The problem is that there’s just not enough evidence to say with regards to any of these.

However some of Joseph’s wives (such as Eliza R. Snow) were around enough that it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t have had relations were relations a significant part of things.

As for the ‘regulations’ regarding the practice, you have to be a severely naive Mormon to think that societal as well as spiritual pressures were not placed on first wives to compel aggreement to their husbands taking more wives. In my ward, you wouldn’t even hold a calling in the YW organization if you have a second earring on your earlobe,(nevermind that your favorite dead grandma took you to get that piercing 20 years ago when you were 12 and it is a fun memory and you wear nothing but a tasteful small diamond stud in that hole)

Women of the 19th and early 20th centuries had very few resources for providing for their children should their husband leave them for not allowing them to ‘live their religion’. And, any resource that may have been available was further restricted from these women for openly going against the ‘bretheren’.

I am willing to accept that Joseph received revelation as a young boy and young man, prophet and husband. I am also willing to believe he had a choice in the matter of polyandry and he ‘chose the left’. Does that make the BoM false? No. Does it mean that possibly Joseph was not allowed to live a long life as prophet? Possibly yes.

And I don’t mean to get too graphic, but lets not be guilty of what makes us angry about the PR machine-gloss and shine for the least amount of offense.– I have been married 12 years, had 2 pregnancies, and have had a lot of unprotected sex with my husband. It’s called ‘pulling out’. I wouldn’t count on it if you really didn’t want to get pregnant but it works at least 20 days of every month. Ann–why is it harder for you to accept Joseph had children with these wives? Is it the practice or the proof you abhore? They are both the same-sorry.

For the RLDS, it makes perfect sense to have two different rules. If your truth claims center on the prophetic career of Joseph, but are hostile to any prophetic claims of Brigham, then you will be interested in drawing this distinction as sharply as possible. I understand that the RLDS have traditionally done this, though more recently they’ve faced up to the historical evidence and had to eat crow.

As you point out, this issue is stranger in a Mormon (LDS) context. Obviously, as long as we believe Joseph and Brigham were both “prophets” in the same qualitative sense, clinging to the distinction makes no sense. I suspect that what’s really going on is this: Enough people recognize that to acknowledge Joseph’s polygamy is to invite a discussion about how he lied about it (unlike Brigham, who was open about it). THIS is the discussion that people don’t want to have.

Having said this, I really don’t know how common or uncommon knowledge of Joseph’s polygamy is among most Church members. I seem to recall an essay in which Paul Toscano recounts how his Bishop or Stake President very over-bearingly tried to put down any notion that Joseph was polygamist in an interview with him before his mission. But I don’t know how representative that story was.

Aaron B

I’ll have to do an informal survey of my friends and neighbors to see what their experience is.

I’m no historian, but could there also be a difference in the extent of the polygamous relationships? Although there are 30+ names we have Joseph being sealed to, how many marriages resulted in children? How many were supported by Joseph financially?

I don’t know. When I was in seminary, I was taught that a lot of the sealings to Joseph grew out of a misunderstanding of the sealing ordinance. It was revealed you had to be sealed in order to be exalted, and everyone was pretty sure the prophet was gonna make it so women got sealed to him. Later, sealings occurred between spouses, as the Saints understanding of the practice grew line upon line.

I think that people want to blame Brigham because it seems that he is the font of all things repudiated. This can be just one more thing to pin on the uber-fallible prophet. We want Joseph to be innocent and infallible.

Buy Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith for some of these answers. It’s all in there. Here’s some of what I remember:

1). Some claims to have carried Joseph’s seed were made. I think only two were ever pursued, both girls, and subsequently proved but only by affidavit. Can’t remember the outcome.

2). That there was not a sexual dimension to the marriages is ludicrous. A cursory reading of the age groups of the women to whom he was sealed reveals that most were teenagers and in their twenties. Only a handful were above 40 years old. Why so young? Perhaps he was trying to raise up seed unto himself.

Back to the Brigham vs. Joseph issue: I think, again, it’s the PR machine at work. BY isn’t pushed in the discussions (and justifiably so, he’s not the one who started it). JS however, has to be painted as a good-looking sandy blond man with straight and polished teeth (or are they caps?). His image needs to be squeeky clean in order for people to like him. So perhaps the distance between the JS of today and the JS of 1830s is for PR reasons. It seems these days that a lot of the church history and doctrine is a reflection not of what we were per se, but of what we want to become.

That people deny JS’s polygamous involvement is about the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. I know the RLDS used to do this before the research was done (after all, you can’t find polygamy in TPJS or WJS and D&C 132 was canonized in Utah, not in Nauvoo), but even before that, I had never been taught that JS WASN’T a polygamist by believing LDS-folk. I’d like to know what SS or seminary instructor was pushing that. The person ought to be flogged for it.

Funny — just today I was thinking about something I read on the blog not too long ago about Oliver Cowdry copying Isaiah into the BofM while Joseph was out running errands, and I thought to myself how hypocritical it is for NT scholars to posit that Mark (being the earliest) was copied into Matthew and Luke (which I believe) and that’s “okay” but it’s fraudulent for Isaiah to get copied into the BofM… I wonder if there’s a Q source for the BofM… maybe the inscription on Nephi’s Asherah pole???