When talking about JS being a true or a false prophet with Mormons, a common response I’ve been given by LDSs is to say that if JS was a false prophet for having given predictions that didn’t come true, then Jesus was also a false prophet.
Let me first say that they are in the right to insist upon equal scales and equal measurement. We must avoid giving our own side a pass on the same things that we chastise or denigrate their side for doing. We must be fair to both sides.
In case you don’t know what they might be talking about when they say that if we reject JS as being a false prophet we’d have to reject Jesus as a false prophet as well, I guess I should first start with the main (only?) example they give. It’s in the Olivet Discourse, which is recorded in the late chapters of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as is the account of Jesus and His disciples looking at the Temple in Jerusalem, with the disciples admiring the building and its surroundings, then with Jesus predicting it would all be torn down “in this generation”. So far, so good — nobody has a problem with that, because we all agree that Jesus spoke these words somewhere around 30 A.D., and it happened just as He said about 40 years later, which qualifies as “this generation”. The problem arises with much of what else Jesus says in that same section, which most Christians take as being “end of the world” predictions, that are also said to be taking place before the end of “this generation”, but since the world has continued on for nearly 2,000 years since that time, that would seem to be a false prophecy.
There are a variety of ways that Christians of today get around the implications of Jesus predicting something that didn’t come true in that passage, and it often involves one or more of the following:
- invoking “dual fulfillment” (so that it was partially fulfilled — the bits about the Temple being completely destroyed and Jerusalem surrounded by armies, etc. were fulfilled as a type, but the parts about the world coming to an end are yet-future — sort of like Isaiah saying that a virgin would have a child and before the child was of the age of reason the two kings would be dead, yet this was also fulfilled in a greater way by the virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus)
- saying “this generation” must refer to the Jews as a people, and it’s just saying that the Jews will continue to be an ethnically distinct people until the end of the world
- saying “this generation” is talking about some future generation, so that the people who are alive at the commencement of the time will live to see its end
- saying that there are multiple aspects involved in this, with the disciples wrongly thinking they were all asking one single question, but Jesus’s answer broke it up into multiple questions so that “the destruction of the Temple” would occur in “this generation” (i.e., A.D. 70) while “the end of the world” wouldn’t happen for quite some time (nearly 2,000 years now)
I would caution against using most of these, or at least, would say that if you use these to “rescue” the Olivet Discourse, you must equally allow Mormons to use the same things to “rescue” JS’s false prophecies. [That said, there are many examples of JS’s failed predictions that would still fail, even while allowing some of these “rescues”, but the list of his failed prophecies becomes much shorter if you allow the same excuses of “this generation” meaning “some future time”, or saying of the Olivet Discourse, “yes, it sounds like Jesus is saying the world would end in 40 years, but it must mean something else”, because the same must be allowed for JS’s predictions so that Mormons can say, “yes, it sounds like JS is saying X would happen in Y years, but it must mean something else”.]
While I’m not going to go into my views on this subject in depth here (because it’s getting far away from Mormonism and would likely take some time) my friend has a website with many articles and also a published book that more fully explains the position, if you’re interested in a deep dive into the subject. The short version, however, is that when Jesus said that Jerusalem and the Temple would be destroyed within the generation, that that’s just what He meant, and that the passages that sound like the entire world would be brought to an end have been misunderstood, and that we need to understand them in the Jewish context, with the OT having similar “end of the world” language that meant the destruction of this or that nation (and it would be “the end of the world” to them, and actually would be “the end of the world as they knew it“, and we still use that sort of language today without necessarily meaning the destruction of the entire cosmos).
No, Jesus is not a false prophet. Mormons also wouldn’t say that Jesus is a false prophet. But we do have to use caution so that we weigh Mormonism and Christianity on equal scales, so that we don’t use different criteria with JS.
TOYBOM: The One Year Book of Mormon 
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