To show that Joseph Smith was “prophesied” by various peoples and texts, Richard N. Skousen and W. Cleon Skousen made the following claim:
A MODERN PROPHECY
Very few people know that Brother Joseph also fulfilled a prophecy
that Thomas Jefferson made late in his life. In 1820—a rather significant year—after
Jefferson had retired as President of the United States, he made a prophetic
statement in a letter to his friend, Jared Sparks:
“I hold the precepts of Jesus as delivered by Himself, to be the most
pure, benevolent, and sublime, which have ever been preached to man. I adhere
to principles of the first age, and consider all subsequent innovations as
corruptions of religion, having no foundation in what came from Him. . . .
“If the freedom of religion guaranteed to us by the law in theory can
never rise in practice, . . . truth will prevail over fanaticism, and the
genuine doctrines of Jesus, so long perverted by pseudo-priests, will
again be restored to their original purity . . . but too late for me to
witness it.
Jefferson was so certain there would be a restoration of the original teachings
of Jesus that in 1822 he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse that he was “happy in
the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity.” Jefferson died in
1826, just as Joseph’s ministry was beginning. (Richard N. Skousen and W. Cleon
Skousen, Brother Joseph: Seer of a New Dispensation, 2 vols. [Orem, Utah:
Verity Publishing, 2004], 1:16-17)
The problem is
that if you read the entirety of the letter, one will find that Jefferson was a
Unitarian, and the belief in the divinity of Jesus and a plurality of divine
persons was, for him, blasphemy. Here is the portion of the letter that the
authors did not include:
the metaphisical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, & of Calvin,
are to my understanding, mere relapses into polytheism, differing from paganism
only by being more unintelligible. the religion of Jesus is founded on the
Unity of God, and this principle chiefly, gave it triumph over the rabble of
heathen gods then acknoleged. thinking men of all nations rallied readily to
the doctrine of one only god, and embraced it with the pure morals which Jesus
inculcated. (Thomas
Jefferson To Jared Sparks, 4 November 1820)
A better candidate
for the fulfillment of this “prophecy” would be someone like John Thomas, the
founder of the Christadelphians,
or some other proponent of a variation of Unitarianism, not Joseph Smith.
That this is the
case can be seen in the second source the authors reference. Here are the two
sentences before the singular line they quote:
I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls of Bedlam to
sound understanding, as to inculcate reason into that of an Athanasian. I am
old, and tranquility is now my summum bonum. keep me therefore from the fire
& faggots of Calvin and his victim Servetus. (Thomas
Jefferson To Benjamin Waterhouse, 19 July 1822)
Notice that Jefferson
praises Servetus, who was burned at the stake in Geneva for his anti-Trinitarianism
and rejection of a “high” Christology.
Thomas Jefferson
did not predict Joseph Smith. One is not honored by someone imputing to them honors and accolades which are not true.
