CLARIFICATIONS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE GREAT APOSTASY: A HISTORICAL AND BIBLICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CLAIM TO RESTORE THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH BY THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

This article critically analyses the doctrine of the Great Apostasy and its implications for the restorationism of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). According to this doctrine, following the death of the apostles, priesthood authority and certain truths of the gospel were lost and were restored in the nineteenth century through Joseph Smith Jr. The study compares this conception with biblical texts concerning the continuity of Christ’s Church throughout the centuries and with differing understandings of its historical continuity within the Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed Protestant and Baptist evangelical traditions. It also examines biblical criteria for prophetic authority and religious leadership, prophecies attributed to Smith, and the practice of plural marriage. In addition, it analyses temple ordinances and the parallels between the LDS endowment and Masonic rituals, considering the chronological proximity between Joseph Smith’s initiation into Freemasonry in March 1842 and the introduction of the endowment ceremony in May of the same year. It concludes that, within the biblical and historical framework adopted, the Latter-day Saint claim to have restored the Apostolic Church is not evidenced as a recovery of apostolic Christianity, since several practices and ordinances introduced within LDS restorationism have no historically demonstrable correspondence with the practices of Jesus Christ, the apostolic Church, or the ancient Temples of Jerusalem. Historically, therefore, the nineteenth century witnessed the introduction by the Latter-day Saint movement of new scriptures, doctrines, ordinances and claims to religious authority, rather than simply the re-establishment of practices that had previously existed and subsequently been lost. This finding significantly weakens the historical basis of the Restoration proclaimed by the LDS Church, according to which the Church originally instituted by Jesus Christ was restored through Joseph Smith Jr., together with the divine authority, doctrines and ordinances said to have been lost during the Great Apostasy.