The Joseph Smith Translation is unlike any other translation of the Bible ever made. Since antiquity, many have created new Bible translations as needs arose. Among the most famous were the Septuagint translation from ancient Egypt (Greek) and the Vulgate of Jerome (Latin). In the Protestant world, the translations of Martin Luther (German), William Tyndale (English), and King James’s translators (English) stand out as signature achievements. Even in Joseph Smith’s lifetime, several Americans had translated all or parts of the Bible to makes its words more contemporary and accessible.[1] But Joseph Smith’s translation was unlike any of those. It was not a translation from one language to another but a reinvention of the Bible, and it was made possible not through knowledge of languages but through Joseph Smith’s prophetic gifts, which included both divine revelation and his ability to perceive his readers’ need for greater clarity in the word of God.

The Translation Process

Much of this book is dedicated to exploring what we know about how the New Translation was made. It is beyond our reach to enter into the mind of God and the mind of his Prophet to understand the workings of the Spirit that made the translation possible. But we do have important sources, including the JST manuscripts, that help us understand the earthly technicalities of the Bible revision. As we saw in the previous chapter, during the revising process the Prophet and his scribe—of which there were six who took the dictation over the course of the revision—sat in a room together. He spoke, and the scribe recorded.

A printed copy of the King James Bible played an important role in the translation. Oliver Cowdery bought it in October 1829 in E. B. Grandin’s ground-floor Palmyra bookstore, during the time that the Book of Mormon was being printed on the third floor of the same building.[2] We have no reason to believe that it was purchased with a new translation of the Bible in mind, but it clearly was intended for the work of the Restoration, because the inscription Cowdery wrote in the front of the book reads, “Holiness to the Lord.” The Prophet apparently used that Bible from the beginning as he dictated the text to his scribes.[3] The evidence of his writing in the Bible shows that he had it in his lap or on a table in front of him while a scribe sat nearby. Sometimes when the Prophet dictated, he read the existing biblical words precisely, not desiring to make a change. But at times the words he spoke diverged from the King James text, sometimes dramatically. In many places he left the printed text in the middle of a verse and did not return to that verse until he had added new material. In the most remarkable case, he left the biblical text at Genesis 5:22 and did not arrive at verse 23 until after he had added about 4,500 words between them. The scribes wrote what they heard whether it was the text as printed in the Bible, the biblical text with revisions, or new text altogether.

From June 1830 through February 1832, Joseph Smith dictated the text in full, including verses in which he made no changes. His scribes wrote what they heard, so there are many verses written on the manuscripts in which he did not revise the text. The translations of Genesis 1–24 and Matthew 1–John 5 were recorded in full. In February 1832 the Prophet and his scribes developed an abbreviated system that ended up saving them a great deal of labor. Rather than dictating the entire text, he dictated only new words and additions, along with the chapter and verse numbers where the changes were to be inserted. The scribes wrote that information on the manuscript pages while Joseph Smith marked or circled in his Bible the words that were to be replaced and the locations for insertions and changes. Consequently, in order to obtain the correct translation from Genesis 25 through the end of the Old Testament and for John 6 through the end of the New Testament, one needs both the manuscripts and the marked Bible.[4]

Some have asked whether Joseph Smith used a seer stone or the Nephite interpreters in the process of the New Translation. Unlike with the Book of Mormon, none of the JST scribes mentioned the use of any such devices for the translation, and there are no contemporary sources that suggest he used them. Elder Orson Pratt asked the Prophet the question himself. Joseph Smith explained “that the Lord gave him the Urim and Thummim when he was inexperienced in the Spirit of inspiration. But now he had advanced so far that he understood the operations of that Spirit, and did not need the assistance of that instrument.”[5]

Changes after the Original Dictation

That Joseph Smith and his assistants prepared the text on OT2 and NT2 for publication is clear on the manuscripts. After the original dictation the project was not yet finished, and they continued to work on it until it was ready to go to press. The writing that was done on the manuscripts following the dictation falls roughly into three categories, listed here in the most likely chronological order.

Correction of transcription and dictation errors: In Joseph Smith’s final manuscripts, the first fifty-eight pages of the Old Testament and the first forty-nine pages of the New Testament were copied from earlier draft manuscripts. John Whitmer was the copyist. He checked and corrected his copying against the originals and inserted the corrections. He may have done some of this work concurrently with his transcribing, but some appears to have been part of a careful check later. When Joseph Smith dictated those original texts, often reading from the Bible, he sometimes skipped words. Sidney Rigdon apparently proofed the text later against the Bible and restored overlooked words, or Joseph Smith did so with Rigdon as scribe. In both the dictation by Joseph Smith and the transcription by John Whitmer, haplography is evident. Haplography is missed text that results from the eye skipping from a word to the same word later on, causing the text in between to be lost. The comparisons against originals thus caught not only words transcribed incorrectly but also words that had been accidentally skipped.

Editing for style and content: On many pages of the New Translation there is evidence of later passes in which the wording was revised. Many of the revisions are minor word edits, but others change the meaning of the passages. The largest revisions were too long to be written between existing lines on the page, so scribes wrote them on pieces of paper and pinned them in place on the manuscript—the equivalent of today’s paper clips or staples. The Prophet wrote a few of the refinements himself, and others are in the hands of Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams.[6] They are of the same nature as the other revisions Joseph Smith made throughout his revising of the Bible, continuing the process that began when he first commenced the New Translation. They do not have a central theme, and it does not appear that he had specific objectives in mind other than to refine the wording and add further prophetic insights—the same objectives that are evident on all of the JST’s pages. Some changes are merely editorial, with simple modernizations of language. Others are much more significant doctrinally, sometimes providing additional context and sometimes revising the quoted words of biblical speakers. All these factors argue that these later revisions are a continuing part of the New Translation process.[7]

Much of this work was done before the original dictation of other parts of the Bible was completed. Sidney Rigdon’s handwriting on these refinements ends at the point in the Bible where his tenure as scribe ended in late March 1832. Not all parts of the Bible received equal attention. The most significant refinements came as the Prophet made a careful pass through the early chapters in Genesis, where some of the revisions he made are very significant. There is no evidence of a later pass through the text from Genesis 24:41 to Malachi.

Technical refinements to prepare the text for publication: Because Joseph Smith’s dictations consisted only of spoken words, he did not verbalize the other features that make up a finished text. After the words were in place, he had his assistants go through the text and provide punctuation, capitalization, and correct spelling. This work was done conscientiously, but not with linguistic expertise. On some pages they also changed ampersands (&) to “and.” Some of this copyediting may have been done concurrently with the other refinements, but in most places it appears that it was done later.

Much evidence exists to show that Joseph Smith had a preference for paragraph-length verses instead of short ones as currently found in the Bible. This is evident in the earliest printings of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Book of Abraham, and also on the New Translation manuscripts.[8] Working on the JST, he and his assistants discarded the traditional verse divisions found in the Bible and systematically created new verses that are on average almost three times as long. Sidney Rigdon was the scribe who inserted the verse breaks through Genesis 11. Newel K. Whitney inserted them for the rest of the manuscripts. In the New Testament, most of the verses through Matthew 5 correspond with those in traditional Bibles or are of similar length. Longer verses begin consistently with Matthew 6. In some cases the new paragraph breaks correspond with the paragraph markers (¶) in the King James Bible.

The insertion of the verse divisions appears to have been the final process in preparing the text for printing, because the verse numbers were sometimes written around the other refinements.[9]

Joseph Smith took seriously all of these matters of reviewing and preparing the New Translation and knew that God had entrusted him with an important work. In the summer of 1832, he apparently received an invitation from W. W. Phelps, the Church’s editor and printer in Missouri, to send the JST manuscripts there for preparation to be printed. The Prophet was not pleased with the suggestion and in his response expressed annoyance over what others had done with the texts of the revelations. As a consequence of that experience, he vowed forcefully that the Bible revision would not undergo correction or revision except under his control.[10] This suggests strongly that all of these refinements and preparations for publication were done under his close supervision. The best evidence leads to the conclusion that the entire work was completed when he announced on July 2, 1833, that the New Translation was finished.

Scribes and Pages

Our examination of the Joseph Smith Translation necessarily requires that we learn about some of the history of the research done on it. The handwriting on the manuscripts has turned out to be an important part of the story. Because Oliver Cowdery was the principal scribe for the Book of Mormon, his handwriting has been available and known by researchers for many years. Similarly, various documents were available early on in archival sources to identify the scribal hands of John Whitmer and Sidney Rigdon.

Richard P. Howard, Church Historian of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), researched the JST manuscripts in the 1960s.[11] He identified the handwriting on what is now called OT1 as belonging to Oliver Cowdery, John Whitmer, and Sidney Rigdon, and he believed that the rest of the dictated writing in the Old and New Testaments was in Rigdon’s hand.[12] He also concluded that the later refinements in the text were written by Joseph Smith himself. Howard had an interest in the development of the text, but he misidentified the scribal hands, which could have given him much-needed clues. Robert J. Matthews of Brigham Young University did groundbreaking research a few years later and corrected some matters that Howard and earlier Latter-day Saint scholars in Utah had misunderstood. His work was the foundation for all of the scholarship on the JST that followed.[13]

In the 1990s the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Brigham Young University, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints entered into a cooperative effort with two primary goals in mind: to preserve the pages of the Joseph Smith Translation manuscripts and to prepare and publish an academic transcription of the text. Accordingly, a team from BYU went to the RLDS Library-Archives in Independence, Missouri, and scanned and photographed all of the pages, thus for the first time making available quality images from which scholars would be able to work. The manuscripts were then taken to Salt Lake City, where specialists cleaned, repaired, deacidified, and stabilized the pages and encapsulated them for long-term preservation before returning them to Independence.

Over the course of several years, BYU researchers studied and transcribed all of the manuscript pages, preparing a transcription with original spellings, strike outs, deletions, and insertions. The transcription was published in an oversized 851-page volume in 2004.[14] Later the same material and much more was published in an electronic edition.[15] In the process of the research, scholars were able to build on previous research and gain much new information about the activity of the scribes and about how the Joseph Smith Translation was produced. The work was done with resources never before available to scholars working with Latter-day Saint historical documents, including not only the high-resolution scanned images and access to the manuscripts but also staff resources that previous researchers had never enjoyed. The result was a better understanding of the text than had been achieved in former generations. Much of what was previously believed turned out to be incorrect.

Early in that effort, when BYU researchers Robert Matthews and Scott Faulring were studying the manuscripts in Independence, they noticed some handwriting anomalies in the OT1 section identified as having been written by John Whitmer. Operating on a thought that Emma Smith might have served as a scribe, they compared the writing with known Emma Smith documents and made the connection: two of the pages previously identified with John Whitmer were actually written by Emma Smith. Her writing had been unnoticed because it was preceded and followed by Whitmer’s writing and has similarities with it.[16] Previous scholars had not identified Frederick G. Williams’s handwriting on the manuscripts, but Faulring was able to identify it and show its prominence in many places.[17] BYU handwriting specialist Brenda Burton Johnson isolated Jesse Gause’s writing,[18] but because so few sources exist in his hand for comparison, the identity of the writer was not determined until four years after the transcription was published.[19] The work of Sidney Rigdon and Newel K. Whitney as scribes for the insertion of the verse divisions was first discovered only in 2020, during the writing of this book.[20]

Notes

[1] See Kent P. Jackson, “The King James Bible in the Days of Joseph Smith,” in The King James Bible and the Restoration, ed. Kent P. Jackson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2011), 138–61.

[2] The Bible was printed in 1828 by the H. & E. Phinney Company of Cooperstown, New York. See Kent P. Jackson, “Joseph Smith’s Cooperstown Bible: The Bible Used in the Joseph Smith Translation in Its Historical Context,” BYU Studies 40, no. 1 (2001): 41–70. It is housed in the Library-Archive of the Community of Christ, Independence, Missouri.

[3] See Kent P. Jackson, “The Visions of Moses and Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation,” in “To Seek the Law of the Lord”: Essays in Honor of John W. Welch, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson and Daniel C. Peterson (Orem, UT: Interpreter Foundation, 2017), 167.

[4] Images of the marked Bible verses are presented side-by-side with the corrections written on the JST manuscripts in 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), 456–581, 668–851.

[5] “Two Days’ Meeting at Brigham City, June 27 and 28, 1874,” Millennial Star 36, no. 32 (August 11, 1874): 498–99. See also Pratt’s similar statement in Minutes, Salt Lake School of the Prophets, January 14, 1871, Church History Library, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. Some authors have referenced an untrustworthy late account to suggest the contrary, for which see Kent P. Jackson, “Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 40 (2020): 21n33.

[6] Oddly, a few after-dictation refinements were written on OT1 after OT2 had already been created, written by both Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. The reason may simply be that the Prophet pulled the wrong manuscript off the shelf.

[7] Because of the factors mentioned in this paragraph, I attribute these after-original-dictation revisions to Joseph Smith, just as we recognize that the rest of the New Translation comes from him even though very little of it is in his handwriting. In preparation for the publication of the Book of Commandments, Joseph Smith’s assistants edited the texts of the revelations for style, and thus I cannot rule out that some of the word-modernization work was done at his direction by others. But those edits are so inconsistent that it does not appear that there was a systematic effort to do that kind of revising. Moreover, other rewordings and additions show every indication of prophetic origin, suggesting to me that they are the direct product of Joseph Smith.

[8] See Kent P. Jackson, “Paragraphs and Verses in the Scriptures,” in Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Studies of the Book of Mormon, Bible, and Temple in Honor of Stephen D. Ricks, ed. Donald W. Parry, Gaye Strathearn, and Shon D. Hopkin (Provo, UT: Interpreter Foundation and Religious Education, Brigham Young University, 2020), 151–69.

[9] There is other writing on the manuscripts now, including some manuscript numbers, line numbers, and other archival notations. There are even a few random places where later writers penciled in words on the manuscript. All of that was likely done by RLDS archivists in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century.

[10] “Letter to William W. Phelps, 31 July 1832,” p. 5, The Joseph Smith Papers. The Prophet wrote regarding the JST manuscripts, “I would inform you that they will not go from under my hand during my natural life [modern translation, “over my dead body”] for correction, revisal or printing.”

[11] Howard’s book Restoration Scriptures devoted 123 pages to the New Translation. See Richard P. Howard, Restoration Scriptures: A Study of their Textual Development (Independence, MO: Department of Religious Education, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 1969), 7–193.

[12] Howard misidentified a copy that John Whitmer transcribed in early 1831 as the original dictated Genesis manuscript. After the research of Robert J. Matthews proved otherwise, Howard corrected that in his second edition. See Richard P. Howard, Restoration Scriptures: A Study of Their Textual Development, rev. and enl. (Independence, MO: Herald, 1995), 63, note 1. Both Howard and Matthews lacked some key evidence in their proposed dating of the translation process.

[13] See Robert J. Matthews, “A Plainer Translation”: Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible—A History and Commentary (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975).

[14] Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews, Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts.

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

[16] See Scott H. Faulring, “Emma and the Joseph Smith Translation,” Insights: An Ancient Window: The Newsletter of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, August 1996. Years earlier, based solely on Doctrine and Covenants 25:6, Matthews listed Emma Smith as a possible scribe for the New Translation. Matthews, “A Plainer Translation,” 95.

[17] Like Emma Smith, Williams was also listed by Matthews as a possible JST scribe. See Matthews, “A Plainer Translation,” 94–95.

[18] Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews, Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts, 48, 69–70.

[19] In the 2004 volume, editors identified Gause as “Scribe A.” The identification with Gause was made by historian Erin B. Jennings. See Jennings, “The Consequential Counselor: Restoring the Root(s) of Jesse Gause,” Journal of Mormon History 34, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 182–85. Gause’s name was included in Faulring and Jackson, Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: Electronic Library.

[20] The identification of Rigdon’s numbers is based on comparison with numbers he wrote on the many JST pages for which he was the scribe. The identification of Whitney’s numbers is based on comparison with many samples of his handwritten numbers in commercial documents in the Newel K. Whitney Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Matthews included Whitney as a possible scribe because Joseph Smith was living in the Whitney home during part of the translation. See Matthews, “A Plainer Translation,” 94–95.