Scott Woodward:
 Did Joseph Smith ever consider his Bible translation work finished? Will the JST ever be canonized and replace the King James Version as the official Latter-day Saint Bible? Why haven’t any other of our prophets since Joseph Smith engaged in similar translation work? How can we reconcile Joseph Smith’s Bible revision work with Deuteronomy 4:2 and Revelation 22:19, which actually warn against adding to the Bible? Is there any evidence whatsoever that Joseph Smith consulted any outside sources in his Bible translation work? Does the fact that Joseph Smith’s Bible translation started out with massive amounts of new and significant revealed text and then tapered off at the end with only minor revisions support the narrative that Joseph became a fallen prophet? If not, how else can we make sense of this timeline? In today’s episode of Church History Matters, we dive into all of these questions and more with Dr. Kent Jackson, a premier scholar on Joseph Smith’s Bible translation. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our fourth episode in this series dealing with Joseph Smith’s non-Book of Mormon translations and revelations. Now, let’s get into it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Well, hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
Hello, Casey. How you doing?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’m doing great. I’m really excited about our episode today and our guest that we have with us.

Scott Woodward:
Yes. We have been quoting him all series long.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I don’t know if quoting or stealing is the best word, but we’ve definitely been using a lot of his work, but we are pretty excited to have one of the real leading experts on the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible with us today. That’s Dr. Kent P. Jackson.

Scott Woodward:
Welcome, Kent.

Kent Jackson:
Thank you.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Welcome, Kent. Good to have you with us.

Kent Jackson:
Thank you.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Now, we have questions from listeners here, but first I want to give our listeners a little biographical background on you, and you can offer any corrections as we go. So Kent P. Jackson was a professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. He was born in Salt Lake City, received a bachelor’s in ancient studies from BYU, a master’s and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan. He is a former associate dean of religious education and associate director of the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. He’s married and has five children, and I should mention you’ve written two books on the Joseph Smith Translation, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, which is excellent, and Understanding Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible, which we both drew from pretty heavily in our podcast where we talked about this. So Kent, you’ve had a chance to listen to a couple of the podcasts. How’d we do? Are there any corrections you want to offer?

Scott Woodward:
Please.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Which we will humbly accept. Please, go ahead.

Kent Jackson:
I don’t know if I’m here to give corrections, so if you have things that you feel bad about, Casey, you can bring them up, and I’ll respond.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I just want to note that Kent sent some corrections, which I am going to read off right now, just so you know we’re doing the best we can, but we want to get things right. So in the podcast, we said that Joseph Smith bought the Bible. Kent clarified Oliver Cowdery bought the Bible. The Bible was purchased from the Grandin Press in Palmyra. Joseph Smith was living in Harmony. The inscription in the Bible that we mentioned is in Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting. Then Kent offered a couple corrections about scribes for the Joseph Smith Translation. John Whitmer replaced Oliver Cowdery, then Emma acted as scribe, then Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams was scribe for the last year of translation.

Kent Jackson:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And we thank you for that and welcome your corrections.

Kent Jackson:
Yeah. It’s interesting on the scribes that Joseph Smith had the people work with him on the JST who were very closest to him. First it was Oliver Cowdery, who obviously had had great experience as Joseph Smith’s scribe working on the Book of Mormon, and when he gets sent on a mission to the West, the prophet uses John Whitmer, and John Whitmer then was replaced for a time, maybe just for one day, with Emma Smith.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Kent Jackson:
Maybe Whitmer wasn’t available that day, so there are two pages that are in handwriting of Emma Smith, and then John Whitmer’s the scribe again. And those Emma Smith pages weren’t discovered until 1995.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, wow.

Kent Jackson:
Her handwriting looks quite a bit like that of John Whitmer, and nobody had ever noticed the different handwriting. In 1995 Robert Matthews and Scott Faulring, two BYU colleagues, examined those pages carefully against some Emma Smith letters in Independence, Missouri, and voilà, there we had Emma Smith’s handwriting for two pages.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Kent Jackson:
And then John Whitmer gets sent on a mission to Kirtland to oversee the church there, and by then Sidney Rigdon had become a convert, had moved to Fayette, where the prophet was. And then he was the primary scribe for a good part of what was left. He was the primary scribe for something like two-thirds of the total manuscript pages. And then, in turn, he was, of course, a member of the First Presidency, and then he was released from being a scribe, and Frederick G. Williams, another member of the First Presidency, continued to scribe. So this is a project, as you two emphasize, that was very, very important to the prophet, very close to his heart, and he took it very seriously and kept it very close to him.

Scott Woodward:
So let me ask a kind of a preliminary question here, Kent, and that is, how did you first get involved in studying Joseph Smith’s Bible translation so deeply and then making it a major focus of your career?

Kent Jackson:
I was educated in the Old Testament, the Ancient Near East, and when I came to BYU and joined the faculty in religious education, I just naturally gravitated to focus on the intersection of the Bible and the Restoration. So Restoration/Bible connections were something that I always wanted to pursue. The JST project came to me out of the blue when Scott Faulring, a BYU researcher in communications with the Community of Christ, initiated a project of having BYU and the Community of Christ and the LDS Church work together to publish a transcription, and I soon became in charge of that, and so for something like six years, I worked with the scans and photographs of the original manuscripts and with a small army of really highly motivated and smart students to transcribe all the original manuscript pages. And we published that transcription in 2004, and since then I’ve been entrapped by the intrigue and the excitement of dealing with this great revelation that was dictated from the lips of the Prophet Joseph Smith through inspiration and recorded by his scribes.

Scott Woodward:
So you got in so deep you couldn’t get out.

Kent Jackson:
Yes, and that’s a good thing.

Scott Woodward:
Absolutely.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Okay. Well, let me dive in with a couple questions. First one might come from Scott right here.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, shoot.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We sort of prefaced a lot of our discussion on the JST by listing off five things that it could be. One of them was original lost content, and when it comes down to it, Kent, you’ve probably studied this more than any living person right now. Scott’s question was, are you comfortable saying that it was original lost content? Or what’s the best way to approach that idea of what exactly the JST is? How would you define what Joseph Smith was trying to do?

Scott Woodward:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because now I’m remembering I expressed skepticism that we could know for sure that it was partially, at least, a restoration of original content, because wouldn’t we have to have some original content to compare it to or a statement from Joseph claiming that that’s what he was doing in order for us to be able to make that claim?

Kent Jackson:
And we have neither of those two things that you said.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
It’s unfortunate that the default assumption of members of the church, including curriculum writers and others, is that the JST is a restoration of original Bible content.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
Let me say first that Joseph Smith never made that claim. The JST doesn’t make that claim, except obliquely with one experience with Moses in Moses chapter 1, but the prophet never made that claim, and we should be very, very cautious about that. I can’t rule things out that I can’t prove negatives for.

Scott Woodward:
Right. Right.

Kent Jackson:
But I think, despite the fact that it’s a default assumption in the Church, we can’t say that it’s restoration of original content, because Joseph Smith never gave us any reason to believe that. And the reason it’s popularly believed that it’s restoration of original Bible content is because we have scriptures in 1 Nephi, as well as Joseph Smith himself, talking about plain and precious things being lost from the Bible, but when Nephi talks about plain and precious things being lost from the Bible, he doesn’t tell us that the Lord was going to fix the Bible. He says the Lord’s going to restore those things through the Book of Mormon.

Scott Woodward:
Through the Book of Mormon, that’s right.

Kent Jackson:
By having those truths be revealed to the Nephite prophets and come forth in the Book of Mormon and other books, which would include the Doctrine and Covenants. But it’s not something that can be ruled out, because like you said we have nothing to compare it to to say, uh-huh, this was original content. I think other suggested ways are much more persuasive. For example, I give in the book—Casey, how many were there? Four or five suggestions?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, I think we used five suggestions as our outline in the podcast.

Kent Jackson:
Okay. One is that the JST restores things that were said and done but were never recorded. And I’m quite sure that something like that took place.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
For example, there are all kinds of passages that most Latter-day Saints aren’t even aware of in the New Testament where the JST provides context for Jesus’s words and lead-ins for his words and explanations for Jesus’s words. Those things may never have been in the Bible, but the prophet is restoring things that were said or context that is necessary to help us better understand the biblical text.

Scott Woodward:
So we call that more, like, inspired commentary or restoration of context, or…?

Kent Jackson:
Yeah, restoration of context. I would never use the word commentary because commentary means an external, modern writer giving his views on the topic. I don’t think that’s that.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
I think that’s Joseph Smith providing context, restoring context, so that the words of Jesus can be understood better.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, that’s fair.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And we’re clear in saying that Joseph Smith himself never definitively said what the JST was supposed to be, and so we’re working backwards here from the manuscripts, just looking at them. Is that the best way to approach it, Kent?

Kent Jackson:
Absolutely. Absolutely. The best way to approach it is to take what we have, like you said, and work backwards, and say what we can observe. Not what we can prove, but what we can observe from the final product. Now, in an early chapter in my book, Understanding the Joseph Smith Translation, I mentioned that there are two ways to try to figure out what the JST is. One is to focus on the intention and the origin, and the other is to focus on the outcome. And when we focus on the outcome and then look backwards, as you said, Casey, then we can see what I think are the three easiest ways to look at the JST. It contains what I call New Text, capital N, capital T. I think that’s a whole category here. It contains New Text, and then it contains revised text, and revised text is of two sorts: revised text that doesn’t change the meaning, and then revised text that does change the meaning. So that’s what we see when we look at the final product and go backwards and say, what do we have? And when we do it that way, then we’re not trying to invent interpretations or motives or anything like that.

Scott Woodward:
And that kind of leads into another question that a listener named Gabe, Gabe from Rexburg. Welcome, Gabe. Gabe said, he said, “In my mind, you have sufficiently shown in your series that the Joseph Smith Translation is more than simply a translation of the Bible, that it’s many different things”—you just mentioned those three categories there, I think is what Gabe’s referring to, “but we still call it a translation. That’s how the Lord referred to it in Doctrine and Covenants 124. The scriptures teach that the Lord speaks in our language according to our understanding, but with all that you’ve shared, is ‘translation’ an insufficient word? Is there a better word by which we could refer to the Joseph Smith Translation?” What are your thoughts, Kent?

Kent Jackson:
In the Joseph Smith Papers, they have adopted the term for labeling the manuscripts, “revisions.” And revision is a perfectly good word, and I use it all the time, but I will defend the word translation as well.

Scott Woodward:
Mm. Okay.

Kent Jackson:
We have hang-ups with the word translation because the word translation has a different meaning today than it did in Joseph Smith’s day. For us, what does translation mean? It means to convey from one language to another. In Joseph Smith’s day, I think in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, that’s the fifth definition given. The other definitions are “to convey from one place to another place,“ or “convey from one person to another person,“ or “change.” And so our word translation today focuses on language. The word translation in Joseph Smith’s day, nobody had a problem with the word translation in his day. The word meant to move from one form to another, to change, or to move from one person to another.

Scott Woodward:
So, like, when Joseph talks about translated beings.

Kent Jackson:
Exactly.

Scott Woodward:
He’s talking about a being who is changed from one state to another state.

Kent Jackson:
Absolutely. And from one location to another location.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
And I think all of that’s important for the Eighth Article of Faith as well, “the Bible … as far as it is translated correctly.” That’s not an issue of whether the King James translators got it right or anybody else got it right. That’s an issue of the whole process of transmission from original writers to the present. But yeah, revision—what the prophet was doing, he was revising and he was adding new material, revealing new material to us.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That might be a good lead-in to the next question, which comes from TJ in Riverton, Utah. He says, “How do we reconcile the scriptures in Deuteronomy 4:2 and Revelation 22:19 regarding taking away or adding to the words of this book with the Joseph Smith Translation?” I think the word revision when it comes to the Bible might make some people uncomfortable. How do you reconcile that?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Our evangelical brothers and sisters don’t really like people messing with the Bible.

Kent Jackson:
That’s right. And they have used both those verses on us because of our belief in the Book of Mormon as well, as you know.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Kent Jackson:
I looked at those passages last night, and Moses says, none of you can add or take away from the Bible. We get that. But he wasn’t talking to God. God can inspire prophets to do things. And same thing with the one in the Book of Revelation, you and I aren’t authorized. As smart as we think we are, we’re not authorized to mess with the Bible, right?

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Kent Jackson:
But God can, and you can raise up a prophet to do that.

Scott Woodward:
And it seems like there was a whole lot of scripture that was added to the Bible post Deuteronomy 4:2, wasn’t there?

Kent Jackson:
Right. But I’m sure that Moses was only talking about his own book.

Scott Woodward:
Right. And Revelation 22:19, that seems to also be a reference only to John’s Book of Revelation, correct?

Kent Jackson:
Sure.

Scott Woodward:
There was no such thing as a Bible proper in terms of the New Testament when he wrote that.

Kent Jackson:
Correct.

Scott Woodward:
Right. That happens a few centuries later.

Kent Jackson:
Correct. Not only that, but John’s three letters were probably all written after the Book of Revelation. So he wasn’t talking about the Bible.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Kent Jackson:
There was no Bible.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. That’s important. So TJ, I don’t know if you’re asking for yourself or if you’ve got friends, Bible-believing friends who have pestered you about that, but I think those are the beginnings of some good answers in response to that. I know Elder Holland also gave an entire conference talk about Revelation 22:19.

Kent Jackson:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
I’m trying to remember the name of that talk where he gives a whole lot of context there. What’s the name of that talk?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I think it’s called “His Words Never Cease,” if I remember correctly.

Scott Woodward:
That’s exactly right. “His Words Never Cease.” That’s a great talk where you can dig into more detail where Elder Holland will explain about especially the Book of Revelation a whole lot deeper. So great question, TJ. Thank you.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
This comes from Lauren. She said, “Now that we have the text of the Bible revision made by Joseph Smith based on the prophet’s original manuscript, do you think it will be canonized?” And here’s the other question I’m going to combine with it. Another person asked, “Do you believe the JST will ever be adopted or replace the King James Version in the Church?”

Kent Jackson:
That’s obviously not up to the three of us to determine that, but our jobs as scholars and teachers, the three of us and others, is to make the Joseph Smith Translation available and to talk about it and inform people about it, and the Brethren will choose to do what they will choose to do, but I might say that the very best stuff of the Joseph Smith Translation is already in our scriptures. The Book of Moses is a highlight, or the highlight, of the whole Joseph Smith Translation, and Joseph Smith—Matthew, which is Matthew 24 from the JST, is the gem of the New Testament. It’s the finest thing in the New Testament. So we already have the best stuff. And when it comes to the footnotes in our scriptures, the people who have worked on those footnotes have done a super good job. And we have the very, very best stuff. So all together we have the bulk of the new text that the prophet revealed, as far as the Joseph Smith Translation, in the Pearl of Great Price now and have since 1851, and then we have the best of the smaller changes that were made in the verses in the footnotes and the excerpts in the back of the LDS Bible. And all together, we have about 800 verses of those 3,600 verses that the prophet changed. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but so many of the changes the prophet made were specific to the King James Translation because of the old language in it that we really do have the best stuff available to us.

Scott Woodward:
So would you say we have everything of doctrinal significance already in the scriptures?

Kent Jackson:
I would never say anything that definitive about any topic, but, no, they have done a wonderful job. There were two JST changes that weren’t in the 1979 edition of the English LDS Bible that I really wished were in there, and they were put in in the 2013 edition with a lot of other stuff. So we’re well taken care of.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
But it is a delight—having said that, it is a delight to just read the JST text, especially in the Gospels, that has the whole thing in a continuous mode. It’s a delight to do that because the prophet put in lots of filler words and transitions that make it read so smoothly and so nicely when we read it not as footnotes but as a continuous text.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you. Now, we know that Joseph Smith wanted to publish the JST in his lifetime, and the Lord even commands it to happen, and we know that some money was raised by the Saints to do so, but then that money gets sent off in different directions. I think they bought a hemp farm and other things instead of publishing this translation. Do you get the sense that Joseph felt like he actually was done with the translation? I hear some people say Joseph never finished the translation, and others say he absolutely finished it. Some say 1833 was the end of his first round, or his first go at it, but he intended to continue to translate, but those efforts to publish in his lifetime seem to suggest that he felt it was finished. So what’s your take on that, Kent? Did Joseph actually finish the translation, or did he intend to do more?

Kent Jackson:
The answer is clear that he finished it. He considered it finished. He considered it done. There are a number of revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants that talk about the Joseph Smith Translation where the Lord encourages the prophet to get to work on it or to speed it up, or the Lord tells the Saints to build a house for the prophet so he can work on it, but once he declared it finished—so at the end of the manuscript, they wrote, done. They wrote, finished, and then they wrote to the church and said, we have finished the translation. From that moment on, there is never discussion of translating. It’s, let’s get it printed. And the prophet tried very hard to get it printed. He intended to get it printed. He wanted it to get printed, and the Lord told him to print it. I think the last reference chronologically in the Doctrine and Covenants to the Joseph Smith Translation is in section 124, where the Lord says, “Let William Law,” who was a counselor in the First Presidency, “publish the new translation of my holy word unto the inhabitants of the earth.” So William Law was assigned by God to put the process in motion to get the Joseph Smith Translation published, and he apostatized.

Scott Woodward:
We’re going to say he dropped the ball on that assignment.

Kent Jackson:
Right. Well stated. We can blame him for the fact that it didn’t get published in the prophet’s life.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, man.

Kent Jackson:
But we can blame other circumstances as well.

Scott Woodward:
Sure. Okay. Yeah, that’s great. So it was completed. And that’s July 1833, done.

Kent Jackson:
July 1833, done.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
Now, another common misconception in the Church is that the prophet continued to work on it through the rest of his life. That’s been proven to be untrue as well. It didn’t happen. So really, from 1833 until the prophet’s death 11 years later, he considered it done. He called it done. The Saints knew it was done and had no intentions of doing anything on that.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. So that might actually answer another question from a listener named Lisa from Minnesota. She asked, “Why was Joseph Smith the only modern prophet to engage in such translation work? In other words, did Joseph Smith have a singular role compared to other modern prophets, or just a different mission?” And it seems like what I’m hearing you say, Kent, is that, well, by July of 1833, that project was done, so no other prophet needed to work on it. Is there any other response you want to say to Lisa’s good question there?

Kent Jackson:
I think in many ways, Joseph Smith’s mission was unique. All of our prophets have been prophets, and we’re blessed to have 15 prophets, seers, and revelators in the world today. Joseph Smith had kind of a unique calling to be the guy to restore and lay the foundation, and prophets since then have been taking the church in great directions and will continue to do so.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Kent Jackson:
There undoubtedly are other changes that could be made in biblical passages that the prophet didn’t address, but as far as he was concerned, it was done, and it appears that no prophet has had this assignment to do anything more beyond that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. It seems in D&C 21, where Joseph Smith is referred to as prophet, seer, revelator, and translator, that that last designation has never been used for any other apostles since Joseph. He almost had that unique fourth designation. Would you say that’s fair to say that way?

Kent Jackson:
Yeah. For now, anyway.

Scott Woodward:
For now, yeah. That’s right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s open-ended.

Scott Woodward:
Well, thank you.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Well, let me ask another question. This one’s a little complex. We had a listener write in and say, “How do you reconcile passages in the JST that appear problematic? Is it possible Joseph got anything wrong? For instance, some Latter-day Saint scholars have suggested that perhaps 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is an editorial addition to the writings of Paul by another party, but in the Joseph Smith Translation, it’s not removed, it’s edited, which suggests that in Joseph’s mind it belonged there, at least in its edited form. In your model of the Joseph Smith Translation, what it is, and how it came to be, could such an errant passage be justly corrected instead of removed?” I hope that all makes sense.

Kent Jackson:
Sure. First of all, we don’t know if that’s an errant passage. I think many of us wish it weren’t in the Bible.

Scott Woodward:
Wait. Should we read it? What does that say?

Kent Jackson:
It says women shouldn’t talk in church. They should go home and listen to their husbands.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, oh.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yep. Yep.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, I see how that’s a little spicy.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We read that in family scripture study the other night, and my wife and my daughters all had a few choice words to say about Paul. So it would be nice if we could say that that was an errant passage, but you’re saying we don’t know if it’s an errant passage. And Kent, you and I talked about this before we started recording, but it doesn’t seem like Joseph Smith was very into removing Biblical passages, with one major exception. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kent Jackson:
Well, yeah. For the most part—so the prophet did edit those two verses and change the word “speak” to “rule.” Said women don’t rule in the church. Now, if he were doing that in 2023, he may have been inspired to edit it a little bit more than that, but I think the principle is, for the most part, the prophet dealt with the text that was there. He didn’t deal with what we call text-critical questions, of whether some editor put that in there and it didn’t really belong there, except in a very few cases. The most well-known case, of course, is the Song of Solomon, which he rejected altogether as being inspired scripture.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But outside of that, he doesn’t seem to be very interested in removing parts of the Bible with the exception of the Song of Solomon, which most people agree probably didn’t originate with Solomon, correct?

Kent Jackson:
Absolutely not with Solomon. It’s love poetry, and it’s, if you like that kind of stuff, it’s nice love poetry.

Scott Woodward:
If you’re into that kind of thing.

Kent Jackson:
But it certainly isn’t inspired scripture.

Scott Woodward:
And he did omit one phrase in the Sermon on the Mount, right? The whosoever is angry with his brother “without a cause.” He took out a little bit there, right? A little bit of excising.

Kent Jackson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But, yeah, so you’re saying that it wasn’t his MO to take text out so much as to comment on the text that was already there.

Kent Jackson:
Well, to revise the text that was there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, sorry. I used the word comment again. That’s right. Yeah, it’s not a commentary. It’s a revision. That’s right.

Kent Jackson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So let me restate, then. It is possible that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is an editorial addition that Paul didn’t write. It’s also possible that Paul did write it. We don’t know. Scholarship is still unsettled on that question. But either way, it was Joseph Smith’s modus operandi to deal with the text that was there rather than to decide whether or not a text should be there. Is that a fair way of stating it?

Kent Jackson:
Generally speaking, I think that’s the right way to say it.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
Also, I would point out, too, that there are several books in the Old Testament where the prophet, where he was going through with his scribes, and the prophet just said, correct, for whole books, in some cases for several chapters. Now, I don’t think that meant there was nothing in that chapter, in that book, that could be corrected. I think that meant we’re not going to deal with this, or it’s good enough as it is, and we have better things to do.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s pretty much the whole minor prophets of the Old Testament. It seems like Joseph Smith just lists correct for the majority of them and then kind of moves on, would be an example of that kind of thing.

Kent Jackson:
Yes. And it’s worth pointing out where the prophet’s emphasis was: Genesis and the four Gospels. Two-thirds of the pages of the Joseph Smith Translation are Genesis and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Those were the things that are at the heart of our religion, at the heart of the gospel. They’re way more important to Latter-day Saints than Paul’s letters, for example, and those are the ones where the prophet spent the most time and made the most changes. And putting Genesis in that category makes Genesis a Christian book. It’s one of the most important contributions of the Joseph Smith Translation is helping us to see that the earliest history of humankind on this planet was a Christian history, where the fulness of the gospel was revealed to our first parents.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Very good. Well, let’s move on to another question. This one comes from Kadisha, and she asked about one of the more recent controversies. That’s the suggestion that Joseph Smith may have used outside sources as part of the Biblical revision project, like Adam Clarke, for instance. Kent, you’ve written a little bit about this. Is there evidence that Adam Clarke, in his commentary, was a source for Joseph Smith’s translation?

Kent Jackson:
My research tells me no, none whatsoever. Let’s look at the broader question here. So, as I look at the Joseph Smith Translation, I see different kinds of things. I see revelation of new texts, word for word, that is, revelation of words through the Holy Ghost. The Lord isn’t just giving his prophet ideas, but words. So much of what we have in the Book of Moses today was dictated, clear through, with hardly a hesitation or a stutter, and very, very few later corrections. And it gives me the impression that God was just revealing words to the prophet all the way through, and his scribes were just writing as fast as they could. There are other places where I think that the Lord inspired his prophet with thoughts, through revelation, real revelation of thoughts, but the prophet himself needed to find the words. So can you see what I’m—the distinction I’m trying to make there?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
So in one case, the Lord reveals words. In other cases, he reveals ideas and the prophet needs to find the words. Now, there’s a test case for that second category of revelation.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Kent Jackson:
Because the prophet revised Matthew chapter 26 twice with different scribes months apart. All the evidence is he simply forgot that he had done it the time before.

Scott Woodward:
Ah. Oh, wow.

Kent Jackson:
So as we compare those, what we find is that probably in that case the Lord was revealing ideas, but not necessarily the words in every case.

Scott Woodward:
Because why? Was there a different wording in each case?

Kent Jackson:
Exactly. Because they are—they’re not identical. They have differences, but the interesting thing to me is that the Lord is revealing the same concepts to the prophet, but the prophet is sometimes inserting those new concepts in different locations in the chapter. So we get the same material, but not in the exact words. and not in the exact places. That, to me, is a remarkable, remarkable thing.

Scott Woodward:
Very interesting.

Kent Jackson:
We also have cases where the prophet went through and edited previous revisions that he had made, like the Holy Spirit was working on him to refine it, to make it better, make it more helpful. So the question then comes up, is the prophet using other sources that he had available to him to do the translation? And I like to look at the analogy of the brother of Jared. The brother of Jared was commanded to build a ship, the Lord gave him instructions, but there was a rather significant lack in the blueprints for the ships. They didn’t have the light, right? And so the brother of Jared, it was his job to come up with a solution in that particular case. And so my question is did the prophet also use his own common sense to make changes? Did he use what I would call prophetic instincts without details? And did he use other sources? And the answer is probably all those things. And you two brought up the word—I guess I didn’t know it was Casey’s favorite word, the word Wot, W O T. The word wot means know, K N O W. So W O T means K N O W, right?

Scott Woodward:
Okay. Uh-huh.

Kent Jackson:
So the prophet dictated that to be changed to his scribes in a couple of places. Then finally, in Exodus, the prophet dictated a note to a scribe that said, change wot to know every time we find it.

Scott Woodward:
Mm. Okay.

Kent Jackson:
And so that got changed. There are no wots in the Joseph Smith Translation. Now, the past tense, Casey, I’ll give you a quiz here. What is the past tense of wot?

Scott Woodward:
Oh, shoot.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh man. I’m going to fail this. I do not know.

Scott Woodward:
You don’t wot what it is?

Kent Jackson:
You don’t wot what it is. The past tense of wot is wist.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Wist.

Kent Jackson:
W I S T.

Scott Woodward:
Wist.

Kent Jackson:
The prophet changed some of those, but not all of those. So we can ask a question: how did the Prophet know that wot means know and wist means knew? He may have learned that in Sunday school class or in some conversation and then changed it. So we could consider that an outside source. Here’s another one: the word conversation. Conversation does not mean conversation. The King James Translation, conversation means behavior or conduct.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
Did God reveal that to Joseph Smith, or did Joseph Smith learn that in school, or what, in order to make that change? So I have no disagreement with the prophet learning something somewhere outside of revelation and incorporating that into the JST.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
So the question comes up about my friend Professor Thomas Wayment and his theory that was published some years ago about the prophet availing himself of outside commentaries and books. I would have no problem had Joseph Smith done that.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Kent Jackson:
Because it makes sense that if the prophet learned something that he could use in addition to revelation to make the new translation better, nothing wrong with that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
So Professor Wayment, in his two published articles on this, identified about 30 passages that he thinks were dependent upon Adam Clarke, who was a Scottish Bible commentary, wrote a 5,000-page commentary on the whole Bible. I went very carefully through those 30-plus examples, and it’s my firm conclusion that not a single one of those was influenced in any way by Adam Clarke at all.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Kent Jackson:
The passages are typically one- or two-word vague similarities.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
They’re rarely identical wording, and most of the passages he identified are very unimportant passages, with unimportant revisions, so I do not believe at all that there was any influence by Adam Clarke on the JST.

Scott Woodward:
In our last episode, we went through this controversy for the entirety of the episode. So if any listeners want to go deeper into this, we quote Kent’s article at length. We have links to it in the show notes, so if you want to dig deep into Kent’s remarkable analysis of all 30 of those proposed Adam Clarke convergences, you can go check that out.

Kent Jackson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Now, Kent, I’ve also heard some people suggest, like, maybe Buck’s Theological Dictionary, kind of a Bible dictionary of Joseph Smith’s day, could have been a source, or other things. And like you’re saying, like, we’re open to Joseph doing something like that, that’s fine, but have you ever seen actual evidence for Joseph quoting from a commentary or a theological dictionary, a Bible dictionary of his day? Is there any phrases that you think, okay, that’s actually Joseph doing that?

Kent Jackson:
None.

Scott Woodward:
None. Okay.

Kent Jackson:
But there’s one interesting case in the Book of Isaiah where the word unicorn appears.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, yeah.

Kent Jackson:
Now, we know what unicorns are.

Scott Woodward:
Uh-huh.

Kent Jackson:
The King James translators picked a very unhappy word when they pick unicorns there.

Scott Woodward:
I feel like unicorns are happy, though. Aren’t unicorns generally a happy creature?

Kent Jackson:
They’re always happy. Yes, I stand corrected.

Scott Woodward:
I’m just teasing.

Kent Jackson:
So it’s a re’em in Hebrew.

Scott Woodward:
Re’em.

Kent Jackson:
Its identity is not known. It appears three or four times in the Old Testament. Its identity is not known. The translators of the Greek Septuagint picked the word rhinoceros. That’s where the English word unicorn—it’s a one-corn animal, so the Septuagint translators thought it was a rhinoceros. May or may not have been a rhinoceros. I don’t know. But when the prophet comes to that in one place—not in all the places where the word appears, but in one place is—he has the word R E hyphen E M. So he transliterates the Hebrew word instead of fixing the word unicorn. He left the word unicorn in other places, but he changes it in one place. I think the Lord has better things to do than to reveal something as nitpicky and inconsequential to the prophet Joseph Smith. I may be wrong on that, so I think he learned that somewhere, and maybe he was in a sermon somewhere where somebody was preaching and came to that word and said, it’s not a unicorn, it’s a re-em, and maybe the prophet got it from that, or maybe he saw it in a book. But cases like that are exceedingly rare, and so I would say, again, I haven’t seen any evidence that Joseph Smith consulted any book of any kind working on the JST.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So here’s another question. You mentioned that the Book of Moses represents the added text, the new text. There’s a lot of new text in the Book of Moses as we have it today, and then later on there’s a lot of small changes that Joseph is making that may or may not change the meaning of the text.

Kent Jackson:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
So there’s one listener that’s keyed into that, and he has a question about the timetable of that. His name is Scott. I like his name. Scott asked this: He said, “I have heard some critics differentiate the parts of the JST on a timeline, mainly separating the early writings, like Book of Moses and other doctrinally rich sections, from the more mundane and grammatical edits that came during the latter half. They make claim that there were events in Joseph’s personal life that perhaps left him less worthy of clear revelation. Thus he turned to his own abilities and perhaps the abilities of others to clarify the Bible.” So question number one is, “Is there any truth to this timeline critique?” And then he says, “Perhaps these critiques originate from those who believe that Joseph’s plural marriages were done in error and he started losing spiritual guidance once he started down that road. Do the timelines overlap?”

Kent Jackson:
You know, during the prophet’s lifetime, the final years of his life, there were members of the church who felt that he was fallen. It was generally people who were out of the loop, didn’t have access to temple blessings, hadn’t heard of plural marriage except through rumors, who concocted the notion that the prophet had become a fallen prophet, and then after the Saints moved to the West, many of the people who became the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built their idea on the notion that Joseph Smith had become a fallen prophet. So I think your listener is referring to that kind of notion there, and, of course, I reject it entirely. The prophet Joseph Smith was never a fallen prophet. He was the Lord’s anointed from the first moment of his calling through his death. But chronologically, it is true to say that the big explosion of new stuff came very, very early on.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
And one reason for that is what you pointed out in one of your podcasts, and that is that the Lord wanted to get the Zion story out there so that he could then reveal the idea of Zion to the Latter-day Saints, as you two explained very, very well. And so we get the visions of Moses, then we get the stories of Adam and Eve. Then what do we get? We get Enoch and Zion, and then the Lord can start revealing to the saints, let’s build Zion.

Scott Woodward:
Time to gather to Kirtland. Time to build Zion. Yeah.

Kent Jackson:
Exactly. Yeah. And that’s why so much of that kind of really powerful new material came very early in the Restoration.

Scott Woodward:
Hmm. That’s good. Yeah, and the timeline doesn’t seem to overlap at all with polygamy, right? Like 1833 July, he’s done. Joseph doesn’t get involved with polygamy. The Fanny Alger timeline is, what, somewhere between 1834-36? Somewhere in there. Probably ’35. So he wasn’t even involved even a little bit yet with polygamy by the time the JST was completely done.

Kent Jackson:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So that was a thought I had when I was reading that question, that the timelines do not overlap in terms of polygamy, but interesting. I’ve actually never heard that critique before until this listener sent that in. Anything else either of you want to say about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I work a lot with Community of Christ, and I—this is something that would be commonly quoted among historical scholars from their camp, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but that to any extent he was involved in plural marriage, he was a fallen prophet. I just think this is a reach, though, to tie that to the JST when the timeline clearly shows that the work was done before any of that stuff kind of comes up, so.

Scott Woodward:
Good point.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s a big reach in my mind, but yeah, it’s an interesting thing to bring up.

Scott Woodward:
Very good.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So, Kent, if you could ask Joseph Smith any clarifying questions about the translation project, what would you ask? So if you were in a room with Joseph Smith and you had a chance to pick his brain a little bit, what’s some of the questions you would ask him?

Kent Jackson:
As much as I would love to hang out with the Prophet Joseph Smith, I’ve never thought of that question before. *inaudible* Okay. I would ask him if the work that I’ve done is acceptable to him. That’s what I want to know.

Scott Woodward:
I love that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Good question. This might be our last question. So you have probably studied this more thoroughly than any other person that’s still around today, and you’re still a believer. How come? What makes you a believer in the prophetic mission of Joseph Smith and the core truth claims of the Restoration?

Kent Jackson:
I’m a believer in the work of the prophet Joseph Smith and the core truths of the Restoration because of the Holy Ghost, but I have to say that intellectually, I am dazzled when I look at what the prophet Joseph Smith produced with his new translation of the Bible. Just think of it: We have scriptural text now that tells us that Adam and Eve were Christians, had the fullness of the gospel in their lives, that they taught it to their children. We have, through the JST, explanations of what animal sacrifice is about, where Satan comes from, what he’s about. We learned that Noah and Enoch shared in the covenant promises that we have, and they had the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that Moses did. So all of these things dazzle me by how intricately the Joseph Smith Translation ties in with the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants with one united effort on the part of the Lord to reveal to us in the last days the fulness of the gospel so that we can do what the Lord wants us to do. All of these things just dazzle me as I go through the Gospels and read how the JST adds to the words of Jesus and clarifies the words of Jesus. All of this bears testimony to me that the Gospel is true, and that Joseph Smith was precisely who he said he was.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Well, Kent Jackson, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you so much for your great scholarship, for your testimony, for all you’ve added to our understanding of this important topic.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. We can’t thank you enough for sharing your time with us to help clarify and share your study of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. Thank you very much.

Kent Jackson:
Thank you.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. For more of Dr. Kent Jackson’s excellent work on the Joseph Smith Translation, we encourage you to check out a few of his books, including, first, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, second, Understanding Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible, and third, a study volume just published in 2021 entitled Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: The Joseph Smith Translation, and the King James Translation in Parallel Columns, printed by BYU Press and Deseret Book. In our next episode, we turn to the process of and complexities involved with the canonization of Joseph Smith’s revelations in the Book of Commandments and the Doctrine and Covenants. If you’re enjoying Church History Matters, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.