The Book of Onias

The Book of Onias, a collection of revelations attributed to Onias, became a printed warning aimed at the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In late 1983, excerpts from it supplied both a rebuke to church leaders and a shared religious cause for Onias and the Lafferty brothers. Its significance lay not simply in what it condemned, but in how its claims of divine authority helped turn an alliance into organized action.

Revelation and Compilation

On November 26, 1983, Onias said he received a revelation commanding him to prepare pamphlets for stake presidents and ward bishops. The intended recipients were leaders throughout the church, from its president in Salt Lake City to local authorities across North America. The pamphlet drew on excerpts from Onias’s collected revelations and was framed as a warning to leaders who, in the text’s account, had committed fornication against God by mismanaging His church.

The revelations presented Onias as a divinely commissioned critic, not merely a dissenter with objections to church policy. They called on the established leadership to confess its errors and yield control to God’s chosen prophet, identified as the one mighty and strong. The pamphlet thus joined accusation to a claim of succession: its message challenged the church’s conduct while asserting that authority should pass to Onias.

Doctrinal Charges

The pamphlet’s sharpest objections concerned doctrines that Onias believed the church had betrayed. It condemned the church’s support for the government’s criminalization of plural marriage, treating that position as defiance of teachings revealed through Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century. In this argument, the dispute over marriage was evidence that modern leaders had abandoned sacred doctrine and forfeited their right to govern the church.

It also denounced the 1978 decision of church president Spencer W. Kimball to admit Black men to the priesthood. The pamphlet’s purported revelation advanced a racist doctrine that described Black people as subhuman and denied them the priesthood. That claim made the text’s opposition to the policy explicit: it presented the change as blasphemy, even as it contradicted the church’s policy turn and the broad approval it had received outside the church. The pamphlet’s religious authority therefore served to assert both Onias’s prophetic standing and an openly racist vision of who could belong to the priesthood.

The text also promised that Onias, then held in derision, would receive God’s spirit and that his words would expose those who refused to repent. Its warning was meant to make the leadership choose between acknowledging its errors and facing divine wrath. The pamphlet’s religious rhetoric made a sweeping institutional demand appear, to its adherents, to be a command from God.

Printing, Distribution, and Reception

At a gathering near the end of 1983, Bernard Brady brought Onias together with the Lafferty brothers, except Allen. According to Onias, five of the six brothers became enthusiastic when they understood that they had received a commandment to send three sections of The Book of Onias to church authorities. The pamphlet’s condemnation of church policy resonated with them as a long-denied truth, and they saw Onias as an ally in restoring the church of Joseph Smith to righteousness and preparing for the Second Coming of Christ.

The brothers put that conviction to work. They printed, folded, and collated more than fifteen thousand pamphlets, then addressed and mailed them to church leaders around the country. Onias contrasted their two weeks of work, day and night, with the several months the same task would have taken him and his associates in their spare time. Distribution was therefore not incidental to the revelations: the brothers turned a claimed divine warning into a large-scale campaign directed at the institution it condemned.

The Book’s Consequences

The collaboration helped establish the School of the Prophets, which by early 1984 met weekly, usually upstairs from the family chiropractic clinic at the Provo home of the Laffertys’ mother, Claudine. Onias regarded the brothers’ labor as pivotal to the school’s successful launch and treated their commitment as confirmation of their importance to his mission. On January 8, he received a revelation describing them as an elect people and chosen seed; about six weeks later, he received another directing him to appoint Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. The younger brothers approved the appointment and looked to Ron as they had throughout their lives.

The surviving account establishes the pamphlet’s intended audience, its central accusations, and its effect on the relationship between Onias and the brothers; it does not establish how church leaders responded to receiving it. Within the group, however, the text had a clear practical force. The Book of Onias gave Onias’s challenge a reproducible form, enlisted the brothers in carrying it to church authorities, and helped bind their joint religious project to a claim of divinely mandated authority.