Joseph Smith, modern prophet, seer, and revelator.

Joseph is probably easily in the top few of the world’s most prolific revelators.

That’s 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 Rawson.

One of the most distinguishing features of the Church of Jesus Christ restored through Joseph Smith was that it was inaugurated and perpetuated by continuing revelation.

Those revelations restored doctrine and organized and ordered the Church.

How significant are they? To Joseph Smith

they were not a trifling matter. “Take them away,” he said, “and where is our religion? We have none.”

What

makes the Prophet Joseph Smith unique and different is that almost immediately he continues to receive revelation. And the longest revelation that this world ever knows anything about took him 90 days to write it down or plus.

And that, of course, is the Book of Mormon.

And then at each stage of the development of the Church,

he will receive revelation to aid and to guide him in that work.

Now we have a prophet who is is bringing up volumes of revelation.

And if I believe that the canon is closed and here's a man who is claiming, no, it’s not closed at all. It is,

it’s still open and well, for Latter-day Saints today,

our ninth article of faith, “We believe all that he has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and that it will yet reveal,” to us that’s second nature. But to somebody outside looking in, this is pretty heavy stuff.

And I would believe that if I don't believe in modern revelation, then I've got to defend myself.

And so Joseph Smith found himself in conflict with a lot of people over the issue of revelation.

That conflict carried beyond the mortal life of Joseph Smith.

Near the turn of the century, the state of Utah elected Reed Smoot as a member of the United States Senate.

He was also an Apostle, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve,

falsely accused of promoting polygamy.

The Senate refused to see Senator Smoot. Four years worth of hearings were conducted until Senator Smoot was finally given a seat.

The counsel for those who were opposed to seating him,

Robert W. Taylor, made the following provocative statement on the floor of the Senate. “Several hundred thousand sincere men and women have believed and now believe, as they believe in their own existence, that Joseph Smith Jr. received revelation direct from God.

And if anyone ever believe that, we must assume that Senator Smoot believes it.”

Obviously, because he’s an Apostle. “Now a senator of the United States might believe anything else in the world but that. And not be ineligible to a seat in the body to which he belongs. He might believe in polygamy.

He might believe that murder was commendable.

He might deny the propriety as a rule of life of all the Ten Commandments.

He might believe in the sacrifice of human life. He might believe in no God or in a thousand gods.

He might be Jew or gentile, Mohammedan or Buddhist, atheist or pantheist.

He might believe that the world began last year

and would end next year. But to

believe with the kind of conviction Reed Smoot possesses that God speaks to him or may speak to him,

is to admit by the inevitable logic of his conviction that there is a superior authority with whom here and now he may converse

and whose command he can no more refuse to obey than he can will himself not to think.”

And then this Robert Taylor explained how in each instance in New York, in Ohio, in Missouri, in Illinois,

among the other issues wherein the Latter-day Saints were in conflict with their neighbors,

revelation is one of the premier ones,

and that revelation would govern their politics, for instance, and of course, revelation that guided them to live the life of consecration and the other kinds of things.

And so he, as a non Latter-day Saint, were showing to the Latter-day Saints how revelation had set us apart from everyone else.

The key thing there is Joseph's revelations. That's what the mainstream culture finds objectionable in Joseph. He claims to receive revelations from God,

and that’s what the Saints find so compelling in Joseph. He receives revelations from God, that’s why we’ll follow him.

It's not because he's a good wrestler or handsome or anything else. He receives revelations from God and we’ll follow him because God speaks through him.

So that question of revelation is the dividing line. It’s the thing that makes Joseph a prophet to me and

an enemy to those who hated him.

The revelations given to Joseph Smith could be called his legacy.

During his lifetime, Joseph would receive these revelations and then dictate them to scribes,

which is a common practice with him that we've already talked about. Others would then copy and recopy those revelations for their personal use.

Now, as we've already seen, record keeping and history in the Church developed slowly.

Because of that, some of those original copies of the revelations were lost.

We only know of a handful of revelations received by the Prophet Joseph Smith wherein we have the original document.

Most of them we cannot identify as being original,

but we do have a document, a manuscript document

for just about every revelation that has appeared in the D&C or in the Pearl of Great Price that dates prior to publication.

Well, let's take Section 76. This is such big news that everybody wants a copy. So people are making copies of it.

And so we have multiple copies of some of these revelations where missionaries and others would make copies to take with them

prior to their publication.

Once they're published,

then we don't know what happened to the originals.

They may have just been discarded.

With the one series in the Joseph Smith Papers called Revelations and Translations,

we will have a a high definition scan of the original document

on the right hand page. And the definition is so good that you can even see the texture of the paper.

And on the opposing side, on the left hand side, will be a typescript.

And so Latter-day Saints are going to be able to see these early documents. And what is fascinating about that is some of these documents were written and then corrected later on.

And so the reader can see the original and see any variation that has occurred over the years, either by way of correction or addition or deletion and so on.

So the first thing that comes to mind that you mentioned there is that—and I can just see someone saying this—

What, you mean the originals didn’t come right out of the mouth of Joseph and go right into the Doctrine and Covenants?

Well, that's right. Now, Royal Skousen was your guest for a couple of three weeks.

Mm hmm. And what he said about the manuscript of the Book of Mormon, we could say ditto in the Doctrine and Covenants.

That is, Joseph Smith received it by revelation.

He did not write it himself. He dictated it.

The early copies are almost devoid of any punctuation at all,

as you would find when things are dictated like that.

And just as Joseph Smith did extensive correction on the Book of Mormon in 1837,

so he did in 1835 with the Doctrine and Covenants.

And so, putting him in that kind of a context,

we will be able to to show the original document,

show the history behind it,

and some alterations that Joseph Smith made over a period of time.

When Joseph Smith edited the revelations, there were other revisions that he made besides punctuation.

Let me just give you some ideas of what kind of editing has taken place. Dictionaries, few and far between; people in that day spelled phonetically. What was it that Mark Twain said? “A man’s not very creative if he doesn’t know three or four ways to spell something.”

So we have some of the early manuscripts with strange spellings that we would never accept today.

If you were sitting on a high council today

and somebody wanted to call you a high counselor,

that would be C-I-L. OK, but if you’re a counselor to a bishop, it’s S-E-L. And they could not, you know—

the nuances of spelling in that day had to be decided.

And it takes us till almost

the 1876 edition before they get this worked out as to how that should be spelled. Joseph Smith, on occasions when it came time for publication, would combine revelations.

I think I've got here a copy of the Book of Commandments, and

they went by chapters then, but it's chapters 17 through 21 in the Book of Commandments is now Section 23 in the Doctrine and Covenants.

He took these five very short revelations and combined them and put them into one. OK.

Now, the champion for all of this kind of combining is Section 107. And people need to look at the introductions to these revelations in the current edition, because they reveal a lot of what you're going to find in the Joseph Smith papers.

And in the introduction today, I'll just read it,

“Although portions of this section were received on the date named, the historical records affirm that various parts were received at sundry times, some as early as November 1831.”

Well, this is dated 1835. So he's putting revelatory information in here that he has accumulated over four years.

And we have been able to identify at least five separate

revelations that he combined together. It’s still true, but he combined them together to form this revelation.

So anyway, the combining of revelations is a reality.

Let me give you another idea. I’ve got here a very old edition of the D&C, it’s an 1879 edition.

Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants was given about the time that the Church was organized, April 1830.

So it talks about the office of elder, priest, teacher, and deacon, and Apostle.

And it's not going to mention anything about high priests because they don’t come until 1831,

or high council, stake presidents, bishops, these kinds of things.

You wouldn't expect it to anyway,

and it didn’t in the original years. But later on, we get these

verses, 65, 66, and 67, wherein it talks about high councilors, high priests, bishops, and so on, that are completely foreign to that age of the Church.

And in this edition of the D&C,

there’s an asterisk right before verse sixty five, and it calls your attention to the bottom of the page, and it says versus 65, 66, and 67 were added sometime after the others.

There are other bits of editing that have been done,

and each one takes kind of an individual explanation.

So with the documents series in the Joseph Smith papers,

we will take each revelation separately.

We will write a historical context to it.

Put it in its context.

We will take the earliest complete manuscript that we can find. Use that as our as our featured text.

And then we will footnote it.

And if there are any alterations that are major,

we will make note of those in the footnotes.

So that Latter-day Saints can look at their current revelation

and they can see how it developed from the original to where it is today.

Now, I've got to say that most of them,

there’s hardly a change at all. Right.

Some of them are very important.

But each one will get that kind of treatment.

Most of them, by far, the vast majority of them happened in 1835 with the Prophet Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdrey, Frederick G. Williams, Sidney Rigdon, William W. Phelps, and others sitting down together

and putting these revelations in their current form.

Revelation can come in a variety of ways.

And such was the case with Joseph Smith.

Visions, visitations, inspiration, et cetera.

The common thread with Joseph is that he was a worthy vessel

and he was seeking.

I would emphasize that Joseph knows that revelation is not

a spiritual process or an intellectual process. To receive revelation is a joint process of one's soul, one's whole soul, body, mind.

Joseph had to to reconcile his spirit and his mind and his body to the will of God.

You can think of the famous account where David Whitmer tells us that Joseph tried to translate the Book of Mormon one morning. He couldn’t. Not a single syllable, David Whitmore says. He had become frustrated with them

and spoken something unkind or unright to her.

He could not translate again until he went into the woods,

according to David's account, for about an hour,

repented and reconciled himself to God, and then reconciled with Emma. “Then the translation went on all right,” says David Whitmer,

telling us that what Joseph is doing in translating the Book of Mormon is not solely an intellectual process.

He has to be morally right.

He has to be spiritually right in order to get revelation.

So many over the years have accused Joseph Smith of fraud

and deceit, that he just made these revelations up.

But the historical record does not bear that out.

One of the great questions about Joseph Smith is, is he sincere?

That is, when he said, “The Lord has spoken to me,”

did he truly believe himself, that God had spoken to him?

Did he believe his own revelations?

And in my experience, you can scrape right down to the bottom, look at every document that's left behind.

And he's sincere right to the bottom of his soul.

He believed God was speaking to him.

He went through immense trouble, all kinds of suffering.

Put his family, his own children,

his closest friends into very difficult situations

because he truly believed the Lord was leading him.

And if you start with that point, then you have to go on to say, well, I may believe it or I may not believe it,

but at least this man believed that God had spoken to him.

It's striking to me that Joseph is the first

and best believer of his own revelations,

and he doesn’t notice this. Joseph does not.

know everything about his revelations.

He’ll get a revelation that will say,

“Gather five hundred men if you can, and take them to Missouri and help the Saints there,”

and then he'll be left with figuring out the details and the logistics and the puzzles and the problems and so on.

I just can’t imagine that Joseph is the creator of his revelations, because of the difficult things they call him to do.

One other thing about these revelations is,

Joseph Smith would speak as though God was speaking, first person.

You notice the revelations started off with, fairly thus saith the Lord, or verily, I say unto you concerning your brethren.

John Whitmer is notified that he is to be the historian of the Church. He said, I’d rather not do it.

But if the Lord tells me I should, I will. So, section 47.

And he's satisfied that that's different than Joseph Smith telling him. One of the most

important points is that he's not the creator of these revelations.

They're independent of him.

They come to him from the heavens. I don't know exactly how to explain it,

but these are not the products of his own mind,

of his own consciousness.

Now, if you're one of those like me who may have struggled somewhat in reading the Doctrine and Covenants the way you would the Book of Mormon, consider this.

This is a hard book to read. And there are maybe several reasons. One is that it doesn't have the kind of connective tissue that our other scriptures have.

The Book of Mormon is almost just as full of revelations as the Doctrine and Covenants is but you notice that at every step you’ve got a narrator helping you through,

you've got somebody providing you connective tissue from one revelation to the other. In the first few chapters of the Book of Mormon, there are eight revelations.

You hardly notice it in some ways, because “I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” takes you right through. You feel like he’s holding you by the hand.

Right. You’re dropped off at the doorstep of section one of the Doctrine and Covenants, “Hearken all ye people of my Church,” and you’re swept into this document, this text.

And if you're unprepared for it, if you don't know why the text was given,

it's very difficult sometimes to get your mind around it and understand it. So we struggle sometimes with the revelations.

The explanatory introduction says they were given to real people in times of need, came out of real-life situations.

So the better we learn to know those people and those real life situations, what were one of the prayers,

what’s the content of the prayer that evoked section

18, or whatever it may be? Then we’ll understand better.

One of those real people was William E. McClellan,

an original member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

When William met the Prophet Joseph, he desired a revelation.

Joseph inquired of the Lord, and section 66 was the result.

Now, that's a revelation today that perhaps few of us pay little attention to. Yet behind that revelation is a story.

I read his twenty nine October 1831 journal account.

He says—that week he had met Joseph Smith for the first time, and he tried to meet him earlier and been frustrated. So for months now, he's been longing to meet Joseph Smith and he wants to ask him

if he can get a revelation. So he gets up his courage.

He asks the prophet if he will ask the Lord for revelation.

And he does. McClellan writes in his journal that

“I got home to Hiram, Ohio, with Joseph Smith.” He'd come home from a conference with him and sought a revelation.

“This day, the Lord condescended to hear my prayer and give me a revelation of his will through his prophet, or seer Joseph” in great big parentheses, Joseph.

“And these are the words which I wrote from his mouth.”

And McClellan gives D&C 66, a copy.

He’d written the original as Joseph dictated it that day.

And then that evening, as he writes his journal entry, copies it into his journal entry. Fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating. Imagine that.

And in 1848, this is 10 years after bitterly parting ways with Joseph Smith and the Church,

William McClellan writes an editorial in his own newspaper

and he explains the setting for that revelation.

He says, “I asked the Lord five secret questions, unbeknownst to Joseph Smith.” Five secret questions.

And he says Joseph received the revelation,

explains the whole—the dating and everything.

And then he says, “Every question I lodged in the ears of the Lord was answered to my full and entire satisfaction.

I desire it to me to this day evidence I cannot refute.”

Now, all of a sudden, does that 13 verse, mundane mission call,

not particularly memorable, all of a sudden, does that become meaningful.

So I love the way that Joseph's revelations solve problems.

They’re deep. They’re profound.

They solve the problems of the world, and theological problems.

And they do it by the Creator of the universe speaking very intimately and

and pointedly sometimes to mortals to get us to do things that will help us come come to him.

Many of the revelations that Joseph Smith received that are in our Doctrine and Covenants today were received by Joseph in the presence of others. They were witnesses.

We have numerous accounts not only of what he said,

but of his countenance as he received those revelations.

And it would seem like many of the revelations, also, that are in your D&C are done in public. Section 76 as a whole group of people there. They see a light.

They don't see anything more than that. But they are there witnessing it. Section thirty eight that I’ve just mentioned to you,

section 42 in the presence of 12 elders;

section 29 in the presence of six elders.

And so these are not behind the scenes kinds of things. They're done out in public.

Another thing that it really impresses me about, the revelations, is that Joseph Smith is not adverse to admitting his own faults in the revelations.

If he were a fraud, I think he would want to paint himself—and if these were creations of his own head, he’d paint himself as a model citizen.

Section 93 where he says “You have not kept the commandments.”

And so that is very awe inspiring to me.

As Joseph Smith matured in his experience as a Prophet,

the manner in which he received revelation changed as well.

By the Nauvoo period, Joseph Smith has moved into a new phase of revelation method.

In the early history of the Church,

he got all these bursts of revelation,

which he faithfully wrote down because he treasured them. After the organization of the Quorum of the Twelve, he told them to keep careful minutes

because their minutes would be “Doctrine and Covenants to the Church.” Those were his words, right at the moment that

the Doctrine and Covenants is being published as a collection of revelations. Yeah.

So he moves into a phase that we now live in, it’s sort of the book of Acts phase.

The history of the Church itself,

and its administrative decisions, are the way the Lord guides us and reveals His will to us.

And after that, he wrote very few sort of flamboyant revelations like Section 76, where great things are revealed. They tend to be letters.

And then what happens is that he gets William Clayton to walk around with him and write down comments.

He has Willard Richards keeping his journal. But Willard—

But William Clayton is writing down comments that just fall from his lips, and these become revelations.

So revelation becomes embedded in sort of the administration of the Church. And then these little flashes that Joseph would have.

As we’ve already said, some hated Joseph for his revelations,

but so many others rejoiced after so long of a famine to finally hear the word of the Lord again from an authorized representative.

Folks for all time have longed to hear from God. We just wish God would speak to us so we would know as well.

Lorenzo Dowell, a wonderful Methodist exhorter, said, “I wished I’d lived in the days of prophets and apostles so I could have sure signs of God’s will.”

Well, what Christian hasn’t? What human hasn’t long to know with a little more certainty or clarity what exactly God wanted?

Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the Divinity School at Harvard

in 1838. He just pled with the graduates.

“Tell them that God speaks, not spake. Please. Let's let's find a theology in which God still speaks to answer our yearnings.” So this is widespread. And Joseph Smith, he steps up and answers that.

I’m here to say God speaks,

Joseph Smith declares. Those revelations built the Church that we have today. They built the Church.

I use that intentionally a powerful language.

They literally built the Church, the quorums, the principles that orient and organize the Church are all embedded in Joseph Smith’s revelations.

We would be poor indeed if we had to sacrifice any of the revelations that we have from Jehovah.

The first attempt to publish the revelations was the Book of Commandments,

and it was destroyed by a mob in 1833 in Independence, Missouri.

Then in 1835, the Church published the Doctrine and Covenants.

In its introductory page, our modern edition of the Doctrine of Covenants says the following. “One of the standard works of the Church,

unique because it is not a translation of an ancient document, but is of modern origin.

And that in it one hears the tender but firm voice of the Lord Jesus Christ speaking anew.”

It’s meaningful that in May of 1844, from the stand in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith declared, “There is no error in the revelations which I have taught.”

Next week on the Joseph Smith papers,

the return of the Church of Christ to the earth.

I’m Glenn Rawson. Thanks for joining us.