Joseph Smith stated, “[There are] many things in the Bible which do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the Holy Ghost to me.”[1] He likely gained that belief while working on the New Translation and while receiving revelations on topics relevant to the Bible.

The Instinct to Correct Errors

Many examples show that Joseph Smith was guided in the New Translation by an instinct to correct what he felt were errors. The following disparate examples illustrate this instinct.

Much of the writing that exists from the ancient Near East was created to aggrandize rulers. Thus, the account of King David’s career in 1–2 Samuel stands out as a remarkable text in its candor about the king and his family, not hesitating to point out David’s crimes and sins. The writers (or perhaps later editors) of 1–2 Kings, however, chose to depict David in glorifying ideal terms. Subsequent kings were measured against him as the ideal monarch who was chosen of God and ruled in righteousness. In the New Translation, Joseph Smith revised the idealizing passages.

1 Kings 3:14

1 Kings 11:6

2 Kings 22:2

Matthew and John saw Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem as a fulfilment of the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9: “Thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” All four Gospels tell the story, but Matthew alone apparently misunderstood Zechariah’s poetic parallelism, where two phrases refer to a single animal.[2] Thus, Matthew brought two animals into his telling of the story and has Jesus apparently riding both of them. The Joseph Smith Translation corrects the passage to one animal.

Matthew 21:2–3, 6–7

Twice in the New Testament, at John 1:18 and 1 John 4:12, we have the phrase “No man hath seen God at any time.” Joseph Smith had seen God, as had prophets in the Book of Mormon, so he knew that this sentence was inaccurate. In addition, Jews in the days of Jesus and his apostles would also have known that this statement was in error, because their own scriptures told of prophets who had seen God.[3] Joseph Smith changed both verses by adding qualifying text:

John 1:18

1 John 4:12

Another inaccurate statement is found in 2 Timothy 3:16. It is not true that everything in the Bible is “given by inspiration of God” and is “profitable,” as Joseph Smith well knew.

2 Timothy 3:16

This revision makes “all scripture given by inspiration of God” the subject of the sentence, rather than “all scripture,” rendering the passage both accurate and sensible. A final example is an obvious inconsistency in the New Testament. Matthew 27:3–5 and Acts 1:16–19 contain conflicting information about the death of Judas. In Matthew, Judas “went and hanged himself.” The odd wording in Acts states, “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.” The Prophet reconciled the accounts by reworking Matthew’s sentence:

Matthew 27:5, JST

went and hanged himself on a tree. And straightway he fell down, and his bowels gushed out and he died.

These examples from the New Testament are cases where many modern readers might reasonably conclude that there are errors in the Bible as we have received it. But Joseph Smith made a few thousand other revisions as well, and he sometimes called his rewording of Bible passages “correcting.”[4] Whether those other revisions are corrections of errors is not always clear, and as we have seen, they may include text once in the Bible and now lost, words and events never recorded, or other issues that made the Bible in need of correction.

The Instinct to Preserve God’s Sanctity

There are biblical passages in which God is depicted as doing things that seem out of character with what one would expect from his divine nature. The Joseph Smith Translation shows sensitivity to passages that depict God in any ungodly way, revising many of those passages. Many revisions respond to unfortunate word choices in the King James translation. Among the most notable are the passages in which God is described as repenting. In most of the examples that follow, the Hebrew verb nḥm would be rendered better as “relent,” rather than “repent.”[5] The JST usually revises those verses by moving the verb repent to the clause that refers to the people who were in need of repentance.[6]

Exodus 32:12

Exodus 32:14

Jeremiah 26:13

Jonah 3:9–10

In some places in the King James text the verb repent is used with the sense of “regret.” The New Translation revises those in different ways.[7]

Judges 2:18

1 Samuel 15:35

The next passage depicts God’s eyes running to and fro through the earth. This oddity is not the result of a word choice in the translation but is in the biblical text itself.

Zechariah 4:10

Genesis depicts God walking about in the Garden of Eden, a phrase that may seem ambiguous in English but is clear in the Hebrew text. In the Joseph Smith Translation, Adam and Eve are the ones who are walking.

Genesis 3:8

Similarly, when Noah offered a burnt offering, the JST has Noah smelling the sacrifice, not the Lord.

Genesis 8:21

The book of Jeremiah has a unique way in which God expresses his persistent and intense action. The structure is strictly a literary device that is used idiomatically to emphasize how important the expressed action is to God. Its literal wording, however, makes no sense in modern languages. It consists of a clause with a finite verb (such as “I taught them”) followed by “rising early and,” followed by an infinitive form of the initial verb. In this phrasing God gets up early in the morning and repeats the action. The Joseph Smith Translation removes the humanizing language in several instances.[8] The passages that follow are also good examples of words being reassigned in revised text.

Jeremiah 35:14

Jeremiah 44:4

The Joseph Smith Translation is also sensitive to the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels. In the first of the examples that follow, it removes Jesus’s desire to withdraw himself from the multitude. In the second it revises Jesus’s words to his mother.

Mark 7:24

John 2:4

Neither of these revisions is trivial, as both make Jesus’s actions more consistent with how he is depicted elsewhere in the Gospels. The following two examples show that the impulse in the JST to preserve the divine character of Deity also extends in some passages to preserving the noble character and dignity of other exemplary people.

Genesis 15:8

John 13:8

The Instinct to Correct Doctrine

As we have seen in some of the passages above, there are many places in the Joseph Smith Translation where the Prophet made changes that correct erroneous doctrine. The passages show a sensitivity to words that seem incompatible with other revealed truth. The examples we have seen already that deal with God repenting fit into this category. Next we will see the same impulse but toward passages that depict God tempting people.

Genesis 22:1

Matthew 4:1

Matthew 6:13

Likewise, the passages in which God is described as hardening hearts drew Joseph Smith’s attention.[9]

Exodus 10:1

In the KJV of Exodus 10:1, above, God hardened the hearts of Pharaoh and his servants in order to show his miraculous signs. The Joseph Smith Translation retains “hardened” but transfers it to Pharaoh. Then it revises the final clause into a sentence that does not show God’s desire (“that I might”) but his resolve (“Therefore I will”) in consequence of the actions of Pharaoh and his people.

Deuteronomy 2:30

Joshua 11:20

In each of these examples, the agent of the heart-hardening is changed in the New Translation. These may seem like common-sense revisions by someone who rejected the idea of God’s predetermination of human actions, but the way Joseph Smith made the corrections, as can be seen, is innovative and often very remarkable.

In some revisions, very few words were needed to revise the text, as in these that depict lying prophets and evil spirits sent from God.[10]

1 Samuel 19:9

Ezekiel 14:9

First Samuel 28 contains a story of King Saul in conflict with the Philistines. Desperate for divine guidance to help him in the coming battle, he sought inspiration from God but received none, so he disguised himself and went to a medium to see if she would contact the dead prophet Samuel in his behalf. The story is troubling to many Bible readers because it validates necromancy, something forbidden in the Bible,[11] and it has God’s departed prophet communicating with the living through a medium. The Joseph Smith Translation retains the essentials of the story but revises the wording by having the medium bring up Samuel’s words rather than Samuel himself.

The Book of Mormon teaches that humans have agency and gives no support to the notion that God predetermines human behavior and predestines ultimate rewards and punishments.[12] Working on the New Translation, Joseph Smith learned that God’s children already had agency in the Garden of Eden,[13] and later he would learn from the record of Abraham that humans had agency even in the pre-earthly life.[14] Predestination in modern Christianity is largely the result of the teachings of the Reformer John Calvin, built upon the predestinarian philosophy of the fifth-century writer Augustine. It was a common belief among some Christians in Joseph Smith’s time, and it remains so today. The JST’s revision of passages in which God hardens hearts shows a rejection of this kind of thinking, as do revisions to the phrase “lead us not into temptation.”

Isaiah 63:17

Luke 11:4

Several biblical passages are used by Calvinists in support of predestination, three of which were revised substantially in the Joseph Smith Translation.[16] John 6:44 suggests to Calvinists that divine preselection independent of human agency determines who will come to Christ and be raised up. The JST change, however, inserts human agency into the equation repeatedly; those who will be raised up must do the will of the Father, receive the Son, and receive the testimony:

John 6:44

The Prophet’s revision of Acts 13:48, in which he reversed the order of words in the text, explicitly rejects Calvinist doctrine.

Acts 13:48

Joseph Smith’s text of Romans 8:29–30 is a dramatic revision of Paul’s words, which are often taken to refer to God’s election of individuals in advance for salvation. The Prophet changed the meaning of the passage entirely. He did that by changing all of the relative pronouns (whom and them) from plural to singular, making the whole text refer not to elect individuals but to Jesus Christ.

Romans 8:29–30

The Instinct to Soften Expressions of Condemnation

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the Joseph Smith Translation is that it frequently softens, or ratchets down, the level of condemnation against sinners. This is seen in several different ways. The Prophet changed the word “hell” to “prison” in Acts 2:27, “worthy of death” to “inexcusable” in Romans 1:32, and “heresies” to “divisions” in 1 Corinthians 11:19. He revised “perdition” to “destruction” in Philippians 1:28 and “damnable” to “abominable” in 2 Peter 2:1. As the following examples show, the concept of damnation was particularly a target of revisions.

Matthew 23:14

Romans 13:2

1 Corinthians 11:29

2 Peter 2:3

Changes like these are consistent with Latter-day Saint theology, which is mostly universalist in nature and teaches that God will redeem virtually all of his children eventually, and they will live eternally in some form of heaven.

2 Thessalonians 1:9

Notice in the example above how Joseph Smith retained the removed word and placed it later in the sentence.

All people sin, and all people have access to repentance. Thus, the revisions in the Joseph Smith Translation that distinguish between sinning and continuing in sin are instructive.

1 John 3:6, 8–9

1 John 5:18

Early in the Restoration, Joseph Smith received a revelation in which he learned that adjectives like eternal and endless, when applied to God’s punishments, are descriptors of the quality of the punishment, not the duration: “I am endless, and the punishment which is given from my hand is endless punishment, for Endless is my name. Wherefore—Eternal punishment is God’s punishment. Endless punishment is God’s punishment.” The revelation continues by saying that Christ himself suffered in our place, and if we choose to repent and follow him, his sufferings will be sufficient for our salvation.[17] Consistent with these revealed truths, the Prophet’s revision of the Bible provides an invitation to repentance.

Notes

[1] “Discourse, 11 June 1843–A, as Reported by Willard Richards,” p. [245], The Joseph Smith Papers.

[2] See Matthew 21:2–5; Mark 11:2–7; Luke 19:29–35; John 12:12–15.

[3] Exodus 24:9–11; 33:11; Numbers 12:6–8; Isaiah 6:1; Amos 9:1.

[4] In the context of rewording a passage in a sermon, Joseph Smith said, “God may correct the scripture by me if he choose,” “Discourse, 13 April 1843, as Reported by Willard Richards,” p. [125], The Joseph Smith Papers. Chapters not in need of revisions were usually labeled “correct.”

[5] The reflexive form of the Hebrew verb is used in these cases.

[6] See also 1 Chronicles 21:15; Jeremiah 18:8; 26:3, 19; Amos 7:3, 6.

[7] See also Genesis 6:6, 7; 1 Samuel 15:11.

[8] See also Jeremiah 26:5; 29:19; and 35:15. Modern translations generally interpret the phrases without the confusing idiom: “I have spoken to you persistently” (Jeremiah 35:14, English Standard Version) and “I persistently sent to you all my servants the prophets” (Jeremiah 44:4, New Revised Standard Version).

[9] It is worth noting here that Joseph Smith did not revise every incidence of the textual anomalies discussed in this chapter.

[10] See also 1 Samuel 16:16, 23; 18:10; 1 Kings 13:18.

[11] Leviticus 19:31; 20:6; Deuteronomy 18:10–11.

[12] See, for example, 2 Nephi 2:27; Helaman 14:30–31.

[13] OT2, page 22 (Moses 7:32).

[14] Times and Seasons 3, no. 10 (March 15, 1842): 720 (Abraham 3:23–26).

[15] See also Matthew 6:13.

[16] Some other passages frequently cited by Calvinists to support their predestinarian beliefs were not revised, such as Ephesians 1:4–12.

[17] Doctrine and Covenants 19:10–12, 16–19.