In June 1830, Joseph Smith dictated to a scribe a text containing the account of a series of supernatural encounters experienced by the Old Testament prophet Moses. The account is remarkable, with God and Satan each coming to Moses and presenting him with alternative views of reality. What the account leads into is perhaps even more remarkable. When the narrative of Moses’s visions ends, readers come to words that are at once familiar and also startlingly unfamiliar:

In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth upon which thou standest. And the earth was without form and void, and I caused darkness to come up upon the face of the deep. And my Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, for I am God. And I God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.[1]

Joseph Smith, a twenty-four-year-old farmer with only a limited formal education, had begun a new translation of the Bible. Yet as one can see from more than a dozen words in this passage that are not found in anyone else’s Bible, this was going to be something unique. The account of Moses’s visions was just the beginning, the beginning of a process through which the young prophet revised the Bible from cover to cover, making thousands of changes under the authority of what he and his followers believed was a divine calling. To him and to his contemporaries the Bible revision would be known as the New Translation. Today most Latter-day Saints refer to it as the Joseph Smith Translation (JST).[2]

This book will examine what the New Translation is, what it contains, what it teaches, and how Joseph Smith arrived at its text. I have written with the intent to make the information accessible to scholars and general audiences alike, and my desire has been to make its chapters not only informative but also readable. I am a believer in the prophetic mission of Joseph Smith, and I consider the JST and its story to be evidence of his divine calling. More important to me, however, is the message that is clear throughout the New Translation’s pages—that Jesus is the Christ, the Savior of the world.

For the most part, we have good enough evidence to reconstruct the mechanical process by which Joseph Smith created his Bible revision, that is, the way he dictated the text and the way his scribes wrote it to create what is written on the existing manuscript pages. But behind the physical artifact, what was the means by which he came to the words that would become the New Translation? Did they come from his own experience, from assumptions he made while reading the Bible, or from other sources? Or did some or all of the text come through revelation, as he and his followers believed? What were the instincts that guided his work, and how did he translate those instincts into words? This book cannot answer the theological questions, but it can assess the evidence in the primary documents in an effort to understand how the New Translation came to be.

In the following pages, chapters 1–3 will deal with historical questions about the manuscripts and the creation of the text and will discuss what we know about how and when the JST was dictated by Joseph Smith and written down by his scribes. In chapter 4 we will deal with the question of what the translation is and what its text represents. Chapters 5–12 will examine the unique narratives that Joseph Smith brought forth that do not have any biblical counterparts, and chapters 13–15 will explore the revisions he made to existing biblical passages and attempt to understand what those revisions teach us about the translation as a whole. We will then, in chapters 16–19, examine some of the unique texts in the JST. The discussion in chapters 20–24 will then focus on the translation’s publication history and the role it has played in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Chapters 25 and 26 will ask what the Joseph Smith Translation is ultimately about and will revisit questions of origin and authority.

This book does not engage with or respond to all the ideas expressed about the Bible revision in Latter-day Saint culture and recent scholarship. The focus instead is on what the original documents and their derivatives tell us about what the New Translation is, how it came to be, and its place alongside the Latter-day Saint scriptures. At the center will be the documents and the text they preserve. The notes will focus on primary sources and a few specific textual studies.

Texts and Sources

Transcriptions of the words of the Joseph Smith Translation as preserved on the original manuscripts can be found in a 2004 volume published by Brigham Young University’s Religious Studies Center,[3] in the 2011 electronic library published by the Brigham Young University Press,[4] and on the Joseph Smith Papers website.[5] The latter two include images of all the manuscript pages.

After the publication of those transcriptions of the original scribal writing, in 2021 the Brigham Young University Press, in cooperation with the Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book Company, published a “finished” edition of the Joseph Smith Translation, in scripture format and with standardized spelling and punctuation (see chapter 24).

In this book I have referenced passages by manuscript and page numbers or by scripture references, depending on the context. I have included references to the current Book of Moses where needed. Unless noted otherwise, the excerpts of the New Translation come from the final texts that Joseph Smith and his scribes prepared for publication, labeled by archivists Old Testament Manuscript 2 (OT2) and New Testament Manuscript 2 (NT2).[6] For ease in comparison and analysis, I have referenced New Translation passages throughout the book with the traditional chapter and verse designations as found in the King James Version and in modern Bible translations.

This book contains many passages from the Joseph Smith Translation and includes many side-by-side comparisons between it and the King James Bible. I present passages from the New Translation with modern punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and with quotation marks to identify spoken words. In the side-by-side comparisons, highlighted King James Bible words are underlined, and the corresponding JST text is set in bold type.

Where easily accessible online sources exist for nineteenth-century documents, the notes generally refer readers to online, rather than print, sources. When necessary for clarity, I have lightly standardized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in quotations from those sources. The easiest way to access documents in the Joseph Smith Papers collection is to go to josephsmithpapers.org and use the dropdown menu “The Papers,” where documents, journals, revelations, translations, histories, and other items are organized by category and date.

Acknowledgments

For their excellent editorial and production work, I thank the highly professional staff of the Religious Studies Center. In writing this book I was blessed to have fine scholars read the manuscript: Kevin L. Barney, Richard D. Draper, Andrew D. Hedges. Each of these made contributions to the final product, and I thank them for their corrections, suggestions, and insights.

Notes

[1] Genesis 1:1–3; Old Testament Manuscript 1, page 3, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization standardized.

[2] For the title “New Translation,” see “Letter to Church Leaders in Jackson County, Missouri, 25 June 1833,” p. [2], The Joseph Smith Papers; “Recommendation for Samuel Bent and George W. Harris, between circa 17 and circa 28 July 1840,” p. 158, The Joseph Smith Papers; Doctrine and Covenants 124:89; “Books!!!” Times and Seasons, July 1840, 140; “History of Joseph Smith (Continued),” Times and Seasons, January 1, 1844, 754; “History of Joseph Smith (Continued),” Times and Seasons, February 15, 1845, 801. Another once-common title, the Inspired Version, refers only to an edited, printed edition, published since 1867 by the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints): The Holy Scriptures, Translated and Corrected by the Spirit of Revelation. By Joseph Smith, Jr., the Seer (Plano, IL: The [Reorganized] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1867).

[3] Scott H. Faulring, Kent P. Jackson, and Robert J. Matthews, eds., Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2004).

[4] Scott H. Faulring and Kent P. Jackson, Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: Electronic Library (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2011).

[5] See “Bible Revision Manuscripts,” The Joseph Smith Papers.

[6] In the Joseph Smith Papers they are titled Old Testament Revision 2 and New Testament Revision 2.