Priesthood Restoration
Latter-day Saints believe that the authority to act for God, the priesthood, was taken from the earth after the death of the ancient apostles and given back to Joseph Smith by heavenly messengers. The account names them. John the Baptist came first and conferred the lesser, or Aaronic, priesthood in May 1829. Peter, James, and John, the chief apostles of the New Testament, came weeks later and conferred the greater, or Melchizedek, priesthood. That claim is the foundation of every ordinance the Church performs, from baptism to the sealing of families in the temple.
The CES Letter's charge is about timing. It argues that nobody in the early Church heard this story until years after it supposedly happened, that the detailed version with named angels did not reach print until 1834 and 1835, and that Joseph then quietly worked it backward into older records to make it look earlier than it was. The section calls this "backdated and retrofitted."[1]
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."[2] 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 it names as the moment of fabrication.
So the whole section turns on a gap, and the shape of the argument is worth tracing. It runs almost entirely on what is missing. The detailed published narrative does not appear in print until Oliver Cowdery's letters of 1834 and 1835 and the Doctrine and Covenants published that same year, and the earlier 1833 Book of Commandments carries no such account.
From that silence the CES Letter draws its conclusion. 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]
The epigraph is genuine, the historian is real, 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 narrates neither ordination, and the specific dates and the named angels come into focus gradually across the 1830s rather than arriving all at once.
A response that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading. The critic Grant Palmer puts the strongest form of the case in one sentence:
"Accounts of angelic ordinations from John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John are in none of the journals, diaries, letters, or printed matter until the mid-1830s."[4]
The question is whether a thin record means an invented one. On that, the CES Letter's own sources do not cooperate.
Bushman was answering the objection, not making it
Read past the cut, and the historian the CES 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:
"Did Joseph add the stories of angels to embellish his early history? If so, he made little of the occurrence."[5]
He went on to note that Cowdery, not Joseph, first published the account, that it "circulated without fanfare, more like a refurbished memory than a triumphant announcement," and that "experience may have outrun comprehension" for a man who had not yet learned to speak in the vocabulary of "priesthood," a word that carried negative, Catholic associations on the Protestant frontier.[5:1] 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 same cut happens a second time, a few pages later. There the section quotes Bushman raising a puzzle about the June 1831 conference, where Lyman Wight ordained Joseph to the high priesthood, and asks why Joseph would need ordaining if he already held apostolic authority. The very next sentence, the one the CES Letter omits, is Bushman's own answer:
"The usual explanation is that Joseph meant to say 'high priest,' one of the offices in the Melchizedek Priesthood, not 'high priesthood.'"[6]
Joseph taught the same distinction in 1841: "All priesthood is Melchizedek; but there are different portions or degrees of it."[7] The conference minutes also record what the CES Letter leaves out. Joseph ordained Wight first, in the same meeting, before Wight ordained him in turn.[8] A man who can confer the high priesthood on Wight is not obviously a man scrambling to acquire authority he lacks.
The deeper trouble for the "invented in 1835" reading runs past the two trimmed quotations. The claim of authority shows up in writing, from several unrelated directions, well before 1835.
The claim was already in writing before 1832
Begin with the people who had every reason to get the story wrong. The Painesville Telegraph item above was not an isolated slip. A December 1830 follow-up reported that Cowdery claimed "his commission directly from the God of Heaven," and in February 1831 the Palmyra Reflector passed along that "Cowdery and his friends had frequent interviews with angels."[9] [10] Three hostile newspaper reports, run by editors with no motive to help the movement, were reporting the very claim the CES Letter says had not yet been thought up.
Then Joseph's own hand. His earliest history, dictated in the summer of 1832, lists among the handful of events he counted as foundational 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."[11] Two distinct priesthood events, both by angelic ministry, three years before the supposed forgery, in a private account he was publishing to no one. The CES Letter quotes only the first phrase and drops the second, which leaves the 1832 history looking like a single passing mention rather than the structured listing of two conferrals it actually is.
Then the Church's organizing documents. The April 1830 Articles and Covenants, read aloud at the first conference and accepted by the membership, already described Joseph as "called of God, and ordained an apostle of Jesus Christ."[12] Oliver Cowdery's own 1829 manuscript called himself "an Apostle of Jesus Christ."[13] These are not stray words. Apostolic authority is precisely what the later narrative says the angels conferred.
Then the Church's 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, months before the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants the CES Letter pinpoints as the fabrication.[14] A story cannot be first composed in 1835 and also be in print in 1834.
Even one of the original Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, Hiram Page, writing in 1847 from outside the Utah Church, recalled that "Peter James and John ordained Joseph and Oliver … before the 6th of april 1830."[15] The backdating and retrofitting article lays all of this out as a documentary trail: roughly eight independent witnesses, hostile and friendly, public and private, attesting the substance of the claim before the date the CES Letter calls the beginning.
What David Whitmer actually said
The section's strongest single witness is David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, whose testimony Latter-day Saints still cite. Late in life, in interviews of 1885 and a published Address of 1887, Whitmer said he never heard of an angelic ordination until the mid-1830s and did not believe John the Baptist had ordained Joseph and Oliver. The CES Letter quotes him to that effect, and the statements are real. A serious response cannot wave off a Three Witness as a hostile outsider.
What the CES Letter does not mention is the rest of Whitmer's life. He was ordained a high priest in 1831, named as Joseph's potential successor in 1834, organized his own priesthood-structured "Church of Christ" in 1847, and ordained other men under his own claimed authority into the 1870s. The denial belongs to the last decade of an eighty-three-year life, not to a settled view held across it.
And in 1861, standing at Oliver Cowdery's graveside in Richmond, Missouri, and reported by a Latter-day Saint named David H. Cannon who was present, Whitmer said 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."[16]
That is twenty-six years before the Address the CES Letter cites, and twenty-three years after Whitmer's own excommunication. The late appearance of the accounts article weighs this graveside testimony with its real limits, restores the Bushman epigraph to its paragraph, and lays out what the 1832 history actually lists. It does not pretend the record is tidier than it is. What it will not grant is that the late-life Whitmer is the only Whitmer in the record.
There is a quieter point in the same direction. Oliver Cowdery, who would have to be a co-conspirator on the fabrication reading, was excommunicated in 1838 and spent a decade outside the Church with every motive to recant. He never did. As late as 1848, rebaptized and back among people who had humiliated him, he testified again that he was present when "the Aaronic Priesthood" and later "the Melchisedek Priesthood" were conferred "by the holy angels of God."[17]
Adding to a revelation is not inventing one
The hardest documentary fact in the section is that the revelation now called Doctrine and Covenants 27 grew between its 1833 and 1835 printings. The Church has never hidden this. The 1833 version contained sacrament instructions of roughly two hundred words; the 1835 version ran to roughly seven hundred fifty, including the verses naming John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John as the priesthood-conferring messengers.[18] The CES Letter reads that expansion as the smoking gun: new content, dated old.
The leap the CES Letter needs is from "expanded" to "fabricated," and that leap assumes a theology of revelation that Joseph's own canon rejected. In November 1831, four years before the 1835 compilation, a conference of the Church voted to authorize Joseph to revise the wording of the revelations for publication, and a revelation received that same month, now the preface to the entire Doctrine and Covenants, said the commandments were given "unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language … And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known."[19] Revising the language of a revelation between printings was openly authorized procedure, not a covert act.
The pattern is older than the Restoration. When King Jehoiakim burned the prophet Jeremiah's scroll, God commanded a replacement, and the new one was not a copy:
"Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe … who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words."[20]
A standard that makes the D&C 27 expansion proof of fraud would, applied evenly, convict the Bible of the same thing. The expansion added detail to a revelation a church already believed it had received. That is a different act from inventing the revelation, and the surviving paper trail, including documents that already assume the claim years earlier, is what tells the two apart.
Set the dates in order
Lay the documents out by 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, or leave a Book of Mormon witness affirming it at a graveside decades later. The evidence the CES Letter dismisses as arriving too late was, by the calendar, 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.
None of this turns on the record being cleaner than it is. The pre-1835 sources are sparser than a believer might wish, and the linked articles say so without hedging. The honest position is narrower than the polished telling but far stronger than the CES Letter's: the substance of the claim is attested from several directions before the supposed invention, and the 1835 expansion is canonization, not forgery.
When the priesthood-restoration trail gets thin, and in places it genuinely does, the dates are still the thing the section cannot get around. The claim of angelic authority is fixed in writing from several unconnected directions, hostile and friendly, public and private, before the year the CES Letter names as its invention, and the one documentary fact it can prove, the 1835 expansion of what is now Doctrine and Covenants 27, is the language of a revelation being finished for publication rather than a story being made up. Lay the record out in order and "backdated and retrofitted" is the one reading the calendar will not bear. The believer's position here is the modest one, and it is also the one the evidence makes hardest to escape.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Priesthood Restoration," nos. 1, 5, pp. 81–83. ↩︎
"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," p. 80, quoting Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, p. 75. ↩︎
Grant Palmer, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002). Palmer argues: "Accounts of angelic ordinations from John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John are in none of the journals, diaries, letters, or printed matter until the mid-1830s." The statement is defensible if "mid-1830s" includes 1834 and if it requires the specifically named identification, but is substantively narrower than the CES Letter's blanket claim that nothing existed in any previous Church records. ↩︎
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." ↩︎ ↩︎
Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 158. The sentence the CES Letter omits, immediately following the block quote it cites on the June 1831 conference: "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. 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, 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." ↩︎
"Minutes, circa 3-4 June 1831," Joseph Smith Papers. 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; Joseph Smith Jr. and Sidney Rigdon are then ordained "under the hand of br. Lyman Wight." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-circa-3-4-june-1831/2 ↩︎
Painesville Telegraph, December 7, 1830. Reproduced in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 2 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 274–275. Reports Cowdery claimed "his commission directly from the God of Heaven" and "credentials, written and signed by the hand of Jesus Christ." ↩︎
Palmyra Reflector, February 14, 1831. Editor Abner Cole. Reproduced in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 2 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998). Reports "Jo Smith had now received a commission from God"; "Cowdery and his friends had frequent interviews with angels." ↩︎
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 ↩︎
"Articles and Covenants, circa April 1830 [D&C 20]," Joseph Smith Papers. D&C 20:2-3 (1833 Book of Commandments Chapter 24:2-3): Joseph Smith "having been called of God, and ordained an apostle of Jesus Christ, to be the first elder of this church; And to Oliver Cowdery, who was also called of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to be the second elder of this church." Read at the first Church conference June 9, 1830, accepted by common consent. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/articles-and-covenants-circa-april-1830-dc-20/1 ↩︎
"Articles of the Church of Christ, June 1829," Joseph Smith Papers. Cowdery's 1829 manuscript describes him as "an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." This document, written months before April 1830, presupposes apostolic ordination. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/articles-of-the-church-of-christ-june-1829/1 ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Hiram Page to William E. McLellin, May 30, 1847, with elaboration in 1848 correspondence. Published in Ensign of Liberty 1, no. 4 (January 1848). Page, one of the Eight Witnesses and present at the Church's organization, wrote: "Peter James and John ordained Joseph and Oliver … before the 6th of april 1830." See discussion in H. Michael Marquardt, "David Whitmer," in Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2007), 142–145. ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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. Cowdery: "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." https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/reuben-miller-recorder-of-oliver-cowderys-reaffirmations/ ↩︎
"Revelation, circa August 1830 [D&C 27]," historical introduction, Joseph Smith Papers. The editors note: "Early manuscripts, including the copy featured here, contain only the first portion of the combined revelation as published in 1835... While an earlier manuscript may have existed for the September portion, the earliest extant text for the expanded version of the revelation is the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants." The 1833 Book of Commandments text (sacrament instructions, roughly 200 words) is expanded in 1835 to roughly 750 words, adding the named identifications of John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-circa-august-1830-dc-27/1 ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 1:24-28 (received November 1, 1831), the Lord's preface to the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants: "these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding. And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known." Received at the same November 1-2, 1831 conference (Minute Book 2) that voted to authorize Joseph Smith to "correct those errors or mistakes which he may discover by the holy Spirit while reviewing the revelations & commandments." ↩︎
Jeremiah 36:32 (KJV): "Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words." The biblical tradition contains revisable, expandable revelation; the standard the CES Letter applies (textual change = fabrication) would, applied consistently, falsify Jeremiah. ↩︎