The Joseph Smith Papers Project
is tasked with gathering all The Joseph Smith Papers that we
can find anywhere in the world
and making them available.
To this point, we have published since 2008 six
volumes in three different series:
the Journal series, the History
series, and the Revelations and Translation series.
And to date, the Revelations of
Translation series has been a series focused on the texts, the
earliest texts of Mormonism,
the sacred text of
the revelations,
and will now be forthcoming
the text of the Book of Mormon
translation. Only with the Documents series can one
look at the history from the beginning through to the end
on all of the existing surviving
Joseph Smith documents. Every Latter-day Saint, every student
of Mormonism knows roughly the story of the angel Moroni
and the translation and the publication in the Grandin
Print Shop in Palmyra.
But as you look at this unfolding
document by document,
one gets a very different view of
the details of that process
and the challenges of that process
and the complexities.
And one does feel at the end
of going through that, that you've experienced something
totally differently than
the high-level overview
we’ve had before.
