It is a fairly well-known LDS teaching that John is still alive and wandering around the earth.
It is also an LDS teaching that before Joe Smith faked a new scripture, the true gospel had been lost for over 1500 years. because of course, follow Joe or else.
The implication of these two LDS teachings is that the apostle John is still alive yet is either apostate or for some reason stopped witnessing to anyone within 50 or an hundred years or so of the resurrection.
i have yet to meet a mormon that would explain that. none of the ones i've talked to could explain why John doesn't show up to their board of directors meetings, either..
which is weird. if John was here i would kind of expect him to show up to at least some of the more important events in the last 2000 years of church history.
I don't really read Joseph Smith that way. I know he was a bit young for a preacher and that the gold and brass plates give a lot of people the heebie jeebies, but he lived in really violent times in America, during the "rim of the Earth kind of way out in the unexplored" far off wastes of Indian raids and revolts by less settled elements of society during the Campaigns of Napoleon in Europe, which overlapped both the War of 1812 and Spanish American Wars in his geographical area, and the American Civil War.
I read their books, and in spite of the fact that I really think Doctrine and Covenants indicate a not very well knit social group around the author, I also thought that the parable in the Book of Mormon itself had good moral perspectives on brother against brother conflicts writ larger than single combat Cain and Able or small clan incidents like the one among the children of Noah, even if he set them in a more open, 1940s giant cast film ready landscape rather than focusing on drawing extremely individual character portraits like the ones in the stories of Jacob vs Esau or Joseph sold by his 11 brothers.
Those were the nature of the extremes in religion that the Early Republic experienced, excluding the local politics, focusing on the role of the prophets against the tyrannical and apostate kings, and emphasizing purity as the way to valor and honor. But then, I'm American.
1 Timothy 4:12 Context
9This
is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.
10For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.
11These things command and teach.
12Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity. 13Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine.
14Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery.
15Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all.