The Crucifixion of Joseph Smith

In 1830, Mary Elizabeth Rollins was a pretty, precocious twelve-year-old girl living with her aunt and uncle in Kirtland, Ohio. Her father had perished in a shipwreck on Lake Ontario when she was two years old. Mary and her mother went to live with her uncle Sidney Gilbert, an early convert to Joseph Smith’s new religion. Soon the mother and daughter became Saints, baptized in a stream near their home.

Visiting a neighbor’s house, Mary spotted a rare Book of Mormon. Only a few hundred copies had been printed, mostly reserved for the use of missionaries wending their way around the northeastern United States. Mary begged to borrow the book for an evening. In her autobiography, she reported that she and the Gilberts savored the “Golden Bible” until late at night. She woke up early and memorized the first verse of Nephi, the first book in the Mormon bible: “I, Nephi, have been born of goodly parents…