LDS Apostles
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40 free LDS Apostles trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints come to the calling from every kind of life. Before they were called, they were doctors and judges, teachers and executives, farmers and soldiers, and a few had brushes with national history that most members have never heard about. This quiz asks you to put names to those stories. It covers the first Quorum of the Twelve and how its members were chosen, the missions that shaped the early church, the apostles who went on to lead it, and the men who serve or served in living memory. There are also questions on how the quorum works: who presides, how a new church president is chosen, and what the titles mean. It is written for members, missionaries, seminary and institute classes and family home evenings, and for anyone curious about how the church is led. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01As a law clerk, LDS apostle D. Todd Christofferson worked for the judge who presided over which scandal's trials?
Watergate
Watergate landed on Judge John Sirica's desk soon after Christofferson began clerking for him. The two were the first people outside the White House to hear Nixon's recordings.
Q 02Which LDS apostle spent three decades as an airline pilot, making captain at just 29?
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Dieter F. Uchtdorf first trained as a fighter pilot in Big Spring, Texas, where he won the trophy for the best student pilot in his class. He left the airline in 1996, having risen to senior vice president.
Q 03Which LDS apostle, a pioneering heart surgeon before his call, later led the church past age 100?
Russell M. Nelson
Russell M. Nelson built his own heart-lung machine in Salt Lake City and used it for Utah's first open-heart operation. He died in 2025 at 101.
Q 04Which LDS apostle sat in Eisenhower's cabinet for eight years without giving up his church calling?
Ezra Taft Benson
Ezra Taft Benson ran the Department of Agriculture through both of Eisenhower's terms with the church president's blessing. An earlier apostle of the same name was his great-grandfather.
Q 05Which LDS apostle spent thirty years in the U.S. Senate and co-sponsored a notorious 1930 tariff?
Reed Smoot
Reed Smoot faced a four-year fight over whether an apostle could sit in the Senate at all. His tariff raised almost 900 import duties and is widely regarded as a catalyst for the worsening Great Depression.
Q 06Which early LDS apostle, an ancestor of Mitt Romney, was murdered in Arkansas in 1857?
Parley P. Pratt
Parley P. Pratt was killed by the estranged husband of his twelfth wife. A canyon above Salt Lake City, where he built the first public road, still carries his first name.
Q 07Ulisses Soares, the first LDS apostle from South America, was born in which country?
Brazil
Brazil got its first stake of the church in 1966, at a meeting Soares attended as a boy. The branch his family first went to met in a rented room above a bakery.
Q 08Which LDS apostle was called to the Twelve in 1963 at just 36, leaving a career in printing?
Thomas S. Monson
Thomas S. Monson was the youngest man called to the Twelve in 53 years, and he led the church from 2008. He once led a ward with 85 widows and kept visiting them long after his release.
Q 09Which LDS apostle, a Utah Supreme Court justice, was twice considered for the U.S. Supreme Court?
Dallin H. Oaks
Dallin H. Oaks was weighed for the nation's top bench by Gerald Ford in 1975 and again by Reagan in 1981. He had clerked there for Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Q 10Which LDS apostle once led a cruise-ship dance band and later served the shortest church presidency?
Howard W. Hunter
Howard W. Hunter played piano, violin, drums, saxophone, clarinet and trumpet, and named his band Hunter's Croonaders. He led the church for nine months before his death in 1995.
Q 11Which LDS apostle, a Yale PhD, led BYU as its president for most of the 1980s?
Jeffrey R. Holland
Jeffrey R. Holland saw the university's Jerusalem Center founded during his nine years in charge. He was born in St. George, Utah, and died in 2025 as president of the Twelve.
Q 12Which LDS apostle taught business at Stanford and is the son of a renowned chemist of the same name?
Henry B. Eyring
Henry B. Eyring spent nine years on the Stanford faculty, then left to run a church college in Idaho. His father, also Henry Eyring, was president of the American Chemical Society.
Q 13Which LDS apostle oversaw Ricks College's change into the four-year BYU–Idaho before his 2004 call?
David A. Bednar
Q 21Who was president of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve when Joseph Smith was killed in 1844?
Brigham Young
Brigham Young was preaching near Boston that summer and had no firm word of the killing for almost three weeks. The Twelve then governed the church under him until 1847.
Q 22Joseph Smith asked which group to choose the original LDS Quorum of the Twelve in 1835?
The Three Witnesses
The Three Witnesses, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris, announced their choices on 14 February 1835 and then ordained the new apostles themselves.
Q 23Nine of the original twelve LDS apostles had marched to Missouri in 1834 with which expedition?
Zion's Camp
David A. Bednar inherited what was then the largest private junior college in the United States, after years teaching management at the University of Arkansas. At 52 he was the youngest apostle called in two decades.
Q 14Which LDS apostle, called in 2015, was a cardiologist who ran a Utah heart transplant program?
Dale G. Renlund
Dale G. Renlund spoke Swedish before English, because his Finnish and Swedish parents had only just emigrated so they could marry in a temple. He directed the transplant program from 1991 to 2009.
Q 15Gerrit W. Gong, the first LDS apostle of Asian descent, won which award to study at Oxford?
Rhodes Scholarship
The Rhodes Scholarship led to an Oxford doctorate in international relations in 1980. Gong went on to work at the State Department and at the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
Q 16Which LDS apostle, called in 2023, joined the church as an adult, baptized on Christmas Eve 1987?
Patrick Kearon
Patrick Kearon spent part of his childhood in Saudi Arabia and first met Latter-day Saints while staying with a family in California. He met missionaries in London a few years later.
Q 17Which LDS apostle, called in 1961 and later church president, sat for 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace?
Gordon B. Hinckley
Gordon B. Hinckley stayed friends with Wallace for the rest of his life and later appeared on Larry King Live. In 2004 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House.
Q 18Which LDS church president, an apostle since 1943, announced the 1978 revelation on the priesthood?
Spencer W. Kimball
Spencer W. Kimball spoke in a hoarse rasp after cancer surgery removed one vocal cord and half of the other. He wore a small ear-mounted microphone even at pulpits that had their own.
Q 19Which LDS apostle was badly wounded at Carthage Jail in 1844 but lived to lead the church?
John Taylor
John Taylor was long said to have been saved by a pocket watch that stopped a musket ball. Later analysis suggests the watch broke when he fell against the windowsill.
Q 20Which LDS apostle, a geologist born in Berkshire, wrote the 1915 book Jesus the Christ?
James E. Talmage
James E. Talmage wrote it in under a year, a decade after the First Presidency first asked him for it. He had also been president of the University of Utah.
Zion's Camp failed in its stated aim of protecting church members in Jackson County, but Joseph Smith later drew most of his first leaders from the men who had made the march.
Q 24By long custom, which member of the LDS Twelve becomes church president when a president dies?
The longest-serving apostle
The longest-serving apostle has succeeded every time, which leaves no room for campaigning. Rank is set by the date a man joined the Twelve, not by his age.
Q 25Latter-day Saints sustain the First Presidency and each LDS apostle under which threefold title?
Prophets, seers, and revelators
Prophets, seers, and revelators is how Joseph Smith asked the congregation to acknowledge the Twelve at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple in 1836.
Q 26LDS teaching likens the calling of each new apostle to which man, chosen to replace Judas Iscariot?
Matthias
Matthias filled the gap Judas left among the Twelve, as told in the first chapter of Acts. In the LDS Church the First Presidency makes the choice, and members then vote to sustain it.
Q 27In which Lancashire town did two LDS apostles win the church's first British converts in 1837?
Preston
Preston offered a ready audience through relatives of Canadian converts, and more than 140 people were baptized there by October 1837. Within a year Britain had about 1,500 members.
Q 28From which Illinois city did the LDS Twelve lead the church in 1845, before heading west?
Nauvoo
Nauvoo was held just long enough for the Twelve to ready its temple for ordinances in December 1845. Nearly 6,000 members received temple blessings there by February 1846, when the exodus began.
Q 29The title apostle, used for the LDS Twelve, comes from a Greek verb meaning what?
To send forth
To send forth is the sense of the Greek apostellein, so an apostle is an envoy acting as someone's representative. The Twelve carry that role as missionaries to the whole world.
Q 30The LDS Twelve are instructed to call on which body first when they need help in their ministry?
The Seventy
The Seventy echo the seventy disciples Jesus sent out two by two in Luke's Gospel. Their presidents report to the Twelve, who direct their work around the world.