Six months before his death, the Prophet Joseph said to a group of trusted friends,

I am exposed to far greater danger from traitors among ourselves than from enemies without.

And if I can escape from the ungrateful treachery of assassins,

I can live as Caesar might have lived, were it not for a right-hand Brutus.

All the enemies upon the face of the earth may roar and exert all their power to bring about my death,

but they can accomplish nothing, unless some who are among us enjoying

our society, who have been with us in our councils, participated in our confidence, taken

us by the hand, called us brother, and saluted us with a kiss.

Join with our enemies, turn our virtues into faults, and by falsehood and deceit, stir up

their wrath and indignation against us and bring their united

vengeance upon our heads.

And then he said, Judas was one of the 12 apostles and through his treachery the crucifixion of Christ was brought about.

And we have a Judas in our midst.

In today's episode of Church History Matters, we look at what we know about those trusted church members who treacherously turned on Joseph Smith and conspired to bring about his death, one of whom, like Judas of old, was an apostle and counselor to the prophet.

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

And today Casey and I dive into our second episode in this series about the martyrdom of Joseph and Hiram Smith.

Now let's get into it. Hi Casey. Hello Scott. Here we go round two on the martyrdom and who this is a complex story I got to tell you.

There's a lot of moving parts here and I hope this all comes together and makes sense.

Yeah, today we're going to try to get into more of the complexity.

Yeah.

Last time we dove headlong into the complexity of the external factors that led to Joseph's death,

specifically highlighting who pulled the trigger,

...