Temples & Freemasonry
The temple endowment is the central ceremony of Latter-day Saint worship. Inside the temple, a member is washed and anointed, clothed in white, taught a dramatized account of the creation, the Fall, and the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ, and led to make a series of covenants with God before passing through a veil that represents the return to His presence. It is the most sacred of the Church's rites, and members do not discuss its specifics outside the temple.
Freemasonry is a centuries-old fraternal order, organized into lodges, that teaches moral lessons through ritual drama. A man advances by degrees, learning at each stage a set of tokens (handgrips), signs (gestures), and passwords, and swearing oaths to keep them secret. The version Joseph Smith encountered is the eighteenth-century English form, the one with the legend of Hiram Abiff, the murdered architect of Solomon's Temple, at the center of its third degree.
The two rituals overlap on the surface, and the overlap is not a coincidence of timing. Joseph Smith was raised a Master Mason on March 15 and 16, 1842. Seven weeks later, on May 4, he gathered nine men in the upper room of his Nauvoo store and gave them the temple endowment for the first time.[1] Both ceremonies use tokens, signs, and a staged drama; the pre-1990 endowment shared with the Masonic third degree a verbatim exchange called the Five Points of Fellowship. The CES Letter lays the endowment and the third degree side by side on page 109 and lets the near-identical wording carry the argument: the temple, it concludes, is borrowed Masonry dressed up as revelation.[2]
That overlap is real, and a response that pretends otherwise forfeits the reader's trust. At the level of presentation, the borrowing is not in dispute. No serious scholar, believing or skeptical, denies that Joseph drew gestural vocabulary from the lodge he had just joined.
The case the CES Letter never makes is that this vocabulary reaches the meaning underneath it. Two columns of nearly identical wording prove the columns are nearly identical. Seven weeks of proximity establish that Joseph had the opportunity to borrow, which no one disputes, and say nothing about where the ceremony's meaning came from. The question to put to the plagiarism reading is the one the timeline steps around: if Joseph lifted the endowment from Freemasonry, where did its theology come from? The lodge teaches no creation account, no Fall, no Atonement, no covenants of obedience, sacrifice, chastity, and consecration, no return to the presence of God. Those are the substance of the endowment, and the section that calls the ceremony a copy never names a single Masonic source for any of them.
A decade of doctrine before the Lodge
The answer to where the theology came from is on the public record, and it predates the Nauvoo Lodge by years.
The language of temple ordinances was canonized across the decade before Joseph became a Mason. In January 1831, more than eleven years ahead of his initiation, a revelation promised the Saints they would be "endowed with power from on high." By November 1835 Joseph was teaching the Twelve about washings, anointings, and the endowment as a body of content, telling them they needed it "in order that you may be prepared and able to overcome all things," five months before any ceremony was performed. In January 1836 he and the First Presidency washed and anointed one another in the Kirtland Temple, six years before any lodge encounter. And on January 19, 1841, fourteen months before he was raised a Master Mason, a revelation commanded the Nauvoo Temple itself, naming it as the house for "your anointings, and your washings, and your baptisms for the dead, and your solemn assemblies."[3]
The distinction that does the work here is between form and content. What the seven-week window can explain is a layer of forms: the handgrips, the signs, the staged delivery, the Five Points of Fellowship. What it cannot explain is the doctrine those forms were wrapped around, because the doctrine was already written down. The creation and Fall material came from the Book of Moses, dictated in 1830 and 1831; the covenants and the endowment of power were named in canonical revelation across the whole decade that followed.
This is also the verdict of the scholar critics most often cite. David John Buerger's history of the endowment is written from a position skeptical of orthodox claims, not from the apologists' side, and his bottom line is careful in both directions:
"The temple ceremony cannot be explained as wholesale borrowing from Masonry; neither can it be explained as completely unrelated to Masonry."[4]
Buerger lists the overlap precisely, tokens, signs, and penalties, and is just as precise about what has no Masonic parallel at all: the creation and Fall narrative, the major covenants, the washings and anointings. The structural backbone of the endowment, on the account of its most rigorous critical historian, is independent of the lodge.
The full paper trail belongs to the sub-article on Masonic Connections, which sets the seven-week chronology against the decade-long documentary record and works the criticism in its most demanding form. The short version is that the endowment's content was a long project under canonical revelation, named and located and tied to specific buildings, while the gestural staging the side-by-side comparisons turn on entered the ceremony in 1842. A window of seven weeks can account for the staging. It cannot account for the doctrine that staging was built to carry.
The strongest form of the charge
A fair hearing means stating the criticism at full strength before answering it, and at full strength it has real force.
Among all the parallels, one is conspicuously close, and the CES Letter is right to put it at the center. The Five Points of Fellowship was a five-part contact at the veil. Set the pre-1990 endowment wording beside the Masonic third degree:
"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"[5]
The wording is too close to be coincidence. A conditional oath turns up all across the ancient world, so its wording could come from many places; this is different. The Five Points is a specific gesture sequence, and it came into the endowment from eighteenth-century English Masonry as a teaching vehicle. So the concession belongs on the table without hedging: the gesture itself, not just its wording, was borrowed.[6]
What the concession does not reach is the meaning the gesture was placed inside. In its Masonic home the Five Points is the climax of the Hiram Abiff legend, a fraternal greeting whose moral is loyalty among brothers. In the endowment the same physical contact marked the participant's reception by Christ at the veil, a covenant moment in an Atonement-centered story with no counterpart in the lodge. The form was Masonic; the function was not. The deeper challenge, why the borrowing was acceptable in 1842 and removed in 1990, belongs to the sub-article on temple changes; the point here is narrower. The hardest single piece of evidence the CES Letter can produce is a gesture the Church itself took out, and it left every covenant standing.
A second pillar of the section is a line from the apostle Heber C. Kimball, who had been a Mason before Joseph: "We have the true Masonry. The Masonry of today is received from the apostasy which took place in the days of Solomon, and David... but we have the real thing."[7]
The CES Letter reads this as a confession that the temple is just Masonry. It says the reverse. Kimball was claiming that the priesthood is the ancient original and Masonry its degraded descendant, not its parent. Whether that claim about ancient transmission is historically true is a separate question the Masonic Connections article treats with care. But it cannot be quoted as an admission of borrowing when its whole point is to deny it.
What the texts and the centuries show
For most of its history the comparison between the endowment and Masonry ran on impression. In 2025 David Eddington ran it on the texts.
His computational study put the conceptual overlap between the endowment and a nineteenth-century Masonic rite at 9.7 to 17.2 percent.[8] For scale, the Odd Fellows, an order that openly modeled itself on Masonry, overlap with Masonic ritual at about 24.7 percent. The endowment sits below that floor. It overlaps less with the lodge than a self-described Masonic imitation does, and less than it overlaps with the Latter-day Saint scripture Joseph had published a decade earlier. A ceremony copied wholesale from Masonry should not read as more Latter-day Saint than Masonic. This one does.
The same study turned up something stranger. When Eddington measured the endowment against Cyril of Jerusalem's fourth-century instructions to new Christians, the match came in higher than the match to the lodge. Cyril wrote around 350 AD, describing an early Christian initiation of stripping off old clothing, anointing with oil, washing, clothing in a white robe, sealing with a sign, and receiving a new name.[9] Joseph Smith had no way to read him: no usable English translation existed in frontier Illinois, and Joseph read no Greek. The resemblances that run deeper than gestures point not to a Nauvoo lodge room but past it, by some fifteen centuries, to the ancient world.
And Cyril is not alone. The pattern Joseph could not have reached, ritual washing, anointing with oil, sacred clothing, a new name, progressive covenants, and an ascent toward God's presence guarded by signs, recurs across the ancient record. It appears in the Mari Investiture Panel, an Old Babylonian wall painting from about 1800 BC that was buried in the Syrian desert until archaeologists uncovered it in the 1930s, showing a king receiving symbols of authority from a goddess in a temple garden with guardians at the gates.[10] It appears in the conditional self-curse, the oath form behind the endowment's old penalties, which is documented in Akkadian treaties and across the Hebrew Bible, from Ruth and Job to the covenant God cut with Abraham, millennia before any lodge existed.[11] None of this was on a shelf Joseph could open.
This is why the careful scholarly verdict, from believers and skeptics alike, sits far from "borrowed Masonry." Jeffrey Bradshaw's summary, which much faithful scholarship accepts, calls the endowment and Masonry "distant cousins rather than members of the same nuclear family," sharing "some common ancestry in the Bible and also some nineteenth-century borrowing."[12] The nineteenth-century borrowing is the form. The common ancestry is the pattern, and the pattern is older than the lodge by thousands of years.
What 1990 took out, and what it left
The CES Letter's strongest move on the changes is to ask why, if the endowment was divine, the Church removed its most Masonic-looking elements in 1990. The symbolic penalties went; the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil went.[13] If those came out, the argument runs, the whole ceremony stands exposed as borrowed.
That inference holds only if the presentation and the ordinance are the same thing, and they are not. Set what 1990 removed beside what it kept. Out came the elements that looked most like a lodge: the penalties, the Five Points, the staging that read as Masonic. The covenants stood untouched. Every promise a member makes at the veil, obedience, sacrifice, the law of the gospel, chastity, consecration, remained exactly where it had been. The revision stripped away the forms most easily traced to Masonry and left the entire substance of the ordinance intact.
Run the plagiarism theory forward and it predicts the opposite. If the borrowed Masonry were holding the ceremony up, taking it out should have brought the ceremony down with it. Instead the most Masonic-looking material proved to be the part the endowment could shed without losing anything essential, which is what you would expect of staging laid over a meaning that did not come from the stage.
The endowment has in fact been revised many times since 1842, under Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and on down to President Nelson, and a faithful account does not hide that. What anchors the pattern is the testimony of the man who introduced it. On the very day he gave the first endowment, Joseph told Brigham Young it was "not arranged right but we have done the best we could," and charged him to "organize and systematize all these ceremonies."[14] The person who started the ceremony did not treat his first attempt as a finished, sealed text. He treated it as a beginning. The sub-article on temple changes traces what each revision since 1842 actually touched, and where the line falls between an ordinance that has held and a presentation that has adapted.
The concession is the doorway into this question, not the verdict on it. Grant everything the CES Letter can prove: the initiation, the seven weeks, the matching gestures, the 1990 removals. None of it reaches the creation, the Fall, the Atonement, or the covenants a Latter-day Saint makes before returning to God. Those Joseph had been teaching and canonizing for years before he ever knelt in a lodge, and the deepest echoes of the endowment sound not from an eighteenth-century lodge room but from temples buried in the ancient Near East that no one in 1842 had yet dug up.
Greg Kearney, a Latter-day Saint who is himself a Master Mason, puts the difference 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."[15] What Joseph carried out of Freemasonry was a way to stage an ordinance. The ordinance, and the theology that gives it meaning, was already his, and it was never anyone else's to teach.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 1, p. 107. "Just seven weeks after Joseph's March 1842 Masonic initiation, Joseph introduced the LDS endowment ceremony in May 1842." ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," p. 109. The page 109 side-by-side sets the endowment's pre-1990 "Five Points of Fellowship" against the Masonic third-degree formula; the wording is nearly identical. ↩︎
D&C 38:32 (January 1831) promised the Saints they would be "endowed with power from on high"; washings and anointings were performed in the Kirtland Temple in January 1836; D&C 124:39 (January 19, 1841) commanded the Nauvoo Temple "for your anointings, and your washings, and your baptisms for the dead, and your solemn assemblies," fourteen months before Joseph's March 1842 Masonic initiation. The full documentary trail is laid out at Masonic Connections. ↩︎
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. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-development-of-the-mormon-temple-endowment-ceremony-2/ ↩︎
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." ↩︎
The Five Points of Fellowship is a specific gestural sequence (foot, knee, breast, hand, mouth/ear) embedded as the candidate's reception at the veil, distinct from the symbolic-penalty wording. Unlike the conditional self-curse, it has no documented ancient analog as a gesture; Buerger 2002 distinguishes the two cases. The faithful position concedes that the gesture sequence, not merely the wording, was borrowed from eighteenth-century English Masonic ritual as a pedagogical vehicle, and that the same gesture was attached in the pre-1990 endowment to the participant's reception by Christ at the veil, a covenant-making moment with no Masonic counterpart. See the Temple Changes article. David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), chapters 7–8. ↩︎
Heber C. Kimball, address at a General Meeting, November 13, 1858: "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." The CES Letter quotes the substance on p. 107. The manuscript record is preserved in the Church History Library, CR 100 318; see BH Roberts Foundation, "Heber C. Kimball Attributes Freemasonry to Solomon and David and Church Possesses True Masonry," https://bhroberts.org/records/qqPgcb-wSYutc/heber_c_kimball_attributes_freemasonry_to_solomon_and_david_and_church_possesses_true_masonry. Kimball had articulated the same framework in a June 1842 letter to Parley P. Pratt, written six weeks after the first endowment: "Br. Joseph Ses Masonry was taken from preasthood but has become degenerated. But menny things are perfect" (reproduced in Buerger 1987). ↩︎
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): 311–326. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-textual-comparison-of-masonic-rites-and-the-lds-temple-endowment/. Measures 9.7–17.2% conceptual overlap with a nineteenth-century Masonic rite, below the roughly 24.7% fraternal-borrowing floor of the Odd Fellows, and finds the endowment more similar in bigram analysis to Cyril of Jerusalem's Mystagogical Catecheses (c. 350 AD) than to the Lodge. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
The Mari Investiture Panel, an Old Babylonian tempera-on-plaster wall painting c. 1800 BC, excavated by André Parrot from the Royal Palace of Mari (modern Syria) in 1933–1939 and now in the Louvre (AO 19826). It depicts King Zimri-Lim receiving symbols of authority from a goddess in a temple-garden setting with creation imagery, guardians, and ritual ascent. The panel was unknown to Western scholarship until the Mari excavations, a century after Joseph Smith. See Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, "Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances," Interpreter 15 (2015): 159–237, and the Masonic Connections article. ↩︎
Conditional self-cursing as an oath-form structure ("if I violate this oath, may [a horrific thing] happen to me") is documented across the ancient Near East millennia before Freemasonry. The foundational study is Delbert R. Hillers, Treaty-Curses and the Old Testament Prophets, Biblica et Orientalia 16 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1964); the most recent comprehensive survey is Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), which argues the structure functioned as covenant-petition. Hebrew Bible instances in the same form include Ruth 1:17, 1 Samuel 3:17, Job 31:21–22, and the covenant of Genesis 15. The pre-1990 endowment penalties were one instance of this ancient structure, not a Masonic invention at the structural level; see the Temple Changes article. ↩︎
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 characterizes Masonic and temple rituals as "distant cousins rather than members of the same nuclear family," sharing "some common ancestry in the Bible and also some nineteenth-century borrowing." 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/ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 5, p. 108. ↩︎
L. John Nuttall journal, entry of February 7, 1877, recording Brigham Young's recollection of Joseph Smith's instruction following the May 1842 endowment: "Brother Brigham, this is not arranged right but we have done the best we could under the circumstances in which we are placed, and I wish you to take this matter in hand and organize and systematize all these ceremonies." Nuttall served as Brigham Young's secretary and recorded the statement during the 1877 St. George Temple endowment systematization Brigham was actively executing. https://archive.org/stream/TheJournalOfLJohnNuttall/The journal of L John Nuttall_djvu.txt ↩︎
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 temple ritual teaches us about our relationship to deity. The Masonic Lodge is teaching us about our relationship to our fellowmen." The CES Letter cites the same 2005 paper for its "no continuous functioning line from Solomon's Temple" admission. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/august-2005/the-message-and-the-messenger-latter-day-saints-and-freemasonry ↩︎