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It is impossible to overstate what Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible does to the early chapters of Genesis, those that have been in the Pearl of Great Price since 1851 and have been known as the Book of Moses since 1902.[1] Without these grand revelations, there is no Only Begotten Son in Genesis. Nor is there a God the Father. In the Bible humans are created in God’s image, but the Old Testament does not teach that they are God’s children. Satan is a character in the drama in the book of Job, but the Satan of the New Testament is not found in the Old. The Old Testament has no idea of the Holy Ghost, let alone the Holy Ghost bearing witness of the Father and the Son. It teaches nothing about spiritual rebirth. It testifies of Jehovah’s power to save, but its references to Jesus Christ are only understood through Christian eyes. Although Genesis tells the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden, the Christian idea of the Fall is not to be found in Genesis. The Old Testament teaches faith in God and repentance, but the first principles and ordinances of the gospel are not there. There is no plan of salvation from death and hell and no salvation at all except from earthly threats. In Genesis, Enoch “was not,” because God “took him,” but the text does not tell us what that means, nor does it foretell the return of his community. There is no pre-earthly experience in Genesis. God is the creator of the universe, but the concept of other worlds inhabited by his children is unknown.

These are dramatic ideas—revolutionary ideas—especially coming from a young man in his early twenties who had no schooling in the great religious questions of his day.

The teachings in the early chapters of Joseph Smith’s Genesis set Latter-day Saints apart from other Christians perhaps more than do the words of any other texts, revealing truths that contradict some fundamental Christian traditions that had been handed down through the centuries. These teachings repudiate, for example, the false doctrines of original sin, the depravity of humankind, the lack of human agency, and God’s predestination of our ultimate rewards and punishments. Those beliefs, developed in late antiquity and repopularized in the Protestant Reformation, are negated by JST phrases like these: “The Son of God hath atoned for original guilt, wherein the sins of the parents cannot be answered upon the heads of the children, for they are whole from the foundation of the world”; “And it is given unto them to know good from evil; wherefore they are agents unto themselves”; and “in the Garden of Eden man had agency.”[2] Thus the New Translation of Genesis rejects false teachings and reveals in plainness and clarity true fundamental Christian doctrines—vital to the lives of every human.

Some may suppose that Joseph Smith began with a plan or purpose to revise the book of Genesis into a Christian story. But any suggestion of conscious intent on his part seems to be rendered impossible by the writing on the dictated manuscript. The material discussed in the three previous chapters comprises well over twelve thousand words that Joseph Smith’s scribes wrote densely on twenty-five manuscript pages from top to bottom and margin to margin.[3] The writing shows every indication of being done spontaneously and without premeditation, with only rare cases of minor correcting during the dictation.[4] If there were goals and intentions with the translation, the writing would betray them by showing hesitation, backtracking, revising, and inserting. But that is not what we see. As far as the language is concerned, it does not matter who the scribe was, because on each page the seamless writing suggests that Joseph Smith neither reflected nor deliberated when he spoke the words that his scribes wrote down. Nor is there any difference in content, emphasis, or theology based on who was taking the dictation. All of this suggests a divine work of revelation, not a conscious act of composition.

When the Doctrine and Covenants was prepared for publication, the words of the revelations were copied into special manuscript volumes, and the original sheets were set aside and discarded or lost.[5] Thus today there are likely very few extant pages from the original dictations. The same is not the case with Joseph Smith’s Bible revision. The words on the manuscript pages, written as the Prophet spoke them, show a seer at work, receiving God’s word and dictating it to careful scribes who recorded what they heard. The manuscripts of the Joseph Smith Translation are evidence of revelation taking place at the moment when it happened.[6]

Notes

[1] The title “Book of Moses” was first used in the edition of 1902.

[2] OT2, pages 17–18, 22 (Moses 6:53–56; 7:32).

[3] OT1, pages 1–25.

[4] There are some contemporaneous corrections to spelling or writing errors, and there are very few places that show Joseph Smith dictating and then revising the wording spontaneously. See, for example, OT1, page 3, line 44; page 13, lines 11–12; see also pages 22–24.

[5] “Revelation Book 1” and “Revelation Book 2,” The Joseph Smith Papers.

[6] Certainly the same can be said as well for the extant pages of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon.