Following a brief hiatus from the blog so I could take care of an increasingly demanding personal life, I'm happy to announce that Paul issued what seems to be a challenge:
In February 1835, Joseph Smith declared that Jesus’s second coming would occur in 1891. This was 56 years later. How in Jesus’s return it would wind up the scene for the times of this earth, for the pruning of the vineyard would be over. It is written, “President Smith then stated that the meeting had been called because God had commanded it, and it was made known to him by a vision and by the Holy Spirit. He then gave a relation of some of the circumstances attending us while journeying to Zion–our trials, sufferings; and said God had not designed all this for nothing, but He had it in remembrance yet; and it was the will of God that those who went to Zion, with a determination to lay down their lives, if necessary, should be ordained to the ministry, and go forth to prune the vineyard for the last time, or the coming of the Lord, which was nigh–even fifty-six years should wind up the scene.” (History of the Church, vol. 2, p. 182) And so we learn that in 1891, Jesus was supposed to return to the earth in His Second Coming. Imagine how excited people were.
The bottom line here, is that this is a common "refutation" of Joseph Smith's prophetic calling. However, when the above quote is examined alongside other documents and accounts from the same time--especially Joseph Smith's own record of the revelation he received as well as how he understood it--it becomes quite obvious that this argument against Smith's claim to prophethood is frivolous. For a more detailed examination of this issue, see this article from FAIR.
So did Jesus return in His second coming in 1891? No. Jesus has not returned to the earth yet. So what does this make Joseph Smith? A false prophet. It is written in God’s Word, the Bible, “but the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)
Paul's reliance on Deuteronomy 18:20-22 as the "test of a prophet" is, unfortunately, faulty. For an analysis of why this scripture is a poor prooftext, see this article from FAIR that also details how a number of Old Testament prophets would need to be thrown out as "false prophets", based on the way these verses are applied to Joseph Smith.
As demonstrated by the resources linked above, this is no "false prophecy", and is instead a misrepresentation of what Joseph meant. Paul's implication that God apparently killed off Joseph after losing patience with him is totally baseless, as is Paul's assertion that "God was not with him."So at the age of 29, Joseph Smith made a false prophecy about Jesus’s second coming. And the fact that Joseph Smith died at the age of 38 means that God had enough of him and his false teachings/prophecies. He died after giving so many false prophecies, for example, the coming of Jesus in 1891. It is evident that God was not with him.
For a more expansive list of resources regarding Joseph Smith's purported false and true prophecies, see this article by Robert Boylan at his blog, Scriptural Mormonism.
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