Temples & Freemasonry
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] The two rituals share visible forms: tokens, signs, a verbatim "Five Points of Fellowship" exchanged at the veil, a staged drama. The CES Letter lays the endowment and the Masonic third degree side by side on page 109 and lets the near-identical wording carry the argument.[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 section 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 establishes that Joseph had the opportunity to borrow, which no one disputes; it says nothing about where the ceremony's meaning originated. Matching handgrips show that two rituals share a gesture, not that one fathered the other. So the question to put to the plagiarism reading is the one the timeline is built to step 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," half a year before any ceremony was performed. The Kirtland Temple followed: in January 1836 Joseph and the First Presidency washed and anointed one another there, performing structured ritual 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 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 through the criticism in its most rigorous 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 a layer of forms. It cannot account for the doctrine those forms were wrapped around, because the doctrine was already written down.
What a count of the words shows
For most of its history the comparison between the endowment and Masonry has run 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.[4] 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 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 his catechetical lectures around 350 AD, describing an early Christian initiation of washing, anointing, clothing, and covenant. Joseph Smith had no way to read them; no English translation was at hand in Nauvoo, and Joseph read no Greek. The resemblances that go deeper than gestures point not to a Nauvoo lodge room but past it, to the ancient world, by some fifteen centuries. A man assembling a ceremony out of the lodge he had just joined does not, by accident, build something that lines up better with a Christian liturgy buried sixteen hundred years in the past.
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.[5] 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 of Fellowship, the staging that read as Masonic. Untouched stood the covenants. 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 exactly what you would expect of staging laid over a meaning that did not come from the stage. The history of those revisions, and Joseph's own remark on the day he introduced the endowment that it was "not arranged right," is the subject of the sub-article on temple changes, which 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 section 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. What he carried out of Freemasonry was a way to stage the 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. 106. "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 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. 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. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 5, p. 108. ↩︎