Most historians you ask will tell you that Joseph Smith was definitely a polygamist, and that the practice started with him. But there is a growing resistance to those claims. Did Joseph actually practice polygamy? Mark Curtis had the same question, and his search led him to the primary source documents about Joseph's alleged polygamy. He found that some accounts appear decades after the fact, are secondhand (or more), and may not be as reliable as they seem. In this fascinating discussion, I ask Mark about Fanny Alger (Joseph's first plural wife), the provenance of D&C 132, what Jacob 2 was really saying, and how polygamy, if wrong, could have been justified in the scriptures.
Mark Curtis runs the website and YouTube channel called Hemlock Knots, where he delves into topics of Church history, including polygamy. Find links to his work in the show notes!
Show notes for this episode: https://mormontheories.wordpress.com/2022/02/01/010markcurtis/
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