[Jenamarie]

I think Joseph Smith has a huge disadvantage to ancient prophets: very many details of his personal life were preserved, his history is recent, and he was American. There seems to be a lot of leeway given to the mistakes of the ancient Prophets living in foreign lands in different times. We don't know much about their childhoods, or what their pre-Apostolic/Prophet adult lives were like, or what they did during their "off" times when they weren't actively preaching God's word. One of the apostles *denied Christ three times* and yet he is still very much reveered in Christendom. We don't know if Isaiah ever lost his temper. We DO know that Noah got so smashing drunk that he didn't realize it was his own daughters he has having sex with, yet I never hear Christians decrying his claim to Prophethood as I'm about 99.9% sure would be the case if it had been something Joseph had done.

Obviously Joseph wasn't perfect. He screwed up on more than one occasion. But I keep coming back to the thought of: do his mistakes negate his claim to Prophethood? God has such Spiritually fragile, highly rebellious material to work with in building His Kingdom here on Earth. To say that His chosen Servents would never do something that He didn't approve of is setting ourselves up to rejecting all of the Written Word, simply because of the mistakes of His messengers.

Of course that doesn't mean that everyone's claim to Prophethood is valid, but we can't look solely at the character of the messenger in determining the validity of their claim. Jesus Himself was accused of being a deranged alcoholic.