Church History

The Priesthood Restoration — What the Record Actually Shows

The CES Letter argues that the visits of John the Baptist and of Peter, James, and John were invented after the fact and quietly written back into scripture in 1835. It is a serious charge, and it deserves the strongest possible statement before it deserves an answer. This page gives it both.

The CES Letter’s Claim

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter argues that there is no contemporaneous record of the priesthood being restored in the Church’s earliest years, and that the account of John the Baptist and of Peter, James, and John ordaining Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery was added to Section 27 in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants — expanding a revelation first printed, in the 1833 Book of Commandments, without that language. It points to David Whitmer, who later said he never heard of angelic ordinations until the mid-1830s.

Three threads are braided together here: an argument from silence (no early record), a textual argument (the 1835 additions), and a witness argument (David Whitmer). Each deserves its strongest form before it is answered — and its strongest form is stronger than most defenders admit.

Steelmanning the Objection

Here is the objection at full strength, with no softening. Section 27 of the Doctrine and Covenants — the revelation that names John the Baptist and “Peter, and James, and John” as those “by whom I have ordained you and confirmed you to be apostles” (D&C 27:12) — first appeared in that form in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. When the same revelation was printed two years earlier, in the 1833 Book of Commandments as chapter 28, the passage naming those apostolic messengers was not there. This is not a vague “change”; it is a documentable expansion in which more than half of the present section — including the explicit naming of the heavenly ordainers — is material added after 1833.

A doubting Latter-day Saint who has heard only the standard Sunday answer — “records were sparse in the early days” — deserves to know that this particular objection is not hand-waving. There really is a revelation whose canonical wording grew, and the growth really does include the priesthood-restoration language. If the defense of the Restoration cannot survive that fact stated plainly, it is not worth having. So let us state it plainly, and then answer it.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Faced with an expanded revelation, a resource-poor early paper trail, and one bitter recollection sixty years after the fact, Jeremy Runnells had two roads open to him.

The road he took is the argument from silence, hardened into an argument from fabrication: if the fullest wording appears late, the event must have been invented late. It is the simplest inference the evidence permits — and it works only if you decline to look for positive evidence before 1835, treat editorial expansion and outright fabrication as the same act, and read a hostile 1887 memory as neutral testimony.

The road he passed by is the historian’s road: ask what the record actually contains before 1835, distinguish the compiling of a canon from the inventing of a claim, and weigh a late adversarial witness against the earlier invested ones. That road is harder, but it is the one the documents reward — because the priesthood claim is not absent before 1835. It is present in Joseph Smith’s own earliest writing, present in the church’s own newspaper the year before the 1835 edition, and present in revelations already in print in 1833. Jeremy chose an argument from silence over a record that is not, in fact, silent.

The Record Is Not Silent Before 1835

The whole force of the objection rests on the word retroactive — the idea that nothing about angelic ordination existed until it was slipped into the 1835 canon. That premise collapses against three documents that predate it.

1. Joseph Smith’s 1832 History. The earliest autobiographical account Joseph ever wrote — begun in the summer of 1832, and famous as the earliest surviving First Vision account — lists among the founding events of his ministry “the reception of the holy Priesthood by the ministring of Aangels.” The Joseph Smith Papers, an academic documentary edition, reproduces the holograph. This is positive, contemporaneous evidence: a record in Joseph’s own hand, three years before the disputed 1835 edition, already framing his authority as conferred by the ministry of angels. Whatever else is thin in the early paper trail, the priesthood claim itself is not a post-1835 novelty — it is written down in 1832.

2. Oliver Cowdery’s 1834 published account. A full year before the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, Oliver Cowdery published in the church’s own newspaper, the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate (October 1834), a detailed, first-person narrative of the day the angel came and the Aaronic Priesthood was conferred — “the voice of the Redeemer spake peace to us, while the veil was parted and the angel of God came down.” This is the co-recipient of the ordination, in print, describing the event in reverent detail, before the edition Jeremy calls the point of fabrication. You cannot retroactively invent in 1835 what your second witness already published in 1834.

3. The revelations already in the 1833 Book of Commandments. Even setting aside the expanded Section 27, the 1833 book — the edition before the alleged additions — already presents Joseph and Oliver as divinely called-and-ordained apostles. The April 1830 “Articles and Covenants,” printed in the 1833 Book of Commandments as chapter 24 (now D&C 20:2–3), describes Joseph as “called of God and ordained an apostle of Jesus Christ, an elder of this church,” and Oliver likewise as “called of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ, an elder of this church.” (The now-familiar “first elder” and “second elder” wording is itself a later refinement, added in the 1835 edition — a change critics rightly catalog, and one that does not touch the point.) What the 1833 print already establishes is decisive: both men are presented as apostles whose authority was conferred and ordained, not assumed. The 1835 wording of Section 27 did not introduce that idea — it named the messengers who conferred it.

Compilation Is Not Fabrication

Return now to the strongest fact: yes, the naming of Peter, James, and John in Section 27 appears in 1835 and not in the 1833 printing. The honest question is what that expansion is. Jeremy’s reading requires it to be fabrication. But the same evidence fits a far better-supported reading: a revelation being completed and made explicit as it moved from loose manuscript into a compiled, canonical text.

Here the record must be stated with care. The fuller text of Section 27 — the verses naming Peter, James, and John — is first documented in the 1835 edition; no contemporaneous 1830 manuscript of that expanded language is known to survive. Latter-day Saint accounts hold that the revelation was received in 1830 and completed shortly afterward, but that fuller reception rests on later attestation rather than a surviving 1830 text. That is the honest state of the evidence, and it is worth conceding plainly, because the believing reading does not depend on hiding it. A prophet who understands his revelations as living text will expand, clarify, and make explicit what earlier stood in summary. That is a claim about the nature of revelation, and it must be granted or denied on its own terms; it cannot be smuggled into a fraud verdict simply because the text grew. Critics and defenders agree on the textual facts; they part ways only on whether prophetic clarification is a legitimate category. The believer’s framework has always answered yes — and, decisively, the new wording named messengers who were already in the record by 1832 and 1834. Section 27 made a standing claim explicit; it did not conjure a new one.

This same pattern — early revelations refined, expanded, and clarified as they were gathered for publication — runs through the whole early history of the canon, and reading it as fraud requires ignoring how nineteenth-century scriptural publication actually worked. That larger question is answered directly on a companion page: Changes to the Doctrine and Covenants — What They Show.

David Whitmer in Context

Whitmer’s statement — that he “never heard” of an angel ordaining Joseph and Oliver until “1834, 5, or 6” — is real, and it should not be waved away. But read it precisely. He says he first heard of it later; he does not, and cannot, say it did not happen. He was not present. The Aaronic Priesthood was restored in May 1829 near Harmony, Pennsylvania, before Whitmer entered the story. A man reporting when a piece of news reached him is not a man reporting when the event occurred.

Two further facts frame the quotation. First, Whitmer gave this statement in an 1885 interview — more than fifty-five years after the events, a half-century after he had separated from the church, two years before he would publish his 1887 Address to All Believers in Christ, whose express purpose was to argue that the office of high priest and much of the later organization were unwarranted innovations. That is precisely the setting in which a memory of “I never heard of this early on” would form and harden. A late, adversarial recollection carries different evidentiary weight than a contemporaneous, invested one — a distinction any historian applies as a matter of course.

Second, and tellingly, the very same David Whitmer never once wavered on the claim that most threatens a fraud theory: that he saw the angel and the plates of the Book of Mormon, and heard the voice of God declare the translation correct. He held that to his dying day, outside the church, with every incentive to recant. A witness whose central supernatural testimony stayed rock-solid for sixty years is a strange foundation for the charge that the founders manufactured supernatural claims. We take Whitmer’s reliability seriously precisely because it cuts in the Restoration’s favor far more than against it — a case made in full for the Book of Mormon witnesses.

The “High Priesthood” Objection Is a Vocabulary Problem

A related argument notes that at a June 1831 conference Joseph Smith was ordained to the “high priesthood,” and treats this as proof he had not received the Melchizedek Priesthood from Peter, James, and John in 1829. This mistakes a change in vocabulary for a change in claim. In early Latter-day Saint usage, “high priesthood” named the office of high priest — a specific ordained office within the Melchizedek Priesthood — not the underlying authority itself. The same distinction operates today: a man holds the Melchizedek Priesthood, and may later be ordained to the office of high priest within it. Receiving the priesthood in 1829 and receiving that office in 1831 are sequential steps, not competing origin stories.

Underneath the vocabulary lies the point the whole controversy circles: authority in this church is understood to be conferred by those who already hold it, keys passing hand to hand from heaven, never claimed by a man on his own initiative. That is why the messengers must be named at all — and why self-appointment is precisely what the account rules out. The doctrine is developed in The Priesthood — Authority That Can’t Be Self-Appointed and in the study of priesthood keys.

The Book of Mormon Already Demanded Ordained Authority

One point is routinely underweighted. The retroactive-invention thesis needs Joseph to have cared little about conferred priesthood authority in the earliest years, only to bolt it on later. But the Book of Mormon — dictated in 1829 and published in March 1830, before any of the disputed 1835 wording — is saturated with the theology of ordained authority. The risen Christ personally gives Nephi “power that ye shall baptize this people” (3 Nephi 11:21), and the record preserves the exact words by which priests and teachers were ordained (Moroni 3).

So the man the CES Letter casts as indifferent to priesthood authority until 1835 had already published, in 1830, a scripture insisting that no one may baptize or ordain without power properly given. The concern with conferred authority is not a late graft; it is load-bearing in the founding text. The account of the 1829 John the Baptist ordination (later D&C 13) and of the Melchizedek Priesthood restoration under Peter, James, and John are the historical fulfillment of a doctrine the Book of Mormon had already made non-negotiable.

Verdict

What is resolved. The claim of retroactive invention does not survive contact with the pre-1835 record. Angelic priesthood conferral appears in Joseph’s own hand in 1832, in Oliver Cowdery’s published testimony in 1834, and the conferred-and-ordained character of their authority is in print in the 1833 Book of Commandments. The 1835 expansion of Section 27 named messengers already standing in the record; it did not create them. David Whitmer’s statement reports when news reached a non-witness sixty years later, and comes from the very man whose supernatural testimony of the plates never once bent. Jeremy took the simplest inference — late wording means late invention — when the harder, better-documented reading was available and is better supported.

What remains genuinely, and only mildly, open. The precise date of the Melchizedek Priesthood restoration is not fixed by a contemporaneous document, and the earliest paper trail for Peter, James, and John is thinner than for John the Baptist. Faithful historians have said so for decades; it is a gap in documentation, not a hole in the account — the ordinary sparseness of a poor, oral, press-less frontier movement whose members were building Zion, not filing affidavits. An honest reader can hold that this one detail is imperfectly recorded. What that reader cannot honestly hold, on this evidence, is that the priesthood restoration was manufactured after the fact.

Further Study