What Latter-day Saints today call the Temple Endowment was first given by the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1842,

two years prior to his death, to a small group of nine of his trusted

associates in Navao, Illinois.

It was a key piece of the larger vibrant temple liturgy than developing in Nava. But where did this temple

endowment come from? What was its relationship to the Prophet's previous

revelations? And what, if anything, was its relationship to mry, which Joseph Smith had joined only two months

before administering that first endowment to his nine friends, who, by the way, were all

masons as well.

In today's episode of Church History matters, Casey and I dig into the

details of what we know or think we know about the origins of the temple

endowment ritual. We'll discuss several of what we believe our primary source materials the Prophet Joseph drew from

as he formulated this important ordinance under inspiration. And we'll offer a Navu angle to the meaning of the word restoration.

I'm Scott Woodward and my co-host is Casey Griffiths

and today Casey and I dive into our fourth episode in this series

about the development of Latter-day Saint Temple

worship. Now let's get into it.

Hello Scott. Hey Casey how are I in my friend good just I have a mountain of material like so much stuff that I want to talk about today and so yeah so buckle up everybody we plan

on going deep today particularly on the Navao endowment yeah how are we going to cover all this in one episode? I don't know but we're going to give it our darndest

This happens every time church history is very rich and so we're trying to streamline for you guys but there's a lot of stuff that we want to talk about that might not make it in but we're going to do the best we can to at least give you the outline or point you towards some sources that can allow you to do a deeper dive. But I think this is a pretty deep dive. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about what happened last time. Scott, do you want to give us a little recap? Yes, we mentioned how in the Kirtland temple as the capstone of the Kirtland Endowment,

Joseph Smith was given keys from Moses, Elias, and Elijah, but no instruction manual

as to how to use those keys exactly.

So we likened it to being given the puzzle pieces that he needed to assemble a later temple

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