Why Didn’t Joseph Smith Preach from the Book of Mormon?

Smith’s description of the Book of Mormon is one of the most familiar statements in Latter-day Saint history. In November 1841, Wilford Woodruff recorded Joseph calling it “the most correct of any book on earth” and saying that a person would “get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.” He also called it the “keystone” of the religion. [1]

Modern Church life reflects those claims. Missionaries place the Book of Mormon at the center of conversion. Members are encouraged to read it every day. General Conference speakers quote it constantly, and Church lessons often treat a testimony of the book as the surest path toward accepting Joseph Smith as a prophet. Ezra Taft Benson reinforced that emphasis when he called the Book of Mormon the keystone of the Church’s witness of Christ, its doctrine, and individual testimony. [17]

That makes a historical question hard to avoid: did Joseph Smith himself use the Book of Mormon the way the modern Church does?

The surviving record suggests that he did not. Joseph continued to defend the book, supervise new editions, and present it as evidence of his prophetic calling. He sometimes quoted it and clearly drew on ideas that also appear in its pages. But when he preached, argued from scripture, or introduced the doctrines that made Nauvoo Mormonism distinct, he usually turned to the Bible, new revelation, and his own prophetic interpretation.

The point is not that Joseph ignored the Book of Mormon. That would go beyond the evidence. The stronger and more defensible claim is that the book appears far less often in his surviving sermons than the Bible, and that the doctrines most associated with his later ministry were not developed through sustained public teaching from the Book of Mormon.

What the Surviving Record Actually Shows

This pattern has been recognized for years within Mormon scholarship. Philip L. Barlow wrote that, “compared to the Bible, the Book of Mormon was used surprisingly little.” [2] [3] Terryl Givens was even more specific, observing that “the hundreds of recorded pages of his sermons contain only a handful of brief allusions to the Book of Mormon.” [4]

Mark Lyman Staker summarized the issue in BYU Studies by noting that historians have “documented Joseph Smith’s preference for citing the Bible rather than the Book of Mormon in his sermons and writings.” [2] Kent P. Jackson described the same imbalance from the other direction, writing that “virtually every aspect of Joseph Smith’s career involved the Bible.” [5] Grant Underwood called the early Saints “a Bible-oriented people” and noted that their scriptural heroes were at least as likely to be Abraham, Moses, or Joshua as Alma or Captain Moroni. [6]

Those observations do not rest on the assumption that every Joseph Smith sermon was preserved. Most were not. Joseph usually spoke without a complete manuscript, and listeners recorded what they could in journals, notebooks, minutes, and later recollections. The surviving reports are uneven. Some preserve several pages, while others capture only a few sentences. William V. Smith has shown that the record becomes much fuller during Joseph’s final years as clerks and private listeners made a greater effort to write down what he said. [18]

That limitation matters, but it does not explain away the pattern. The same sermon reports that preserve hundreds of biblical quotations, paraphrases, and arguments preserve far fewer direct uses of the Book of Mormon. Lost sermons may have included more Book of Mormon material, but there is no evidence that the missing record would reverse the imbalance found in the material that survives.

Joseph Said He Would Prove It “by the Bible”

The King Follett discourse offers the clearest example. Joseph delivered the sermon in April 1844, only a few months before his death. Four people recorded it, making it one of the best-preserved sermons of his ministry. [7] [8] The discourse addressed the nature of God, the eternal existence of the human mind, resurrection, salvation, and the possibility that human beings could become divine.

Joseph stated his method plainly: “I am going to prove it to you by the Bible.” He then declared, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man,” and told his audience, “You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves.” [7]

These were not minor observations. They helped shape the mature Latter-day Saint understanding of exaltation and the nature of God. Yet Joseph did not build the argument from the Book of Mormon. He moved through Genesis, Hebrew terms, sayings attributed to Jesus, the Gospel of John, Revelation, and other biblical passages. The Church’s own history of the discourse points to earlier revelations and selected scriptural parallels, but the sermon itself is overwhelmingly biblical. [8]

Baptism for the dead followed a similar pattern. Joseph introduced the practice publicly in Nauvoo in 1840. When he later discussed it, Wilford Woodruff recorded him explaining that the Bible supported the doctrine and then turning to Paul’s reference to people being “baptized for the dead” in 1 Corinthians 15:29. [9] In the letter now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 128, Joseph again announced, “I will give you another quotation of Paul,” before connecting the practice with Malachi’s prophecy about Elijah and the turning of hearts between generations.

The Book of Mormon says a great deal about baptism, resurrection, judgment, and salvation. It does not describe living people being baptized for the dead. Joseph did not introduce the ordinance by pointing to a forgotten Nephite practice. He began with a short and difficult biblical verse, then expanded it through continuing revelation into a full system of proxy ordinances, record keeping, witnesses, temples, and family sealing.

The Doctrines That Made Nauvoo Mormonism Distinct

The same issue appears when the Book of Mormon is compared with the teachings Joseph introduced during his final years. The book contains temples, covenants, priests, visions, sacred worship, and encounters with God. Those themes gave later Latter-day Saints plenty of material to connect with temple worship. Still, the book does not describe the Nauvoo endowment with its ritual drama, signs, tokens, instructions, and sequence of covenants.

Joseph first administered the endowment to a small group in May 1842. The Church’s historical account acknowledges that “there is no recorded revelation outlining its content.” [10] Participants believed the ceremony came through revelation, but Joseph did not publicly introduce it through a detailed explanation of Book of Mormon passages.

Eternal marriage and family sealing developed in much the same way. The Book of Mormon teaches resurrection, eternal life, covenant relationships, and the importance of families. It does not describe an ordinance joining a husband and wife for eternity, nor does it teach the later Nauvoo system in which sealing becomes part of the highest form of exaltation. Church histories connect Joseph’s sealing teachings with biblical language about binding on earth and in heaven, the return of Elijah, and later revelation. [11] [14]

Priesthood is a more complicated case because the Book of Mormon clearly contains priests, high priests, ordination, authority, and a “holy order” associated with the Son of God. Those ideas mattered in the early Church. But Joseph’s mature explanation of priesthood offices and powers was organized mainly around biblical figures and texts. An 1835 instruction said the higher priesthood was named after Melchizedek because he was “such a great high priest.” [19] Later sermons returned to Aaron, Levi, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John, Hebrews 7, and Revelation.

Plural marriage also needs careful wording. It would be wrong to say that the Book of Mormon says nothing about it. Jacob condemns David and Solomon for having many wives and commands that “there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife.” The same passage leaves an exception in which God may command plural marriage to “raise up seed.” [13]

That exception gave later believers a way to reconcile the book with the practice. But Joseph did not publicly introduce Nauvoo plural marriage through a sustained reading of Jacob 2. Doctrine and Covenants 132 begins with Joseph’s questions about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon, then lays out a much broader theology of eternal marriage, sealing authority, plural wives, and exaltation. Church materials likewise explain that Joseph’s questions arose while he was studying the Bible. [12] [14]

None of this proves that every Nauvoo doctrine contradicts the Book of Mormon. Some later teachings can be connected to its language, and believing scholars have spent considerable time tracing those connections. The narrower point is that the Book of Mormon does not plainly lay out the temple, sealing, proxy-ordinance, and exaltation system Joseph developed in Nauvoo. Those teachings entered Mormonism mainly through later revelations, biblical interpretation, private instruction, and new ritual practice.

Joseph Spent Years Reopening the Bible

Joseph’s work after the publication of the Book of Mormon makes his priorities easier to see. Only a few months after the book appeared in 1830, he began what his followers called a new translation of the Bible. The project occupied Joseph and his scribes for nearly three years. According to the Joseph Smith Papers, he revised “more than three thousand verses,” sometimes changing a word or phrase and sometimes adding entire passages. [15]

That work produced some of Joseph’s most important new scripture. His expansion of Genesis gave the Church the Book of Moses and a much larger story of Enoch. His revision of Genesis 14 enlarged the role of Melchizedek. Questions raised during the Bible project led to revelations about heaven, resurrection, spiritual gifts, and other subjects. Church teaching materials acknowledge that several sections of the Doctrine and Covenants were received as a direct result of the Bible revision. [20]

Joseph kept returning to the Bible after the main revision was complete. He studied Hebrew, proposed new translations, and argued that errors introduced by scribes and translators had hidden important truths. The Bible was not a closed book for him. It was a text that could be corrected, expanded, decoded, and reopened through prophetic authority.

He never produced a comparable Book of Mormon project. Joseph supervised new editions in 1837, 1840, and 1842, correcting printing mistakes and changing some wording. But he did not create a verse-by-verse commentary, deliver a sustained sermon series, or produce hundreds of pages of expansion comparable to his work on the Bible.

That difference does not necessarily mean he considered the Bible more inspired. Joseph often complained that the Bible had been corrupted, while he described the Book of Mormon as the most correct book on earth. But the Bible was where he repeatedly went to uncover new doctrine. The Book of Mormon was more often treated as a completed witness whose greatest work had already been done.

What the Book of Mormon Still Did

The Book of Mormon’s limited appearance in Joseph’s sermons does not mean it was unimportant to the movement. It supplied the wording of early sacramental prayers. It shaped teachings about baptism, priesthood, spiritual gifts, covenant, Zion, the gathering of Israel, additional scripture, and the restoration of Christ’s church. It gave early missionaries a second witness of Jesus Christ and a distinctively American sacred history.

Its greatest function may have been even more basic. The Book of Mormon established Joseph Smith as a prophet.

The physical book gave converts something they could hold in their hands. Joseph claimed that an angel had revealed an ancient record, that he had translated it through divine power, and that witnesses had seen the plates. Anyone who accepted those claims had already accepted that revelation had reopened, angels had returned, and Joseph possessed authority that ordinary ministers did not.

Once that authority was accepted, Joseph’s later teachings did not need to be found in the Book of Mormon before believers could accept them. New revelation could stand on the prophetic office the book had helped establish. In that sense, the Book of Mormon did not need to function as a complete theological manual. It had already made continuing revelation possible.

Gerald E. Smith’s Schooling the Prophet offers the strongest believing response to the claim that Joseph rarely used the Book of Mormon. Smith argues that the book shaped Joseph indirectly through its stories, ritual patterns, ideas about sacred communities, and repeated themes. That is possible. People often absorb a text without announcing every time it influences them.

The difficulty is separating Book of Mormon influence from the Bible and the wider Christian culture Joseph shared with his readers. Covenant, temples, priesthood, Israel, Zion, prophecy, apostasy, and restoration were all biblical ideas before they appeared in the Book of Mormon. When Joseph named his source, he often named the Bible. When he did not name a source, historians cannot automatically assume that an underlying Book of Mormon pattern explains the teaching.

Indirect influence may show that the book mattered more than quotation counts alone can measure. It does not change the visible record. Joseph rarely made the Book of Mormon the main text from which he publicly developed his mature theology.

The Modern Church Made the Book More Central

The contrast can be hard for modern members to see because the Church’s own emphasis changed over time. A BYU study of General Conference citations notes that the Book of Mormon “was not frequently studied in worship services or in gospel instruction in the early Church.” [16] Its use grew during the twentieth century as Church lessons became more tightly organized around the standard works.

The shift accelerated under Ezra Taft Benson. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Benson repeatedly warned that the Church had neglected the Book of Mormon. He urged members to read it daily, use it more heavily in missionary work, and place it at the center of personal testimony. [17] That campaign had a lasting effect. The Book of Mormon-centered Church familiar to current members reflects Benson’s influence as much as it reflects Joseph Smith’s recorded preaching habits.

This does not make the modern emphasis illegitimate. Religious communities regularly change which texts they emphasize and how they use them. But it does mean that today’s devotional culture should not be projected backward without qualification. Joseph praised the Book of Mormon, defended it, and tied his prophetic authority to it. He did not usually preach from it the way modern leaders do.

The Keystone Was Not the Blueprint

The Book of Mormon was the keystone because Joseph Smith’s prophetic credibility rested heavily on its claimed miraculous origin. If the book was authentic, then Joseph had communicated with angels, translated an ancient record, and reopened the Christian canon. The Book of Mormon gave the Restoration its founding proof and gave Joseph the authority to keep revealing.

But it was not the blueprint for everything Joseph later built. The mature religion of Nauvoo took shape through continuing revelation, biblical revision, temple ceremonies, private teachings, and Joseph’s expanding understanding of priesthood and exaltation. Baptism for the dead began with Paul and grew through revelation. Sealing drew on Matthew, Malachi, Elijah, and new revelation. The endowment appeared without a surviving revelation outlining its full content. The King Follett discourse openly developed its argument “by the Bible.”

Joseph Smith did not abandon the Book of Mormon. He continued to treat it as scripture and as proof of his calling. But when he explained the doctrines that came to define Mormonism, he usually looked somewhere else.

The historical record supports a careful conclusion. The Book of Mormon was central to the creation of Joseph Smith’s authority, but it played a much smaller explicit role in his surviving sermons and in the public development of his mature theology. It launched the movement. The authority it created then allowed the movement to continue far beyond the book itself.