The Mormon Apocrypha

Last Saturday was the anniversary of the Martyrdom of Joseph Smith Jr. To honor this occasion, I wanted to post the funeral sermon given by W. W. Phelps, a close friend of Joseph's., at his and Hyrum Smith's funeral, delivered today, almost two centuries ago. This reproduction contains several notes and corrections he took. Revelation chap. 14, v. 13:—(corrected from the Greek)  “ and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, write; congratulate the dead that die in the Lord from this time, verily says the spirit, for they can rest from their labors, and their works shall follow them .”  Saints and Sinners, thus said John on the Isle of Patmos, and thus say who have lived on the earth, I in Nauvoo.  Two of the greatest and best men, ^who have lived on the earth , since the Jews crucified the Savior, have fallen victims to the popular will of mobocracy in this boasted  “Asylum of the oppressed” —the only far famed realms of liberty—or freedom, on the globe; and the ...

Not all talks given at General Conference are huge sermons. Below is a short and simple talk, delivered in the April 1932 conference. Elder George S. Romney President of the Northern States Mission I have been thrilled, during this Conference, with the testimonies of my brethren. I am happy to report to you that the missionaries in the Northern States mission are carrying the message of the Gospel, and the testimony that the Lord has spoken again to his people in this day, and that they are doing it well. They are faithful young men and women. They grow very rapidly in the testimony of the Gospel when they come to the mission field. This last Sunday I listened to the testimony of a young lady who has been only a few months in the mission field. She was a very timid girl when she left home, and was extremely frightened when she arrived in the mission field. It seemed almost beyond her strength to go up to the doors of the people and announce that she was a member of the Church of Jesus ...

The first Lecture of Faith set the groundwork for the rest of the work, defining faith and its power. 1   Faith being the first principle in revealed religion, and the foundation of all righteousness, necessarily claims the first place in a course of lectures which are designed to unfold to the understanding the doctrine of Jesus Christ. 2 In presenting the subject of faith, we shall observe the following order: 3 First, Faith itself—what it is: 4 Secondly, The object on which it rests; and 5 Thirdly, The effects which flow from it. 6 Agreeably to this order we have first to show what faith is. 7 The author of the epistle to the Hebrews, in the eleventh chapter of that epistle, and first verse, gives the following definition of the word faith: 8 Now faith is the substance [assurance] of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 9 From this we learn, that faith is the assurance which men have of the existence of things which they have not seen; and the principle of action i...

This month marks the one-year anniversary of my blog and to celebrate, I wanted to go over some of the most famous "apocryphal" texts of Mormonism, the Lectures of Faith. The Lectures of Faith were a collection of seven Lectures delivered to the School of the Elders in Kirtland, Ohio in the winter of 1834-35 and first published in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants. The authorship of the Lectures is not entirely known, with recent scholarship attributing a lot of the lectures to Sidney Rigdon, with substantial input from Joseph Smith Jr. They were published in the doctrine and covenants by the LDS church until 1921, when they were removed, as they were not revelations in the same way the rest of the D&C was. The RLDS church removed the Lectures from their version of the D&C a few decades earlier, in 1897 (Though they still publish it in a separate volume). Other branches of the restoration, such as the Strangite Church and the Remnant movement still use th...

Unlike the other churches of the restoration, I have talked about so far, The Church of Christ with the Elijah Message was not created during the succession crisis, but instead in the 1920s. Despite this, it is the fourth largest Mormon denomination, with over 12,000 members. Otto Fetting was a member of the Church of Christ, Temple Lot. On February 4, 1927, Fetting claimed that John the Baptist gave him a message to give to the Church of Christ. The church was originally accepting of Otto's visions, even publishing them in their paper, The Zions Advocate. Soon however, Otto began receiving messages contrary to the Church of Christ's policies. Consequently, in 1929, Fetting was silenced. Fetting chose to withdraw from the church, bringing a large percentage of church of Christ members with him. Otto passed away in 1933, after claiming to have received multiple revelations by the angel. William A. Draves, a member of this church, claimed to have received revelations from the sam...