Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
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Mormon Studies Review

Keywords

William Bickerton, Daniel Stone, latter day saint movement, Church of Jesus Christ, restoration

Abstract

Daniel Stone’s William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet is a biography of a significant nineteenth-century Latter Day Saint “prophet, seer, and revelator.” It is as much a story about the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1850s Pennsylvania as it is an account of the life of this fascinating man. The Latter Day Saint tradition encompasses hundreds of denominations that have a heritage in the Church of Christ founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. Scholars have spent most of their attention on the largest division of the tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Utah, but there have also been significant studies on the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints led by James Strang, the Church of the Firstborn led by Joseph Morris, the Church of Zion founded by William S. Godbe, and others.1 Usually the movements that have attracted the most scholarly attention emerged during the initial succession crisis at the death of Joseph Smith in 1844 or are later schisms from the Utah-based faith. The Church of Jesus Christ, in contrast, had its origins a decade later and did not include any major players from the early history of the Restoration. This means that the comparatively successful Pennsylvania-based church, the third largest denomination in the Latter Day Saint tradition, has been largely neglected until this new work by Daniel Stone.

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