WAGONS BEARING MEDICINE SHOWS AND CARNIVALS CREAKED ALONG THE dusty roads of frontier towns in the early nineteenth century, bearing entertainment and curiosities to feed the imaginations of village citizens. In 1835 an Irish immigrant named Michael H. Chandler worked his way to Kirtland, Ohio, with a wagon holding Egyptian mummies and some ancient papyri for sale. Originally there had been eleven mummies; Chandler had sold seven to museums, including two in Philadelphia. The mummies had attracted considerable attention in Cleveland. Along the way Chandler heard that Joseph Smith Jr. was able to translate “reformed Egyptian.” He had four mummies and some papyri left by the time he reached Kirtland. Would the Mormons be interested?
They were. And despite the financial desperation of the Kirtland church, they anted up the then-enormous sum of $2,400 to buy the lot. The mummies—which, like the papyri, were documented and authentic pieces of Egyptian antiquity—became a popular exhibit in Kirtland, and later in Nauvoo, a museum curiosity for tourists to admire. But what really mattered for the newborn faith was the papyri.
Joseph was excited. Soon after the purchase he wrote, “With W. W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery as scribes, I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, etc.,—a more full account of which will appear in its place, as I proceed to examine or unfold them. Truly we can say, the Lord is beginning to reveal the abundance of peace and truth.”
This was a period of eager interest in such antiquities. The Rosetta Stone had been discovered in 1799; its trilingual inscription was translated in 1822 by the Frenchman Jean François Champollion, but the unlocking of the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphics was not published in Europe until 1841, and not until even later in the United States. Such scholarship was unknown to Chandler, to the academics Chandler consulted, and to Joseph Smith.
Smith went to work on the papyri and, with the help of his scribes, developed a working list of characters, his Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, which is in the Utah church’s possession, as are four manuscript copies of the Book of Abraham. No mention is made of the work from 1836 until 1842, when it was published in three installments in the church’s paper Times and Seasons.
Abraham was, and still is, published with three facsimiles of the papyri used in the book’s translation. The book claims to be Abraham’s own story, transmitted in his own hand, and provides materials on Abraham’s life that are not present in the biblical Genesis account. It introduces doctrines distinctive to Mormonism, especially the plurality of gods, the preexistence of human souls, and the doctrine that the gods’ creation was organization rather than the traditional notion of divine creation ex nihilo—out of nothing.
After publication, the Abraham story—five short chapters with three facsimiles and explanations—was on its way to becoming Mormon scripture. As part of the Pearl of Great Price, it was published in Liverpool in 1851. The Abraham headnote written by Smith describes the papyri as “writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt,…written by his own hand, upon papyrus.” The Pearl also includes selections from the Book of Moses, a selection of the Gospel of Matthew as retranslated by Smith, a brief biographical statement including the canonized version of his First Vision, and a list of the thirteen Articles of Faith. This collection was made part of the “Standard Works” of scripture by the Utah church in 1880.
Mormons believe in an open canon and the principle of continuing revelation. They are promised that more scriptures will be discovered; more revelations could be canonized by the current seer, revelator, and prophet. The Bible, though officially a “standard work” in Mormonism as well and cited by its missionaries, is read through the lens of this open canon and the interpretation of Mormon prophets, especially Joseph Smith. The Book of Mormon teaches that, due to the Great Apostasy of “the great and abominable church,…there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God” (I Nephi 24:28).
Of the many “plain and precious things” restored to the Latter-day Saints by the prophet Joseph Smith, these few pieces of ancient Egyptian papyri and the Book of Abraham are, to non-Mormons, among the strangest. For Mormons the Book of Abraham presents one of the church’s most difficult apologetic challenges.
Gentiles were dubious about Abraham’s authenticity early on. In 1837 the Ohio non-Mormon William S. West wrote, “Is it possible that a record written by Abraham…containing the most important revelations that God ever gave to man, should be entirely lost by the tenacious Israelites, and preserved by the unbelieving Egyptians, and by them embalmed and deposited in the catacombs with an Egyptian priest?…I venture to say no, it is not possible. It is more likely that the records are Egyptian.”
The first professional Egyptologist to translate the Mormon papyri was the French scholar Théodule Devéria, who came upon a Liverpool Pearl pamphlet in the late 1850s and recognized the facsimiles as common Egyptian funerary papyri. Devéria’s work, “Fragments of Egyptian Funerary Mss. Considered by the Mormons to be Autograph Memoirs of Abraham,” appeared in French in 1860 and was published in London in English the following year.
The next critic was T. B. H. Stenhouse, who republished Devéria’s scholarship in several New York and London editions over the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In 1912 an Episcopal bishop from Utah, Franklin S. Spaulding, sent the Abraham facsimiles to eight Egyptologists as far afield as New York, Chicago, Munich, and London, all of whom returned verdicts as negative as Devéria’s a half-century earlier. They all reported that the prophet’s interpretations were fraudulent nonsense. The LDS Church then had no scholars qualified to respond.
The papyri themselves had disappeared. Along with the mummies, they had reportedly ended up in a Chicago museum and had been destroyed in the city’s great fire of 1871. To everyone’s surprise, some of them surfaced in 1966 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when University of Utah professor Aziz S. Atiya, a Coptic Christian and scholar, was searching through papyrus manuscripts for Coptic materials. The first of the eleven fragments that Atiya saw was a fragment he recognized from facsimile No. 1 of the Book of Abraham. The file also contained a bill of sale from Emma Smith Bidamon, the prophet’s widow (she married Lewis C. Bidamon after Smith’s death). After the find was authenticated, Atiya arranged for the materials to be donated to the LDS Church.
The discovery created a stir. So did a publication of Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Salt Lake’s most prominent ex-Mormons. In 1966 they somehow managed to obtain a microfilm copy of Smith’s Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, a restricted item in the church historian’s office, and published a photomechanical reproduction of it.
Hugh Nibley, a BYU scholar in ancient Near Eastern studies but not an Egyptologist, began an explanatory series in the church magazine, Improvement Era, the precursor to Ensign. Improvement Era published sepia-toned photographs of the papyri. In 1967 Thomas Stuart Ferguson, well-known amateur LDS archaeologist, provided photographs of the Smith papyri to Henry L. F. Lutz and Leonard H. Lesko, both Egyptologists with the University of California at Berkeley. Both quickly identified the fragments as from an Egyptian Book of the Dead. At this time there were as yet no qualified Mormon Egyptologists. Dialogue devoted much of 1968 to studies on the subject, turning to qualified non-Mormon Egyptologists to translate and analyze the newfound papyri.
The 1968 articles by Egyptologists such as John A. Wilson and Klaus Baer at University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, and Richard A. Parker of Brown University, agreed with all the earlier scholars’ findings: the English content of the Book of Abraham was unrelated to the content of either the three facsimiles printed with it or to the papyri Joseph Smith had used. The facsimiles and the papyri were Egyptian funerary documents of a fairly common type, and the papyri could be dated from about 100 b.c., some 2,000 years after the time of Abraham. Facsimile No. I was based on fragment No. 1 and fragment No. xi, which had originally been joined. Missing parts in the figures of fragments Nos. 1 and xi had been incorrectly restored to produce the Abraham facsimile No. 1.
In addition, it was clear that the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar had been the Smith working documents for producing Abraham. Columns of characters taken from the papyri appeared with English text used in Abraham, content that had nothing to do with the Egyptian original. I. E. S. Edwards, an Egyptologist at the British Museum, wrote that Smith’s Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar “reminds me of the writings of psychic practitioners which are sometimes sent to me.”
In time the LDS Church produced several fully credentialed Egyptologists of its own. The most accomplished was Stephen E. Thompson, then of Brown University and the first to establish a career in his specialty outside of the church and its institutions. Thompson’s conclusions resembled those of the other scholars. Comparing the facsimiles against the text of the Book of Abraham, Thompson described the text, in Dialogue in 1995, as “not in agreement with the meanings which these figures had in their original, funerary, context.” He also found that the text of Abraham presents some historical problems with its use of several anachronistic names such as the title “Pharaoh,” which is not attested until 1504 b.c., centuries after Abraham. In addition, Thompson considered the “account of the attempted sacrifice of Abraham extremely implausible” and concluded, “I see no evidence that Joseph Smith had a correct conception of ‘Egyptian religious practices’ or that a knowledge of such was essential to the production of the Book of Abraham.”
The LDS response has largely been twofold: much of the papyri Smith used in producing the Book of Abraham is still missing; or else translation for the prophet did not mean finding linguistic equivalents from one language to another—the papyri served as a sort of mnemonic device or catalyst to inspire him toward revelatory work. In other words, the papyri should be severed from any direct relationship to the content of the Book of Abraham in spite of the three facsimiles always published with it in the LDS scriptures. The known existence of Smith’s Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar and Smith’s extensive journal entries about his own translation work make the catalyst theory particularly difficult to sustain.
“No one ever suggested explanations like that—the idea that the papyri was a catalyst for inspiration or a mnemonic device—before November 1967,” commented Stan Larson, late of the church translation staff and now a University of Utah librarian. “They had to find new explanations to account for the Book of Abraham, after-the-fact explanations.”
Richard Bushman has been willing to accept Abraham on faith through a revisionist view of its translation. He observed in his important biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling that when the Prophet “translated” the Book of Mormon “he did not read from the gold plates” but “the words came by inspiration.” So with the Book of Abraham. “Joseph saw the papyri and inspiration struck.” He knew the meaning without knowing the language. This was no “word-for-word interpretation of the hieroglyphics…. The whole thing was miraculous, and to reduce Joseph’s translation to some quasi-natural process, some concluded, was folly.”
Mormon defenders of Abraham speak of the book’s literary beauty, its doctrinal importance, and its apparent fidelity to ancient Near Eastern, especially Hebrew, culture. Non-Mormon critics find it baffling to conceive of the Hebrew God using pagan papyri as a source for Judeo-Christian inspired scripture.
Klaus Hansen, an LDS history professor at Queen’s University, Ontario, mused about the effect of the Abraham problems in a 1970 Dialogue piece:
Mormons, of all people, ought to remind themselves that religion is not based primarily on reason or logic. To a professional historian, for example, the recent translation of the Joseph Smith papyri may well represent the potentially most damaging case against Mormonism since its foundation. Yet the “Powers That Be” at the Church Historian’s Office should take comfort in the fact that the almost total lack of response to this translation is uncanny proof of Frank Kermode’s observation that even the most devastating act of disconfirmation will have no effect whatever on true believers. Perhaps an even more telling response is that of the “liberals,” or cultural Mormons. After the Joseph Smith papyri affair, one might well have expected a mass exodus of these people from the Church. Yet none has occurred. Why? Because cultural Mormons, of course, do not believe in the historical authenticity of the Mormon scriptures in the first place. So there is nothing to disconfirm.
Hansen appeared to be correct in his opinion that the average Mormon would be untouched by the controversy. A 1995 book by H. Donl Peterson of the Church Educational System, The Story of the Book of Abraham, went on for 302 pages about mummies and Egyptian digs, who Chandler was and how he acquired the items, the way the ancient corpses were saved from thieves in Kirtland and displayed in Nauvoo, and the details about Atiya’s discovery. It briefly speculated about missing papyri, then disposed of the findings of Egyptologists with one sentence: “Several of Joseph Smith’s explanations are similar to interpretations of some Egyptologists, but some are not.” Without further elaboration, Peterson reminded his readers that “Egyptology is not an exact science.” He cautioned, “Our understanding will be faulty until we have the entire text with which Joseph Smith was working.”
Though the Book of Abraham presents several distinctive doctrines that are important to Mormonism, it is Doctrine and Covenants that is central to the everyday life and organization of the church. Students undergo required D&C coursework in high school seminary and college-level institute classes. The present-day LDS Doctrine and Covenants is a compilation of 138 revelation chapters and two special declarations. The vast majority—133—came from Joseph Smith. Others came from Oliver Cowdery (chapters 102 and 134), Brigham Young (136), John Taylor (135), and Joseph F. Smith (138). The compilation is not strictly chronological and reflects some editing changes over the years. The two declarations are the 1890 Manifesto on polygamy issued by Wilford Woodruff and the 1978 statement ending racial discrimination in the priesthood, issued under Spencer W. Kimball.
The revelations embody the church’s principle of continuing revelation: the First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve affirm a new revelation, which is presented to the membership at General Conference to be unanimously “sustained.” Three revelations were added in the twentieth century: D&C 137—an 1836 Joseph Jr. vision of the Celestial Kingdom; D&C 138—a 1918 vision of the redemption of the dead by President Joseph F. Smith a few weeks before his own death; and the 1978 priesthood declaration. The two visions were canonized into the Pearl of Great Price in 1976 and moved into the D&C five years later.
Concerns in the early years reflect church organizational matters and Smith’s need to establish his unique prophetic authority. It was a period when many claimed revelations and visions, and Smith hastened to assert that he alone held the keys. Unlike the Book of Mormon, in these revelations Smith is the Lord’s mouthpiece, delivering the commands in the first-person voice.
“I, the Lord, am God, and have given these things unto you, my servant, Joseph Smith, Jun.,…And you have a gift to translate these plates;…I have entrusted unto you, my servant Joseph, for a wise purpose in me, and it shall be made known unto future generations;…And to none else will I grant his power, to receive this same testimony among this generation,” proclaimed a March 1829 revelation (D&C 5:2, 4, 9, 14). This concept would be repeated from time to time: “But, behold, verily, verily, I say unto thee, no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., for he receiveth them even as Moses” (D&C 28:2; September 1830); there is “none other appointed” to receive revelations that speak for the church (D&C 43:1–6; February 1831).
Early revelations included the testimony of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon (15 and 17); concern about missions because the “field is white already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap, let him thrust in his sickle with his might, and reap while the day lasts” (D&C 6:3; April 1829); establishment of the Aaronic priesthood (section 28); and incorporation and administrative organization of the church itself (section 20; April 1830).
As time passed, the revelations ranged from missionary assignments (the first mission to the Lamanites, American Indian tribes, is assigned in section 32; October 1830) to the practical advice for missionaries to go about two by two (section 52; 1831). Mundane matters included caring for widows and orphans (179), administering the Bishop’s Storehouse (78), and organizing economic affairs (104).
The Lord stressed the importance of keeping careful written church records (102 and 127). The concern for written records included appointing a church historian (21, 47, and 69) as well as a command to collect and keep careful track of anti-Mormon literature (“all that are in the magazines, and in the encyclopedias, and all the libelous histories that are published, and are writing, and by whom, and present the whole concatenation of diabolical rascality and nefarious and murderous impositions that have been practised upon this people”; D&C 123:5), an order Mormons continue to take seriously.
Some of the revelations are simply announcements of appointments to office. Others cover issues of governance such as tithing, church conferences, information about the priesthood, missionary callings, duties of bishops, organization of the First Presidency, and commands to build temples. American geography enters scripture through these revelations: Smith located the Garden of Eden in Jackson County, Missouri, and prophesied that Adam would return there in the end times (116); Independence, Missouri, was singled out as the “Center Place of Zion,” the spot where the Lord will return one day (57). There is a time frame too: the temporal existence of the earth is given as 7,000 years (D&C 77:6). Meanwhile, the Saints are to obey civil law (58) and regard the American Constitution as divinely inspired (101).
A study of the Doctrine and Covenants is a walk through early Mormon church history: the temporary abode in Ohio; the persecutions in Missouri; the Zion’s Camp expedition; the desire to seek redress of grievances; the trek to Utah. Practical concerns inspired revelations. Woven throughout are many words of spiritual guidance, pithy aphorisms of religious advice: “Seek not for riches but for wisdom” (D&C 11:7); “Without faith you can do nothing” (8:10); “Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good” (90:24); “He that trembleth under my power shall be made strong, and shall bring forth fruits of praise and wisdom” (52:17).
The millennial heritage of the church expresses itself in a dozen revelations. The elect are to be gathered because “the hour is nigh” (D&C 29:10); there will be plagues and desolations before the Second Coming of Christ; the elect are to be gathered to Zion; after the resurrection there will be judgment. These themes are repeated a number of times: in the end times there will be wars and rumors of wars; the righteous are to gather to Zion, and to prepare, and for the faithful there will then be nothing to fear.
Future predictions are usually left vague, with one significant exception: D&C 87, Smith’s famous prophecy about the Civil War. Both the LDS high school seminary and college institute D&C course textbooks use this revelation as evidence that Smith was a prophet who spoke by divine inspiration. In this prophecy, issued December 25, 1832, Smith predicted that war would soon come, beginning in South Carolina, with slaves rising up against their masters, dividing North and South, and spreading into a world war.
However, Civil War fears and South Carolina’s rebellion were much in the news in 1832, and “soon” was a matter of a twenty-eight-year wait. Four days before Smith’s Christmas revelation, Eber D. Howe’s Painesville Telegraph, published just twelve miles from Kirtland, had editorialized that “civil war” was at hand and that it was possible “our national existence is at an end.” There were, of course, wars elsewhere in the world in the 1860s, but the American Civil War did not evolve into a world war. This prediction was not published until 1851, when it appeared in the Pearl of Great Price, then noncanonical. It was not canonized until 1876 when the LDS church added it to the D&C.
Embedded in the D&C are many revelations containing doctrines central to the Mormon faith. The theology of God is discussed in section 20 and further explored in depth in sections 93, 130, and 132. Celestial marriage and polygamy arc discussed in sections 131 and 132 (with the Lord admonishing Emma to obey and accept it). Other topics include baptism for the dead, exaltation (progression toward holiness in the afterlife), angelology, the nature of heaven, and proclamations that the restored church is the one true church.
How “open” is the canon of revelation? One early dissident was David Whitmer, one of the original Three Witnesses, who began to have severe doctrinal disagreements with Smith around 1835 and was excommunicated in 1838. Whitmer tried to establish a church under his own leadership and always maintained his Book of Mormon testimony. But he objected to the changes and additions to D&C, and in a late-in-life statement charged that “the meaning is entirely changed on some very important matters; as if the Lord had changed his mind a few years after he gave the revelations.” In the twentieth century, however, changes were infrequent.
The open-canon principle, and Smith’s translation work mentioned frequently in Doctrine and Covenants, point to the final book in the Latter-day Standard Works: the Bible. Missionary talks and proselytizing activities emphasize that Mormons share belief in the Bible with other Christians. For English-speaking Saints, the required Bible is that familiar old standard, the King James Version (kjv). The Bible is taught in Sunday school and studied in seminary and institute courses. But the status of the Bible in Mormon usage can be understood only within the framework of Joseph Smith’s concept of revelation.
For Smith, LDS scholar Philip L. Barlow wrote, the Bible “was not the static, final, untouchable, once-and-for-all Word of God that it was for many antebellum Christians.” Smith was profoundly affected by it, but for him it was “provisional, progressive, relivable, subject to refinement and addition, spoken as well as written, varied in its inspiration, and subordinate to direct experience with God.”
The Mormon prophet himself had appeared by name in the Book of Mormon, the Lord declaring to the biblical Joseph in Egypt, “A seer shall the Lord my God raise up…. And I will make him great in mine eyes; for he shall do my work…bringing…the knowledge of their fathers in the latter days, and also to the knowledge of my covenants,” and then the scriptural Joseph prophesied, “And his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father” (II Nephi 3:6–8, 15).
For Joseph Smith, the Bible was not sufficient revelation; it was subject to his prophetic interpretations, changes, and additions. Because the Bible was not sufficient, and because Smith as prophet had direct access to divine inspiration, he produced further scripture to serve the needs of the latter days and restore the “plain and precious things” lost in the Great Apostasy of the early church.
The Book of Mormon, besides echoing King James diction, uses large sections of biblical materials, especially from Isaiah, Matthew, and He-brews, sometimes reworking the material and adding to it. Isaiah in the Book of Mormon has 433 verses, of which 199 are directly from the King James Version and 234 appear with changes. The D&C also draws heavily from biblical materials in individual verses and phrases.
The word “plagiarism” as sometimes used by critics seems inappropriate. When the “William Tell Overture” appears in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, for example, it is a musical quotation, not plagiarism: Shostakovich expected that sophisticated listeners would recognize Rossini. Similarly, the culture of Smith’s day was immersed in biblical literacy in a manner hard to conceive of today, and the only English translation people used was the kjv. It was natural for the Book of Mormon, the D&C revelations, and other Smith writings to reflect that diction.
As the body of D&C revelations began to emerge, Smith felt the need to harmonize the Bible with his doctrinal developments, so he began work on his own “translation” of the Bible. “There are many things in the Bible which do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelations of the Holy Ghost to me,” Smith wrote in 1843. A body of his Genesis additions, the Book of Moses (now part of the Pearl of Great Price canon), was written around the summer of 1830. With the help of scribes, Smith worked his way through the Bible from 1830 to 1833. His most extensive changes—both corrections and additions—were in Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Psalms, Matthew, Luke, Romans, I Corinthians, Galatians, Hebrews, James, II Peter, and Revelation. Smith rejected Song of Solomon as inspired scripture, though the church includes it in the LDS edition of the King James Version along with a footnote giving Smith’s judgment of the book.
Smith had no knowledge of biblical languages, so “translation” of these materials was clearly approached as revelatory inspiration. The full collection of his biblical writings is known as the “Inspired Version” or the Joseph Smith Translation (jst). By the time Smith produced the Book of Abraham, he had begun to take some Hebrew lessons. He was intrigued by his discovery that the one Hebrew designation for God, Elohim, is a plural noun.
Smith’s Elohim usage turns up in the Book of Abraham as a plurality of gods directing the creation of the world. Instead of the biblical “God created the heavens and the earth,” Smith wrote (Abraham 4:1) that “the Gods organized and formed the heavens and the earth.” His idiosyncratic use of Elohim in Abraham, and later in the “King Follett Discourse” of 1844, had no foundation in the text of his tutor, Rabbi Joshua Seixas. Seixas’s Grammar, in an 1834 edition, defines Elohim in the standard Hebrew manner as “a singular noun with a plural form,” normally interpreted in Judaism and in Christianity after it as an intensifier to stress magnitude, not as plurality of number.
Some of the themes that receive special emphasis in the Smith version include extensive materials related to the Melchizedek priesthood, the Christian understanding of prophets in pre-Christian times, and Christ’s Second Coming. LDS scholar Robert J. Matthews listed twenty-three D&C revelations that contain doctrinal material directly related to changes that Smith made in his translation. In at least four D&C revelations, entire sections are directly from Smith changes in the Bible. Matthews emphasized the importance of the jst for Mormon doctrines. The “pre-earth life, the degrees of glory in the resurrection, much information concerning Adam, Enoch, and the ancient patriarchs, of Cain, of the work of Satan, views of the Church respecting the Apocrypha, an explanation of the Revelation of John, the age of accountability, and probably also the doctrine of the eternal marriage covenant are associated directly with the translation of the Bible.” The books of Abraham and Moses in the Pearl of Great Price bring additions to Genesis materials.
Some seemingly minor changes have larger implications. In Genesis 12:11–13, for example, Abraham tries to protect his comely wife Sarah from the Egyptian by instructing her to lie about their marital status. In the parallel account of the Book of Abraham (12:22–25), it is God who is the author of deception, telling Abraham to lie.
The jst was not published during Smith’s lifetime. The manuscript remained with the prophet’s widow Emma and was first published in 1867 by the Reorganized Church. For more than a century it was the official RLDS Bible, though in recent years the renamed Community of Christ has backed away from exclusive endorsement of the jst. On the other hand, the Utah church has been moving closer to canonizing the jst. In 1968 the Reorganized Church gave Matthews access to the original manuscript of the Smith translation.
This was a critical juncture in LDS scriptural scholarship because the church was about to embark on a major project correlating all its standard works in an edition of the King James Bible that is printed with a complete interpretative apparatus that Mormonizes the Bible. Barlow in his study Mormons and the Bible credited Apostles Boyd Packer and Bruce McConkie with largely shaping the project, which “will continue to guide the Mormon mind for the indefinite future.”
McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine remains an all-time LDS best-seller. He did not know any of the ancient biblical languages. The cross-reference to the topic “Higher Criticism” in Mormon Doctrine reads, “see Apostasy.” Most Mormons remain aloof from such questions as the philosophy of interpretation or the principles of hermeneutics. Biblical materials are subject to Smith’s revelatory changes, but miracles are interpreted literally. The Mormon approach to the Bible is an idiosyncratic blend of linguistic liberalism in defining inspiration combined with a strict literalism in matters pertaining to history, narrative, miracles, and the supernatural.
The LDS edition of the Bible includes interpretative chapter headnotes written by McConkie; a Bible dictionary that Barlow calls “not really a Bible dictionary but a dictionary of LDS theology, conservatively construed, using biblical terms”; an LDS topical index; cross-references incorporating all the Mormon Standard Works; excerpts and footnotes incorporating all doctrinally important differences with jst material; and a gazetteer and maps.
An example of a “Mormonizing” McConkie headnote cited by Barlow is the summary sentence introducing Romans 4: “Man is justified by faith, righteous works, and grace.” Barlow wrote, “Now, it is true that the Apostle Paul did have more to say about the importance of ‘works’ than is sometimes acknowledged by those in the Augustinian tradition, but this does not occur in the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.”
After seven years’ work this edition of the King James Bible was published in 1979. The King James Version is the required official LDS Bible; although this edition has not been “sustained” in the permanent canon, in practice it is regarded as the normative edition for use by the Saints. The church’s 1979 edition of the kjv, with its notes and other apparatus, incorporated all the doctrinally important, distinctive changes that the prophet made in the Joseph Smith Translation.
The kjv will probably remain the official English biblical text for Mormons into the indefinite future. It is practical for missionaries, wrote Joseph Fielding Smith in the 1950s. Later the church’s tenth president, he viewed the kjv as providing “a common ground for proselytizing purposes.” Matthews echoed that sentiment in a 1995 Brigham Young University symposium, “As Translated Correctly”: “As a missionary tool, for public relations reasons, a Bible that the world at least tentatively accepts such as the King James Version has advantages.”
Unlike modern translations and editions by traditional Christians, this current Mormon edition was published without reference to the best available ancient manuscripts, the scholarly enterprise called “lower criticism.” The Bible is actually the best-attested body of literature from the ancient world. The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus (the latter lacking the last books of the New Testament) are full biblical manuscripts dating from circa a.d. 350. But there are thousands of other ancient New Testament texts or fragments and sixty other codices (complete books). The oldest are extensive portions dating from circa a.d. 200 and a fragment of John dated at a.d. 110 to 125. Some would date the Chester Beatty Papyrus II containing all of Paul’s epistles except the three Pastorals as early as the late first century. The major Hebrew Old Testament “Masoretic” Texts include Codex Leningrad B, dated a.d. 1009. But the Dead Sea Scrolls, one thousand years earlier, preserve parts of all the Hebrew books except Esther, and all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah. There are other ancient texts in Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic.
All these ancient texts indicate that the text of the Bible we have has substantially been transmitted through the ages with surprising accuracy. Some of the New Testament fragments represent a shorter time span back to the biblical author than the time span from our day to Joseph Smith. As evidence for translation, all the ancient texts share in common support for the traditional Bible text; none support any changes introduced by Joseph Smith.
From the Mormon perspective, however, all of this, the entire scholarly enterprise of textual criticism, is irrelevant. In a canonized article of faith in the Pearl of Great Price, Smith wrote, “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.” The standard of judgment applied to the Bible for “correct translation” is the revelation attributed to prophet Smith. “I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors.”
“It is not scribal error that we are talking about, nor is it faulty translation,” said Joseph Fielding McConkie, speaking at a 1995 symposium. In the view of McConkie, a BYU professor of ancient scripture and the son of Bruce R. McConkie, parts of the original Bible are missing thanks to the “great and abominable church,” which removed those parts as “deliberate, premeditated mischief.” What is the evidence for this? McConkie said, “The restoration of the gospel is the most perfect evidence.” In other words, the revelations received by Joseph Smith correct the traditional, faulty Bible, and the Smith revelations themselves are all the evidence the believer needs to prove this.
As would be expected with this perspective, Mormon scriptural scholarship functions almost entirely within an enclosed, intramural world. According to Barlow, there are no full-length Mormon commentaries on the Bible. Despite regular rotations of Sunday school study, he said that, except for “brief proof-texts and favorite poetic passages,” most modern Mormons “are not deeply familiar with the Old Testament once they pass Genesis and the first twenty chapters of Exodus, nor with the New Testament after the Gospel of John.”
Mormon Bible scholars face serious problems. Stepping outside the enclosure is risky, as scholars such as Stan Larson and David Wright discovered. Barlow observed, “Sensitive areas are studiously avoided by many scholars. And, unlike historians, Mormon biblical students have relatively few employment opportunities outside Church-owned facilities.”
For the believer, it is a faith choice. In the words of the FARMS writer Kevin Christensen, it is a choice “between competing world views. Which community, if any, has authority? Should prophets take their license for seeing from the community of secular scholars? Must we have secular academia’s permission to believe? Is personal spiritual experience valid? Can we ignore scholarly and scientific opinion and survive as a faith?…What kind of faith should we have?…What, if anything, in this life deserves our commitment?”
These kinds of questions shape the life choices of the Saints, as they shape the life choices for all religious believers.