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Joseph Smith is described as “an authentic religious genius”, having founded the only documented religion totally formed by man. What Smith created was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or simply Mormonism. Through a series of encounters God revealed himself to Joseph, telling him that all religions since the death of Christ’s disciples had strayed from the True Church of Christ. It was set upon Joseph to restore the True Church. Joseph Smith was born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont. While he was still a baby, his family moved to Palmyra, New York, an area where Protestant revivals were frequent. Here he spent most of his childhood with his 9 other brothers and sisters. The revivals he witnessed made him question which religion was right, but he never wondered if they were all wrong. Joseph’s first encounter with the Father and Son (implied as God and Jesus, though not directly stated) was in a grove near his family’s Vermont farm at age fourteen. He was told that all the churches were wrong and that he was to join none of them. Joseph was also told that an angel would visit him and teach him the fullness of the gospel. Three years later, a angel appeared to him and gave him the location of a sacred record, written on plates of gold. After he found the plates, he was instructed to translate and record what they said. Using two stones he found with the plates, he was able to decipher the ‘reformed Egyptian’ they were written in. The plates told the history of Jewish families that migrated to America, becoming the ancestors of American Indians. According to the plates, Jesus himself had visited America before his ascension. Joseph claimed he didn’t have to look at the tablets to decipher them. He simply had to look into two stones he buried with the tablets. He couldn’t read them in the light, he said, so he placed them in a hat and put the hat over his face. He read aloud what he saw to his wife Emma, who he had married several years before. The tablets lay on the table in front of Joseph, “in a box underneath cloth”.
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