Three Claims of New Revelation
How Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and Islam Each Began
A Comparative Study
One Truth Ministries
Scripture quotations from the New International Version (NIV)
Introduction: Why the Founding Story Matters
Every religious movement rests on a claim about where its authority comes from. For historic, orthodox Christianity, that claim is simple: God has spoken fully and finally through Jesus Christ, and the apostles who walked with Him, saw Him risen, and were commissioned by Him recorded that revelation in what became the New Testament, standing on the foundation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and Islam each tell a different kind of story. Each one says that at some point after the apostles, something had been lost, corrupted, or misunderstood, and that a single man received new, corrective revelation that supersedes what came before. Understanding exactly how each founder described his experience is the first step in testing that claim against Scripture.
This document lays out the origin of each movement as its own adherents and historians describe it, then closes with a side-by-side comparison and a short biblical framework for weighing these claims.
1. Mormonism — Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The Man and the Setting
Joseph Smith Jr. was born in 1805 and raised in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York, a region so named because it had been swept repeatedly by revivalist preaching in the early 1800s. Smith's family, like many neighbors, was involved in folk magic and treasure-seeking with divining or "seer" stones, a detail that later becomes important to how he described translating scripture.
The First Vision (1820)
Smith later taught that as a fourteen-year-old, confused by competing churches, he went into the woods to pray and ask God which church was true. He said two "personages" appeared to him in a pillar of light, whom he identified as God the Father and Jesus Christ. According to Smith's own account, he was told that he should join none of the existing churches, because their creeds were "an abomination" and their teachers were corrupt.
This is the foundational claim of the entire movement: that every existing Christian church, and by extension the entire Christian tradition since the apostles, had fallen into total apostasy and needed to be restored from scratch through Smith.
The Angel Moroni and the Golden Plates (1823-1827)
Three years later, in 1823, Smith said an angel named Moroni appeared to him at night and told him about a set of gold plates buried in a hill near his home, containing a history of an ancient people and "the fullness of the everlasting Gospel." Smith said he was shown the plates but was not permitted to take them for four more years, visiting the hill annually until 1827, when he said Moroni finally released them to him along with two seer stones, described as "interpreters," to aid the translation.
Translating the Book of Mormon
Multiple eyewitnesses to the translation process, including Smith's wife Emma, his scribe Oliver Cowdery, and witnesses David Whitmer and Martin Harris, described a method that has become a point of significant debate even among Latter-day Saint historians: Smith placing a seer stone in a hat, burying his face in the hat to block out light, and dictating English sentences that he said appeared on the stone, with the golden plates themselves often covered or not even in the room.
The Book of Mormon was published in 1830 and describes ancient Israelite peoples migrating to the Americas, with a resurrected Christ appearing to them after His ascension. Smith and his followers organized the Church of Christ (later the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) that same year.
What Followed
Smith went on to claim ongoing revelation for the rest of his life, producing the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price as additional scripture, and introducing doctrines with no precedent in historic Christianity, including plural marriage, baptism for the dead, and the teaching that God the Father was once a man who progressed to godhood. He was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois in 1844 while in jail awaiting trial, after ordering the destruction of a newspaper press that had printed exposes about polygamy in Nauvoo.
2. Jehovah's Witnesses — Charles Taze Russell and the Watch Tower Society
The Man and the Setting
Charles Taze Russell was born in 1852 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian family. As a teenager he began to doubt core doctrines of his upbringing, particularly the idea of eternal conscious punishment in hell, which he felt was incompatible with a loving God. He drifted from Presbyterianism, then Congregationalism, and for a time was influenced by Adventism, the movement that grew out of William Miller's failed predictions of Christ's return in the 1840s.
A Different Kind of Founding Claim
This is the most important distinction to notice: unlike Joseph Smith or Muhammad, Russell never claimed an angelic visitation, a vision, or direct verbal revelation from God. His authority rested instead on his own systematic, independent reinterpretation of the Bible, particularly biblical chronology and prophecy, which he believed revealed truths the mainstream churches had missed or deliberately obscured.
In the early 1870s, Russell organized a small Bible study group in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. In 1879 he began publishing Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, and in 1884 he incorporated what became the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, the legal and publishing arm that still governs Jehovah's Witnesses today.
Chronology and 1914
A central pillar of Russell's system was a chronology built around the "Gentile Times," a period he calculated from Old Testament texts (particularly Daniel and Ezekiel) as ending in 1914. He taught this would mark the establishment of God's kingdom and the end of the present order. When 1914 arrived and brought the outbreak of World War I rather than Armageddon, the movement reinterpreted the date as the beginning of Christ's invisible heavenly rule rather than a visible, earthly event.
A Pattern of Revised Dates
This reinterpretation set a pattern that continued for decades under Russell's successors. Under second president Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the organization taught in the book Millions Now Living Will Never Die that faithful Old Testament figures like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would be resurrected to rule the earth beginning in 1925. Rutherford was confident enough that he built a mansion in San Diego called Beth Sarim ("House of the Princes") to house them. The resurrection did not occur.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Watch Tower publications strongly suggested 1975 as the likely end of the present system, tied to a calculation of 6,000 years since Adam's creation. An Awake! magazine article in 1969 told young readers they would "never grow old in this present system of things." When 1975 passed without incident, a significant number of members left the organization disillusioned. The Watch Tower Society later offered a partial acknowledgment that members had "read too much" into the statements, without fully owning the specificity of what had been published.
From Bible Students to Jehovah's Witnesses
Russell died in 1916. A leadership struggle followed, and roughly three-quarters of the Bible Students associated with the movement in 1917 had left by 1931, some forming their own splinter groups. Those who remained under the Watch Tower Society formally adopted the name "Jehovah's Witnesses" in 1931 under Rutherford's leadership. The organization today is governed by a Governing Body headquartered in Warwick, New York, and continues to reject the doctrine of the Trinity, teaching instead that Jesus is a created being, originally the archangel Michael.
3. Islam — Muhammad and the Quran
The Man and the Setting
Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born around 570 AD in Mecca, a trading city in the Arabian Peninsula built around the Kaaba, a shrine that at the time housed idols worshiped by various Arab tribes alongside a belief in a high god called Allah. Orphaned young, Muhammad was raised first by his grandfather and then his uncle, and became a merchant, eventually marrying a wealthy widow named Khadijah, who was significantly older than him and became his first follower.
By his forties, Muhammad had developed a practice of periodically withdrawing to meditate alone, particularly in a cave called Hira on Jabal al-Nour ("the Mountain of Light") outside Mecca.
The First Revelation (c. 610 AD)
Islamic tradition holds that during one of these retreats, around 610 AD, when Muhammad was about forty years old, he was visited in the cave by a being he identified as the angel Gabriel (Jibril), who commanded him to "recite" or "read." Muhammad, who by tradition was illiterate, protested that he could not read, and the encounter was repeated with increasing intensity until words came to him, understood as the first verses of what would become the Quran.
By multiple early accounts, Muhammad found the experience terrifying rather than comforting. He reportedly returned home shaken and physically disturbed, and it was Khadijah who reassured him and, according to Islamic tradition, her Christian cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal who first suggested that what he had experienced might be the same kind of revelation given to Moses.
A Widening Claim
Revelations continued intermittently over roughly the next twenty-three years, both in Mecca and later in Medina, and were eventually compiled into the Quran, which Muslims hold to be the literal, eternal word of Allah dictated through Muhammad. Like Smith's and Russell's movements, Islam's founding claim includes the idea that earlier revelation, in this case the Torah given to Moses and the Gospel given to Jesus, had been corrupted or altered by Jews and Christians over time, and that Muhammad's revelation was sent to correct and complete it as the final word to humanity.
The Hijra and the Formation of a Community
Muhammad preached in Mecca for about a decade, gaining a small following but facing significant opposition from the city's dominant tribes, whose economic and religious life centered on the Kaaba's idols. In 622 AD, facing persecution, Muhammad and his followers emigrated to the city of Yathrib, later renamed Medina. This migration, the Hijra, marks year one of the Islamic calendar and the point at which Muhammad became not only a religious teacher but a political and military leader, eventually uniting the Arabian Peninsula under Islam by the time of his death in 632 AD.
This is a notable contrast with both Smith and Russell: Islam's founding includes an explicit military and political dimension from a very early stage, including armed conflict with Meccan forces and neighboring tribes, that is woven into the Quran and the hadith (recorded traditions of Muhammad's sayings and actions) as part of the faith's founding narrative.
Side-by-Side Comparison
What These Three Claims Have in Common
- Each founder claimed that the existing faith of his day had gone wrong and needed correction or replacement — not reform from within, but a fresh start under his unique authority.
- Each claim rests on a private, unrepeatable, unverifiable experience: a vision (Smith), a personal reinterpretation of chronology (Russell), or an angelic dictation (Muhammad). None occurred in public, before witnesses who could test what was happening as it happened.
- Each produced a new body of scripture or teaching that was said to stand alongside or above the Bible, either replacing it (the Quran), supplementing it with equal authority (the Book of Mormon), or radically reinterpreting it through a single, centralized human authority (the Watch Tower Society).
- Each movement asks its followers to trust the founder's account of what happened to him personally as the foundation for everything that follows.
Weighing These Claims Against Scripture
Scripture does not leave believers without a way to test claims like these. Paul, writing to a church already being pulled toward "another gospel," put it starkly:
It's worth sitting with the specific wording there. Paul doesn't just warn against false teachers; he explicitly names "an angel from heaven" as a possible source of a counterfeit gospel, and says the message should be rejected even if that's where it claims to come from. Every one of the three founders in this study said his authority came from an angelic being, a spirit, or new insight into God's Word that no one before him had rightly understood. Scripture calls believers to test that kind of claim against what has already been once for all delivered, not to accept it simply because it comes wrapped in religious language or a vivid personal experience.
Jesus Himself warned that this exact pattern, compelling figures claiming special insight or authority, would be a recurring feature of the age between His first and second coming, not an exception to it:
None of this requires assuming bad intent on the part of Smith, Russell, or Muhammad personally to say plainly that their claims fail this test. The question Scripture puts to every claim of new revelation isn't primarily "was this person sincere," but "does this align with what God has already spoken, and does it add to or subtract from the finished work of Christ." In all three cases here, the answer moves the follower's trust away from the sufficiency of Christ's finished work and onto continuing revelation mediated through a single human founder or organization.
A Closing Word
If you have a friend, neighbor, or family member inside one of these three traditions, it's worth remembering that most people raised in these movements did not choose them the way an adult convert weighs competing claims; they inherited them, often from parents and grandparents who were themselves sincere and devout. Approaching these conversations with the historical facts laid out clearly, but also with patience and genuine care for the person in front of you, will do far more than winning an argument.
One Truth Ministries