The Priesthood Restoration's Late Appearance
The claim:
The Priesthood Restoration section of the CES Letter opens with one sentence set apart on its title page, a line borrowed from a faithful Latter-day Saint historian:
"The late appearance of these accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication." — LDS Historian and Scholar Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, p. 75[1]
From there the section argues three things about timing. That nobody heard about angels restoring the priesthood until 1832 at the earliest, and the story only grew more detailed over time.[2] That David Whitmer, one of the men who testified to the Book of Mormon, said late in life he never heard of an angelic ordination until the mid-1830s.[3] And that if Peter, James, and John gave Joseph Smith the higher priesthood in 1829, it makes no sense that a man named Lyman Wight ordained him to that same priesthood again in 1831.[4]
Put plainly, the charge is that the Church's story about how it got its priesthood authority is a tale that grew in the telling. The named angels, the specific dates, the dramatic visitations, none of it shows up early, so maybe none of it happened the way the Church now says.
It is a serious question, and a fair answer has to start by granting what is true. The detailed published account naming John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John really does first appear in print in 1834 and 1835, in letters written by Oliver Cowdery. David Whitmer really did make those late-life statements, and he was a serious witness, not a stranger throwing stones. And the paper trail for the priesthood restoration is genuinely thinner than the trail for the First Vision or the Book of Mormon. None of that is in dispute on this page.
What is in dispute is whether thin and late add up to fabricated. They do not, and one habit repeats three separate times in this short section that shows why: each time the CES Letter reaches for its strongest source, it stops reading one step before that same source turns around and answers the worry.
Worth Acknowledging
The detailed published account with named angels first appears in 1834-35. Whitmer's late-life dissent is real, and it comes from one of the Three Witnesses. The June 1831 conference is the first time Church records explicitly mention a "high priesthood" ordination. And the documentary trail here is thinner than the trails for the Book of Mormon or the First Vision. The faithful answer grants every one of those facts. They simply do not amount to fabrication once the evidence the CES Letter leaves out is put back in.
Start with the quote that frames the whole section
That epigraph on the title page is doing almost all the work. It puts a believing Latter-day Saint historian forward as the opening witness for the prosecution, the scholar himself supposedly admitting the priesthood story might be invented.
The rest of that paragraph tells a different story. On the very page the CES Letter cites, Richard Bushman raises the fabrication idea in order to test it, and then knocks it down in the next breath:
"Did Joseph add the stories of angels to embellish his early history? If so, he made little of the occurrence."[5]
Bushman goes on to point out that it was Cowdery, not Joseph, who first published the John the Baptist account, and that it "circulated without fanfare, more like a refurbished memory than a triumphant announcement." He notes that the word "priesthood" carried unpleasant Catholic associations for frontier Protestants and was foreign to their vocabulary, which could explain why Joseph was slow and quiet about it rather than why he made it up. Joseph, Bushman suggests, "may not have realized" the full framework at first, that his "experience may have outrun comprehension."[5:1]
So the line the CES Letter quotes is Bushman naming a possibility on his way to rejecting it. Cut the quote where the CES Letter cuts it, and a careful historian weighing a question becomes a hostile witness against the Church. Watch for that move, because the section runs it twice more.
The Lyman Wight question answers itself
Take the question the CES Letter puts in capital letters: if Peter, James, and John already gave Joseph the higher priesthood in 1829, why did Lyman Wight ordain him to it again at a conference in June 1831?[4:1]
The minutes of that conference are public, and they record the order of events. Joseph Smith ordained Lyman Wight first, along with four other men. Only after that did Wight turn and ordain Joseph.[6] The CES Letter quotes the second half of that exchange and leaves out the first. A man who can ordain Wight before Wight ordains him back is not a man frantically reaching for authority he does not have.
There is a reason these mutual ordinations were normal in the early Church, and it comes down to a difference between an office and a priesthood. The CES Letter borrows this question from Bushman too, quoting him raising the puzzle. The sentence Bushman writes immediately after, the one the CES Letter skips, is his own answer:
"The usual explanation is that Joseph meant to say 'high priest,' one of the offices in the Melchizedek Priesthood, not 'high priesthood.'"[7]
The idea is simpler than it sounds. Think of a priesthood as the authority itself and an office as a particular job within it, the way "holding a medical license" is different from "being named chief of surgery." Joseph already held the higher priesthood. What happened in June 1831 was the first time the Church organized the office of high priest within it. Joseph said as much himself in 1841, years before anyone needed an excuse: "All priesthood is Melchizedek; but there are different portions or degrees of it."[8] One priesthood, with offices and degrees inside it. Being ordained to one of those offices is not the same as receiving the priesthood for the first time.
That is twice now the CES Letter has quoted Bushman asking a question and dropped the answer he gives in the next line. The in-depth version lays out the conference minutes in full, including the witnesses on both sides of the office-versus-priesthood reading.
David Whitmer said more than the one thing the CES Letter quotes
The third pillar is David Whitmer, and it is the one that deserves the most care, because Whitmer was no outsider. He was one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, a man whose testimony Latter-day Saints still cite today. Late in his life he said he never heard that an angel ordained Joseph and Oliver until 1834, 1835, or 1836, and that he did not believe John the Baptist ever ordained them.[9] If that one statement were all we had from Whitmer, it would carry real weight.
It is not all we have. Whitmer lived eighty-three years and left a trail of statements and actions stretching across more than half a century, and almost all of it cuts the other way.
Whitmer was ordained a high priest in 1831. In 1834 Joseph designated him as a possible successor. In 1847, almost a decade after he was excommunicated, he was busy organizing his own "Church of Christ" built around priesthood offices, writing that he and others had been re-ordained and that two men "have been ordained High Priests." In 1869 he laid his hands on William McLellin and re-ordained him under his own claimed priesthood authority. In 1875 and 1876 he founded a small church with priesthood offices in it. For roughly forty-seven years, this is a man living inside priesthood structures, not a man who thought the whole thing was a hoax.
The single most important piece the CES Letter never mentions sits right in the middle of that span. In 1861, standing at Oliver Cowdery's grave in Richmond, Missouri, Whitmer told a Latter-day Saint named David H. Cannon that he had heard Cowdery declare:
"I know the Gospel to be true and upon this head has Peter, James, and John laid their hands and conferred the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood."[10]
That is Whitmer, twenty-six years before the late-life denial the CES Letter quotes, and twenty-three years after his own excommunication, publicly affirming that Peter, James, and John conferred the higher priesthood. The faithful scholar who documented this encounter, Kenneth Godfrey, grants that the records here are thinner than we would like and still concludes that Whitmer's late-life doubt "should not be accepted as true, especially in light of what he told Cannon."[10:1] To be precise about it, the 1861 statement is Whitmer reporting what Cowdery had said, and it concerns a different priesthood and different angels than the 1885 denial does.[11] That does not erase the later denial. It shows that Whitmer's testimony moved across his life, and that the flat denial belongs only to its final decade.
Even that final-decade denial is narrower than it first looks. In the same 1885 interview the CES Letter draws from, Whitmer affirmed that Joseph and Oliver did ordain each other as elders in 1829.[12] He never denied the ordinations happened. What he questioned, at the end of his life, was whether angels were the source. And his fullest late-life statement, an 1887 booklet, was not even written in his own hand. A man named John J. Snyder admitted he wrote it from notes as Whitmer dictated, then reshaped it through "constant changing on my part" until Whitmer approved it. By then Whitmer had spent fifty years building a rival theology and, as the historian who studied his evolving beliefs put it, "pushed his views about the pure church further and further back."[13] [14]
So the late-life Whitmer is real, and he deserves a fair hearing. But he is one voice from a long life, and the younger Whitmer at Cowdery's grave is just as much David Whitmer as the older one. The in-depth version walks the full timeline year by year. The broader puzzle of how to weigh any witness's late-life words against decades of earlier testimony is handled across all eleven Book of Mormon witnesses in the article on credibility concerns.
The earliest history already names both priesthoods
The CES Letter says that even in 1832 there was no real claim of a priesthood restoration, just a vague "reception" of priesthood, with nothing about angels or named figures.[2:1] The document it is describing says more than that.
Joseph wrote his earliest history in the summer of 1832, partly in his own hand. It was never finished, and the part that survives breaks off before it would have told the priesthood story in full. But near the start, Joseph lists what he saw as the four great events of the Restoration, and two of them are priesthood events:
"thirdly the reception of the holy Priesthood by the ministring of—Aangels to adminster the letter of the Gospel… forthly a confirmation and reception of the high Priesthood after the holy order of the son of the living God"[15]
Two distinct priesthoods, both tied to angelic ministry, both written down in 1832. It is the same two-priesthood structure the Church would later canonize. The version of this quote the CES Letter works from keeps the first phrase and drops the second, the one about the "high Priesthood after the holy order of the son of the living God." With the second phrase missing, the 1832 history looks like a single passing mention. With it restored, the earliest history Joseph ever wrote already lists both priesthoods, in his own handwriting, two to three years before the account critics say was invented. The fuller treatment of this document lives in the sister article on backdating and retrofitting.
Oliver Cowdery had every reason to recant, and never did
There is one more person the fabrication story needs, and he refuses to cooperate. If the priesthood narrative was built up after the fact, Oliver Cowdery had to be in on it, because he is the one who first published the detailed account.
Cowdery was excommunicated in 1838 and spent the next decade outside the Church, practicing law. He had every reason to walk the story back and no reason left to protect Joseph. He never did. In an 1846 private letter he wrote of standing "in the presence of John, with our departed brother Joseph, to receive the Lesser Priesthood — and in the presence of Peter, to receive the Greater."[16] When he returned to the Church in 1848, he stood up at his rebaptism and testified:
"I was present with Joseph when an holy angel from God came down from heaven and conferred, or restored, the Aaronic Priesthood… I was also present with Joseph when the Melchisedek Priesthood was conferred by the holy angels of God."[17]
A man does not spend ten years estranged from a church that humiliated him and then come back to publicly reaffirm the very story he supposedly helped fake. Cowdery named the same figures and the same structure, in private letters to friends who had no stake in propping him up, right up to the end of his life. The fabrication theory has no room for him.
How thin the trail is
The genuine soft spot in the faithful case is not any single document. It is the overall thinness of the trail.
Lay the priesthood restoration next to the Book of Mormon and the gap is obvious. The Book of Mormon has 588 printed pages, multiple scribes, twelve witnesses, a printer, and a hostile neighbor who tried to plagiarize it before it was even published. The First Vision has four written accounts from Joseph's own lifetime. The priesthood restoration has Joseph's brief 1832 list, Cowdery's letters from 1834 and 1835, and the fuller history from 1838, with the named figures, John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John, not appearing in print until those 1834-35 letters. That is real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
There is also a serious version of the critic's case that deserves naming. Careful historians like Dan Vogel do not argue that Joseph and Cowdery sat down and consciously lied. Vogel argues something subtler: that the two men sincerely believed they had been commissioned by God, and that the specific details, the exact names and dates and locations, took shape gradually as the experience was retold and the young Church needed firmer footing.[18] That reading is coherent, and it cannot be waved away. The faithful answer here is to grant the observation, that the detailed published narrative did come together between 1832 and 1835, while disputing the leap from "came together late" to "was made up." The in-depth version engages that scholarly case directly, along with the early documents, hostile newspapers, and persecution history that bound when the Saints could publish anything at all.
What tips the balance is that the gradual reading has to explain too much. It has to explain why Cowdery kept affirming the named figures across a decade of estrangement. Why Whitmer affirmed apostolic priesthood at a graveside in 1861. Why Joseph's own 1832 history already lists both priesthoods. Why hostile newspapers in 1830 were already reporting that Cowdery claimed to have "conversed with Angels."[19] The pieces are scattered and quiet, but they are there, and they were there before the date the CES Letter says the story began.
The missing half of each quote
The section rests on three sources: Bushman, the June 1831 minutes, and David Whitmer. Each one says something the CES Letter does not quote. Bushman names the fabrication idea and then rejects it on the same page. The minutes show Joseph ordaining Wight before Wight ordained Joseph. Whitmer denied the angelic source at the very end of his life but affirmed it at Cowdery's grave decades earlier and never denied the ordinations themselves. Put the missing half of each quote back, and the case for fabrication comes apart in your hands.
The faithful position that remains is narrower than the simplest Sunday-school telling but sturdier than the CES Letter's. The trail is thinner than for other foundational events. The detailed narrative did sharpen between 1832 and 1835. Those things are true. They just do not carry the reader to fabrication, because the substance of the claims, angelic authority, apostolic ordination, two priesthoods, sits in the record from 1829 forward, in friendly and hostile sources alike.
It is worth noticing where the CES Letter's own star witness finally points. Its strongest human source is David Whitmer. But the same Whitmer who, in his last decade, doubted the angels is the Whitmer who, as a young man at his family's farm, watched Joseph dictate the Book of Mormon line by line, and who insisted to his dying day that he had seen and handled the plates. He never took that back. Underneath every question about the priesthood lies the book Whitmer never stopped vouching for: a long, internally consistent text dictated out loud at several thousand words a day, in one continuous pass, with no manuscript in front of the translator and no going back to revise. That pace is the fact a reader can hold onto when the priesthood trail thins out. The witnesses, friends and estranged former friends alike, kept answering the question of where that book came from the same way, all the way to the end of their lives.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," section epigraph, p. 80. The epigraph is set apart on the section title page, before the numbered claims begin. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," no. 1, p. 81. Includes the Bushman Rough Stone Rolling p. 75 block quote ending "The late appearance of these accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication." and the closing rhetorical question "Why did it take 3 plus years for Joseph or Oliver to tell members of the Church about the restoration of the priesthood under the hands of John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John?" ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," no. 2, p. 81. The CES Letter cites Early Mormon Documents, 5:137, which is the David Whitmer interview by Zenas H. Gurley Jr., January 14, 1885. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," no. 6, pp. 83-84. Includes the Bushman Rough Stone Rolling pp. 157-158 block quote ending "If Joseph was already an elder and apostle, what was the necessity of being ordained again?" and the headline question "IF PETER, JAMES, AND JOHN ORDAINED JOSEPH SMITH TO THE MELCHIZEDEK PRIESTHOOD IN 1829, WHY DID LYMAN WIGHT ORDAIN JOSEPH SMITH TO THE MELCHIZEDEK PRIESTHOOD AGAIN IN 1831?" ↩︎ ↩︎
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005; Vintage paperback 2007), 75. The full p. 75 paragraph reverses itself within the same passage the CES Letter quotes. After raising the "possibility of later fabrication," Bushman writes: "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, was first to publish 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." ↩︎ ↩︎
"Minutes, circa 3-4 June 1831," Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-circa-3-4-june-1831/2. The minutes record the order of ordinations: Joseph Smith Jr. ordains Lyman Wight, John Murdock, Reynolds Cahoon, Harvey Whitlock, and Hyrum Smith to the high priesthood; multiple others receive ordinations; Joseph Smith Jr. and Sidney Rigdon are then ordained "under the hand of br. Lyman Wight"; John Corrill and Isaac Morley are ordained as assistants to the Bishop under Lyman Wight's hand. ↩︎
Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 158. The sentence the CES Letter omits, immediately following the block quote it cites: "The usual explanation is that Joseph meant to say 'high priest,' one of the offices in the Melchizedek Priesthood, not 'high priesthood.'" Bushman frames the office-vs-priesthood reading as the standard scholarly resolution. ↩︎
Joseph Smith, sermon recorded by William Clayton, attributed to 1841 (some compilations place the underlying Clayton record at October 5, 1840). Cited in History of the Church and in Joseph Fielding Smith, comp., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Discussed in Brian C. Hales, review of Michael Hubbard MacKay's Prophetic Authority: Democratic Hierarchy and the Mormon Priesthood, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 36 (2020): 219-224. "All priesthood is Melchizedek; but there are different portions or degrees of it." The precise primary venue is contested; Hales is cited here as accessible secondary anchor. ↩︎
David Whitmer, interview by Zenas H. Gurley Jr., January 14, 1885. Published in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 5 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2003), 137. Manuscript in LDS Church History Library. The interview is the source the CES Letter cites for claim 2. ↩︎
Kenneth W. Godfrey, "David Whitmer and the Shaping of Latter-day Saint History," in Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, and Andrew H. Hedges, eds., The Disciple as Witness: Essays on Latter-day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2000), 223-256. The David H. Cannon graveside encounter at Oliver Cowdery's grave in Richmond, Missouri, in 1861 is documented at p. 240. Whitmer told Cannon he had heard Cowdery declare: "I know the Gospel to be true and upon this head has Peter, James, and John laid their hands and conferred the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood." Godfrey's conclusion at p. 256: "Certainly David Whitmer's testimony that casts doubt on the appearance of John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John should not be accepted as true, especially in light of what he told Cannon." Confirmation in Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 43," FAIR Blog, January 21, 2022. ↩︎ ↩︎
The 1861 statement is not Whitmer's first-person testimony of priesthood reception; it is Whitmer reporting in 1861 what Cowdery had said to him at some earlier point — documentary recall of another person's statement, given at a thirty-two-year remove from the underlying 1829 events. In 1861 Whitmer was also inside a priesthood-structured framework he would later abandon (he had been organizing a "Church of Christ" with high priests since 1847), so affirming Cowdery's claim of apostolic conferral was internally consistent with his then-theology. And the two statements are not strictly identical: the 1861 statement is about Melchizedek conferral by Peter, James, and John; the 1885 statement is specifically about whether an Angel had ordained Joseph and Oliver to the Aaronic Priesthood. Different priesthood, different angels. None of this neutralizes the 1861 affirmation; it locates it precisely. ↩︎
David Whitmer, interview by Zenas H. Gurley Jr., January 14, 1885, in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 5 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2003), 137. The relevant exchange is reproduced and analyzed in Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 43," FAIR Blog, January 21, 2022, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2022/01/21/43, citing Whitmer: "Joseph ordained Oliver Cowdery to be an Elder, and Oliver ordained Joseph to be an Elder in the Church of Christ." Allen notes that Whitmer affirmed the fact of 1829 ordinations even while disputing their angelic source. ↩︎
Marquardt, "David Whitmer," in Scattering of the Saints, 152. "By the end of his life, David had become fully active again as a believer in the restored Church of Christ and the Book of Mormon. As the years went on, Whitmer pushed his views about the pure church further and further back." ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer, 1887). Dated April 1, 1887. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/addresstoallbeli00whit (102-page archival document; commonly cited as a 75-page booklet). ↩︎
"History, circa Summer 1832," Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/2. Manuscript in Joseph Smith Letterbook 1, written between July 20 and September 22, 1832, partly in Joseph Smith's own hand and partly in the hand of scribe Frederick G. Williams. The history is six pages long and breaks off mid-narrative. The prospectus paragraph identifies four cardinal events of the Restoration including "the reception of the holy Priesthood by the ministring of—Aangels to adminster the letter of the Gospel" and "a confirmation and reception of the high Priesthood after the holy order of the son of the living God." ↩︎
Oliver Cowdery to Phineas Young, March 23, 1846. Original at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Published in Improvement Era 2 (October 1899): 891. Cowdery to Young: "Had you stood in the presence of John, with our departed brother Joseph, to receive the Lesser Priesthood — and in the presence of Peter, to receive the Greater… you would feel what you have never felt." ↩︎
Reuben Miller's record of Oliver Cowdery's October 21, 1848 testimony at Kanesville, Iowa, upon Cowdery's rebaptism. Published in Richard Lloyd Anderson, "Reuben Miller, Recorder of Oliver Cowdery's Reaffirmations," BYU Studies 8, no. 3 (1968): 277-93. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/reuben-miller-recorder-of-oliver-cowderys-reaffirmations/. Miller's record contains Cowdery's explicit affirmation of both Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood restorations. ↩︎
Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004). 715 pp. The most thorough developmental-hypothesis monograph. Argues priesthood-restoration narrative crystallized between 1829 and 1835 from earlier substance-claims, not as conscious fraud but as religious experience whose specific contours emerged from retrospective theological need. ↩︎
Painesville Telegraph, November 16, 1830. Eber D. Howe, editor (later co-author of Mormonism Unvailed, 1834). Reproduced at FAIR (https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Source:Painesville_Telegraph:1830) and in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 2 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 271. Reports Cowdery "pretends to have a divine mission, and to have seen and conversed with Angels," and the claim that "the ordinances of the gospel, have not been regularly administered since the days of the Apostles." ↩︎