Editing Openai/691a45a6-8ed0-8010-a7d9-24657a41a9aa (section)

==== The Latter-day Saint worldview assumes: ====
# Jesus established a very specific church structure. Think: clear hierarchy, priesthood offices, authority tied to individuals.
# That structure depended on living apostles with unique “keys.”
# When those apostles died, no one on earth held the same authority.
# Christianity kept going, but minus the essential ingredient. It still talked about Jesus, still produced theology, but it lacked divine authorization.
# Result: a “Great Apostasy,” not in the sense that all goodness vanished, but that the authorized church vanished.
# Solution: God restarts the system through Joseph Smith.

This is a clean, mechanical model.
It only works if early Christianity was relatively uniform and highly centralized under apostolic authority. That’s why LDS teachings often portray the first-century church as tightly organized and the second century as a sudden free-for-all.