Did Joseph Smith really predict that the Constitution would hang by a thread and the Mormons would save it? Jess went looking for an easy debunking of the White Horse Prophecy. The history was messier than that.
In this What You Know Wednesday, Jess walks Hannah through the origins of the White Horse Prophecy: a document attributed to Joseph Smith, written down by English convert Edwin Rushton decades after Nauvoo, and denounced by Mormon leaders in 1918 and again in 2010. BYU Studies researcher Don Penrod’s analysis of the Rushton manuscripts shows why the horse document doesn’t hold up. But the “Constitution hanging by a thread” idea doesn’t depend on the horses. It appears in earlier accounts of Joseph Smith, in the Church’s own Ensign magazine in 1976, and in Ezra Taft Benson’s 1987 general conference talk “Our Divine Constitution.”
So what exactly did the Mormon Church reject in 2010, and what did it keep teaching?
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