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]
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?
The question lands, and the right place to start is the part of it that is true. Some prophecies attributed to Joseph Smith are hard to square with what happened, and this article names them. 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 nearly 180 years, 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 then 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 oldest surviving copy of the revelation's text, written into an early manuscript book of revelations about a year after the trip. People could finally read what the revelation 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. And the condition is no afterthought: 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. 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…" He took it as a lesson, not an indictment: "by the above we may learn how a revelation may be received and the person receiving it not be benefited" (spelling modernized).[5]
So the one eyewitness who was there remembered the condition, and the manuscript text contains the condition. Why build the whole case on the one witness who was never there?
A skeptic can still ask: if the revelation was conditional, why send four men across fifty miles of frozen lake in midwinter 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 later.
The CES Letter's aside, why would God command his servants to sell the copyright of his own word, 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 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.
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, predates the record it supposedly excuses. Joseph 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]
That one sentence 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.
There are more, and the in-depth version lays them out. Joseph repeatedly predicted his own violent death, with witnesses present. He prophesied that the Saints would go to the Rocky Mountains, years before they went. And in Liberty Jail he promised he would triumph over his enemies, while a prisoner facing a treason charge with his church 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 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 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 Stephen and the Apostle Paul, and that Hyrum's name genuinely is honored across generations now. That is a real answer, but it is an interpretation, not a clean match to how the words first sound. And in 1843, Joseph predicted that the United States government would be "utterly overthrown and wasted" 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 overthrown, and that case is not one I am willing to call fully closed.
These are real gaps. 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
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 adding up what is missing and asking you to conclude the prophet was false.
But you do not weigh a prophet's claim by what is missing; you weigh it by what is there, and the largest thing 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 270,000-word book that exists, dictated out loud in roughly 60 working days with no notes and no rewrites.[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.
Two deeper worries sit under all of this: whether a spiritual feeling can be trusted as evidence at all, and whether people in other faiths feeling the Spirit too cancels a Latter-day Saint's witness. Both are real questions, and the answers live in Reliability of Spiritual Witnesses and Competing Spiritual Claims. The CES Letter's two-tier question, that we are now expected to discern both when a prophet speaks as a prophet and whether our own answers come from God, deserves a simple yes. Expected is exactly the word: scripture assigns the work and spells out 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 (rhetorical question closing the no. 4 discussion). ↩︎
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 men; some of the devil" attribution and for the "Toronto" geographical error. (The Address's own wording is "some revelations are of men"; the CES Letter's quotation renders it "of man.") ↩︎
"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. Text quoted with spelling and punctuation modernized, following Stephen O. Smoot and Brian C. Passantino, eds., "A Revelation to Secure the Copyright of the Book of Mormon," in Joseph Smith's Uncanonized Revelations (Religious Studies Center, BYU), 33-35; the manuscript reads "privelige… enticeings." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-circa-early-1830/1 ↩︎
Hiram Page to William E. McLellin, February 2, 1848 (typescript, Church History Library, MS 9090); printed in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2003), 5:257-59, and quoted in the Joseph Smith Papers introduction to "Revelation, circa Early 1830" and in Scripture Central, KnoWhy 556. Page, a participant in the Canadian copyright trip, confirms the conditional clause ("if they would not harden their hearts") from inside the trip and reflects that "we may learn how a revelation may be received and the person receiving it not be benefited" (spelling modernized; the manuscript reads "revlation… receving… benafited"). His separate letter of May 30, 1847 (in Larry E. Morris, ed., A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon [New York: Oxford University Press, 2019], 428) defends his plates testimony: "to say that my mind was so treacherous that I had forgotten what I saw." ↩︎
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; recorded in Revelation Book 2 in early 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 manuscript copy and Seer printing, and the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury May 5, 1861 reprint, headlined "A Mormon Prophecy" and closing with the question "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, discourse, in Journal of Discourses 13:159: "The Missourians had sworn by all the gods of eternity that if every other revelation given through Joseph Smith were fulfilled, that should not be, for the day and date being given they declared that it should fail." Quoted in Scripture Central, "How Did Brigham Young and the Apostles Fulfill Prophecy in 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 18, 1843, at Carthage, from William Clayton's journal record; the same dinner conversation carries the Stephen A. Douglas prophecy. 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, counting "a total of only 57 to 63 available full-time working days" and concluding the dictation took "not many more than the equivalent of about 60 actual working days" (p. 34). 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. ↩︎