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After the publication of the 1878 Pearl of Great Price and its canonization two years later, Latter-day Saints recognized it as scripture alongside the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants. Originally the Church published it as a separate volume, but as time went on in the twentieth century it was usually printed and bound with the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, comprising what is commonly called the “triple combination.”

The 1902 Pearl of Great Price

The 1902 edition of the Pearl of Great Price was not a minor update but a major revision. Its most notable feature was that it no longer included the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants that were in the previous editions.[1] The new edition also divided all of the texts, including those that came from Joseph Smith’s Bible revision, into chapters and verses for the first time. Footnotes with cross-references to other scriptures were added as well. Most important for this study, the 1902 edition revised the text of the JST Genesis excerpt substantially.

A page from the 1902 Pearl of Great Price, published in Salt Lake City. This was the first edition that divided the text into the chapters and verses that are still in use today, but the two-column format was not added until the edition of 1921. The 1902 edition was the first to label the JST Genesis material “The Book of Moses.”

It is important to remember that Joseph Smith’s death in 1844 disconnected the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the New Translation of the Bible. The Prophet was the last Church leader to see the original manuscripts and the only president of the Church ever to be involved in any way with them. After his death no Latter-day Saint edition of JST passages was prepared with any access to the original texts, and thus there were limitations to what the Church could do when its leaders decided to provide a revised edition in 1902. They knew that the Genesis and Matthew material came from Joseph Smith’s Bible revision, but they knew very little about the JST’s history or about the origin of its sections in the Pearl of Great Price.

The First Presidency asked James E. Talmage, a professor of geology at the University of Utah and a well-respected gospel scholar, to prepare this new edition.[2] He did so, as Orson Pratt had done a generation earlier, by writing revisions in a copy of a previous edition. Unfortunately, he used as his beginning text an 1888 printing, which was the 1878 edition but included both typographical errors and other changes. On its pages he edited the text, inserting many new wordings, and also inserted the new chapter and verse divisions that continued in later editions. It was from his copy that the typesetters printed the 1902 edition.[3]

The evidence shows that in an effort to produce the best text possible of the Genesis selections, Talmage edited his printed copy against earlier printings that he apparently felt contained texts that were superior to those then in use. Taking in hand the early printings in The Evening and the Morning Star and the Times and Seasons, he edited his text backwards to match many of the wordings in those printings. He had no way of knowing what was on the original manuscripts, and it is likely that he believed that because the newspaper texts were older and were published during the lifetime of Joseph Smith, they contained a more accurate or authoritative text than the one used in 1878. Probably no one living in Utah at that time could have known that Orson Pratt’s 1878 edition was closer to the words on Joseph Smith’s manuscript prepared for publication. Pratt had passed away in 1881, and it is not clear if any Latter-day Saint living in 1900 knew that the JST sections came from the RLDS Inspired Version. If Church leaders did know that, the revisions Talmage made likely show that they had doubts about the Inspired Version’s accuracy.

In all, Talmage made about seventy revisions back to readings in the earlier, inferior, printings. Following are some examples, listed with the printings from which he copied the revisions:[4]

Talmage made over thirty edits not based on any previous printing or any known manuscripts. Most are not transcription errors but apparently show stylistic preferences that differ from the original wordings:[5]

A few changes standardize the grammar or bring the wording more in line with contemporary usage:

In the 1902 edition the Genesis excerpts, now in eight chapters, received a new name: “The Book of Moses.” It was not identified as coming from Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible. The revision of Matthew 24 was identified as “an extract from a translation of the Bible” but without reference to Joseph Smith in the heading. It was placed, however, in a section called “Writings of Joseph Smith.” Item I in that section was the Matthew text, item II was the excerpt from Joseph Smith’s history, and item III was the Articles of Faith. From 1902 until the 1981 edition, the Matthew revision was commonly referred to as “Joseph Smith I.”

As for the Matthew 24 text, a close comparison shows only slight differences from the edition of 1878. There are three changes of “you” to “ye” when it was the subject of a sentence.[6] This was perhaps done to bring the grammar more in line with biblical language, but if that is the case, it is puzzling that other identical forms were left unchanged.[7] One small word change was perhaps accidental, but it changes the word back to the correct reading:

The punctuation in the 1902 Pearl of Great Price generally follows that of the 1888 printing, with most differences caused by the insertion of verse breaks. Because Talmage had no access to the original manuscripts, he was unaware that Joseph Smith and his assistants had provided verse divisions for the JST. The verses Talmage created were much smaller, consistent with those in the Bible and with those that had been added to the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon in the 1870s.

We do not know what Professor Talmage’s instructions were for preparing the 1902 JST material nor how the plans for it developed over time. In his journal, on several occasions he mentions his work on the new edition and related meetings, but with little detail. In the October 1902 general conference, President Joseph F. Smith presented the newly published edition for a sustaining vote, and it was reaffirmed in its place as one of the standard works of the Church.[8] Almost all of the wording in the 1902 edition remained in the Pearl of Great Price through the 2013 edition.

The 1921 Pearl of Great Price

The 1921 edition of the Pearl of Great Price was prepared under the direction of a committee of members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, including Elder Talmage, who had been called to be an apostle in 1911. The most visible change in that edition was the two-column format, which had been the norm in Bible printings for centuries and was now adopted in the Pearl of Great Price. The text of the Book of Moses underwent only small changes, mainly in spelling or typography, as these examples show:

The following change corrects an error from the 1902 edition:

The text of the Matthew excerpt contains only a small difference in spelling compared to the 1902 edition.

The 1981 Pearl of Great Price

The 1981 Pearl of Great Price was part of an extensive project that produced new editions of all the scriptures, including a new Latter-day Saint edition of the King James Bible published in 1979. New editions of the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price were published together in 1981.[9] The new edition of the Pearl of Great Price introduced a new title for the Genesis excerpt: “Selections from the Book of Moses.” This title acknowledges that the Genesis material consisted only of a selection, not the entirety of a “Book of Moses.” A subheading further identified the text as “an extract from the translation of the Bible as revealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet, June 1830–February 1831.” The new title for the Matthew excerpt, “Joseph Smith—Matthew,” connects the text with the Prophet’s name. That narrative also included a subheading that identifies it as “an extract from the translation of the Bible as revealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet in 1831.” These clear identifications with the New Translation likely reflect the efforts of Robert Matthews, who worked on the new editions with the members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who oversaw the project.

The 1981 Pearl of Great Price included new footnotes, headings, an introduction, and small changes to the text. In the Book of Moses, only four changes were made in the wording. An error was corrected that had entered the Pearl of Great Price in 1902, having been copied from the 1843 Times and Seasons:

The 1981 edition dealt with an enigmatic word in Moses 1:19 that illustrates some of the complexity involved in matters of textual history. Oliver Cowdery wrote Joseph Smith’s dictation as follows: “Satan cried with a loud voice and wrent upon the earth” (emphasis added). The words were copied identically on OT2 by John Whitmer, but in Whitmer’s personal copy of the same passage he wrote “rent.”[10] “Wrent” is likely Oliver Cowdery’s spelling for rent, the past tense of rend, which means “tear.” Perhaps the intended meaning was that Satan “tore upon the earth.” In the printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon, copied by Oliver Cowdery from the dictated original manuscript, the word wrent is found at Alma 14:27, “the walls of the prison were wrent in twain,” and at 3 Nephi 8:18, “the rocks were wrent in twain.”[11] In the 1830 Book of Mormon the spelling of the first of these remained “wrent,” but the spelling of the second was standardized to “rent.” The word wrent also appears elsewhere in the Joseph Smith Translation, as a noun at Mark 2:21: “the wrent is made worse.”[12] John Whitmer was the scribe for that section. When the Visions of Moses was published in the Times and Seasons in 1843, the word was printed as “went,”[13] and that is how it was printed in the 1867 Inspired Version. Orson Pratt corrected it back to “rent” in the 1878 Pearl of Great Price, and so it remained until the 1981 edition, when it was changed to “ranted,” perhaps with the understanding that rent represented the past tense of rant.[14]

At Moses 4:18 the 1981 edition changed the meaning of another word:

The spelling “commanded” on OT1 is in Joseph Smith’s handwriting, so he clearly intended the past tense. The 1878 edition revised it to “commandedst,” making the word consistent with the rest of the King James Version language in the passage, including “thou gavest.” The deletion of the second d in the 1981 edition did away with a difficult consonant cluster, but it changed the tense of the verb from the past to the present.

The final word change in the 1981 Book of Moses revises the phrase “save it were” to “save it was” (Moses 7:22). The phrase “save it were” means “except for,” and it is not uncommon in the scriptures. It appears seventy-six times in the Book of Mormon, once in the Doctrine and Covenants, and another time ten verses earlier in the Book of Moses.[15] It is unclear why it was changed here.

The newly labeled Joseph Smith—Matthew in the 1981 Pearl of Great Price differs in two ways from the 1921 edition. It corrected an error that came into the text in the 1878 edition:

The 1981 Joseph Smith—Matthew also restored a clause that was lost in 1831, correcting a haplography. When John Whitmer copied the dictated text while creating NT2, his eyes skipped from the word another to the same word later in the line, thereby omitting the text in between:

The 2013 Pearl of Great Price

The 2013 edition of the Latter-day Saint standard works was a careful update of the 1979–81 editions.[16] In the excerpts from the Joseph Smith Translation in the Pearl of Great Price, it included only three adjustments, and they were all typographical:

The 2013 edition made a change in capitalization in an important passage:

It is easy to see why Professor Talmage capitalized that in the 1902 edition, because “That which” refers to Jesus Christ. But the problem with all of these readings is that they are based on the inaccurate wording of the Inspired Version. As we saw in chapter 20, editors of the Inspired Version misunderstood the relationship between the early Genesis manuscripts and printings and thus made errors by not including all of Joseph Smith’s revisions. In doing so with this passage, they rejected the Prophet’s final reading, which is much to be preferred: “A�Ի� he whom I have chosen has pled before my face.”[17]

Notes

[1] The poem “Truth” was also removed.

[2] Title page, 1902 Pearl of Great Price; Conference Report, October 1902, 83; James E. Talmage Journal, February 2, 1900 (vol. 10, page 327), L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

[3] Talmage used two identical copies of the 1888 Pearl of Great Price, both housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. One copy was used for the creation of the cross-reference footnotes of the 1902 edition.

[4] See also Kent P. Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2005), 38–47.

[5] In addition, Talmage apparently copied some errors from an 1879 Liverpool printing, or one of its reprints, and there are some wordings that seem to be errors introduced during the typesetting process.

[6] Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:1, 3, 7.

[7] Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:12 [twice], 23, 38, 46.

[8] Conference Report, October 1902, 83. See also James E. Talmage Journal, October 6, 1902 (vol. 10, page 471).

[9] See Robert J. Matthews, “The New Publications of the Standard Works—1979, 1981,” BYU Studies 22, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 387–423.

[10] See Kent P. Jackson and Scott H. Faulring, “Old Testament Manuscript 3: An Early Transcript of the Book of Moses,” Mormon Historical Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 121.

[11] Royal Skousen, ed., The Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Entire Text in Two Parts (Provo, UT: FARMS, Brigham Young University, 2001), 462, 804. The pages of the original manuscript containing these passage are no longer extant.

[12] NT2, folio 2, page 12. I thank Robert Matthews for bringing these uses of the word wrent to my attention.

[13] “History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons, January 16, 1843, 72.

[14] Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary cites a source that uses rent (present tense) as a verb with the meaning “rant”; An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828), s.v. rent.

[15] Moses 7:12. The related phrase “save it be” also appears in the Book of Mormon forty-seven times (e.g., 2 Nephi 2:8) and nine times in the Doctrine and Covenants (e.g., Doctrine and Covenants 18:20).

[16] The Church posted online the changes that were made in the 2013 edition. Pearl of Great Price changes are listed on page 10: “Detailed Summary of Approved Adjustments for the 2013 Edition of the Scriptures,” churchofjesuschrist.org.

[17] OT2, page 22.