Page numbers correspond with my digital version, and do not likely reflect hard copy pagination.
Benjamin Moser offers a good analysis of the book in the New York Times.
Some observations that I found particularly intriguing:
54: “The Saints helped the Saints; that was a core tenet of Joseph’s religion. In response to a revelation concerning Enoch, a grandson of Adam and Eve, Joseph encouraged his flock to “consecrate” all their property to the church, which in turn redistributed the collective wealth to families in need. This was pure communism, and it benefited many Mormons who followed Joseph to his first religious base in Kirtland, Ohio, having left their belongings behind them. By 1844, in Nauvoo—Joseph’s “Zion” on the banks of the Mississippi—Joseph had abandoned the law of consecration but had substituted tithing in its place. Observant Mormons agreed to donate one-tenth of their goods or services to the bishop’s storehouse for redistribution to the needy. Joseph often staked newly arrived families to (cramped) living quarters, a house plot, a larder full of supplies, or a portion of a working garden. Converts understood that their fellow Mormons would help them get on their feet, which partially explained the Saints’ missionary successes.”
65: “Around the time that the mass baptisms were ramping up, Joseph embraced Freemasonry, with a passion. There are plenty of reasons he would have opposed Masonry. Upstate New York, where he lived until age twenty-four, was a hotbed of anti-Masonry. The European fraternal order, which had established a beachhead in the New World during the eighteenth century, was widely denounced as a shadowy, atheistic cabal aimed at creating a secret world government. William Morgan, famous for publishing the Masons’ secret codes and rituals in the widely disseminated 1826 book Illusions of Masonry, lived in Batavia, New York, and was supposedly drowned by hostile Masons in the Niagara River. (In a curious twist of fate, his widow, Lucinda, became one of Joseph’s first plural wives.) New York even had its own anti-Masonic political party, which fielded a presidential candidate in 1831. The Book of Mormon, wholly composed in upstate New York, repeatedly condemned the “abominations” of secret societies, with “their secret signs and their secret words . . . [that] they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms” (Helaman 6:22). On the other hand, Joseph’s father and brother Hyrum were Masons, as were several other prominent Saints. It was hard not to notice that almost everyone who was anyone in southwestern Illinois—the lawyers, judges, and leading businessmen—were also Masons. So, with considerable fanfare, Joseph became an entered apprentice mason on March 15, 1842. After obtaining a waiver from the usual twenty-eight-day waiting period, he attained two higher degrees the following day.”
71: “In April 1844, he preached the most famous sermon of his life, what some regard as one of the most famous sermons ever preached in America. As if on a whim, Joseph turned nearly 2,000 years of Christian belief on its head at a funeral service for his loyal colleague King Follett. Joseph had laid the groundwork for a new world order, and for the foundational ritual for his entire church, but that was in secret. Now, speaking in Nauvoo’s East Grove, under a massive canopy of elm and chestnut trees, he unpacked some of the most radical Christian doctrine ever preached on the American continent…Joseph started out with his boldest statement: “We suppose that God was God from eternity,” he shouted. “I will refute that idea. God that sits enthroned is a man like one of yourselves.” “It is the first principle to know. We may converse with him and that he once was a man like us. God was once as one of us and was on a planet as Jesus was in the flesh. I defy all hell and earth to refute it.” Joseph referred to gods in the plural, because he explained that gods evolved from men and were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing. The raw material of godhead was a form of free intelligence that preexisted our creation. From intelligence, God became a man, then perfected himself to become a god. So did Jesus Christ. And so, Joseph said, can you. “You have got to learn how to be a god yourself in order to save yourself,” he proclaimed, “ —to be priests and kings as all Gods have done–by going from a small degree to another—from exaltation to exaltation—till they are able to sit in glory as with those who sit enthroned.” This became the “doctrine of eternal progression,” the Mormons’ supremely optimistic belief in the perfectibility of men and women living on earth. Joseph freed his followers from the strictures of predestination and the inevitability of sin.”
229: “…the dissidents were calling out Joseph’s startling new theology unveiled in the King Follett sermon, his contention that God was once a man who lived on earth, and advanced spiritually under the tutelage of a preceding god. This was indeed blasphemy against the established Christian church, but could a prophet guided by heavenly revelation blaspheme his own theology? Joseph had already rewritten both the Old and New Testaments and created holy rituals, all of them inspired by his direct communications with God.”
259: “Joseph was recapitulating the famous argument of the King Follett sermon, that just as God was the father of Jesus Christ, “you may suppose that He had a Father also.” “Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. . . . I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it.” He then cited biblical examples of the plurality of gods, claiming, for instance, that “Paul says there are Gods many and Lords many.”* Smith also applied his modest knowledge of Hebrew, pointing out that “Elohim,” the Old Testament word for “god,” is a plural form, and is almost always used plurally when God, or Elohim, creates the world. It was a stretch to argue that the Old Testament Israelites were polytheists, although Joseph did just that. “In the very beginning the Bible shows there is a plurality of Gods beyond the power of refutation,” he declared. “The word Elohim ought to be in the plural all the way through—Gods. The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us; and when you take [that] view of the subject, it sets one free to see all the beauty, holiness and perfection of the Gods.” Biblical scholars have called Elohim an example of the “plural of excellence,” akin to the “plural of majesty,” better known as the “royal we.”
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