Documents volume 1 has the earliest Joseph
Smith documents in The Joseph Smith Papers series.
It has letters that Joseph Smith
writes, letters that he receives, dozens of revelations.
Also, there are minutes of
meetings that he participated in that you can see how it shapes
this early history of the Church.
What a difficult prospect
it was to translate the Book of Mormon to produce
this new Church and present these revelations
from God,
because there was opposition
everywhere.
There was opposition from the
areas we commonly think of, from people who were opposed
to the Church. But there was also opposition from
places you wouldn't expect, from opposition from
within the Church, in fact, from some of
his closest friends.
Hiram Page found a stone and upon which writing would
appear that he believed were revelations from God. And Joseph
has to go and deal with this. And he finds that the Whitmers and Oliver Cowdery and are not
very easily persuaded.
And so it's one of these
early challenges to the proper authority.
And you can see in Documents vol.
1 how Joseph goes about trying to resolve this. And in the
September conference of 1830,
he is able to persuade people
that he is the only avenue for receiving revelation.