The Prophet and the Priest

Joseph Smith's Ecclesiastical Roles

“If you start a church with a prophet in it everybody will be against you,” Smith’s friend W.W. Phelps wrote ruefully in 1835. People had been calling Joseph Smith a prophet since before he organized his church in April of 1830, and the revelation that he presented to the group of people there that day claimed the title. “Behold there Shall a Record be kept among you & in it thou shalt be called a seer & Translater & Prop[h]et,” it said. They voted to accept this statement as the word of God.

But soon Smith reached for another title too. In November 1831, he dictated a revelation that now comprises the latter half of the current section 107 in the Doctrine and Covenants. Several passages near the beginning of that revelation (now versus 64-66) delineate that office.

“Wherefore, it must needs be that one be appointed of the High Priesthood to preside over the priesthood, and he shall be called President of the High Priesthood of the Church; or, in other words, the Presiding High Priest over the High Priesthood of the Church.”

In January 1832, an assembly of the Church voted to sustain Joseph Smith as the President of the High Priesthood, and at that conference he was ordained the President of the High Priesthood of the Church.

This is, in fact, the formal title of the man who is in charge of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his technical ecclesiastical office, even as the November 1831 revelation acknowledges that the Church sustained Smith as a prophet too.