A Commentary on Four Past and Present Naturalistic Explanations for Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon Whether one believes that Joseph Smith was a divine prophet, a fraud, or in between, he still had a personality. This personality would have been partly the result of his cultural (American Frontier) background, his family environment, and even his childhood typhoid illness and traumatic surgery. There have been few attempts to understand him psychologically, and virtually none from devout Mormonism, despite the challenge by Jan Shipps more than 20 years ago to solve “the prophet puzzle.” This paper will review four interesting ones, three from outside Mormonism, and one (partly) from within, by Whitsitt (1885), Riley (1902), Brink (1976) and Morain (1998).

Robert D. Anderson, Robert A. Rees