Joseph Smith Jr. was an American religious leader and founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day

Joseph Smith Jr. was an American religious leader and founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. When he was 24, Smith published the Book of Mormon. By the time of his death, 14 years later, he had attracted tens of thousands of followers and founded a religion that continues to the present with millions of global adherents.

Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont. By 1817, he had moved with his family to Western New York, an area of intense religious revivalism during the Second Great Awakening. Smith reported experiencing a series of visions, beginning with one in 1820, during which he saw "two personages" (whom he eventually described as God the Father and Jesus Christ). In 1823 he said he was visited by an angel who directed him to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization. In 1830, Smith published an English translation of these plates called the Book of Mormon. The same year he organized the Church of Christ, calling it a restoration of the early Christian Church. Members of the church were later called "Latter Day Saints" or "Mormons", and Smith announced a revelation in 1838 that renamed the church as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

In 1831, Smith and his followers moved west, planning to build a communal American Zion. They first gathered in Kirtland, Ohio, and established an outpost in Independence, Missouri, which was intended to be Zion's "center place". During the 1830s, Smith sent out missionaries, published revelations, and supervised construction of the Kirtland Temple. Because of the collapse of the church-sponsored Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, violent skirmishes with non-Mormon Missourians, and the Mormon extermination order, Smith and his followers established a new settlement at Nauvoo, Illinois, where he became a spiritual and political leader. In 1844, when the Nauvoo Expositor criticized Smith's power and practice of polygamy, Smith and the Nauvoo city council ordered the destruction of their printing press, inflaming anti-Mormon sentiment. Fearing an invasion of Nauvoo, Smith rode to Carthage, Illinois, to stand trial, but he was killed when a mob stormed the jailhouse.

During his ministry, Smith published numerous documents and texts, many of which he attributed to divine inspiration and revelation from God. He dictated the majority of these in the first-person and said they were the writings of ancient prophets or expressed the voice of God; Smith's followers believed this, and they accepted his teachings as prophetic and revelatory. Several of these texts have been canonized by denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement which continue to treat them as scripture. Smith's teachings discuss God's nature, cosmology, family structures, political organization, and religious community and authority. Mormons generally regard him as a prophet comparable to Moses and Elijah. Several religious denominations identify as the continuation of the church that he organized, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and the Community of Christ.

EARLY YEARS (1805–1827)
Smith was born on December 23, 1805, on the border between South Royalton and Sharon, Vermont, to Lucy Mack Smith and her husband Joseph Smith Sr., a merchant and farmer. He was one of 11 children. At the age of seven Smith suffered a crippling bone infection and, after receiving surgery, used crutches for three years. After an ill-fated business venture and three successive years of crop failures culminating in the 1816 Year Without a Summer, the Smith family left Vermont and moved to Western New York, taking out a mortgage on a 100-acre (40 ha) farm in the townships of Palmyra and Manchester.

The region...

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith

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