Priesthood Restoration
In November 1830, the Painesville Telegraph told its readers that Oliver Cowdery "pretends to have a divine mission, and to have seen and conversed with Angels."[1] It was a hostile paper, printed by people who wanted the new church gone, and it ran the angelic-authority claim as a charge. That date matters. It is a year and a half before the CES Letter says anyone in or around the Church had heard of a priesthood restoration, and more than four years before the document the letter names as the moment of fabrication.
The whole section turns on that gap, so it is worth seeing how the case is built. The argument runs almost entirely on what is missing. The detailed narrative with named figures, John the Baptist for the lesser priesthood, then Peter, James, and John for the greater, does not appear in print until Oliver Cowdery's letters of 1834 and 1835 and the Doctrine and Covenants published that same year. The earlier 1833 Book of Commandments carries no such account. From that silence the letter draws its conclusion: the story was "backdated and retrofitted" in 1835 and quietly worked back into the record.[2] For scholarly cover it borrows a line from the Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman, set as the section's epigraph: "The late appearance of these accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication."[3]
That is a real epigraph from a real historian, and the silence it points to is partly real too. The early documentary trail here is thinner than the trail for the First Vision or the Book of Mormon. The Book of Commandments does not narrate either ordination. The specific dates and the named angels do come into focus gradually across the 1830s rather than arriving all at once. A response that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading. The question is whether a thin record means an invented one, and on that the letter's own sources do not cooperate.
Bushman was answering the objection, not making it
Read past the cut, and the historian the letter enlists is arguing the other side. Bushman raised the late-appearance problem in order to test it, and in the same paragraph he set it down. Joseph's early reticence, he wrote, fit a man who had not yet learned to speak in the vocabulary of "priesthood," a word that meant little on the Protestant frontier; the gradual telling looked "more like a refurbished memory than a triumphant announcement" than like a story being assembled after the fact.[4] Stop the quotation where the CES Letter stops it, and a scholar working through an objection becomes a witness for it. He conceded nothing.
The deeper trouble for the "invented in 1835" reading is not that one quotation was trimmed. It is that the claim of authority shows up in writing, from several unrelated directions, well before 1835.
Begin with the people who had every reason to get the story wrong. The Painesville Telegraph item above is not an isolated slip; hostile non-Mormon papers in 1830 and 1831 were already passing along that Cowdery and Smith claimed to have seen and spoken with angels and to hold a divine commission. Critics writing to discredit the movement were reporting the very claim the letter says had not yet been thought up.
Then Joseph's own hand. His earliest history, dictated in the summer of 1832, names two separate conferrals of priesthood, both by the ministering of angels, among the handful of events he counted as foundational to the Restoration.[5] That is three years before the supposed forgery, in a private account he was not publishing to anyone.
Then the Church's own press. In October 1834, Cowdery printed the account of the Aaronic ordination in the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, the first published narrative of that event, and it appeared months before the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants the letter pinpoints as the fabrication.[6] A story cannot be first composed in 1835 and also be in print in 1834.
What the documents say, and what silence is being made to prove
These two threads, the wording of the texts and the meaning of the gaps, are where the section actually lives, and each has an article that follows it to the bottom.
The timing case is the subject of the page on the late appearance of the accounts. It restores the Bushman epigraph to its paragraph, lays out what the 1832 history really lists, and weighs the section's strongest single witness, David Whitmer. Late in life Whitmer did say he never heard of an angelic ordination until the mid-1830s, and the letter quotes him to that effect. It does not mention that in 1861, standing at Oliver Cowdery's graveside and reported by a Latter-day Saint who was present, Whitmer affirmed that Peter, James, and John had "laid their hands and conferred the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood," twenty-six years before the denial it cites. The same page takes up the Lyman Wight puzzle the letter raises, why Wight ordained Joseph at the June 1831 conference if Joseph already held the Melchizedek Priesthood, and notes the detail the letter leaves out: the minutes show Joseph ordaining Wight first, in the same meeting.
The forgery case proper belongs to the page on whether Joseph backdated and retrofitted the revelation. The expansion of the text now called Doctrine and Covenants 27 between 1833 and 1835 is real, and the Church has never hidden it; the published record shows the verses about Elijah, John the Baptist, and Peter, James, and John being added. The leap the letter needs is from "expanded" to "fabricated," and that leap runs into a wall of documents that already assume the claim: Cowdery's 1829 letter, the 1830 Articles and Covenants calling Joseph "an apostle of Jesus Christ," the hostile newspapers, the 1832 history. Adding detail to a revelation a church already believed it had received is a different act from inventing the revelation, and the surviving paper trail is what tells them apart.
None of this requires the record to be tidier than it is. The pre-1835 sources are sparser than a believer might wish, and the linked articles say so without hedging. What they will not support is the load the section asks the silence to carry.
Set the documents in order of date and the timeline argues against the very theory it is supposed to prove. A man planning to backdate a story of heavenly authority does not let his enemies print the claim five years early, in papers run to ruin him. He does not write it in his own hand in a private history three years before the alleged forgery, or publish it in his own newspaper the year before. The evidence the CES Letter calls late was, in plain fact, already early, kept by Joseph's friends and confirmed, against their own interest, by the men who most wanted the whole thing to fall apart.
"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. ↩︎
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, attributing Joseph's early silence to reticence and the unfamiliar frontier vocabulary of "priesthood." ↩︎
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. ↩︎