The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, to Joseph, was one of the most important parts of his early ministry,

but was essentially lost to the Church for more than a century. Coming up next on the Joseph Smith Papers.

K-jazz television, in cooperation with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rossin.

Joseph Smith finished the publication of the Book of Mormon in March of 1830. Then, within three months, he began a new translation of the Bible of the King James version.

It was time for that which had been lost to the ages to be restored again.

He worked on that until July of 1833.

And then for the rest of his life,

Joseph worked to bring the new translation to publication.

It never happened. After Joseph was killed, Emma retained possession of the manuscript.

And when the Latter-day Saints came west, that manuscript eventually came into the possession of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,

known today as the Community of Christ. For more than a hundred years, few Latter-day Saints saw that manuscript

or even had interest in it until a young BYU professor named Robert Jay Mathews became fascinated with it.

I began to to feel a great amount of interest and curiosity about this, and I would talk to people in the ward.

And I was growing up in Evanston, Wyoming,

and I was just graduated from high school and scheduled to come to BYU

soon. And no one seemed to know anything about it.

And so when I got to BYU, I talked to various professors and they all knew that Joseph Smith had made a translation of the Bible, but no one knew very much about it.

They didn’t know how he did it.

They didn't know how we got a printed copy of it.

They didn't know whether or not the reorganized church had changed it. There were suspicions. There were doubts. And so I finally decided through the years that if I was ever going to know just how accurate this printed edition was,

I would have to see the original manuscripts.

So I wrote a letter to the reorganized church that had the original manuscripts in Independence, Missouri.

Now, I didn’t do this when I was 17.

The years were passing,

and I wrote a letter and asked their historian if I could come and see the manuscripts. And he wrote back and said no.

And then I read in the paper that the historian had passed away and a new man had been appointed.

He had a little different view.

And I wrote to him and he said, yes, you come to Independence and I will show you the manuscript.

So all in all, I made 13 trips to Independence, Missouri,

usually spend a week each time,

and they laid out the manuscripts before me and the Bible which Joseph Smith had used, a King James version.

And I said, may I make notes? And they said, yes.

And I remember that it was on my birthday.

I was forty-four years of age that they first let me use the original manuscripts.

And so every time I would go there,

I worked with the very,

the very pieces of paper that Joseph and Oliver and Sidney and others had written on and handled.

And I was, to say the least,

exceedingly interested and energized to be doing this.

So that went on for a long time until I—and then they said, oh, well, we will supply a typewriter for you.

There are about four hundred and sixty pages of manuscript,

and I typed the entire four hundred and sixty pages.

Dr. Matthews also took the time to copy all of the notations that Joseph had made in the fini edition of the King James version of the Bible that he used during the translation process.

So he now had a typescript of the manuscript and copies of the notations in the Bible.

So the question now automatically becomes,

hHow did Joseph and his scribes mechanically do this process

of translation?

Now, what happened was they started with Genesis,

and the first 24 chapters of Genesis were written in full.

Even some chapters in which he made no changes.

And for that, there are no markings in the Bible.

They then, the Lord indicated for them to go into the New Testament. So they did Matthew, Mark, Luke,

and the first six chapters of John were all written out in longhand, for which there are no markings in the Bible.

Then they developed a quicker system.

The Lord had indicated in the Doctrine and Covenants,

you ought to go a little faster.

And so they developed a quicker system,

and that is they would mark in the Bible passages that needed to be revised,

and then they would only write on the paper the actual words of the revision or the correction, and that way it took the Bible and its markings and the notations on the piece of paper to match them together. And so that’s how

they went through the Bible.

You may remember from an earlier episode with Royal Skousen, and when we talked about the translation of the Book of Mormon, he told us that Joseph had used the Urim and Thumim and the seer stone as translating tools to assist him in that work.

Well, when Joseph came to the translation of the Bible,

he used neither of those.

One time Orson Pratt asked Joseph Smith,

how is it that you used the Urim and Thumim when you translated the Book of Mormon, but you did not use it when you translated the Bible?

According to Orson, the prophet responded,

“When I was a beginner, I needed the Urim and Thumim.

But during the translation of the Book of Mormon, I became so well acquainted with the spirit of revelation that when I translated the Bible,

I did not need the Urim and Thumim.”

When Joseph Smith tells the story of the

baptism when John the Baptist came and ordained them and they baptized each other, Joseph and Oliver.

And then he says, and this is pretty close to an exact quote. He said, “The Holy Ghost fell upon us,

our minds being now enlightened by the Holy Ghost.

We began to have the scriptures open to us,

and the meaning of their more mysterious passages made clear in a way that we never had been able to attain to previously.”

When you see, since—after they had that experience,

they could look at the Bible and by revelation came

the words in the JST.

Do we have any insight as to why he skipped from Genesis 24 up to Matthew 1?

Does the Lord reveal why he was told to go there?

The Lord suggested—it’s in Doctrine and Covenants section

45 or 60. They had up to that time been working in Genesis,

and then the Lord said to the Prophet,

and now you will not—

I'm not going to reveal any more to you concerning this subject

until the New Testament be translated, for in it, you will learn all these things.

Wherefore I now given unto you to translate the New Testament. That was done on the 7th of March 1831,

and then they began the New Testament the next day.

I know that he started with Genesis, but that was to give the Prophet a statement,

a clear statement about the Creation,

about the Fall of Adam, and about Enoch and his city and his economic order. And no sooner got that done, and a little bit about Abraham,

and then the Lord said, no, forget that—or don’t forget it, but leave that and go and do the New Testament,

because there’s things in there you need to know.

As hoped and expected,

Dr. Mathews learned some wonderful things about the Joseph Smith Translation by studying the manuscript,

but there were some things that he learned that were unexpected and wonderful surprises.

I learned very quickly to note the different style of scribes.

It was not always—it didn’t always say who the scribe was sometimes.

But you could tell when there was a change of scribes by the change in the quality of the handwriting and particularly the spelling. One of the original things was, and

and quite striking, is that all of these scribes, Sidney Rigdon, John Whitmer, Oliver Cowdry, Frederick G. Williams, they had their own style of spelling.

People were not as particular in that day as we are now.

And they would misspell words that were right before them in the Bible. Resurrection until, water.

Sidney Rigdon always spelled water W-A-T-T-E-R.

And even though the Bible has it right in front there, but they were original.

One of the other very interesting things that, of course, this was all done with a quill pen.

Also, quill pens occasionally drop ink, which you didn’t intend.

So here on the sheet of paper was an occasional blot of ink.

When I was going over these little spots of ink,

I discovered fingerprints there, you know,

and that gives you a feeling of closeness when you're handling a piece of paper, you know that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdry and Sidney Rigdon had handled.

And you begin to get so you recognize their handwriting

and are charmed by their spelling.

And then you see a blot of ink and you look at it and you can

see all the little lines and swirls of a fingerprint,

that gives you a feeling of being there.

There is no substitute for looking at original documents.

Was the Joseph Smith Translation then a completed work?

Well, technically, yes, it was.

Early Church records indicate that as of July 1833, Joseph had finished the translation.

But you'll recall, just as Joseph did with the Book of Mormon, he continued to work on the Book of Mormon text up into the Nauvoo period.

He did the same thing with the JST,

preparing it for publication.

Joseph's original intent was to publish the Joseph Smith Translation and the Book of Mormon together in the same volume.

But it was just too big.

The Prophet began to translate the Bible in June of 1830,

and he finished the first trip through in July 1833.

So essentially three years.

But then the remainder of his life, which is another 11 years,

he would dictate various corrections,

fine tuning is what I call it,

and marginal notes and so on into the manuscript.

There are numerous statements in the history of the Church where

there’d be a statement like this:

“Joseph Smith is very busy these days and preparing

the manuscript of the Bible for publication.”

And so if you have something that can be taken up by a member of the Twelve or something,

we need to leave Joseph Smith free to do the work that only he can do.

Another thing I discovered about the manuscript that I had not known was that there was an initial draft.

And then there was a polished, or edited, draft.

And so as the Prophet would dictate and the scribe would write, and they didn’t take time to punctuate or divide into verses or chapters, as the words of inspiration came through the Prophet,

they were written on paper. That's the initial draft.

Then later, they would rewrite that,

and down the left side would indicate verse numbers

and punctuate and capitalize and various things.

So there was the initial draft and the polished draft. In the History of the Church, Volume 1, page 238,

He refers to his work with the Bible as “a branch of my calling.”

In other words, he regarded his work with the Bible as a branch of what he was to do as a prophet. In Section 42

of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord is talking about

the manuscript of the JST, and He says it will be preserved in safety.

He said, don't teach it now,

but He says the the day will come when you will teach it when it is received in full. And we don't have it in full yet.

And it’s in section thirty five is where Sydney Rigdon is called as a scribe, and verse 20,

He says, Sidney, you will write for him and the scripture shall be given as they are in mine own bosom,

to the salvation of mine elect.

Now there's the Lord saying, Sidney,

you’re going to write for the Prophet as he translates and dictates the scriptures, and

they’ll be just like the Lord feels them in His own bosom.

Well, that’s good. And we have that, most of the New Testament was written by Sidney, as Joseph dictated.

Another of the great discoveries that Dr. Matthews made during his work was the interconnectedness of the Joseph Smith Translation and the Doctrine and Covenants.

I had heard people say from time to time,

“Well, it’s very obvious that Joseph Smith just copied out of the Doctrine and Covenants.”

There are numerous places where the manuscript of the JST indicates that this particular concept was revealed to him while translating the Bible earlier than it was restated

in the Doctrine and Covenant. A major case in point

is the age for baptism being eight years old.

The Book of Mormon is very clear that children are not to be baptized, but it does not state the age of accountability. In the 17th chapter of Genesis,

which the Prophet was translating in April 1831,

the Lord revealed to Abraham that the age of accountability and baptism for children should be eight years old.

Well, that occurs in Section 68 of the Doctrine and Covenants,

but Section sixty eight did not occur until November 1831. That was the first one I discovered that something was written more clearly at an earlier time in the JST than it occurred in the Doctrine and Covenants.

When I saw that relationship,

it put everything in a perspective that I had never thought of before.

And Joseph Smith looked upon the translation of the Bible with very high regard.

He knew about it better than anybody else.

And he would have known that this was the—his work with the Bible was the initial

introduction, in many cases,

on the great doctrines of the Restoration.

The Bible has almost nothing about Melchizedek.

The Joseph Smith Translation has quite a lot.

The Bible has almost nothing about Enoch.

I counted up the words in the Old Testament about Enoch.

There are a hundred and nineteen words about Enoch.

In the Joseph Smith Translation,

there are five thousand two hundred and forty words about Enoch.

So, you know, Enoch is a big man in our theology and doctrine.

The city of Enoch, the Bible never mentions that Enoch had a city,

nor does it mention that the city was translated,

nor does it mention that they had an economic program among themselves

and that there were no poor among them.

All of that comes from the Joseph Smith Translation.

It’s immediately after that that the Lord says to the Church,

now, get out of New York and go to Ohio. And there I will give you the economic law,

which we call the united order of the law of consecration.

Enoch had had that law, and they lived it successfully.

And that's sort of an introduction or a backdrop, that’s opening the door to about the next 20 sections of the Doctrine and Covenants dealing with the economic order of the Church. And you see the connection there is extremely important.

It was from Enoch that we we learn much about the Atonement of Christ, and Enoch’s testimony of Christ,

and spirits in prison, and that’s all in this revelation about Enoch. It was from the JST that we get the vision of the degrees of glory.

John 5. What a connection that is. That’s about as doctrinal a contribution as you could ask for.

I would hope we’ve made a major relationship today of

the connection between the Prophet’s work with the Bible and the Doctrine and Covenants. Oh, yeah.

To me, that is really a more significant point than the relationship between Joseph Smith's translation and any other Bible. I like to compare it with other Bibles because he is so much clearer. Yeah.

But the real force and thrust of what happened

was the Doctrine and Covenants. Because you see,

if the important thing was to have a better Bible,

then we’ve dropped the ball.

But if the real contribution was the revelations that are in the Doctrine and Covenants, and we’re right on target.

Now, as we mentioned earlier,

there were suspicions that the RLDS church had changed the manuscript, causing Latter-day Saints out here in the West to be suspicious of the accuracy of the Joseph Smith Translation as they published it.

Dr. Matthews, in his research, discovered the basis for those suspicions,

which it turns out were entirely unfounded.

When the reorganized church published

the JST in 1869, they naturally quoted and published from the more finished, polished draft.

And so we didn't know that out here.

Then when the reorganized church publishes their Bible

and it is a little different, they say, well, you fellows changed it.

What we didn’t know is, no, Joseph Smith had changed it.

That was my question. This polished draft was polished by Joseph. Yes, in Nauvoo.

And we didn't have access to the manuscripts, you see.

So we didn’t know that.

There was a time when relations between the RLDS Church and the Latter-day Saints were strained. For that reason.

The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,

who refer to the Joseph Smith Translation as the inspired version,

well, they guarded those manuscripts very carefully.

But with the work of Robert Matthews and others, not only did it bring the JST to light,

but it also helped to smooth relations between the two churches.

I was the first Latter-day Saint that really saw those manuscripts for about a hundred years. President John Taylor in 1878

sent Elder Orson Pratt, who was an elderly member of the Twelve,

and Elder Joseph F. Smith, who was a younger member in the Twelve,

had sent them to the headquarters of the reorganized church with the

particular request that they look at the manuscript of the Joseph Smith translation.

But they wouldn’t let him, they wouldn’t let them see it.

So they did not get to see it.

With all the work then that’s been done to bring forth the Joseph Smith Translation for our use,

people are finally starting to recognize its worth,

and to use it.

I think in many people’s minds, the JST still is a little suspect, or at least not very important.

I find so many people feel that way.

They say, oh, yeah, we got him in those footnotes, but we don’t really use that. The Church doesn’t accept it. And so

the point I want to make is the same man

and many of the same places that are mentioned in—

like Harmony, Pennsylvania, that’s a Book of Mormon place, I mean, that’s where part of the Book Mormon is translated. Oliver Cowdrey, Joseph Smith,

they’re the first translators, the first people who worked on the JST.

Well, what you're saying is that we reverence the Book of Mormon,

the people and places where it came for us and who brought it forth.

But those—so it doesn’t make any sense not to provide the same reverence and respect for the JST.

Yeah, it was the same people, same places, same time. Yeah.

The early sections of the Doctrine and Covenants deal with the coming forth and the translation and the publication of the Book of Mormon.

The later sections of the Doctrine and Covenants deal with

the translation and proposed publication of the JST.

I don’t know whether people pick that up or not, but it’s there. It’s right there in the Doctrine and Covenants.

There are more people today that are familiar with what the JST is than there used to be. And

it's not as heavily used as I think it ought to be.

I have sometimes said in Sunday school classes or other classes,

and heard people quote from passages of the Bible,

from the King James that are obscure or vague,

and they misinterpreted them, where if they had just looked at the footnotes, they would have had a better explanation.

The text of the Joseph Smith Translation especially expanded our understanding of Jesus's role.

There’s information about the Savior, His ministry and His doctrine

that’s contained in the JST that we just can’t get anywhere else.

I often hear it said we don’t know anything about Jesus from the time He was just little until He began His ministry when He was baptized. Except that trip to the temple when He was 12.

That's not quite true, because from this third chapter, Matthew, in the JST, we find that He was a very wise,

obedient, and

precocious child, more than we had ever supposed.

Neither could He be taught, for He had the Spirit, it says, without measure.

And that no man could teach Him. Jesus was just filled with light, and He was filled with the Spirit, and the JST says that.

Another thing that I notice,

I’ve sometimes thought the JST gives a greater portrayal of Jesus. For instance,

the color of His garment

that He wore at the time of His trial was really purple, not red. And you say, well, what difference does that make? It must have made some difference because Joseph Smith was very particular to say it was not red, it was purple. That’s a royal color.

Another item that I’ve thought is, frequently when a certain circumstance was taking place, something was developing with Jesus and the Twelve and

the surrounding people, something would be said.

And it says, “and when Jesus understood it,”

he said that kind of has a little delay in His mind. “When Jesus understood it.” In the JST

it doesn’t say “when Jesus understood it,” It says “and Jesus understood what they were thinking,

even before they said it,” and made certain comments. He’s a greater being in the JST than he is in any other Bible.

The Community of Christ has generously given Latter-day Saint scholars access to the Joseph Smith Translation manuscripts.

That's broadened their understanding of Joseph's work

and of his ministry and intent.

Those manuscripts have given us a perspective on the restored gospel that we just couldn't have from anywhere else.

Now, next week, when we come back,

an even closer look at the JST

and more questions answered about it.

First question to ask about the Joseph Smith Translation is, what is it? I’m Glen Rossin. Thanks for joining us. See you next week.