Joseph Smith: Wrong from the Very First Verse (publ. 2025-07-19)

A very helpful resource for understanding the false teachings of Joseph Smith and of Mormonism is the "King Follet Discourse", which is a sermon he gave in front of 20,000 Mormons in 1844 in connection with the recent death of Elder King Follet. This sermon is recorded in "Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith", 2nd Ed (1940) by Joseph Fielding Smith, a Mormon historian. It should be emphasized — as can easily be understood by reading this book — that Joseph Fielding Smith was not an enemy of Joseph Smith but rather was fervently devoted to him and his teachings, though the two men were not contemporaries. A scan of this book can be downloaded from the Internet Archive:

I would like to emphasize in particular one curious teaching, buried several pages into the sermon:

I shall comment on the very first Hebrew word in the Bible; I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation in the Bible—Berosheit. I want to analyze the word. Baith—in, by, through, and everything else. Rosh—the head. Sheit—grammatical termination. When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the baith there. An old Jew without any authority added the word; he thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head! It read first, “The head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.” That is the true meaning of the words. Baurau signifies to bring forth. If you do not believe it, you do not believe the learned man of God. Learned men can teach you no more than what I have told you. Thus the head God brought forth the Gods in the grand council.

This might be a confusing argument to those who do not know Hebrew. In the Hebrew Bible—what Christians usually call the "Old Testament"—the first word of the first book (Genesis 1:1) is בראשית. This is a compound word, where the first letter ב (bet) means "in", and the rest of the word — ראשית — is a form of the word ראש (rosh) which literally means "head", but can also mean "beginning".

What Joseph Smith is saying here is that the Hebrew text we have was corrupted by "an old Jew" — I suppose that must have been an antisemitic slur in Smith's day — who inserted the ב in order to pervert the original meaning. In Smith's view, we should get rid of that first letter, and then reinterpret ראשית to be a reference not to the beginning of creation, but rather the "head one of the Gods", i.e., the God Elohim that fathered all the other gods.

This modification of the verse — from Smith's point of view — is necessary because

(1) in Mormonism, all men are gods. Fundamentally, none of us are any different than the head God Elohim, just at a different stage of development. Eventually, if we are faithful to the teachings of God's law, we will attain the same level of power and knowledge as Elohim, and we will rule over our own planets like Elohim does.

(2) in Mormonism, all matter is eternal. Therefore, the universe can have no beginning — at least not in the absolute sense of first coming into existence at a point in time or the beginning of time itself.

I want to emphasize that, whether or not you find Smith's argument convincing, it should be clear at this point that Mormonism is not simply some slight modification of Christianity, or some branch of it, but rather is diametrically opposed to it. Joseph Smith's teachings prevented him from believing the very first verse of the Bible!

As far as the text itself: to the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of this alleged corruption of the text of Scripture, neither in the Hebrew manuscripts, nor in the ancient translations of Scripture. My Vulgate (ancient Latin translation) with critical apparatus, gives "in principio" (in the beginning) without variations, and likewise my Rahlfs-Hanhart Septuagint (ancient Greek translation) gives "εν αρχη" (in the beginning).

I suspect that, even if we did remove the letter ב as Smith proposes, we would likely run into some grammatical difficulties in trying to adopt Smith's understanding of this new Hebrew verse. The ראשית here is a feminine form of rosh, whereas we would expect it to be in the masculine form if it was being used in the sense that Smith claims it is.

I would like to provide some additional quotes or summary from the King Follet Discourse to give further clarity on key Mormon teachings. But I'll need to save that for a later post.

Copyright

This work © 2025 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.