Question 42

Time and again we are told that Joseph "sealed his testimony with his blood," went " like a lamb to the slaughter," and "died a martyr's death."  Yet the specifics of the dastardly murder of Joseph as related in the Documented [sic] History of the Church 6:xli, 618, 620; 7:102) clearly reveal that he died in a blazing gunfight--John Wayne style--and he is reported to have killed a couple of the Mobocrats in the fracas.  Lambs do not fight to the death with six-shooters.  How can the LDS Church insist that Joseph was a martyr, knowing that Joseph fought for his life, when the universally accepted definition of a martyr is one who dies willingly and without resistance?

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