Joseph Smith’s Doctrines & Insights: the Last Charge & Transfiguration by Drew Briney

Description

While Joseph Smith’s Last Charge stands as one of Mormonism’s most monumental events, access to the original accounts and pioneer perspectives has been difficult to come by. The Last Charge & Transfiguration presents over seventy separate accounts of the Last Charge and challenges modern approaches to understanding this “event.” It wasn’t simply a one-time, secretive discourse given to the Council of Fifty. Evidence shows that Joseph publicly repeated this injunction “more than one score of times” in front of “hundreds” or “thousands” of saints. It was a campaign, not a sidebar.

With that understanding, our perspective of the 1844 succession crisis dramatically changes. Rather than viewing Brigham Young’s transfiguration speech as a desperate, last-minute effort to convince the saints to follow the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, we see Brigham Young deftly reminding the saints of what Joseph had been teaching before his martyrdom. Indeed, one account suggests that Brigham Young quoted the Last Charge as part of his speech. With roughly one hundred first-hand accounts of Brigham’s transfiguration, this event is documented better than ever before and offers a fresh perspective in light of these new understandings.