Failed Revelations
The claim:
"Joseph Smith received a revelation, through the peep stone in his hat, to send Hiram Page and Oliver Cowdery to Toronto, Canada for the sole purpose of selling the copyright of the Book of Mormon, which is another concern in itself (why would God command to sell the copyright to His word?). The mission failed and the prophet was asked why his revelation was wrong.
Joseph decided to inquire of the Lord regarding the question. Book of Mormon witness David Whitmer testified:
'…and behold the following revelation came through the stone: "Some revelations are of God; and some revelations are of man: and some revelations are of the devil." So we see that the revelation to go to Toronto and sell the copy-right was not of God, but was of the devil or of the heart of man.'
— An Address to All Believers in Christ, p.31
How are we supposed to know what revelations are from God, from the devil, or from the heart of man if even the Prophet Joseph Smith couldn't tell?"[1]
"Are we now expected to not only figure out when a prophet is speaking as a prophet and not as a man while also trying to figure out whether our answers to prayer are from God, from the devil, or from ourselves?"[2]
In plain terms, the worry runs like this. Joseph Smith said God told him to send men to Canada to sell the copyright of the Book of Mormon. They went, nobody bought it, and Joseph reportedly explained the flop by saying some revelations come from God and some do not. If a prophet can deliver a revelation that simply does not pan out, and cannot even tell afterward which kind it was, then how is anyone supposed to trust that a revelation, his or your own, came from God at all?
It is a fair question, and the place to start is by granting the part that is true. Some prophecies attributed to Joseph Smith are genuinely hard to square with what happened, and I will name the hardest of them plainly later on rather than pretend they are not there. But the single case the CES Letter actually puts forward, the Canadian trip, is the wrong one to build on, because the document at the center of it says something the CES Letter never quotes.
The line the CES Letter leaves out
For almost two centuries, nobody outside a few archives could read the actual words of the Canadian revelation. The account everyone argued over came from one man, David Whitmer, in a book he published in 1887, fifty-seven years after the trip, by which point he had been out of the Church for nearly half a century and had not even been on the journey he was describing.[3] His is the only source for the famous "some of God, some of the devil" line.
Then in 2009 the Church published the original manuscript of the revelation, written down in 1830. People could finally read what it actually said. The command to sell the copyright was not a flat order. It carried a condition built right into the sentence:
"I grant unto my servant a privilege that he may sell a copyright through you — speaking after the manner of men — for the four provinces, if the people harden not their hearts against the enticings of my spirit and my word."[4]
If the people harden not their hearts. The sale was always conditional on how the Canadians received it. That is not an excuse cooked up later to explain a failure. It is in the oldest copy of the text, and a second witness confirms it from the inside. Hiram Page actually went on the trip, and in an 1848 letter, written thirty-nine years before Whitmer's book and addressed to a man who by then had turned against Joseph, Page recalled that they were to sell the copyright "if they would not harden their hearts; but when we got there, there was no purchaser."[5]
So the one eyewitness who was there remembered the condition, the original manuscript contains the condition, and the man the CES Letter quotes was neither present nor writing anytime near the events. A skeptic can still ask a sharp question: if the revelation was conditional, why send four men on a 200-mile winter trip at all? Because the trip was the test. Joseph could not know in advance whether the people would harden their hearts; the only way to find out was to go and offer it. The condition is the frame that makes the outcome readable, not a patch applied after the fact.
There is one more wrinkle worth clearing up, since it sounds damning at first. Selling a "copyright" is not selling God's word, any more than an author selling foreign publishing rights is selling the story itself. The historical work on this episode shows the trip was a sensible business move: a printer in Palmyra had begun pirating Book of Mormon text, and Canada was a separate legal market where a copyright could shut piracy down there too.[6] The named exhibit, in other words, falls apart on the one document the argument is built on. The fuller legal and source history is in the in-depth version.
The Bible already works this way
Behind the Canadian case is a bigger assumption, and it is the one really doing the work: that a true prophet's predictions must all come true exactly as stated, or he is exposed as false. Past the specifics, the whole argument leans on that one standard.
The trouble is that the Bible does not hold its own prophets to it. Take Jonah. He walks through Nineveh announcing, with no "if" attached, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."[7] Forty days pass. Nineveh is not overthrown, because the city repents and God spares it. And the Bible treats this as the story working exactly right, not as Jonah getting caught in a false prophecy. The book of Jeremiah states the principle out loud: when God pronounces judgment on a nation, "if that nation… turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them."[8] A prophecy of doom can be called off by repentance. That is simply how prophecy works in scripture.
Or take Isaiah, who tells King Hezekiah plainly, "Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." Hezekiah prays. Isaiah comes back the same day with a corrected message: fifteen more years.[9] The first word did not come to pass, and the Bible never calls Isaiah a false prophet for it. Conditional warnings, answered prayers, course corrections: these are not Latter-day Saint loopholes. They are written into how God speaks through human beings all through the Bible. The standard the critic applies to Joseph Smith would quietly disqualify Jonah and Isaiah too.
The rulebook came first
This is where the argument turns around on itself. The framework critics treat as a convenient excuse, that prophets are fallible men who can get things wrong, was not invented after the fact to clean up Joseph's record. He wrote it into scripture himself, in 1831, before nearly every prophecy people now point to as a failure.
In a revelation Joseph placed at the very front of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Church's book of modern revelations, the Lord says his commandments were given to his servants:
"in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding. And inasmuch as they erred it might be made known."[10]
Read that slowly, because it gives away the whole game. God says up front that he speaks through imperfect men, in their own limited words, and that when they err it will be made known and corrected. A church that expected its prophets to be flawless does not open its book of revelations by saying the opposite. Joseph understood his own role this way from the beginning. The standard the CES Letter assumes, that real revelation would be perfect and automatic, is the very standard Joseph's own scripture rejects.
The prophecies that came true
A prophet is not tested only by what went wrong, and the CES Letter is careful to mention only the trip that failed. The same record holds predictions that came true in ways that are hard to wave off.
The clearest is the Civil War. On December 25, 1832, Joseph dictated a revelation that wars would break out "beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina," that the Southern States would divide against the Northern States and call on Great Britain, and that it would mean "the death and misery of many souls."[11] Twenty-eight years later the war began at Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, the exact state he had named. This was not a lucky guess about a war already underway. The 1832 crisis that might have looked like a trigger fizzled out peacefully within months; the actual war came nearly three decades later. And the text was printed in 1851, a full ten years before the fighting started, so it cannot be dismissed as written after the fact.[12]
Another came due under conditions designed to make it fail. In 1838 Joseph prophesied that the apostles would leave for a mission "over the great waters" from a specific spot, the temple lot in Far West, Missouri, on a specific date, April 26, 1839.[13] By the time that date arrived, the Saints had been driven out of Missouri at gunpoint under an extermination order, and armed men had sworn that whatever else Joseph predicted, this one would not happen.[14] On the morning of April 26, the apostles slipped back into hostile territory before dawn, met at that exact lot, held the appointed meeting, and left for England as commanded. The men watching for it to fail are part of the historical record, which is what makes it so hard to explain away.
I am keeping this short, but there are more, and the in-depth version lays them out: Joseph's repeated, witnessed predictions of his own violent death, the prophecy that the Saints would become a great people in the Rocky Mountains recorded years before they went, and the Liberty Jail promise that he would triumph over his enemies, made when he was a prisoner facing a treason charge and his church lay in ruins.
The revelations that don't filter out
When you filter the long list of alleged failures down to formal revelations, stated without conditions, with solid documentation behind them, a few genuinely hard cases remain.
The hardest is the temple at Independence, Missouri. In 1832 Joseph prophesied that a temple would be "reared in this generation" on a particular plot, and that "this generation shall not all pass away" before it was built.[15] It has now been 194 years. No Latter-day Saint temple stands on that plot; the Church does not even own it. There are faithful responses. A later revelation establishes that when God commands a work and enemies violently prevent it, he no longer requires it, and the Saints were in fact driven from Missouri by mobs.[16] Many Latter-day Saints also read "generation" here as the whole final dispensation rather than thirty or forty years, and hold that the temple will yet be built. Those readings are defensible, but I will be straight: the word "generation" plainly suggests a near-term span, and reading it as a long age is an interpretation applied after the deadline passed. This one is not tidy.
Two others belong in the same column. A revelation gave Hyrum Smith a calling that sounds like the work of a long ministry, his name to be honored "from generation to generation, forever and ever," and he was murdered at Carthage three and a half years later.[17] The faithful reading is that a calling can be fulfilled through faithful witness and even martyrdom rather than length of years, the way Christian tradition reads the deaths of apostles like Stephen and Paul, and that Hyrum's name genuinely is honored across generations now. That is a real answer, but it is an interpretation, not a tidy match to how the words first sound. And in 1843 Joseph predicted that the United States government would be "broken up" unless it redressed the wrongs done to the Saints in Missouri.[18] The word "unless" is in the original, which makes the prophecy conditional, and the Civil War did reshape the country profoundly; but the government was not literally broken up, and that case is not one I am willing to call fully closed.
These are real gaps, and I am not going to minimize them or bury them in footnotes. What they are not is the case the CES Letter actually made, and they sit inside a record that also contains the prophecies above that did come true.
Built on what isn't there
Step back and notice the shape of the whole argument. Every one of these hard cases is a place where the historical record does not deliver something, a temple that was not built, a ministry cut short, a government still standing. The argument works by pressing on the gaps and asking you to conclude the prophet was false.
But a prophet's claim does not rest mainly on what is missing. It rests on what is actually there, and the largest thing that is actually there is the Book of Mormon. A temple that was never built and a timeline that ran out are both absences, holes in the record you can point to. The Book of Mormon is the opposite: a 269,000-word book that exists, dictated out loud in roughly sixty-five working days by a young man who had never written a book, with no notes and no rewrites, witnessed by multiple men who handled the plates and never took back their testimony.[19] Two centuries of effort have produced no ordinary explanation for how it came to be. The failed-revelations argument tries to defeat Joseph by cataloging the blank spaces while never once reckoning with the book, the same way it built its whole case on a manuscript it never quoted. Reckon with the book, and the heart of the prophet's claim is untouched.
The deeper worry under all of this, whether a spiritual feeling can be trusted as evidence at all, and whether the fact that people in other faiths feel the Spirit too cancels a Latter-day Saint's witness, are real questions, and they get full treatment in Reliability of Spiritual Witnesses and Competing Spiritual Claims. The CES Letter's two-tier punchline, that we are now expected to discern both when a prophet speaks as a prophet and whether our own answers come from God, has a plain answer: yes. That is the work. Scripture names the method, and it was always going to ask something of us. A faith that handed out certainty with no discernment required would not be one worth having.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 4, pp. 76-77. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," p. 77 (closing rhetorical question). ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer, 1887), 31. Written 57 years post-event, 49 years post-excommunication. Whitmer was not a participant in the Canadian trip. He is the sole source for the "Some revelations are of God; some of man; some of the devil" attribution and for the "Toronto" geographical error. ↩︎
"Revelation, circa Early 1830," Revelation Book 1, pp. 30-31, Joseph Smith Papers. First published in Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper, eds., Revelations and Translations: Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile Edition, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Church Historian's Press, 2009). The conditional clause ("if the people harden not their hearts") is in the 1830 manuscript text, not added later. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-circa-early-1830/1 ↩︎
Hiram Page to William McLellin, February 2, 1848. Published transcription in Larry E. Morris, "'I Should Have an Eye Single to the Glory of God': Joseph Smith's Account of the Angel and the Plates," FARMS Review 17, no. 1 (2005): 11-82. Page, who participated in the Canadian copyright trip, confirmed the conditional clause ("if they would not harden their hearts") and described returning with "added respect" for Joseph's prophetic role. (Note: the FARMS Review article URL at scholarlypublishingcollective.org may be paywalled for unauthenticated readers; the print citation is the citation of record. The article is also accessible through institutional library subscriptions.) ↩︎
Stephen K. Ehat, "'Securing' the Prophet's Copyright in the Book of Mormon: Historical and Legal Context for the So-Called Canadian Copyright Revelation," BYU Studies Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2011): 5-70. Definitive scholarly treatment. Demonstrates legal plausibility under 1814 British copyright law (54 Geo. 3, c. 156), establishes Kingston (not Toronto) as the correct venue, reconstructs the full revelation text from manuscript sources, and documents the January 1830 Abner Cole piracy crisis as motivating context. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/securing-the-prophets-copyright-in-the-book-of-mormon-historical-and-legal-context-for-the-so-called-canadian-copyright-revelation ↩︎
Jonah 3:4: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." The Nineveh prophecy is unconditional in its surface form; the city repented (Jonah 3:5-10) and the destruction was averted. Jonah remained the prophet of Israel. ↩︎
Jeremiah 18:7-10 (KJV). The canonical biblical framework for conditional prophecy. Prophecies of judgment can be averted by repentance; prophecies of blessing can be forfeited by disobedience. The full passage continues: "And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them." ↩︎
2 Kings 20:1-6; Isaiah 38. Isaiah delivered an unconditional message ("thou shalt die"); Hezekiah prayed; Isaiah returned the same day with a corrective revelation extending Hezekiah's life by fifteen years. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 1:24-28. The Lord's preface to the D&C, received November 1, 1831 — before most of the alleged "failed prophecies" critics cite. Anticipates errant servants speaking through human limitation, names a correction mechanism, builds in iterative growth. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 87:1-4. Dated December 25, 1832; scribed by Frederick G. Williams; copied into Revelation Book 2 between January-February 1833. Joseph Smith Papers, "Revelation, 25 December 1832 [D&C 87]." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-25-december-1832-dc-87/1 ↩︎
Scott C. Esplin, "'Have We Not Had a Prophet Among Us?': Joseph Smith's Civil War Prophecy," in Kenneth L. Alford, ed., Civil War Saints (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2012). https://rsc.byu.edu/civil-war-saints/have-we-not-had-prophet-among-us-joseph-smiths-civil-war-prophecy The author is Scott C. Esplin (BYU Religion professor) — not to be confused with Ronald K. Esplin, a different historian. Documents the 1832 Nullification Crisis context, the 1851 Pearl of Great Price publication, Orson Pratt's preaching of the prophecy in the 1850s, and the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury May 5, 1861 reprint headlined "Have we not had a prophet among us?" ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 118:4-5. Dated July 8, 1838, given at Far West, Missouri. The revelation specified the date (April 26, 1839), location (Far West temple lot), and commission (mission to England) for the Twelve's departure. ↩︎
Wilford Woodruff, journal entry (later retrospective). Records the Missouri mob's vow that "if every other revelation [Joseph] gave were fulfilled, that should not be." Cited in Susan Easton Black, Insight on D&C 118: April 26, 1839. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 84:1-5. Dated September 22-23, 1832. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 124:49-51. Dated January 19, 1841. The canonical apologetic resolution mechanism: when commanded people give full diligence and enemies prevent the work, the commandment is no longer required. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 124:91-96. The patriarchal-keys-and-prophet-seer-revelator material for Hyrum, designating William Law as counselor "in the room of" Hyrum so Hyrum could take the office of Patriarch. The "name had in honorable remembrance from generation to generation, forever and ever" language in v. 96 is the operative honor-and-remembrance promise. Some apologetic accounts have framed this case as "Hyrum's protection" by analogy to Isaiah 54:17, but the verses do not contain the "no weapon formed against thee shall prosper" clause. They contain calling-language. The case the article must engage is the calling-language-and-long-arc-ministry case, not a literal physical-protection promise. ↩︎
History of the Church 5:394, May 6, 1843. The "unless the United States redress the wrongs" language is in the original utterance, supplying explicit conditional structure that critics' "broken up as a government" framing typically omits. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "How Long Did It Take Joseph Smith to Translate the Book of Mormon?" Ensign, January 1988, calculates the dictation phase at "sixty-five or fewer working days" (mid-April through late June 1829). See also John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 11-50, refining the estimate to "not many more than the equivalent of about 65 actual working days." The total word count is 269,510. The broader period of the Book of Mormon's coming forth — from the 1823 Moroni visitation, through the lost 116 pages and other events, to the completed dictation in 1829 — extends across several years and remains debated. The full case is engaged in the Book of Mormon Translation section of this site. ↩︎