John Turner is known in Latter-day Saint circles for his biography of Brigham Young and his book The Mormon Jesus: A Biography. Next year, however, he will add to that collection with John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography. Turner recently spoke about the forthcoming biography with From the Desk, and announced that “I loved writing Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, which Yale University Press will publish in Summer of 2025.” What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
John Turner’s efforts to write about Joseph Smith were rooted in his previous work in Latter-day Saint history. He wrote, “As a research subject, Brigham Young pretty much wore me out. He lived such a long and controversial life, and there were so many tough questions to answer.” Even though he had been worn out, he still felt drawn to Joseph Smith:
After finishing that second book, I planned to stop writing Mormon History, but it proved difficult and ultimately impossible. The Joseph Smith Papers kept bringing out richly annotated volumes. New sources, like the Council of Fifty minutes, became available.
There is also a community of historians—academic historians but also many others—engaged in creative and thorough scholarship, not just on Smith but on the global history of the many movements that trace their origins to his career.
So, even though I segued into other writing projects, I kept coming back to Joseph Smith. Several years ago, I decided to write my own biography of Smith. It seemed a propitious time. The Joseph Smith Papers project was nearing completion, and the relevant sources were readily available.
And the subject—he continued to fascinate and sometimes astonish me.
… Joseph Smith published what his followers regarded as scripture, gathered large communities in several places, introduced rituals that remain sacred to people around the world and married more than thirty women. Is there a more remarkable life in nineteenth-century America?
Joseph Smith is a fascinating figure and resources to research his life are more available now than ever before.
Now, Turner’s biography of Brigham Young gives an unvarnished look at the man, portraying him as a rougher individual than most Latter-day Saints are familiar with. I would expect that his portrayal of Joseph Smith may be similar. For example, in the interview he shared a story along these lines:
Just a few weeks after a Nauvoo court freed Joseph Smith after his arrest at the hands of Reynolds and Wilson, Smith tangled with Walter Bagby, the Hancock County tax collector. The altercation stemmed from a dispute over property taxes.
On August 1, 1843, Bagby approached Smith’s carriage as the prophet arrived at the temple. Smith accused Bagby of abusing the citizens of Nauvoo, and Bagby called Smith a liar.
Joseph climbed down out of his buggy.
Bagby picked up a stone.
According to his own admission, Smith then seized Bagby by the throat “to choke him off.” The prophet apparently struck Bagby several times.
After Daniel H. Wells separated Smith and Bagby, Smith told Wells—a justice of the peace—to fine him for the assault. Wells declined to do so, so Smith went to see Newel K. Whitney, another justice of the peace.
Whitney apparently did as Smith requested, and the prophet paid the fine for his transgression. That outcome didn’t satisfy Bagby, one of the leaders of the anti-Mormon movement that caused Smith and the Saints so much trouble in the months ahead.
I probably wouldn’t have put the above story together without the indefatigable research of the Joseph Smith Papers project, whose Legal Papers series summarizes the case. The episode brings together several aspects of Joseph’s personality: bravado, defiance, occasional tempestuousness, and a splash of humor. Choke and punch an antagonist, but pay the fine immediately.
It’s an interesting incident that sheds light on Joseph Smith’s personality, but also shows a more violent side than most Latter-day Saints are accustomed to hearing about.
Perhaps more controversial, however, is that Turner is looking to address some of the fundamental questions that face historians and Latter-day Saints when they examine the life of Joseph Smith. He noted that when he wrote about Brigham Young,
There were certain other questions that I did not need to answer in what became Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. Those questions pertained to Joseph Smith. …
Whether or not Smith actually possessed golden plates, Young accepted the divinity of the Book of Mormon. No matter what motivated Smith to introduce plural marriage, once Brigham Young accepted the teaching, he pursued it wholeheartedly. …
Therefore, I mostly left those questions alone when writing about Brigham Young, and I did the same when I wrote a book about the role of Jesus Christ in Latter-day Saint thought and devotion.
In a biography about Joseph Smith himself, however, Turner indicated that he will need to address questions of this sort:
Unlike in my prior books, I cannot simply set aside or work around the key questions surrounding Joseph Smith’s life:
- Did he have visions of deity?
- Did he obtain golden plates?
- Did he translate a historical record?
- What were his motivations for pursuing plural marriages?
These and many other questions blend matters of faith and history. One cannot penetrate to the marrow of another individual’s religious experience, and one cannot confidently assess a biographical subject’s sincerity on every matter.
Still, I see it as the responsibility of any Joseph Smith biographer to give his or her thoughts on these questions while recognizing both the epistemological and evidentiary challenges that surround them.
I’ll be interested to see his thoughts, though I also feel no obligation to agree with his conclusions on the matter.
For more information on John Turner’s Joseph Smith biography, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history site From the Desk to read more. While you’re there, check out the new Brigham Young Quotes page!
This part does not make me optimistic:
Because that’s simply not true. I’ve read the works of visionaries, and scholarship about them, and I’ve published on some of them, and the weak scholarship is the stuff that tries to decide these questions. If I had tried to write an article about whether or not some 16th century prophet had truly seen visions or if he was making it up, the editor would have (correctly) given me a quick rejection and wondered why I was wasting my time and theirs. And that approach would have been detrimental to the actual scholarly project of understanding that person’s worldview and contextualizing their visionary experience. The approach being described here is how you disguise polemic as scholarship, and I’m not optimistic about what that means for this book.
I don’t read Turner’s interview as saying his biography will try to decide these questions, just that he can’t avoid considering them. For his biography on BY, it didn’t really matter whether JSJ experienced deity or not. What was important was whether BY believed he did. Therefore, Turner didn’t need to address those questions head on. But obviously, for a biography on JSJ that approach doesn’t work. It’s a biographer’s job to evaluate the historical evidence re. the questions that are central their subject’s life, while accepting, as Turner does, that “one cannot penetrate to the marrow of another individual’s religious experience, and one cannot confidently assess a biographical subject’s sincerity on every matter.”
Personally, I’m really looking forward to Turner’s JSJ biography. His BY was a challenging read but I thought it was excellent (and not polemical).
I should say that I agree that to the extent that Turner tries to decide what the answers to these questions are he may well overstep the mark. I just don’t read this particular interview as an indication that that is what he is trying to do with this biography. Obviously could be wrong on that. I look forward to finding out.
I know that I have read more in my lifetime about all things Joseph Smith – the good, the bad, and the inexplicable – than I have read about any other person. Based on that, I have to support Jonathan thoughts on this. When you look at the four questions, you’re already in trouble semantically before you’re even out of the starting gate, let alone on the racetrack. What is a vision? Who or what is Deity? What did it mean to Joseph Smith to “obtain” the golden plates? Why in the world is the word “translate” used in the context of bringing forth the Book of Mormon?
With the challenge in writing history of being both correct and being accurate in your presentation, what deviation of the mythical 100% (as in the oft referred to “beyond a shadow of a doubt”) when checking all the BOM claims: like dates, locations, angels, boxes, Urim & Thummim, Reformed Egyptian, Nephi, cities buried, appearance of Jesus in “the new world”; is acceptable for something to be called “historical”? And don’t even get me started about the motivations of why people, including myself, do stuff?
So, with all of that said, you can be sure I’ll buy and read the book.
Color me skeptical. I read a lot of history–including church history–and I’m a big believer in warts-and-all books; I won’t read a book if I think that it’s going to tell too a rosy or biased of a story. But my recollection of Turner’s BY biography (and I think I’ve said this before) is that it was just warts and then more warts. It’s like he had a laundry list of things other biographers hadn’t been able to cover in detail because they didn’t have access to church records, and so he was just going to hit those things. So you only got things like polygamy, MMM, Adam/God, and Godbeites but then nothing about his sermons or leadership and not that much on the incredibly difficult circumstances the Saints found themselves. (Or at least that’s my recollection–I think it’s been more than a decade since I read it.) As such, the reader was left to fill in the blanks about why so many thousands of people found him engaging and inspiring enough to leave family and friends and hack out a life in the inhospitable West, and still regard him as a hero.
And at some level I get it. As a church, our narratives are also too biased and rosy, and maybe that’s what he was battling against. But as a history, I found it to be about as useful as a Krakauer book. So I don’t have a lot of hope for the JS biography.
My understanding is Turner had the Church’s full permission and access to most church records/archives in writing his BY bio….and with JS papers, I am sure he has full range again.
What do you expect from a non-believing non LDS?
I appreciated his BY bio but completely understand that it was a faithless take on our dear brother Brigham. But we don’t buy and read these books from these authors to stroke our ego, but to strike our comfort.
Can’t wait to read his take on the GOAT.