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In 1851 Elder Franklin D. Richards of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was serving as president of the British Mission in Liverpool, England. For the benefit of Church members there, he published a small book that he described as “a choice selection from the revelations, translations, and narrations of Joseph Smith.”[1] He chose the title The Pearl of Great Price, drawing it from Jesus’s parable in Matthew 13:45–46, in which a merchant finds a pearl so precious that he was willing to sell everything he had to obtain it. For Richards the content of his book was that kind of treasure.

Title page, The Pearl of Great Price, Liverpool, 1851. Intended as a collection of sacred content for the benefit of British Latter-day Saints, this booklet was later republished in Utah and in 1880 was added to the standard works of the Church. Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University.

The Pearl of Great Price included three sections from Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible, listed here as they are listed in its table of contents:

Extracts from the Prophecy of Enoch, containing also a Revelation of the Gospel unto our father Adam, after he was driven out from the Garden of Eden. Revealed to Joseph Smith, December, 1830.

The words of God, which he spake unto Moses at the time when Moses was caught up into an exceeding high mountain, and he saw God face to face, and he talked with him, and the glory of God was upon Moses; therefore Moses could endure His presence. Revealed to Joseph Smith, June, 1830.

An Extract from a Translation of the Bible—being the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, commencing with the last verse of the twenty-third chapter. By the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, Joseph Smith.

The booklet also contained other materials (using the titles in the 1981 and 2013 editions): the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith—History, the Articles of Faith, parts of five revelations from the Doctrine and Covenants, and a poem called “Truth.”

The 1851 Pearl of Great Price

By 1851 all efforts of Church leaders to obtain the Joseph Smith Translation manuscripts from the Prophet’s family had failed. From then until the 1960s the only access to them was through handwritten copies and printings. The printings included the excerpts in Church periodicals and eventually the RLDS Inspired Version.[2]

“Extracts from the Prophecy of Enoch,” the first item in the 1851 Pearl of Great Price, is not identified as coming from Joseph Smith’s Bible revision, but it is identified nonetheless as a revelation. It corresponds with part of Moses 6 and all of Moses 7 in later editions. Its text came from the two early publications in The Evening and the Morning Star.[3] The second section that Richards included, “The words of God, which he spake unto Moses,” is likewise not identified as coming from the Bible revision but is also noted as a revelation. That section included all of what was later called Moses 1–3 and parts of Moses 4, 5, and 8.

Altogether the 1851 Pearl of Great Price contained Moses 1:1–4:19, 22–25; 5:1–16, 19–23, 32–40; 6:43–7:69; 8:13–30. The composition of this material shows that Richards gathered it from a variety of sources that he had available, including early Church periodicals and the Lectures on Faith, sources where the texts had been published previously.[4] But a small portion of the material had never been printed before, and because Richards had no access to original documents, he must have had handwritten copies of some JST Genesis pages and used them in his compilation. All of his printed Genesis sources were ultimately based on OT1, except for the Visions of Moses, which was based on a copy of OT2 but before it received the Prophet’s later revisions. Thus none of it came from Joseph Smith’s finished texts. In addition, the material was not always copied with accuracy, and thus there are errors in the text in various places.

At the same time The Pearl of Great Price was being prepared, Richards published part of the same Genesis material in the British Mission periodical the Millennial Star, of which he was the editor.[5]

The third section of New Translation material, “An Extract from a Translation of the Bible,” was Joseph Smith’s revision of the Matthew 24 account of the Olivet Discourse. This JST chapter had been published previously as a broadside, and that (or a handwritten copy of it) was Richards’s source. This is shown in the fact that it starts and finishes exactly at the same locations and reproduces most of its errors. But interestingly it also shows evidence that Richards or his source had a handwritten copy of all or parts of the same text from NT2, because his printing includes some readings that could only have been found there.

Despite the incompleteness and imperfection of the New Translation material in the 1851 Pearl of Great Price, its presence there was a blessing for the Church both in Britain and then later in America. Very few Latter-day Saints then had access to the JST printings from the periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s, and thus many were unaware of these texts. Richards’s compilation brought thousands of Latter-day Saints into contact for the first time with great revelations to Joseph Smith. The 1851 Pearl of Great Price went far to fulfill the wish that Richards expressed in its preface, that readers would come to know that Joseph Smith was “the Prophet and founder of the dispensation of the fulness of times, in which will be gathered together into one all things which are in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth.”[6]

The 1878 Pearl of Great Price

Over a quarter century after the printing of the 1851 edition, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints decided to publish a Churchwide edition of the Pearl of Great Price and thus make its texts available to all Church members. Elder Orson Pratt of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was assigned to prepare it for publication. Its content was the same as that of the 1851 edition, except for the addition of one revelation that was also in the Doctrine and Covenants.[7] Pratt had long been interested in Joseph Smith’s Bible revision and had welcomed the publication of the RLDS Inspired Version a decade earlier.[8] To prepare the JST excerpts for the new edition, he took in hand an 1851 Pearl of Great Price and edited it against the Inspired Version. That copy records his work, inserting and editing directly in the book to make the new Pearl of Great Price texts identical to those in the Inspired Version.[9] He filled in the gaps in the Genesis material with passages that were not included in the 1851 edition, copying the corresponding Inspired Version text. Even with no access to the original manuscripts, Pratt’s revising for the new edition shows that he trusted the work that Joseph Smith III and his colleagues had done.

When we compare the 1867 Inspired Version with the 1878 Pearl of Great Price, we see that Pratt reproduced the Inspired Version text carefully and faithfully, though with some modifications in punctuation. In the 1851 Liverpool edition, Richards had published the Genesis material out of order and in a fragmentary form because he did not have complete texts to work with. Pratt’s 1878 edition presented the narrative in the contiguous form in which it appears on the original manuscripts. It included the Visions of Moses through Genesis 6:13—the first nineteen pages of the printed Inspired Version.[10] The Genesis material was divided into two sections: “Visions of Moses” (corresponding with what would later be called Moses 1) and “Writings of Moses” (corresponding with the later Moses 2–8). Pratt likewise edited the Matthew 24 narrative against the corresponding text in the Inspired Version, which came from Joseph Smith’s final text on NT2. He modified its title only slightly from the 1851 edition: “An Extract from a Translation of the Bible, Being the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, commencing with the last verse of the twenty-third chapter, King James’ Translation. By the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, Joseph Smith.”

The new edition of the Pearl of Great Price came off the press in 1878. In the October 1880 general conference of the Church it was presented for a sustaining vote and was canonized—accepted as scripture.[11] Since then the Church has accounted it as one of its standard works of scripture, and Latter-day Saints have acknowledged officially its remarkable contributions to the faith.

Both the Genesis material and the Matthew chapter were more complete and accurate in the 1878 edition than in the 1851 edition. Errors still remained, however, mostly because of the misunderstandings regarding the Genesis manuscripts when the RLDS Church created the Inspired Version (see chapter 20).[12] Some small changes, like the following example, seem to be errors made during the typesetting.

Some changes likely resulted from editorial decisions. In the following example the 1878 edition standardizes the grammar of the final clause (changing the case of the pronoun and adding a preposition) but adds an error in an effort to correct the grammar of the first clause (using a finite verb where the phrase requires the subjunctive).

Later Printings

The 1878 Pearl of Great Price had become the Church’s official edition, and the Genesis and Matthew selections in it were the standard texts of those narratives. As needed, the Church prepared and printed new editions, retaining the 1878 texts. An 1879 printing in Liverpool, England, was typeset using the 1878 texts, and that edition’s plates were used again for reprintings in England and in Utah.[14] An 1888 printing in Salt Lake City took its text from the 1878 edition, but editors were not careful in its preparation, and the Genesis material in it differs in over twenty places from the 1878 edition. A close examination of the changes shows that some may have resulted from editorial decisions, but most of them probably came about from lack of care and precision. Among the differences are these:[15]

The 1888 printing of the Book of Moses would be of limited interest historically were it not for the fact that it is a direct ancestor of every edition of the Book of Moses from 1902 through 2013. Most of its errors were discovered during the preparation of the 1902 edition and were corrected. A few continued into the twenty-first century.

Notes

[1] The Pearl of Great Price: Being a Choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith, First Prophet, Seer, and Revelator to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1851), title page.

[2] See Kent P. Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2005), 18–20.

[3] “Extract from the Prophecy of Enoch,” The Evening and the Morning Star, August 1832, 2–3; “The Church of Christ,” The Evening and the Morning Star, March 1833, 1. Although the two excerpts were not originally published in the order in which they appear on the manuscripts, Richards joined them in the correct sequence.

[4] In addition to the sources cited above, also “The Gospel,” The Evening and the Morning Star, April 1833, 1–2; “Lecture Second,” Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Kirtland, OH: F. G. Williams and Co., 1835), 13–18; “History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons, January 16, 1843, 71–73.

[5] The Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star, March 15, 1851, 90–93. This material corresponds with Moses 2:1–4:13 in the Pearl of Great Price.

[6] Pearl of Great Price, 1851, vi.

[7] Doctrine and Covenants 132.

[8] See Ronald E. Romig, “The New Translation Materials since 1844,” 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), 34–35.

[9] That copy of the 1851 Pearl of Great Price is in the Church History Library, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[10] Pages 7–9, 11–26.

[11] “The Conference,” Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1880.

[12] Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 33–36.

[13] Pratt did not mark “that” for deletion in his edited 1851 edition, so it was perhaps a typographical error.

[14] For all these editions, see Chad J. Flake and Larry W. Draper, eds., A Mormon Bibliography, 1830–1930, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2004), 2:62–65.

[15] Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 37–38.