxy at Elvira's eternal sealing to Joseph.[27:1]
  • Orson Hyde (LDS apostle): on returning from Palestine, sought Joseph's help to perform Orson's own plural marriage to Martha R. Browitt; later sealed to Marinda in the Nauvoo Temple in January 1846.[22:1][29]

A man does not stand proxy at his own wife's eternal sealing to another man if he believes that man committed adultery with her. A non-member husband does not initiate a request to have his wife sealed eternally to the prophet if he understands the sealing as wife-stealing. A returning apostle does not, weeks after coming home, ask the prophet to perform his next plural marriage if the prophet has just stolen his current one. The husbands' contemporary record is not the record of aggrieved men.

And the cases where consent is not documented, Lucinda Harris and the disputed entries, are not cases where aggrieved-husband evidence appears either. They are documentary silence, not contemporary protest.

The Ruth Vose Sayers paradigm case ​

One case breaks the CES Letter's framing most cleanly. It is Ruth Vose Sayers.

Ruth was born around 1808, married Edward Sayers in 1828, and was sealed to Joseph Smith in February 1843. Edward was a non-member who showed no interest in joining the Church. Andrew Jenson, Church Historian, wrote in his 1887 research notes, published as part of "Plural Marriage" in The Historical Record 6:6 (May 1887), the foundational primary-source document for many polyandrous-sealings affidavits:

"Mr. Sayers, not attaching much importance to the theory of a future life, insisted that his wife Ruth should be sealed to the Prophet for eternity, as he himself should only claim her in this life."[30][26:2][31]

The salient points:

  1. Edward initiated the request. The sealing was not arranged by Joseph and handed to the Sayers as a fait accompli. Edward asked Joseph to perform it.
  2. Edward's reasoning was specifically eternity-only. The reason he gave was that he, as a non-believer, would only "claim her in this life," and he wanted Ruth to have an eternal sealing to a man within the LDS theological framework.
  3. The sealing did not disturb the marriage. Ruth continued living with Edward until his death in 1861, eighteen years past the sealing.
  4. The participants understood the category in real time. "He himself should only claim her in this life" is explicit eternity-only language from the husband, recorded in 1887 from contemporaries close enough to the events to count as a primary-source reflection of how the participants framed what they were doing.

The Sayers case is the one the CES Letter cannot describe as "Joseph took another man's wife" without falsifying the record. The non-member husband initiated the request, named the eternity-only frame in his own words, and continued his marriage with Ruth for almost two more decades. Whatever else one says about the eleven sealings, this one was not what the CES Letter implies.

The case also shows why an eternity-only sealing to Joseph was a theologically coherent move for a couple in this situation. In LDS sealing theology as it was developing in 1842–43, a woman married to a non-believing husband faced a real exaltation problem: a sealing requires a covenant relationship to which a non-believer is not party. An eternity-only sealing to a faithful Latter-day Saint man, Joseph in this case, answered the exaltation question without disrupting Ruth's legal marriage to Edward. That is what Edward seems to have understood was at stake, and what he asked for. The framework was not invented by 21st-century apologists. The husband named it himself in 1843.

This is why several other polyandrous-sealings cases involve non-LDS husbands (Lightner, Cleveland) or out-of-Church husbands (Buell, Lyon). The pattern is not coincidence. The sealings concentrate where the eternity-only logic has its cleanest fit.

Worth Acknowledging

The Sayers case is the cleanest paradigm case, but it is not the only kind of case in the eleven. The Marinda Hyde case, the Lucinda Harris case, and the Sylvia Sessions Lyon case do not fit the Sayers paradigm cleanly. The article engages those cases below.

The eternity-only sealing framework ​

What it was theologically ​

D&C 132, the founding text for Joseph Smith's sealing theology, distinguishes multiple categories of marital covenant. Verses 15 through 18 specify that a marriage performed only "by the law of the land," without sealing authority, is "not of force" beyond death. Verses 19 through 20 describe the sealing of a man and wife "for time and all eternity" with full priesthood authority. Verse 26 references covenants conditioned on faithfulness. The text presupposes that some sealings are time-and-eternity, some are eternity-only, and some, the legal-only marriages of the world, are time-only and not eternally binding.[11:1]

The eternity-only category was therefore not an invention to handle Joseph's polyandrous sealings. It was a category internal to the sealing system. A woman married to a non-member had a legally valid time-only marriage that, on Joseph's theology, would not extend into eternity. An eternity-only sealing to a man who was in the new and everlasting covenant could create an eternal bond without disturbing the time-only earthly marriage.

The documentary record shows the pattern: the women in the polyandrous sealings did not move into Joseph's household, did not bear his children, did not appear publicly as his wives in any domestic sense. Ruth Vose Sayers lived with Edward for eighteen years past the sealing. Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner remained legally married to Adam Lightner until his death in 1885, forty-three years past the sealing.[20:2] Sarah Kingsley Cleveland, counseled by Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball after Joseph's death to return to her husband John in Illinois, "stayed with her husband...died a faithful member."[24:1] Zina Huntington was already six months pregnant with Henry Jacobs's son Zebulon (born January 31, 1842) when she was sealed to Joseph in October 1841; her second son with Henry, Chariton, was born March 22, 1846 at the Chariton River crossing in Iowa.[18:2][17:2]

For the polyandrous-sealings cluster specifically, the pattern is decisive: Joseph never lived with any of the eleven as a husband, and the documentary record contains no cohabitation evidence, not even occasional, for any of them. (Some of the non-polyandrous sealings are more textured. Compton, Bradley, and others have argued that occasional overnight visits occurred for several of those. The distinction matters, because it keeps the article's claim from being collapsed across categories. "Joseph never lived with any of these women" is restricted to the eleven polyandrous-sealings cases, where it is the record's actual shape.)

Was the category post-hoc? Honest acknowledgment of documentary thinness ​

The most rigorous critique of the eternity-only framework comes from the A Careful Examination analysis and from Bruno-Stone's methodological work on the William Clayton affidavits: the category was inconsistently articulated in Nauvoo and was substantially elaborated in Utah after Joseph's death.[32][14:1][33][12:1] Four data points carry the critique. The 1869 affidavits use standardized "married or sealed" language without distinguishing time-and-eternity from eternity-only. Patty Sessions left three inconsistent accounts of her own sealing. There is a 38-year gap between Helen Mar Kimball's 1843 sealing and her 1881 articulation of "for eternity alone." And Joseph F. Smith, in his 1906 Reed Smoot testimony, recalled only "one or two" eternity-only sealings between living people. Together these constitute a real evidentiary problem for the strong claim that all eleven sealings were definitively eternity-only.

So the article takes the weaker position. The eternity-only category was theologically real to Joseph and articulated in D&C 132; it was named explicitly by some participants (Sayers most clearly in 1843, Zina in 1898, Helen in 1881 with the retrojection caveat); and it was implicit in the documentary practice, the women not moving into Joseph's household, not bearing his children. But it was not uniformly named in the contemporary record. The defensible claim is not "all eleven sealings were definitively eternity-only." It is "no documented case shows conjugal relations, and the cases where the framework is explicitly attested support eternity-only." The CES Letter needs the opposite of the inconsistency, uniform concurrent sexual marriage, and the inconsistency cuts against its reading at least as hard as against the apologetic one.

Continuity in Utah-era practice ​

The eternity-only category did not disappear after Joseph's death. Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Wilford Woodruff performed such sealings into the 1860s and 1870s. The 1877 St. George Temple records include sealings of unrelated individuals into family relationships specifically for the next life, not for establishing earthly relationships. The category persisted as a recognized ordinance for decades. That is consistent with a theologically real category Joseph operated within, and inconsistent with a defensive Utah-era invention to retroactively explain his sealings.[8:2]

The Marinda Hyde / Orson Hyde case ​

The CES Letter highlights this case as its lead example: "Apostle Orson Hyde, who was sent on his mission to dedicate Palestine when Joseph secretly married his wife, Marinda Hyde."[1:2] The framing implies two things: that Joseph engineered Orson's mission to remove him from Nauvoo, and that Marinda was a vulnerable apostle's wife sealed during her husband's absence without his knowledge or consent. Both fail when the chronology is examined.

The chronology ​

Orson Hyde was called by the Twelve to dedicate Palestine for the gathering of Israel, a major doctrinal initiative, not a logistical pretext. He was originally called with John E. Page; when Page abandoned the mission, Orson continued alone. He left Nauvoo on April 15, 1840 and returned on December 7, 1842, a nearly 32-month absence (31 months, 22 days).[22:2][34]

Two sealing dates appear in the documentary record:

  • April 1842. The date assigned to the Marinda sealing on a list of Joseph's plural wives in Journal, December 1841 – December 1842, in the handwriting of scribe Thomas Bullock. Mid-mission, with Orson 24 months away from Nauvoo.[35]
  • May 1843. From Marinda's signed affidavit, witnessed by Eliza Maria Partridge Lyman and Emily Dow Partridge Young. Five months after Orson returned home.

Hales argues for the May 1843 affidavit as the more reliable date and treats the April 1842 list-entry as either a different, earlier sealing (re-affirmed in 1843), a copyist error, or a date otherwise hard to reconcile.[22:3] Neither document is a clean knockout. The journal list was itself entered in mid-1843, after the July 14, 1843 entry, so it is not strictly contemporaneous; and the affidavit is a Utah-era reminiscence collected in a context where affidavits were being used to defend plural marriage's institutional legitimacy.[33:1] The apologetic case prefers the affidavit, signed by the participant and witnessed by two contemporaries, but cannot rule out the April 1842 date.

Orson Hyde's Palestine mission and the two competing Marinda sealing datesHorizontal timeline running April 1840 through January 1846. An amber band marks the 32-month Palestine mission span from April 15, 1840 to December 7, 1842. Four blue or green markers above the axis plot the departure, the return, Orson's Browitt plural-marriage request in February-March 1843, and Marinda's January 1846 sealing to Orson in the Nauvoo Temple. Two red markers below the axis mark the two competing dates for Marinda's sealing to Joseph: a hollow red marker at April 1842 for the journal-list entry, and a solid red marker at May 1843 for Marinda's signed affidavit. A red dashed bracket joins the two sealing-date markers and labels them "Documentary ambiguity." The two-year gap between mission departure and the earliest possible sealing date is visible at a glance.Orson Hyde's Palestine mission and the Marinda sealing datesApril 1840 — January 1846 (69 months)Palestine mission · 32 monthsQuorum of the Twelve initiative184118421843184418451846Apr 15, 1840Departure forPalestine missionDec 7, 1842Mission returnto NauvooFeb–Mar 1843Orson requests Josephperform his marriageto Martha BrowittJan 1846Marinda sealed to Orson(Nauvoo Temple)Apr 1842journal-list entry(Bullock hand,copied mid-1843)May 1843Marinda's signedaffidavit (Utah-era,two witnesses)Documentary ambiguity — both possibleMission eventPalestine mission spanNauvoo Temple sealingSealing — journal 1842Sealing — affidavit 1843
Orson left Nauvoo on April 15, 1840. The earliest documented sealing date, even taking the contested April 1842 journal-list entry at face value, falls two full years into the mission. The May 1843 affidavit Marinda herself signed places the sealing five months after Orson's return. Whichever date the record actually supports, the "sent on missions to steal wives" framing fails the chronology. The long-term arrangement settled with Orson at the January 1846 Nauvoo Temple sealing.

Even granting the April 1842 date, the "sent on missions to steal wives" framing fails on the record. Joseph did not call Orson alone. The Palestine mission was a Quorum of the Twelve initiative, Orson was originally called with John E. Page, and its purpose, dedicating the land for the gathering of Israel, was central to the Restoration's millennial theology. The chronology is also wrong for opportunism: Orson left in April 1840, and the earliest documented sealing date is two full years later. A scheme to remove a husband does not wait two years to act.

The "sent on missions" claim, the broader pattern ​

FAIR's response to the "sent on missions" charge contains a specific finding from Hales: "Of the twelve 'polyandrous' husbands identified by Todd Compton, ten were not on missions at the time Joseph was sealed to their legal wives."[34:1] The "sent on missions to steal wives" pattern fits, at most, Marinda Hyde and possibly Lucinda Harris (whose husband George served a mission July 1840 – September 1841). It does not fit the broader pattern.[9:1][34:2]

The CES Letter's lead example is the case that fits the framing best, and even that case, examined, does not cleanly fit. Ten of twelve polyandrous husbands were home in Nauvoo when their wives were sealed.

The only direct attestation of Orson Hyde's posture toward the sealing comes from John D. Lee's 1877 Mormonism Unveiled. Lee wrote that Hyde's wife was, "with his consent, sealed to Joseph for an eternal state," and immediately qualified, "I do not assert the fact."[36]

Lee's reliability is contested. He wrote thirty-five years after the sealing, after his own excommunication and just before his execution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, with reasons to be both bitter and cooperative depending on the reader. The "with his consent" detail cannot be leaned on as primary attestation. It can be acknowledged for what it is: the only direct testimony of Orson's posture, given by a contemporary who knew Joseph and Orson personally, and offered with Lee's own qualification preserved.

Orson's later behavior ​

What does the record show about Orson's posture after he returned from Palestine and learned, whenever he did, of the sealing?

  • Within weeks of his return (December 1842), Orson appealed to Joseph to perform Orson's own plural marriage to Martha R. Browitt (February-March 1843).[22:4] This is not the behavior of a man who has just discovered his wife was stolen.
  • In January 1846, Marinda was sealed to Orson in the Nauvoo Temple, not to Joseph for time. The long-term arrangement settled with Orson, indicating Marinda chose to be eternally identified with Orson rather than with Joseph.[22:5]

Worth Acknowledging

The Marinda Hyde case is uncomfortable. The April 1842 date appears in Joseph's journal (on a list entered in mid-1843 in Bullock's handwriting), the question of which date the sealing actually occurred has not been resolved, and the documentary record does not contain a contemporary written consent from Orson. John D. Lee's "with his consent" recollection is hearsay, qualified by Lee himself, and recorded decades later. The case cannot be cleanly defended on a "sealing was after Orson returned" narrative if the April 1842 entry is taken at face value. What it can be defended on is that, even taking the April 1842 date, the broader CES Letter framing of "sent on missions to steal wives" fits zero or one cases out of eleven, the long-term arrangement settled with Orson, and Orson's behavior on returning home is inconsistent with discovering his wife was stolen.

The Sylvia Sessions Lyon case ​

If Marinda Hyde is the case the CES Letter foregrounds, Sylvia Sessions Lyon is the case the critical side has historically rested on. Sylvia's deathbed statement to her daughter Josephine in 1882, that Josephine was "the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith," was for over a century the strongest single piece of evidence for sexual polyandry.[25:1][37]

The 2016 DNA finding on Josephine Lyon ​

In 2016, Ugo Perego published the autosomal DNA analysis that resolved the paternity question. He compared genetic material from Josephine Lyon's documented descendants against documented descendants of both Windsor Lyon and Joseph Smith. The result: Windsor Lyon was Josephine's biological father; Joseph Smith was excluded.[2:3][38]

The finding lands hardest precisely because Sylvia was the case Hales himself had previously found most likely to indicate polyandrous sexuality. He was "largely convinced" of Joseph's paternity of Josephine until the DNA evidence emerged. The single strongest case the critical narrative had, the one specific case where contemporaneous deathbed testimony and probable timing converged, was resolved against the predatory reading by peer-reviewed genetics.[37:1][2:4]

Sylvia's deathbed statement ​

The 2016 DNA finding settles the paternity question. It does not, by itself, settle the meaning of Sylvia's deathbed statement. The honest treatment distinguishes two questions:

Did Joseph father Josephine? No. The DNA is decisive.

Did Sylvia herself, on her deathbed in 1882, believe Joseph had fathered Josephine? Yes. That is what her statement records, and there is no reason to think Sylvia was lying or being mischaracterized by Josephine's later report.

Sylvia's sincere belief presupposes she understood her relationship with Joseph to include the kind of conjugal contact from which Josephine could plausibly have resulted. Her understanding may not have been correct; she may have been mistaken about which conception led to Josephine's birth. But her belief about the relationship she had with Joseph cannot be eliminated by the DNA. The finding removes the paternity claim. It leaves the understanding-of-her-relationship claim standing.

What is resolved and what isn't ​

Hales acknowledges Sylvia as one of the two or three documentary-margin ambiguous cases, where the eternity-only generalization is silent or inconsistent.[5:2][25:2] His treatment is candid: the documentary evidence is silent on whether Sylvia and Joseph had any conjugal contact, the deathbed statement attests Sylvia's belief of paternity but not the underlying fact, and the DNA finding confirms his pre-2016 documentary analysis on the central paternity question.

Where that leaves things:

  • Resolved: Joseph did not father Josephine Lyon. The strongest single empirical claim of the critical narrative is gone.
  • Not resolved: Sylvia's deathbed statement reflects her own understanding that conjugal contact had occurred, even if Josephine was not the result. The record allows conjugal contact during Sylvia's brief sealing window (between November 1842 and May 1843). It does not require it, and it does not exclude it either.

This is the genuine difficulty Hales acknowledges, and the one the article has to engage. The eternity-only generalization holds across the eleven as a pattern; the no-documented-conjugal-contact claim is supported in eight or nine cases; in two or three, Sylvia most clearly, the record allows but does not require conjugal contact. The CES Letter's framing requires systematic sexual polyandry. Even the most generous critical reading of Sylvia gives one ambiguous case, not a pattern.

Worth Acknowledging

Sylvia Sessions Lyon is the case where the apologetic narrative is at its weakest. The 2016 DNA finding is decisive on paternity, but the deathbed statement still suggests Sylvia herself did not understand her sealing as eternity-only in the strict no-sexuality sense. This is the case where the eternity-only generalization has documentary thinness, and even here, the case does not rehabilitate the CES Letter's broader "11 sexual polyandry marriages" framing.

The Marlin K. Jensen Swedish Rescue Fireside ​

The CES Letter opens its Polygamy | Polyandry section with Elder Marlin K. Jensen's "Joseph did both" quote from the November 28, 2010 Swedish Rescue Fireside. Jensen, then sitting LDS Church Historian, was at the fireside with Richard E. Turley to engage disaffected Swedish members on hard historical questions in plain language. The full context is not what the epigraph implies.[10:1][39]

What Jensen actually said and when ​

The quote occurs during a Q&A exchange. A female attendee asked specifically about apostles' wives sealed to Joseph during their husbands' missions. Jensen's first move was a vocabulary clarification:

"So, the question of Polyandry. Polygyny is when a man has multiple wives. Polyandry is when a man marries another man's wife. Joseph did both, so your question is about polyandry."[10:2]

(The CES Letter renders Jensen's "Polygyny" as "Polygamy." Both refer to one man with multiple wives, so the substance is unchanged; the article quotes Jensen's actual word here.)

Jensen was identifying the topic. The questioner had used "polyandry," and Jensen acknowledged the term and translated between English and the audience's understanding. He was not articulating doctrine in this sentence; he was setting up the answer. And his framing was a real concession: rather than redirecting to "sealings to women with living husbands," he accepted the questioner's framing that the form is what she had named. That concession is meaningful and honest. What he did not concede is the substance of what those sealings were.

Turley's substantive answer ​

After Jensen's setup, Turley addressed the topic. The verified transcript shows Turley acknowledged Joseph "did practice polyandry" in the form sense, noted "this is a very complex subject," and said the substantive case-by-case treatment was beyond the fireside's scope. He did not deliver a full eternity-only / non-conjugal framework there. He acknowledged the topic's complexity and pointed toward the institutional engagement that the 2014 Gospel Topics Essay would later articulate.[10:3]

The CES Letter's quoting strategy isolates Jensen's vocabulary clarification, a single sentence of definition, and ends the quote there. The epigraph reads as if Jensen had told the Swedish audience that Joseph practiced concurrent sexual polyandry. He said no such thing. He acknowledged the form of the sealings, and the rest of the fireside acknowledged the complexity of the substance.

What the Jensen quote can and cannot bear ​

The CES Letter is right that Jensen, as Church Historian, deliberately used the word "polyandry" rather than softening it to "sealings to women with living husbands." That choice was institutional honesty: the Church engages the historical record using the same vocabulary critics use. Jensen's framing is consistent with the 2014 Gospel Topics Essay, which acknowledges polyandrous sealings and frames them as "for eternity alone."[7:1] From 2010 (Jensen) through 2014 (the Essay), the institutional position is internally consistent: yes, sealings to women with living husbands occurred; their character was eternity-only.

What the Jensen quote cannot bear is the weight the CES Letter puts on it: the implication that the Church's own historian conceded concurrent sexual polyandry. He did not. The clarification was the prelude to a substantive engagement the CES Letter does not quote. Quoting the prelude and stopping is not engagement with what Jensen and Turley actually said.

Worth Acknowledging

Jensen's "Joseph did both" is real, deliberate vocabulary, and the CES Letter is not fabricating it. What the CES Letter does is treat a vocabulary-clarification sentence as if it settled the substantive question, when in the fireside it was the prelude to an exchange that acknowledged complexity rather than affirming concurrent sexual polyandry. Read in full, Jensen 2010 + Turley 2010 + Gospel Topics 2014 are one consistent institutional framing: sealings to women with living husbands occurred; their character was eternity-only.

The strongest critical case ​

The defense above should not be confused with a claim that the case is closed. There are genuine difficulties: points where the record is thin, the timing is uncomfortable, the Utah-era succession pattern complicates the picture, or the moral question outlives the empirical findings. Each gets engaged here head-on.

Eternity-only category was documentarily thin in Nauvoo ​

Addressed above, under The eternity-only sealing framework. The category was theologically real to Joseph and articulated in D&C 132, explicitly attested in some specific cases (Sayers most clearly, Zina in 1898, Helen Mar Kimball with the retrojection caveat), but not uniformly articulated. The defensible position is the weaker one: no documented case shows conjugal relations, and the cases where the framework is explicitly attested support eternity-only.

The Brigham Young succession pattern with Zina ​

After Joseph's death, Brigham Young inherited several of Joseph's sealed-but-still-married women. The most documented is Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs: sealed to Joseph on October 27, 1841 while married to Henry Jacobs; sealed to Brigham Young for time in February 1846 while pregnant with Henry's child Chariton; after which Brigham called Henry on a mission to England, reportedly told Henry that "Zina was no longer his wife," established Zina in Salt Lake City, and had multiple children with her starting in March 1849.[18:3][17:3] The pattern is real and it presses on the strict eternity-only reading: if Zina's sealing to Joseph was purely spiritual and non-marital, why did Brigham later treat that sealing as if it severed her relationship with Henry?

The defensible response places the pattern within a levirate framework, a man taking responsibility for the family of a deceased male relative, and reads the post-1844 pattern as the eternal bond Joseph had created superseding Henry's prior unsealed marriage.[40] But the framework is post-hoc reconstruction. The contemporary 1846 record does not name it directly, and Bradley/Woodward's Four Zinas documents that contemporaries themselves found the moral situation complicated. What the pattern shows is that Mormon leaders in 1846 treated Joseph's sealings as the senior marital relationship, outranking prior unsealed marriages. The eternity-only reading is consistent with that succession pattern only if one accepts that "eternity-only" creates an eternal marital bond that, post-mortem, ranks above earthly time-only marriages. That is a non-trivial theological claim, and the apologetic case rests on it.

Marinda Hyde April 1842 timing ​

The Marinda Hyde / Orson Hyde case above lays this one out. The April 1842 date in Joseph's journal exists in the record alongside the May 1843 affidavit. The case is documentarily ambiguous; the apologetic reading prefers the affidavit but cannot rule out the journal entry, and it rests on the broader pattern (ten of twelve polyandrous husbands not on missions, Orson's later behavior consistent with no grievance, the long-term arrangement settling with Orson) rather than on a clean exculpation of this specific case.

Lucinda Harris pre-sealing-keys authority gap ​

D. Michael Quinn argued that Joseph's earliest sealings, Fanny Alger (~1835), Lucinda Harris (~1838), Zina Jacobs (October 1841), and Presendia Buell (December 1841), predated the formal authority structure Joseph later cited as the basis for the practice. D&C 110, dating the sealing keys' restoration in the Kirtland Temple, occurred April 3, 1836. D&C 132, articulating the priesthood theology of plural marriage, was dictated July 12, 1843. The earliest polyandrous sealings, Lucinda Harris around 1838 among them, were performed before the formal sealing-keys-cited framework was articulated.[41]

The Lucinda Harris case is also documentarily thin. Anderson and Faulring concluded "the claim that Lucinda was sealed to Joseph Smith is not based on impressive evidence." The only documentary support comes from proxy sealings after Joseph's death (1846 and 1899). George W. Harris was a faithful LDS member at the time: Stake High Councilor in Far West, March 1838, and host to Joseph's family for two months that year.[16:1][42]

Hales's response to Quinn is that Joseph was acting under Melchizedek priesthood marriage authority, continuously available since 1829, which did not require the specific sealing keys later restored at Kirtland in April 1836 to authorize plural-marriage sealings; Quinn argued the opposite, that the pre-1843 sealings were authority-gapped and the later D&C 110 / D&C 132 framework was articulated retroactively.[43] The broader question is engaged in Joseph Smith's Marriages. For the polyandry article: the Lucinda Harris case is the thinnest of the eleven, the pre-1843 authority question is genuinely contested, and the article should not lean on Lucinda Harris as load-bearing evidence on either side.

The secrecy and what it cost ​

The empirical findings (no documented sexual polyandry, no biological children, no contemporary aggrieved-husband testimony) do not erase the moral question that the 2024 Secret Covenants anthology and the broader critical case press. Even granting the eternity-only character of the sealings, the systematic concealment of those sealings from the sealed women's husbands, from Joseph's own legal wife Emma, and from the Saints generally is a cost the empirical findings do not touch.[4:1]

The contextual defense for the secrecy operates on three layers:

  1. Illinois illegality and persecution risk. Plural marriage was a felony under Illinois statute, and even public discussion of it would have meant Joseph's arrest. The Saints were already targets of mob violence; the 1838 expulsion from Missouri was three years past, the 1844 mob killing of Joseph at Carthage two years future. Public discussion of plural marriage would have supplied the legal pretext for arrest and the rhetorical pretext for further mob action. The secrecy was not gratuitous. It was the survival condition for the practice.[44]
  2. Sealings vs. civil marriage categorical confusion. From Joseph's theological perspective, a sealing was not a civil marriage, and the eternity-only sealings did not displace existing legal marriages. From a non-Mormon's perspective, the categories collapsed: a man sealed to another man's wife looked, in any externally observable sense, like adultery. The secrecy operated on the premise that the categories were separate and the practice was not what its appearance suggested. That premise is coherent within the developing sealing system and opaque to anyone outside it. The secrecy was, in part, the cost of operating in a category that had no public language.
  3. Embedding in the broader Nauvoo culture of secret councils. The polyandrous sealings were not sui generis. The Anointed Quorum was instituted in May 1842, the Council of Fifty in March 1844, the temple endowment administered privately to a small inner circle. The Secret Covenants contributors place the polyandry secrecy inside this broader pattern of Nauvoo institutional development: the secrecy of plural marriage was part of how the entire late-Nauvoo religious system worked, not a unique pattern attached to plural marriage alone. This is a genuine contextualization. It does not reduce the secrecy to "everyone was doing secret things, so this was fine"; it places the polyandry secrecy inside a larger institutional culture whose moral character is its own question.[4:2]

The contextual defense does not eliminate the moral cost. Three things in particular survive:

  • Emma was deceived. Joseph kept the practice of plural marriage, including the polyandrous sealings, hidden from his legal wife for most of the period in which he practiced it. Even after Emma was eventually told about some plural marriages, others remained hidden. The deception of a wife is a cost the contextual defense does not absorb.
  • Some husbands did not know in real time. Several husbands, Edward Sayers and Adam Lightner among them, initiated or knew of the sealings. In other cases the husband's real-time knowledge is unclear. Whatever the eternity-only theological character, sealing oneself to another man's wife without that man's knowledge is a different moral act than sealing oneself with his initiation and consent, and the record does not support uniform husband knowledge across the eleven.
  • The opacity of the record is itself a cost. Because the practice was conducted in secret, the record on the eternity-only character, the participants' understanding, and the cases' specific details is fragmentary. The 1869 affidavit collection's standardized language is a consequence of the secrecy: there was no contemporary register of the sealings to refer back to, so participants reconstructed their accounts decades later. The Secret Covenants contributors' case here is essentially methodological: the secrecy produced an opaque record, and the opacity is itself a moral consequence of the secrecy regardless of the practice's underlying character.[4:3] The downstream curricular consequences (what later generations of Latter-day Saints were and were not taught about these sealings, and the post-2007 institutional shift toward direct engagement with the polyandry) are the subject of the Transparency & Censorship article.

The article therefore concedes that the moral question survives the empirical findings. The CES Letter's framing of Joseph as systematic sexual predator fails the documentary test. The Secret Covenants framing, Joseph as a prophet whose sealing theology required forms of secrecy whose moral cost the contextual defense reduces but does not eliminate, does not fail it in the same way. The harder remaining question is the one the Secret Covenants contributors press: how to weigh the moral cost of systematic concealment against the theological case for the sealing system's legitimacy. The article's authors believe the theological case is sufficient. A reader who weighs the two differently is engaging the question on the right terms, even reaching a different conclusion.

What we honestly don't know ​

A short inventory of the genuine evidentiary gaps remains: whether the April 1842 and May 1843 Marinda Hyde sealing dates are two events or one; whether Sylvia Sessions Lyon and Joseph had any conjugal contact during her brief sealing window; whether the Lucinda Harris sealing actually occurred; what some faithful-LDS husbands understood at the time the sealings were performed; whether the eternity-only category was the participants' uniform self-understanding or a generalization that fits some cases more cleanly than others; and whether the 1846 levirate framing was actively named by participants or is a post-hoc reconstruction. These gaps do not collapse the apologetic case; the no-documented-polyandrous-sexuality finding holds across eleven cases despite them. But they belong on the page, named, rather than smoothed over into a record that looks more uniform than it is.

What the silences mean, or don't ​

Several of the strongest arguments for the eternity-only, non-sexual reading are arguments from silence: things that would have been documented if sexual polyandry had occurred, and aren't in the record. Their force is in their independence. The DNA, the contemporary critics, the women's own language, the husbands' behavior, D&C 132's text, and Vogel's grudging concession are six different evidentiary lines, and the predator reading requires all six to fail at once.

Six independent evidentiary lines against the predator readingA six-column structural diagram. A red header band at top states the predator reading the article is refuting. Below sit six identical evidentiary-line cells, each with a blue header naming the category — DNA exclusion, contemporary-critic silence, eternity-only language, husbands not aggrieved, D&C 132 condemnation, Vogel concedes — and beneath each header a check mark, a one-sentence evidentiary anchor, and citation keys. A red dashed footer band reads: "All six must fail simultaneously." The visual reads the article's structural argument at a glance: the predator reading is a single proposition; the six cells are independent evidentiary lines that each, on its own, weighs against it.Six independent evidentiary linesPREDATOR READINGIf Joseph practiced concurrent sexual polyandry, each of the six lines below would have to failDNA exclusion(empirical)✓All 3 polyandrouscandidates excludedby autosomal DNABuell · Jacobs · LyonPerego 2007–2016Contemporarycritic silence✓Bennett, Law, theExpositor circle —no polyandry chargeBennett 1842Expositor 1844Eternity-onlylanguage✓The women's ownwords: "for eternity";"for eternity alone"Zina 1898 · Helen 1881Sayers · Jenson 1887Husbands notaggrieved✓Sayers requested;Lightner backed him;Holmes pall-bearerHales wife biographiesFAIR responsesD&C 132forbids it✓Three condemnationsof a wife with"another man"D&C 132:41, 42D&C 132:61–63Vogelconcedes✓Leading criticalbiographer agrees:"no solid evidence"Hales–Vogelexchanges (2014–)All six must fail simultaneously for the predator reading to hold
Six independent lines of evidence, grouped as three empirical (DNA, critic silence, husbands' behavior), two textual (women's own language, D&C 132), and one scholarly convergence (Vogel), each weigh against the predator reading. Their independence is the structural argument: any one of the six on its own creates a problem; collectively they require the predator reading to fail at every point at once.

No confirmed children, DNA across the tested candidates ​

The single strongest empirical finding. Six historical candidates for Joseph's biological children from plural wives have been DNA-tested, three of them from polyandrous-sealings women:

CandidateMotherResult
Mosiah HancockClarissa Reed HancockExcluded
Oliver BuellPresendia Huntington Buell (polyandrous)Excluded: Norman Buell is biological father (2007)
Moroni Llewellyn PrattMary Ann Frost PrattExcluded
Zebulon JacobsZina Diantha Huntington Jacobs (polyandrous)Excluded: Henry Jacobs is biological father (2005)
Orrison SmithFanny AlgerExcluded
Josephine LyonSylvia Sessions Lyon (polyandrous)Excluded: Windsor Lyon is biological father (2016)

Perego's bottom line: "out of those we have data for, there is no evidence from DNA at this point that Joseph Smith had any children from women other than Emma Smith."[2:5][15:1] Three of the six were children of polyandrous-sealings women, and all three trace to the legal husband. The tested candidates do not exhaust the historically rumored children (additional possibilities, such as the rumored Eliza Snow miscarriage, cannot be tested for lack of descendant material), but the tested set includes every candidate for whom living-descendant material was available, and it includes the strongest pre-2016 case.

Across roughly two and a half years of supposed concurrent sexual marriages with eleven married women, the absence of any confirmed biological child fits the eternity-only, non-conjugal hypothesis and cuts against the systematic-sexual-polyandry one. The DNA does not by itself prove no conjugal contact ever occurred. It does eliminate the strongest single empirical argument the critical narrative had, and it does so by peer-reviewed genetics rather than historical inference.

Husbands' silence in the documentary record ​

The 19th-century frontier had robust machinery for an aggrieved husband to seek redress: duels, horsewhippings, lawsuits, public exposés in newspapers. If Joseph were sleeping with eleven men's wives, the record should contain multiple aggrieved husbands publicly accusing him, threats of violence (possibly actual violence), civil and ecclesiastical proceedings, and anti-Mormon literature emphasizing the polyandry charge.

What the record actually contains:

  • Edward Sayers: actively requested the sealing (the Sayers paradigm case).[26:3]
  • Adam Lightner: refused to testify against Joseph during persecution, "sacrificed his property" rather than testify.[20:3]
  • Jonathan Holmes: pall-bearer at Joseph's funeral; later stood proxy at his wife's eternal sealing to Joseph.[27:2]
  • Henry Jacobs: "I have no feelings against [Brigham] nor never had"; signed the slip agreeing his civil marriage was "for time only."[18:4][17:4]
  • Orson Hyde: appealed to Joseph for his own plural marriage to Browitt within weeks of returning from Palestine.[22:6]

Hales: "No one made the accusation that Joseph Smith practiced genuine polyandry until several years after his death, and then the accusations were made by non-members."[9:2] The polyandry-specific charge, that Joseph slept with this man's wife while that man was on a mission, does not appear anywhere in the contemporary 1842–44 record. Not in John C. Bennett's 1842 History of the Saints, not from the Nauvoo Expositor circle, not from the dissenting Illinois press generally. The first such accusations come decades later (the Sarah Pratt 1886 Wyl interview is the earliest concentrated set). Were sexual polyandry happening on the scale critics describe, the absence of contemporary complaint would be inexplicable. The silence is loud precisely because the documented contrary is so substantive. Non-aggrieved husbands. Husbands initiating the sealing, serving as pall-bearers and proxies, seeking the prophet's help for their own later sealings.

Bennett's silence on polyandrous-sexuality charges ​

John C. Bennett, Joseph's most hostile ex-insider, excommunicated in 1842, became the most aggressive contemporary anti-Mormon writer of the Nauvoo period. He accused Joseph of running a "spiritual wifery" scheme, named names, made graphic accusations, and published The History of the Saints (1842) to destroy Joseph's reputation.

He did not charge sexual polyandry. He charged "spiritual wifery," a doctrine Bennett himself had promoted in Nauvoo, distinct from Joseph's sealing theology. His accusations went after Joseph's plural marriages broadly, not specifically the sealings to women with living husbands.[45][46]

The pattern continues with William Law, founder of the Nauvoo Expositor, who charged "spiritual wife system" adultery but never identified specific polyandrous wives or specific aggrieved husbands. Sarah Pratt's claims emerge in the 1886 Wyl interview, four decades after the fact, in a hostile context, and have been substantively challenged.[47] Hostile contemporary insiders made many graphic accusations. The specific charge ("Joseph slept with this man's wife while that man was on a mission," the charge the CES Letter makes in 2017) was not among them. The contemporary critics' charges were broader and looser. The polyandry-specific charge surfaces decades later, and primarily from non-LDS sources.

The 1892 Temple Lot trial witness pattern ​

In 1892, the Reorganized LDS Church (RLDS), the church led by Joseph Smith III after 1860, today the Community of Christ, sued the Hedrickite Church of Christ over ownership of the Independence Temple Lot. The case turned partly on whether Joseph Smith had practiced plural marriage. Both sides took depositions from people with direct knowledge. Several of Joseph's plural wives testified under oath that they had had sexual relations with him:

  • Emily Partridge (single when sealed): "slept with him in the same bed."
  • Lucy Walker (single when sealed): described the marriage as a real wife relationship.
  • Malissa Lott (single when sealed): in her 1892 Temple Lot deposition, testified that she "roomed" with Joseph as his wife. The famous "wife in very deed" exchange comes from her 1893 interview with Joseph Smith III, where to the question "Was you a wife in very deed?" she answered "Yes," completing the Temple Lot deposition picture.[48]

Every Temple Lot witness who testified to consummation was a wife who had been single at the time of her sealing. The polyandrous wives still alive in 1892, Zina Huntington (then 71), Mary Elizabeth Rollins (then 74), and others, were not called to testify to conjugal relations with Joseph. The "not called" fact admits more than one reading. The eternity-only, non-conjugal reading is the natural one, but it is also possible the LDS-affiliated side did not want the polyandrous wives cross-examined on the more complicated category. What is clear is that the LDS-affiliated witnesses did proudly testify to plural marriage and to consummation where it had occurred. So the absence of polyandrous-wife consummation testimony is not a generalized reluctance to discuss plural marriage's intimate dimensions. The pattern fits the polyandrous sealings being religiously different, eternity-only and non-conjugal, with witnesses on both sides knowing it.

Vogel's grudging concession ​

Dan Vogel is one of the most prolific non-LDS Joseph Smith biographers: generally critical of LDS truth claims, author of the multivolume Early Mormon Documents, the most rigorous unbelieving scholar in the field. In his published exchanges with Brian Hales, Vogel agreed to the formulation Hales proposed:

"There is no solid evidence of polyandrous sexuality in any of Joseph Smith's plural marriages."[3:1][49]

That is Hales's phrasing, which Vogel agreed to. Vogel's own language is more grudging: he calls the no-sexual-polyandry conclusion "more probable than Hales' unwarranted assertion that all of JS's polyandrous wives were for eternity only." In other words, he concedes the absence of documented polyandrous sexuality but not that polyandrous sexuality didn't occur, because he treats the secrecy context as an obstacle to documentation rather than as evidence the practice didn't exist.[49:1]

The distinction matters. Vogel is not endorsing the eternity-only framework. He is conceding that the empirical record contains no documentary evidence of polyandrous sexuality. But the operative half, "no documented polyandrous sexuality," is the same finding the apologetic case relies on, and the convergence of the most rigorous critic and the most rigorous apologist on that empirical floor is the strongest single move available.

Vogel and Hales still disagree about interpretation of the marital category: whether the sealings were "real" marriages without sexual content, whether the secrecy was morally defensible, what the participants understood themselves to be doing. On the empirical question of whether documented sexual polyandry occurred, both agree there is no documented case. The CES Letter's framing needs the reader to assume sexual polyandry occurred. The rigorous critical scholarship the CES Letter would presumably defer to, if asked, does not support the assumption.

D&C 132 condemns polyandry ​

The most striking single textual fact about Joseph Smith's marriage doctrine is that the founding text, D&C 132, dictated July 12, 1843, explicitly condemns sexual polyandry as adultery. The text condemns it three times:

"And as ye have asked concerning adultery, verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man receiveth a wife in the new and everlasting covenant, and if she be with another man, and I have not appointed unto her by the holy anointing, she hath committed adultery and shall be destroyed." (D&C 132:41)

"If she be not in the new and everlasting covenant, and she be with another man, she has committed adultery." (D&C 132:42 — paraphrasing the text's structure)

"And again, verily, verily, I say unto you, if any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed... And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood — if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified... but if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed; for they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment, and to fulfil the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world, and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men." (D&C 132:61–63)[11:2]

The structure is plain: a woman who is "with another man" outside the covenant frame has committed adultery. Plural wives must be virgins and must "belong to him, and to no one else," with violation labeled adultery. The doctrine Joseph dictated rules out the sexual-polyandry reading on its face.

This is not a small textual fact. A man inventing a revelation to justify sexually using other men's wives does not write three condemnations of sexually using other men's wives into that same revelation. The natural reading of D&C 132 is that Joseph believed the very thing critics accuse him of doing was adultery. The doctrinal text he produced cuts directly against the predatory reading.

The textual analysis of D&C 132 (including the argument that vv. 41–42 were back-edited, and the broader question of when D&C 132 was first dictated as opposed to written down) is engaged in D&C 132 Contradictions. For the polyandry-specific question, the basic fact is enough: the founding text of Joseph's marriage doctrine explicitly condemns the very practice the CES Letter accuses him of. That is hard to explain on the predator reading.

What the women said ​

The polyandrous wives left their own words in the record. Their language, from women who lived the experience, is the strongest direct evidence of how the participants understood their sealings.

Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, in her 1898 statement (the strongest direct first-person attestation from a polyandrous wife on the eternity-only question):

"I was sealed to Joseph Smith for eternity..."[13:1]

She was emphatic when pressed: not "for time and eternity," not "for time alone," but "for eternity" only.

Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, in her 1905 BYU testimony, recalled that her sealing to Joseph was performed by Brigham Young (the standard account places this on March 23, 1842) and reported Joseph's words about her premortal foreordination:

"I was his before I came here and he said all the Devils in Hell should never get me from him."[20:4]

Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, in her 1881 autobiographical poem (Helen was not in a polyandrous sealing, but her language is the closest extant first-person articulation of the eternity-only category from any participant, with the explicit caveat that 1881 is 38 years after Helen's 1843 sealing, so the vocabulary may reflect Utah-era theological development rather than her 1843 understanding):

"I thought through this life my time will be my own / The step I now am taking's for eternity alone."[12:2]

Andrew Jenson's 1887 research notes on Edward Sayers (recording how Edward himself framed the request, contemporaneously enough to count as the cleanest primary-source attestation of the eternity-only category from a participant):

"Mr. Sayers, not attaching much importance to the theory of a future life, insisted that his wife Ruth should be sealed to the Prophet for eternity, as he himself should only claim her in this life."[30:1][26:4][31:1]

"For eternity." "For eternity alone." "As he himself should only claim her in this life." That is the vocabulary of the eternity-only category. The women did not describe their sealings to Joseph as concurrent earthly marriages, did not represent themselves as living with Joseph as wives, did not bear his children, and did not, with the singular partial exception of Sylvia's deathbed statement, speak of the sealings as conjugal marriages. The CES Letter's framing requires the women's own self-described relationships to be misrepresented, or requires the women to have been lying about themselves. Neither is the natural reading of the primary record.

Assessment ​

The CES Letter's polyandry section relies on a single interpretive move: treat eleven sealings to women with living husbands as if they were eleven concurrent sexual marriages, then evaluate the result through the modern English connotations of "polyandry." Examined case by case, the move fails on every axis. The findings below are six independent lines of evidence: DNA, the contemporary critics' silence, the women's language, the husbands' behavior, D&C 132's text, and Vogel's concession. For the predator reading to hold, all six have to fail at once.

The husbands varied. Three were non-LDS, two were disaffected or excommunicated, six were faithful Latter-day Saints. Edward Sayers initiated his wife's sealing. Adam Lightner refused to testify against Joseph during persecution and "sacrificed his property" rather than betray him. Jonathan Holmes served as pall-bearer at Joseph's funeral and later stood proxy at his wife's eternal sealing to Joseph. Henry Jacobs signed the slip in the Salt Lake Temple agreeing his civil marriage was "for time only" and wrote, "I have no feelings against [Brigham] nor never had." Orson Hyde, on returning from Palestine, asked Joseph to perform Orson's own next plural marriage. The contemporary record of the husbands is not the record of aggrieved men.

The women never left their husbands. Joseph never lived with any of these eleven as a husband, never appeared publicly as their husband in any domestic sense, never claimed paternity of any of their children. The pattern is decisive: a sealed-but-existing-marriage relationship that did not displace the existing marriage but added an eternal covenant alongside it. The women's own language, "for eternity," "for eternity alone," is the language of a category internal to LDS sealing theology, not the language of concurrent earthly marriage.

No confirmed biological children exist. Three children of polyandrous-sealings women have been DNA-tested, including the strongest pre-2016 candidate, Josephine Lyon, and all three trace to the legal husband. The 2016 Perego finding eliminated the strongest single empirical claim the critical narrative had. The tested candidates do not exhaust the historically rumored possibilities, but they include every case for which testable descendant material existed. The absence of any confirmed biological child across 2.5 years of alleged concurrent marriages fits the eternity-only, non-conjugal hypothesis and cuts against the systematic-sexual-polyandry one.

The contemporary critics' silence on polyandrous sexuality is conspicuous. John C. Bennett, the most aggressive contemporary anti-Mormon writer and an ex-insider, charged "spiritual wifery" but did not specifically charge that Joseph slept with named men's wives during their absences. William Law's Nauvoo Expositor charged "spiritual wife system" adultery but did not identify specific polyandrous wives or specific aggrieved husbands. The polyandry-specific charge, that Joseph slept with this man's wife while that man was away, appears decades after Joseph's death, and primarily from non-LDS sources. The contemporary record does not contain the testimony the predator reading requires.

D&C 132 condemns sexual polyandry as adultery three separate times. A man inventing a doctrine to justify sexually using other men's wives does not write the condemnation of sexually using other men's wives into the founding text. The text Joseph produced explicitly rules out the practice the CES Letter accuses him of.

The most rigorous unbelieving scholarship agrees on the empirical floor. Dan Vogel, author of Early Mormon Documents and the standard non-LDS biographer of Joseph, in his exchanges with Brian Hales agreed to the formulation: "no solid evidence of polyandrous sexuality in any of Joseph Smith's plural marriages." He does not concede the eternity-only theological frame, and his concession on the empirical question is grudging, treating the secrecy context as an obstacle to documentation rather than as evidence the practice didn't exist. But the empirical floor he agreed to is the same one the apologetic case relies on.

Together these six are decisive on the systematic claim the CES Letter makes. Its framing of Joseph as a serial adulterer who married eleven men's wives while sending those men away requires assuming exactly what the record does not support: the husbands aggrieved and concealed, the women living concurrent marriages, the children documented and concealed, the contemporary critics naming the specific charge. None of it appears in the contemporary record.

The case is not without difficulties, and the article has tried to engage them honestly. The eternity-only category was theologically real to Joseph and articulated in D&C 132 but was not uniformly named by participants in the contemporary record; the strong "all eleven were definitively eternity-only" claim is not defensible, and the weaker one is: no documented case shows conjugal relations, with explicit attestation where the framework is named. Sylvia Sessions Lyon's deathbed statement, even after the 2016 DNA finding, reflects her own understanding that conjugal contact had occurred; the record for her brief sealing window allows it. The Marinda Hyde April 1842 date in Joseph's journal sits alongside the May 1843 affidavit; the apologetic case prefers the affidavit but cannot rule out the journal entry. The Brigham Young succession-with-Zina pattern shows that Mormon leaders in 1846 treated Joseph's sealings as the senior marital relationship; the levirate framework that explains it is post-hoc reconstruction, not a contemporary articulation. The Lucinda Harris case is documentarily thin, and the pre-1843 authority question is genuinely contested between Hales and Quinn.

And the moral cost of secrecy survives the empirical findings. Even granting the eternity-only character of the sealings, Joseph kept the practice hidden from Emma for most of the period in which he practiced it, kept some sealings hidden from the sealed women's husbands, and embedded the practice in a developing Nauvoo culture of secret councils. The contextual defense (Illinois illegality, the sealings-vs-civil-marriage categorical confusion, the broader Nauvoo institutional culture) reduces the cost but does not eliminate it. This is the contribution of the 2024 Secret Covenants anthology, and the article concedes it as the harder remaining question once the CES Letter's framing has been answered.

The center holds here: no documented case of polyandrous sexuality exists in the eleven sealings to women with living husbands. This is the rare point where rigorous apologetic scholarship (Hales) and rigorous critical scholarship (Vogel) converge. The eternity-only, dynastic theological framework was real to Joseph and explicitly attested in several specific cases (Sayers, Zina, Helen Mar Kimball, Mary Elizabeth Rollins), even if it was not uniformly articulated across all of them. The CES Letter flattens the eleven into one undifferentiated "polyandry" category, importing modern, conjugal, exclusive-marriage assumptions onto a 19th-century sealing system the participants understood differently.

None of this pretends the polyandry record is uncomplicated, that the secrecy was costless, or that a modern reader's discomfort is illegitimate. Polygamy generally, and the polyandrous sealings within it, is one of the harder portions of Joseph's prophetic record. The evidentiary gaps are real. The discomfort a modern reader feels with the secrecy and the moral weight is honest discomfort the empirical findings do not resolve.

But a reader who comes through the documentary case and concludes that Joseph was a serial sexual predator running an eleven-woman polyandry scheme is reading something the record does not contain. The husbands are not aggrieved in the record; the women did not move into Joseph's household; no biological child exists; the contemporary critics do not name the charge; the founding doctrinal text condemns the practice; and the most rigorous unbelieving scholar agrees on the empirical floor.

What the moral question survives, and what genetics has already settled, mark out the real shape of this section. DNA closed the paternity question that stood for a century (Josephine Lyon was Windsor's daughter, not Joseph's), and it could close it because the Book of Mormon was never the kind of claim that secrecy could hide. It was dictated in the open, in a single sustained burst, in front of scribes and family who watched the words come and told the story without contradiction for the rest of their lives. That openness is exactly what the polygamy record lacks and exactly what makes the Book of Mormon checkable: a text whose origin can be examined directly, whose internal complexity outstrips anything 1820s upstate New York could account for, and that no naturalistic explanation has dislodged in nearly two centuries. The polygamy questions are genuinely hard, and the secrecy that produced them carries a moral cost this article does not wave away. But the foundation those questions rest against is not hidden, not fragmentary, and not in doubt. The hard questions that remain are not the questions the CES Letter asked.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 51–53. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Ugo A. Perego, "Resolving the Paternity of Josephine Lyon Fisher Through DNA Analysis," Mormon Historical Studies (2016). The 2016 paper specifically resolves the Josephine Lyon paternity question via autosomal DNA. Summary at Mormon Heretic, "Joseph's DNA Test," https://mormonheretic.org/2016/06/19/josephs-dna-test/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Dan Vogel agreed to the formulation "no solid evidence of polyandrous sexuality in any of Joseph Smith's plural marriages" in his published exchanges with Brian Hales. The wording is Hales's; Vogel's own characterization is more grudging — he frames the conclusion as "more probable than Hales' unwarranted assertion that all of JS's polyandrous wives were for eternity only." See Hales-Vogel exchanges at https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/hales-vogel-1-facebook-exchanges/ and https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/hales-vogel-2-private-correspondence/ ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. Cheryl L. Bruno (ed.), Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2024). https://www.signaturebooks.com/books/p/secret-covenants. Multi-author anthology with critical editorial framing, including contributions from Compton on eternity-only sealings, Bruno on Emma's denials, Tensmeyer on polygamy denial, Don Bradley on Nauvoo sealing chronology, Susan Staker, and others — some critical, some faithful-leaning. The volume's editorial direction and several contributing chapters contextualize the polyandrous sealings within the Nauvoo culture of secret councils (the Anointed Quorum from May 1842, the Council of Fifty from March 1844, the developing temple endowment) and shift the moral weight from sexual polyandry to systematic concealment. A faithful-side review appears in Times & Seasons, "Secret Covenants: A Review" (September 2024), https://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2024/09/secret-covenants-a-review/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's 'Polyandry': Expanding the Narrative," Journal of Mormon History 50, no. 2 (April 2024). https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jmh/article-abstract/50/2/105/386867/Joseph-Smith-s-Polyandry-Expanding-the-Narrative ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. Todd M. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997). Internet Archive full text: https://archive.org/details/insacredloneline0000comp ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2014). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo?lang=eng ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013). Volume 1 (history) is the principal source for case-by-case wife biographies; Volume 3 (theology) is the principal source for the eternity-only / dynastic theological framework. https://gregkofford.com/products/joseph-smiths-polygamy ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Sexual Polyandry and the Emperor's New Clothes: On Closer Inspection, What Do We Find?" FAIR Conference, August 2012. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/august-2012/joseph-smiths-sexual-polyandry-and-the-emperors-new-clothes-on-closer-inspection-what-do-we-find ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. "2010 Sweden Fireside with Marlin Jensen and Richard Turley" (full transcript with corrected Q&A), FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/resources/primary-sources/2010-sweden-fireside-with-marlin-jensen-and-richard-turley-held-november-28-2010. Jensen's actual word in the fireside is "Polygyny" (the technical term for one man with multiple wives); the CES Letter renders this as "Polygamy" — both refer to the same form. Turley's substantive contribution acknowledged the topic's complexity ("this is a very complex subject. This is one we could spend a lot of time on") and pointed toward the institutional engagement that the 2014 Gospel Topics Essay would later articulate, rather than delivering a complete eternity-only / non-conjugal framework in the fireside itself. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. "Doctrine and Covenants 132," The Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132?lang=eng ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, A Woman's View, 1881 autobiographical poem. Helen wrote 38 years after her 1843 sealing, in Utah, during the post-Reynolds period when the eternity-only category was being articulated as a defensive theological move; her 1881 vocabulary may reflect Utah-era theological development rather than her 1843 understanding. Published in Jeni Broberg Holzapfel and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, eds., A Woman's View: Helen Mar Whitney's Reminiscences of Early Church History (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1997). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  13. Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, 1898 statement on her sealing to Joseph Smith. See Brian C. Hales, "Zina Diantha Huntington" biography, https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/zina-diantha-huntington/; and Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), http://signaturebookslibrary.org/4-zinas/ ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. "Sealing for Eternity Only," A Careful Examination. https://faenrandir.github.io/a_careful_examination/sealing-for-eternity-only/ — critical-side analysis of the eternity-only framework, citing the 1869 affidavits' standardized language, Patty Sessions's inconsistent accounts, and Joseph F. Smith's 1906 Reed Smoot Hearings testimony. ↩︎ ↩︎

  15. Ugo A. Perego, "Joseph Smith, the Question of Polygamous Offspring, and DNA Analysis," in The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2010). Perego's bottom-line summary across multiple paternity tests: "Out of those we have data for, there is no evidence from DNA at this point that Joseph Smith had any children from women other than Emma Smith." ↩︎ ↩︎

  16. Brian C. Hales, "Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/lucinda-pendleton-harris/. Note the documentary thinness: Anderson and Faulring concluded "the claim that Lucinda was sealed to Joseph Smith is not based on impressive evidence." ↩︎ ↩︎

  17. Brian C. Hales, "Zina Diantha Huntington" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/zina-diantha-huntington/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  18. Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999). Full text: http://signaturebookslibrary.org/4-zinas/. The work documents Zebulon Williams Jacobs (born January 31, 1842, three months after Zina's October 27, 1841 sealing to Joseph) and Henry Chariton Jacobs (born March 22, 1846, at the Chariton River crossing in Iowa). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  19. Brian C. Hales, "Presendia Lathrop Huntington" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/presendia-lathrop-huntington/. Note: Hales's main narrative dates Norman Buell's disaffection to 1838 in Missouri; Presendia's own 1881 biographical sketch dates it to 1839. The article uses 1839, following Presendia's first-person account. ↩︎ ↩︎

  20. Brian C. Hales, "Mary Elizabeth Rollins" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/mary-elizabeth-rollins/. Mary's sealing to Joseph occurred in early 1842; her legal husband Adam Lightner died in February 1885 — placing Mary's continuous legal marriage to Adam at approximately 43 years past the sealing. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  21. Brian C. Hales, "Patty Bartlett" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/patty-bartlett/ ↩︎

  22. Brian C. Hales, "Marinda Nancy Johnson" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/marinda-nancy-johnson/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  23. Brian C. Hales, "Elizabeth Davis Goldsmith Brackenbury Durfee" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/elizabeth-davis-durfee/ ↩︎

  24. Brian C. Hales, "Sarah Kingsley" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/sarah-kingsley/. The counsel to return to John was given by Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball after Joseph's death; the "stayed with her husband and died a faithful member" formulation appears in a family biography reproduced on the Hales page. ↩︎ ↩︎

  25. Brian C. Hales, "Sylvia Sessions" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/sylvia-sessions/. See also https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/common-questions/plural-marriages-sexual/sylvia-session-evidence-of-sexuality/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  26. Brian C. Hales, "Ruth Vose" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/ruth-vose/. Quoting Andrew Jenson's 1887 research notes (Andrew Jenson Collection, Church History Library): "Mr. Sayers, not attaching much importance to the theory of a future life, insisted that his wife Ruth should be sealed to the Prophet for eternity, as he himself should only claim her in this life." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  27. Brian C. Hales, "Elvira Annie Cowles" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/elvira-annie-cowles/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  28. "What did the husband of Ruth Vose Sayers know about her sealing to Joseph Smith for eternity?" FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Question:_What_did_the_husband_of_Ruth_Vose_Sayers_know_about_her_sealing_to_Joseph_Smith_for_eternity%3F ↩︎

  29. "What did Orson Hyde, the husband of Marinda Nancy Johnson, know about her sealing to Joseph Smith for eternity?" FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Question:_What_did_Orson_Hyde,_the_husband_of_Marinda_Nancy_Johnson,_know_about_her_sealing_to_Joseph_Smith_for_eternity%3F ↩︎

  30. Andrew Jenson, "Plural Marriage," The Historical Record 6, no. 6 (May 1887). The foundational primary-source compilation for many of the polyandrous-sealings affidavits, drawn from Jenson's contemporaneous interviews with surviving participants. The Edward Sayers material on Ruth Vose's sealing appears in Jenson's research notes preserved in the Andrew Jenson Collection at the Church History Library and is reproduced in Hales's wife-biography pages. ↩︎ ↩︎

  31. "Eternity-only Sealing with non-LDS husband: Ruth Vose Sayers," Why The LDS Church Is True. https://whytheldschurchistrue.com/eternity-only-sealing-with-non-lds-husband-ruth-vose-sayers/ ↩︎ ↩︎

  32. The detailed evidentiary points behind the "documentary thinness" critique: (1) The 1869 Joseph F. Smith affidavit collection uses standardized "married or sealed" language across more than thirty wife affidavits without distinguishing time-and-eternity from eternity-only. (2) Patty Sessions left three different accounts of her own sealing — one specifying "for Eternity," another omitting the temporal/eternal distinction, a third stating "for time and all eternity." (3) Helen Mar Kimball's "for eternity alone" language appears in her 1881 poem, 38 years after her 1843 sealing — a substantial retrojection problem; the 1881 vocabulary cannot be cleanly retrojected onto Helen's 1843 understanding because Helen had decades of post-Joseph theological development to absorb (and, by the 1880s, the eternity-only category was being articulated as a defensive theological move in the post-Reynolds legal context). (4) Joseph F. Smith testified in the 1906 Reed Smoot Hearings that eternity-only sealings between living people had not occurred "very recently" — approximately "twenty years or more" prior — and recalled only "one or two instances"; Angus Cannon testified he had "never witnessed any for eternity and not for time." (5) Bruno and Stone have argued, in their analysis of Joseph F. Smith's curation of the William Clayton affidavits, that late-affidavit testimony from the post-1869 collection is methodologically problematic because it was collected post-hoc with theological purpose. Patty Sessions's three accounts are the cleanest example of the inconsistency; the most likely explanation is some combination of memory drift across decades, scribal variation, and Utah-era vocabulary partially overwriting Nauvoo-era memory — but the article cannot resolve which of those it was, and the discrepancy is a real evidentiary problem that the apologetic case must absorb rather than explain away. ↩︎

  33. Cheryl L. Bruno and Michelle B. Stone, "Crafting a Sacred Story: Joseph F. Smith and the William Clayton Affidavits," Journal of Mormon Polygamy (2025). https://journalofmormonpolygamy.org/jmp/article/view/4. Methodological caution regarding the 1869 affidavit collection: the affidavits were collected post-hoc, decades after the events, in a Utah-era context where plural marriage's institutional legitimacy was being defended; the standardized "married or sealed" language reflects collection-context formatting rather than necessarily the participants' contemporaneous self-understanding. ↩︎ ↩︎

  34. "Did Joseph Smith send men on missions in order to steal their wives?" FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Joseph_Smith/Polygamy/Sent_husbands_on_missions_to_steal_wives. Containing the Hales-attributed finding: "Of the twelve 'polyandrous' husbands identified by Todd Compton, ten were not on missions at the time Joseph was sealed to their legal wives." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  35. Joseph Smith Journal, December 1841 – December 1842, in The Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-december-1841-december-1842/. The April 1842 sealing date for Marinda Hyde appears on a list of Joseph's plural wives written in the handwriting of scribe Thomas Bullock; the list itself was entered into the journal in mid-1843 (after the July 14, 1843 entry), so the April 1842 date is a Joseph-Smith-era retrospective listing rather than a strictly contemporaneous April-1842 record. The relative weight of this list-entry against Marinda's May 1843 affidavit is engaged in the body text. ↩︎

  36. John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of John D. Lee (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1877). Lee's recollection: Hyde's wife was, "with his consent, sealed to Joseph for an eternal state" — qualified by Lee, "I do not assert the fact." Cited in Hales, "Marinda Nancy Johnson" biography. ↩︎

  37. Brian C. Hales, "The Joseph Smith–Sylvia Sessions Plural Sealing: Polyandry or Polygyny?" Mormon Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 41–57. PDF: https://ensignpeakfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/4-MHS_spring2008_Joseph-Smith-Sylvia-Sessions.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎

  38. "Joseph's DNA Test" (Perego summary), Mormon Heretic, June 19, 2016. https://mormonheretic.org/2016/06/19/josephs-dna-test/ ↩︎

  39. "Firesides/28 November 2010 — Sweden" (overview/index page), FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Firesides/28_November_2010_-_Sweden ↩︎

  40. The levirate framework for the Brigham-Young-with-Zina succession pattern: levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5–10) is the scriptural precedent of a man taking responsibility for the family of a deceased male relative. Applied to the post-1844 Mormon pattern: Joseph's eternity-only sealing to Zina established her eternal bond to Joseph; the for-time sealing to Brigham established her this-life relationship with Brigham; and the implication that her relationship with Henry was severed reflects the framework's view that the eternal bond superseded any prior marriage that wasn't yet sealed. The framework is the apologetic explanation post-hoc; the contemporary 1846 record does not contain a clean theological articulation by Brigham, Henry, or Zina that names what they were doing as levirate. Bradley/Woodward's Four Zinas shows the contemporary record around February 1846 was much more textured than the framework alone captures — it includes Brigham's statements about Joseph's wives ("they will be Joseph's in the eternities, but they are mine for time"), Zina's complicated journal record, Henry's later letters, and a moral situation that contemporaries themselves found complicated. The strongest single attestation of the eternity-only character of Zina's sealing to Joseph is Zina's own 1898 statement (fifty years after the events). The strongest reading is that Mormon leaders in 1846 treated Joseph's sealings as the senior marital relationship — outranking prior unsealed marriages even if not including earthly conjugal expression while Joseph was alive — and the eternity-only reading is consistent with the Brigham succession pattern only if one accepts that "eternity-only" creates an eternal marital bond that, post-mortem, ranks above earthly time-only marriages. ↩︎

  41. D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994); see also Quinn, "Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormon Plural Marriage," and the Hales-Quinn dialogues. ↩︎

  42. "Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Joseph_Smith/Polygamy/Plural_wives/Lucinda_Pendleton_Morgan_Harris ↩︎

  43. Hales-Quinn dialogues at https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/dialogues/hales-quinn/ — Hales's argument that pre-1843 sealings used Melchizedek priesthood marriage authority (continuously available since 1829) rather than requiring the specific sealing keys restored at Kirtland in April 1836; Quinn's contrary position that the pre-1843 sealings were authority-gapped and the later D&C 110 / D&C 132 framework was articulated retroactively. ↩︎

  44. Background on Illinois statutes criminalizing bigamy and the legal/persecution context for the secrecy: see the Joseph Smith Papers contextual essays on Nauvoo legal pressures and the discussions in BYU Studies treatments of the period, summarized in Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy vol. 1. ↩︎

  45. John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints; or, an Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism (Boston: Leland & Whiting, 1842). Bennett's accusations charge "spiritual wifery" but do not specifically charge sexual polyandry. See Brian C. Hales, "John C. Bennett and Spiritual Wifery," https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/john-c-bennett-and-spiritual-wifery/ ↩︎

  46. Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014). Mainstream non-LDS treatment of the Bennett conflict and the spiritual-wifery accusations. ↩︎

  47. Sarah Pratt's claims appear in the 1886 Wilhelm Wyl interview, four decades after the events. See Todd M. Compton, "Sarah M. Pratt: The Shaping of an Apostate," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/sarah-m-pratt-the-shaping-of-an-apostate/ ↩︎

  48. 1892 Temple Lot trial depositions and 1893 Joseph Smith III interview with Malissa Lott. Emily Dow Partridge Young, Lucy Walker Smith Kimball, and Malissa Lott Willes testified to consummation of their sealings to Joseph Smith. Malissa's "wife in very deed" exchange comes from the 1893 Joseph Smith III interview, complementing her 1892 Temple Lot deposition testimony that she "roomed" with Joseph as his wife. See discussion in Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy (vol. 1) and Compton, In Sacred Loneliness. ↩︎

  49. Hales-Vogel exchanges and "Polyandry in Nauvoo: Dan Vogel style," Mormon Polygamy Documents. https://mormonpolygamydocuments.org/dan-vogel-dialogues/ ↩︎ ↩︎

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