Stated in Mormons and the Bible, Barlow explains that Joseph Smith’s theological process as baraufication, meaning that he gathered and organized ideas and concepts from different traditions and formulated a new one, Mormonism. When Joseph was a teenager he started praying about which religion to join. He would go to the woods behind his house in New York, prayed and felt immoral powers fighting him. He was then rescued by a bright light, thus was Smith’s first vision and the light of the start of it all. In the bright light he claims that God and angels appeared before him telling him to not join any church because none of the churches had all the truth and that they also had work for him. Later Joseph was visited by an angel who led him to plates and the start of it all started to begin and arise. …show more content…
Smith was induced in a family and a cultural environment in which those kinds of heavenly manifestations were not commonplace, but they weren't all that rare. I think that's part of what prepared him but also what prepared his family to accept him as a prophet, because before he could test the waters of public opinion, he had to be accepted with his own family. And it isn't every child who would go to his parents and say, "God and Christ have just visited me in a grove of trees," and be believed. Joseph Smith differed from evangelical protestants in rejecting the Bible as a sufficient religious guide. Thus urging him to gather and organize ideas and concepts from different traditions and create new one, Mormonism. Smith swore that an angel named Moroni visited him leading him to ancient plates linking the American Indians as descendants to immigrants from Jerusalem. Supposedly before the death of the angel, Moroni, he was supposed to bury the plates once written by his father