June 3, 2026

The Prophets All Testified of Christ

How Joseph Smith learned, in translating the Book of Mormon, that the testimony of Christ was old before the Gospels — and how his work on the scriptures restored that witness where it had been lost.

Before the first Gospel opens, the testimony of Christ was already old. From the beginning the Lord set His Son at the center of the story: chosen in the council before the world, promised to Eve as the seed of the woman, preached to Adam, foreseen by Enoch, and carried in the covenant made with the fathers. The Gospels do not introduce the Son of God; they record the keeping of a promise.

This was not the picture the Bible alone gave Joseph Smith. In translating the Book of Mormon he met prophets — Lehi, Nephi, Jacob, Abinadi, the brother of Jared — who spoke of Christ plainly, by name, centuries before Bethlehem. They testified that all the holy prophets, from the beginning, had looked forward to the same Redeemer. That witness pressed a question on him: if the ancient prophets knew Christ so clearly, why did the Old Testament as it had come down speak of Him so dimly?

His later work on the scriptures answered it. Where the received text had lost or muted the testimony of Christ, the translation restored it — the gospel preached to Adam, the meaning of the sacrifice, the Son named and worshipped from the first. The Restoration Edition carries that restored witness forward. Read against the King James baseline, it shows the seam: the place where a promise the world had forgotten was written back into the record.

The opening section of this study, Prophecies of the Son of God, gathers the earliest of these witnesses. They are set first for a reason. The life of Christ does not begin in a manger; it begins in a council, in a garden, in a covenant — and the Gospels are its fulfillment.