Commenting on how some early LDS leaders "divinized" Joseph Smith, and how it influenced their eschatology, Christopher Blythe wrote:
Gradually the public rendering of the prophet's afterlife was consigned to a role in Mormon eschatology concerning death. Smith frequently was envisioned in the role of psychopomp, a figure who in many religious traditions leads a deceased spirit into the afterlife.[86] The idea that such a being o beings awaited the dying was common for the era. Church patriarch William Smith was a major proponent of Smith in this role, and in inspired blessings to grieving Saints he pointed to Joseph's presence at the time of death. He promised one Saint that she would "hear his voice and his voice thou shalt hear before thy death and it shall be in a dream." To another he promised "thou shalt behold him afar off beckoning for three to come [and] the time shall come when thy desire shall be to depart."[87] Later in the century, Mormons would see great significance in the fact that Brigham Young and Smith's widow Emma both died uttering the words "Joseph, Joseph, Joseph." A celestial reunion with Joseph Smith was characterized in the concluding line of W.W. Phelps’ important poem, Praise to the Man--"Millions shall know 'Brother Joseph' again."[88]
Young fleshed out the details of this reunion when he portrayed Smith in the eschatological role traditionally ascribed to St. Peter as the gatekeeper of Heaven: "no man or woman in this dispensation will ever enter the celestial kingdom of God without the consent of Joseph Smith." Individuals now required "the certificate of Joseph Smith, junior, as a passport to their entrance into the mansion where God and Christ I--I with you and you wish me. I cannot go there without his consent."[89] At the end of the age, according to Young, Smith would serve as "President of the Resurrection." For Mormons, who emphasized the necessity of ritual, the bodily resurrection of the dead was a ritual akin to baptism. Just as men were invested with authority to baptize they could be invested with authority to resurrect. Smith would be "the first to rise from the dead. When he has passed through it then I reckon the keys of the resurrection will be committed to him."[90] The prophet then would appoint others, specifically his apostles, to assist in performing resurrections. Here was the classic imitatio Christi so often used to sacralize Christian religious figures. Smith's afterlife followed that of Jesus, who died, performed a three-day work in the spirit world, was resurrected, and at his second coming would resurrect his disciples. Smith hagiographies commonly made use of the same framing from Christ's passion and resurrection.[91]
Notes for the Above:
86 Various saintly individuals have been assigned this role in different traditions. See Richard F. Johnson, Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2005), 71–86.
87 Quoted in Christine Elyse Blythe, ‘‘William Smith’s Patriarchal Blessings and Contested Authority in the Post-martyrdom Church,’’ Journal of Mormon History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 90.
88 W. W. Phelps, ‘‘Joseph Smith,’’ Times and Seasons 5 (1 August 1844), 607.
89 Journal of Discourses, 7:289.
90 Richard S. Van Wagoner, ed., The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2009), 853.
91 For a lengthy discussion of Mormon conceptions of imitatio Christi, including that of Joseph Smith, see Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth, esp. 296–98.
(Source: Christopher James Blythe, "'Would to God Brethren I could Tell You Who I am!': Nineteenth-Century Mormonisms and the Apotheosis of Joseph Smith," Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 18, Issue 2, pp. 5-27, here, p. 21)
For more on the role of the Prophet Joseph Smith in LDS theology, see:
