Appearance
Masonic Connections
The claim:
The CES Letter's Temples & Freemasonry section opens on page 106 with a 1911 First Presidency line — "Because of their Masonic characters the ceremonies of the temple are sacred and not for the public" — and then advances seven numbered concerns built around a single chronological frame: Joseph Smith was initiated as a Master Mason on March 15-16, 1842, and introduced the temple endowment seven weeks later on May 4, 1842.[1] From that frame the section asks why the endowment so closely resembles 1842 Illinois Masonry rather than an earlier form, why Heber C. Kimball claimed Latter-day Saints had "the true Masonry" if the temple was independent of the Lodge, why the Church removed the symbolic penalties and the Five Points of Fellowship in 1990 if those elements were divinely revealed, and whether the eternal salvation of families can really hinge on Masonic-looking rituals.[2]
The section's centerpiece, on page 109, is a side-by-side comparison of the Five Points of Fellowship: an LDS endowment text reading "inside of right foot by the side of right foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, and mouth to ear," set against a Masonic third-degree text reading "foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, and cheek to cheek, or mouth to ear."[3] The wording is nearly identical. The chapter ends with the rhetorical demand: if Freemasonry has "zero links to Solomon's Temple" — a fact even FAIR concedes — and if the most visibly Masonic elements were quietly removed in 1990, what is left of the endowment's claim to divine origin?[4]
This article responds to the borrowing argument: chronology, textual overlap, ancient parallels, and Joseph's own theological framework. The 1990 changes themselves and the broader history of endowment revisions belong to the sister article on temple changes; the source-of-the-endowment question and the historicity-of-the-changes question are distinct.
The honest place to begin is by acknowledging what is true. Joseph Smith was a Master Mason — the Nauvoo Lodge minutes for March 15–16, 1842 record him being "duly received and passed" through the Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft degrees in the morning session of March 15, and at the 2 PM session that same day "duly raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason," with Grand Master Abraham Jonas of the Grand Lodge of Illinois presiding.[5] Seven weeks later, on May 4, 1842, in the upper room of the Red Brick Store, he gave the first endowment to nine men, most of them Masons.[6] Specific elements of that 1842 ceremony — particularly tokens (handgrips), signs (gestural forms), penalties (with verbatim wording matching Masonic third-degree language), aprons, and the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil — overlap so closely with contemporary Masonic ritual that no honest scholar denies the surface borrowing.[7] The Five Points of Fellowship side-by-side that the CES Letter reproduces on page 109 cannot be explained as coincidence. And the symbolic penalties and the Five Points of Fellowship were in fact removed from the endowment in 1990 under President Hinckley.[8]
The chronology is suggestive on its face. The textual parallels are real. The 1990 removals are real. What follows engages the strongest version of the criticism — Buerger 1987 in Dialogue, Homer 1994 in Dialogue, Bruno-Swick-Literski 2022 in Method Infinite — rather than only the CES Letter's compressed version.
Worth Acknowledging
Joseph Smith was a Master Mason. The first endowment was given seven weeks after his Masonic initiation. Specific 1842 endowment elements — tokens, signs, penalties, the Five Points of Fellowship — overlap closely with contemporary Masonic ritual. The Church did remove the most visibly Masonic-looking elements in 1990. None of this is contested. The question is what it means.
What the pre-1842 record establishes — and what it does not
The "seven weeks" framing is the structural argument of the CES Letter section. It treats March 1842 as the temporal starting point for the entire endowment. The pre-1842 documentary record complicates that picture in important but limited ways: it establishes the categorical existence of temple ordinance language — endowment of power, washings, anointings, sealing, baptism for the dead, solemn assemblies — fourteen months to a decade before the Lodge. It does not establish that the specific gestural vocabulary the May 1842 endowment introduced (tokens, signs, penalties with verbatim Masonic-third-degree wording, the Five Points of Fellowship) was already present in pre-1842 ritual practice. That vocabulary is what the CES Letter's side-by-side comparisons actually overlap on, and that vocabulary entered the LDS ceremony in 1842, not 1832.
The chronology argument is therefore not "the pre-1842 record proves no Masonic vocabulary borrowing." It is more limited: the categorical institution of temple ordinances was a decade-long project, not a seven-week one. The specific gestural vocabulary added in May 1842 was placed inside a body of teaching, narrative content, and covenant structure that had been developing under canonical revelation for years before any Lodge encounter.
The earliest endowment-of-power language in the canonical record is Doctrine and Covenants 38, dictated January 2, 1831, which closes with the promise: "I give unto the church a commandment, that ye should assemble yourselves together to Ohio… and there I will give unto you my law; and there you shall be endowed with power from on high."[9] This is fifteen months before the Saints reached Ohio in earnest, and over eleven years before both the Nauvoo Lodge dispensation and the May 1842 ceremony. The endowment is named, located ("from on high"), and tied to a specific physical gathering.
In December 1832, Doctrine and Covenants 88 — the "olive leaf" — gave detailed instructions for a "school of the prophets" with ritual elements that have no nineteenth-century revivalist parallel. The text prescribes the formal greeting "Art thou a brother or brethren? I salute you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in token or remembrance of the everlasting covenant" with a specific accompanying handshake (verses 132-133), an extended call for ritual cleanliness (v. 138), and a structured liturgical setting: "a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God" (v. 119).[10] This is the closest pre-1842 element to a Masonic-style token. A skeptic can fairly note that even this resembles Masonic forms — and Joseph's brother Hyrum had been a Mason since the mid-1820s, supplying potential indirect exposure. The argument here is not that the December 1832 handshake was generated in a Masonic vacuum; it is that the formal greeting and handshake were attached to canonical revelation in 1832, not introduced fresh in May 1842.
In June 1833, Doctrine and Covenants 95 explicitly commanded the Kirtland Temple. The Lord declared: "I gave unto you a commandment that you should build a house, in the which house I design to endow those whom I have chosen with power from on high" (v. 8).[11] One year later, Doctrine and Covenants 105:33 reaffirmed that "the first elders of my church should receive their endowment from on high in my house, which I have commanded to be built unto my name in the land of Kirtland."[12]
In November 1835, Joseph began teaching the Twelve about ritual ordinances directly. At a meeting on November 12, 1835, his journal records his teaching about washings, anointings, and the necessity of endowment in the Kirtland Temple — "you need an endowment, brethren, in order that you may be prepared and able to overcome all things" — and his reference to the endowment "you are so anxious about you cannot comprehend now, nor could Gabriel explain it to the understanding of your dark minds."[13] The endowment as a content-rich category — not just a phrase — was being taught five months before any temple ceremony was performed and six and a half years before the Masonic initiation.
On January 21, 1836, in the recently completed Kirtland Temple, Joseph and the First Presidency observed an actual ritual. Joseph's own journal records: "we attended the ordinance of washing our bodies in pure water. We also perfumed our bodies and our heads, in the name of the Lord."[7:1] Oliver Cowdery's contemporaneous record describes the participants washing one another, anointing with oil "in the manner that were Moses and Aaron, and those who stood before the Lord in ancient days," and pronouncing blessings.[14] On January 22, the Aaronic Priesthood quorums received washings and anointings. On March 27, 1836, the Kirtland Temple was dedicated; D&C 109 (the dedicatory prayer) asked the Lord to "let thine anointing be sealed upon them as upon those of old" (v. 35). On March 30, 1836, a "solemn assembly" was held with washings, anointings, and a Hosanna Shout.
That is six years before the Nauvoo Masonic initiation. It is not the May 1842 endowment — Buerger explicitly notes these were "not the later endowment"[7:2] — but it is structured temple ritual with washings, anointings, sealing, prayer-circle elements, solemn assembly, and pronounced blessings, in the absence of any Lodge.
In August 1840, Joseph introduced baptism for the dead. The category of "vicarious ordinance for the deceased" — a category nineteenth-century American Protestantism vigorously denied — was operational eighteen months before the Masonic initiation.
On January 19, 1841 — fourteen months before Joseph became a Mason — Doctrine and Covenants 124 commanded the Nauvoo Temple. The text is explicit about what kind of building it was to be:
"your anointings, and your washings, and your baptisms for the dead, and your solemn assemblies, and your memorials for your sacrifices by the sons of Levi, and for your oracles in your most holy places wherein you receive conversations, and your statutes and judgments, for the beginning of the revelations and foundation of Zion, and for the glory, honor, and endowment of all her municipals, are ordained by the ordinance of my holy house."[15]
The Lord names anointings, washings, baptisms for the dead, solemn assemblies, oracles in most holy places — fourteen months before Joseph's Masonic initiation. Verses 40-41 add that this temple is to be built "that I may reveal mine ordinances therein unto my people" and "things which have been kept hid from before the foundation of the world." The category of revealed ordinances inside a dedicated temple structure was on the page, in canonical revelation, in January 1841 — but D&C 124 names categories of ordinances, not the specific gestural elements (tokens, signs, penalties, the Five Points of Fellowship) that the May 1842 ceremony would introduce.
In March 1842 — simultaneous with the Masonic initiation — the Book of Abraham was published in Times and Seasons. Abraham 4-5 contains the creation account that would form the narrative core of the May endowment. The Book of Abraham was begun in 1835; its publication in March 1842 is contemporaneous with rather than caused by the Lodge.[16] The Book of Moses, dictated in 1830-31, had supplied the Adam and Eve material more than a decade earlier.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1830-31 | Book of Moses dictated; supplies the creation, Fall, and Eden material that anchors the endowment narrative |
| January 2, 1831 | D&C 38: "endowed with power from on high" promised |
| December 1832 | D&C 88: school of the prophets ritual with formal greeting and accompanying handshake |
| June 1833 | D&C 95: Kirtland Temple commanded "that I may endow those whom I have chosen with power" |
| November 1835 | Joseph teaches the Twelve about the necessity of an endowment they "cannot comprehend now" |
| January 21-22, 1836 | Washings and anointings in the Kirtland Temple |
| March 27-30, 1836 | Kirtland Temple dedication, solemn assembly, Hosanna Shout |
| August 15, 1840 | Baptism for the dead introduced |
| January 19, 1841 | D&C 124: Nauvoo Temple commanded; anointings, washings, baptisms for the dead, solemn assemblies named — but tokens, signs, penalties, Five Points of Fellowship not named |
| March 1, 1842 | Book of Abraham (creation account) published in Times and Seasons |
| March 15, 1842 | Joseph initiated as Master Mason — all three degrees conferred in a single day (Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft in the morning, Master Mason at 2 PM), expedited admission by Grand Master Jonas; lodge meeting itself spanned March 15–16 |
| April 28, 1842 | Joseph addresses Relief Society in the upper room of the Red Brick Store |
| May 4, 1842 | First endowment given to nine men in the same upper room — first appearance in LDS practice of tokens, signs, penalties, Five Points of Fellowship |
The seven-week chronology is mathematically accurate for the specific Masonic-form elements. It also misses more than a decade of categorical development of temple ordinance language under canonical revelation. Both observations are true at once.
A further complication the strongest critical reading presses, and which the article should concede honestly: Joseph's personal exposure to Masonic content stretches back fifteen years before his March 1842 initiation, through Hyrum, Heber C. Kimball, John C. Bennett, and other Masonic associates.[7:3][17] The naturalistic explanation does not require Joseph to have been formally initiated as a Mason in 1832 to have been aware of Masonic ritual content — only proximity to Masons, which he had from at least the mid-1820s onward.
What survives this concession is narrower but real. The theological content of the endowment — creation, Fall, Atonement-centered covenants made between participant and God, the return to God's presence — was developed through canonical revelation and scripture-translation across the decade before May 1842, on a track that contained material absent from Masonic ritual at any layer. The form/content distinction does not require pre-1842 LDS development to have been Masonry-blind. It requires the content to have come from somewhere other than the Lodge — and the documentary record establishes that, even allowing for indirect Masonic exposure through Hyrum and other associates.
Key Point
The pre-1842 record establishes the categorical existence of temple ordinance language fourteen months to a decade before the Lodge. It does NOT establish that the specific Masonic-form gestural elements (tokens, signs, penalties, Five Points of Fellowship) existed in LDS ritual before 1842; those elements entered the ceremony in May 1842. The seven-week timeline is real for those specific elements. The chronology defeats the categorical version of the seven-week argument; it does not by itself defeat the gestural-vocabulary version, which requires the form/content distinction and the ancient-parallels case to do additional work.[15:1][18]
What the actual scholarly literature says
The CES Letter compresses the scholarly conversation into bullet points. The conversation itself is more careful, and the most important scholars on this question — across the faithful-critical spectrum — agree on more than Runnells acknowledges.
David John Buerger's 1987 article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought — "The Development of the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony" — is the standard critical-but-thoughtful scholarly history of the endowment, expanded in his book The Mysteries of Godliness.[7:4][19] Buerger writes from a position skeptical of orthodox claims; he is not a faithful apologist. And his bottom line is direct:
"The temple ceremony cannot be explained as wholesale borrowing from Masonry; neither can it be explained as completely unrelated to Masonry."[7:5]
Buerger then catalogs three categories of overlap that he describes as "very marked" or "sometimes identical": tokens (handgrips), signs (gestural forms), and penalties.[7:6] He is precise about what is not in this overlap. The creation and Fall narrative has, in his words, "no parallel in Masonry." The major covenants — obedience, sacrifice, chastity, consecration — have no Masonic parallel. Washings and anointings have no Masonic parallel. The structural backbone of the endowment is, on Buerger's own account, theologically and textually independent of Masonic ritual.
Michael W. Homer's 1994 Dialogue article — 113 pages, "'Similarity of Priesthood in Masonry'" — is the longest sustained scholarly treatment of the question, expanded in his 2014 University of Utah Press book Joseph's Temples.[20][21] Homer documents real overlap and real influence on form while consistently distinguishing form from theological content.
Bruno, Swick, and Literski's 2022 Method Infinite: Freemasonry and the Mormon Restoration, published by Greg Kofford Books, is the most ambitious recent critical-scholarly work on the topic — arguing for a more substantial Masonic axis running through the Restoration than faithful scholars typically grant.[22] Method Infinite is the steelman the article must engage. Bradshaw's review in Interpreter 54 engages the work seriously, agreeing where the documentation supports the thesis, dissenting where it does not, and concluding with a framing Bradshaw himself developed and which much faithful scholarship accepts: "Masonic and temple rituals are better characterized overall as distant cousins rather than members of the same nuclear family," sharing "some common ancestry in the Bible and also some nineteenth-century borrowing."[23] Bruno-Swick-Literski explicitly disagree with Bradshaw on the weighting; their position is closer to "second cousins, with substantial nineteenth-century borrowing."
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw's 2015 Interpreter article, "Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances," is the longest single faithful-scholarly response and the most carefully argued.[18:1] Bradshaw concedes the chronological optics openly: Joseph "became a Mason not long before he began to introduce others to the Nauvoo endowment, creating plausible grounds for suspicion." He then argues at length that the suspicion is not borne out by the textual data, the pre-1842 chronology, or the ancient parallel evidence — and that "what he did with those suggestions through his prophetic gifts was seen by the Saints as transformative, not merely derivative." Bradshaw's framing is "translation, not derivation": Joseph translated revealed truths "into words and actions that the Saints in Nauvoo could readily understand," using familiar Masonic vocabulary among other available cultural materials.
Greg Kearney — an LDS Master Mason whose 2005 FAIR conference paper the CES Letter actually quotes against the Church — gives the cleanest summary of the faithful position.[24] Kearney's view, broadly shared by Brown, Bradshaw, and Buerger, frames the question this way:
"Everybody wants to know, 'Okay Greg, did the temple ritual come from Freemasonry?' And I'm going to answer that with a qualified yes."[24:1]
Kearney is careful to distinguish what the qualified yes does and does not concede. On his reading, the endowment is revealed doctrine necessary for the salvation of the Saints; "the ritual" — call-and-response, memorized sequences, three-stage progression, ritual gesture — is how the endowment is taught. Masonry, on his account, influenced the form of instruction rather than the doctrinal content. He describes Joseph's experience in Lodge in his own words:
"Joseph Smith sat in Lodge, he watched as humble farmers — most of whom he knew probably couldn't read and write well — learned complicated, difficult ritual and he said in his mind, 'Ah! This is how I'll do it. This is how I'll teach the endowment to the Saints.'"[24:2]
The endowment, on Kearney's reading, is revealed content delivered through a teaching method that Joseph encountered through Masonry and recognized as effective pedagogy for transmitting complex doctrine to a frontier audience that included many illiterate converts. The familiar packaging let the converts focus on the unfamiliar content.
Massimo Introvigne — a non-Latter-day Saint Catholic scholar of new religious movements who has been engaged by LDS scholars but has no LDS apologetic stake — frames the question similarly: in his published work on Mormonism and Freemasonry he describes Joseph as having "used the Masonic language of the rituals for the purpose of confirming his followers familiar with Freemasonry into a doctrine which had no 'similarities' with anything they had heard in the masonic lodges."[25]
The faithful scholarly position on the Masonic question — Bradshaw, Brown, Kearney, Welch, the contemporary Church History Topics page — is closer to "form yes, content no" than to "no Masonic influence whatsoever." And the critical scholarly position — Buerger, Homer, even Bruno-Swick-Literski — is closer to "real but limited overlap, with substantial independent material" than to wholesale-plagiarism. The two camps are arguing about the relative weights of acknowledged-form-overlap and acknowledged-content-independence.
Worth Acknowledging
Even Buerger — a critical scholar — explicitly rejects "wholesale borrowing." Even Bradshaw — a faithful scholar — concedes "some nineteenth-century borrowing." The faithful and critical literature agree on more than the CES Letter's framing suggests: real but limited form-level overlap, substantial content-level independence, and an ongoing dispute about what the limited overlap means.
Quantifying the actual overlap — and its limits
David Eddington's 2025 article in Interpreter 66 — "A Textual Comparison of Masonic Rites and the LDS Temple Endowment" — is the first systematic quantitative analysis of the question.[26] Eddington applied n-gram and conceptual-similarity techniques to four corpora: an early-twentieth-century LDS endowment text (the 1931 Paden version, which preserves more of the original 1842 elements than later versions and is publicly available); a nineteenth-century Masonic rite (Duncan, 1866); the Pearl of Great Price's Books of Moses and Abraham; and Cyril of Jerusalem's Mystagogical Catecheses (c. 350 AD). He added the Odd Fellows rite (1909) as a control.
| Comparison | Conceptual or vocabulary overlap |
|---|---|
| Endowment vs. Masonic rite (liberal, conceptual) | 17.2% (77 of 448 sentences) |
| Endowment vs. Masonic rite (restrictive, conceptual) | 9.7% (41 of 423 lines) |
| Current 2023 endowment vs. Masonic rite (after revisions) | 8.3% |
| Endowment vocabulary vs. Pearl of Great Price | 18.4% |
| Endowment vocabulary vs. Masonic rite | 10.8% |
| Masonic rite vs. Odd Fellows | 24.7% |
| Endowment vs. Cyril of Jerusalem (bigram) | Second-highest bigram match to the endowment — above the endowment-Masonic bigram match |
These numbers are the best quantitative evidence currently available on the borrowing question. They are also interpretive rather than dispositive, and several methodological caveats matter before drawing conclusions — including that vocabulary measures word-frequency overlap rather than ritual-form overlap, that the 1931 Paden text is a publicly available proxy for an unavailable 1842 original, and that the Cyril comparison has a Christian-vocabulary confound on the bigram measure that the structural argument (stripping/anointing/clothing/sealing/new-name) does not depend on.[27] The Odd Fellows comparison matters in the opposite direction. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows explicitly modeled itself on Masonic ritual structure — three-degree progression, lodges, regalia, signs and grips, treated as documented fact in the history of fraternal orders. The 24.7% Odd Fellows-Masonic overlap therefore represents the documented threshold of "recognizably-borrowed-fraternal-ritual," and the endowment-Masonic overlap at 9.7-17.2% sits meaningfully below that floor.
With those caveats in place, three findings carry real weight.
First, the maximum conceptual overlap between the endowment and the nineteenth-century Masonic rite is 17.2% under a generous criterion, dropping to 9.7% under a stricter one — much lower than the CES Letter's "100% Masonic" rhetoric requires.[26:1]
Second, the endowment shares more vocabulary with the Pearl of Great Price (18.4%) than with the Masonic rite (10.8%).[26:2] If Joseph had borrowed wholesale from the Lodge, the relative magnitudes should run the other way. They do not.
Third, the endowment-Masonic overlap (9.7-17.2% conceptual) is below the Odd Fellows-Masonic overlap (24.7%) — below the threshold at which one fraternal organization is documented to have openly modeled itself on Masonic ritual. The endowment-Masonic figure is real and identifiable; it is also notably below where the documented borrowing comparison sits.
Eddington's overall verdict on the borrowing thesis: the data "demonstrate the unlikeliness of Joseph Smith having appropriated wholesale from Masonic rites."[26:3] That verdict is appropriately calibrated — it concerns the wholesale-borrowing thesis, not the existence of any Masonic influence at all.
The Five Points of Fellowship problem
Among the textual overlaps, one is conspicuously close. The CES Letter places it at the center of its case for a reason. On page 109:
"PETER: 'The five points of fellowship are: inside of right foot by the side of right foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, and mouth to ear.' — LDS Temple Endowment - Five Points of Fellowship, Removed 1990
WORSHIPFUL MASTER: 'The five points of fellowship are: foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, and cheek to cheek, or mouth to ear.' — Masonic Five Points of Fellowship from the 3rd Degree Master Mason Ritual"[3:1]
This is the strongest single piece of textual evidence in the CES Letter section. The wording is too close to be coincidence. A response that pretends otherwise is not a response.
The Five Points of Fellowship was removed from the endowment in 1990 under President Hinckley.[8:1] The deepest treatment of the 1990 changes belongs to the sister article on temple changes; for the source-of-the-endowment argument, the relevant fact is that the strongest single piece of textual evidence the CES Letter can produce is for an element that no longer exists in the live ceremony.
The Five Points of Fellowship was not itself a covenant. It was a teaching gesture conveying the relationship between the participant and Christ at the veil. The covenants on either side of the gesture (obedience, sacrifice, the law of the gospel, chastity, consecration) are theologically distinct from anything in Masonry, and they survived 1990 intact. The Masonic Five Points of Fellowship is, in its own context, the climax of the Hiram Abiff drama — the Worshipful Master raises the candidate from his symbolic death by the grip, in a ritual whose moral is fidelity among Masonic brothers. The endowment Five Points of Fellowship was the candidate's reception by Christ at the veil — a fundamentally different theological frame using a recognizable physical form.
The form-was-the-same point is what Eddington's quantitative analysis identifies as contributing to the 9.7-17.2% conceptual figure. It is real and identifiable. It is also exactly the kind of overlap the faithful scholarly position has always conceded.
A skeptic can press the 1990 pattern further: the changes removed precisely the elements that match Masonic ritual forms — penalties and the Five Points of Fellowship — which is consistent with institutional discomfort about Masonic appearance and can be read as the Church quietly fixing a source problem. The faithful response is two-part. First, the form/content distinction was not invented in 1990 — it is what Joseph's contemporaries said about the relationship from 1842 onward, as the next section documents. Second, what the 1990 pattern actually demonstrates is that the Masonic-form elements were structurally severable from the covenants without altering the substance of what was being made and to whom — the empirical signature consistent with "form, not content," even if it is not the only possible interpretation.
Worth Acknowledging
The Five Points of Fellowship side-by-side is the strongest single textual parallel in the CES Letter section. The wording overlap is real and uncomfortable. The element was removed in 1990 without disturbing any covenant of the endowment. That is consistent with the form having always been separable from the covenants — though a critic can read the same pattern as the institution recognizing a source problem and addressing it.
What the framework of the early Saints does and does not establish
Heber C. Kimball's "true Masonry" statement is the second pillar of the CES Letter section. The CES Letter quotes it as Q2:
"We have the true Masonry. The Masonry of today is received from the apostasy which took place in the days of Solomon, and David. They have now and then a thing that is correct, but we have the real thing."[28]
The CES Letter cites "Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball and Family: The Nauvoo Years, p. 458." Stanley B. Kimball is the correct author. The CES Letter's title is a hybrid: the 1975 BYU Studies article carries the title "Heber C. Kimball and Family, The Nauvoo Years," but the CES Letter's page-458 citation falls outside that article's pagination (which runs from 447 to 479 across about 33 pages). The page reference is consistent with Stanley B. Kimball's 1981 University of Illinois Press biography, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer — a book-length work whose pagination accommodates p. 458. The CES Letter therefore appears to have combined the BYU Studies article title with the page reference of the 1981 biography. The original primary attestation underlying both works is a speech Heber C. Kimball gave at a General Meeting on November 13, 1858; the manuscript record is in the Church History Library (CR 100 318), and the BH Roberts Foundation has digitally cataloged the relevant excerpt with the full citation chain.[29][30] The quote and substance are real.
Kimball had articulated a parallel statement in 1842 — within weeks of the first endowment — in a primary-source letter to Parley P. Pratt. Buerger 1987 reproduces the 1842 letter in Kimball's hand:
"Thare is a similarity of preast Hood in masonry. Br. Joseph Ses Masonry was taken from preasthood but has become degenerated. But menny things are perfect."[7:7]
Kimball's June 1842 letter is contemporaneous primary attestation of what Kimball reports Joseph as teaching ("Br. Joseph Ses..."). It is hearsay-format in the technical sense — it documents what Kimball understood Joseph to be saying, not Joseph's words as recorded by Joseph himself — but it is contemporaneous, written by an inner-circle participant six weeks after the first endowment, and consistent with what later witnesses recorded.
A careful framing of what these statements establish, and what they do not, matters here.
What the early-Saint witnesses establish: the contemporaneous theological interpretation held by Joseph and his closest associates. Within weeks and months of May 1842, the inner circle was articulating a single coherent framework about the relationship between Masonry and the temple. That framework was not a mid-twentieth-century apologetic invention; it is what early Saints were saying contemporaneously with the events.
What the early-Saint witnesses do not establish: the historical accuracy of the ancient-transmission claim the framework embeds. Whether Masonry actually preserved fragments of an ancient priesthood ordinance through millennia of apostasy is a historical claim about ancient transmission, and that claim is not established by documenting what nineteenth-century Mormons believed about ancient transmission. The witnesses corroborate the contemporaneity and consistency of the framework's articulation; they do not corroborate the framework's underlying historical premise. Nor are the witnesses strictly independent — Kimball, Willard Richards, Benjamin Johnson, Joseph Fielding, and Franklin D. Richards were Joseph's inner circle, hearing the framework from Joseph or from one another.
Within those limits, the framework the early Saints articulated is documented across the following primary or near-primary sources:
- Joseph Smith via Willard Richards (Joseph's secretary, an endowed Mason, present at the May 4 endowment): "Masonry had its origin in the Priesthood." Reported in Bradshaw 2015 from contemporary records of Joseph's teaching.[18:2]
- Heber C. Kimball, June 1842 letter to Parley P. Pratt (six weeks after the first endowment): "Br. Joseph Ses Masonry was taken from preasthood but has become degenerated. But menny things are perfect."[7:8]
- Heber C. Kimball, November 13, 1858 General Meeting Minutes: "We have the true Masonary. The Masonary of the day is received from the apostasy which took place in the days of Solomon and David. They have now and then a thing that is correct, but we have the real thing."[29:1]
- Benjamin F. Johnson, recording Joseph's teaching (memoirs published 1947 from material written from memory in earlier decades): "Freemasonry, as at present, was the apostate endowments, as sectarian religion was the apostate religion."[18:3]
- Joseph Fielding (an endowed Mason), 1844 journal: "Many have joined the Masonic Institution… this seems to have been a Stepping Stone or Preparation for something else, the true Origin of Masonry."[31]
- Franklin D. Richards records Joseph as having "desired to know what they were" regarding ancient elements in Masonry — language consistent with (though not requiring) a frame in which Joseph approached the lodge as an investigation of preserved fragments rather than as a source.[18:4]
The framework is internally consistent with broader Restoration theology, which takes as foundational the premise that primitive Christianity was corrupted across centuries of apostasy with fragments of true doctrine and ordinances surviving in degraded forms throughout that period. From inside that framework, the existence of a Masonic ritual sharing fragments with the endowment is what one would expect.
It is also unfalsifiable as a strictly historical claim. If the endowment looks Masonic, that is because Masonry preserved fragments. If it looks like Cyril of Jerusalem, that is because early Christianity preserved fragments. If it looks like the Mari Investiture Panel, that is because temple ideology was pan-cultural in the ancient Near East. The framework can absorb either "Joseph received material via revelation that Masonry happened to preserve in degraded form" or "Joseph absorbed Masonic content naturalistically and theologically reframed it as ancient priesthood preservation." Both are compatible with what early Saints believed about transmission. The framework remains coherent as a theological claim whose truth depends on the truth of the Restoration as a whole; it is not a historical hypothesis that documentary evidence about nineteenth-century beliefs can independently confirm.
What the article rejects is the CES Letter's framing of the Kimball quote as a confession that the temple is just Masonry. That framing inverts what Kimball was claiming. He was claiming the opposite — that the priesthood is anciently and divinely authentic, and that Masonry is its degenerate descendant rather than its ancestor.
Key Point
The "Masonry came from priesthood" framework is documented in contemporaneous primary sources from 1842 onward, articulated consistently by Joseph and his inner circle. What this establishes is the contemporaneity and consistency of the early Saints' theological interpretation — not the historical accuracy of the ancient-transmission claim. The framework remains coherent as a theological reading whose truth depends on the truth of the Restoration as a whole. Its primary work in the article is to invert the CES Letter's framing of the Kimball quote: Kimball was not confessing borrowing; he was articulating a framework in which the priesthood is the ancient ancestor and Masonry the degenerate descendant.[7:9][29:2][18:5]
The Solomon-temple objection and the ancient-parallels case
The CES Letter's Q4 — "Freemasonry has zero links to Solomon's Temple" — is, on its surface, correct. Faithful and critical scholars agree. There is no documentary evidence of continuous ritual transmission from the First Temple in Jerusalem (c. 950 BC) to the Grand Lodge of London (1717). The CES Letter quotes FAIR conceding the point, and Greg Kearney concedes it explicitly.[24:3] The CES Letter then quotes Kearney as saying "Masonry, while claiming a root in antiquity, can only be reliably traced to medieval stone tradesmen." The closest verbatim language in the actual paper reads "Freemasonry as we know it today can trace its origins only as far back as the medieval stone Masons guilds of the Middle Ages."[24:4] The substance is the same.
Two further facts about Masonic ritual matter for the structure of this argument.
The 1842 Masonic ritual is the eighteenth-century English form, not an ancient form. Trigradal Freemasonry as a documented institution dates to 1717 (the first Grand Lodge in London). The third-degree Hiram Abiff legend, the penalties, the Five Points of Fellowship, and the specific tokens and signs Joseph encountered in Nauvoo Lodge in 1842 are products of eighteenth-century English Speculative Masonry. When the LDS endowment matches Masonic ritual on tokens, signs, penalties, and the Five Points of Fellowship, it matches the eighteenth-century English form, not an abstract ancient form.
The faithful position therefore must distinguish between two claims. Ancient temple ideology — washing, anointing, sacred clothing, progressive covenants, name-and-token-mediated ascent — is documented across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East and recurs in patterns that exceed what 1842 cultural availability can explain. The specific Masonic-form elements in the May 1842 endowment are products of eighteenth-century English Masonic ritual development. The faithful argument is therefore not "the specific Masonic forms trace back through ancient priesthood transmission" but rather "Joseph used eighteenth-century English Masonic forms as teaching scaffolding for ancient temple content whose underlying pattern recurs across ancient initiation traditions." The teaching scaffolding came from Masonic forms culturally available to him; the underlying pattern is older than Masonry itself.
This distinction matters because the ancient-parallels case does not require Masonic mediation. It requires the ancient parallels to exist independently of Masonry. That ancient-parallels case is empirically substantial — though the specific interpretation as parallels to the LDS endowment is more LDS-inflected than the documentary evidence alone determines, and a general academic reader without LDS commitments may find the parallels suggestive without finding them dispositive.
Cyril of Jerusalem's Mystagogical Catecheses (c. 350 AD) is the cleanest example of an ancient text Joseph could not have accessed. Cyril's five lectures detail catechumenal initiation: candidates strip off old clothing, are anointed with "exorcised oil, from the very hairs of your head" (Lecture 20:2-4), undergo triple immersion baptism, are clothed in "the garment of salvation" — white robes (19:10-11), are sealed with the sign, and receive a new name through ritual progression.[32] On Eddington's bigram analysis, Cyril is the second-highest bigram match to the endowment — above the bigram match between the endowment and the nineteenth-century Masonic rite.[26:4] (The bigram measure has a Christian-vocabulary confound, as noted; the structural argument — stripping/anointing/clothing/sealing/new-name — holds independent of bigram methodology.) No usable English translation of Cyril existed in early-1840s rural Illinois. Systematic English translations of the patristic literature begin in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu — second-century AD Christian Gnostic texts — describe disciples in linen garments surrounding Christ for prayer and contain detailed instructions for the ascending soul to pass heavenly guardians using seals, names, and signs. The first English translation (G. R. S. Mead, 1896) was published fifty-two years after Joseph's death.[33]
Joseph and Aseneth (c. 100 BC – 200 AD) contains a sequence in which Levi reveals "unspeakable mysteries" through hand contact. The first English translation was published in 1918.[34]
The Apocalypse of Paul in the Nag Hammadi library contains an ascent through gates with the apostle giving signs at each. The Nag Hammadi codices were not discovered until 1945 — 103 years after Joseph's death.[35]
The Hekhalot Rabbati describes the adept passing "through the seven doors of the seven heavenly temples, past angels whose name he must give." First Western academic editions appeared in the twentieth century.[36]
The Mari Investiture Panel — an Old Babylonian wall painting (c. 1800 BC) excavated in the 1930s — depicts a royal investiture scene in a temple-garden setting with creation imagery, sacrifice, guardians at the entrance, and the king receiving symbols of authority from a goddess.[18:6] The panel was unknown to Western scholarship until the 1933-1939 Mari excavations.
The Dead Sea Scrolls (1947-1956) include community texts describing rituals "enabling members of the community… to participate in a form of worship that brought them into the presence of God ritually."[18:7]
Margaret Barker's First Temple reconstruction. Barker, an Old Testament scholar in the Methodist Church and a former president of the Society for Old Testament Study, has spent four decades arguing that pre-exilic Israelite religion preserved temple traditions — including a divine council, a high God and an enthroned son figure, ritual meals in heaven, theophanies in the most holy place — that were systematically suppressed in post-exilic redactions but are recoverable from the apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and early Christian texts.[37] Kevin Christensen's Interpreter survey "Twenty Years After 'Paradigms Regained'" documents the convergence between Barker's reconstruction and Latter-day Saint temple themes — a convergence that emerges from her independent reading of Old Testament textual history.[38] Barker is not LDS and has no apologetic stake. Her conclusions are also genuinely contested in mainstream Old Testament scholarship; the "high God / enthroned son" reconstruction is not consensus. The article cites her as independent corroboration of a reading of First Temple ideology that aligns with Latter-day Saint themes — corroboration that is real on her reading and weaker if mainstream scholarship's more conservative reconstruction is preferred.
John W. Welch's The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple (Ashgate Society for Old Testament Study Monographs, 2009; Routledge 2017) — published outside the LDS scholarly press — argues for the Sermon on the Mount as itself an ancient temple text.[39] Welch's reading is contested in mainstream NT scholarship; the article cites it as scholarly support while flagging that the reading is one LDS-friendly interpretation among others.
The Hugh Nibley corpus, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, William Hamblin, and Donald Parry / Stephen Ricks edited volumes catalog parallels across Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek-magical-papyri, Ethiopic, Coptic, and rabbinic literatures.[40][41][42][43][44][45] Gee, Muhlestein, and Hamblin are LDS scholars whose readings of the evidence are inflected by faith commitments; the parallels they document are real, the specific interpretation of those parallels as prefiguring the LDS endowment depends on readings the LDS scholarly tradition has developed. William Hamblin and David Seely's Solomon's Temple: Myth and History (Thames & Hudson, 2007), published outside the LDS press, documents priestly consecration via washing, anointing, and vestments; the Holy of Holies as sacred space; and ritual ascent symbolism implicit in the temple's architectural progression — features common to many ancient temple traditions.[46]
The pattern recurring across these ancient sources — ritual washing, anointing with oil, donning of sacred clothing, conferral of a new name, progressive covenants, ritual ascent or progression toward the divine presence, prayer circle — is striking and is not present in modern Masonic ritual at the depth or specificity it appears in the endowment. Many of the documenting sources were not available to Joseph in any form. The empirical claim — that the pattern is real, recurs across antiquity, and includes Latter-day Saint temple worship as one instance — is well-supported. The interpretation of the pattern as evidence for the Restoration's truth claims depends on readings stronger for LDS-friendly audiences than for general academic ones. The Israelite Temple, with its priestly consecration, washings, anointings, holy of holies, and architectural progression, is the typological parent the LDS scholarly tradition consistently identifies — not Masonry.[46:1]
Further Reading
For the foundational compilation of ancient parallels: Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch, eds., Temples of the Ancient World (FARMS, 1994); Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, eds., The Temple in Time and Eternity (FARMS, 1999); Truman G. Madsen, ed., The Temple in Antiquity (BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984). For Margaret Barker's non-LDS reconstruction of First Temple traditions, see her Temple Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 2007). The clearest single faithful-scholarly response to the borrowing argument is Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, "Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances," Interpreter 15 (2015): 159-237.
The 1842 cultural context
A piece of cultural context the CES Letter does not work in: in 1842 Illinois, Masonry was not coded as a deceptive secret society. The anti-Masonic period of the late 1820s and 1830s — triggered by the William Morgan disappearance in 1826 — had largely subsided by the early 1840s. Masonic lodges were re-establishing themselves; political and religious Americans across denominations were joining; the fraternity was a normal feature of frontier civic life. Hyrum Smith had been a Mason since the mid-1820s. Heber C. Kimball was a Mason before Joseph. John C. Bennett was an active Mason brokering Mormon-Masonic relations from 1840 onward.[7:10][20:1] Joining a Lodge was, in 1842, comparable in social register to joining a fraternal benevolent society in the twentieth century. The CES Letter implicitly invokes a later cultural register in which Masonry would be coded as suspicious or occultic; that coding does not match the 1842 environment.
A related datum: Joseph's Masonic involvement was, by Masonic standards of long-term commitment, opportunistic. He was raised through all three degrees in a single day — the "made a Mason at sight" expedited admission, an honor extended by Grand Master Abraham Jonas of the Grand Lodge of Illinois (whose own motivations included political alliance with the Mormons in Illinois) that bypassed the normal degree-by-degree proficiency requirements.[5:1][21:1] The Nauvoo Lodge was effectively suspended in 1843; Mormon Masons were declared "clandestine" by the Grand Lodge of Illinois in 1844 over irregular-work charges.[20:2] This pattern is consistent with the view that Joseph saw Masonic ritual as a teaching scaffold rather than as a doctrinal commitment — that he engaged the Lodge as long as it served the broader purpose of introducing the endowment, and did not bother with the sustained fraternal investment a long-term Masonic career would have required.
What the silence of the endowed Masons does and does not establish
The first endowment on May 4, 1842 was given to nine men: Hyrum Smith, Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards, William Law, William Marks, George Miller, Newel K. Whitney, and James Adams.[47] Among these nine, James Adams was Deputy Grand Master of the Illinois Grand Lodge. Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Hyrum Smith were Masons. These men would have recognized any third-degree borrowing. Bradshaw documents that "none of the many contemporary Mormon Masons who remained faithful to the Prophet following their temple endowment expressed a concern that Joseph Smith had been untrue to his Masonic oaths by incorporating some Masonic elements into the endowment ceremony."[18:8]
The argument from silence here is real but bounded. The endowed Masons were LDS believers whose loyalty bound their public criticism, Masonic oaths bound them to silence on third-degree content under self-cursing penalties (so a portion of the silence is structurally compelled), and the Grand Lodge of Illinois's 1844 declaration of Mormon Masons as "clandestine" over irregular-work charges has a partially-documented record whose contents cannot definitively rule out content concerns.[48] Within those bounds, what the silence can establish is that the endowed Masons wrote about the endowment in their journals and letters using language that distinguished it from Masonic ritual — Fielding's "Stepping Stone or Preparation for something else, the true Origin of Masonry," Kimball's "Masonry came from priesthood." That language is not consistent with "this is just Masonry I have to keep quiet about." Some endowed Masons did later leave the Church (William Law, William Marks) without publicly charging that the endowment was Masonic plagiarism — even when other religious or doctrinal grievances were on the public record. The silence is not decisive proof of nothing-Masonic; it is one piece of evidence consistent with the faithful reading among others.
Key Point
The silence of the endowed Masons is real: nine men (including a Deputy Grand Master) participated in the May 4 endowment, and none publicly charged Joseph with Masonic borrowing. The argument from silence is bounded by their LDS loyalty, their Masonic oaths, and the partial documentary record of the 1844 clandestine declaration. Within those bounds, the diaries and letters that survive describe the endowment as theologically distinct from Masonry, in language consistent across decades.[18:9]
What endured: covenants, narrative arc, theology
Even granting maximum Masonic borrowing on every gestural form — every token, every sign, every penalty, every piece of ritual vocabulary — the deep structure of the endowment remains theologically and structurally distinct from anything in Masonic ritual.
The endowment's narrative arc: creation of the heavens and the earth (drawn from the Books of Moses and Abraham); placing of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; the Fall; the introduction of the gospel of Jesus Christ; a sequence of progressive covenants — obedience, sacrifice, the law of the gospel, chastity, consecration; the Atonement of Jesus Christ; the return through the veil into God's presence.
Masonic ritual's narrative arc: the legend of Hiram Abiff, master architect of Solomon's Temple, who is murdered by three ruffians for refusing to reveal the Master Mason's word, is buried, and is symbolically raised from the grave by the Worshipful Master. The moral is fidelity, brotherhood, and the persistence of light after death.
These are not the same story. They are stories with structurally different protagonists, structurally different conflicts, and structurally different theological purposes. The endowment's story is every person's story — Adam and Eve as everyman and everywoman, the Fall as universal human condition, the Atonement as universal remedy. The Masonic third-degree story is the story of one specific (legendary) person, and the moral the story teaches concerns brotherhood within a fraternity. The covenants the endowment teaches are made between the participant and God. The covenants the third-degree teaches are made between the participant and his Masonic brethren.
| Feature | Masonic Rites (1842) | Temple Endowment (1842) |
|---|---|---|
| Central narrative | Legend of Hiram Abiff | Creation, Fall, Atonement, return to God's presence |
| Candidate's role | Plays Hiram Abiff | Plays Adam or Eve |
| Theological frame | Non-sectarian; "Great Architect" | Explicitly Christian; Atonement-centered |
| Covenants | Between participant and Masonic brethren | Between participant and God |
| Salvation claim | None — Masonry is not a religion | Essential ordinance for exaltation |
| Gender | Male-only | Men and women from inception |
| Washing and anointing | Absent | Central preparatory ordinance |
| Creation narrative | Absent | Foundational |
| Atonement | Absent | Theological backbone |
| Sealing ordinances | Absent | Central to temple worship |
Matthew B. Brown's Exploring the Connection Between Mormons and Masons catalogs roughly 140 specific elements present in the Masonic third degree but absent from the endowment: sharp objects pressed against the candidate's body, the pillars Jachin and Boaz, the working tools (compass, square, gavel, level, plumb, trowel) of the operative-mason inheritance, the cable-tow, the checkered pavement, the legend of the three ruffians, the 47th Problem of Euclid, the coffin and the symbolic raising sequence specific to the Hiram Abiff drama.[49] Brown also catalogs the inverse — elements present in the endowment but absent from Masonic ritual — and the inverse list is longer in theological substance.
Greg Kearney captures the structural asymmetry in a sentence: "The temple ritual teaches us about our relationship to deity. The Masonic Lodge is teaching us about our relationship to our fellowmen."[24:5]
Eddington's quantitative work converges on the same point. The 9.7-17.2% conceptual overlap is concentrated in clothing references, references to heavenly bodies, the square and compass on garments, and gestural elements (tokens, signs, the Five Points of Fellowship before its 1990 removal). The 80-90% non-overlap is concentrated in narrative content, covenants, theological framework, and soteriology.
Key Point
Even granting maximum Masonic borrowing on every gestural form, the endowment's narrative arc, its covenants made between participant and God, its washing and anointing ordinances, its sealing theology, and its salvation claim are all absent from Masonic ritual. The covenants and the narrative are the endowment.
The hardest version of the question
The deepest residual challenge — the one Bruno-Swick-Literski press hardest, and which the article should be honest about — is whether the "ancient pattern restored" claim has the kind of empirical content that can be tested against alternatives.
The honest faithful response has two parts.
First, the framework does make empirical claims that can be tested. It claims that ancient temple-style initiation rituals existed, that they shared specific structural features (washing, anointing, sacred clothing, progressive covenants, name-and-token-mediated ascent), and that these features recur across cultures and texts in ways that go beyond what cultural diffusion or chance can explain. The cross-cultural pattern catalog (Egyptian, Near Eastern, Cyril, Pistis Sophia, Joseph and Aseneth, the Mari Panel, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hekhalot literature, Barker's First Temple reconstruction, Welch on the Sermon on the Mount) and the documentary work in Hamblin and Seely on actual ancient Israelite temple practice all bear on the empirical claim. The empirical claim — "the pattern is real, recurs, and includes Latter-day Saint temple worship as one instance" — is well-supported by the available evidence, with the methodological caveats already noted about LDS-inflected readings.
Second, the framework does not make a strict claim about the historical channel by which the pattern reached Joseph. Faithful scholars do not need to claim a documentary chain of custody from the First Temple to the Red Brick Store. They claim — and the evidence supports — that the patterns Joseph instantiated have ancient analogues he could not have reached through his cultural environment, whether those patterns reached him by direct revelation, by providential preservation of fragments in many traditions, or by some combination.
What the faithful position should not claim — and apologetic literature has sometimes overclaimed — is that "we have proven ancient transmission to Joseph Smith." We have not. What we have is a pattern of correspondences between Latter-day Saint temple worship and ancient initiation traditions, documented across multiple sources at multiple temporal layers, exceeding what 1842 cultural availability can explain. The pattern's interpretation — direct revelation, inspired pattern-recognition, providential preservation, or some combination — is a theological judgment that the textual data do not by themselves settle.
Bradshaw's "distant cousins" formulation, which much faithful scholarship accepts, is the most defensible current statement of the faithful position: Masonic and temple rituals share "some common ancestry in the Bible and also some nineteenth-century borrowing."[23:1] The "nineteenth-century borrowing" is the form-level overlap; the "common ancestry in the Bible" is the broader temple-ideology pattern.
Bottom line
The CES Letter's seven-week argument for wholesale Masonic borrowing requires four things at once: (a) treating the categorical absence of pre-1842 Masonic-form vocabulary as the only relevant timeline question, when the prior decade of canonical revelation establishes the development of temple ordinance categories, narrative content, and covenant structure that the May 1842 ceremony placed Masonic-form vocabulary inside of; (b) treating 9.7-17.2% textual overlap as proof of plagiarism, when the same threshold applied to documented fraternal-ritual borrowing (Odd Fellows-Masonic at 24.7%) sits meaningfully higher; (c) treating ancient Christian and Jewish initiation patterns Joseph could not have accessed as irrelevant; and (d) substituting surface ritual parallel for deep structural and theological identity, when the actual structural and theological identity of the endowment lies in its narrative arc, covenants, and soteriology — none of which are present in Masonic ritual at any level the comparison documents.
The strongest critical scholarly version of the criticism — Buerger's "real but limited overlap, no wholesale borrowing"; Bradshaw's "distant cousins, common ancestry in the Bible, nineteenth-century borrowing on form" — is more nuanced than the CES Letter and lands much closer to the faithful response than to wholesale-plagiarism. The textual and chronological evidence is consistent with the faithful reading and inconsistent with the wholesale-borrowing reading the CES Letter implicitly defends. The deeper interpretive question — whether the pattern of correspondences with ancient initiation traditions points to direct revelation, providential preservation, inspired pattern recognition, or some combination — goes beyond what textual data alone can settle, and the case for the Restoration as a whole is what carries the deeper claim.
When the topic is genuinely hard — and the Masonic question is genuinely hard, with real Masonic-form parallels and a chronology that looks suggestive on its face for those specific elements — what stands firm is what we can independently document. The pre-1842 chronology of categorical temple ordinance development is documented in canonical revelation across a decade. The quantitative limit on textual overlap is documented in Eddington's analysis. The ancient parallels Joseph could not have known are documented in Cyril, the Pistis Sophia, the Mari Panel, the Nag Hammadi codices, Margaret Barker's First Temple reconstructions, and the broader catalog of ancient Christian and Jewish initiation literature. The framework of the early Saints — Masonry came from priesthood — is documented across multiple inner-circle witnesses contemporary to the May 1842 ceremony as their theological interpretation of what they had received.
What carries the broader case is what stands at the bedrock: the Book of Mormon, produced in roughly sixty working days, with no whistleblowers, with internal and external evidences whose strength has only grown over time, and with no credible naturalistic explanation. The Masonic question is hard. The Book of Mormon question is what does not depend on the Masonic question's resolution — and the case for the endowment's divine origin ultimately rests on the same foundation.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 1, p. 107. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," nos. 2–7, pp. 107–108. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," p. 109. The CES Letter reproduces a side-by-side comparison and an illustration captioned "MASTER GIVING THE GRAND MASONIC WORD ON THE FIVE POINTS OF FELLOWSHIP." ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," nos. 4 and 7, pp. 107–108. ↩︎
"Minutes, 15–16 March 1842, as Recorded in Nauvoo Masonic Lodge Minute Book," Joseph Smith Papers. The minutes record Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon being received and passed to the Fellow Craft degree on March 15 and raised to the Master Mason degree on March 16, with Grand Master Abraham Jonas of the Grand Lodge of Illinois presiding. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-15-16-march-1842-as-recorded-in-nauvoo-masonic-lodge-minute-book/3 ↩︎ ↩︎
"Temple Endowment," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/temple-endowment?lang=eng ↩︎
David John Buerger, "The Development of the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 33–76. Buerger identifies tokens, signs, and penalties as the three categories of "very marked" overlap between the May 1842 endowment and contemporary Masonic ritual, while explicitly noting the absence of Masonic parallels for the creation/Fall narrative, major covenants, and washings/anointings. Buerger reproduces the June 1842 Heber C. Kimball letter to Parley P. Pratt with the verbatim wording "Thare is a similarity of preast Hood in masonry. Br. Joseph Ses Masonry was taken from preasthood but has become degenerated. But menny things are perfect." https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-development-of-the-mormon-temple-endowment-ceremony-2/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), chapters 7–8. Buerger documents the 1990 changes that removed the symbolic penalties and the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil, alongside earlier and later revisions. The 1990 dating is well-documented in contemporaneous Salt Lake Tribune coverage and in Buerger's book-length treatment. The Church History Topics page on "Adjustments to Temple Work" discusses the broader history of temple revisions but does not name 1990 specifically. https://www.signaturebooks.com/books/p/the-mysteries-of-godliness ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 38:32. Revelation given through Joseph Smith, January 2, 1831. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/38?lang=eng ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 88, dictated December 27–28, 1832 and January 3, 1833. The school of the prophets formal greeting and accompanying handshake appears in verses 132–133; the cleanliness requirement in verse 138; the description of the temple as "a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God" in verse 119. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/88?lang=eng ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 95:8. Revelation given through Joseph Smith, June 1, 1833, commanding the Kirtland Temple. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/95?lang=eng ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 105:33. Revelation given through Joseph Smith, June 22, 1834. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/105?lang=eng ↩︎
"Journal, 1835–1836," entry for November 12, 1835, Joseph Smith Papers. Joseph teaches the Twelve about the necessity of an endowment and the washings, anointings, and ritual ordinances to be received in the Kirtland Temple. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/ ↩︎
Oliver Cowdery, journal entry, January 21, 1836. Published in Leonard J. Arrington, "Oliver Cowdery's Kirtland, Ohio, 'Sketch Book,'" BYU Studies 12, no. 4 (1972): 410–426. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol12/iss4/6/ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 124:38–41. Revelation given through Joseph Smith at Nauvoo, Illinois, January 19, 1841 — fourteen months before Joseph's Masonic initiation. The Lord names anointings, washings, baptisms for the dead, and solemn assemblies as the ordinances to be revealed in the Nauvoo Temple. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/124?lang=eng ↩︎ ↩︎
"Introduction to Documents, Volume 9: December 1841–April 1842," Joseph Smith Papers. The introduction frames the chronological context including the publication of the Book of Abraham in Times and Seasons in March 1842. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/intro/introduction-to-documents-volume-9-december-1841-april-1842 ↩︎
Joseph's pre-initiation exposure to Masonic content runs through multiple inner-circle associates fifteen years before his March 1842 initiation. Hyrum Smith joined Freemasonry between 1825 and 1827. Heber C. Kimball was a Mason before Joseph. John C. Bennett, an active Mason, was politically pushing Mormons toward Masonry from late 1840 onward. (Newel K. Whitney's documented Masonic involvement runs through the Nauvoo Lodge from 1842 onward, not pre-conversion; the strongest pre-Joseph case is Kimball, with Whitney as documented later participant rather than pre-Joseph Mason.) The pre-1842 LDS ritual development was therefore not strictly Masonry-independent in a cultural-availability sense, and this concession cuts genuinely against the simplest "fifteen years of Masonry-independent preparation" framing. See Buerger, "The Development of the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony," Dialogue 20, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 33–76, on the Hyrum/Kimball/Bennett biographical particulars. ↩︎
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, "Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 15 (2015): 159–237. Bradshaw documents the pre-1842 chronology of endowment-related teaching, including Joseph's November 1835 instruction to the Twelve about the necessity of an endowment, the Mari Investiture Panel as a Bronze Age Mesopotamian parallel, and the multiple primary-source attestations of the "Masonry came from priesthood" framework from Willard Richards, Benjamin Johnson, and Franklin D. Richards. Bradshaw 2015 (p. 162) addresses the silence of the endowed Masons: "none of the many contemporary Mormon Masons who remained faithful to the Prophet following their temple endowment expressed a concern that Joseph Smith had been untrue to his Masonic oaths by incorporating some Masonic elements into the endowment ceremony." https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/freemasonry-and-the-origins-of-modern-temple-ordinances/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002). Originally published 1994; the 2002 edition is generally a reprint. https://www.signaturebooks.com/books/p/the-mysteries-of-godliness ↩︎
Michael W. Homer, "'Similarity of Priesthood in Masonry': The Relationship between Freemasonry and Mormonism," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 1–113. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/11636/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Michael W. Homer, Joseph's Temples: The Dynamic Relationship Between Freemasonry and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014). Book-length expansion of the 1994 Dialogue article. Documents the "made a Mason at sight" expedited admission as an honor extended by Grand Master Jonas, with Jonas's motivations including political alliance with the Mormons in Illinois. ↩︎ ↩︎
Cheryl L. Bruno, Joe Steve Swick III, and Nicholas S. Literski, Method Infinite: Freemasonry and the Mormon Restoration (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2022). Argues for substantial Masonic influence beyond the endowment, including in early Mormon language and certain Restoration narratives. https://gregkofford.com/products/method-infinite ↩︎
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, "An Important New Study of Freemasonry and the Latter-day Saints: What's Good, What's Questionable, and What's Missing in Method Infinite," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 54 (2022): 223–332. Bradshaw's review of Bruno-Swick-Literski 2022, including the "distant cousins" framing. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/an-important-new-study-of-freemasonry-and-the-latter-day-saints-whats-good-whats-questionable-and-whats-missing-in-method-infinite/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Greg Kearney, "The Message and the Messenger: Latter-day Saints and Freemasonry," paper presented at the FAIR Conference, August 2005. Kearney is a Latter-day Saint Master Mason. The 2005 paper is the source the CES Letter cites for the "no continuous functioning line from Solomon's Temple" admission and for the "medieval stone tradesmen" framing. The verbatim text in Kearney's paper reads: "Freemasonry as we know it today can trace its origins only as far back as the medieval stone Masons guilds of the Middle Ages." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/august-2005/the-message-and-the-messenger-latter-day-saints-and-freemasonry ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Massimo Introvigne's published work on Mormonism and Freemasonry frames Joseph as having "used the Masonic language of the rituals for the purpose of confirming his followers familiar with Freemasonry into a doctrine which had no 'similarities' with anything they had heard in the masonic lodges." Introvigne is an Italian Catholic sociologist of religion specializing in new religious movements; his work on Mormonism and Freemasonry has been engaged by LDS scholars but he has no LDS apologetic stake. The formulation appears in his work on Latter-day Saint origins and is widely catalogued in the secondary scholarship; the BH Roberts Foundation maintains a digital catalog entry tracking Introvigne's framing on this question. ↩︎
David Eddington, "A Textual Comparison of Masonic Rites and the LDS Temple Endowment," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 66 (2025): 311–356. Quantitative analysis using n-gram, vocabulary-overlap, and conceptual-similarity techniques across the 1931 Paden version of the LDS endowment, the 1866 Duncan Masonic ritual, the Pearl of Great Price (Books of Moses and Abraham), Cyril of Jerusalem's Mystagogical Catecheses, and the 1909 Odd Fellows rite. Core findings: 9.7–17.2% conceptual overlap between endowment and Masonic rite; 18.4% vocabulary overlap with the Pearl of Great Price; 24.7% Masonic-Odd Fellows overlap; bigram similarity between endowment and Cyril higher than between endowment and Masonic rite. Methodological caveats: the 1931 Paden text is a publicly available proxy for an unavailable 1842 original; bigram comparison across translated texts is sensitive to translator vocabulary choices; vocabulary measures word-frequency overlap rather than ritual-form overlap; the Cyril comparison has a Christian-vocabulary confound on the bigram measure. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-textual-comparison-of-masonic-rites-and-the-lds-temple-endowment/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Detailed methodology caveats on Eddington's analysis. "Vocabulary overlap" measures word-frequency match. "Conceptual overlap" measures sentence-level concept matching under criteria Eddington describes as "liberal" (counting loosely related material) and "restrictive" (requiring tight conceptual correspondence). "Bigram similarity" measures two-word sequence overlap. None of these is a direct measure of ritual-form overlap: the specific Masonic-form elements — penalties with verbatim third-degree wording, the Five Points of Fellowship as a structured gesture, the tokens with associated penalty signs — are real and identifiable even at modest vocabulary or bigram measures, so vocabulary analysis is necessary but not sufficient for the question of how much Masonic ritual form the endowment incorporated. The 1931 Paden text is the most appropriate publicly available proxy for the unavailable 1842 original, but it is a reconstruction of a ceremony revised multiple times since 1842; other Masonic-ritual versions exist beyond the 1866 Duncan text Eddington uses, and methodological choices on both sides bound the precision of the figures. The Cyril comparison's bigram measure has a Christian-vocabulary confound: Cyril is Greek (the bigram analysis runs on an English translation) and is explicitly Christian (anointing in the name of Christ, baptism into the Trinity, sealing with the Holy Spirit, clothing in white robes representing the body of Christ); the endowment is also explicitly Christian; the Masonic third degree is explicitly non-sectarian ("Great Architect of the Universe" rather than Christ). A bigram measure of two Christian texts will rank them more similar to each other than either to a non-sectarian text, simply by virtue of shared Christian vocabulary (anointing, sealing, witness, covenant, light). The Cyril comparison therefore does not by itself prove "the endowment is closer to ancient Christian initiation than to Masonic ritual." What it can show is that ancient Christian initiation literature contains structural features (pre-baptismal stripping, anointing with oil, white robes, sealing with a sign, new-name reception, ritual progression) that recur in the endowment in ways Masonic ritual does not match — a structural argument that holds independent of bigram methodology, supported by the broader cross-cultural pattern catalog. See Eddington 2025 for the full methodological treatment. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 2, p. 107. ↩︎
BH Roberts Foundation, "Heber C. Kimball Attributes Freemasonry to Solomon and David and Church Possesses True Masonry," primary-source record. The original quote is from Heber C. Kimball's address at a General Meeting on November 13, 1858; the manuscript record is preserved in the Church History Library, CR 100 318. https://bhroberts.org/records/qqPgcb-wSYutc/heber_c_kimball_attributes_freemasonry_to_solomon_and_david_and_church_possesses_true_masonry ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). The CES Letter's "p. 458" reference is consistent with the pagination of this book-length biography rather than with Stanley B. Kimball's earlier 1975 BYU Studies article ("Heber C. Kimball and Family, the Nauvoo Years," BYU Studies 15, no. 4 [1975]: 447–479), whose 33-page span does not accommodate p. 458. The CES Letter appears to have combined the BYU Studies article title with the page reference of the 1981 University of Illinois Press biography. The November 1858 speech material both works draw from traces to the same primary-source manuscript record in the Church History Library (CR 100 318), also preserved in the BH Roberts Foundation catalog. The 1975 BYU Studies article: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol15/iss4/7 ↩︎
Joseph Fielding diary, January 1844. Fielding, an endowed Latter-day Saint and a Mason, describes Masonry as "a Stepping Stone or Preparation for something else, the true Origin of Masonry." Quoted in Bradshaw 2015 and in Andrew F. Ehat, "'Who Shall Ascend into the Hill of the Lord?' Sesquicentennial Reflections of a Sacred Day: 4 May 1842," in Temples of the Ancient World, ed. Donald W. Parry (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1994). ↩︎
Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses, c. 350 AD. Five lectures detailing Christian initiation: stripping, anointing with oil "from the very hairs of your head" (Lecture 20:2–4), triple immersion baptism, clothing in white robes (19:10–11), reception of a sealing sign, and a new name. F. L. Cross, ed., St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1977), is the standard modern English edition. ↩︎
Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu. Coptic Gnostic texts, c. 2nd century AD, preserved in the Askew Codex (acquired by the British Museum in 1785). First English translation: G. R. S. Mead, Pistis Sophia, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Watkins, 1921 [1st ed. 1896]). ↩︎
Joseph and Aseneth, Jewish-Christian text, c. 100 BC – 200 AD. Earliest English translation: E. W. Brooks, Joseph and Asenath: The Confession and Prayer of Asenath, Daughter of Pentephres the Priest (London: SPCK, 1918). ↩︎
The Nag Hammadi codices, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices unearthed near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in December 1945. James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 4th rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1996), is the standard English edition. ↩︎
The Hekhalot literature, a corpus of Jewish merkavah mystical texts. Hekhalot Rabbati describes the adept's ritual ascent through "the seven doors of the seven heavenly temples, past angels whose name he must give." First Western academic editions in the twentieth century. See Peter Schäfer, ed., Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981). ↩︎
Margaret Barker, Temple Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 2007). Barker, an Old Testament scholar in the Methodist Church, has spent four decades reconstructing pre-exilic First Temple traditions from the apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and early Christian texts. See also Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God (London: SPCK, 1992); The Older Testament (London: SPCK, 1987). Barker's reconstruction of First Temple ideology is contested in mainstream Old Testament scholarship; her readings are influential but not consensus. ↩︎
Kevin Christensen, "Twenty Years After 'Paradigms Regained,' Part 1: The Ongoing, Plain, and Precious Significance of Margaret Barker's Scholarship for Latter-day Saint Studies," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 54 (2022): 1–64. Christensen's 2001 FARMS occasional paper "Paradigms Regained" was the original treatment; the 2022 Interpreter article is the twenty-year follow-up surveying the convergence between Barker's reconstruction of First Temple ideology and Latter-day Saint temple themes. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/twenty-years-after-paradigms-regained-part-1-the-ongoing-plain-and-precious-significance-of-margaret-barkers-scholarship-for-latter-day-saint-studies/ ↩︎
John W. Welch, The Sermon on the Mount in the Light of the Temple, Ashgate Society for Old Testament Study Monographs (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009; reprinted Routledge 2017). Welch argues for the Sermon on the Mount as an ancient temple text reflecting initiation themes. The reading is contested in mainstream NT scholarship. ↩︎
Hugh Nibley, "What Is a Temple?" (1968), reprinted in The Temple in Antiquity, ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984). See also Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1992). ↩︎
Hugh Nibley, "The Early Christian Prayer Circle," BYU Studies 19, no. 1 (1978): 41–78. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol19/iss1/5/ ↩︎
Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch, eds., Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Symbolism (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1994). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/76/ ↩︎
Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, eds., The Temple in Time and Eternity (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1999). Follow-up volume to Temples of the Ancient World. https://mi.byu.edu/the-temple-in-time-and-eternity/ ↩︎
John Gee, "Prophets, Initiation and the Egyptian Temple," Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 31 (2004): 97–107. Gee is an LDS Egyptologist; the article is published in a peer-reviewed non-LDS Egyptology journal. ↩︎
Kerry Muhlestein, BYU Egyptologist whose work documents structural parallels between Egyptian temple ritual and Latter-day Saint temple themes. See Kerry Muhlestein, "Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: A Faithful, Egyptological Point of View," in No Weapon Shall Prosper: New Light on Sensitive Issues, ed. Robert L. Millet (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2011); and "A Primer on Egyptian Religion, How it Parallels LDS Beliefs and Temples." https://rsc.byu.edu/no-weapon-shall-prosper/egyptian-papyri-book-abraham ↩︎
William J. Hamblin and David Rolph Seely, Solomon's Temple: Myth and History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). Non-LDS-press scholarly treatment of Israelite temple practices. Hamblin is an LDS scholar; the volume documents priestly consecration via washing, anointing, and vestments; the Holy of Holies as sacred space; sacred-name traditions; and ritual ascent symbolism implicit in the temple's architectural progression. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Masonry," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Topics article confirms the May 4, 1842 first endowment to nine men and identifies the participants. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/masonry?lang=eng ↩︎
The argument from silence among the endowed Masons is bounded in three ways. (1) The endowed Masons were also LDS believers, several were Joseph's closest associates, and their loyalty and theological commitment bound their public criticism in ways the silence of neutral Masonic observers would not have been bound — argument-from-silence among loyalists is much weaker than argument-from-silence among neutral parties. (2) Masonic oaths bound Master Masons to silence on third-degree content under self-cursing penalties; an endowed Mason who wrote in a private letter that "Joseph is repeating Masonic content" would himself have violated his Masonic oath, so a portion of the silence is structurally compelled by Masonic obligations the witnesses had taken, independent of any belief about whether Joseph violated those obligations. (3) Some external Masons did, in fact, object: the Grand Lodge of Illinois's 1844 declaration of Mormon Masons as "clandestine" came over irregular-work charges whose specific contents are partially documented but not exhaustively recorded; whether content concerns were among them cannot be definitively ruled out. The argument from silence remains real within these bounds — it is one piece of evidence consistent with the faithful reading, not decisive proof of nothing-Masonic. ↩︎
Matthew B. Brown, Exploring the Connection Between Mormons and Masons (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2009). Brown documents approximately 140 specific elements present in the Masonic third degree but absent from the endowment, alongside elements present in the endowment but absent from Masonic ritual. See also "What are the differences between the Endowment and Freemasonry?" FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_temples/Endowment/Freemasonry/Unparallels ↩︎