Chapter 7

Conclusions

"Where is your wise man now, your man of learning or your subtle debater--limited, all of them, to this passing age? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish."

- 1 Corinthians 1:20-21 NEB

The great historian of Christianity, Adolf von Harnack, assessed the state of modern Christianity in the following way:

There are only two possibilities here: either the Gospel is in all respects identical with its earliest form, in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which, under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity.¹

Notice that Harnack takes for granted the fact that the "primitive" Church has come and gone, because modern mainstream Christianity is demonstrably far different from it. Latter-day Saints believe that much of the New Testament church with its basic doctrines and ordinances forms the fabric of most modern Christian churches, but they also hold that "many plain and precious" things have been lost or changed over the two centuries since Christ was crucified and the church fell into apostasy. Latter-day Saints claim that those lost or altered elements were restored by God in these latter days through the Prophet Joseph Smith.

Since he claimed to restore ancient Christian truths at a time when not much was known about that era, we have tested his claim by showing that these restored doctrines and practices were for the most part indeed present in early Christianity. If Joseph Smith taught a number of esoteric doctrines that were unknown to have existed in the early church during his time but which research and uncovered documents now show were part of early Christianity, one has to conclude that he was either inspired or impossibly lucky.

In other words, the Church which Joseph Smith claims to have restored is much closer to the original church of Christ, as revealed in the many documents of the first three centuries after Christ, than any other modern Christian church. Had Joseph Smith created a church which differed from the other churches of his day and which had no relation to what we now know of the primitive church, his claim to be a restorer would be blatantly fraudulent, but since support for his teachings and ideas is so abundant from early documents, not in a general way, but in numerous specifics, one has to conclude that there was some source other than his own imagination for these striking parallels.

Notes

¹ Harnack, A., What is Christianity?, 13-14.

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