Twenty-Five (1830)do with choosing the original twelve members of the LDS Church’s apostles. He assigned the
task to the Three Witnesses (Harris, Whitmer, and Cowdery).
The events of April 6, 1830 were merely a formal, legal event required by law to
incorporate an official church. (The law required 6 incorporators, and thus evolved the
idea that there were originally only 6 members, while there were actually about 50
people in attendance.) After the Church of Christ was officially organized, Joseph was
bombarded with requests from people asking him to “enquire [sic] of the Lord” “what
might be their respective duties in relation to this work.”^44
Casting Out Devils and Other “Spiritual” Phenomena
Joseph spent most of 1830 giving the people what they wanted. He preached
according to the desires of the people. He even “cast the devil” out of Newel Knight, who,
according to some embellished reports, supposedly levitated up to the ceiling of the room
where his “shoulder and head were pressing against the beams.”^45 Newel did not levitate.
Joseph was with him the entire time. Here was what really transpired:
Newel Knight was greatly agitated by what Joseph was claiming, along with the
fact that his family had already accepted Joseph as a chosen prophet of God. Newel
possessed a natural cognitive dissonance^46 regarding the whole matter, culminating one
day in which he got so worked up into a frenzied and disconcerted state of mind, that
his family reported him as being “possessed by the devil.” Newel barricaded himself in
one of the rooms in his father’s house and began beating on the walls and yelling
feverishly. The neighbors heard the noise and came over to see what was happening.
When none could convince Newel to settle down and come out of the room, Joseph
Knight (Newel’s father) went and found Joseph.
Joseph immediately came to the Knight home and calmly asked Newel if he could
come in the room and talk about it. Newel agreed, if everyone else stayed outside. Joseph
went in alone and shut the door behind him. The people heard Newel ranting and raving to
Joseph for a few moments and then nothing. Joseph smiled calmly at Newel and took him
by the hand, at which point Newel started crying and asked Joseph to cast the devil out of
him. Now, Joseph already knew the cause of Newel’s behavior—acting out his own
personal drama—and that Newel believed that he, Joseph, could “cast out the devil,” (“[i]f
you know that I can, it shall be done.”^47 ). Newell lay on the floor, exhausted. Joseph had
already experienced many instances in which he saw how people reacted when “wrought
upon by the Spirit of God,”^48 but this was the first time he was personally involved with a
person claiming to be “wrought upon by the devil.”
In his own account of the incident, Joseph did not ascribe what happened to Newel
Knight as “being possessed by the devil,” until Newel himself told Joseph that he was—
leaving Newel with an impression of what he wanted to believe. Joseph subsequently
reported that he “went and found him suffering very much in his mind, and his body acted
upon in a very strange manner; his visage and limbs distorted and twisted in every shape
and appearance possible to imagine; and finally he was caught up off the floor of the
apartment, and tossed about most fearfully. ...After he had thus suffered for a time, I
succeeded in getting hold of him by the hand, when almost immediately he spoke to me,
and with great earnestness requested me to cast the devil out of him, saying that he knew he
was in him, and that he also knew that I could cast him out.”^49