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During Joseph Smith’s lifetime, parts of his New Translation of the Bible were copied by hand, and some copies circulated among interested Church members. Today we know of only a few early copies that have been preserved.[1] John Whitmer made the earliest one, probably around the end of December 1830. It includes the first five chapters of Genesis, rather hastily copied from OT1.[2] The occasion was Whitmer’s upcoming trip to Ohio to care for the new converts there that resulted from the preaching of Oliver Cowdery and others during the Lamanite Mission. Joseph Smith had instructed Whitmer to carry with him copies of “the commandments and revelations,” and his Genesis copy was among those documents.[3] Edward Partridge made a copy of OT1 in about February 1831, not long after Joseph Smith and his scribe Sidney Rigdon arrived in Kirtland, Ohio. The surviving pages contain parts of Genesis 5, 6, and 9.[4]

Excerpts from the New Translation of the Bible, published in The Evening and the Morning Star, April 1833. This page includes Moses 5:1–16; 6:52; and 8:13–26, not all visible in this image. In the previous issue of the Star, editor W. W. Phelps noted one of the important truths made known through the JST, that the gospel was revealed in the beginning of human history, and that “Adam was the first member of the church of Christ on earth.” Here Phelps introduces the text by pointing out that “the plan of salvation, was revealed to Adam, after he was driven out of the Garden of Eden.” Courtesy of Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Two copies of the Visions of Moses (Moses 1) in the hand of W. W. Phelps are known to exist. Their dating is uncertain. Phelps wrote one of them in his 1835 daybook, which he used mostly to record copies of Joseph Smith’s revelations. This transcription is historically important because it was likely from it that Phelps set the type for the first ever printing of the Visions of Moses.[5] The other copy of the Visions in Phelps’s hand is only partially complete.[6] Willard Richards kept a notebook, which he called his Pocket Companion, in which he collected copies of revelations and teachings of Joseph Smith. In it is a copy of the Visions of Moses which he transcribed from a copy someone else possessed.[7]

In 1845, after the Prophet’s death, John M. Bernhisel received permission from the Prophet’s widow, Emma Smith, to borrow the JST manuscripts and to study and copy them. His copy includes parts of the Old and New Testaments. At some point, without access to the original manuscripts, some Latter-day Saints in Utah came to believe incorrectly that Bernhisel’s copy was the original document from which the Book of Moses derived.[8]

Each of these manuscripts contains transcription errors, and it is likely that the same can be said for all other handwritten copies that ever existed. Whitmer averaged about ten differences per page between the original manuscript and his December 1830 copy, with half estimated to be scribal errors and half deliberate edits.[9] The Richards copy, which was at the very least a copy of a copy, differs from OT1 in over sixty places. These examples illustrate what can happen when documents are transcribed by hand.

Early Genesis Printings

The earliest printing of Genesis material took place in August 1832, when part of the record of Enoch was printed in the Church’s Independence, Missouri, periodical, The Evening and the Morning Star.[10] In March 1833 more of the Enoch record was printed in the same venue,[11] and excerpts about Adam, Eve, and Noah appeared the following month.[12] When the Lectures on Faith were printed in the Doctrine and Covenants in 1835, they included some Genesis quotations from the New Translation in the second lecture.[13] In January 1843, in an installment in the serial publication of Joseph Smith’s history, the Visions of Moses was printed in the Church’s Nauvoo, Illinois, periodical, the Times and Seasons, likely typeset from Phelps’s daybook copy.[14] All of those early publications from JST Genesis were based on the text of OT1, the Prophet’s preliminary manuscript, and thus they do not contain the refinements and insertions he added to the text after the original dictation.

In addition to the fact that these printings came from a draft manuscript, they were not always carefully done. There are typographical errors, and editors or typesetters may have consciously made some word changes for reasons that are not known to us now. Following are some examples of divergences from the original New Translation manuscripts (Book of Moses chapter and verse numbers are provided for reference).[15]

Extract from the New Translation

It was perhaps in 1835 that a unique publication came off the press—one chapter of Joseph Smith’s Bible revision printed on a sheet of paper about 8 by 12 inches in dimension.[16] This kind of publication was called a “broadside,” a term used for a handbill or poster printed on one side, often to make an announcement. The full title was “Extract from the New Translation of the Bible, It being the 24th chapter of Matthew; but in order to show the connection we will commence with the last verse of the 23rd chapter.” The title precisely describes the content. This was Joseph Smith’s revision of the Olivet Discourse from the Gospel of Matthew, to which we were introduced in chapter 16. A close examination of the text of the broadside shows that it came from NT1, so it did not contain Joseph Smith’s final wording.[17] It cannot be determined if the publisher typeset it directly from that manuscript or from an intermediary copy, but in either case there are several word differences between it and NT1 that prove that it was not copied carefully, or that it came from a copy that was not copied carefully.[18]

In addition to showing that Church members recognized this excerpt from the JST as worthy of special notice, historically the broadside is also significant because it likely led to this chapter’s later inclusion in the Pearl of Great Price.

Preserving the Master Texts

In these early printings in Church periodicals and elsewhere, a pattern becomes evident: Joseph Smith was not letting the final New Translation manuscripts out of his hands. In 1828 he had gained wisdom from the hard experience of losing what was then his only copy of the Book of Mormon translation, and he was not going to make that mistake with his Bible revision.[19] Now with the New Translation he allowed or instructed the publication of excerpts, but they only came from sections for which he possessed duplicate manuscript copies—Genesis and Matthew.[20] In addition, all of those publications of excerpts came from preliminary drafts, rather than from the final texts, likely showing that he wanted to retain and protect the precious master copies until he could publish the New Translation as a whole.

The Inspired Version

At the time of Joseph Smith’s death, the manuscripts of his Bible revision were in the possession of Emma Smith, his widow. In the 1860s she gave them to the recently established Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church, now the Community of Christ), of which her son Joseph Smith III was president.[21] Under the direction of Joseph Smith III, the RLDS Church published the New Translation in 1867. The intent was to publish a complete Bible, but because Joseph Smith did not revise all parts of the Bible and frequently revised only isolated words, the editors inserted the Prophet’s additions and revisions into an existing King James text. Joseph Smith identified the Song of Solomon as being “not inspired writings,” so editors did not include that book at all.[22] Aside from that exception, the Inspired Version contains the whole Bible. Editors made changes in the King James text itself, removing all of the italic type as well as the small capital letters from “the Lord” throughout the Old Testament. In its original edition and in later printings and editions, there is no indication of what material is unique to the New Translation and what is simply the King James text.[23] Members of the publication committee in the 1860s punctuated the new text based on the model of the King James translation and standardized the spelling and capitalization. They chose not to use Joseph Smith’s verse divisions but added verse breaks based on the model of the Bible. The resulting publication was titled The Holy Scriptures, Translated and Corrected by the Spirit of Revelation.[24] A later edition added a subtitle that was already in popular use, Inspired Version, and that came to be the name by which the publication has been known since then. In 1944 the RLDS Church published what it labeled the “Corrected Edition.” It rectified transcription errors of the 1867 edition as well as typographical errors from that edition and later printings. An edition of 1991 added further corrections to minor typographical and punctuation errors.

For many decades the relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was strained. Early on, suspicions developed between the two groups, and when the Inspired Version was first published, many Latter-day Saints in Utah questioned its integrity. They had no access to the original documents and thus were not in a position to know what was on them and how well the Inspired Version represented the Prophet’s work. As a result, misunderstandings and myths about the New Translation became accepted as though they were true, as we saw in chapter 3. In the late 1960s Brigham Young University professor Robert Matthews went to Independence and did research on the manuscripts. He ended up spending months there over multiple trips in order to study them in depth. As a result of his efforts, a few years later he published a large volume on the JST, and his scholarship contributed much to bringing the JST to the attention of Latter-day Saints.[25] One of Matthews’s objectives was to ascertain the Inspired Version’s reliability. After exhaustive research he found that the members of the publication committee who prepared it had done so with great care and integrity. He also found out, however, that something was wrong with its text of Genesis. The text of that book differs in important places from the text that Joseph Smith had prepared for publication.

Research done since Matthews’s findings has documented the complicated details of the preparation of Genesis for the Inspired Version. It was a multistage process that did not turn out as well as intended.[26] To prepare for the publication, the committee deemed it necessary to transcribe the JST text onto a new printer’s manuscript that could be edited and otherwise prepared for publication—a wise procedure that would protect the original documents. The writing on that manuscript tells the story. The transcriber of Genesis concluded incorrectly that OT1 was Joseph Smith’s intended manuscript, not realizing that it was a first draft that had been superseded by the later finished text, OT2. Thus the OT1 text of Genesis 1:1–24:41 was transcribed onto the new manuscript that would be taken to the printer. Joseph Smith III realized that a mistake had been made, so he corrected the transcribed text against OT2. But he then made a critical decision: Knowing that parts of the Genesis text had been published in Church periodicals during his father’s lifetime (in The Evening and the Morning Star and the Times and Seasons), he double-checked his transcription against those publications and edited out many of the differences. He did this assuming that he was correcting the text, but he was actually doing the opposite, not knowing that those excerpts published in the periodicals were based on inferior preliminary drafts and not on the final text. He thus took out most of the content refinements that Joseph Smith had made to the first half of Genesis. Following are some examples in which the Inspired Version differs from Joseph Smith’s final text on OT2:

These unintended mistakes made in producing Genesis in the Inspired Version came about because its editors did not understand the history of the manuscripts and the writing on them. It was not until almost a century and a half later that scholars came to understand the full history of the text.

Notes

[1] The Whitmer, Partridge, and Bernhisel copies are published in Scott H. Faulring and Kent P. Jackson, eds., Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: Electronic Library (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2011), under “Early Copies.”

[2] It is housed in the Library-Archives of the Community of Christ in Independence, Missouri. 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): 113–44.

[3] “John Whitmer, History, 1831–circa 1847,” p. 10, The Joseph Smith Papers.

[4] It is housed in the Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. The text includes Genesis 5:18–6:2, 5–14; 9:1–11, 16 (Moses 6:21–8:16, 22–30).

[5] “William W. Phelps diary, 1835 January-June; 1864,” pp. 50–57, Church History Library, catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org. A comparison of this text with the printing in the January 16, 1843, Times and Seasons shows a near perfect match, with two small differences that are perhaps typographical errors.

[6] William W. Phelps three-page insert to “History, 1838–1856, volume A-1 [23 December 1805–30 August 1834],” p. 48, The Joseph Smith Papers; “Book A1, 1805–1834 August 30,” pp. 611–13, Church History Library, catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org. This document includes less than two-thirds of the text of the Visions of Moses and differs from the printed text in the Times and Seasons in several places, including lacking an entire line that is in the Times and Seasons. It includes, however, Phelps’s introduction that precedes the text in the Times and Seasons.

[7] Willard Richards, “Pocket Companion, circa 1840,” pp. 86–93, Church History Library, catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[8] This is reflected in a footnote in Joseph Fielding Smith, comp., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1938), 10. Based on the research of Robert Matthews in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the footnote was corrected in the 1970s. This manuscript is also housed in the Church History Library.

[9] See Jackson and Faulring, “Old Testament Manuscript 3,” 116.

[10] “Extract from the Prophecy of Enoch,” The Evening and the Morning Star, August 1832, 2–3 (Moses 7).

[11] “The Church of Christ,” The Evening and the Morning Star, March 1833, 1 (Moses 6:43–68).

[12] “The Gospel,” The Evening and the Morning Star, April 1833, 1–2 (Moses 5:1–16; 8:13–30).

[13] “Lecture Second,” Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Kirtland, OH: F. G. Williams and Co., 1835), 13–18 (Moses 2:26–29; 3:15–17, 19–20; 4:14–19, 22–25; 5:1, 4–9, 19–23, 32–40).

[14] “History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons, January 16, 1843, 71–73.

[15] See Kent P. Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2005), 12–17.

[16] See Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church, Volume One 1830–1847 (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1997), 60–61.

[17] NT1, pages 56–57a.

[18] Willard Richards also included a copy of this text in his Pocket Companion.

[19] He let his scribe, Martin Harris, borrow the Book of Mormon manuscript to show to his family. See J. B. Haws, “The Lost 116 Pages Story: What We Do Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Might Know,” in The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon: A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, ed. Dennis L. Largey et al. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2015), 81–102.

[20] In addition to the JST Genesis passages, the second Lecture on Faith quotes twenty other Bible verses outside Genesis, and none of them come from the JST.

[21] 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), 29–40.

[22] OT2, page 97. The Song of Solomon was omitted without comment in the 1867 and 1944 editions, but beginning with the 1974 printing, its absence was indicated with a note following the book of Ecclesiastes.

[23] Several publishers later created parallel-column editions of various sorts with the King James Version text.

[24] The Holy Scriptures, Translated and Corrected by the Spirit of Revelation. By Joseph Smith, Jr., the Seer (Plano, IL: The [Reorganized] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 1867).

[25] Robert J. Matthews, “A Plainer Translation”: Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible—A History and Commentary (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975). See Thomas E. Sherry, “Changing Attitudes toward Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible,” in Plain and Precious Truths Restored: The Doctrinal and Historical Significance of the Joseph Smith Translation, ed. Robert L. Millet and Robert J. Matthews (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1995), 187–226.

[26] See Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 20–33.