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In earlier chapters of this book, we explored the nature of the Joseph Smith Translation and asked questions about how best to define it or describe what it is and what it does. It is important to be reminded of God’s endorsement of this great work so we can understand clearly that the Prophet’s labor on the Bible was not a hobby or a trivial use of his time; it was a part of his mission. The Lord told one of Joseph Smith’s scribes, and the Church as well, that through the revision of the Bible he would reveal the scriptures “to the salvation of [his] own elect.” How will the New Translation assist in the salvation of God’s elect? One of the answers is that through it, the elect would hear God’s voice in modern times.[1]

New Gospels and New Genesis

Bible scholars have known for centuries that there is a close relationship between the Gospel of Mark and the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The evidence seems to be beyond dispute that both Matthew and Luke are to some extent edits of Mark—that is, Matthew and Luke began with Mark’s Gospel in hand as they created their own Gospels. This is seen in the fact that most of Mark’s words can be found in the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke. That is a major reason why these three Gospels contain so much common material.[2]

But there are fundamental differences as well, and those differences help us understand an important process for the creation of scripture. We can think of Matthew as being (a) Mark’s Gospel, (b) edited and corrected by Matthew where Matthew felt Mark left something out or his wording could be improved, (c) plus new text that Matthew added from other sources available to him, including his own experience. The composition of the Gospel of Luke went essentially the same way. Luke is (a) Mark, (b) edited and expanded based on knowledge Luke had, (c) plus added new text that Luke had from his own sources. The JST of Matthew suggests that Matthew had an earlier written source that contributed to one of his narratives: “Now as it is written, the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise.”[3] And Luke tells us that “many” had undertaken to prepare accounts of Jesus and his teachings, so he had sources to draw from.[4] One of Luke’s additional sources was also used by Matthew.[5]

It makes sense that the Gospel writers would use all the sources available to them, written or oral. As a believer in the authority and divine origin of the New Testament, I do not hesitate to state that revelation from God was one of the sources that they used. The Lord told his disciples, “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”[6] That promise of divine intervention was certainly in effect in the creation of the Gospels, even though God used fallible humans to write them.

I view the story of the Joseph Smith Translation to be the same as the story of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Joseph Smith (a) took an existing text—namely, the King James Bible in the English language—(b) edited and corrected it, and (c) added new text from sources he had access to. The result was something extraordinary. Through those efforts he brought forth a new book of Genesis, profoundly reworked and expanded, and newly added and revised text elsewhere in the Old Testament. And through those efforts he brought forth four new Gospels, each with its unique contributions to our scriptural record, as well as many other revisions and additions in other New Testament books. Genesis and the Gospels were clearly the primary focus, because together they make up over two thirds of the New Translation.

Authority and Sources

Those who do not share the Latter-day Saints’ belief in the mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith may find such words to be unsettling. But those who believe he was called of God have faith that he had as much authority to edit an existing sacred text as did Matthew and Luke, and that he had as much authority to write new scripture as did the Bible’s other authors, including Isaiah, John, and Paul. The Prophet called revising the Bible “a branch of my calling,”[7] yet because we have no record of his instructions, all we can do is observe the revisions he made and draw conclusions from them about what the directives were that God gave him. In this book we have attempted to do this by looking at some of the results of his work, most of which can be characterized broadly with words like clarifying and correcting. In addition, of course, he added new text throughout the translation.

As the Gospel writers had sources for their writing and revising, what were the sources Joseph Smith used to accomplish his task? From what we can see in the New Translation, it appears that his sources included, in varying degrees, revelation, other scriptural texts, his prophetic instincts, and his common sense.

If Joseph Smith had a mandate to make changes in the Bible to clarify and correct its words, to what degree did he need revelation to do that? Did the Lord need to tell him what to do in each case, or did the Lord trust his prophet to use his divinely given instincts and good judgment to do what needed to be done? Three examples will illustrate the question.

Mark 4:24

Luke 1:12

Acts 3:17

In the first example the Prophet replaced archaic pronouns with modern equivalents. In the second he replaced an italicized pronoun with a noun, making the meaning explicit. In the third he replaced an unrecognizable and obsolete verb with a modern one, and he smoothed out a verbal clause that contains an italicized word. We have seen that hundreds of revisions like these exist in the New Translation, but they were not done with consistency. Did the Prophet require revelation to make each change like these?

Another question is, was he ever influenced by other sources in making revisions? We know that the answer to this question is yes, because he drew words from other scriptural texts—from parallel accounts in the New Testament, from elsewhere in the JST, and from the Book of Mormon.[8] In all those cases it was both wise and appropriate for him to draw from what was available to him to improve the biblical text. But what of drawing information from nonscriptural sources? For example, did he learn from some book or sermon that the KJV word conversation means “conduct”? If so, it would make sense for him to put that knowledge to use and replace the archaic word with the modern one, as he did a few times in the JST. In Isaiah 34:7 the Prophet replaced the KJV word “unicorns” with the transliteration of a Hebrew word. In 2 Chronicles 22 he revised the age of a king of Judah to match the correct age given in 2 Kings 8. And in Nehemiah 7 he revised a list of names and numbers to match those in a parallel account in Ezra 2. Revisions like these are very rare in the New Translation, but they raise a question. Were those obscure matters important enough to bring forth divine revelation, or did the Prophet notice the oddities or discrepancies and wisely decide to look them up in a printed source? In the latter two examples, the Bible he used may have been his printed source, because it has cross-references to the parallel accounts, and a table in the back of his Bible mentions the discrepancy in the case of Ezra and Nehemiah.[9] Some have suggested that the Prophet drew ideas from one or more Bible commentaries current in his day, but no evidence has been found to substantiate that theory.[10]

And what of revisions that involve more than simply changing a few words or correcting apparent errors? Modernizing or smoothing out the English is one thing, but adding new text is another. We have seen that the JST adds thousands of words in Genesis and that it adds new text in dozens of New Testament passages—sometimes only a few words but sometimes more. I am not uncomfortable with the idea that in making minor word changes like the ones in our examples from Mark, Luke, and Acts, above, Joseph Smith had his instructions and thus did not require further divine directives to make the revisions. But I do not feel the same way about the new text that the JST inserts in the words of God, Adam, Eve, Enoch, Jesus, and others. Those insertions show all the hallmarks of revelation that Latter-day Saints are accustomed to seeing in other revealed sources, such as the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. But again, the Joseph Smith Translation is in modern English, not in the words of the original speakers, and as with all our ancient scriptures, we do not know to what degree the JST summarizes, paraphrases, or generalizes.

“As They Are in God’s Bosom”

God said that through Joseph Smith’s work with the Bible, “the scriptures shall be given, even as they are in mine own bosom.”[11] That statement says nothing about the process, but it clearly endorses the product. The New Translation is many things, and the Lord may have employed different means to create the text that we have. Joseph Smith’s agency and good judgment were likely among the means, and revelation certainly was as well. The revelation may have come sometimes in the form of “pure intelligence,”[12] which brought truth to the Prophet’s mind but required him to find words in English to match that truth, but it may also have come sometimes in words—words directly revealed in clarity to the mind of the Lord’s prophet. Whatever the process was, he was commissioned by God to do the work, so the Joseph Smith Translation has all the authorization it needs to be embraced by the Latter-day Saints.

Consider the following: Early in the Book of Mormon, the prophet Lehi foretold the work of the Restoration. Apparently reading from the plates of brass, he quoted God’s words from an ancient revelation that foretold Joseph Smith’s latter-day mission: ��� will give unto him a commandment that he shall do none other work, save the work which I shall command him.” And “he shall do my work.”[13] Those are not insignificant words. Joseph Smith would do no other work but the work that God would command him to do, and among the work he was commanded to do was to make a revision of the Bible. As the Prophet recalled a difficult time in the earliest days of the Church, he wrote, “Amid all trials and tribulations we had to wade through, the Lord, who well knew our infantile and delicate situation, vouchsafed for us a supply, and granted us ‘line upon line, here a little and there a little;’ of which the following was a precious morsel.”[14] The Visions of Moses that followed, which is indeed “a precious morsel,” was the beginning of the New Translation. It is no wonder, then, that Joseph Smith took the work so seriously, saying that “except the Church receive the fulness of the scriptures that they would yet fall.”[15]

While Frederick G. Williams was working as the JST scribe in January 1833, the Lord told him in a revelation, “My servant Joseph is called to do a great work and hath need that he may do the work of translation for the salvation of souls.”[16] At the time of this revelation, the Prophet had already completed the New Testament and was translating in the middle of the Old Testament, perhaps somewhere between Chronicles and early in the Psalms. Some may find it surprising that even there, and in the Old Testament pages that followed, the translation would be “for the salvation of souls.” Those words, as unexpected as they may be in this setting, are important. They emphasize God’s endorsement of the work, and they highlight his divine promise that the Joseph Smith Translation has saving power. The untold number of hours of difficult labor that the Prophet invested in the New Translation was one of the important contributions of his prophetic ministry, and we are the beneficiaries.

Notes

[1] Doctrine and Covenants 35:20–21.

[2] See Frank F. Judd Jr., “Who Really Wrote the Gospels? A Study of Traditional Authorship,” in How the New Testament Came to Be, ed. Kent P. Jackson and Frank F. Judd Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006), 123–30; Gaye Strathearn, “Matthew as an Editor of the Life and Teachings of Jesus,” in Jackson and Judd, How the New Testament Came to Be, 141–56.

[3] Matthew 1:18, emphasis added.

[4] Luke 1:1–3.

[5] A common source of sayings of Jesus that both Matthew and Luke drew from is labeled Q by scholars, from the German word Quelle, “source.”

[6] John 14:26.

[7] “History of Joseph Smith, Continued,” Times and Seasons, May 1, 1844, 513.

[8] See chapters 14, 16, and 17, respectively.

[9] ���ndex to the Holy Bible,” 760.

[10] See Kent P. Jackson, “Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 40 (2020): 15-59.

[11] Doctrine and Covenants 35:20.

[12] “Discourse, between circa 26 June and circa 2 July 1839, as Reported by Willard Richards,” p. 18, The Joseph Smith Papers.

[13] 2 Nephi 3:8.

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

[15] “Minutes, 25–26 October 1831,” p. 13, The Joseph Smith Papers.

[16] “Revelation, 5 January 1833,” p. [1], The Joseph Smith Papers, emphasis added.