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There are some unique texts in Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible that illustrate both the variety of the material in it and some of the processes by which the Prophet brought it into being. The passages that have counterparts in the Book of Mormon are especially interesting. Because the Book of Mormon was revealed in modern times in the English language, its English text is the closest thing we have to the words of its ancient writers. It is evident that the King James translation is the base text of the many biblical passages that are quoted in it. We are not in a position to understand fully why and how that is the case, and doing so is beyond the purview of this book.[1] This chapter’s objective is rather simple: to describe what we know about the relationship between the JST and the Book of Mormon from the writing on the JST manuscripts.

The Sermon on the Mount

Soon after the publication of the Book of Mormon, readers must have noticed that “The Book of Nephi, the Son of Nephi, which Was the Son of Helaman” (now 3 Nephi) contained a sermon of Jesus’s that was remarkably similar to the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.[2] While revising the New Testament, Joseph Smith and his scribe Sidney Rigdon likely arrived at the sermon in Matthew in mid-March of 1831. By that time the Book of Mormon had been in print for almost a year. In his work on the New Translation, this was Joseph Smith’s first encounter with a text that overlapped so significantly with words in the Book of Mormon. The Prophet made extensive changes to the sermon in the JST. In comparing the JST text of Matthew 5 with the text in the Book of Mormon, it is clear that when he was revising Matthew 5 he had before him not only the Bible but also the Book of Mormon. Many of the JST revisions are identical to the text in the Book of Mormon where it differs from the text in Matthew. An example is an insertion at 3 Nephi 12:29–30 (Matthew 5:28), which is not in the Bible but which the JST copies verbatim from the Book of Mormon.

Behold, I give unto you a commandment, that ye suffer none of these things to enter into your heart: for it is better that ye should deny yourselves of these things, wherein ye will take up your cross, than that ye should be cast into hell.[3]

The following text, at 3 Nephi 12:2, is also not in the Bible but is in both the Book of Mormon and the JST. In this case, however, there are differences that show that Joseph Smith revised the 3 Nephi text while he was including it in the New Translation.[4]

In addition to those longer insertions, there are about thirty other places in Matthew 5 in which the JST copies word changes from the Book of Mormon. Most are small revisions that are not of great consequence, yet they illustrate how the base text for many of the JST verses was the Book of Mormon and not the Bible. Even so, there are unique revisions that the JST makes in Matthew 5 that are not found in the 3 Nephi text, and there are some Book of Mormon revisions that were not included in the New Translation.

The situation is different for the remaining chapters of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6 and 7. The Prophet made many revisions in those chapters but did so without consulting the Book of Mormon. A likely exception is a revision at Matthew 6:30 that was added to the JST text after the original dictation. The change of “O ye of little faith” to “if ye are not of little faith,” made during the reviewing of the JST, may have been influenced by the same wording in 3 Nephi 13:30.

It appears that the best way to understand Matthew 5 in the Joseph Smith Translation is that the Prophet, realizing that he already had a revealed translation of Jesus’s words in the Book of Mormon, copied from those words instead of revising the text anew. Matthew 5 is not unique in that regard, and we will see further examples of the same procedure in the following pages. It is nonetheless interesting that there are differences between the two versions of the sermon, showing that he did not hesitate to take the JST text in different directions when he felt inspired to do so.

A Choice Seer

In chapter 9 of this book, I noted that when Joseph Smith was revising Genesis he added a large amount of new material at Genesis 50:24. It consists of a prophecy of ancient Joseph told to his fellow Israelites near the end of his life. A very similar text is found in the Book of Mormon in what is now 2 Nephi 3.[6] In the setting of that text, the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi was speaking to his son Joseph, teaching him from the words of their biblical ancestor Joseph. He introduced the prophecy by saying, “For Joseph truly testified, saying . . . ,” and he ended it with “A�Ի� now, behold, my son Joseph, after this manner did my father of old prophesy.”[7] We are not told that Lehi was quoting from the plates of brass, but it seems reasonable to assume that he was.

The relationship between the two texts is not altogether clear. It is tempting to suggest that Joseph Smith copied some of the words from the Book of Mormon, and that may well have happened. But there are significant differences between the texts. We can view the prophecy as having three sections. The first is found only in the Joseph Smith Translation. It consists of almost two hundred words of the prophecy that are not quoted by Lehi.

The second section is where Lehi begins quoting. In that section the two texts overlap in the course of over five hundred words. They are clearly two versions of the same material, and overall they are identical in more than half of the words. In the following examples, text that is identical or close to identical is highlighted in bold type.[8]

As can be seen, the text above from 2 Nephi 3:11 is virtually identical to the corresponding text in JST Genesis 50. But in verses 14–17, below, interspersed in both texts are words and phrases that make the two versions different.[9]

If Joseph Smith copied this material from the Book of Mormon, he revised repeatedly as he did so. He did not use some of Lehi’s language, and he added phrases not included by Lehi. The identical language is undeniable, but in many ways the two texts in this section seem to come from two different ancient translations of a common ancient document.

In the third part of the Joseph prophecy, Lehi’s text continues with about two hundred more words for which there is no JST counterpart.

Perhaps the best conclusion for understanding the relationship between JST Genesis and 2 Nephi 3 is that both the plates of brass and a proto-Genesis text (or some other ancient document) contained records of the prophecy of ancient Joseph. The version Lehi quoted was apparently longer, because it continues after the JST version had come to an end. When revising the Old Testament, Joseph Smith may have drawn from the words in the Book of Mormon when the two accounts were close enough to the same, but even that is speculation.

Isaiah

The Book of Mormon quotes material from almost a third of the chapters of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. In most cases the material is identified as coming from the plates of brass, and it often differs somewhat from the same passages as preserved in the Bible. The relationship between the Joseph Smith Translation of Isaiah and corresponding Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon is more straightforward than what we have seen above with regard to Matthew 5–7 and Genesis 50. In almost every case, Joseph Smith, working with his scribe Frederick G. Williams, revised the Isaiah passages on the JST manuscripts to match the same passages in the Book of Mormon. Again the Prophet likely felt that he already had a new translation, so he copied the texts from the Book of Mormon rather than revising them. The evidence on the manuscript pages shows that producing the JST of Isaiah in this way was not merely a guiding instinct, it was a careful project. It was also a project that took some effort, because one would need to know where the Isaiah material was located in the Book of Mormon, and the 1830 edition did not come with the headings and cross references of modern editions.

Detail of Isaiah 5 in Joseph Smith’s Bible, and the manuscript of the same chapter in the hand of Frederick G. Williams. Much of the New Translation text was dictated in full, but for parts of it, the Prophet dictated only chapter and verse numbers and new words such as those shown here. In his printed Bible, he marked the words to be replaced and the locations for the insertion of the words written on the manuscripts. Thus, to reconstruct the intended text, the Bible pages and the corresponding manuscript pages are needed. On this Bible page, verses needing revisions are marked at the beginning and the end. Locations for revisions are marked with strike-throughs, circles, or slashes for insertions. Courtesy of Community of Christ Archives.

The recording method for JST Isaiah followed the same pattern that is found elsewhere in the New Translation. In most cases the Prophet dictated to his scribe the chapter and verse numbers and the words or sentences to be changed, and he marked in his Bible the insertion points. In Isaiah 2, for example, Williams wrote “2 Verse” on the manuscript and then “when.” In the Prophet’s Bible, the word “that” is crossed out, identifying the location for its replacement with “when.” Next verse 5 is spelled out completely. Then Williams wrote “6” and “O Lord — hearken unto.” In the Bible at verse 6, Joseph Smith wrote a slash (/) after “Therefore,” showing the insertion point for “O Lord,” and another slash next to the crossed-out verb “use,” showing where to insert “hearken unto.” As the revision of Isaiah 2 continued, the Prophet revised other verses in the same way, whether with a single word, a sentence fragment, or even multiple sentences. In each case the writing on the manuscript and the marks in the Bible reworded the KJV to match the text in 2 Nephi.[10] This process continued through the New Translation’s Isaiah chapters, as Joseph Smith revised passages again and again to match the corresponding passages in the Book of Mormon.

Isaiah 29, which is related to 2 Nephi 27, is a special case. The writing in 2 Nephi 27 is not a copy of Isaiah 29 from the plates of brass but is an extended revelatory sermon of Nephi about the future of the Book of Mormon, interwoven with many phrases from Isaiah 29. That important Nephite revelation is now in the Joseph Smith Translation, thanks to the fact that it was copied onto the JST manuscript.[11]

The revision of Isaiah 50 was done entirely without the help of the marked Bible and was simply copied in its entirety from the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 7).[12] There is a difference, however. The Book of Mormon version of the chapter does not include the second half of verse 10: “let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.” The JST restores those words.[13]

There are some further differences between Book of Mormon Isaiah and JST Isaiah. On a few occasions when Joseph Smith dictated single words for individual verses, revising them to match the Book of Mormon, he apparently did not notice in the same verses other differences and thus did not revise them.[14] There are a few small variations that may be transcription errors, and in a few places the Prophet modernized the language copied from the Book of Mormon, as in these two examples:

Some Isaiah material in the Book of Mormon was not included in the JST. Isaiah 48 is the primary example. It is found in 1 Nephi 20 and differs from the King James text in many ways, but it was not included in the New Translation. And there are some verses in JST Isaiah passages that are also in the Book of Mormon, yet Joseph Smith did not revise them to match the Book of Mormon. For example, Isaiah 51:1 was not revised in light of the Book of Mormon (at 2 Nephi 8:1) but was edited directly from the Bible. Nephi’s quotation of Isaiah 49:25 (1 Nephi 21:25) is identical to the verse in the King James Bible, but Joseph Smith’s revision of it is substantially different.[16] The Prophet revised three verses of Isaiah 52, and none of them match their Book of Mormon counterparts. These verses are the exceptions, however, and it is clear that revising Isaiah to match the passages in the Book of Mormon was an objective in the JST, and it was carried out almost with consistency.

It is important to note that the Book of Mormon Isaiah passages did not drive the New Translation of Isaiah. Like every other book in the Bible, the revision of Isaiah was done in order, from the first chapter to the last. It appears that while the Prophet and his scribe worked their way through Isaiah, when they found chapters represented in the Book of Mormon they turned to that source, and then they moved on to the next Isaiah chapter. In that process they also made revisions in seventeen Isaiah chapters that are not found in the Book of Mormon at all. Altogether, thirty-five of Isaiah’s sixty-six chapters received revisions in Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible.

Notes

[1] The biblical passages in the Book of Mormon, though based on the King James Bible, differ from the KJV words in many places, for which see Royal Skousen, “The History of the Book of Mormon Text: Parts 5 and 6 of Volume 3 of the Critical Text,” BYU Studies Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2020): 90–110.

[2] Matthew 5–7; 1830 Book of Mormon, pages 479–85, 3 Nephi 12–14 in modern editions.

[3] 1830 Book of Mormon, page 481; NT2, page 8.

[4] 1830 Book of Mormon, page 479; NT2, pages 6–7.

[5] Joseph Smith changed both of the occurrences of which in this passage to who in preparation for the printing of the 1837 edition of the Book of Mormon, illustrating his frequent (but by no means consistent) interest in modernizing archaic language. See Royal Skousen, ed., The Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text in Two Parts (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2001), 815.

[6] 1830 Book of Mormon, pages 66–68.

[7] 2 Nephi 3:6–7, 22.

[8] 1830 Book of Mormon, page 67; OT2, page 64.

[9] 1830 Book of Mormon, page 67; OT2, page 65.

[10] OT2, pages 97–98.

[11] OT2, pages 102–6. The JST begins copying at Isaiah 29:8, and thus 2 Nephi 27:3–35 is reproduced on the JST manuscript, including all the 1830 paragraph breaks but one.

[12] OT2, pages 108–9.

[13] The page of the original Book of Mormon manuscript that contains 2 Nephi 7:10 is no longer extant, so there is no way to know if the final clause was once part of the text. See Royal Skousen, ed., The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text (Provo, UT: FARMS, Brigham Young University, 2001), 179.

[14] Examples can be seen in Isaiah 51:11–12, where not every unique Book of Mormon reading was incorporated into the JST.

[15] Joseph Smith edited this in the same way as he prepared the 1837 edition of the Book of Mormon. See Skousen, The Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, 171.

[16] Isaiah 49:23 is quoted twice in the Book of Mormon but not identically (1 Nephi 21:23; 2 Nephi 6:7). It appears that the JST revision was made to match the text at 2 Nephi 6:7.