Janiece Johnson:
When he first hears Joseph Smith has produced this book, he says he’s filled with wrath. This punk kid would claim that he had produced a book of scripture. It was a signal to people that the heavens were not closed, that it wasn’t just the record of the Bible, but that there was more scripture.

Scott Woodward:
I have more confidence in the Book of Mormon than any book of this wide earth.

Janiece Johnson:
Orson Pratt, Parley Pratt, know the Book of Mormon way better than Joseph does.

Casey Griffiths:
It seems like his unfamiliarity might be a strength for us. If he’s the translator and not the author of the Book of Mormon, maybe he did know it not as well as Orson or Parley Pratt, and that’s okay.

Janiece Johnson:
It is just like any relationship. It takes time.

Casey Griffiths:
We’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and part of it is because Janiece has just done some really great work in early Latter-day Saint converts, and especially early Latter-day Saint converts and the Book of Mormon. Janiece Johnson specializes in American religious history, specifically Latter-day Saint history, and the prosecution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Dr. Johnson has master’s degrees in American religious history and theology, and a PhD in American history, taught and researched as a professor at BYU-Idaho and BYU, and is now an Acquisitions Director at Deseret Book. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including the award-winning Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture, and her newest book on revelation in the series, Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants, that was published by the Maxwell Institute and Deseret Book. Dr. Johnson’s current research centers on the Book of Mormon and the relationship of early Latter-day Saint converts to this new American scripture. Janiece, that is an impressive retinue of projects that you’re involved in. And it seems like you’ve worked with a lot of good organizations. Right now, you’re with Deseret Book.

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah. Right now, I’m focusing on helping Deseret Book get more authors and working on some really cool projects. So it’s fun.

Scott Woodward:
We’re so excited to hear from you today. In the Come, Follow Me manual for this week’s Voices of the Restoration study, it says this, quote, “Even before the Church was organized in April 1830, the Lord declared, ‘The field is white, all ready to harvest.’ This statement proved true in the months that followed, as many seekers of truth were led by the Spirit of God to find the restored Church of Jesus Christ. Many of these early converts were instrumental in laying the foundation of the Restoration, and their stories of conversion are valuable to us today.” Close quote. This is something you resonate with. This is something you spend a lot of time on. And maybe just tell us, to begin with here, what led you to study conversion stories of these early Church converts?

Janiece Johnson:
So my main area of focus is the Book of Mormon, specifically, and thinking about how these people who were, by and large, already Christian, and probably a very high percentage were Protestant. They believed in the, the singular authority of the Bible. And I really was very interested in how they opened themselves up to the possibility of more scripture, and, and then how they developed a relationship with the Book of Mormon, how they used the Book of Mormon, what kind of effect it had on, on their lives. Some of this, like, I think, a lot of good research, came because I was annoyed at something somebody wrote, where I didn’t think that it, it fit. And this was something that I read probably back in maybe like 2002, but I had just finished a master’s degree, and my master’s thesis was on the religious experience of the earliest Latter-day Saint women. And I read this book arguing that The Book of Mormon was important for their initial conversion, their initial testimony, but then they didn’t really use the book, devotionally. And I kind of angrily wrote in the margins, Lucy Mack to Solomon Mack, January 1831.

Scott Woodward:
By which you meant what? Yeah, fill us in on this.

Janiece Johnson:
My master’s thesis was… So I actually used women’s letters to kind of try and understand their relationship and how they were converted and their religious experience as it was happening rather than, you know, decades later as, as they’ve processed it through memory.

Casey Griffiths:
I’m going to pause you there for a second…

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Because I want to mention something, and that is that you have written a wonderful book with Jenny Reeder called The Witness of Women that focuses specifically on all these early sources of women in the Church. One of my favorite books. I just want to make sure everybody knows that this research that you’re talking about is available and out there. And so continue.

Janiece Johnson:
Looking at and trying to, like with Witness of Women, we just wanted to make women’s voices really easily accessible. You know, there were lots of biographies out there of women, but you’d have to read a whole geography, and maybe you’d have a couple snippets you could use in a lesson at some point, but we wanted to make them really accessible. And so it’s organized thematically. So you know, you have teaching a lesson or giving a talk on revelation, and you can open it up and you have a bunch of women’s voices to contribute to whatever you’re teaching. We wanted to make that process really, really easy because as President Nelson keeps teaching us, it’s very important that all of us, women and men, hear women’s voices and listen to women’s voices. And one of those women that I had initially started studying was Lucy Mack Smith, and she wrote this fabulous letter. This was the kind of beginning of this Book of Mormon project. So 20, more, you know, 25 years ago, this is the beginning of this. So it’s nine months. It’s January 1831. It’s nine months after the Book of Mormon has been published, and she is writing to her brother and sister-in-law to tell them about the Book of Mormon.

Janiece Johnson:
So, you know, she’s… The topic is the Book of Mormon. At that point, I knew that it was a lot of Book of Mormon. Today, I know that more than half of that letter is specific Book of Mormon language. The Smiths are a family of scripture. Their mother tongue is the King James language of the Bible. And the Smiths are not unique in that. That is very common for this time period. You have… You know, before industrialization, before the 1850s and having lots of books readily available, there are only a limited number of books. And most people, if they have a book in their home, it’s the Bible. Most people will have learned to read with Bible primers. They know their Bibles inside and out. So Joseph’s mom says, Lucy says Joseph reads the Bible less than any of her other children, we should never assume that he doesn’t know it well, because he still knows it way better than we do. They know their Bibles inside and out. And that language, that King James language is very reflected in Lucy’s language. But it’s fascinating to me how just nine months after the publication of the book, it has already, the language the Book of Mormon, has already become part of her language.

Janiece Johnson:
Now, it’s very possible that she was sitting down kind of crafting this letter and pulling out quotes from the text. That’s, that’s possible. That’s a feasible thing. We only have a few sources from Lucy, and the other primary source is her history of her son, which she dictated after the martyrdom. She dictated it in 1846. And we see the same kind scripturalism, like really dense quotes and paraphrases and allusions of the text that really kind of show us the depth of her relationship with the Book of Mormon.

Scott Woodward:
When you say that the Book of Mormon language is in her letters and in her book, you don’t mean that she’s just quoting from the Book of Mormon a lot. You mean it’s like become part of her vocabulary. It’s become, like, how she chooses to phrase things when she’s talking.

Janiece Johnson:
That language has become her own. Since we’ve had scripture, since, if we talk about the New Testament, since like the first century, you know, as sermons were given, if people quoted and paraphrased, the more scripture you could put in it, the greater authority it would feel like it had.

Casey Griffiths:
One of the reasons why people sometimes say the Book of Mormon wasn’t used doctrinally is the, the Nauvoo discourses of Joseph Smith, which we have extensive records of. You know, Words of Joseph Smith was published a long time ago. And it does seem like he favors the Bible when he quotes things. Like I had one of my professors in my graduate program say, I think you guys probably know the Book of Mormon better than Joseph Smith did. Did you find any evidence that that might not be the case, too? Or are we not taking into account some of these factors you’ve discussed?

Janiece Johnson:
Joseph is an interesting thing. So I spent a whole summer and with a small army of research assistants just looking at this question because I think that the Joseph Smith Papers have given us more and that we see more there. But yet, Joseph doesn’t know the book as well as some people do. He does not know the book as well as Orson Pratt does. And I think part of that is that Joseph is a translator, but he’s also a revelator, and that is taking up most of his time. Most of his… You know, other than, like, King Follett, most of his sermons are not prepared. Now, there are some times, and I would argue, I did a presentation at the Joseph Smith Papers, one of their conferences a few years ago, talking about what is there. And there is more there than we assumed in the past. Even if we just want to look at his 1832 history, the first time he starts to write something down, he says, I, having been born of goodly parents. We have hundreds and thousands of early Saints who begin their own histories that exact same way, modeling the, the pattern that Nephi laid out for us.

Casey Griffiths:
They’re at least like us in that they’ve read 1 Nephi 1. Maybe they didn’t get any further than that, but they’ve read the opening sentence.

Janiece Johnson:
The most read, you know, few verses of the, of the whole book.

Scott Woodward:
A very honorable vanguard of us who’ve read 1 Nephi 1. Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Janiece Johnson:
It’s a complicated question. It’s more allusions, but I think Orson Pratt, Parley Pratt, know the Book of Mormon way better than Joseph does.

Scott Woodward:
Like, isn’t that, like, a really Interesting testimony to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, that it’s not a product of Joseph Smith’s brain?

Casey Griffiths:
See, that’s how I see it, too, because when you write something, you’re continually citing it. Like Scott will attest that there’s hardly an episode where I’m not like, Well, once I wrote a paper on this, because it sort of makes you dive deep and gets the material in your brain. But like you said, Scott, it seems like his unfamiliarity might be a strength for us, because if he’s the translator and not the author of the Book of Mormon. Maybe he did know it not as well as Orson or Parley Pratt, and that’s okay.

Janiece Johnson:
He is learning, but also his task, once he’s done with translating, that’s not his task anymore. He’s going to still be very focused on getting the Book of Mormon to more people, and that is going to remain a focus. But him sitting sitting down and having time to just study, that doesn’t happen very often.

Casey Griffiths:
He’s a busy fellow. And you’re making me think he had three months to translate the Book of Mormon as we know it. Three years, he works on his translation of the Bible. So, yeah, maybe he is more familiar with the Bible than the Book of Mormon, and that’s okay.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. There’s that study that somebody did called the Scriptural Teachings of Joseph Smith, right, where it’s the old blue book, Teachings of Joseph Smith. But then they went through and footnoted every time he’s alluding to some scriptural reference, and yeah, it is overwhelmingly biblical.

Janiece Johnson:
I think he sees more than there is, and there are others who don’t see anything. I think it’s somewhere in the middle. There is more than we have generally assumed with kind of the words of Joseph Smith and what we, those Nauvoo sermons that we had for so long. But also Richard Galbraith sees quite a bit more. Some of those are, like, quite a stretch. Intertextuality is always a tricky thing. If the Saints use a phrase, this is one of the really difficulties of this, of this project and trying to do a really close reading of people’s journals. Sometimes it’s a phrase like “an instrument in his hands.” That’s language that’s familiar to Joseph, that it’s coming out, the translation is coming out that way. So just someone quoting, “I want to be an instrument in his hands,” isn’t there a whole bunch of… You can go on Google Books and find a bunch of Protestant sermons that use that same language. So I think that is more an instance of this kind of… I can’t use that to prove that someone was reading the Book of Mormon. But there are other phrases that are definitely unique to, to the Book of Mormon. But there is a, a very similar name that’s in the Bible, you know, and so…

Janiece Johnson:
Initially, when I read that, I was like, Oh, it’s the Bible dude, like the Bible dude who is carrying the Ark of the Covenant with Uzzah or Uzz. I always forget the, all the names there. The guy who I think owns the cart has a very similar name, yet the context fits. And, and some of Brigham… So this, that one reference, so it first shows up in this letter to Mary Ann in 1841, but we actually get him repeating it. We have a record of him repeating it five or six other times in other sermons. So it’s clearly a Book of Mormon example that stuck with him. And the context is clear that it’s Book of Mormon, but one of his scribes actually writes the biblical name, not the Book of Mormon name, because it’s so obscure that they miss and they write the other name, whereas the context fits the Book of Mormon clearly better than it, it fits the, the biblical guy. If you find, in a letter, if you find 10 references that are kind of paraphrases of Book of Mormon language, and one of them maybe doesn’t work out, there’s still nine. Like, you can carefully say, Oh, yeah, this Book of Mormon, this person knows their Book of Mormon.

Janiece Johnson:
To recognize that water within which these early converts were swimming, the majority of them were converted to the Book of Mormon before they’re converted to the Church. I think it’s part of their process of recognizing Joseph as a prophet. But the Book of Mormon, for many of those early converts, comes first. So like W. W. Phelps, he dates his conversion from the 9th of June, 1830, which is the day he gets a Book of Mormon. He’s not going to meet Joseph Smith. He’s not going to be baptized for more than a year. But for him, his conversion was the Book of Mormon, which introduced him to the Restoration. Now, that is not across the board. It doesn’t happen the same. Conversions happen in lots of different ways. Like Zina Huntington, who sees the book on the windowsill in their home, and she just knows it’s true. Like she has this very clear experience that she knows it’s true. Ezra Thayre, who is a neighbor to the Smiths, when he first hears of the Book of Mormon and hears that Joseph Smith has produced this book, he says he’s filled with wrath, that Joseph, this punk kid, would claim that he had produced a book of scripture.

Janiece Johnson:
And he goes to the Smith house, and Hyrum actually brings out a Book of Mormon, and they’re in front of the Smith’s house. He is all worked up. He’s angry about it. But Hyrum hands him the book, and he says when he touches the book, he feels something. He doesn’t know how to explain this, but his wrath melts away. And then he says when he begins to read it, that the book is opened up to him, and he feels this joy coming from its pages. So for him, it’s this combination of this very, this kind of almost charismatic experience. When he touches the book for a first time, he actually describes it, I think, as electricity, which is interesting.

Scott Woodward:
Was electricity a thing back then?

Casey Griffiths:
They still had static electricity, right?

Janiece Johnson:
Well, I think he says a shock. And maybe he… His language may not be electricity. It may be a shock. But then he talks about the process of, of opening up the book and, and learning more from, from the book. Other people like Brigham Young or Eliza R. Snow, who read the book for years. Eliza R. Snow, before converting. Like Eliza R. Snow, her mother gets baptized, her sister gets baptized. They’ve been a family that have been very open to a lot of different religious ideas. Like, she seems like the perfect ideal convert. She’s worried that Joseph Smith is too charismatic. She’s worried that it’s going to be a flash in the pan. And so she studies scripture. So she reads the Bible and she reads the Book of Mormon. And for four years, she studies scripture. And then in 1835, her mom and her sister go to Kirtland. They don’t live too far from Kirtland. They’re 20 miles, 30 miles from Kirtland. They come back and they’re all abuzz with all the things that they’ve experienced in Kirtland. And Eliza has this moment and she thinks, Oh, no. Have I waited too long? Maybe I’ve missed out on it. But she writes in her journal, she said, My heart was fixed, and she would not deviate from that.

Janiece Johnson:
Her heart was fixed. She knew what truth was. She knew she needed to get baptized at that point, but it took her a long time. No two converts are exactly the same. We have some converts who avidly listen to missionaries. We have a whole bunch who just want to read the book themselves. John Murdock doesn’t care what the missionaries have to say. He want to, he just wants to take the book and read the book himself. Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner is like a 13-year-old girl, and her uncle, Isaac Morley, gets a Book of Mormon, and she asks if she can borrow it for the evening, and she reads, and she stays up late, and she reads, and then she’s supposed to give it back, and she asks if she can keep it for longer. And her parents are like, No, like, that’s too much. You’re asking too much. But she shows her uncle, Isaac Morley, that she’s already begun to memorize the Book of Nephi, and he lets her keep it for longer. I mean, we have so many different kinds of experiences. But to try and narrow it down and say, Oh, the Book of Mormon was just a sign that Joseph was a prophet and the heavens were opened.

Janiece Johnson:
Yes, it certainly functioned that way. It was a signal to people that the heavens were not closed, that it wasn’t just the record of the Bible, but that there was more scripture and that the heavens were opened. Yet that’s not the only way that it functioned. For many people, they developed a relationship with the book. And for some, like Lucy Mack, I have a few other examples like Lucy Mack who are just, just immerse themselves in the text, and it changes how they express themselves. It changes how their relationship with God. But they become dedicated to the text, and they, they believe it’s scripture.

Casey Griffiths:
But Janiece, is it fair to say that they might have used it differently than we do today? I remember this, this article by Grant Underwood, where he pointed out that the passages that were most often cited in the Book of Mormon were 3 Nephi 22 and Ether 13, which the average member of the Church today probably can’t off the top of their head say what those chapters are about, but they both had to do with a New Jerusalem, a, a sacred city that would be built on the American continent. Today, you know, when we introduce the Book of Mormon, we’ll usually to 3 Nephi 11, the appearance of Christ, or Moroni’s promise. Were they using the Book of Mormon the same way we’re using it today?

Janiece Johnson:
So in some instances, they are. So Samuel Smith is the first missionary who is officially called. He meets Phineas Young, Phineas, brother to Brigham. Their, his sister, Rhonda, has, has already joined the Church, but he looks about, he learns about it from Samuel Smith. And as he writes it down in his journal, which it’s an autobiographical sketch, but it’s written within like five years. So it’s not like a, a 50 years later sort of autobiographical sketch. He writes it down relatively contemporaneously. And it’s basically Moroni’s promise that Samuel is teaching him. Now, whether that is imposed in the few years that have passed, that is a possibility, but we’re still in the 18, early 1830s. And he’s already saying, Well, you know, ask God. And it’s very, like the language is very explicitly Moroni’s promise. So certainly some things are the same. Now, too, you brought up Grant Underwood’s article. That’s another thing that I think that that was kind of the jumping off point for Terryl Givens’ work, and Terryl Givens arguing that the Book of Mormon was a sign. He uses Grant’s work, but Grant is also basing it on that master’s thesis from the 1940s, and they are only looking at published sources. They are not looking at any women.

Janiece Johnson:
There are two holes in that, in that research. If we’re going to say that this is representative of it as a whole. I think his argument still very definitely holds when we’re talking about published materials. But I also think there are a couple of things that we need to keep in mind. Published materials were used as proselytizing materials. One of the recent, more recent Joseph Smith Papers finds a letter that we know really well from 1841 that Joseph wrote to the Twelve in Great Britain. We knew the letter for a long time from the copy of it that was published in the Millennial Star. But the Joseph Smith Papers actually found the original version of it, and it includes a whole section on baptism for the dead that Joseph explicitly says, This is not not ready to go out to the world. So I want you to not put this part in the newspaper. You know, the newspaper is for the Church, but it is very definitely, if not its central purpose, but one of its primary purposes are to use it as a missionary tool. And Joseph says, This is not ready to go out to the world, so don’t publish this in the newspaper yet.

Janiece Johnson:
So this whole section this, that Joseph writes talking about baptism for the dead to the Twelve is kept from going out to the larger audience. Also, something like A Voice of Warning, which was consistently the most used proselytizing tool. Well, I don’t even know how to rank Book of Mormon versus A Voice of Warning because A Voice of Warning was shorter and it was easier to get to people than sometimes when they’re going through Book of Mormon shortages because they definitely have kind of consistent Book of Mormon shortages. Parley Pratt doesn’t quote the Book of Mormon until we get to three quarters of the way through the text. However, on the second page of the text, he says that doing this, he’s encouraging people to just think about the Bible, and he’s going to go a bunch through a series of kind of biblical verses that he wants to offer kind of a proof text for, that the Bible leads us to the possibility of more scripture. On the second page, he says, This will be for our profit and learning. It comes from the Book of Mormon, and so it doesn’t have quotations or marks around it. It doesn’t have a citation.

Janiece Johnson:
But the Book of Mormon, and, and if we, if we take it apart even much more specifically, that’s just one kind of anecdotal example. But the Book of Mormon is, is shaping his whole argument. An early self-appointed missionary is Solomon Chamberlain. This is the first person that Brigham Young heard preach about the Book of Mormon. But he’s going around preaching that you have to, and he is an ardent believer in the Book of Mormon. He has converted to the book and he believes that he, that it is his duty to share it with other people. But he’s going around preaching that you have to believe in the Book of Mormon or be damned to hell. And Brigham Young is completely turned off by hearing this. Now, as they move, they begin to use the Bible and this common scripture that they’re sharing to begin to open people up to the Book of Mormon. The problem is that it’s claiming more than they have evidence for. You know, if you want to make a claim about early Church periodicals, that totally holds. But when you’re trying to make a sweeping claim about Latter-day Saints as a whole, just looking at one single source, Grant Underwood has a footnote in that article where he says, Oh, and I checked out an excerpt of Orson Pratt’s journal and Wilford Woodruff’s published journal and one other little excerpt from a journal that was published, and this holds.

Janiece Johnson:
And that’s all he says.

Scott Woodward:
And to add to that, Parley P. Pratt, like, it was because of his reading in the Book of Mormon that they start to agitate the question about when is the gospel going to be preached to the Lamanites? The Book of Mormon keeps saying the gospel is going to be preached to Lamanites. So that precipitates the Lamanite Mission. See, like Section 28 through, like, 34. Casey, you mentioned Ether 13, 3 Nephi 22, also 3 Nephi 20. The prophecies about establishing the New Jerusalem here.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
They took that really, really seriously. I mean, that’s part of the Lamanite Mission, right, is to go and find the place of the New Jerusalem. And I mean, this is all motivated by the Book of Mormon. They’re taking it incredibly seriously. This isn’t just, I read it or it’s a sign that converted me. It’s like, okay, what did the words actually say? When are we going to preach to the Lamanites? Oh, what about this New Jerusalem? It’s moving the questions that the prophet is going to take to the Lord. And yes, they’re going to act in it. And Joseph is going to get more revelations as he asks more about these things that the converts are asking.

Scott Woodward:
And I mean this really, at the very beginning of the Restoration, is kicking things off in the direction that we can now look back and say, that’s exactly, like, where things went. We were all about Zion. We were about the Lamanites. Who are about trying to build this New Jerusalem. And that occupied the first, what, decade of the Church’s attention, if you will.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and you could argue that the Lamanite Mission really got kicked off because they were curious about the New Jerusalem as described in the Book of Mormon. Hiram Page’s revelations when they’re described, and we don’t know very much about what was actually in them, but that they dealt with this idea of a New Jerusalem. That seems to have really fired the imagination of a lot of the early members of the Church.

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah, definitely. And we get ideas about Zion and New Jerusalem, both from the Book of Mormon and from, you know, when starting in, what is it, August of 1830 with Moses and the translation and the additions that we get to Moses, to the Genesis text.

Scott Woodward:
And just another beautiful connection there, speaking of Parley P. Pratt on, and the Lamanite Mission, it’s as they’re leaving that they want to stop by a Parley’s old preacher friend in Kirtland, Ohio, Sidney Rigdon, who is very skeptical of the Book of Mormon. Correct me if I’m wrong, Janiece. And, but he says, I’ll read your book, Parley, and I’ll see what… How does he say it? I’ll see what the power it has over my mind or something like that. And two weeks later, he’s telling his congregation, You need to listen to these missionaries. And shortly after that, he’s converted. Shortly after that, he’s Joseph’s scribe right there with the Book of Moses. Talk about a significant convert. I mean, if you want to say anything about Sidney Rigdon.

Janiece Johnson:
And Kirtland is that expansion beyond the really familial converts. You know, early on, you have the Smith family, and then you have a few. You have the Knights. You have a few families, the Whitmers, that are really supporting this fledgling church. But with those missionaries going to Kirtland, and they go to Kirtland, they have 50 Books of Mormon with them. And very quickly, that is not enough. So most of the early converts in Kirtland are going to hear the Book of Mormon being read to them initially. Just like the early, earliest Christian converts, the Book of Mark is short. You can read it in about 90 minutes, and most early Christians would hear it in a single setting. And for many in Kirtland, this is how they’re hearing because they don’t have their own book. Like Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, trying to borrow this book, can I just have it for a night? You know, because there is this shortage of books. John Murdock tries to go around to get one because he wants to have his own book. John Murdock is fascinating to me because there’s… So his journal, he titles it An Abridgment, which I always thought that was so weird.

Janiece Johnson:
Why did he title it An Abridgment? Because I had only read like the first 20 pages of his journal, which were what was online for the longest time, what was available online. His whole journal is about 120 pages, and it’s in special collections at BYU, and get about halfway through the journal. Now, he, again, he’s another one like Lucy Mack. Like, the Book of Mormon becomes part of how he expresses himself, how he talks. Like he is just quoting scripture, paraphrasing scripture, echoing scripture all over the place. But you get about, I think it’s about halfway through the journal, and he starts talking about how he feels a kinship with Mormon. He feels like he and Mormon are very much alike. So he does with his journal the same thing that Mormon does with the Book of Mormon, and he makes an abridgment. So there is a longer journal, and there is a shorter journal. His last testimony is really beautiful, but it also echoes scripture. And then he dies, and the next entry is his son, Gideon, who says, I, Gideon, son of John, pick up the record of my father and continue the record of my father. In a very, you know, like… This is, these are people who are immersed in the Book of Mormon, and that has shaped their whole lives.

Janiece Johnson:
I think that that is such a beautiful testament to his father’s love of the Book of Mormon, and of Mormon, specifically, that Gideon feels that compulsion, like Moroni did, to pick up his father’s record. That doesn’t happen with something that they read once and discarded.

Casey Griffiths:
You’re making me think of another metric, which is names. Book of Mormon names start appearing among the early Saints. Where is it that someone asks for the name of their child, and Joseph Smith says, He shall be called Mahonri Moriancumer. This is the name of the brother of Jared.

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah. So that happens in Nauvoo. The naming starts in Kirtland. It starts amongst those Kirtland Saints. Nancy Tracy is one of my favorite Kirtland Saints. So her son, before she’s a member of the Church, she names him Eli. Good biblical name. Her next son, she wants to give him a big name out of the Book of Mormon, and she names him Lachoneus Moroni. Like, Lachoneus Moroni.

Scott Woodward:
Lachoneus.

Janiece Johnson:
This is not a casual reader of the Book of Mormon. This is hardcore. She is, like, she is intense. And, and then her next son is named Moses Mosiah. And I love that, like, bringing the stick of Joseph and the stick of Judah together in one kid. You know, that this is, I mean, and it will continue, Parley Pratt, after 1844, has 12 sons and one adopted daughter, and they all get Book of Mormon names, every single one of them. Even the ones that you’re like, there were a couple that I was like, Surely those are made up Book of Mormon names. Like he didn’t have enough Book of Mormon names, so he just decided to make some up. No, they’re actually in the text. They’re just ones I didn’t, you know…

Scott Woodward:
Obscure.

Janiece Johnson:
Ever, ever realize.

Casey Griffiths:
See, and now I’m thinking of place names because right now I live by Lehi, and I used to have to drive through Nephi to get to Provo. And near the town I grew up in, which is Delta, Utah, there’s an abandoned town named Zarahemla, which I don’t think you’d name your town Zerahemla if you didn’t feel pretty strongly about the truthfulness of the book, so.

Janiece Johnson:
We’ve got plenty of biblical names, too. We’ve got both. And again and again, we see that the Saints are using both of those scriptures. Now, we shouldn’t assume that that means everybody knows the Book of Mormon as well as Orson Pratt does in the first two years. It’s 600 pages of new scripture. Like, it is going to take a long time. So I’ve looked at more than 700. I’m close 800 19th century copies of the Book of Mormon. I most desperately want the ones that have writing in them because that tells me something. I can see kind of how much something was used, but also books from the 19th century look old at this point. One exception to that is there’s an 1835 first edition of the Doctrine and Covenants that Oliver Cowdrey, so he actually bound a bunch of Books of Mormon, 1837 Books of Mormon and 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, for his family.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ve seen that one, Janiece. Community of Christ used to own it. They let me take a picture of it. I don’t know if it’s with them anymore.

Janiece Johnson:
I don’t know if it went, yeah, where it is now, but it was only pristine and bright red because it was in a barn for 150 years. They also have one from Oliver’s nephew, Marcellus, that is black now, out of use. It started out in that same bright red, Moroccan, you know, leather. Harvard has Patience Cowdery Simons, who is Oliver’s sister-in-law. Her 1837 Book of Mormon, that was in that same, you know, batch. And that’s another thing, like. Oliver makes this special one, you know, binds these in this really nice leather. Like Oliver has learned this skill, but it’s not an expert binding. Like the gilding and the stamps are a little off-kilter, you know, they’re not perfect, but I think it tells us something about how much they’re valuing it and that they don’t just, other than this one 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, which is pristine, and no one’s ever read it clearly. But the rest them like they meant to use them. He bound them really beautifully, really nicely, but they were meant to be used. They were not meant to just stick on a shelf, and they use them. Most of the marginalia that we see, so most of the writing in books.

Janiece Johnson:
There are only a handful of first editions that have a lot of writing in them. And I can tell you about a few of those because there’s really remarkable ones that tell us a lot about how people are, have been converted and how they’re studying their Books of Mormon. For the most part, as we move through the 19th century, we get more and more writing in the books. I think some of that is, you know, early on, if you have a shortage of books, you have maybe one for your family. You don’t necessarily have your own book. So I think people would be less likely to write in them. As we move through the 19th century, and then we get more… You know, with industrialization, it’s a lot easier to get your book, then we get more and more writing. And there’s also no the, there’s an expectation that you could get another book. If you write too much in this book, you could get another book. But looking at the marginalia, most of the time people are just keeping track of a complicated narrative. They haven’t necessarily drawn out doctrine or theological truths yet. They’re just trying to understand a complicated narrative. And sometimes the structure today, or I should say when we were reading paper scriptures.

Janiece Johnson:
We haven’t ditched that entirely, but reading it, if we were reading our scriptures digitally, it’s changing our process. That’s another interesting thing, like, working for Deseret Book. Deseret Book has a new series of of new scriptures out in new colors, because I think for a while, people thought that digital scriptures would replace people’s real scriptures, and they haven’t. People still want scriptures, but the kind of standard two column versified. So this really began for the Book of Mormon with the 1920 edition. That changes your, changes how you read the book. The verses break it up, and it changes your process. I’ve had students read a first edition, and then a study edition of the Book of Mormon, and their regular edition, and talk about the process. And some, I had, remember one student at BYU-Idaho, who was like, The Spirit’s not there. It’s too different. He reacted very, very badly to the first edition, to the 1830 edition. I think just because it was so different for him. I think a really remarkable illustration of just how different our experience is depending on the format. These changes in the text change how we read the book. And those earliest Saints, when you don’t have the shorter chapters, Orson Pratt chops it up for the 1879 edition.

Janiece Johnson:
When you don’t have the verses, we first get numbered paragraphs with the 1852 edition. It changes your process. And those earliest Saints, the narrative is what sticks out the most when you have kind of long pieces of it to read and it’s not so chopped up. And they’re just trying to learn that narrative. It’s going to take a long time for them to really incorporate kind of doctrinally what the Book of Mormon is offering them.

Casey Griffiths:
I was going to say, back in 2005, you remember President Hinckley challenged everybody to read the Book of Mormon as a 200th birthday gift to Joseph Smith. And I read the 1830 edition then, and I actually loved it. It flowed much more like a story, and the chapters were a lot longer. Those are still the chapters that some groups, like Community of Christ, use. That’s why in a Community of Christ Book of Mormon, you have like verse 234 of 2 Nephi 1 or something like that. But that is interesting that the format in which we get it might affect our experience, too. Because I want to add, I haven’t read paper scriptures in probably over 10 years. I use my iPad or my phone now, and my paper scriptures are dusty. I don’t know if that makes me a bad person or not.

Scott Woodward:
There’s a few listeners that are judging you right now, so.

Casey Griffiths:
Probably, yeah.

Janiece Johnson:
You know, I actually, teaching Book of Mormon, I’d ask students to bring a book, to just get a little blue cover book.And I was like, You can the little miniature version and throw it in your backpack and you’re not going to notice it’s there. But just because that… Having, I think, a different format, some will like a study edition. I really like the Maxwell Institute’s study edition because that was really good for me to read it in a different way. I’ve also read, you know, the 1830 edition all the way through, and sometimes I think we need that change. But sometimes, some of those differences are going to make a big difference for how the early Saints learned the text. We’ve got some early books where people have just written like 10 page numbers inside their back cover, like their 10 favorite pages. Some people have written, you know, a few notes. Some people have made their own indices. So we don’t have… The first Book of Mormon index was published in 1835, and that helped people to study. So some first editions, they’d actually tip them in. They’d sew that index in. Two of my favorite books that I’ve ever seen, actually, Scott, you should go check this out.

Janiece Johnson:
It’s at BYU-Idaho. Frederick G. Williams’s first edition is in special collections at the library, and he has in the back, fly leaves, and inside the back cover, he crafted his own index. Now, his book has one of the published indexes, but he creates his own, and then he alphabetizes it, and then he writes it in his book. And I think that that’s such an interesting thing, that the, the index that’s provided isn’t enough for him. He wants to make his own index.

Scott Woodward:
These are people who are hungry. They want to understand this sacred record. Yeah, that’s inspiring to hear some of their efforts, it’s…

Janiece Johnson:
And they’re learning about it in a lot of different ways. And then he includes a list of 20, I think it’s 26 books that are mentioned in the Bible, but not in the Bible. So it’s another interesting thing, but I think he wants to have that as a ready reference for anybody who says, No, the Bible is all scripture we’ve got. And he wants to say, Wait, the Bible itself testifies that there is more scripture than what’s included here.

Casey Griffiths:
You made me think of George Reynolds, who makes the first concordance of the Book of Mormon while he’s in prison. He gets sent to prison for practicing plural marriage and makes good use of his time by producing the very first concordance of the Book of Mormon, which we just take all this stuff for granted now. You just search and it shows up on your iPad or phone or whatever. But they’re doing the hard work of, you know, putting down where they’re finding these golden phrases in the Book of Mormon.

Janiece Johnson:
Well, and I think that there’s thinking about that process, like, the importance of the difference between studying and just reading. So my other favorite book belonged to William McLellin, early Apostle, in and out of the Church, all over the place, but converted to the Book of Mormon. His first edition, this probably isn’t the only first edition he had, but the first five pages are filled with his own index and his own studying system. So he started out alphabetically like, like Frederick G. Williams did, and then it keeps expanding. But he’s got all these different topics, and each topic gets a little symbol, and then he lists every page number where that topic shows up in the Book of Mormon. And so like, his entry for ministering, it has a little symbol by it. It’s just an equal sign. The equal sign is the symbol for, for ministering. Minister, Ministered, Ministering is the entry. And then he has found the 52 times where that word shows up in the, in the Book of Mormon. I think that if we do a digital search, he missed one. And then when you go through his book, every time that that idea shows up, you have the little equal sign in the margins.

Janiece Johnson:
There is something to that kind of work to try and learn about the, you know, to try and study in that way. This is not a casual relationship with, with scripture.

Scott Woodward:
No. In fact, William E. McClellin is a really fascinating case study. He is out of the Church, I think, officially in what, 1838? I think he’s excommunicated. I don’t think he comes back after ’38. Is that your understanding?

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah, I think ’38 is it.

Scott Woodward:
So here’s what’s so fascinating. So he’s out of the Church since 1838, and he criticizes the Church, he criticizes Joseph. But when people criticize the Book of Mormon to him, he cannot abide it. In fact, I want to read. Can I just read a little snippet? And I want your…

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Your thoughts on this, Janiece, as well as, like, any other converts or those who left the Church, specifically, that you know, reacted similarly. So here someone wrote him a letter, and he is responding. The date is 1880. Think how long he’s been out of the Church. What? 42 years. He’s an old man now. And one of the lines he says, I have no faith in Mormonism. So that’s, this is where he’s at in 1880. But then he says this. He says, “I don’t know that I’m surprised at a thinking man for rejecting LDS-ism, as it’s now developed in any of all the branches of what’s called Mormonism. But when a man goes at the Book of Mormon, he touches the apple of my eye. He fights against truth, against purity, against light, against the purest or one of the truest, purest books on earth. I have more confidence in the Book of Mormon than any book of this wide earth, and it’s not because I don’t know its contents, for I have probably read it through 20 times.

Scott Woodward:
“I have read it carefully through within a year and made many notes on it.” Some of the notes you just mentioned, Janiece.

Janiece Johnson:
Well, Scott, I actually, I mean, I can’t prove this, but I wonder if that, if he’s describing this book because it’s in this, that he’s talking about this specific book and how much time he spent with this book, particularly.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and then he says this. He says, “It must be that a man does not love purity when he finds fault with the Book of Mormon.” Two exclamation points. “Fight the wrongs of LDS-ism as much as you please,” he said, “but let that unique, that inimitable book alone. “Close quote. He is fired up about the Book of Mormon. He’s been out of the Church 42 years, and he just, he can’t… I know there’s another testimony where he says, basically, I don’t know what to do with the Book of Mormon. I know that book is true, but I, I don’t have confidence in Mormonism. He’s kind of conflicted to his dying day about this amazing, remarkable book. Any other converts that you see, is this a pattern or is this kind of unique to William E. McLellin that the Book of Mormon had such hold on them that even when they maybe lose faith in the Church as an institution or as Joseph Smith, they cannot let go of the Book of Mormon.

Janiece Johnson:
No, there’s, there are multiple accounts. So all of this, I’m working on a book on early Book of Mormon reception. So how people were converted to the book and how they use the book. I think that I’m going to have a chapter that’s called Book as Critic, because there are some who find fault with the people and have a very hard time with the limited humans who are in the Church and will separate themselves with, from the Church because of it, but will actually come back and use the book to critique the Church. It’s a, it’s a fascinating thing. They’re not always quite so aware of how those critiques could also be applied to themselves. But, but this is a very consistent pattern that we have of people who still believe in the Book of Mormon.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, you’re making me think of David Whitmer here. David Whitmer didn’t even think there should be a Doctrine and Covenants got and mad because they were putting in offices like the high priests, and he kept saying, Well, that’s not in the Book of Mormon. Like, what are you guys doing? So that’s an interesting phenomenon. Janiece, let me ask a question. A lot of times when we talk about contemporary movements with, with the Restoration, there’s a lot of churches out there in Joseph Smith’s time trying to do some of the things we’re doing, like restoring early Christianity, that’s an Alexander Campbell thing, or even doing unconventional things with marriage, like the Oneida community or communal societies. Is there anything like the Book of Mormon out there in any of these other movements? Anything that claims to have heavenly origins or that ties people to it?

Janiece Johnson:
So you get lots of commentary on scripture. So like Mary Baker, the head of Christian science, the, you know, she is the mother of Christian science, she will write a commentary on the Bible, and you have lots of commentaries on the Bible, lots of people who are rewriting or expanding, or Vincent Wimbush, who is a scholar of this period of the Bible calls it scriptualizing, that they’re taking scripture and they’re expanding on it. I think that Ann Lee is probably the closest parallel, but the Doctrine and Covenants is a better parallel for Ann Lee because she’s illiterate. She doesn’t write anything down. One of her followers, one of her disciples, specifically writes down her revelations and then publishes them after her death. And so that fits more in the genre of Doctrine and Covenants than it does Book of Mormon. Like, Joseph is the only one who intends to produce a book, right? And, you know, we get, with like Kinderhook plates and other random things, we get some other parallels for people wanting to provide translations of ancient things. I mean, this is also a time of Egyptomania. Like, they’ve just found the Rosetta Stone, and they’re excited about, you know, all sorts of things ancient. But Joseph is the only one that produces a book, and that is a really remarkable thing, a 600 page book, no less.

Janiece Johnson:
One of my good friends who’s, Liz Fenton, who’s a professor, an English professor at the University of Vermont. She loves… She’s not a Latter-day Saint. She’s obsessed with the Book of Mormon. She loves the Book of Mormon. I think there are scholars out there who are not Latter-day Saints who have really studied the Book of Mormon and recognize just how complex the Book of Mormon is. I’ve seen a lot of freshmen Book of Mormon students go through that process of thinking that they knew the Book of Mormon. They went to four years of seminary. They’ve been a member their whole lives. Of course, they know the Book of Mormon until they take their first test or until, you know, you ask them questions about a complicated narrative. One of my favorite kind of allusions. So Brigham Young writes a letter to Mary Ann Young in 1841. He’s on a mission. So he’s talking about being a missionary. And he I feel like Aminadab, and offers no explanation. Do you guys know the reference?

Scott Woodward:
He’s the writing on the wall guy, right?

Janiece Johnson:
He’s the writing on the wall guy. So this is Helaman 5. He shows up. His name shows up once in the Book of Mormon. That’s one for Scott. It shows up. I’m sure you already had one, Casey. This totally obscure Book of Mormon reference, but it’s like quoting movies between him and Mary Ann. It is a shared shorthand. He says, I feel, I feel like the charity of Aminidab. Aminidab had left the Church and then is, like, reconverted or remembered of this when this miraculous event happens. And Brigham feels like him as a missionary, as he’s sharing the gospel with other people. He feels like that. But it is so fascinating to me that he doesn’t have to explain that to Mary Ann. She knew her Book of Mormon. She loved her Book of Mormon. She was converted to the Book of Mormon before, long before Brigham was. Well, two years before Brigham was. It took Brigham two years of studying the Book of Mormon to be converted. They’re not married yet. They don’t know each other yet, so. But she is converted to the Book of Mormon very quickly, and then she is a prolific lender of her book out to people who, who can’t get their own book.

Janiece Johnson:
Joseph Holbrook is looking for a Book of Mormon, and his cousin Mary Ann Angel has one, and she lends it out to him for 72 hours. Like, her, her Book of Mormon lending is so prolific that her obituary talks about how much she did it. This is a woman who loves the Book of Mormon. And so, Brigham can make this off-handed comment about this totally obscure Book of Mormon reference, and she gets it. There’s no, you know she’s going to understand it. It’s a shorthand. It’s a shared, it’s a communal sort of knowledge and love for this new book of scripture.

Scott Woodward:
So it seems like if we’re going to step back and kind of synthesize what we’ve talked about the last hour, Janiece, like, it seems like your thesis is if we ask, like, What’s, what’s the most important things we should know about these early converts? Really high up on the list is, do not underestimate their relationship with the Book of Mormon and the role that that book played in their conversion and their continuing to endure in the Church, and some of them even out of the Church, with the conviction of the truthfulness of the Restoration. Is that a fair summary or what would you add to that?

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah. No, I think that don’t underestimate the power of the Book of Mormon but, and the power of scripture. You know, sometimes we have to pay close attention. We have to find in a journal account, find these, you know, obscure references to Aminidab. Mary Haskin Parker is a 16-year-old girl in Nauvoo, and in her journal, she writes for a while, for about a month. She, she reads something every day after dinner. And so we can see which day she reads the Book of Mormon, and which day she reads the Bible, and which day she reads a novel. It takes a lot to, to kind of get a more complete understanding of it.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s just a big shout out, honestly, to you. I mean, that is very meticulous, careful, probably laborious, in some cases, research, and…

Janiece Johnson:
In all cases, really.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Well, to thank you, I guess. Thank you for doing that research so that the rest of us can benefit from that. That’s remarkable what you’ve already told us. And I think there’s ready application to everything that you’ve said about those early converts to us today.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ll just make this assertion, too. Sometimes there’s speculation about new religious movements that are tied to a person, you know, a charismatic leader. In fact, a lot of antagonists of the Church felt like, if we can kill Joseph Smith, the whole thing will collapse, cut off the head of the snake, and the body will die. This adherence to the Book of Mormon, this connection with it, might explain why we endured, because it wasn’t just centered around this one charismatic person. It was the ideas, it was the teachings. It was the book that kind of kept everybody connected together.

Janiece Johnson:
And as I look at those people’s relationship with the book, that is the thing. Like this is not just something casual that maybe every once in a while they check it out. Caroline Barnes Crosby has a hard time with the Book of Mormon. She picks it up and puts it back down and picks it up, and it takes her a while to gain a testimony of the Book of Mormon. But as I look at my own relationship with the Book of Mormon, it has grown in a lot of different ways. But it is just like any relationship. It takes time to grow. It takes time for us to be converted. It’s never an, you know, an instantaneous thing. It’s a process. But when scripture becomes written on our souls, it changes us. And that is a beautiful, remarkable thing. The word of God has the ability to change us and to seal us to God.

Scott Woodward:
Even if you read it digitally, Casey.

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It can still have that impact.

Janiece Johnson:
Even if you don’t like your paper.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, you guys need to join the 21st century. I’m sorry.

Scott Woodward:
If our listeners want to go deeper in learning more about these early converts, early men and women, where would you recommend they go? Any good sources you could recommend for people to go dig deeper?

Janiece Johnson:
So I published a journal article, which kind of lays out my whole plan for the book. It was published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, and that gives kind of the basics of this argument. The last issue of the Ensign has an article that I wrote on kind of the wide variety of people’s different conversions, that there’s never just one way that people are converting to the Book of Mormon, the last issue of the Ensign.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, before they, before they switched over to Liahona.

Janiece Johnson:
At the Maxwell Institute, I gave one of their annual Book of Mormon lectures, specifically on, on this.

Janiece Johnson:
You could probably link to those things in the show notes. But that will give you a few more examples of this kind of, until my book comes out.

Casey Griffiths:
I have found the Ensighn article. It’s in the December 2020 Ensign. It’s on my iPad, you guys. Are you okay with that?

Scott Woodward:
I don’t know, a little…

Casey Griffiths:
It’s called A Witness of One’s Own by Janiece Johnson, and so. That’s a great place. It’s free. You can…

Janiece Johnson:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Access some of Janiece’s remarkable work that she’s done, too. How has your research helped strengthen your witness of the Restoration and helped you draw closer to Jesus Christ?

Janiece Johnson:
I love the Book of Mormon. Doing this research not only reinforces that love and that witness that I have, that Joseph was a prophet of God and that he translated by the gift and power of God. I may not get all the particulars. I may have lots of questions about process and about, you know, how much of the language is Joseph and how much of it is the translation, whether it’s a loose or a tight translation. But I believe that Joseph is a prophet of God and that this was a miraculous thing that he was able to translate the Book of Mormon. My life is better because I have the Book of Mormon in it, and I am inspired by these early Saints. Sometimes I feel like I am a little chastised by these early Saints because I realize that I’ve been kind of a slacker, and I haven’t been studying enough that I’ve just been reading. And, you know, and I think that there is always, scripture is always valuable, even if we’re just reading a verse a day and we have that ritual of connecting ourselves with, with scripture. But there is something remarkable that happens when we dedicate ourselves to study. The divine piece of this book has changed me.

Janiece Johnson:
I better understand God because of the Book of Mormon. I have a better testimony of Joseph Smith as a it because I study the Book of Mormon. And when I make that effort, I am rewarded.

Scott Woodward:
Sounds like the Book of Mormon is still doing very well what it did in that first generation. It’s done it to you. I think Casey and I, we could both attest that we’re talking about three Book of Mormon converts right here on this episode. It still does its amazing work, and it does it really, really well.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, Janiece, this has been a pleasure, and we hope a lot of people find your research and take a look at what you’ve done.

Scott Woodward:
This has just been a thrill. Thank you so much, Janiece.

Janiece Johnson:
It’s been lovely to be here with you..