Priesthood Restoration
The priesthood is the authority to act in God's name, and in this Church it was not handed down through other churches over the centuries. It was restored directly to Joseph Smith by heavenly messengers, in two stages: John the Baptist came first and gave the lesser, or Aaronic, priesthood; then the ancient apostles Peter, James, and John gave the greater, or Melchizedek, priesthood. Without that authority, the ordinances of the Church would carry no weight, so the claim sits close to the foundation of everything.
The CES Letter's whole objection comes down to dates. It says this detailed story, with its named angels and specific days, appears nowhere in the early records and surfaces in print only in 1834 and 1835. From that silence it draws a conclusion: the account was "backdated and retrofitted" years later and quietly written into the Church's history.[1] For scholarly weight it borrows a sentence from the Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman and prints it as the section's epigraph:
"The late appearance of these accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication."[2]
Part of what the section points to is real. The written record for these two ordinations is thinner than the record for the First Vision or the Book of Mormon. The earliest published collection of revelations, the 1833 Book of Commandments, narrates neither ordination, and the exact dates and named messengers come into focus across the 1830s rather than all at once.
A thin record, though, is not the same as an invented one, and that distinction is the whole question. Once you ask it, the section's own sources start pulling the other way.
The quote is arguing the other way
Read the next sentence the CES Letter cuts, and Bushman turns out to be answering the objection, not making it. He brought the late-appearance puzzle up so he could weigh it, and within the same paragraph he put it back down.
Joseph's early quiet, he wrote, fit a man who had not yet learned to speak in the language of "priesthood," a word that meant little to frontier Protestants. The slow, low-key way the story came out struck him as "more like a refurbished memory than a triumphant announcement," not like something stitched together after the fact.[3] Cut off one line too soon, a historian working through a doubt gets recast as a witness for it.
The trimmed quote is the smaller problem. The bigger one for any "invented in 1835" theory is that the claim of angelic authority was already being written down, by people with no connection to each other, well before that year.
The enemies reported it first
Look first at the witnesses with every motive to get it wrong. In November 1830, the Painesville Telegraph, a hostile paper run by neighbors who wanted the church gone, told its readers that Oliver Cowdery
"pretends to have a divine mission, and to have seen and conversed with Angels."[4]
That ran a year and a half before the CES Letter says anyone had heard of a priesthood restoration. Critics out to bury the movement were already reporting the very claim the section says had not yet been invented.
Then Joseph's own hand. His earliest history, dictated in the summer of 1832, lists two separate conferrals of priesthood by the ministering of angels among the events he counted as foundational.[5] That is three years before the supposed forgery, in a private account he was publishing to no one.
Then the Church's own press. In October 1834, Cowdery printed the account of the Aaronic ordination in a Church newspaper, months ahead of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants the CES Letter names as the fabrication.[6] Something supposedly made up in 1835 cannot have been sitting in print the year before.
The two articles
The page on the late appearance of the accounts weighs the section's strongest single witness, David Whitmer. Late in life Whitmer said he never heard of an angelic ordination until the mid-1830s, and the CES Letter quotes him. It leaves out that in 1861, at Oliver Cowdery's graveside, Whitmer told a witness he had heard Cowdery testify that Peter, James, and John conferred the Melchizedek Priesthood, twenty-six years before the denial the section cites.
The page on whether Joseph backdated and retrofitted the revelation takes the forgery charge head-on. The text now called Doctrine and Covenants 27 really was expanded between 1833 and 1835, and the Church has never hidden it. But adding detail to a revelation a church already believed it had received is a different act from inventing it, and the documents that already assume the claim are what separate the two.
Put every document on a timeline and the dates turn on the theory they are supposed to support. Someone quietly inventing a tale of heavenly authority would not let his enemies announce it in print half a decade ahead of schedule, jot it in his own private journal three years before the supposed forgery, and run it in his own newspaper a year before that. What the CES Letter files under "too late" was, on the calendar, already on the early side, written down first by the very men who most wanted the whole movement to fail.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," nos. 1, 5, pp. 81–83. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," p. 80, quoting Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, p. 75. ↩︎
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 75. Bushman raises the late-appearance objection and, in the same paragraph, rejects it. After asking "Did Joseph add the stories of angels to embellish his early history? If so, he made little of the occurrence," he notes that Cowdery, not Joseph, first published the John the Baptist account; that the account "circulated without fanfare, more like a refurbished memory than a triumphant announcement"; and that "experience may have outrun comprehension," attributing Joseph's early silence to reticence and the unfamiliar frontier vocabulary of "priesthood." ↩︎
"The Golden Bible," Painesville Telegraph, November 16, 1830, reporting that Oliver Cowdery "pretends to have a divine mission, and to have seen and conversed with Angels." Reprinted in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996–2003), 2:271. ↩︎
Joseph Smith, History, ca. Summer 1832, The Joseph Smith Papers. The account names both "the reception of the holy Priesthood by the ministring of … Aangels" and "a confirmation and reception of the high Priesthood after the holy order of the son of the living God." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/1 ↩︎
Oliver Cowdery, Letter I to W. W. Phelps, Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate 1, no. 1 (October 1834): 14–16, the first published narrative of the Aaronic Priesthood restoration, appearing months before the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. ↩︎