A Succession of Continuity

To my surprise, the dramatic film Witnesses is still available tonight for streaming at no charge via The Witnesses Initiative.  Evidently, nobody has bothered to take it down yet.  If you wish to take advantage of this offer, you should do so quickly.  I can’t guarantee that it will last even into tomorrow.

The other Interpreter Foundation dramatic film, Six Days in August (2024), is also available for streaming, on several platforms.  However, there is (in most cases) a modest charge for streaming it that we are not at liberty to waive:  https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/six-days-in-august-2024

On Tuesday, I’m scheduled to spend several hours interviewing Ron Esplin, who currently serves as a general editor of The Joseph Smith Papers and as director of the Brigham Young Center, for the docudrama portion of the overall Six Days in August project, a series of short features that we’re calling Becoming Brigham.  So, in preparation for the interview, I’ve just finished rereading Ronald K. Esplin, “Authority, Keys, and ‘the Measures of Joseph’: A Detailed Exploration of 1844 Succession,” in Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, ed., Joseph Smith: A Life Lived in Crescendo (Orem: The Interpreter Foundation and Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2024), 745-882.  It builds upon his very important earlier article, Ronald K. Esplin, “Joseph, Brigham and the Twelve: A Succession of Continuity,” BYU Studies 21/3 (1981): 301-341.

My impression upon re-reading this new piece is the same as my impression from my initial reading of it, when the article was still in manuscript:  It is a brilliant and extraordinarily important contribution to scholarship on Latter-day Saint history.  I want to share one of the many passages from it that I marked as I was going through the article:

There were not, Dr. Esplin argues,

multiple claimants with plausible claims clamoring to be heard.  Before the Twelve returned to Nauvoo from their summer mission in the East, there was one: Sidney Rigdon. . . .  But after Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of the Twelve, and most of his quorum returned returned to Nauvoo in early August 1844 and presented their “case,” the decision for most Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo was relatively straightforward. . . .

The crisis was real.  There was no precedent.  Many things might have gone awry.  But the backstory of how Joseph Smith prepared Brigham Young and the Twelve to lead and why the Saints so quickly supported them makes for a different story than one of a deep and lengthy succession crisis.  It was not a lengthy crisis.

Why?  Because if the matter rested on authority, no one else did or could make an equally authoritative claim to having priesthood authority and keys to continue forward.  If it was a question of who Joseph had confided in, leaned on, and prepared to lead in his absence, no one in Nauvoo in 1844 did or could offer a case comparable to that of Brigham Young and the Twelve.  Finally, on the question of who the Saints had confidence in, there was no rival to Brigham Young and the Twelve.  Especially the thousands in Nauvoo who had come from Great Britain felt a love for and loyalty to the Twelve. . . .

[N]ot only did those who sought an alternative to the Twelve not have anyone to turn to with an equal claim to authority, most of the minority who sought an alternative to the Twelves did so less from a quarrel with the claims Young and the Twelve made to have authority from Joseph, but because they had a quarrel with the program.  They were searching for a way to hold on to the Book of Mormon, to the Restoration, to earlier Latter-day Saint teachings without embracing the temple and its ordinances, and the new, sometimes radical (for traditional Christians) teachings that characterized Joseph Smith’s last years in Nauvoo.  (746, italics in the original)

Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve were the only ones on the ground in Nauvoo in 1844 with a plausible claim to lead — because Joseph Smith had prepared them and had given them all the priesthood keys and authority needed to do so in his absence.  No one else held all the keys, no one else had the confidence of most of the people, no one else knew the full program in detail, and therefore no one seriously challenged their leadership.  (747)

My central understanding of the succession of 1844 has not changed since my earlier study, but today we can add important new details that flesh out the story.  My focus will be on priesthood keys and how Joseph Smith not only conveyed to Brigham Young and the Twelve “all the keys I have received,” but how he prepared them with the instruction — especially pertaining to temple ordinances — to see that the Saints received the blessings and benefit of those keys even if it be in his absence.  We will see that Joseph Smith made these preparations in part because he understood that his own time was short and that it was essential to put in place others with the authority and training to see that the temple, the ordinances, and the Restoration would advance in his absence.

I demonstrated in a different earlier study that Joseph Smith knew when he founded Nauvoo that he would have but little time and only this final opportunity to put in place all that was necessary to fulfill his mission and that the temple and its ordinances were core to that mission.  Here, my focus will be on him preparing Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve to carry that mission forward  when he was gone.  (748)

Dr. Esplin largely devotes the rest of his very substantial and massively documented essay to justifying the assertions that he makes in the early paragraphs from it that I cite above.  It is, in my judgment, a seminal piece of historical scholarship.  Those who doubt that Brigham and the Twelve legitimately succeeded Joseph Smith in the leadership of the Church, and those who favor, say, Sidney Rigdon, or James Strang, or Joseph Smith III, have much to contend against with this article.