In chapters 5–11 we looked at the new text that Joseph Smith added to the Bible—text that does not simply edit existing words but adds new and original content. As we have seen, new text includes not only large additions, such as are found in Genesis, but also the many smaller additions throughout the Gospels. This chapter’s intent is to provide a summary for some of the questions raised by the insertion of new text in those chapters.

How are we to understand the idea of a young man in the nineteenth century taking the words of prophets, evangelists, apostles, and even Jesus Christ, and adding to them? It is not difficult to understand the skepticism of those who reject the idea that Joseph Smith had prophetic authority, but believers in the divine origin of his calling should have explanations. Latter-day Saints cannot interpret these expanded texts as mere fabrications of Joseph Smith, regardless of what one might consider to have been his motives for fabricating them. Nor can they suggest he was inventing a mythic history to serve some modern theological purpose. These accounts are not like the New Testament parables, which do not purport to be historical, but they deal with individuals known in the Bible, including Jesus Christ, and they present real events. I believe that there are explanations for these new texts that are consistent with the evidence. Chapter 4 introduced the topic of what the Joseph Smith Translation is, and the current chapter will explore again some of the proposals made there with regard to the new texts we have seen in the intervening chapters. I suggest that there are three options for understanding the origin of most of the new texts. Each of these options views the insertions to be external to Joseph Smith—that is, he did not invent them. And each is based on the idea that they are not of modern origin but represent things that were spoken or done in antiquity. Yet, as with all of our ancient scriptures, it is beyond our ability to determine to what extent the revealed texts might simplify, reconstruct, or summarize for our benefit.

Three Avenues for Understanding

The new text that the JST adds was once in the Bible. As we have seen, many Latter-day Saints assume that the New Translation is all, or at least primarily, the restoration of original text. This is not an unreasonable assumption for some of the JST’s content. In the Visions of Moses, God commanded Moses to write the things that he would reveal to him. God warned Moses that people would esteem his words “as naught” and would “take many of them from the book” that Moses would write. The removal of the words would not, however, be permanent. God told Moses, “Behold I will raise up another like unto you, and they shall be had again among the children of men, among even as many as shall believe.”[1] It seems impossible to conclude other than that this passage refers to Joseph Smith restoring words that were once written, but it is difficult to say how far this passage can be applied, or whether those removed words were ever included in what we call the Bible.

Nephi in the Book of Mormon tells his readers that the Bible would not go into the world without some of its words being removed. He learned from an angel about a record that “proceedeth out of the mouth of a Jew”—with “a Jew” personifying as singular the Bible’s many authors. When that record was compiled, “it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord, of whom the twelve apostles bear record,” and it would be in a state of “purity.”[2] But Nephi learned that the record would fall into wicked hands, and there would be “many plain and precious things taken away” from it. Then, “after these plain and precious things were taken away,” the record would go forth without them to the nations of the world.[3]

The oldest Old Testament books that have survived were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating mainly a century or two before the time of Jesus. The earliest extant manuscripts and fragments of New Testament books mostly date to the third and fourth centuries AD, but evidence exists that the books had begun to circulate in the Roman world early in the second century AD.[4] The study of those biblical texts reveals that they clearly belong to books essentially as we have them today, not to more pristine former editions. Yet even in the earliest copies, variant readings had already begun to appear. These factors show that the removal of plain and precious things happened very early, both with the Old Testament and with the New Testament.

As Nephi’s vision continues, we learn that Jesus would not allow the ignorance and confusion to continue that had been brought on by the corruption of the Bible and the loss of gospel truth. In the latter days, “I will bring forth unto them, in mine own power, much of my gospel, which shall be plain and precious, saith the Lamb.”[5] But in Nephi’s vision, the focus is on the Book of Mormon as the agent of the promised restoration of truth. Nowhere does it mention the repair of the Bible’s text, but it mentions instead that the writings in the Book of Mormon and other books of modern revelation would be the cure for the loss of the Bible’s truths.[6] In the many revelations to Joseph Smith we have several references to the New Translation, but none of them identify it as the restoration of material that was once in the Bible.

Our evidence is thus inconclusive, but again we cannot rule out the idea that some material in the Joseph Smith Translation restores text that was once in the Bible but was at some point lost or removed from it.

The new text that the JST adds was once recorded in writing but was never in the Bible. The Book of Mormon never uses the word Bible with reference to any record in ancient times; the word is only used in the context of our modern world. The Book of Mormon does speak, as we have seen, of the record that proceeds “out of the mouth of a Jew,” and it tells us what it contained. It was “a record of the Jews, which contains the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel; and it also containeth many of the prophecies of the holy prophets; and it is a record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many.”[7] That record clearly is, in its earliest form, what we call the Bible. But notice that the record on the plates of brass is not the Bible, but it is “a record like unto” the Bible.

We do not know if JST additions to the early chapters of Genesis—including the Visions of Moses, the accounts of Adam and Eve, and the record of Enoch—were ever in the Bible. It appears, however, that at least part of that content, or something like it, was on the plates of brass. Nephi, Jacob, and others taught many of the same topics as are found in the JST Genesis additions, sometimes in very similar words, and they tell us that the record on the plates of brass was their source.[8] Our Old Testament is a collection, but nothing in it suggests that it collects every inspired book from the ancient world, and it even mentions other books that were sources for it or contemporary with it.[9] Most of those other books were historical annals, but the Old Testament also mentions records of prophets that we no longer have: “the book of Samuel the seer,” “the book of Nathan the prophet,” “the book of Gad the seer,”[10] “the visions of Iddo the seer,”[11] “the book of Shemaiah the prophet,”[12] and “the story of the prophet Iddo.”[13] None of those are in the Bible, and they may or may not have been on the plates of brass. In the same way, the plates of brass included the writings of Ezias,[14] Neum, Zenock, and Zenos,[15] prophets unknown to the Bible that may never have been in the Bible.

The Old Testament likely overlaps considerably with the record on the plates of brass, but it is not the same collection. The Visions of Moses, the accounts of Adam and Eve, and the record of Enoch, to the extent that they were written texts in antiquity, may have been in other collections like the plates of brass, but we do not know if they were ever in what eventually became our Bible. No later Old Testament writer shows any awareness of them, and the Bible’s compilers may never have known of their existence. It is possible, then, that the Joseph Smith Translation, by adding these early texts to Genesis, may be bringing to our knowledge ancient writings that were recorded elsewhere but were never in the Bible.[16]

The new texts and events that the JST adds represent what was once spoken or done but was never put into writing. There is no reason to suppose that all the words in the New Translation represent what was once written in any sacred text. Some parts of the Bible contain fairly detailed narratives, but the stories about Jesus in the New Testament are often characterized by economy of words. Joseph Smith’s insertions in the Gospels, as we saw in chapters 10 and 11, often fill in gaps in stories or explain or expand the dialogue. We cannot say if those expansions were once in the Bible or in some other record, but perhaps the best way to explain many of them is that they are the restoration of things spoken or done but never recorded anywhere in writing.

A Compelling Witness

These three options seem to provide explanations for most of the new text that Joseph Smith added to the Bible, but there may be other ways of describing the origin of individual passages. It would be convenient for us if we had revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, or statements by Joseph Smith, that spell out how he created the New Translation. But we do not. We do have, however, revelations that show God’s acknowledgment and divine endorsement of the work.[17]

In chapters 5–11 we often looked at passages out of their broader context, and in chapters 13–15 we will necessarily look at others in the same way. But as we read the revised texts in their biblical setting along with the narratives that precede and follow them, it is plain to see that the words Joseph Smith added to the Bible enlighten its text in significant ways. They explain what often needs explanation and clarify what is often unclear.

Are the new texts, as instructive and edifying as they are, the original words? No. They cannot be, because they are in English. As was noted in chapter 4, it is important to remember that material added to the Bible by the New Translation was not written or spoken originally in the language of Joseph Smith, nor in the scriptural idiom in which it is now expressed. Although God gave us the words “after the manner of [our] language” so that we “might come to understanding,”[18] the very fact that they are now in modern English means that understanding their origin completely is, in some ways, beyond the tools of textual or historical scholarship. Moreover, there is no way to tell exactly what the relationship is between the original thoughts and the words in today’s text. We have examples of Jesus saying the same thing but in different words in parallel passages in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and this tells us that precise word choices are not always important. I believe we can be confident that we have the JST insertions as the Lord wants us to have them. Their message is the most important consideration, and the message is clear: the Joseph Smith Translation, both in its Old Testament and its New Testament, is a compelling witness for the work and words of Jesus Christ.

Notes

[1] OT2, page 3 (Moses 1:41).

[2] 1 Nephi 13:23–25.

[3] 1 Nephi 13:28–29.

[4] See Richard D. Draper, “The Earliest ‘New Testament,’” in How the New Testament Came to Be, ed. Kent P. Jackson and Frank F. Judd Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2006), 260–91.

[5] 1 Nephi 13:34.

[6] 1 Nephi 13:35–36, 39–40.

[7] 1 Nephi 13:23.

[8] Compare, for example, Moses 6:59 and 2 Nephi 9:6, and Moses 6:67 and Alma 13:7; Noel B. Reynolds, “The Brass Plates Version of Genesis,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 34 (2020): 63–96; and Noel B. Reynolds and Jeff Lindsay, “‘Strong Like unto Moses’: The Case for Ancient Roots in the Book of Moses Based on Book of Mormon Usage of Related Content Apparently from the Brass Plates,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 44 (2021): 1–92.

[9] See Numbers 21:14; Joshua 10:13; 1 Samuel 10:25; 2 Samuel 1:18; 1 Kings 11:41; 14:19, 29; 15:7; 16:20; 1 Chronicles 27:24; 29:29; 2 Chronicles 9:29; 12:15; 13:22; 20:34; 24:27; 32:32; 33:19; 35:25.

[10] 1 Chronicles 29:29.

[11] 2 Chronicles 9:29.

[12] 2 Chronicles 12:15.

[13] 2 Chronicles 13:22.

[14] Helaman 8:20.

[15] 1 Nephi 19:10, 21.

[16] Studies in which I suggest possible Hebrew originals for parts of the JST (whether once in the Bible or not) are Kent P. Jackson, “Behold I,” BYU Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 169–75; and “‘If . . . And’: A Hebrew Construction in the Book of Moses,” in Bountiful Harvest: Essays in Honor of S. Kent Brown, ed. Andrew C. Skinner, D. Morgan Davis, and Carl Griffin (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2012), 205–10.

[17] Doctrine and Covenants 9:2; 35:20; 37:1; 45:60; 73:3–4; 76:15; 91:1–3; 124:89.

[18] Doctrine and Covenants 1:24.