Section 5: Polygamy — The Revelation That Could Not Stand

Joseph Smith privately practiced plural marriage from at least 1835, though the practice was publicly denied until 1852 under Brigham Young's leadership. The historical evidence for Smith's polygamy is extensive and is now fully acknowledged in the LDS church's Gospel Topics Essays. Smith married at minimum 33 women — several of whom were already married to other men (polyandry), at least two of whom were 14 years old at the time of their marriage to Smith, and some of whom were told that their families' eternal salvation depended on their agreement to the marriage.

D&C 132, canonized in 1876, presents the doctrine of plural marriage as divine revelation and describes it as necessary for the highest celestial salvation. The revelation explicitly links plural marriage to eternal progression: those who fulfill this covenant shall be gods (D&C 132:20). In 1890, under federal legal pressure following the Edmunds-Tucker Act, LDS President Wilford Woodruff issued Official Declaration 1, ending the practice of plural marriage in the church. The declaration is presented as a revelation from God.

ERROR IDENTIFIED: If D&C 132 is a genuine divine revelation establishing plural marriage as necessary for exaltation, then Official Declaration 1 is a reversal of a divine command. If Official Declaration 1 is a genuine divine revelation, then D&C 132 is either superseded or was never what it claimed to be. The LDS framework cannot account for both being genuine revelations from the same unchanging God. More significantly: D&C 132's specific linkage of plural marriage to exaltation — "they shall be gods" — was repealed under legal pressure, not theological revision. The coincidence of the reversal with the federal threat is a structural problem the "continuing revelation" model cannot resolve without acknowledging that institutional survival, not divine guidance, determined the timing.

Section 6: The Book of Abraham Translation — The Primary Diagnostic Crack

The single most diagnostically important event in LDS historical evidence is what happened to the Book of Abraham papyri.

In 1835, Smith purchased Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibition and announced that he would translate them. The translation he produced — the Book of Abraham, now canonical in the Pearl of Great Price — contains the LDS church's most distinctively theological material: the pre-mortal existence of souls, the council of the gods, the star Kolob, and the framework for the nature of God that distinguishes LDS theology from all creedal Christianity. Smith published facsimiles of the papyri with his explanatory notes identifying specific figures.

In 1966, eleven fragments of the original papyri were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were examined by multiple professional Egyptologists — none of them LDS — using standard Egyptological methodology. The conclusion was unanimous: the papyri are standard Egyptian funerary documents, specifically portions of the Book of Breathings Made by Isis. They contain no narrative about Abraham. Smith's identifications of the facsimile figures — including his identification of Osiris as "God sitting upon his throne" — are without Egyptological basis.

The church's own Gospel Topics Essay on the Book of Abraham acknowledges that Smith's translation does not correspond to what the papyri actually say, and proposes alternative explanations: that Smith may have been "inspired by" the papyri rather than translating them, or that the original text appeared on portions of the scroll now missing. Neither explanation was Smith's own claim. He presented himself as translating the documents.

ERROR IDENTIFIED: This is not a translation disagreement — that category implies competing interpretations of the same text. What happened here is that the text Smith claimed to translate has been recovered, read by professionals trained in the relevant language, and shown to say something entirely different from what Smith claimed it said. If Smith could not translate Egyptian funerary documents — producing a "translation" that bears no relationship to the actual content — then his claim to have translated the Book of Mormon by the same gift and power cannot rest on that authority. The crack runs to the foundation. The Book of Abraham is where the prophetic translation claim is tested most directly, and the test fails. The disciple who knows this holds the most important single piece of information in the entire LDS apologetics conversation.