Moroni's 'Laughably Improbable' Prophecy: That Joseph Smith's Name Would Be Known Among All Nations

In the spring of 1820, an angel named Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith, an obscure 17-year-old farm boy in upstate New York. Among the things Moroni told him was something that, at the time, seemed almost absurd: that Joseph's 'name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people' (Joseph Smith–History 1:33).

Joseph himself described his circumstances as those of an ordinary person 'of no consequence in the world,' forced to earn 'a scanty maintenance by his daily labor' (Joseph Smith–History 1:22-23). He had no wealth, no education, no aristocratic connections, and a thoroughly common surname. How many frontier farmers from early 19th-century America are remembered by name at all today — let alone debated internationally?

Yet the prophecy has been fulfilled in remarkable detail. Around the world, on every inhabited continent, in dozens of languages, missionaries share the story of the Restoration — and with it, the name of Joseph Smith. The prophecy specified both that his name would be good AND evil spoken of, and this too has come true with striking precision.

The evidence accumulates in unexpected places:

- In the 1950s, Elder John H. Groberg served on the remote Tongan island of Niuatoputapu. The islanders were unfamiliar with Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower — but they knew Joseph Smith's name, thanks to the efforts of a hostile Protestant pastor.

- A few months after the 1978 revelation on priesthood, Daniel Peterson visited a Christian bookstore in Nairobi, Kenya. Two large shelves were filled with anti-Mormon materials — possibly more anti-Mormon books than there were Latter-day Saints in all of East Africa at the time.

- Peterson and a colleague visited an abbot at a monastery in the mountains north of Beirut. Upon learning where they were from, the abbot pulled a copy of the Book of Mormon off his shelf. He didn't believe it — but he knew it.

- In the bazaars of Cairo, papyrus reproductions of the facsimiles from the Book of Abraham are on sale. In East Jerusalem, olivewood statues of Joseph Smith and miniature Liahona replicas are sold in shops.

Perhaps most striking is what Harold Bloom — Yale University's Sterling Professor of the Humanities, one of the most eminent literary critics in American history, and certainly no believer — wrote in his 1992 book 'The American Religion': 'Joseph Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history.' And further: 'I do not find it possible to doubt that Joseph Smith was an authentic prophet. Where in all of American history can we find his match?'

Moroni's prophecy was made to a teenager with no earthly reason to be known beyond his own county. Its precise fulfillment — in both the positive and the negative — across every continent and among peoples who had never met a Latter-day Saint missionary, stands as a powerful fulfillment of prophecy.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Gordon B. Hinckley, “Fear Not to Do Good,” General Conference, April 1983):

I took occasion here to open the testimony of Joseph Smith concerning the words spoken to him when a young man seventeen years of age. He was visited by Moroni in the night, and he reports, “He [Moroni] called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me, and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.” ( JS—H 1:33 .) We see in this congregation today a fulfillment of those remarkable words of prophecy. This has become a great, cosmopolitan church. We rejoice in the tremendous growth of the work across the world. We are thankful for your great faith and faithfulness.