The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism's Most Controversial Scripture 0190603860, 9780190603861

Table of contents :
Cover
The Pearl of Greatest Price
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Canonization and Background
Canonization
Backgrounds and Precedents
1. Re-​visioning the Bible: The Joseph Smith Translation
Moses: “Caught Up to an Exceeding High Mountain” 
The Prophecy of Enoch
Matthew 24: Preserving Millennialism
Joseph Smith Translation and Scriptural Coherence
Joseph Smith Translation as Revelatory Catalyst
2. “Written by His Own Hand”: The Book of Abraham
Joseph Smith and Seership
Language and Godly Access
The Ancient Language Quest
Personal Connections
Egyptian Artifacts and the Rise of Egyptomania
The Book of Abraham and Temple Theology
The History of a Controversy
From Mummies to Scripture: Rethinking Translation
3. “Owing to the Many Reports”: Historicizing Mormonism 
Recentering Joseph
The Story of a Story
4. “Not to Be Trammeled”: To Creed or Not to Creed 
The Articles of Faith in Their Context and Since
Epilogue
Sources
Index

Citation preview

The Pearl of Greatest Price

The Pearl of Greatest Price Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture T E R RY L   G I V E N S w ith B R IA N M . HAU G L I D

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Data: Names: Givens, Terryl, author. | Hauglid, Brian M., 1954– author. Title: The pearl of greatest price : Mormonism’s most controversial scripture / by Terryl Givens ; with Brian M. Hauglid. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019010152 | ISBN 9780190603861 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190603878 (updf) | ISBN 9780190603885 (epub) | ISBN 9780190603892 (online) Subjects: LCSH: Pearl of Great Price—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Sacred books—History. | Mormon Church—Sacred books—History. Classification: LCC BX8629. P53 G58 2019 | DDC 289.3/24—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010152 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments

Introduction: Canonization and Background Canonization Backgrounds and Precedents

vii

1

1 8

1. Re-​visioning the Bible: The Joseph Smith Translation

27

2. “Written by His Own Hand”: The Book of Abraham

109

3. “Owing to the Many Reports”: Historicizing Mormonism 

223

4. “Not to Be Trammeled”: To Creed or Not to Creed 

241

Epilogue

271

Sources Index

275 279

Moses: “Caught Up to an Exceeding High Mountain”  The Prophecy of Enoch Matthew 24: Preserving Millennialism Joseph Smith Translation and Scriptural Coherence Joseph Smith Translation as Revelatory Catalyst Joseph Smith and Seership Language and Godly Access The Ancient Language Quest Personal Connections Egyptian Artifacts and the Rise of Egyptomania The Book of Abraham and Temple Theology The History of a Controversy From Mummies to Scripture: Rethinking Translation Recentering Joseph The Story of a Story

The Articles of Faith in Their Context and Since

37 42 60 68 77

109 113 114 117 118 121 140 180 223 226 254

Acknowledgments The conception behind this book was Brian Hauglid’s. His work with the Book of Abraham, its controversies, and its textual history was an important element in its composition. A number of readers contributed invaluable criticisms—​not all of which made it into this final version. Given the vigorously debated nature and origin of the Book of Abraham in particular, as well as the other Pearl of Great Price controversies that strike at the heart of the self-​conceiving of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, I  am particularly grateful for these readers’ generous and undogmatic assistance. I  was fortunate to have one of the tradition’s premier historians, Jed Woodworth, make many substantive corrections and additions. Robin Jensen, one of the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers volume on the Book of Abraham, generously reviewed relevant sections. Morgan Davis of Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute and Stephen Smoot offered learned criticism, and Nathaniel Givens, Gerald Smith, and Douglas Berkey added their suggestions. As always, I thank my editor at Oxford, Cynthia Read, a friend and support through my years as a scholar. I express appreciation to my colleagues at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, where I completed much of the MS as a visiting fellow in 2017. Finally, my thanks to the Neal A.  Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, for sabbatical funding while at Oxford.

 Introduction Canonization and Background

Canonization Winter came early that year, arriving with bluster—​but not daunting enough to dampen enthusiasm for Utah’s latest attraction. “Notwithstanding the inclement weather last night,” reported the Salt Lake Daily Herald on 10 October 1880, “there was a fair attendance at Jennings’ Hall to witness again the entertainment being given there nightly, ‘The Egyptian Mysteries.’ ” “The applause was frequent,” the journalist added, “and showed that the audience appreciated the entertainment. It will be repeated at the same place and hour tomorrow evening.”1 A few blocks away, as the troupe prepared for their repeat performance, America’s fascination with all things Egyptian was manifesting itself among a more sober audience, and to rather more lasting effect for America’s religious history. Shortly after 2 p.m., in the Sunday afternoon session of the fiftieth semiannual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints,2 Elder Orson Pratt rose to begin the ritual of the sustaining of church officers. The conference had begun five days before. Now, as Pratt took the stand, the first name he pronounced was familiar to everyone sitting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle—​the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the last surviving Latter-​day Saint who had been present at Joseph Smith’s 1844 assassination in Carthage, Illinois. “It is moved and seconded,” intoned the venerable Pratt—​the only living apostle called with the original group in 1835, and the man who would himself be now presiding had Young not demoted him five years earlier3—​“that President John Taylor be a prophet, seer, and revelator and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints in all the world.” The announcement was eagerly anticipated and long overdue. Brigham Young, the “Lion of the Lord,” had passed more than three years ago, and Taylor had been functioning as the de facto leader of the church, but from his position as the senior apostle. After a hiatus lasting for years, the throngs

2  The Pearl of Greatest Price filling the tabernacle hoped to see at last a new leader appointed in Young’s stead. At the Friday session two days before, George Q. Cannon, an apostle and former counselor to Young, had told a disappointed assemblage that such a step would only be forthcoming “when it shall be the counsel of our Heavenly Father that a First Presidency shall be again organized.” In the meantime, he chided, “you can wait, as well as we, for the voice of the Lord.”4 But they didn’t have to wait long at all. Wilford Woodruff recorded in his journal that the very next evening, “the Apostles then met in Council at 6 oclock and Decided to Organize the first Presidency of the Church. Wilford Woodruff Nominated John Taylor to be the President . . . and it was Carried unanimously. President John Taylor then Chose George Q Cannon as his first Councillor and Joseph F Smith as his Second councillor.”5 (In his journal, Cannon expressed his shock at the call: “before the names of the counselors were called I had a presentiment that my name would be mentioned and I trembled all over. My nerves twitched all over my body and I could scarcely control myself. When my name was mentioned I rose to my feet and begged of the brethren to excuse me from filling that position.”)6 Now on this Sunday afternoon, the men of the church were seated according to their priesthood offices, following the protocol for a solemn assembly when a new leadership was seated. Voting by priesthood quorums, they unanimously raised their right hands to sustain Young’s successor. The congregation next sustained the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Presidents of Seventy, and so on, down to the temple architect and the auditing committee, ending with the church reporter. After this conference highlight—​only the third such sustaining in half a century7—​apostle George Q. Cannon rose to the stand. With no fanfare, no sense of drama or historic development, he matter-​of-​factly said: “I hold in my hand the revised edition of the Doctrine and Covenants one which the members and certainly all the officers of the church have seen and read; also the Pearl of Great Price. In Kirtland, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, in its original form, was submitted for the acceptance of the officers and members of the church; and as some additions have been made of revelations since the first publication it was deemed advisable to submit it now for the acceptance of the members of the church if they so choose.” Joseph F. Smith then moved that the volumes be so endorsed by the congregation, and the motion carried unanimously.8 And so the proposal to canonize a new book of scripture, as reported by the Salt Lake Herald two days after the conference, took the form of a six-​ word parenthetical—​“also the Pearl of Great Price”—​with not a word of

Introduction

3

commentary, explanation, or motive. This is ironic because the elevation to canonical status of a work first published as a pamphlet twenty-nine years earlier by the president of the British Mission was vastly more significant than the mere expansion of the Doctrine and Covenants, and more farreaching in its effects than John Taylor’s assumption of the title of church president. A set of texts attributed to Abraham and deriving from Egyptian papyri, along with purported writings of Moses and Enoch the prophet, in addition to autobiographical elements from Joseph Smith’s personal writings, constituted the bulk of this new compilation, giving canonical status to the tradition’s richest—and most controversial—theological writings and to an autobiographical narrative written by its founder, Joseph Smith. The church had reprinted the original fifty-six-page pamphlet in 1878 with a particularly important addition: Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage. (The 1878 edition also included additional portions of Smith’s Book of Moses, making a total page count of seventy-one.) In one abrupt and unanticipated gesture, the entirety of that volume was now made scripture. Why was so little attention given to the addition to the Latter-day Saint (LDS) canon of the first— and only—scriptural volume since the founding decade, one that betokened such enormous doctrinal significance? The virtual stealth by which it became the fourth “standard work” of the Church of Jesus Christ on that October afternoon typifies its subsequent history: it is the least studied, written about, understood, and appreciated book in the LDS canon, but it outweighs in theological consequence and influence all the rest. Without the Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ would lose its principal evangelizing tool and its most conspicuous sign of Smith’s prophetic vocation but relatively little of its doctrine. (By itself, noted one religious scholar, “the Book of Mormon . . . may not have added enough doctrinal novelty to the Christian tradition to have made Mormonism more than a Protestant sect.”)9 With the Doctrine and Covenants, the church would lose a good bit of its ecclesiology—organizational templates and guidelines for church government and its offices—but would not suffer a devastating loss of the deeper theological underpinnings of the faith. In fact, the entire section of that volume of scripture that was denominated “Doctrine” (commonly known as the Lectures on Faith) was decanonized in 1921. Even less relied on for distinctive Latter-day Saint teachings is the Bible, which the Latterday Saints embrace as scripture but with the caveat embodied in Smith’s creedal statement “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.”10 Its very inadequacy as a guide to definitive religious

4  The Pearl of Greatest Price truth was, in fact, the catalyst that led Smith to the spiritual quest that culminated in the “Restoration,” or the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints. It is, rather, in the pages of the Pearl of Great Price that we find the essential foundations of a radically new religious tradition. Here Old Testament narratives are totally recast as human ascent rather than fall, a new covenant theology is propounded that reaches back to human premortality, God’s nature is redefined in ways diametrically opposed to Christian creedal formulations, Trinitarianism is undone, the possibilities of human theosis are first limned, and the template of the Zion society Smith was called to build is first laid out. Finally, LDS religion is a religion of the temple. Perplexed by competing religious claims, anguished by fears for his own soul, and finding no clarity from his biblical study, Smith followed the injunction of James to seek wisdom directly from God.11 Kneeling in secluded prayer, he sought an assurance of personal salvation. In response, he wrote, “I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee.”12 The question is, why was this not the end of the story? Why did Smith not, following Luther and Wesley and myriad others, feel his quest at an end and thereafter share the good news of his and humanity’s salvation? Perhaps the single most distinctive hallmark of Smith’s religion-​making was his subsequent conviction that salvation was collective and collaborative, not personal and individual. His conception culminated in discerning God’s grand design of providing a means to redeem the entire human family, incorporating them into an eternal chain of belonging through sacramental rituals and binding covenants. The locus for the earthly consummation of these preparations is to be found within the temples that crowned Smith’s religious project. And the Pearl of Great Price is the scriptural text that largely informs and guides that temple theology. Mormonism, in other words, is absolutely inconceivable apart from this collection of scriptural texts that provided the faith’s theological core from the beginning but only received canonical recognition in 1880. At the present moment, controversies regarding multiple accounts of Smith’s “First Vision,” as well as the origins of the text of the Book of Abraham, have brought unprecedented attention to this hitherto largely neglected work. The consequence is that the Pearl of Great Price represents at one and the same time the greatest vulnerabilities and the greatest strengths of the Church of Jesus Christ.

Introduction  5 The Pearl of Great Price is a seemingly incongruous mélange of texts that include not only those of purported ancient authorship (of Enoch, Moses, and Abraham) along with Smith’s autobiographical texts but also his extensive emendations to Matthew 24 and a creedal summary of Mormon beliefs he provided to a Chicago newspaper editor. Franklin Dewey Richards, president of the British Mission and an apostle since 1848, compiled these scattered writings and published them for the use of British Saints and his missionaries in 1851, months after his call to preside. He wrote to his uncle that his intention was not “to pioneer our doctrines to the world, so much as for the use of the Elders and Saints to arm and better qualify them for their service in our great war.”13 Richards elaborated his purposes in a preface to the first published edition. He intended to demonstrate that the “doctrine and ordinances” of the Church of Jesus Christ were “the same as were revealed to Adam for his salvation after his expulsion from the garden, and the same that he handed down and caused to be taught to his generations after him, as the only means appointed of God by which the generations of men may regain his presence.”14 This is a perhaps surprising feature of Smith’s manifold teachings to single out for unique emphasis in a diverse compendium. Clearly, Richards felt that the key to understanding Joseph Smith’s mission was not to perceive it as the contributing of a few missing pieces to the gospel puzzle or a redirection more in consonance with Holy Writ. On the contrary, by identifying the Restoration with the recuperation of an Adamic rather than merely Christian dispensation, Richards was signaling an entirely new understanding of Christian covenant theology. Positing Adamic foundations to the gospel meant the collapse of all those polarities on which traditional Christian understanding was based: the Old and New Testaments, covenants of works and of grace, historic and spiritual Israel, typology and fulfillment—​even catastrophic fall and reparative redemption—​were now newly integrated into a seamless vision of a premortally conceived plan delivered in the Garden and made new again in Smith’s day, in the era Saints refer to as the dispensation of the fulness of times. The very first sentence ever published from Smith’s biblical revision put the case baldly: “and it came to pass that Enoch continued his speech, saying: Behold, our father Adam taught these things, and many have believed and become the sons of God.”15 Although he was in most regards a meticulous record-​keeper, Richards’s journals offer no details of what was passing through his mind in regard to this project that would outshine in significance all his other manifold labors.

6  The Pearl of Greatest Price “He doesn’t mention the gathering of material, the decision to publish or any other details,” one of his editors notes. Little wonder; at this time in his life, he had just become the emigration agent for the Church, was constantly counseling with the other members of the Twelve who were in Europe at the time—​John Taylor in France and Germany (who were printing the Book of Mormon and other periodicals while Lorenzo Snow in Italy and Erastus Snow in Denmark were also publishing). Richards was coordinating the reprinting of the Book of Mormon, the hymnal, Parley Pratt’s Voice of Warning, and other works. He was moving the Millennial Star to a weekly production and was writing an editorial each week, reflecting an insatiable appetite among the British members for church literature. He was gratefully reprinting the Official Communications from the First Presidency as official information and instruction for the Saints.16

Apparently, his assembly and printing of the Pearl of Great Price was, in his estimation, just one more project among myriad works he was ushering into print, not deserving of any particular notice in the larger field of his endeavors. From his introduction to the work, we know that Richards believed that the availability of the documents he selected—​principally the recovered Mosaic text along with the firsthand accounts of Smith’s encounters with heavenly beings calling him to his work—​would serve to impress readers “with a sense of the Divine calling, and holy ordination, of the man by whom these revelations, translations, and narrations have been communicated to us.”17 In this regard, Richards’s strategy was part of a growing trend in Mormon evangelizing, the foregrounding of Joseph Smith’s particular role in the project that Latter-​day Saints refer to as the Restoration—​a role that is as seemingly obvious today as Martin Luther’s role in Lutheranism. However, Smith’s personal prominence was not always emphasized in early presentations of the church and its beliefs. Like many pamphlets published in far-​flung missions, Richards’s compilation was directed both to “all careful students of the scriptures” as well as those just “beginning in the gospel.” In other words, he envisioned it as a tool for evangelizing the open-​ minded, and for edifying the already converted. Like all LDS tracts of the day, it also contained what the author considered “confirmatory evidence of the rectitude” of the LDS teachings. The precise contents of this first edition were as follows.

Introduction

7

1. Extracts from the prophecy of Enoch, together with some writings of Moses. Both of these sections were interpolations added to the Book of Genesis in Smith’s reworking of the Bible. Portions had been printed previously in the church’s newspaper, The Evening and Morning Star. 2. The Book of Abraham:  writings arising from Smith’s work with Egyptian papyri that he acquired in 1835. Portions of these writings had been published in the church newspaper, Times and Seasons. 3. A reworking of Matthew 24, from Smith’s new translation of the New Testament. 4. Two revelations that would be added to the Doctrine and Covenants in 1876 (D&C 77 and 87);18 a partial key to the Book of Revelation; and a prophecy about an impending civil war. The first had been published in Times and Seasons in 1844. 5. Extracts from the life story of Joseph Smith. These portions recounted the essentials of Smith’s 1820 theophany and the origins of the Book of Mormon and had already been published serially in Times and Seasons. 6. Extracts from the Doctrine and Covenants, consisting principally of the Articles and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ (pertaining to sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper; offices and organization of the Priesthood) and a revelation affirming the contemporary era as the last dispensation. These revelations (D&C 20, 27, and 107) had been in print since 1835. 7. The Articles of Faith: a creed consisting of thirteen affirmations, first published in 1842. 8. A concluding poem, “What Is Truth,” by British convert John Jaques, which appeared in the British hymnal Richards was publishing at that time. After the 1878 republication of The Pearl of Great Price—which in that year also included the plural marriage revelation (D&C 132)—was canonized in 1880, the other Doctrine and Covenants excerpts were removed as redundant, as was the concluding poem, which was little more than a typographical adornment. That left the five principal sections I will deal with in this book. Each presents its own questions and dilemmas, as follows. First, the Genesis material. Why was it not published earlier in its entirety?19 And given its theological significance, why did it take half a century to become canonized? And how do these portions fit into Smith’s larger project, the “New Translation” of the Bible?

8  The Pearl of Greatest Price Second, the Book of Abraham chapters. How were they produced, and does their unique manner of production bear on their scriptural status? What are the challenges to their standing as inspired scripture today? Third, Matthew 24. Why was such special significance accorded to one New Testament chapter out of the dozens Smith reworked? Fourth, Joseph Smith’s personal history. What does its elevation to scriptural status signify? Why this particular version—​and how significantly does it vary from other versions? Fifth, the Articles of Faith. Given Smith’s often-​expressed disdain for creeds, why did the church move to canonize these expressions of church belief, and why at this time? How do they, and how do they not, function as a church creed? By way of background, however, it will be useful first to establish what was new and what was old in Richards’s decision to make and publish this compilation.

Backgrounds and Precedents The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​ day Saints began with a book. Missionaries had been going abroad to share the news of the Book of Mormon before its signatures were even bound into final form. Unwilling to wait for the finished volumes, Christian Whitmer, brother to the witness to the gold plates, David, “copied from the manuscript the teachings and doctrine of Christ, being the things which we were commanded to preach.”20 Similarly anxious, others took signatures as they came off the press in the fall of 1829 and used them in preaching or distributed them to the curious. Thomas Marsh journeyed from Lyons, New  York, to inquire about the “Golden Book.” He said that he “found Martin Harris at the printing office, in Palmyra, where the first sixteen pages of the Book of Mormon had just been struck off, the proof sheet of which I obtained from the printer and took with me. . . . After staying there two days I started for Charleston, Mass., highly pleased with the information I  had obtained concerning the new found book.” Another visitor from Lyons, Solomon Chamberlain, had had a vision in 1816 of “a book to come forth, like unto the Bible.” Smith’s brother Hyrum took Chamberlain to the printing office in Palmyra, and gave him not one but four sixteen-​page signatures. Convinced that he had found the book of his vision, Chamberlain “took them with their leave and pursued my journey

Introduction  9 to Canada, and I preached all that I knew concerning Mormonism, to all both high and low, rich and poor, and thus you see this was the first that ever printed Mormonism was preached to this generation.”21 Joseph Smith and his scribe Oliver Cowdery also took loose sheets from the printing to share with their own relatives. From Smith’s perspective, the value of these previews was not so much as preaching guides or distillations of gospel truths but as tangible evidence that his disputed claims about a magnificent record were about to be realized: “there begins to be a great call for our books in this country,” he wrote in October 1829. “The minds of the people are very much excited when they find that there is a copyright obtained and that there is really books about to be printed [sic].”22 Once the completed volume came off the press, Samuel Smith filled his rucksack with the volumes and departed as the first officially called missionary of the new church. Members of the new church were not nicknamed after their founder, like Lutherans, or after distinctive practices, like the Quakers and Shakers and Baptists, or after their approach to salvation, like the Methodists. They were named after their book. Mormon missionaries could preach from the Bible and frequently debated Protestant preachers using that shared scripture. But the Book of Mormon was the basis of their claim to be recipients of a new revelation from heaven, and it was by that designation that they came to be known. However, well before Smith presented his “gold Bible” to a dubious world, he had received the word of God in theophanies, visions, personal revelations—​and the organization of the church and the publication of the Book of Mormon accelerated, rather than abrogated, that stream of revelation. As Smith declared at the time of the church’s formal incorporation, God had much more to say “by way of commandment to the church.”23 The challenge was in how to disseminate those new directives pouring through the mind and voice of Smith and onto paper. So two years after founding, Smith mustered the resources to procure a press and began publication of the Evening and the Morning Star, a new church paper. As the opening words of the inaugural issue explained, “the Star will borrow its light from sacred sources and be devoted to the revelations of God as made known to his servants by the Holy Ghost.”24 Twenty-​six revelations, in whole or in part, were published in the newspaper’s first thirteen issues.25 A collection of almost all the revelations received to date was assembled as the Book of Commandments in 1833 and published in an incomplete version (sixty-​five of a likely seventy-​seven),26 after a mob destroyed the press

10  The Pearl of Greatest Price and scattered the work-​in-​progress. In 1835, the Latter-​day Saints published an even larger collection, this time containing 100 revelations (along with meeting minutes and “explanations”), titled the Doctrine and Covenants. However, even with the Book of Mormon as the principal evidence of a new era in God’s dealing with mankind, and even with the revelations that describe the “principles for the regulation of the church” and the “law” of the church, LDS missionaries and leaders felt the lack of materials that would provide an introduction to the church—​its founding, its core theology and basic teachings—​in an efficient and accessible way.27 The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants attempted in part to answer that need with a set of seven “lectures on theology” (more often called the “lectures on faith”) which made up the “Doctrine” section of the volume. Much of the material was basic Christian catechism on the necessity for faith and on the attributes of God. Two radical, distinctive doctrines found their way in. One was a detailed definition of salvation as theosis—​the process of becoming like God, hinted at in the Enoch text Smith had produced in 1830. The second was also a doctrine born of Smith’s 1830 work on retranslating Genesis. Lecture 2 recounts how an angel visited Adam and Eve and taught them the principle of sacrifice and its significance as a type of a Savior yet to come, the only begotten of the Father. Thus, the lecture continues, “the plan of redemption [was] revealed to man,” and “from this we can see that the whole human family, in the early age of their existence, in all their different branches, had this knowledge.”28 In the mission fields of England, where written LDS resources were inadequate to the demand, elders produced their own pamphlets. (Such publications also helped fund their missions.) The apostle Orson Hyde began the practice with a single-​sheet broadside in 1836:  “A Prophetic Warning to all the churches of Every Sect and Denomination.” Like most jeremiads, it is unlikely that it proved very effective, asserting that Christianity was in apostasy and that “the great body of the clergy are acting without authority from God.” As proof, Hyde cited the dearth of spiritual gifts. Then, rather tendentiously, he urged readers to “REPENT! REPENT!” and “Pray, therefore, that God may send unto you some servant of his, who is authorized from on high, to administer to you the ordinances of the gospel.”29 The next year, apostle Parley Pratt went to the other loquacious extreme and published a work of 216 pages, A Voice of Warning.30 An incredibly effective polemical work, it was the most widely distributed book of Mormon authorship well into the twentieth century. The most curious omission in Pratt’s otherwise

Introduction  11 substantial treatment of Mormonism was the name “Joseph Smith.” Smith had not achieved the fame or notoriety he would in following years. But in an 1837 saga of the LDS project of Restoration, with a whole chapter devoted to the Book of Mormon, one would expect at least a mention of his name.31 Apparently, Pratt considered Joseph Smith the messenger, not the message. Antebellum America, as well as England, was in the throes of a fervent millennialism, and the term “restoration” was on many tongues. Missionaries were preaching a gospel restored, and LDS evangelizing was oriented around the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and the return of spiritual gifts—​ not the particular instrument of those developments. The printing press facilitated the spectacular early growth of the Church of Jesus Christ, but that rapid growth in converts in turn spurred the need for more and better vehicles for the evangelization and indoctrination of the newly converted. The LDS center of gravity was shifting from America to Great Britain. In 1837, the first Mormon missionaries departed for England. In three years, membership was over 3,500,32 more than were yet settled in the church’s gathering place of Nauvoo, Illinois.33 British membership increased thereafter by thousands yearly, exacerbating the acute need for printed materials. Smith was bombarded with urgent requests for permission to reprint church scriptures and hymnals for use in the far-​flung mission fields. Pleas came from elders in New York, Germany, and England, as missionaries found themselves underequipped to preach to the unconverted and firm up the newly baptized. Smith assessed the critical need, which had now grown beyond requiring a third printing of the Book of Mormon alone. (The second had been an 1837 printing of 3,000–​5,000).34 Hymnals were needed for congregations abroad, as well as a new edition of the Doctrine and Covenants. (Inventory had been long depleted since its 1835 printing.) And now weighing heavily on Smith were crucial details of an Adamic dispensation and Enoch texts he had brought to light in the process of reworking the Bible into his own “new translation,” only portions of which had seen print in church newspapers and the 1835 Lectures on Faith. In July 1840, these concerns were articulated in this announcement in Times and Seasons: “the spread of truth for a few years past, has been so exceedingly rapid, that, amid the conflicting winds of persecution, that has rolled with unexampled fury upon the heads of the saints; it has been impossible to keep the public supplied with books: and, inasmuch as the universal cry has been ‘Books,’ ‘Books,’ ‘we want Books,’ &c. and none could be had: we announce with pleasure, that effectual measures are now taking

12  The Pearl of Greatest Price to accomplish the long desired object of getting books once more into circulation.”35 A third edition of the Book of Mormon, already in press, was announced, as well as a new hymnal. More groundbreaking, however, was Smith serving notice that funds were needed “for spreading before the world other Books, which are very much desired,” singling out “the necessity of Publishing the new translation of the scriptures” and urging “the saints in general to act the liberal part in subscribing and paying in advance for these valuable works.”36 At the same time, in Nauvoo the church’s High Council appointed two members, Samuel Bent and G. W. Harris, “to go on a mission to procure money to be applied to the purpose of printing” those “valuable works.”37 A few months later, as a new edition of the Book of Mormon was beginning to roll off the presses, Smith was still envisioning the full array of gospel resources about to pour forth: connected with the building up of the kingdom, is the printing and circulation of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Hymn book and the new translation of Scriptures. It is unnecessary to say any thing respecting these works; those who have read them, and who have drank of the stream of knowledge, which they convey, know how to appreciate them, and although fools may have them in derision, yet they are calculated to make men wise unto salvation, and sweep away the cobwebs of superstition of ages, throw a light on the proceedings of Jehovah which have already been accomplished and mark out the future in all its dreadful and glorious realities; those who have tasted the benefit derived from a study of those works, will undoubtedly vie with each other in their zeal for sending them abroad throughout the world, that every son of Adam may enjoy the same privileges and rejoice in the same truths. Here then, beloved brethren is a work to engage in worthy of arch-​angels; a work which will cast into the shade the things which have heretofore been accomplished; a work which kings and prophets and righteous men, in former ages have sought, expected, and earnestly desired to see, but died without the sight: and well, will it be for those who shall aid in carrying into effect the mighty operations of Jehovah.38

A modest third printing of the Book of Mormon came off as planned (2,000 copies), and the First Presidency was confident that, regarding the other books in demand, “those works will soon be supplied.”39 Further light on

Introduction  13 the prevailing state of affairs came in November. Even as Times and Seasons announced a new printing of the Book of Mormon for sale, it attempted to remedy the deficit of the other desperately desired materials by proposing to publish (for the second time) the “Prophecy of Enoch,” along with accounts of “the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the rise of the church, and the restoration of the Priesthood”; since “these three subjects excite more curiosity, create more enquiry, and cause more labor to answer, than any others of our faith.”40 This is a telling remark, confirming a pattern first evident in the promulgation and reception of the Book of Mormon: the reconstituting of a Christian community in ways that replicated early Christian practices (scriptural production, spiritual gifts, communitarianism, etc.) directed public attention not to content as much as to forms, not to theology as much as to praxis, and less toward institutional norms and more toward origins and development. In responding to public appetite for such details, proponents of the new faith embarked on a course that continues to the present: Joseph Smith, visions, angels, gold plates, persecution, and gathering—​these themes were coming to assume a prominence in Mormon messaging that continues unabated. Cowdery had published his account of “some few incidents immediately connected with the rise of this church” in the church’s Messenger and Advocate in 1834 and 1835,41 and it was such a narrative that was now needed for wider dissemination abroad. The apostle Orson Pratt agreed that an account of the Book of Mormon’s origin, the rise of the church, and the restoration of the priesthood was imperative, and he produced a pamphlet of his own to that end in 1840. I have noted that his brother Parley had conspicuously omitted mention of Smith in his own account of the LDS Restoration. Parley Pratt had referred to the Book of Mormon as the keystone of Mormonism, but it was Orson Pratt who recognized that it was the credibility of Smith’s own visions that were really the pivot on which the message of the LDS Restoration rose or fell. Accordingly, Orson Pratt was the first to publicize Smith’s “Several Remarkable Visions,” in an Edinburgh publication. (Pratt was in the British Mission at the time.)42 Smith’s theophany, in which he claimed a personal visitation from God the Father and Jesus Christ, had registered in Smith’s own self-​conceiving as a private, personal conversion experience, more along the lines of John Wesley than Moses (and was accordingly absent from Cowdery’s account). In Orson Pratt’s hands, the sacred encounter of the boy Joseph Smith established his bona fides as a true prophet and came to be publicly proclaimed as such.

14  The Pearl of Greatest Price At about the same time, Orson Hyde and fellow apostle John Page had been appointed to a mission to Palestine and had evangelized extensively through several states en route. From Cincinnati they wrote to Joseph Smith, proposing “to write a set of Lectures upon the faith and doctrine of [our] church, giving a brief history of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and an account of its contents, in as clear and plain style as possible; together with the out lines and organization and government of the church of Latter Day Saints, drawn from the ‘doctrine and Covenants.’ ”43 Two weeks later, on 14 May 1840, Smith responded, “In answer to your inquiries, respecting the translation and publication, . . . History of the church, &c, &c; I would say, that I entirely approve of the same; and give my consent. . . . With respect to publishing any other work, either original, or those which have been published before, you will be governed by circumstances; if you think necessary to do so I shall have no objections whatever.”44 Smith’s plan to publish “the new translation of the scriptures” did not come to fruition, but his intention had been made clear and public, and other willing hands were taking up the task. “Are we at liberty to translate and publish any work, that we may think necessary, or that the circumstances in which we are placed seem to require whether original or works published by the Church?” Hyde had asked, and Smith had given the approval. The need for an overview of Joseph Smith’s mission and the core elements of church government and theology, combined with the imperative to assemble and disseminate Smith’s growing corpus of ancient translations, was made ever more acute by a membership base now growing at an explosive rate. By 1851, British membership had soared to 33,000, almost triple the number of Saints now settled in Utah.45 All that was lacking at this point was an individual with the resources and drive to take the next step in developing an effective overview of the origins and essential beliefs of the LDS Church—​ and that role was to be filled by Franklin D. Richards. Brigham Young introduced Richards to the church when Richards was a fifteen-​year-​old youth. He joined two years later, gathered with the Saints, and was on his way to a mission in England when he learned of Joseph Smith’s murder and returned to Nauvoo. There Richards commenced work with his uncle Willard Richards, who was the church historian. This employment would have given Richards firsthand exposure to crucial documents in LDS history, which background would have served him in good stead for his future work as a pamphlet writer. As the exiled Saints were crossing the Mississippi in 1846, Richards outfitted his wife and young daughter and then

Introduction  15 left them in order to complete his own interrupted mission to England. He rejoined his family at Winter Quarters, Nebraska, two years later and then led them to the Saints in Salt Lake City, where in early 1849 Young called him as an apostle at the age of twenty-​eight. Months later, Richards was called to return to the British Mission, arriving in the spring of the next year.46 In October 1850, Richards was sustained to replace Orson Pratt as president of the British Mission.47 Richards assumed the new position in January, when his name appears as editor of the new year’s first issue of the Millennial Star, a newspaper Parley Pratt had founded eleven years earlier.48 Orson Pratt, a principal engine of both providing and disseminating missionary tracts, had driven circulation of the periodical from 3,800 to over 20,000 semimonthly copies in the two brief years of his presidency.49 If the inheritor of the periodical thought this was the culmination of a trend, he was quickly disabused of the idea. A  few months later, Eli Kelsey, called in October as the new president of the London Conference (mission field equivalents of stakes, diocese-​like church units), shared with Richards his “plans for the more extensive circulation of the printed word,” accompanied by a “mammoth order for books [and] pamphlets.” He proposed a central distribution center for the sale of LDS publications (to be called the Latter-​ day Saints’ Book and Millennial Star Depot), with elaborate plans for publishing, subscribing to, and disseminating church literature more widely.50 There were plenty of writers to fill the need. David Whittaker notes that “from Mormonism’s organized beginnings in 1830 to the eve of the Civil War about ninety Mormons wrote and published religious pamphlets and books.” While Parley and Orson Pratt were the most prolific and doctrinally influential, many others expounded original ideas in exposition, elaboration, and defense of core tenets and practices.51 To accommodate demand, Kelsey proposed enlisting 400 distributors and requested an immediate inventory of 25,000 tracts, just for the London Conference alone.52 Richards was fully on board. As he wrote in a subsequent issue of the periodical, “as an index to our views of enlargement we will state that in 1847 an edition of four thousand hymn books was considered ample for the promised demand; in 1849 the eighth edition of ten thousand was published and the ninth edition now in press [1851] consists of twenty five thousand.”53 At that moment in 1851, however, other matters trumped publishing concerns. As Pratt was transferring the leadership of the mission to Richards, Brigham Young’s Fourth General Epistle (issued in late September

16  The Pearl of Greatest Price 1850) arrived.54 Young exuberantly proclaimed an anticipated doubling of the Salt Lake Valley population in the coming year (and subsequent years) thanks to the work of the Perpetual Emigrating Poor Fund, and called on converts abroad to “come in flocks, like doves to their windows.” This ambitious forecast and command had in mind one particular audience: “we feel to say to the Saints in England . . . the Lord hath done a great work in your midst, and speedily a greater responsibility must rest upon your shoulders.” Concluding the epistle was the announcement that Franklin D.  Richards, in addition to presiding over the British Mission, was one of the “Travelling Agents” of the Fund, charged with helping fulfill the gathering of British converts to Utah. Richards replied to the epistle in mid-​February and was clearly troubled by the scope of the challenge. (“The further the subject [of emigration] is explored, the more dark and forbidding it appears in every aspect.”)55 This paramount obligation left him only a little time, he noted, to attend to other matters—​the most pressing of which was to address the other “constantly increasing branch of our business”: publishing. As he explained, “the present editions of the Hymn Book and the Book of Mormon are almost out of print,” missionary work was “spreading on every hand,” and subscriptions to the Millennial Star—​which he was editing—​were surging past 22,000. He had purchased Orson Pratt’s remaining stock of pamphlets to help fill the void, and he noted to Young that Lorenzo Snow had recently written and published two pamphlets as a missionary in Italy (“The Voice of Joseph” and “The Gospel Restored”).56 It was in this context that Richards took the measure of a burgeoning church membership that was centered not in Utah but in Great Britain, where 73 percent of the combined total resided.57 Relying on both printed sources and his own copies of documents he had had access to as assistant to the church historian,58 he quietly went about compiling his own contribution to the cause. Most preceding pamphlets had been written with an eye to introducing the doctrines of the church or defending the faith. Richards had a different audience in mind. He told his uncle that he had in mind a work “for the use of the Elders and the Saints to arm and better qualify them for their service in our great war.”59 He made a prepublication announcement in July 1851, similarly describing a “new work” intended to help Saints “be more abundantly qualified to set forth and defend the principles of our Holy Faith.”60

Introduction  17 In mid-​August, Richards’s 7,000 copies of a salmon-​colored booklet of fifty-​six pages were offered for sale at 1 shilling per copy. (A year and a half later he would announce its availability in a Welsh translation.)61 He had clearly discerned the needs of the growing church and where the lacunae in church publications were and had produced a work that surpassed all others in collating a remarkable collection of useful documents—​with special attention to the founding events of the church. Cowdery had produced the first attempt at a brief history in his “Letters to W. W. Phelps,” recounting, as the title continued, “the origin of the Book of Mormon and the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints” (1834–​1835).62 Orson Pratt, as I have mentioned, published a narrative history in his 1840 Several Remarkable Visions. Following Pratt’s example, Richards republished accounts of the most important of Smith’s visions—​his 1820 theophany and his encounters with the angel Moroni, leading to the publication of the Book of Mormon. Pratt had composed his own version of Smith’s visions; Richards essentially reprinted Smith’s own account, which the prophet had published serially in Nauvoo, beginning in March 1842 in Times and Seasons. As Hyde had suggested, Richards included “the out lines and organization and government of the church of Latter Day Saints, drawn from the ‘doctrine and Covenants.’ ”63 And consistent with Joseph Smith’s expressed intentions, Richards printed many of the most significant portions of the Moses material from Smith’s new translation of the Bible. Not having a complete manuscript, Richards reprinted those portions that had been available through printed church newspapers, also using handwritten copies of portions he likely had had access to when he worked in the church historian’s office. Since Smith had also produced ancient writings attributed to the patriarch Abraham, Richards included those as well, relying on portions published earlier in the church’s Times and Seasons. Finally, LDS writers had struggled since 1834 to provide a concise summary of church beliefs, a succinct confession of faith that would serve as a standard nucleus of doctrine for members and an economical advertisement to the nonbeliever. The need was particularly acute since the public narrative was dominated by overt hostility and distorted press reports arising from the conflicts the Saints had experienced during their residence in Missouri. Published exposés like E.  D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834) had especially stoked the fires of persecution, with its affidavits attacking Smith’s character and alleging that his claim to have authored the Book of Mormon was fraudulent.64 Orson Pratt had attempted such a summary in his Several

18

The Pearl of Greatest Price

Remarkable Visions, attaching a “sketch of faith and doctrine.” It was a little verbose but the best to date; two years later Smith had published his own summary of beliefs in response to an inquiring Chicago reporter. He enumerated thirteen concise tenets that bore the influence of many of these previous incarnations but were a distinct production. Richards now reprinted these thirteen in his pamphlet as the “Articles of Faith.” Then Richards added two revelations of Smith’s to the mix. What now constitutes Doctrine and Covenants 77 is one of Smith’s more unusual revelations. It consists of a series of questions pertaining to the book of Revelation, and regarding which he received very specific “explanation.”65 The fifteen verses, in Q&A format, highlight the millennialism so central to antebellum America and the LDS Church in particular. Smith’s prophetic power to decipher this notoriously obscure text, providing a window into the timetable of the Lord’s imminent return, would have been both impressive evidence of his credentials and timely. The second revelation, dated 1832 (section 87 in current editions), was equally tied to millennialist concerns but expressed with rather more risk. In this heretofore unpublished prophecy, Smith clearly referred to a civil war that would soon break out in America: “the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain . . . to defend themselves.” This was perhaps Smith’s boldest public assertion of his ability to foretell future events, and his prediction that war was soon to be “poured out upon all nations” would have seemed even more reasonable in 1851 than in 1832. Europe had just gone through the revolutionary convulsions of 1848, and the Missouri Compromise of 1850 was perpetuating a fragile stability at home. Richards then added Smith’s revision of Matthew 24, appended a poem as a coda to the pamphlet, and sent the collection—which he titled The Pearl of Great Price—off to the press in Edinburgh. The title was both prescient and apt; the compact volume was destined to have an impact he could hardly have foreseen. At a time when LDS missionary William Gibson was printing 15,000 copies of his Report of Three Nights’s Public Discussion, John Jaques was printing 18,000 copies of Exclusive Salvation, and Lorenzo Snow was publishing 20,000 copies of the now forgotten Only Way to be Saved, Richards’s print run of 7,000 was positively modest.66 In part, this may have been because he intended the work for members, while the majority of publishing was for evangelizing the masses.

Introduction  19 He reaffirmed its audience in a preface, indicating that it was not “designed, as a pioneer of the faith among unbelievers” but aimed at “all careful students of the scriptures” and “the beginner in the gospel.” Key to its particular value and later canonization was its unique theological contributions. For it did indeed “detail . . . many important facts which are [in the scriptures] only alluded to, or entirely unmentioned.”67 If Richards sensed the profound historic or ecclesiastical significance of his contribution, he left no record of such a thought. The actual publication went unnoted in his personal writings, a striking omission from his voluminous and detailed journals. Clearly, his mind was too occupied with other matters:  running the mission, editing the Millennial Star, and directing the emigration of growing throngs of British converts to America. When he enumerated the accomplishments that would define his legacy as president of the British Mission, he listed expanding the Millennial Star’s circulation, revising the church hymnal, supervising the Perpetual Emigration Poor Fund, and overseeing the publication of a new edition of the Book of Mormon. Compiling and publishing The Pearl of Great Price did not make his list.68 If Richards paid the accomplishment no notice, others did. In April 1852, at a convocation of British conference presidents, a memorial was presented to express gratitude to Richards for his service to the British people and for his pamphlet in particular: “when we ponder over the pages of the ‘Pearl of Great Price,’ we are, and ever shall be, inspired with admiration and love, intense and deep, toward you, whose illumined mind has concentrated that peerless pearl of august intelligence.”69 Meanwhile, in Richards’s mission the new pamphlet immediately began to serve as standard issue to missionaries, alongside the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants. As a result, Richards’s missionaries were armed much as they are today: William Clayton recorded that he borrowed 2 pounds from the mission president and obtained a Book of Mormon, a Hymn Book, and The Pearl of Great Price. Richards presented him with a copy of the Doctrine and Covenants. But the pamphlet became widely popular beyond missionary use. Not only had it satisfied the need for general background materials on church doctrine and backgrounds—​it made generally available one of the most important documents in Joseph Smith’s entire corpus. The words of Enoch had been first published in the Evening and Morning Star in 1832, and were reprinted in Times and Seasons in November 1840. Additional Enoch material was published in 1843.70

20  The Pearl of Greatest Price The Enoch story was well entrenched in the LDS theological consciousness, thanks also to Smith’s frequent invocation of that prophet. In the months after its republication in Richards’s pamphlet, the Pratt brothers, Brigham Young, and John Taylor—​as well as others—​were frequently citing Enoch’s words from the Salt Lake Tabernacle.71 As the work continued in distribution, apostles began to cite it by name in General Conferences. “These extracts which I have read concerning Adam, Enoch, and Noah,” said Orson Pratt in 1859, “you will find in a little work called ‘The Pearl of Great Price,’ published by F. D. Richards, in England, a few years ago.”72 When George Q. Cannon cited Smith’s Civil War prophecy, he too told the congregation that “the revelation was in the Pearl of Great Price, which was published 1851.”73 A few years later, the leadership—​especially Orson Pratt—​were citing the work without any publication details, as they would any other scripture, often in the same breath as the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants. The Pearl of Great Price was being quoted for doctrine as much as or more than the Book of Mormon and was gradually slipping into the role of another standard work.74 In England especially, where the book was more widely distributed and read, mention appears frequently in the Millennial Star. When the Saints under Brigham Young made their westward exodus, some church assets remained in the possession of Emma Smith. Included in this category were original manuscripts of Smith’s work retranslating the Bible, known as the Joseph Smith Translation (JST). The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church) inherited these manuscripts from Emma Smith—​who refused to deliver them to Willard Richards, Young’s emissary. (She “did not feel disposed to give it up at present,” she explained to her son.)75 The RLDS Church published much of the Moses material in 1864 and the whole JST in 1867. If the original documents had not been in the possession of the RLDS Church, it is likely that Young would have moved to appropriate at least portions of Richards’s invaluable pamphlet as canonical LDS scripture—​since that had been Smith’s express plan for his Bible translation. Young, understandably resentful of a schismatic group that had rejected him as leader and retained possession of so many founding manuscripts, was unwilling to rely on the RLDS Church to produce an authoritative version of Smith’s revelations about Moses and Enoch. Denied access to the originals, Young may have also harbored doubts as to their unaltered state. The assumption has prevailed that Young on that basis was unsupportive of publishing the Pearl of Great Price itself as a

Introduction  21 canonical work. No such evidence exists, and to the contrary, Young placed a copy of Richards’s pamphlet in the Salt Lake Temple record stone in 1857 and donated a personally inscribed copy to Harvard College in 1864.76 Still, it is striking that it was only on Young’s death that Taylor approved Orson Pratt’s request to prepare an American edition of Richards’s work for wider dissemination. Pratt is credited as the editor behind the 1878 edition and may have done the lion’s share of the work. However, perhaps anticipating a more official status for it—​and in deference to the pamphlet’s original creator—​three days after Young’s funeral, the new leadership appointed Richards, not Pratt, “chairman of [a]‌committee on preparing the new addition of the Pearl of Great Price for the press.” Richards threw himself into the task immediately and in less than a week made a report of his progress to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which “was accepted.”77 That he was called to this work along with three other apostles—​Albert Carrington, Brigham Young Jr., and George Q. Cannon—​suggests that the product was to signify more than the mere republication of a mission pamphlet. A major revision was the addition of ninety-​three verses from the Book of Moses that had been missing from the 1851 edition. Recognizing that the RLDS Church had employed Smith’s original manuscripts in their 1867 Inspired Version of the Bible, the committee used their version of the Book of Moses in producing the 1878 LDS edition of the Pearl of Great Price. For the Book of Abraham, they followed Richards’s 1851 printing, with only a few edits (such as introducing the work as “writings of Abraham” rather than the more tentative “purporting to be” those writings). The most significant portions of the Pearl of Great Price—​that is, the “Prophecy of Enoch”—​had been originally published under Smith’s hand, though Richards tripled the amount of Moses material in his edition, from 129 verses printed in the Evening and Morning Star to 263.78 Some of this material, appearing in print for the first time, was most likely acquired by Richards from manuscripts he had access to when working in the historian’s office. Passages from Moses ­chapters  2, 3, 4, and 5 had been included in the Lectures on Faith,79 a work incorporated into the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. Given its unbroken pattern of use from the pulpit, the 1878 Pearl of Great Price was already scripture in all but name. The canonization of this work in 1880 occurred with little public fanfare perhaps because it only formalized what was essentially a fait accompli. In an LDS era before theology was

22  The Pearl of Greatest Price considered a suspect enterprise, the Pearl of Great Price fared better than it has in recent years. “Theology was given considerable emphasis in the Sunday School classes of those days,” wrote Annie Clark Tanner, who turned sixteen the year the new scriptures were canonized. “I had read The Voice of Warning, Key to Theology, and The Pearl of Great Price. Needless to say,” she then lamented, “these books have now lost much of their interest” (she was writing close to the time of her death in 1941).80 The Pearl of Great Price, unlike the other three canonical works of the Church of Jesus Christ, began its life as an effective catch-​all for texts deemed to have scriptural value but not a settled place in the canon. The Joseph Smith narrative, some of Smith’s biblical revisions and additions, and portions of his Book of Abraham productions had all appeared in church publications and were valued for their origination in Smith’s life and dictates but had not yet found a published form where they were readily available to the church. This potpourri character of the volume was still evident in the 1970s, when two long-​neglected revelations (one by Joseph Smith and one by his grand-​ nephew Joseph F. Smith) were added to the Pearl of Great Price—​but only as a kind of way station on the path to canonization in the Doctrine and Covenants a few years later.81 Today, the Pearl of Great Price is studied in conjunction with the Old Testament, on a four-​year rotation. Its place as a virtual afterthought in the LDS curriculum, as a kind of adjunct or supplement to a large volume with little particular theological significance to Mormonism, is in ironic contrast to the small volume’s disproportionate influence in the LDS tradition, as we will see.

Notes 1. “The Egyptian Mysteries,” Salt Lake Herald, 10 October 1880, 3. 2. Although the church did not acquire the name Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints until 1838, I will use that name, and refer to its members as Latter-​day Saints, LDS, or Saints, for all periods of the church’s history. 3. Pratt had briefly been alienated and then excommunicated from the church in late 1842, and his demotion effectively reflected his uninterrupted tenure since his reinstatement exactly five months later in January 1843 rather than his original appointment. 4. George Q. Cannon, in JD 19:236–​37. 5. Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, ed. Scott G. Kenney (Midvale, UT: Signature, 1983), 7:495.

Introduction

23

6. The Journal of George Q. Cannon, October 6 1880. https://www.churchhistorianspress. org/george-q-cannon/1880s/1880/10-1880?lang=eng. 7. Joseph Smith became president of the First Presidency upon its organization in March 1832; Brigham Young was sustained as church president with a new First Presidency in December 1847, after three years of leadership as president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. 8. Salt Lake Herald, 12 October 1880, 3. 9. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” Review of Religious Research 26.1 (September 1984): 19. 10. Article of Faith 8. 11. James 1:5. 12. “History, Circa Summer 1832,” in JSP-H1, 11–13. 13. Franklin D. Richards to Levi Richards, 1 February 1851, cited in Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church, 3 vols. (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2005), 2:235. 14. Pearl of Great Price, Being a Choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1851), preface. 15. EMS 1.3 (August 1832), 44 (Moses 7:1). 16. Kent F. Richards, a descendant of Franklin D. Richards and editor of his journals, searched all journal material from the period in question before concluding that there was “no mention” of the preparatory work or deliberations for publishing the Pearl of Great Price. His description of Richards’s work at the time is from a private communication, 31 August 2016, in Terryl Givens’s possession. 17. Pearl of Great Price (1851), preface. 18. When Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) citations are given in the text, they refer to the current (1981) edition. 19. For instance, Moses 2:1–4:13a, Moses 4:14–19, 22–25 were published for the first time in the 1851 Pearl of Great Price. 20. David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO:  David Whitmer, 1887), 32. 21. “History of Thos. Baldwin Marsh,” Deseret News, 24 March 1858; Solomon Chamberlain, “A Short Sketch of the Life of Solomon Chamberlain.” Those sources and the Whitmer recollection are quoted in Larry C. Porter, “‘The Field Is White Already to Harvest’:  Earliest Missionary Labors and the Book of Mormon,” in Larry C. Porter and Susan Easton Black, eds., The Prophet Joseph: Essays on the Life and Mission of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City :  Deseret, 1988), 79–81. See also Larry C. Porter, “Solomon Chamberlain—Early Missionary,” BYU Studies 12.3 (Spring 1972): 314–318. 22. Joseph Smith, Jr., to Oliver Cowdery, Harmony, Pennsylvania, 22 October 1829, in JSP-D1, 97, quoted in Porter, “The Field Is White,” 32. 23. BC 24:29 (D&C 20:37). 24. EMS 1.1 (June 1832): 1. 25. “Historical Introduction,” http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/ doctrine-and-covenants-1835.

24

The Pearl of Greatest Price

26. “Appendix:  Proposed Sixth Gathering of the Book of Commandments,” http:// www.josephsmithpapers.org/ paperSummary/ appendix- proposed- sixthgathering- of- the- book- of- commandments?p=1&highlight=proposed%20 gathering. 27. “Preface,” 1835 D&C; BC 44:3 (D&C 42:2). 28. Lectures on Faith 2.33, D&C (1835), 19. 29. Orson Hyde, A Prophetic Warning to all the churches of Every Sect and Denomination (Toronto, 1836). 30. Parley P. Pratt, A Voice of Warning and Instruction to All People (New  York:  W. Sandford, 1837). Richard Bushman mentions Pratt’s omission as part of a general lack of emphasis on Smith in early Mormon literature. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 401–442. 31. The omission could have been a consequence of the recent breach between the two strong personalities, mended but not yet fully healed. It could as easily have been a function of Pratt’s world vision, which at this time saw the impending millennium as the next and final cataclysmic stage in a cosmic narrative. In that light, sweeping historical events eclipsed Smith’s personal role. See Givens and Matthew J. Grow, Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90–102. As Pratt’s feelings or his perspective changed over the next years, he inserted Smith’s name into revised editions of Voice. 32. “Minutes of the General Conference,” MStar 1.6 (October 1840): 165–166. 33. Estimates ranged from 2,800 to 3,000. See Letter to John C. Bennett, 8 August 1840, in JSP-D7, 466. 34. Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1997), 1:67. 35. “Books!!!,” T&S 1.9 (July 1840): 139. 36. “Books!!!,” 139–140. 37. “Minutes, 17 July 1840,” in JSP-D7, 333. 38. “Letter to Saints Scattered Abroad,” September 1840, T&S 1.12 (October 1840): 179. 39. First Presidency Report, 4 October 1840, in JSP-D7, 432. 40. “The Prophecy of Enoch,” T&S 2.1 (1 November 1840): 204. 41. “Dear Brother,” M&A 1.1 (October 1834):  13–16; “Letter III,” M&A 1.3 (December 1834): 41–43; “Letter IV,” M&A 1.5 (February 1835): 77–80. 42. Orson Pratt, An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hughes, 1840). 43. Orson Hyde and John E. Page to Joseph Smith, 1 May 1840, in JSP-D7, 274–275. 44. Joseph Smith to Orson Hyde and John E. Page, 14 May 1840, in JSP-D7, 282–283. 45. Bryan J. Grant, “British Isles, the Church In,” in The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols., ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:228. 46. “Franklin Dewey Richards,” https://history.lds.org/missionary/individual/franklindewey-richards-1821. For a detailed treatment of Richards, see Kent F. Richards, ed., A Family of Faith: An Intimate View of Church History through the Journals of Three Generations of Apostles (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 2013), 190.

Introduction

25

47. October 1850, in Manuscript History of Brigham Young 1847–1850, ed. William S. Harwell (Salt Lake City : Collier’s, 1997), 337. 48. See the masthead, MStar 13.1 (1 January 1851): 16. 49. October 1850, in Young, Manuscript History, 337. 50. “Latter-day Saints in London,” MStar 13.3 (1 February 1851): 33–37. 51. David Whittaker, Early Mormon Pamphleteering (Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Institute for Latter-day Saint History, 2003), xii. 52. “Latter-day Saints in London,” MStar 3.13 (1 February 1851): 33–37. 53. “Letter to Presiding Elders . . . ,” MStar 13.10 (15 May 1851): 154. 54. Fourth General Epistle, Deseret News, 28 September 1850, CHL. 55. Franklin D. Richards to First Presidency, 12 February 1851, CHL, CR 1234 1, Brigham Young office files 1832–1878. 56. Franklin D. Richards to First Presidency, 12 February 1851. 57. Rodney Turner, “Franklin D.  Richards and the Pearl of Great Price,” in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: British Isles (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University, 1990), 181. 58. “He must have had handwritten copies” of the earliest manuscripts, writes Kent P. Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2005), 18. 59. Cited in Crawley, The Pearl of Great Price, Descriptive Bibliography, 2:235. 60. “Etoile du Deseret—Pearl of Great Price—New Catalogues, etc.—Postal Information,” MStar 13.14 (15 July 1851): 216–217. 61. “Pearl of Great Price, in Welsh,” MStar 14.40 (27 November 1852): 634. 62. First published in the M&A between October 1834 and October 1835, they were republished as Oliver Cowdery, Letters by Oliver Cowdery to W.  W. Phelps (Liverpool:  Thomas Ward and John Cairns, 1844). See Crawley, Descriptive Bibliography, 1:238. 63. Orson Hyde and John E. Page to Joseph Smith, 1 May 1840, in JSP-D7, 274–275. 64. E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, OH: Howe, 1834). 65. Before this explanation was published in the 1876 D&C, Richards published it in the 1851 Pearl of Great Price as “A Key to the Revelation of St. John” (D&C 77, heading). 66. These figures are from Crawley, Descriptive Bibliography, 2:13. 67. Preface to Pearl of Great Price, 1851 edition. 68. MStar 14.11 (8 May 1852): 169, cited in Turner, “Franklin D. Richards,” 178. 69. “Minutes of Special General Council,” MStar 14.16 (12 June 1852): 246. 70. Chapter 1 of Moses was published in T&S 4.5 (16 January 1843): 71–73. 71. Orson Pratt, “Celestial Marriage,” 29 August 1852: “we cannot comprehend infinity. But suffice it to say, if all the sands on the sea-shore were numbered, says the Prophet Enoch” (he is quoting Moses 1:28); in JD 1:60; Parley Pratt, 10 July 1853, noted that “Saint [who] was spoken of by Enoch long before the flood” (quoting Moses 7:56), in “Mormonism,” JD 1:298; John Taylor, 19 April 1854, urged the congregation to “reflect back to the time of Enoch, and read some of the revelations given to that people” (referring to Moses chapter 7), in “Men Eternal Beings . . . ,” JD 1:370; Brigham Young,

26  The Pearl of Greatest Price 17 April 1853, noted that “Enoch of old said—​‘Thy curtains are stretched out still’ ” (quoting Moses 7:30), in “Saints Subject to Temptation . . . ,” JD 2:122. 72. Orson Pratt, “The Ancient Gospel . . . ,” 11 September 1859, in JD 7:253. 73. George Q. Cannon, “Remarks on Revelation, Missionary Fund, Word of Wisdom, etc.,” 21 April 1867, in JD 12:41. 74. Orson cites The Pearl of Great Price by name in sermons of 24 November 1872 (JD 15:234); 29 December 1872 (15:263); 18 May 1873 (16:49), 22 November 1873 (16:325); 28 December 1873 (16:337); 27 January 1874 (16:362); and 25 August 1878 (20:64); etc. Erastus Snow cites the volume on 6 April 1878 (JD 20:181). 75. Emma Smith to Joseph Smith III, cited in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible (Independence, MO: Herald House, 1970), 14. 76. “I have been unable to find any concrete evidence in support of this theory” that Young opposed the pamphlet’s republication, wrote Rodney Turner. Turner, “Franklin D. Richards,” 183. 77. Franklin D. Richards Journal, 6 September 1877; 12 September 1877. In Richards, Family of Faith, 190. 78. Turner, “Franklin D. Richards,” 185. 79. See Lecture Second, D&C (1835), 13–​18. 80. Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, 1991), 46. 81. Smith’s vision of the celestial kingdom and Joseph F. Smith’s vision of evangelization in the spirit world make up the current D&C sections 137 and 138, respectively.

1 Re-​visioning the Bible The Joseph Smith Translation

On 19 March 1830, the Wayne Sentinel announced that the Book of Mormon would be offered for sale in the Palmyra Bookstore of E. B. Grandin.1 The Book of Mormon gave the fledgling church its popular name. The derisive “Mormonites,” later shortened to “Mormons,” was resisted, then tolerated, and eventually embraced. The new scripture was the most palpable differentiator setting Mormonism apart on a crowded religious landscape and immediately became the principal instrument of evangelization, the role it occupies to the present day. In addition, the book served as a rough template for the church’s organization, modeled a more dialogic model of divine revelation, and set the stage for Smith’s transmutation of Protestant covenant theology into a more synthetic and universalist conception of biblical history. However, these innovations and a radical revision of Genesis, as narrating a genuinely fortunate fall rather than sinful catastrophe, attracted little notice. It was the scripture’s blatant challenge to sola scriptura, more than its doctrines, that formed the core of its value to Latter-​day Saints and notoriety to others. First-​generation member John Murdock was certain that if the Mormon missionaries were true emissaries of God, “the Book of Mormon will contain the same plan of salvation as the Bible.”2 And Orson Pratt said that when he heard the message of Mormonism, “as soon as the sound penetrated my ears, I knew that if the Bible was true, their doctrine was true.”3 Eli Gilbert, another early convert, wrote that when presented with a Book of Mormon, he “compared it with . . . the bible, (which book I verily thought I believed,) and found the two books mutually and reciprocally corroborate each other; and if I let go the book of Mormon, the bible might also go down by the same rule.”4 Early LDS hymnodist W. W. Phelps rejoiced to find after studying the Book of Mormon that “its gospel was the same and its ordinances were the same as those I had been taught to observe.”5 And his contemporary Joseph Hovey recorded in his journal that his family was baptized only after they “searched

28  The Pearl of Greatest Price the Bible daily” to ensure that it corroborated Book of Mormon teachings.6 Critics, even by their vehement denunciations, acknowledged this truth. Doctrinally, as far as the public was concerned, the Book of Mormon was “a feeble and diluted imitation of the Bible revelation and the gospel which had already been in the possession of the Christian people of this country for over two hundred years.”7 The Book of Mormon was a bombshell of a revelation—​but not by virtue of its particular content.8 Almost everything about the book pointed to earth-​ shattering claims surrounding the text rather than within it: the heavens were again open and miracles had not ceased; gold plates and other sacred relics had been discovered; ancient peoples spoke out of the dust; God had revealed his hand through modern oracles; Joseph Smith was translating new scripture by the gift and power of God; prophets again walked the earth; tangible signs of Christ’s imminent return were at hand; these and other claims were the swirling religious eddies stirred up by this alleged find in a New York hillside by a farmer’s son. Nothing—​virtually nothing at all—​in the book’s pages garnered particular attention within or outside the church. It was only in the months after the Book of Mormon was published that the new religion’s theology was catapulted into what E.  Brooks Holifield called “realms of doctrine unimagined in traditional Christian theology.”9 The most unremarked fact in the chronicling of the Latter-​day Saint faith as a religious tradition is that its doctrinal distinctiveness waited on, grew out of, and was largely contained in a project that historians have skimmingly passed over and that was virtually unknown to strangers to the faith. Latter-​ day Saint teachings, by reaching back to premortal heavenly councils and forward to visions of human theosis in a drama of cosmic scope, became what Catholic theologian Stephen Webb has called the most imaginative and intellectually audacious version of Christianity.10 And the catalyst for these developments was itself the most neglected and underappreciated endeavor of Smith’s entire career: his “new translation” of the Holy Bible, out of which the Book of Moses emerged. The Reformation passion for a religion founded on sola scriptura found its fullest expression in a widespread, fervent biblicism in antebellum America. Bibles were being distributed in unprecedented numbers, read and explicated by thousands of lay preachers and myriad seekers, and retranslated into several new English-​language editions. As early as 1755, John Wesley had retranslated the archaic King James New Testament into a version “for Plain, Unlettered Men who know only their Mother Tongue.” Quakers followed

The Joseph Smith Translation  29 suit with their translation in 1764. Prominent figures on this side of the Atlantic were soon doing the same for an American audience; scholar and patriot (secretary of the Continental Congress) Charles Thomson published an acclaimed English translation of the Septuagint in 1808. The restorationist Alexander Campbell published his version of the New Testament, Living Oracles, in 1826. A few years later, the lexicographer Noah Webster added his contribution, a lightly revised edition of the King James Version (1833).11 Joseph Smith, too, set out to produce a new “translation” of the Holy Bible, but it would be wrong to see his motives or purposes as aligned with those of his contemporaries like Wesley, Webster, or Campbell. Wesley, who taught Greek at Oxford, responded to a growing chorus of biblical criticism by declaring: “if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.”12 Wesley aimed solely to render the inspired document more accessible and true to the sources; he only took “the liberty,” he was careful to explain, “as occasion may require, to make here and there a small alteration.”13 The lexicographer Webster was proficient in both Greek and Hebrew. His concern, too, was to employ a diction and syntax better suited to convey original meaning to a modern audience: “in the lapse of two or three centuries, changes have taken place which, in particular passages, impair the beauty; in others, obscure the sense, of the original languages. Some words have fallen into disuse; and the signification of others, in current popular use, is not the same now as it was when they were introduced into the version. The effect of these changes is, that some words are not understood by common readers.”14 Alexander Campbell, in a slightly different spirit, aimed to correct what he saw as previous translators’ Calvinist bias, so he used his knowledge of Greek to employ a critical Greek text (that of Johann Griesbach) and borrowed copiously from three previous translations (by George Campbell, James MacKnight, and Philip Doddridge) to produce a version more consonant with his Arminian leanings. In addition, like his contemporary retranslators, he argued that “the changes [in English] which have taken place, since the reign of James I  do now render a new translation necessary.” In fact, Alexander Campbell suggested in his “Apology for a New Translation” that “this constant mutation in a living language will probably render new translations, or corrections of old translations, necessary every two or three hundred years.”15 Smith, too, produced a new version of the Bible, but his enterprise, his motivations and qualifications, had little in common with these

30  The Pearl of Greatest Price contemporary reworkers of Holy Writ. Coming fresh from his miraculous production of the Book of Mormon, he referred to his next project, what he called a new “translation of the Bible,”16 as “a branch of [his] calling,”17 and he indicated that it was a task to which God had “appointed” him.18 In fact, Smith told the Latter-​day Saints that the Lord’s parable about a man bringing forth “out of his treasure things new and old” found a threefold fulfillment in himself: “the book of Mormon,” “the covenants given to the Latter Day Saints” (published months earlier as the Doctrine and Covenants), and “the translation of the bible.”19 Clearly he considered that his work was, in this regard, scriptural production, not merely emendation. At the same time, as he would manifest in his decision to study Hebrew even as he applied his prophetic gifts to grappling with Egyptian papyri, he felt that the tools of the scholar and the seer were complementary. And so, as scholars have noted, he was not averse to employing learned commentaries, even as he invoked a prophet’s authority and prerogative to edit Holy Writ. Thomas Wayment and Haley Wilson have found in Smith’s translation 200–​300 examples of clear influence from Adam Clarke’s commentary, in Clarke’s Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, reflecting “how [Smith] used academic sources while simultaneously melding his own prophetic inspiration into the resulting text.”20 Alexander Campbell’s justification was a partial, if inadequate, precedent for Smith’s work, wherein the Reformed Baptist saw a need to correct the biases of Calvinist translators who had impaired the text’s original meaning. Smith went further, tying his rationale directly to the Book of Mormon’s explicit critique of the Bible’s insufficiency, when he said that his aim was to restore “many important points touching the salvation of men, [that] had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled.”21 The problem with the Bible was not a few shadings of Calvinism but wholesale omissions and distortions. This was an audacious critique with no Christian parallels. Smith first experienced the unreliability of scripture as a youth of seventeen, and his instructor in this regard—​he recorded—​was a heavenly messenger. In 1823 the angel identifying himself as Moroni appeared to Smith, introduced him to the story of gold plates and Israelites in ancient America, and told him of a great work he would be called to perform. In spite of these spectacular pronouncements, Smith later recalled one peculiarity of the angel’s communications. He quoted a number of biblical prophecies to Smith, but more than one was recited “with a little variation from the way it reads in our Bibles.”22 Almost six years would pass before Smith

The Joseph Smith Translation  31 produced the great work alluded to on that night—​the Book of Mormon. In its pages, the subtle intimation of “little variation” became a radical allegation of gaping omissions and corruptions. In one of the era’s boldest indictments of the Bible by a believing Christian, Smith stated that “the most plain and precious parts of the gospel” had been “taken away from the [Bible]” over the course of its history.23 Perhaps he sensed that producing the Book of Mormon would not in itself fully make up for that loss.24 Those same attestations of loss hinted at a future corrective yet to come, promising that “the Lord God [would not] suffer that the Gentiles shall forever remain in that awful state of woundedness, which thou beholdest they are in, because of the plain and most precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb which have been kept back.”25 This verse of scripture distills in one sentence Latter-​day Saint understanding of the origins of Christian apostasy and its prophesied remedy that Smith’s Restoration effected. The deficiencies, corruptions, and missteps of the manifold Christian denominations are here laid at the feet of biblical insufficiency. More than half a dozen times, the Book of Mormon indicts those who have “kept back” or “taken away” the Bible’s “plain and precious parts of the gospel.” That God will not suffer “that awful state of woundedness” to remain, suggested an eventual project of scriptural recuperation, repair, expansion, and illumination.26 A hint that Smith might be the one empowered to recover those lost and damaged portions came as he worked on his translation of the Book of Mormon with Oliver Cowdery in the spring of 1829. A revelation to Cowdery confirmed that “there are records which contain much of my gospel, which have been kept back because of the wickedness of the people,” and Cowdery was promised that if he remained faithful, he would “assist in bringing to light, with your gift, those parts of my scriptures which have been hidden because of iniquity.”27 Almost immediately, the two experienced a tantalizing taste of the promise. Returning to the Book of Mormon translation, and prompted by the account in Third Nephi of three New World disciples who asked a resurrected Christ if they could tarry in the flesh until his Second Coming, Smith and Cowdery “desired to know whether John, the beloved disciple, tarried on earth.” By way of reply, Smith channeled a brief expansion on the narrative in John 21 relating Christ’s words to Peter about John’s fate. The recovered text, Smith indicated on its publication, was “translated from parchment,” written by John and “hid up.” (The answer regarding John’s deferred death was “yes.”)28

32  The Pearl of Greatest Price Neither Smith nor Cowdery elaborated on the cryptically brief account of the revelation’s provenance. Did Smith have a vision of a parchment, which he translated? Was it an angelically transmitted artifact, on a parallel with the gold plates? Smith and Cowdery are silent. What we can reasonably conclude is that Smith now viewed his gift of seership, through whatever means or powers, as extending beyond translation of gold plates and discernment of God’s commands—​to enabling him in this case to recuperate missing elements of the biblical narrative itself. And so in a natural progression, a few short months after the Book of Mormon went on sale, Smith turned from the translation of one ancient record to the recuperation, restoration, and expansion of another ancient record: the Bible of Christian tradition. He eventually worked through much of both the Old and New Testaments, producing a “new translation.” Smith called his work “translation,” but the term is a misnomer here, since he did not use original manuscripts in his work of revision, expansion, and correction and went well beyond rendering ancient words and concepts into English equivalents. A few years later, he launched a Hebrew school in Kirtland, Ohio, under the direction of the scholar Joshua Seixas, but by then had essentially completed his work of revision. Smith began his project with the same man who had worked as his scribe on most of the Book of Mormon translation—​Oliver Cowdery. Months into the new project, Cowdery was replaced by Sidney Rigdon, perhaps because of Rigdon’s greater biblical literacy as an ex-​Campbellite preacher. Smith’s working text was an 1828 Phinney edition of the King James Bible.29 Many of the changes he made were simple edits for readability and clarity; some were presumably changes he felt called to make under a spirit of inspiration and in the province of his calling as translator; and some—​such as extensive interpolations into Genesis material—​were clearly the product of revelatory experiences. The text that resulted over three years of sporadic work—​completed in July 1833—​incorporated thousands of changes, most of them in the New Testament and concentrated most heavily in the Gospel of Matthew. The result was never adopted by the LDS Church as their official Bible and is given little more than passing notice in the LDS curriculum—​in spite of Smith’s clear and stated intention to publish the fruits of his work. In March 1833, while laboring through the New Testament, he had announced that his new edition of “the New Testament and the Book of Mormon will be printed together.”30 Then in May a revelation affirmed his commission to proceed

The Joseph Smith Translation  33 with preparations for “the printing of the translation of my scriptures.”31 Two months later, a mob destroyed the church’s press in Missouri. In October, Smith sent Oliver Cowdery to New York with $800 to secure a new press for printing operations in Kirtland.32 After its purchase and the dedication of a new printing office, Smith prayed with his colleagues that “the Lord would protect our printing press from the hands of evil men, and give us means to send forth his word, even his gospel that the ears of all may hear it, and also that we may print his scriptures.”33 A subsequent revelation, Smith said, again urged him “to print my words, the fulness of my scriptures.”34 Certainly, the Missouri crisis and the fracturing of the church in Kirtland made progress difficult on this and other fronts. Nevertheless, a first printing of the Doctrine and Covenants proceeded in 1835 and a Kirtland edition of the Book of Mormon two years later. An 1841 revelation once again reaffirmed the Lord’s will that Smith “publish the new translation of my holy word unto the inhabitants of the earth,” and the next year he delegated Willard Richards “to arrange the . . . translation of the Bible . . . for the press.”35 But at the time of Smith’s assassination in 1844 the project remained uncompleted. One reason the New Translation (as it was eventually named) never emerged in print during Smith’s lifetime may have been his sense, in the words of his widow, Emma, that it was still “unfinished.”36 (The LDS guide to the scriptures notes that “though he published some parts of the translation during his lifetime, it is possible that he would have made additional changes had he lived to publish the entire work.”)37 As Henry Edwards notes, abundant evidence exists that Smith did not finish implementing many of his changes thoroughly and consistently, and he had yet to make the textual passages consistent with Moroni’s quotation of New Testament material in the Book of Mormon.38 And entire, long stretches of biblical text—​and several Old Testament books, including many of the minor prophets and most of Psalms—​remained untouched by Smith’s editorial hand. At the same time, other evidence suggests that he did consider the work complete and was on the cusp of printing it. One such indication is that in the summer of 1833, Frederick G. Williams, Smith’s assistant for much of his translation work (and counselor in the First Presidency), wrapped up his work on the project and began a kind of topical guide to the new translation, “classifying the different Subjects of the Scriptures and reviwing the same [sic].”39 A few weeks earlier, Smith had assured the Saints that even as scribes were doing final edits, “the printing of the New Translation” would take place “as soon as the Lord permit.”40 On his death in 1844, Emma retained

34  The Pearl of Greatest Price possession of the manuscripts; she eventually passed them on to her son Joseph Smith III, founding prophet of the RLDS Church. In preparing the New Translation for publication, editors from the RLDS Church, particularly Joseph Smith III, checked the Book of Moses text against the translation manuscripts that his father and his scribes had created. However, in doing so, these editors introduced into the Moses material textual discrepancies in both grammar and wording. In some cases, Smith’s later corrections were unwittingly dropped and his earlier wording retained. When Richards’s committee (perhaps largely deferring to Orson Pratt) created the 1878 version of the Book of Moses, they placed more confidence in the work of the RLDS Church than Young apparently did, for Pratt in effect copied material from the RLDS Church’s published text into the Pearl of Great Price. Along the way, he corrected some of the RLDS Church’s errors but also inadvertently imported many others, which have been retained in the modern editions of the Book of Moses.41 Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, did not choose to publish the work, for a few reasons. First, he was disinclined to act where Smith had not, and in any case, as noted, the Salt Lake church had lost possession of those manuscripts Smith had produced. What copies the Saints maintained were error-​laden and incomplete. More to the point, perhaps, the needs of an evangelizing Christian movement were better served by using the King James Bible—​the lingua franca of fellow Christians. As Young had said in the church’s first generation of missionary work, “I never asked for any book when I was preaching to the world but the Old and New Testaments to establish everything I preached, and to prove all that was necessary.”42 Using a version at odds with the prevailing text of the English-​speaking world could have discredited the movement and blunted its evangelizing efforts. The historical consequence of never incorporating Smith’s text as the official translation is that the majority of his thousands of changes to the biblical text are nowhere near the center of Mormon consciousness, never even appearing in official publications. When a new edition of the LDS Bible was published in 1981, many but not all of Smith’s edits appeared as footnotes and in an appendix. (The one substantial exception was the Genesis portions designated as the Book of Moses.) Nonpossession of the original manuscripts, strained relations between the LDS Church and the RLDS Church (the latter retained those documents), uncertainty about the reliability or state of completion of those manuscripts, and evangelizing practicalities—​all these

The Joseph Smith Translation  35 factors contributed to past decisions not to employ the JST as the church’s standard edition of the Bible. Yet this work of re-​translation was arguably the most theologically significant endeavor in a productive prophet’s career, evident in three particular ways. First, the immediate fruit of his project was the recovery of a lengthy narrative missing from Genesis, which Smith titled the Book of Moses. This narrative completely rewrote salvation history and in the process redefined God, human origins, and human futures. Page for page, the Book of Moses is the richest doctrinal fount of the gospel Smith developed. In addition to those doctrinally innovative Genesis interpolations, the revised c­ hapter 24 of Matthew was also considered significant enough by Richards—​and later by the church leadership—​to merit independent publication in The Pearl of Great Price. Second, Smith’s biblical edits effected a fuller synthesis and harmonization of the Bible with his own revelations, as well as with the church they undergirded. He eliminated contradictions, worked out discrepancies, and filled in missing segments in the service of the holistic cosmic narrative he was constructing. Third, the work of revising the Bible provoked Smith to make repeated inquiries of the Lord for clarification and explanation. This interrogative posture was the immediate occasion for a number of revelatory experiences that were published independently as modern scripture. One such experience, on plural marriage (D&C 132), which likely emerged out of his work on the patriarchal portions of the Old Testament (though not written until 1843), dramatically reshaped the church and became the most controversial and inflammatory revelation he ever produced. To take another example, a revelatory description of a multitiered heaven (D&C 76), received in response to his work on John, was accorded such supreme value in the early Church of Jesus Christ that members referred to it as “the Vision,” and it grounded the church’s unique brand of universalism. The entire three years of Smith’s biblical re-​visioning were the most fertile theological period of his career. In his roughly fifteen years of revelatory activity, he produced the content for about 130 sections of scripture. Over 60  percent of that content—​eighty sections of scripture—​comes from Smith’s three-​year period of revising the Bible.43 Moreover, the interconnections between his work on the Bible and the revelations that were canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants are profound and pervasive. As such, they provide invaluable insight into the way his revelatory imagination worked. For these reasons,

36

The Pearl of Greatest Price

although the JST was not itself entirely subsumed within the Pearl of Great Price, it makes sense to consider it in its entirety here, both to contextualize those key texts that made their way into the fourth volume of Mormon scripture and to shed further light on the revelatory process behind their production.

Figure 1.1 The first page of Joseph Smith’s Bible manuscript: Moses 1:1– 22a. Courtesy Community of Christ Archives.

The Joseph Smith Translation  37

Moses: “Caught Up to an Exceeding High Mountain” The Bible’s status as sufficient (sola scriptura) may be a Christian commonplace, but the Bible’s incompleteness as a record is readily acknowledged by the text itself. “The world itself could not contain the books that should be written,” writes John, if a complete record of even Christ’s mortal doings were the goal.44 A passage from the Old Testament suggests that episodes not only from Christ’s life but from the Mosaic narrative are missing from the text we now have. Where Moses, in the twelfth chapter of Numbers, alludes to and then neglects to reveal a particular visionary encounter with God, Smith may have found all the prompt he needed to go beyond mere textual edits to a quest for a more ample vision to fill in the missing chapters in the story. In that chapter of the Bible, the Lord promises that he will speak face to face with his prophet “not in dark speeches” but openly—​so that Moses will actually see “the similitude of the Lord.”45 The Bible, however, contains no account of this promised visitation. Whether such a lacuna was the catalyst for Smith we do not know, but the first tangible fruit of Smith’s work on the “new translation” of the Bible was a detailed account that describes the unrecorded fulfillment of that promise, “when Moses was caught up into an exceedingly high mountain & he saw God face to face, & he ta[l]‌ked with him.”46 Evidence that Smith was in fact restoring that missing narrative was confirmed to him in the same revelation, wherein he recorded the Lord as having told Moses that “in a day when the children of men shall esteem my words as naught, & take many of them from the Book which you shall write, Behold, I will raise up another like unto you, & they shall be had again among the Children of men—​among as many as shall believe.”47 The ensuing episode captured by Smith includes a panoramic vision of the cosmos, in which Moses learns two important truths. First, he sees the “workmanship of [God’s] hands” constituting “worlds  .  .  .  without number,” including the human family from first to last. More startling, he sees that “each land was called Earth, & there were inhabitants on the face thereof.”48 This stupefying vision overwhelms Moses with his own finitude and smallness. “Now . . . I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.”49 That God’s creations include other inhabited worlds had been hinted—​or brazenly posited—​many times in the past. When John Milton’s Adam asks the angel Raphael about the seeming waste of so many underutilized heavenly spheres, he is told they are “Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.”50 In Smith’s own day, Raphael’s counterpart was more forthcoming; in Lord

38  The Pearl of Greatest Price Byron’s play Cain, Lucifer tells Adam’s son of “worlds greater than thine own, inhabited By greater things, and they themselves far more In number than the dust of thy dull Earth.”51 Thomas Dick, whom Smith read, contemplated a “history of numerous worlds dispersed throughout the universe . . . replenished with inhabitants,” with their own “modes of existence, of improvement, and of social intercourse,” including “solemn forms of worship and adoration.”52 Never before in Christian history, however, had such multiple habitations been made an affirmative article of faith. The allusion to multiple worlds was to reap more fruit in Mormon folk theology than in doctrine. Combined with the prospect of coinheritance with Christ, the inference has been widely drawn that fully redeemed humans will be coparticipants in the ongoing process of organizing and peopling those worlds. Parley Pratt’s enthusiasm took eloquent shape: “thus perfected, the whole family will . . . continue to organize, people, redeem, and perfect other systems which are now in the womb of Chaos,” he predicted.53 Brigham Young initially advised caution:  “I am asked all sorts of questions about making gods and devils, and organizing the eternal worlds; but we could not get it precisely into our understandings,” he said.54 Still, his caution did little to dampen enthusiasm. It was in fact Young himself who returned to the theme most often: “this was the decree of the Father, for when he sent Adam on this earth,” it was so that “man might be exalted and bring about the great purpose of God. For this was foreordained from before the foundation of the world that man might be exalted and first to descend below all things. That he or they might raise above all things as the Father did before us, and be able to create worlds and go from one world to another.”55 After describing the immensity of creation, Moses learns a second truth that utterly inverts his self-​appraisal, as God makes man the focal point and telos of all divine striving, rather than an inconsequential atom in an infinite structure. Moses learns from the Father’s own mouth that “mine Only Begotten is & shall be the Savior,” whose work it shall be to accomplish the Father’s self-​appointed task: “for Behold, this is my work and my glory to bring to pass the immortality & eternal life of man.”56 The poetic irony is religiously profound: we are an infinitesimal speck in a boundless sea of fathomless immensity; yet that minute particle called humanity is the focus and guiding preoccupation of the Master Architect of the whole. Whereas dozens of writers, from Tertullian to Rick Warren and John Piper, have written with perfect unanimity that God created humans and their world “for the glory of his [own] majesty,” “for God’s glory,” not humans’, because “God loves his

The Joseph Smith Translation  39 own glory above all things,” Smith has Moses reverse the equation.57 Human exaltation, not God’s greater glory, is the point. Here we see the first concrete foundation of what is becoming a full-​ blown cosmic narrative emerging from Smith’s theological innovations. The creation story that follows, a retelling of Genesis 1, is hereby radically recontextualized—​not as the primal act of the universe’s creation ex nihilo but as one particular instance of a timeless, ever-​continuing creation of world upon world, in a dynamic, still-​emerging cosmos inhabited by embodied spirits, consequent to a divine purpose that envisions the apotheosis of the human family. Smith would unambiguously affirm eternalism in contrast to creation out of nothingness in 1833, when he declared “the elements are eternal.”58 But the seeds are present in the Book of Moses. Smith recasts the first and second creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 not as slightly different versions but as the actual creation of the physical world and its inhabitants (Genesis 1/​Moses 2), in distinction from a record of an earlier creation (Genesis 2/​Moses 3), which was a kind of spiritual prototype. All those plants and animals and humans as well, Moses learns, were created “spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the Earth.”59 Before the Documentary Hypothesis explained Genesis 1 and 2 as simply two unsynthesized narratives from two divergent ancient sources, some commentators explained ­chapter 2 as referring to an ideational creation, a kind of divinely imagined blueprint existing only in the mind of God. Jewish traditions abound of a spiritual creation that preceded the physical. Paul Davies insisted that the Hebrew emphasis on the unity of body and spirit precluded an independent or prior existence for that spirit. Apparent references to such, as in Psalm 139 and Jeremiah, he relegated to “ideal existence in the mind and purpose of God.”60 However, the seventeenth-​century Jewish scholar Menasseh ben Israel cites c­ hapter 3 of the Bereshith Rabbah as teaching that human souls existed before embodiment, not just as ideas in the mind of God but as entities with whom he actually consulted before creation, in order to make sure he did not clothe them with matter against their will.61 In any case, as Smith develops his narrative in the fourth chapter, we are clearly dealing with actual events and personages in a real time and place that precede earth history. We leave the narrative at the point where Adam and Eve are left naked in the Garden, for a flashback to events that anticipate and frame what will follow in Eden. The organizational sequence is key; Smith’s narrative ordering is engineered to emphasize that the conventional

40  The Pearl of Greatest Price Christian order—​creation/​fall/​redemption, or creation/​failed original covenant/​supervening new covenant—​has it wrong. Before Adam and Eve are ejected from their garden of bliss, provisions are made for that eventuality. (While it is not clear in this context that God intended their fall, that becomes blazingly clear a few chapters later—​and had already been so affirmed in the Book of Mormon.)62 These new primordial scenes Smith produces expand on the Bible’s scant references to a rebellious angel (Luke 10:18; Jude 1:6; Revelation 12:4), resulting in a more fully formed Satan. Smith is clearly seeing the Old and New Testaments as constituting a single salvation narrative. In his hands, we see Satan rebelling in the context of a pre-​creation redemptive plan under discussion by the gods. Satan proposes himself as redeemer, but the Father selects his “beloved Son . . . chosen from the beginning.”63 Milton had famously portrayed a Lucifer indignant at his subordinate position who leads a heavenly revolt; for Smith, it is rather the rejection of Satan’s offer to save mankind—​on his terms—​that spurs him to enmity with God and leads him to set himself in opposition to mankind. Specifically, Satan plots to “destroy the agency of man”; this agency will become a doctrinal concept of unprecedented significance in LDS theology.64 The potent reference to “man” in a premortal context awaits Smith’s elaboration at this point. But first, Smith unravels yet another conventional paradigm of Christian understanding. Back in the Garden, he depicts Adam in c­ hapter  5 as fully aware of a coming Christ and offering sacrifice with full knowledge of its typological import. Then, in the same chapter, Smith obliterates the foundational Christian bedrock of a catastrophic Adamic sin. The doctrine was already softening in some quarters, largely under Arminian influence. However, Smith goes much further than his contemporaries. Chapter 5 of the canonical version of Genesis had always contained the curious observation by the Deity that by eating the fruit the Adamic couple “have become as one of us.” Smith has Adam unabashedly celebrate that development, blessing “the name of God, for because of my transgression mine eyes are opened.”65 Eve further exults, breaking into a psalm of praise: “Eve . . . was glad, saying were it not for our transgression we should never have had seed, & should never had known good & evil, & the Joy of our redemption, & the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. And Adam & Eve blessed the name of God.”66 For Latter-​day Saints, this rewrite of Genesis recasts the fall as part of an original blueprint, not a divergence from it. With mortality conceived as an

The Joseph Smith Translation

41

educative ascent from premortality, the couple’s decision to eat the fruit is needful and entirely to God’s purposes. The strict injunction to not partake of the Tree of Knowledge is tempered in Smith’s rewrite of Genesis 3: “nevertheless thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given thee,” the Lord says. As a consequence of Eve’s (and then Adam’s) decision, the Garden is revealed as prologue, not permanent home, and abundant life rather than death is the immediate consequence: “[human beings] were born into the world by the fall,” is how Smith’s revision characterizes the aftermath in his first revision of the account in Genesis of the fall.67 In sum, says an early LDS catechism, “the Fall of our first parents is one of the great steps to eternal exaltation and happiness, and one ordered by God in his infinite wisdom.”68 Hence, and with no small irony, the most substantive and consequential modification Smith gives to the opening chapters of Genesis is, in light of his revisions, the new and literal reading of Genesis 3:22 that follows ineluctably from the reshaped context he gives to Eve’s choice. The words “behold, they have become as one of us” have proven incomprehensible to millennia of commentators, unless dismissed as pure irony, divine sarcasm. Presuming that God must be indignant at human aspirations to divine metamorphosis, the words have been read as indicating hot displeasure, not matter-offact recognition. In saying that he “has become as one of us . . . God was mocking Adam,” explained the fourth-century theologian Ephrem the Syrian.69 Centuries later, the commentator on Genesis Andrew Willet agreed that the Lord “derides their folly,” “speak[ing] ironically.” Reformers Phillip Melanchthon, Peter Vermigli, and Konrad Pellikan all employed the term “irony” as well to explain away the plain meaning of the text.70 Chrysostom went further and simply denied the accuracy of the passage, since it is obvious, he wrote, that “they did not become god” or “receive the knowledge of good and evil.”71 Smith, by contrast, read the words as simple statement of fact. It is worth taking stock at this point of how far from Christian orthodoxy Smith moved LDS theology in these few chapters. Compared to the relatively mild expansion of a Christian canon by adding the biblically similar Book of Mormon, the theological fault lines are now enormous. What had originally been—and to some extent continues to be—billed as a restoration of the primitive Christian church has now moved decisively outside any recognizably Christian cosmology or etiology, at least of the nineteenth century.72 Earth is just one among infinite inhabited spheres, with a human “fall” that appears to be designed rather than tragic. Earth life is the result

42  The Pearl of Greatest Price of a premortal victory of the forces supporting moral agency, even at great risk and cost. The choice of Eve and Adam does not bring sin or fallenness on their race but opportunity and progress. In fact, in an astounding reversal, the couple introduces not death but birth into the world (“they were born into the world by the fall”).73 Furthermore, man’s purpose is not to glorify God; rather, God’s self-​declared purpose is to immortalize and glorify man. Finally, Christ’s covenant with his church has Old Testament, not New Testament, roots. Christianity begins before the Garden. But Smith is just getting started. With ­chapter 6, he introduces a familiar biblical name—​the character of Enoch. And it is through the voice of this individual that Smith will present an entirely new human and divine anthropology, along with a comprehensive blueprint for the church and its people. The section is called “The Prophecy of Enoch,” and it is both groundwork and catalyst for almost everything that is to follow in Smith’s Restoration, theologically and organizationally (see figure 1.2).

The Prophecy of Enoch In 1817, the English satirist William Hone suffered three high-​profile trials for his impious attacks on Christianity. His greatest offense, however, was in his simple publication of a collection of ancient documents, The Apocryphal New Testament. The threat this publication posed to the orthodoxy of the day was evident in its full title, which constituted a disconcerting assault on popular notions of biblical canonicity: “being all the Gospels, Epistles, and Other Pieces Now Extant, Attributed in the First Four Centuries to Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and their Companions, and not Included in the New Testament by its Compilers.” Here readers could find “The Gospel of the Birth of Mary” and Jesus’s infancy narratives, along with “the Gospel of Nicodemus” and the “General Epistle of Barnabas.” Diluting the singularity—​and virtual inevitability—​of Christianity’s key text was dangerous enough, but his real provocation was in the particular way he formatted the book—​in double columns with verse numbers, just like the King James Version.74 The visual impact of the book was to blur crucial lines of demarcation and usurp the emblems of scriptural utterance. In other words, Hone’s work was viewed as an assault on what Thomas Rennell called the radical and unassailable “ground of distinction” between scripture and nonscripture. No middle ground was possible, in that view.75

The Joseph Smith Translation  43

Figure 1.2  Joseph Smith’s Bible manuscript corresponding to Moses 6:15–​28a. The Enoch story begins at line 29. Courtesy Community of Christ Archives.

The Apocrypha had been treated as a singular exception to that clear distinction and was only now in the process of eradication from Protestant Bibles. Hone’s publication revealed that tidily packaged set of books of the Bible to be symptomatic of a more universal problem, one with clear implications corrosive to the faith. As he wrote in his preface, the canonical selections of the Bible were made from among a large array of “other Gospels

44  The Pearl of Greatest Price and Epistles, the titles of which are mentioned in the works of the Fathers and the early historians of the Church.” And the principles of selection, the authority by which they were implemented, even the time and place of such decisions, are unchronicled, undocumented, utterly unknown.76 The mere retrieval of those selections that lost out was an implicit rebuff to an arbitrarily designed—​and closed—​canon. “Concerning the genuineness of any portion of the [present] work,” Hone coyly added, “the Editor has not offered an opinion.”77 A copy of this very book eventually found its way into Joseph Smith’s personal collection.78 Hone’s book possibly precipitated the series of “energetic discussions” Smith mentioned in his history, though we do not know at what date he acquired it. “Much conjecture and conversation frequently occurred among the saints,” the Times and Seasons reported, describing the last months of 1830, “concerning the books mentioned, and referred to in various places in the Old and New Testaments, which were now no where to be found.” One missing scripture in particular caught Smith’s interest: “the apostolic church had some of these writings,” he continued, “as Jude mentions or quotes the prophecy of Enoch, the seventh from Adam.”79 These “energetic discussions” provided the context for those Old Testament texts that Smith was recuperating in those closing months of 1830. For it was in those same months, he later reminisced, that “to the joy of the little flock, which numbered about seventy members [he could not yet have known of the success of the mission to the Native Americans, that baptized 130 Reformed Baptists enroute], did the Lord reveal . . . the prophecy of Enoch.”80

Enoch in Jewish and Christian History The Bible mentions two Enochs. About the first we know nothing except that he “builded a city” and took his place in the genealogical record between Cain and Irad. About the second, the father of Methuselah, the Bible says little more. Only that this patriarch “walked with God; then he was no more for God took him.”81 “This cryptic statement,” notes the Encyclopedia Judaica, “implies the existence of some fuller narrative about Enoch, now lost.”82 One scholar speculates that “Genesis preserves a partly expurgated narrative about Enoch and that some of the original mythological motifs

The Joseph Smith Translation  45 continued to exist in oral tradition until they reached their present form in Jewish Pseudepigrapha and medieval legends and mystical literature.”83 In Talmudic lore, Enoch is one of nine righteous men who enter heaven without tasting of death. Christians read the expression “God took him” the same way, based on the verse in Hebrews that explains that “Enoch was translated that he should not see death.”84 He was acclaimed as a powerful teacher of mankind and was awarded with the name Metatron and made chief angel among the heavenly hosts. Several apocryphal works mention Enoch, and two Jewish apocalyptic books feature him prominently, the Ethiopic and the Slavonic Books of Enoch. There is also a Hebrew Enoch (3 Enoch), written in the third or fourth century. The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, also known as 1 Enoch, is from the Second Temple period (c. 500 bce–​70 ce). Its influence in early Christianity was enormous. Early church fathers Justin and Irenaeus refer to Enoch’s work; Clement of Alexandria and Origen knew of it; and some, like Tertullian, considered it canonical—​not surprising, given that the book of Jude apparently quotes a passage from ­chapter 2 of the work.85 Some scholars go so far as to claim that it was a principal conduit for “the concept of a preexistent Messiah . . . and prepared the way for the belief in the divinity of Jesus.”86 By the fourth century, however, Augustine was hostile, the book began to fade in importance, and it was soon virtually forgotten in the Christian world. (Hence the title of Margaret Barker’s book on 1 Enoch, The Lost Prophet. It was “the most important Jewish writing from the New Testament period,” she asserts.)87 The explorer James Bruce rediscovered the text in its fullest extant version, the Ethiopic, in Ethiopia in 1769. Tradition linked the royal house of Ethiopia with King Solomon through the queen of Sheba; how Christianity arrived in the country is unknown, but when Bruce arrived there, evidence of its early influence was everywhere, and the Book of Enoch constituted a portion of the Ethiopian Old Testament. Scholars reintroduced the text to Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An English translation by Richard Laurence appeared in 1821.88 At present, Barker believes, “the study of . . . 1 Enoch and similar works is the fastest growing area of biblical scholarship, and a knowledge of 1 Enoch is now a necessary preliminary to any responsible study of the New Testament.”89 This is because, given its widely attested importance in early Christianity, 1 Enoch adds substantially to the mythic landscape in which Christian belief and practice took root. We may, in other words, have been basing our understanding of early Christianity on a very

46  The Pearl of Greatest Price partial record of texts the early Christians considered important—​a record to which 1 Enoch may be a most important supplement. Laurence’s translation was noted enthusiastically by a number of his clerical contemporaries. John Butt published in 1827 The Genuineness of the Book of Enoch, an investigation of the work.90 He notes Laurence’s argument that the recovered book was “precisely the same as that which was known to St. Jude and the Fathers,” even though it “was [n]‌ever invested [by the Jews] with canonical authority” and was actually pseudepigraphal, that is, a work falsely attributed to famous figures in a bid for authoritative recognition.91 Laurence valued his discovery most for its attestation of Jewish belief in both a preexisting Son of Man, “whom the most High preserved in the presence of his power, and revealed to the elect,” and a Holy Spirit. That “the Jews before the birth of Christ believed the doctrine of a Trinity” was, Laurence argued, the most important fact surrounding the Book of Enoch.92 (That point is disputed, since the relevant sections are not of certain pre-​Christian origins.) Laurence’s book was largely an attempt to argue for the possible Enochian authorship of the book, taking the book very seriously indeed. At the other end of the spectrum, Algernon Herbert dismissed the work a year later as “an ignorant and ridiculous effusion,” “monstrously absurd”;93 and George English had dismissed it a decade before as a “ridiculous . . . stupid forgery.”94 Many of the traditions associated with Enoch designate him “the inventor” of astronomy, instructed by the angels in that science, and connect him with magical and esoteric knowledge.95 The Book of Enoch consists of five distinct sections, each of which modifies the New and Old Testaments’ picture of early Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity in crucial respects. Most fundamentally, the author of 1 Enoch places no emphasis on Mosaic law and ritual sacrifice and criticizes them and other developments he associates with the period after the Jewish return from Babylonian exile. (Their temple offerings will be “polluted and not pure” offerings of “an apostate generation” that “shall arise.”)96 The five sections are the Watchers, the Similitudes, Astronomy, Dreams, and the Epistle of Enoch. The Watchers section narrates the story of fallen angels, including an account of those who descend to earth, breed with mortal women, and create a progeny of monsters (or giants). The Similitudes section (the only one not represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls) describes a great judgment on the kings and the powerful of the earth, presided over by the Son of Man. Astronomy chronicles Enoch’s instruction in the ordering of the heavens and the celestial

The Joseph Smith Translation  47 calendar. Dreams describes the destruction of the earth and the history of Israel. The Epistle of Enoch warns the wicked, promises the righteous a life in heaven, and predicts coming events. Strikingly relevant to Smith’s Enoch, and the cosmology of which it forms a part, is the fact that the original Book of Enoch “is based upon a theory of the origin of evil which does not involve Adam and Eve and original sin, and the massive burden of human guilt upon which the [Christian] churches have fed for so long.”97 Critics and apologists contend over the question of Smith’s access to or knowledge of esoteric materials (like 1 Enoch) that have a striking resonance with what he produced. D. Michael Quinn argues for Smith’s access in Early Mormonism and the Magic World View.98 It is “beyond probability” that he knew, or knew of, 1 Enoch, Salvatore Cirillo agrees. On the other hand, Smith’s preeminent biographer Richard Bushman writes that it is “scarcely conceivable that Joseph Smith knew of Laurence’s Enoch translation.”99 The prolific scholar and Jewish agnostic Harold Bloom sides with Bushman (“crucial elements in the archaic Jewish religion . . . survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly”) but finds the question in any case moot. Given what he refers to as Smith’s “religious-​making imagination,” his “genius or daemon,” Bloom writes: “I hardly think that written sources were necessary.”100 Our focus here is not in resolving the question of influence or access but in plumbing the nature of those parallels and modifications in the Enoch tradition that Smith produced, asking what they reveal about his prophetic project, and how they factored into the shaping of Latter-​day Saint writings and teachings. As exciting and revolutionary as his newly produced Genesis material was, Smith did not rush into print those texts that constituted a new history of Eden. The Latter-​day Saints established their first press in Missouri in the summer of 1832—​and in the third issue of the first volume of the church newspaper Evening and Morning Star, it was not Smith’s rewrite of the story of creation or the story of Eden that was published but an entirely new narrative in which Enoch plays the central role. This first published fruit of Smith’s biblical labors, “The Prophecy of Enoch,” bypasses the first six chapters of his newly reconstituted Genesis and begins with ­chapter  7.101 Dispensing even with words of introduction, W. W. Phelps printed the lengthy extract, which detailed Enoch’s preaching, offered a remarkable ascension narrative, and culminated with the apotheosis of the prophet and his city. This 1830–​ 1831 narrative proved to be central to all that Smith thereafter accomplished,

48  The Pearl of Greatest Price revealing an impact far out of proportion to its modest textual length. This “Prophecy of Enoch” sowed the seeds of the Latter-​day Saints’ most distinctive and vibrant doctrines, in the following ways. It produced the most emphatic version of a passible Deity the Christian world then knew (a God of passions and emotions). It catalyzed the LDS understanding of and enthusiasm for the doctrine of premortal existence. It foreshadowed (and still might more vitally inform) the church’s distinctive doctrine of theosis or divinization. And perhaps most important, it provided Smith with the distinctive contours of his own prophetic vocation as the builder of a literal Zion. If the Book of Mormon lent him his indispensable aura of prophetic authority, the “Prophecy of Enoch” provided a personal role model to inspire him and a blueprint to direct him. The Book of Mormon may be the keystone of Mormonism, but the prophecy of Enoch is its doctrinal foundation.

A Passible God The God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept. —​Moses 7:28

For most of Christian history it has simply been assumed that God cannot suffer. He is infinite, unchanging, and impassible. “Who can sanely say that God is touched by any misery,” says Augustine in a typical formulation.102 To imagine a God literally troubled or grieving for his wayward creatures would be monstrous because it would make God hostage to the whims of those creatures. It would also suggest that in changing his emotional state, he would have to change for the better (hence he was not perfect previously) or for the worse (hence he would not be perfect now). This is why “the idea that God cannot suffer [was] accepted virtually as axiomatic in Christian theology from the early Greek Fathers until the nineteenth century.”103 This dominant historical position was for centuries so uncontroversial, writes one theologian, that no challenge to the doctrine emerged between its defense in the third century by Gregory Thaumaturgus (Ad Theopompum) and assorted critiques of the position in the late nineteenth century.104 As late as 1831, the Presbyterian reverend W. L. M’Calla spoke for most Christians when he held in public debate: “we never believed that God could suffer.”105 The Methodists for a brief time altered the language of the Church of England’s Thirty-​Nine

The Joseph Smith Translation  49 Articles with Wesley’s 1784 Articles of Religion, affirming belief in the “one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts”—​omitting the word “passions.” But within a few years, they added the term “passions” back to the triad of qualities God did not have.106 So by Joseph Smith’s day, the passionless God was virtually universal in Christian dogma. Only with the passage of a few more generations would a suffering God the Father become the norm in Christian theology. All such hedging about the capacity of a Father God to suffer is utterly absent in the Enoch narrative Smith produces in 1830–​1831. In this ascension narrative, the prophet Enoch is taken into heaven and records his ensuing vision. He sees Satan’s dominion over the earth, but he is most struck by God’s unanticipated response to a world veiled in darkness: “And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people and he wept, and Enoch bore record of it.”107 Smith then revised the text to indicate that Enoch is in this scene weeping with God and is surprised when he sees God joining in his grief. “And he beheld, and lo, the heavens wept also and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the Mountains.”108 Though “heavens” stands in here for “God” in poetic metonymy, it is clearly God who weeps, and who personally responds to Enoch’s twice-​expressed amazement: “How is it thou canst weep?”109 (Significantly, Enoch refers to him as the Father; the Divine Being declares himself to be “God; Man of Holiness,” with Christ referred to as “Son of Man” throughout the narrative.)110 The question here is not about the reasons for God’s tears. Enoch does not ask why do you weep but how are your tears even possible, “seeing thou art holy, & from all eternity to all eternity?” Clearly Enoch, who believed God to be “merciful and kind forever,” did not expect that such a being could be moved to the point of distress by the sins of his children. And so—​in the final redacted version of the exchange—​a third time he asks: “how is it thou canst weep?”111 The answer, it turns out, is that God is not exempt from emotional pain. On the contrary, God’s pain is as infinite as his love. He weeps not out of betrayal or rejection but because he anticipates feelingly the consequences of human sin. As he explains to Enoch, “unto thy brethren have I said, & also gave commandment, that they should love one another, & that they should serve me their God but, Behold, they are without affection, & they hate their own blood . . . & misery shall be their doom; & the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands. Wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?” (emphasis added).112

50  The Pearl of Greatest Price Mormonism is more famous for a God of body and parts than for its God of passions. That may be a striking disservice to its theology and its history alike. Actually, both an embodied God and a passible God are rooted in Smith’s revisions of Genesis, as I will show; but it is the weeping God—​a vulnerable God—​that receives most emphasis. God’s distress at the predicament humans have brought on themselves clearly evidences a disappointment, a regret, at the course of events—​which can only mean that they are not consistent with his will. We are here at almost the farthest remove imaginable from the God of Augustine and of John Calvin, who believed that “everything is governed by God’s hand,”113 from who is saved to where and when earthquakes hit. Mormonism’s God, by contrast, does not orchestrate human behavior, choice, and events to comport perfectly with his will. He participates in rather than transcends the ebb and flow of human history, human tragedy, and human grief. This contribution alone would make the “Prophecy of Enoch” a pivotal theological document in the LDS faith tradition.

Premortal Existence I made . . . men before they were in the flesh. —​Moses  6:51

A few of the 1830 revelations of Joseph Smith give hints and intimations of a human preexistence, but only vague glimmers. A September 1830 revelation references fallen hosts of heaven, though they were historically taken to refer to fallen angels. That same revelation (like Moses 3) refers to God’s creation as “first spiritual, secondly temporal,” but without elaboration.114 A passage in the 1830 Enoch text is the first indication by Smith of an unmistakable basis for a specifically human preexistence, leading to both poetic celebration and theological development of the theme. In Smith’s account, Enoch learns in a vision about “the spirits that God had created . . . not visible to the natural eye,” and is told clearly and unambiguously: “I am God; I made the world, & men before they were in the flesh.”115 These Enoch texts were not published until 1833, but it is clear that they were circulating earlier and had profound impact, as two documents illustrate. In the first, dated March 1832 and titled “A Sample of pure language,” the name of God is given as Awman, or “the being which made all things

The Joseph Smith Translation  51 in its parts”; and the “children of men” are said to be “the greatest parts of Awman.”116 The phrasing might not of itself have suggested a premortal genealogy; together with a second revelation, however, the text points quite clearly to a conception of human spirits as emanating from God, with the teaching traceable to Enoch. Little is known of the context in which this second revelation, dated 27 February 1833, was pronounced. An undated broadside of a poetic rendering of the revelation indicates that the original revelation was “sung in tongues by Elder D. W. Patton . . . and interpreted by Elder S[idney] Rigdon.”117 Recorded in the hand of Frederick G. Williams, this translation of an instance of “tongue-​singing” is clearly based on the 1830 prophecy of Enoch. For in this song, Enoch, as in Smith’s version, “saw the begining the ending of man he saw the time when Adam his father was made and he saw that he was in eternity before a grain of dust in the ballance was weighed he saw that he emenated and came down from God.”118 The cross-​fertilization of the Awman revelation and the Enoch hymn emerged when an anonymous writer, perhaps W. W. Phelps, published in the church paper a poetic celebration of preexistence in May 1833, bearing clear phrasing from these two sources (emphasis added): Before the mountains rais’d their heads Or the small dust of balance weigh’d, With God he [Enoch] saw his race began And from him emanated man, And with him did in glory dwell Before there was an earth or hell.119

Tellingly, Smith unambiguously affirmed the eternal preexistence of human spirits early this same month, declaring that “man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”120 Yet Phelps published his poetic declaration borrowing its language not from the definitive revelation of Smith but from the hymn of Enoch, showing the infiltration of the Enoch text into LDS culture in these earliest years. The importance of the Awman and Enoch texts in founding the first clear understanding of preexistence is further evident in the fact that Parley Pratt also relied on these two texts, invoking both the language of the Enoch hymn and the imagery of the Awman revelation in his 1838 pamphlet, wherein he argued that “the redeemed . . . return to the fountain, and become part of the

52

The Pearl of Greatest Price

great all, from which they emanated.”121 So we see in Pratt yet another link in the chain of influence that began with the Enoch text, showing it to be the version of preexistence that resonated widely in the early church, both doctrinally and artistically. Today, legions of LDS children sing “I am a child of God, and He has sent me here,” and official LDS texts refer to heavenly parents who sired us, their spirit children. Recent research has done much to indicate that Smith’s understanding of our primordial relationship to God relied more on language of adoption than parturition,122 but around the time of his death the model was shifting. “Emanation,” a term with Neoplatonic associations, may be a cautious attempt to bridge the linguistic divide between those competing models, and may be a sign that Smith considered neither category of earthly filiation to be a strictly accurate description of humankind’s descent from heavenly parents.

Theosis Thou hast made me, and given me a right to thy throne. —Moses 7:59

As writers from the Babylonians through the Greeks and to the early Christians recognized, and as the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists affirmed again, belief in premortal existence is logically connected with a belief in divinization. An origin with the gods, as the Babylonian epic Atrahasis, the church father Origen, and the Cambridge Platonist Henry More maintained, suggests a destiny among the gods.123 In striking consonance with this pattern, the prophecy of Enoch does not merely anticipate or suggest but actually models a version of theosis, or acquiring the divine nature, after introducing the fact of human preexistence. The linkage of theosis with premortality, is rooted historically in the diminished distance between Creator and creature that humankind’s heavenly origin implies. In other words, a divine premortal origin implies a divine postmortal destiny. In the Enoch text under consideration, this chain of association is clearly evident in the notion of human spirits as emanating from God. What emanates from is part and parcel of and is easily interpreted as destined to return to. Emanation is the concept that Pratt, Patten, and Phelps all derive from Enoch, even if the word itself does not always appear explicitly. What does appear is the rather

The Joseph Smith Translation  53 surprising assertion Enoch makes to God: “thou hast made me, & given me a right to thy throne” (emphasis added).124 Latter-​day Saints (and historians of the LDS tradition) generally consider theosis a late development in Smith’s thought, associated with the King Follett discourse he delivered weeks before his death, but here it is in the Enoch text, more than a decade earlier. And once again, here is evidence of both Smith and Pratt reading the prophecy of Enoch in precisely this way. Just days after the Enoch revelation, Smith pronounced in God’s voice: “I [will] give unto as many as will receive me, power to become my sons.”125 If that sounds too vague to be definitive, Smith repeated the language more emphatically, with an explicit link to Enoch, in 1832. In Smith’s vision of the degrees of glory, he refers to the inheritors of the celestial kingdom as “priests after the order of Enoch. . . . Wherefore, as it is written, they are gods, even the sons of God” (emphasis added). And Smith calls the heaven these gods inhabit “the general assembly and church of Enoch.”126 It was this exact language that Pratt defended in 1838 as a literal claim to theosis, and this reading unfolded as follows. Months after the degrees of glory vision, Smith received a subsequent revelation that declared that “the saints shall be filled with [God’s] glory, and receive their inheritance and be made equal with him” (emphasis added).127 This claim of eventual equality with God was too much for the Methodist journalist and crusader La Roy Sunderland. In 1838, he published a multipart attack on the LDS faith in Zion’s Watchman, his paper, singling out those words in particular as blasphemous. At that point in LDS history, a Mormon like Pratt might have responded that such language was no more audacious than what was found in the New Testament. Or Pratt could have found respectable refuge by invoking the Methodist doctrine of perfectibility. But Pratt shunned any Methodist connection in this regard. “We have often heard individuals, who advocate the Arminian doctrine, talking about perfection,” wrote an ungenerous LDS editorialist in a twice-​published essay, “when indeed, they are not only ignorant of the principle, but destitute of the necessary qualifications.”128 Instead, Pratt ignored the safer readings of precedent and pushed possible metaphor into a literal conception of theosis. In his response to Sunderland, he invokes both the language of the Enoch hymn and the imagery of the Awman revelation, linking the two ideas of theosis and premortality. Pratt argues that “the redeemed . . . return to the fountain, and become part of the great all, from which they eminated.” Indeed, he proclaims, adding language from Smith’s 1832 vision, the saved will “have the same knowledge that

54  The Pearl of Greatest Price God has, [and] they will have the same power. . . . Hence the propriety of calling them ‘Gods, even the sons of God.’ ” Other Christians may call this blasphemy, Pratt suggests, yet he would not retreat from “this doctrine of equality” (emphasis added).129 These affirmations of a robust LDS version of theosis were the first to appear in print, a full six years before the doctrine’s elaboration in Smith’s King Follett Discourse. While the language resonates with Neoplatonism, it is most notable for its intimations of a divine origin that betokens a divine future. As Pratt memorably captures the essential feature of this anthropology, “God, angels and men are all of one species,”130 thus diminishing the ontological distinction between the human and the divine. Whereas Augustine recorded that he was ashamed of once having believed that he was of the same nature as God,131 Latter-​day Saints were by 1838 coming to embrace an essential, primordial kinship with God. And the doctrine was clearly indicated in, and expressly developed from, the prophecy of Enoch emerging out of Joseph Smith’s New Translation. A vital elaboration of theosis that assumes a uniquely LDS cast, also follows from its subsequent treatment in the Enoch text. In early Christian thought, two statements established the historical parameters for theosis. The Second Epistle of Peter suggested that humans might become “participants of the divine nature.”132 Then in the sixth century, Dionysius clarified “theosis” to mean “the attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as is possible” (emphasis added).133 It was on the latter basis in particular that most patristic and later Christian treatments of theosis took shape. When several of the church fathers took up the theme of theosis, they often used “adoption” or “participation” as the operative terms that delimited the scope of divinization, ensuring that the ontological distance between God and humans always remained intact. Still, the degree to which these church fathers understood all allusions to theosis as metaphorical is contested.134 In Smith’s account, Enoch provides a very vivid and concrete instance of what it might mean to “participate in the divine nature.” As the ancient prophet’s encounter with God shows, the most conspicuous attribute of the Deity turns out to be love—​costly love, a love that manifests itself as full participation in and vulnerability to the epic of human suffering. Witnessing God’s weeping over his children is only half the journey Enoch makes. What he next experiences may be the only—​it is surely the most vivid—​ example given in LDS scripture of what the actual process of acquiring the divine nature might look like. It is certainly a lesson far more sobering than

The Joseph Smith Translation  55 exhilarating, a greater call to meekness than to grandiosity of spirit. As Enoch plumbs the mystery of the weeping God, he learns just what it means to be like God. Seeking insight into and understanding of eternal things, Enoch is raised to a perspective from which he sees the world through God’s eyes. The experience is more shattering than reassuring: “and it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, & told Enoch all the Doings of the Children of men, Wherefore Enoch knew, & looked upon their wickedness, & their misery, & wept, & stretched forth his arms, and he beheld eternity, & his bowels yearned, & all eternity shook.”135 His experience of the love that is indiscriminate in its reach and vulnerable in its consequences takes him to the heart of the divine nature. This is the mystery of godliness that Enoch not only sees, but briefly lives for himself. The text of Enoch, then, does not just introduce a vivid version of theosis; the text enacts just what such a process of divinization looks like. (“Enoch’s heart swelled wide as eternity.”) In this harrowing imitatio dei, Enoch experiences his own moment of infinite, godly compassion and suffering. Taught of highest things by the weeping God, Enoch becomes the weeping prophet. (Though 1 Enoch has no weeping God or weeping prophet, 2 Enoch, first translated into English in 1896, had the latter: “and I sighed and burst into tears. [And I said] concerning their disreputable depravity, ‘O how miserable for me.’ ”)136 Under the influence of the Pratts especially, theosis acquired highly speculative and extravagant dimensions. But in Smith’s thought, the most important element in the understanding of the Divine pertained to God’s character and attributes.137 The Enoch text clearly teaches of a God whose power and dominion flow from his love and vulnerability, whose infinite power is grounded in his infinite empathy. And this is a God who, unlike the God of the Bible Smith sought to improve, invites rather than forbids man to “become as one of us.”138

Zion He built a city that was called the City of Holiness, even Zion. —​Moses  7:19

It is no coincidence that Enoch becomes, in the course of this vision, the weeping prophet. On the day of the church’s organization, Smith dictated a

56  The Pearl of Greatest Price revelation that set the stage for his own identification with the prophet Enoch. This identification would be explicitly and hugely influential in Smith’s conception of himself and his mission. On this occasion, he reported the Lord’s voice as saying: “him have I inspired to move the cause of Zion in mighty power for good, and his diligence I know, and his prayers I have heard. Yea, his weeping for Zion I have seen” (emphasis added).139 At the time of this revelation, the early days of the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ, Zion was only an abstraction, and Enoch probably not part of Smith’s conceptual vocabulary. Zion was a term frequently used in this era to poetically evoke the idea of a godly people or project; the cause of Zion was simply the work or kingdom of God (as when the Methodists named new papers Zion’s Herald in 1823 or Zion’s Watchman in 1835). At times, however, visionaries and eccentrics alike turned their efforts to the task of literally constructing a New Jerusalem in the shape of a religious utopia in the American wilderness. This was the case with several efforts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—​three of which centered in Smith’s own New  York state:  John Christopher Hartwick, an eccentric Lutheran clergyman; Jemima Wilkinson, known as “the Publick Universal Friend”; and Robert Matthews, better known by the name he gave himself, Matthias. These dreamers and eccentrics’ impractical quest for a literal Zion on the one hand and the persistent invocation of the name in church hymns, religious newspapers, and Sunday sermons on the other reveal something of the idea’s powerful and enduring appeal in America’s religious history. For most Christians, the ideas of establishing the New Jerusalem, Zion, and the Heavenly City all reflect men and women’s deepest spiritual yearning. This longing takes many forms: the repair of a damaged relationship with God; the healing of a sick and sinful society; the dramatic triumph of good over evil; the transition into the eternal of all that is mortal, transient, and temporary. By the early nineteenth century, a number of loosely defined groups had emerged that reflected the various ways Christians expected to find their spiritual yearnings fulfilled. Initially in Smith’s language Zion is an unexceptional abstraction. An April 1829 pronouncement had urged him and Cowdery to “establish the cause of Zion,”140 and that phrasing was repeated in May and June 1829.141 In the immediate aftermath of Smith’s engagement with the Enoch material during his work of retranslation, however, his employment of Zion imagery shifts radically. As Steve Olsen has written, strains of the Zion ideal had always been present in early Mormonism, but Smith’s vision of Enoch “integrated

The Joseph Smith Translation  57 and energized them in a powerful and unmistakable manner.”142 An early instance of this fact is a September 1830 revelation in which Smith records his first reference to a brick-​and-​mortar city that is to be built, as a locus of the gathering so frequently mentioned in biblical prophecy. (“And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth,” in one of numerous formulations—​Isa. 11:12.) The current edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, section 28, reads: “no man knoweth where the city Zion shall be built.” But that wording is misleading; the original revelation says rather: “no man knoweth where the city shall be built, but it shall be given hereafter” (emphasis added).143 The city becomes “the city of Enoch” only after Smith’s vision of Enoch. For it is on that occasion that he learns that “Enoch built a City, that was called the City of Holyness, even Zion.”144 Smith also learns at this time that Enoch’s people were “of one heart, & of one mind, & dwelt in righteousness, & there were no poor among them”; he learns that they were so righteous that the entire city “was taken up into Heaven.”145 (One ancient Jewish version has over 800,000 followers disappearing along with Enoch at his ascension.)146 And Smith learns how, at the last day, the ultimate consolation and the shape of heaven will be revealed, as God’s righteousness will “sweep the Earth as with a flood, to gather out” those who will have him to be their God. Then, the Lord says to Enoch, shall “thou & all thy city meet them there; & we will receive them into our bosom; & they shall see us, And we will fall upon their necks, & they shall fall upon our necks, & we will kiss each other and there shall be mine abode, & it shall be Zion.”147 God and his people, the living and the departed, heaven and earth, will embrace. One hallmark of Smith’s theology is his metaphysical monism, his conflation of earthly and heavenly, and the collapse of sacred distance and of God’s radical alterity. These fundamentals are here anticipated and even enacted in a concrete image that conflates the temporal and the eternal, the this-​worldly and otherworldly, into an ongoing historical project in which all humans participate. The vision of Enoch’s city has immediate and dramatic effect on his designs for the fledgling church, and in the days ahead, the person and precedent of Enoch fill his mind. After the September revelation, another comes in January in which God identifies himself as “the same which have taken the Zion of Enoch into my own bosom.”148 And Smith immediately lays out a

58  The Pearl of Greatest Price plan for his latter-​day incarnation of Enoch’s city. In February, he encourages the Isaac Morley “family,” a group of some fifty individuals, to abandon their communal experiment for a more perfect version, captured in what comes to be known as the Law of Consecration—​but was originally called, Orson Pratt informs us, tellingly, the Law of Enoch.149 Weeks later, in March 1831, Smith pronounces a revelation confirming that Enoch is his inspiration for this new initiative: Wherefore, hearken ye together and let me show unto you even my wisdom—​the wisdom of him whom ye say is the God of Enoch, and his brethren, Who were separated from the earth, and were received unto myself—​a city reserved until a day of righteousness shall come—​a day which was sought for by all holy men, and they found it not because of wickedness and abominations. . . . Wherefore I, the Lord, have said, gather ye out from the eastern lands, assemble ye yourselves together. . . . And with one heart and with one mind, gather up your riches that ye may purchase an inheritance which shall hereafter be appointed unto you. And it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God; And the glory of the Lord shall be there, and the terror of the Lord also shall be there, insomuch that the wicked will not come unto it, and it shall be called Zion.150

That summer of 1831, Smith personally journeyed to Missouri to locate the site for the city of Zion. While there, he reenacted a portion of his vision of Enoch, uttering a prayer in which he saw himself as a nineteenth-​century incarnation of the weeping prophet, clearly writing under the impetus of a passage from Moses 7. In the original, “Enoch looked, & from Noah he beheld all the families of the earth; & he cried unto the Lord, saying, when shall the day of the Lord come? When shall the blood of the righteous be shed? that all they that mourn may be sanctified, & have eternal life?”151 Smith, rather self-​ consciously the parallels would indicate, expressed similar horror at a comparable scene of wickedness and depravity on the site of the New Jerusalem, substituting the inhabitants of Missouri for Noah’s contemporaries, while expressing the same mournful longing for respite. “Looking into the vast wilderness of those that sat in darkness . . . observ[ing] the degradation, leanness of intellect, ferocity and jealousy of a people,” he was moved to exclaim, in language he explicitly likened to “the language of the Prophets: When will the wilderness blossom as the rose? When will Zion be built up in her glory,

The Joseph Smith Translation  59 and where will thy Temple stand, unto which all nations shall come in the last days?”152 In June 1833, a few months after publishing Enoch’s prophecy, Smith sent the actual blueprint, the plat for the city of Zion, to his colleagues in Missouri. It is easy to see Joseph Smith as a Moses figure, giving a new law, producing scripture, leading his people out of spiritual bondage and into a promised land, speaking with God and angels face to face. But his own words suggest a different parallel. “Moses sought to bring the children of Israel into the presence of God, through the power of the Priesthood, but he could not. In the first ages of the world they tried to establish the same thing—​and there were Elias’s raised up who tried to restore these very glories but did not. . . . But Enoch did for himself and those that were with Him” (emphasis added).153 Smith was deeply attuned to this record of lamentable failure both before and after the accomplishment of Enoch. Apostasy and restoration were a ceaseless cycle in the world’s history, but Smith believed that Enoch offered the model and blueprint for getting all the way to Zion. In 1795, the Scottish minister Alexander Fraser published his popular work Key to the Prophecies, which included a gloss of a passage in Revelation 12 that was of special interest to Protestants of the era: “and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God . . . where she is nourished for a time.”154 In Fraser’s interpretation, this prophecy of the woman in the wilderness refers to the time when, “as the visible church declined from the doctrines and precepts of Christianity, the true Church of Christ gradually retired from the view of men, till at length . . . the true church of Christ, considered as a community, wholly disappeared.”155 Sometime between 1829 and 1835, Joseph enthusiastically embraced a kindred version of restoration as a reassemblage of a scattered—​rather than abandoned—​church in the wilderness. (In the 1835 edition of his revelations, he even changed the wording of the 1833 Book of Commandments, section 4 [“I will establish my church”], to reflect this new reading of Revelation 12 [i.e., that he is to preside over “the coming forth of my church out of the wilderness”].)156 If he was in fact influenced in this regard by Fraser, he may have read Fraser’s further comments on the allegory.157 According to Fraser, when any church becomes “visible as a society, she shall not be safe, but be corrupted more or less by the same artifices which overwhelmed the [first] great body of professed Christians.” New reformations can occur, but inevitably the process of corruption will continue “ad infinitum,” Fraser writes—​at least, until the prophesied years of exile come to an end. Then, and only then, will the church

60  The Pearl of Greatest Price become “visible as a community, extended over the whole earth, ‘clear as the sun, fair as the moon, and terrible as an army with banners.’ ”158 Smith was convinced that he could escape this endless cycle of restoration and apostasy and that the prophetic figure of Enoch showed the way forward. The hope Enoch offered Smith was threefold. First, the panoply of latter-​day events seemed to herald the imminent end of exile—​and an end to the cyclical pitfalls of human history, as the millennium rapidly approached. Second, the prophecy of Enoch demonstrated a particular order of preparation. The city of Zion preceded Enoch’s ascension to heaven and communion with God, thus demonstrating that heaven does not come after there is a sufficient critical mass of righteous individuals. The preparation has to be communal. Preparation for the Second Coming required a prepared people of God. Third, and related to the previous point, Enoch represented the possibility of something more durable than a loose agglomeration of the righteous or of a more inspired ecclesiastical institution. Enoch embodied this idea of a covenant people. “It is the testimony that I want,” Smith said, “that I am God’s servant, and this people his people.”159 In other words, as he told a group in March 1842, he would succeed where Moses and a number of Eliases had failed:  “he was going to make of this society a kingdom of priests—​ as in Enoch’s day.”160 Smith saw the forging of this community as his true prophetic task. As persecution of Latter-​day Saints intensified over the next years, the leadership found it prudent to assume coded names in the printed revelations. Smith’s choice was virtually inevitable. Enoch, he was called.161 The gesture was more than historical nostalgia. Enoch was the single most important figure for Smith’s self-​conceiving and understanding of his prophetic role, and the prophecy of Enoch was his template for its successful implementation.

Matthew 24: Preserving Millennialism Joseph Smith’s “new translation” project was arguably the most theologically significant endeavor of his prophetic career. I’ve noted that he called this “branch of his calling” a special “work of translation appointed” to him by God.162 It was the catalyst that led to his production of the Book of Moses, the most theologically potent of his revealed texts. Ironically, perhaps, given the doubt he had cast on the Bible’s reliability, his new translation—​with its edits

Figure 1.3  Joseph Smith’s Bible manuscript corresponding to Matthew 23:31b–​ 24:5a. Courtesy Community of Christ Archives.

62  The Pearl of Greatest Price and additions—​had the effect of revalidating the integrity of the biblical record as a whole, by virtue of the authority he invoked to pass it through a kind of prophetic review and refurbishment. As noted, Moses 7 (Smith retitled the chapters as Moses rather than Genesis) was published in August 1832 in the church’s Evening and Morning Star. In March 1833, portions of Moses 6 were published (43–​68), and Moses 5:1–​16, 52, 58–​61, 7:5–​11, and 8:13–​30 followed in April. A decade later, another chapter appeared in a successor newspaper, the Times and Seasons (Moses 1). Only in 1851 did Richards assemble the scattered portions in The Pearl of Great Price. One other product of the translation was published as a stand-​alone section in Richards’s pamphlet that became scripture: Matthew 24. Why, of all Smith’s New Testament revisions, did this section alone warrant independent publication as part of The Pearl of Great Price? If any one Christian preoccupation dominated antebellum America, it was millennialism. But Christians were hotly divided on the timing of Christ’s return. A few (like William Miller) anticipated the imminent return of Christ, to bring the kingdom of God by force and usher in a thousand years of peace (hence their later designation as premillennialists). Others, like the restorationist Alexander Campbell, contested hotly for a delayed return, contingent on the earth’s preparation, and to occur after a long period of successful evangelizing and societal reform (postmillennialism). Campbell propounded his views most widely through his paper the Millennial Harbinger, founded four months before the establishment of Mormonism. Most of the LDS Church’s first converts were drawn from Campbellite-​related movements. One Campbellite—​Sidney Rigdon, who later became a potent shaping force in Mormonism—​broke ranks with Campbell largely over the timing of the Second Coming. Rigdon and Campbell both felt that “the restoration of the ancient gospel was . . . the initiatory movement” that would precede the millennium.163 Campbell felt that with time, humans would be capable of effecting that restoration on their own. Rigdon was more emphatic about the Parousia’s imminence, and that the Lord himself would “prepare the way of his coming by raising up and inspiring apostles [and] prophets,” and would “restore again to his Saints all the gifts of the church as in days of old.”164 Campbell’s version of millennialism implied a modest, conservative approach; Rigdon in his zeal wanted a vigorous, proactive strategy that would hasten the Second Coming. As Campbell came sadly to realize, Rigdon “held to a literal fulfilment and application of the written word” and became convinced that scriptural prophecies portended dramatic events that would

The Joseph Smith Translation  63 definitively herald Christ’s coming in glory, “something extraordinary in the near future.”165 William Miller, who would inspire a vast following as well, relied on his reading of Revelation to ascertain an exact date for Christ’s return in 1843. After 1830, Latter-​day Saints felt empowered to go beyond the skills of personal observation and scriptural exegesis alone. They had in their possession a recovered record whose very existence was seen as prophetic proof that the final dispensation was truly arrived. Even before its first page was opened, they believed, the Book of Mormon by its miraculous provenance proclaimed that heaven-​inspired preparations were afoot. And when readers did study its message, what they found was confirmation of its outward meaning. Actual invocation and interpretation of Book of Mormon passages by early LDS Church writers was relatively uncommon. But in those instances where official church publications do provide commentary on selected passages, “what stands out in bold relief . . . is the thematic preeminence of . . . the restoration of Israel.”166 When the Book of Mormon was cited or described, it was to teach the doctrine of gathering and an imminent Second Coming. It was not happenstance that the principal LDS periodical for many years, edited by Richards, was titled the Millennial Star. The coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the gathering of spiritual Israel (attested by the congregating of converts to a central location) and the gathering of literal Israel (seen as the relocating of Native Americans to a geographically delimited sphere, the Indian Territory)—​these three events were taken as prophetically foretold signs that dramatically evidenced an imminent Second Coming. These unfolding contemporary events, as interpreted through the lens of the Latter-​day Saints, were buttressed by the dozen revelations Smith produced in which the Lord warned:  “I come quickly”;167 and together they combined to convince Smith in powerful fashion that the Second Coming was at the very door. Indeed, mere days after “the Vision,” he received explicit affirmation that Christ’s coming would precede, not follow, a millennial era. Interpreting the imagery of the seven seals, Jesus proclaims to Smith that “in the beginning of the seventh thousand years will the Lord God sanctify the earth, and complete the salvation of man, and judge all things, and shall redeem all things.”168 This heightened expectation so abundantly witnessed in scripture and contemporary developments, and so universally anticipated by the LDS faithful, may help to explain the anomaly that is Matthew 24. Smith focused more editorial effort on Matthew 24 than on any other single chapter of the

64  The Pearl of Greatest Price New Testament he revised. Doubtless this was in large part due to the prominence of millennialism in Smith’s surroundings as well as in his own religious thinking. Only a full decade after his followers’ expulsion from the Zion they had attempted to establish in Missouri did Smith conclude that Christ’s return was at least several years in the future. “I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than” the 1890s, he wrote.169 In 1830, however, preparations for the millennium were in earnest, and Smith would have studied Matthew 24, the New Testament’s most extended treatment outside of Revelation describing signs of the Second Coming, with acute interest. He rephrased many of the pending predictions of doom to pertain to “the Jews” and “the inhabitants of Jerusalem” in particular, thereby separating them from the more general signs and warnings preceding Christ’s latter-​day return. In the enumeration of those signs and warnings, Smith reordered them slightly, but since Matthew did not specify chronological sequence, the reordering did nothing to clarify the eschatology. (For example, in Smith’s recasting, “ye shall also hear of wars” follows the reference to false Christs rather than preceding it.) More interesting, Smith inserts two phrases that once again reveal his self-​ conception as a restorer of lost texts and repairer of broken chains of transmission. In verse 44, he adds the significant phrase “then shall be fulfilled that which is written.” In the King James Version, Jesus is the originator of the prophecies that two shall be in the field and two at the mill. At Smith’s hands, Jesus is citing prophecies now lost from the scriptural record. And Smith concludes the chapter by tying “the end of the wicked” here described to “the prophecy of Moses, saying: They shall be cut off from among the people.” These two edits were subtle, but they would have reminded his readers of two points: that there seemed to be no end to the words of Moses and other ancients that were stripped from the modern Bible; and that Smith possessed unique and invaluable access to those sacred texts now lost to history—​ however momentous or fragmentary. Still, the question lingers: why publish this particular chapter in an 1851 mission pamphlet and then retain it through the process of the subsequent revisions and canonization of the Pearl of Great Price? One theory suggests itself. Of all Mormonism’s nineteenth-​century travails, nothing equaled the devastating expulsion from Jackson County in 1833. It was not just the material loss, the dispossession, or the physical suffering. More died in subsequent Missouri conflicts; their prophet and patriarch were martyred in Illinois; and many perished in the ordeal of westward flight. But the eviction

The Joseph Smith Translation  65 from Jackson County meant the postponement—​and subsequent collapse—​ of the millennial hopes, expectations, and yearnings that had catalyzed every aspect of the Mormon people’s lived faith. For the Latter-​day Saints, a return to Jackson County would be a dramatic and unmistakable sign that their millennial hopes were soon to be realized. Today the church continues to affirm that connection: “scripture makes it clear that Missouri has a prophetic role to play in the Second Coming.”170 Smith had arrived in this wilderness in the summer of 1831, learning by revelation that this was indeed “the land which [God had] appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the saints . . . the land of promise and the place for the city of Zion.”171 This was the place where the city of Enoch would descend to meet its earthly counterpart. All the signs were propitious for the Lord’s return, and now the holy city of prophecy, modeled on Enoch’s community, was within reach. On 2 August 1831, Sidney Rigdon dedicated the land of Jackson County to the Lord for the gathering of the Latter-​day Saints. Then the leadership ceremoniously laid the foundations for a schoolhouse, with twelve men, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, placing the first log in the first building of “Zion.” The next day, Smith dedicated a site for a temple. The millennial dream was unfolding. Brigham Young later recalled those days as a glimpse into paradise:  “a great many people imbibed the same idea which I did in the beginning, and really believed that in Jackson County all the earthly sorrows, afflictions, disappointments, and weaknesses pertaining to the flesh would be at an end, and that every one would be sanctified before the Lord, and all would be peace and joy from morning until evening, and from year to year, until the Savior should come.”172 Two years later, the illusion was shattered by violent mobs and militia. The expulsion of the Saints from what they had believed was their millennial dream on the verge of realization was the most shattering episode in the church’s history. The leaders Lyman Wight and Parley Pratt reported to Joseph Smith: “the idea of being driven away from the land of Zion pained their very souls, and they desired of God, by earnest prayer, to return with songs of everlasting joy, as said Isaiah, the prophet.”173 In 1834, Smith led a paramilitary expedition of 200 Saints, “Zion’s Camp,” to reclaim their spiritual inheritance. At the last minute, opposing mobs outnumbered the ragged group of volunteers, the governor’s promise of assistance proved an idle boast, and after sporadic exchange of fire and fierce storms, a stalemate ensued. The final coup de main came not from a mob but a bacterium. In the following days, cholera brought to the armed camp the death and

66  The Pearl of Greatest Price destruction the mob had hoped to inflict. The disease struck down seventy, more than a third of the ranks. Zion’s Camp, undertaken in such exuberant hope and martial fervor, ended with fourteen burials and the military force’s dispersal. The coda to the episode came by way of another revelation tinged with indefinite hope. “It is expedient in me that mine elders should wait for a little season for the redemption of Zion,” came the words of God through the Mormon prophet.174 “A little season”—​what exactly did that mean? On that slender reed would hinge the millennial hopes of the church, then as now. Initially, the leadership understood the postponement to be brief indeed. Camped at Winter Quarters en route to the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young boldly anticipated the day “we get into Jackson county to walk in the courts of that house, we can say we built this temple for as the Lord lives we will build up Jackson county in this generation.”175 It was during these first years of Utah settlement that Richards inserted Matthew 24 into his collection, in his words, as one piece of evidence that Smith was “the Prophet and founder of the dispensation of the fulness of times, in which will be gathered together into one all things which are in Christ.”176 In other words, Richards saw Matthew 24 as both validation of Smith’s repeated promises about a Missouri Zion and confirmation of an abiding belief in the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ as the “Latter-​day” prelude to Christ’s return. The inclusion of Matthew 24, with its detailed accounting of the events accompanying the Second Coming, would have been both an important reaffirmation of millennialism and a comforting reassurance that “the little season” could not last much longer. Richards, in an editorial that opened the new year of 1851, hailed “the Millennial morn” and saw signs everywhere portending the final days. Recent issues of the Millennial Star had noted Jewish plans to rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem,177 and Richards commended the evangelization of Europe, “the rapid spread of the work,” and the “immense gathering and upbuilding of the Saints in the Valley.” These portents gave him reason to hope that his readers would themselves “enjoy a thousand [years] during a reign of righteousness on earth.”178 Back in Utah, Young continued to express optimism: “I should not ponder if we got in to Jackson County before we anticipate”;179 but the first doubts began to emerge. “If we don’t go back there, our sons and daughters will,” he assured an audience in the Tabernacle.180 In his general epistles, read by the British Saints, he continued to preach the unceasing urgency of gathering to Utah. “The signs of the times are highly portentous of a mighty and short work in these last days,” he said in his epistle of

The Joseph Smith Translation  67 27 September 1850.181 “The second coming of the Son of Man . . . is near at hand,” he declared in his next epistle, of 15 July 1851. “It is not yet, neither is it far off.”182 As the decades passed, and the generation who had so hopefully laid the foundations of Zion was dying off, the notes struck seemed more to express stubborn insistence than buoyant hope. “Hear it all the world,” Young proclaimed; “the Latter-​day Saints will go back to Jackson County Missouri and build up the center stake of Zion and all hell can not prevent it.”183 Orson Pratt added his reassurances in 1870: “we have just as much confidence in returning to Jackson county and the building of a great central city that will remain there a thousand years before the earth passes away, as the Jews have in returning to Jerusalem.”184 Three years later, with Young ailing and near the end of his presidency, Pratt opined that God “may spare our present leader to lead this people on our return to Jackson County. But whether it be he or some other person, God will surely fulfill this promise.”185 The following year, the next prophet in line, John Taylor, chimed in: “we have been praying a long while that we might go back to Jackson County.”186 In this context of fading hopes, the decision to keep the millennial hope alive through republication of the apocalyptic verses of Matthew was a vivid reminder—​both in 1851 and even more so in 1880. The gesture, and the rhetoric proceeding from the Tabernacle subsequent to Taylor’s death, were mutually reinforcing. Wilford Woodruff, the fourth LDS president, taught that the millennium was at hand and that many in his audience “would see the savior.” The fifth president, Lorenzo Snow, continued the theme: “Christ will come before long”; and church members’ consecrated donations would provide the funds needed to purchase the temple site and adjacent properties. In July 1899 Snow was even more emphatic: “if you live 10 or 15 years more or less, perhaps Less, we are going back to Jackson County.”187 In the LDS Church of today, promises of imminent return to Jackson County are a relic of the past—​though they were common enough in the mid-​twentieth century that an anonymous figure could credibly forge a letter purporting to be from the First Presidency, directing bishops to make preparations for the return.188 Still, the singularity of Matthew as the only JST revision from the New Testament in Mormonism’s corpus of scripture endures as a defiant sign of millennial hopes deferred but not forgotten. Smith’s extensive interpolations in Genesis and reworking of Matthew 24 were sufficiently significant contributions to LDS doctrine and millennial understanding that Richards felt that they deserved independent publication

68  The Pearl of Greatest Price in his pamphlet. Other fruits of Smith’s “new translation” could not be captured in a discrete text but are apparent both in the pattern of smaller changes scattered throughout his revisions and in a number of subsequent revelations his work on that project prompted.

The Joseph Smith Translation and Scriptural Coherence Smith’s youthful assessment of the grand Protestant Reformation project, after fruitless searching for a spiritual home, was an implicit diagnosis of inevitable failure, since that project was founded on the principle of sola scriptura, but humans were manifestly incapable of resolving religious controversies “by an appeal to the Bible.”189 This rejection of sola scriptura was confirmed both by the Book of Mormon’s indictment of biblical sufficiency and by Smith’s own revelatory experiences, from which “it was apparent that many important points touching the salvation of man had been taken from the Bible,” as well as more pointedly by Smith’s own biblical revisions: “ye have taken away the key of knowledge, the fulness of the scriptures,” he has Jesus saying to the lawyers.190 Arguably, the independent canonization of Matthew 24 signaled an effectual canonization of the myriad minor edits made throughout the biblical text—​since they were made by the same process and as part of the same overall project by the same prophet. This is important, because it was in fact those edits—​much more than the published text from Matthew—​ that effected the greater harmonization and scriptural coherence of the evolving theology of the Church of Jesus Christ. True, the uncorrected King James Bible was the authoritative backbone of the Christendom in which Mormonism flourished, and Latter-​day Saints read it, in the main, as fully consistent with Smith’s evolving gospel schema. Brigham Young, John Young, and John Murdock—​to take three examples—​commented specifically on their assessment of the Church of Jesus Christ as a “Bible church,” its people as “Bible Christians,” and its doctrine as a biblical “plan of salvation,” as crucial to their conversion.191 And Smith himself, when asked if the Saints believed the Bible, responded that “if we do, we are the only people under heaven that does. For there are none of the religious sects of the day that do.” In fact, he added, that was the singular point on which Latter-​day

The Joseph Smith Translation  69 Saints “differ from other sects. Because we believe the Bible, and all other sects profess to believe their interpretations of the Bible, and their creeds.”192 Where the Bible was silent or in tension with Restoration teachings, however, it was the Bible rather than the Restoration teachings that gave ground. This was a radical hallmark of LDS scriptural doctrine 180 degrees removed from Protestant practice: biblical interpretation followed from rather than grounded the church’s theology. As Smith said, without caveat, “many things in the bible . . . do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the holy Ghost to me.”193 Therefore, Smith’s work of biblical retranslation would inevitably be a critically important project of both recuperation and adaptation, filling in “plain and precious things” and reconciling the final product with a fully formed Mormonism. Not all of Smith’s revisions to the Bible became part of the Pearl of Great Price. Nevertheless, this revision project was the context behind the revised chapters of both the Old and New Testaments that were canonized. Looking at the more comprehensive picture those revisions add up to can provide a richer context for Smith’s work on Genesis and Matthew and can reveal a profound continuity in many cases between themes that first appear in the Book of Moses and those that find further elaboration in subsequent work on the JST. Equally important, assessing the larger project of Smith’s Bible translation work illuminates key aspects of his revelatory modus operandi generally. For these three reasons, attention to the JST is essential to a fuller appreciation of the Pearl of Great Price texts that emerged from it. Of the thousands of edits Smith made, three types were of particular importance pertaining to doctrine. These were edits that contributed to (1) a restoration of “plain and precious” truths about God’s nature; (2) a rejection of some key orthodoxies of Christianity, such as original sin, and a repudiation of hallmark Protestant reforms to Christianity, especially human depravity and imputed grace; and (3) the transformation of Protestant covenant theology into an eternal gospel, expressed as a seamless covenant theology originating with Adam.

The Nature of the Divine: A Gentler Face of God The greatest obstacle to Christian belief has, in the experience of many, been the text of the Old Testament. As Mark Twain, one of atheism’s most acerbic writers, noted, “it is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible

70  The Pearl of Greatest Price God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-​goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-​born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities.”194 Legions of theologians and commentators have resorted to semantics, Higher Criticism, or simple fideism to resolve the most repugnant aspects of biblical literalism, when dealing with the Old Testament especially. Smith just rewrote the text. In the traditional Christian narrative, as one historian of theology writes, “God’s purpose and goal in redemption is to reverse the sin, corruption and death introduced into humanity by Adam.”195 This audacity was the most heinous of all human evils in Dante’s catalog of evil. So profoundly wrong was it, his angelic guide explained, that for it “Man, in his limits, could not recompense: /​for no obedience, no humility, /​he offered later could have been so deep /​that it could match the heights he meant to reach /​through disobedience.”196 Jonathan Edwards echoed Dante’s horror at human rebellion against a “holiness that was infinitely beyond human standards.” This infinite disparity between the human and the divine, Edwards wrote, made the attempt “infinitely evil.”197 As a Catholic theologian summarizes the issue, “the story immediately unfolds with a catastrophe. . . . Evil follows evil like an avalanche.”198 Consequently, the personal history of every human being begins in deficit, with loss, sin, corruption, alienation. God’s plan is thwarted, and justice demands payment. I have indicated how in the Book of Moses Smith substantially alters this narrative arc. God’s words that the man and woman “have become as one of us” are spoken with approbation, not alarm; nor, as numerous exegetes have claimed, with sarcasm. Questions about God’s justice and fair dealing emerge next in the story of Cain. For no reason anywhere indicated, the Creator accepts Abel’s sacrifice of animal life but rejects Cain’s bloodless offering. Generations of readers have been stymied by the acceptance of the one and the rejection of the other. Smith’s rewrite of Genesis adds context to the bewildering judgment: Newly exiled from Eden, Adam learns the meaning and form of proper sacrifice, that the firstlings of his flock are offered up as “a similitude of the Sacrifice of the only begotten of the Father.”199 In Smith’s redacted version, Cain’s offering is presented as deliberate sacrilege rather than innocent misstep. For Cain “loved Satan more than God,” and he makes his blasphemous gesture at Satan’s express instigation.200 The bleak defeatism of Eden and God’s censure of the entire human race, at least as construed by mainstream Christianity, finds an echo in the story

The Joseph Smith Translation  71 of Noah, when mass wickedness recasts the entire creation as a poorly conceived idea: “and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth” (Genesis 6:6). Here, too, Smith’s revisions temper the tone. In his edited story it is Noah, not the Maker, who despairingly “repents” of humankind’s creation. (Smith also depicts humans, not God, as repenting in Jeremiah 26 and Amos 7.) And although in both flood narratives the Creator summarily executes judgment on the human race, wiping the slate almost entirely clean, in Smith’s version the flood is predicated on humanity’s refusal to repent (“if men do not repent I will send in the floods”) and follows Noah’s persistent efforts to rehabilitate the people (“Noah called upon the children of men. . . . Noah continued his preaching unto the people”).201 Rather than the impulsive act of an indignant God, in other words, the flood in Smith’s revision follows on warnings and repeated attempts to redeem fallen humanity. And then, in the aftermath of such indiscriminate destruction of all life, God’s wrath is tempered by his expression of special regard for animal life. For he tells Noah, a few chapters after the flood, that animals should be killed and consumed “only for meat, to Save your lives, & the blood of evry beast will I require at your hands.”202 In the story of Babel’s tower Smith also made a small but significant emendation. In the earliest extant Middle Eastern creation narrative, Atra-​Hasis, the council of gods plans the creation of humankind by clothing a divine spirit in earthly clay. If humans remember their origins in the heavens, however, they might aspire to reattain the heights of their kindred gods. As a precaution, therefore, the council of gods obscures from humans their divine origin. And so, one commentator notes, in the process of its mortal incarnation, the human soul becomes “a distant and pale shadow of divine immortality, so that he would never seek immortality further.”203 The story of Babel reinforces this standard account of human hubris as the primal—​and persistent—​human sin and the picture of God as jealous guardian of his uniquely divine stature. In one translation of the story, “the whole earth had one language, and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar, and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly . . . [and] build a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.’ ”204 The King James translation is significant in its difference, as it makes the episode even more evocative of Adam’s sin: “and they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make

72  The Pearl of Greatest Price us a name . . .” The subtle shift from a visual description (“with its top in the heavens”) to an aspirational description (“whose top may reach unto heaven”) is potent. The King James wording emphasizes the hubris of the action, lending logic to the divine wrath that follows. We saw how in the LDS restructuring of the cosmic narrative, God “fore-​ordained the fall of man” as a planned ascent toward deification. As Smith expunged the hubris from Adam and Eve’s decision in Eden, so does he mitigate that motive at Babel. The builders’ growing capacity (“nothing will be restrained from them”) is concerning, but simple disobedience, not heavenly aspiration, prompts their fate. “They hearkened not unto the Lord, therefore, is the name of it called Babel.”205 In subsequent books of the Bible, Smith further rehabilitates God’s character with regard to his sovereignty over human free will. In the King James Version, Exodus 4:21, for example, relates how God vows to “harden” Pharaoh’s heart, thus setting him up for divine retribution. So in the compass of one brief verse we find whimsical cruelty, manipulation, and irresistible predestination. In Smith’s revision, Pharaoh hardens his own heart.206 1 Samuel relates, to similar effect, that the Lord sends an evil spirit to trouble Samuel, making God the orchestrator of sorrow and the supervisor of demon minions. At Smith’s hands, the evil spirit is emphatically “not” of the Lord.207 This pattern finds repetition in 2 Chronicles. Acting more as a trickster than a Being of truth and love, God puts “a lying spirit in the mouth” of his prophets; in Smith’s correction God finds one there.208 Smith edits further traces of God’s tricksterism out of New Testament texts. For instance, for Smith, the Spirit leads Christ to the wilderness “to be with God,” not to be tempted by the devil.209 Finally, Jesus does not need to beseech God not to lead his children into temptation; rather, he prays that God will protect them from temptation.210 In the early Christian centuries, Christianity’s most potent voice after Paul had no patience with those who questioned a capricious God. Augustine asks rhetorically of “what kind of Justice, then, is this” celestial tyrant possessed?—​and replies: “a justice beyond both our understanding and our right of complaint.”211 Smith believed the corruption was in the text written by fallible Old Testament prophets, not the heavenly character. And serving as further evidence that Smith’s revisions were never completed are those instances he left unredacted in which the God of unreasonable vengeance persists in these prophets’ characterizations (such as God’s slaughter of 70,000 innocents for David’s ill-​conceived census in 2 Samuel 24). The consistency of

The Joseph Smith Translation  73 Smith’s existing revisions in this regard indicate a decided movement in the direction of the weeping God of Enoch.

The Nature of the Divine: An Embodied God The one common feature of Catholic and Protestant insistence that the parameters of the historic Christian tradition do not encompass the Church of Jesus Christ is its rejection of Trinitarianism.212 And the irremediable obstacle to the acceptance of that dogma by the LDS Church is its stubborn insistence on a corporeal God the Father, who shares character and mind and purpose with the Son and Holy Spirit but not substance. No one disputes the presence of an embodied God in portions of the Old Testament. Noting the several strains of anthropomorphic thought in the Bible, some historians hold that “over the course of its history, Israelite religion reduced anthropomorphic depictions of Yahweh.”213 The Genesis account of the creation of man “in the image and likeness of God,” according to some scholars, already represents a movement away from an older, even more anthropocentric tradition. In Genesis, for instance, no actual description of the Divine is given. Smith was not privy to recent scholarship that has uncovered an extensive history of divine anthropomorphism in early Christianity,214 but his own experience in the New York grove of trees was sufficient warrant for him to embrace and expand the Bible’s references to a walking, talking God. His first such clarification comes with the creation itself, where he inserted a crucial addition to Genesis 5:1–​2: “in the day that God created man (in the likeness of God made he him) in the image of his own body, Male &and female, created he them & called their names Adam” (emphasis added).215 As David Paulsen notes, “evidently, Joseph added the clarifying phrase, ‘of his own body,’ to distinguish his understanding of the text from any incorporealist construction. From Joseph’s revision of these biblical texts, it appears clear that in 1830 he understood that both the Father and Son are embodied and that man’s body was made in their image.”216 Based on occasional intrusions of Trinitarian language into Smith’s discourse, it is sometimes alleged that he came late to the idea of an embodied God. The historical record is fairly clear in attesting the contrary, however. Long before the Nauvoo era, Smith’s followers were already focusing on Christianity’s bodiless God as a hallmark of its apostate condition. Warren Cowdery criticized the Methodists for believing in a deity “without body

74  The Pearl of Greatest Price or parts” in an 1836 church article.217 While Cowdery wrote in an LDS periodical for an LDS audience, their heterodoxy on this point was clearly recognized—​ and criticized—​ by their religious contemporaries. In the same year that Cowdery’s remarks appeared, a Presbyterian minister from Kirtland wrote that Latter-​day Saints believed in a “material being, composed of body and parts.”218 In 1838, Parley Pratt repeated Cowdery’s criticism of other Christians for belief in “a God without body or parts.” Why worship a God, he wondered, “who has no ears, mouth, nor eyes,” adding with humorous sarcasm: “we do not love, serve, nor fear your God; and if he has been blasphemed, let him speak and plead his own cause: but this he cannot do, seeing he has no mouth.” On the other hand Pratt affirmed without apology that Mormons “worship a God, who has both body and parts; who has eyes, mouth, and ears, and who speaks when he pleases.”219 The bodily God who appears in the Garden and whose bodily parts are seen by Moses becomes at Smith’s hands the same embodied God of whom Christ is a literal likeness. Thus, the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman “God is a Spirit” come to be revised as “unto [true worshipers] hath God promised his spirit.”220 By the same token, the claim in Exodus that “Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and live,” becomes “neither shall there be any sinful man at any time that shall see my face and live” (emphasis added).221 John’s “no man hath seen God at any time” receives the caveat “except he hath borne record of the Son.”222 If the Moses text did the work of endowing God with passions, Smith’s many smaller edits clearly added body and parts to the church’s radical theism.

New Orthodoxies: A Different Sin and Salvation The major debates roiling the Protestant world of Joseph Smith concern the relative roles of grace and works in human salvation, the degree of human will that is operative in the process, and the resources of inner goodness or strength that are available. In his revisions, Smith takes every opportunity to repudiate Christian notions of original sin, singling out children in particular as meritorious of salvation. Children need no repentance, he appends by way of the Savior’s words in Matthew 18:11 and 19:13. Unexpectedly, Smith even intrudes the point in his version of Genesis 17, where the Lord tells Noah that young children are not accountable for sin.223 But Smith’s most significant contributions to an LDS theology of salvation are so subtle that

The Joseph Smith Translation  75 they are easy to miss, coming in Paul’s letter to the Romans—​itself the single most potent text in Christian history. In the fourth chapter, where the King James Version has Paul saying that the promise of salvation “is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed,” Smith’s revision has “therefore ye are justified of faith and works, through grace, to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed.”224 The change may appear a simple sleight of hand, nodding toward Protestant grace while inserting “works” in a move toward Arminianism; but a few moments later, Smith again invokes grace, clearly defining it not as imputed righteousness but as a Christ-​begotten power strengthening humankind’s capacity to submit to law. “For to will is present with me, but to perform that which is good I find not,” Smith says, echoing Paul, but then adds the crucial caveat: “only in christ.”225 Smith reaffirms the point moments later, emphasizing that we can only live the full “law . . . of Christ” “through the assistence of Christ.”226 (This implicit but clear rejection of sola gratia finds full explication in an 1832 revelation wherein Smith states that here and hereafter, all kingdoms are subject to law and “that which . . . abideth not by law . . . cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy.”)227

The Everlasting Covenant Smith’s most significant revisions to the Bible—​revisions that also lay the groundwork for his work on the Abrahamic narrative of the Pearl of Great Price—​are doubtless those that recontextualize all the episodes of biblical history in the master narrative of the Everlasting Covenant, eliding Old and New Testament distinctions and obliterating the traditional Christian narrative of a progressive unfolding of gospel fullness. This framework guiding Smith’s entire Restoration project emerges out of his revisions to several Old and New Testament texts (in addition to his comprehensive treatment of covenant theology in his Book of Moses, wherein Christian principles and sacraments are known to Adam). First is the revisiting of the covenant with Noah. In the biblical account, God appears to be making a covenant with Noah that has no precedent. In Smith’s retelling, God tells Noah he is merely reaffirming the “everlasting covenant” already established with Enoch (among others, it turns out).228 And that covenant, rooted in antiquity, anticipates the future merging of the celestial city (the general assembly of

76  The Pearl of Greatest Price the church of the firstborn) with the earthly Zion—​later developed into the concept of an eternal heavenly family bound together by temple covenants and priesthood powers of sealing. A few chapters later, in a manner parallel to Adam’s instruction about a coming savior (Moses 5), the patriarch Abraham “looked forth & saw the days of the Son of man, & was glad; & his soul found rest, & he believed in the Lord.”229 Then, in the clearest collapse of distance separating things new and old, Moses is presented in Smith’s revision of Deuteronomy as the purveyor of “the everlasting covenant of the holy priesthood.”230 In the preceding account of the golden calf, Smith explains how Moses’s role shifted to lawgiver of a severely reduced and preparatory—​in the sense of remedial—​law. Smith rewrites that episode as a tragic if temporary rupture in a covenant relationship that had extended back to primeval times, rather than a simple story of idolatry punished but soon forgiven. As the Lord explains to Moses after the destruction of the original tablets, hew thee two other tables of stone, like unto the first, and I will write upon them also, the words of the Law, according as they were written at the first on the tables which thou breakest; but it shall not be according to the first, for I will take away the priest-​hood out of their midst; therefore my holy order, and the ordinences thereof, shall not go before them; for my presence shall not go up in there midst lest I [destroy] them. But I will give unto them the law as at the first, but it shall be after the law of a carnal commandment.231

This emended verse (Exodus 34:1) radically restructures Mormonism’s understanding of the whole law/​gospel and works/​faith polarities that underlie Protestant covenant theology. In the light of Smith’s corrections, the Mosaic law is powerless to save not because it is predicated on a doomed theology of works or a failed covenant of obedience but because it is an impoverished version of the Everlasting Covenant, shorn after the golden calf episode of its saving power, which originally included that higher priesthood and those sacramental ordinances “without [which] no one can behold the face of God.”232 In Smith’s revision, Paul is privy to this understanding of the Mosaic law as a declension and substitution rather than preparatory seedbed of the gospel. Though the King James Version, with which Smith worked, characterizes that Mosaic law as a “schoolmaster,” Smith’s recasting

The Joseph Smith Translation  77 of its status is more consistent with better renderings of the term, such as the “disciplinarian” of the New Revised Standard Version. In the New Testament, Paul notes that “the law . . . was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made.” The transgressions referenced are notoriously controversial in the history of commentary.233 One tradition, voiced by Jerome, held that “it was after the offense of the people in the wilderness, after the adoration of the calf and their murmurings against God, that the Law came to forbid transgressions.”234 Even that reading, however, sees the law as an advance rather than a diminution. Smith’s reading is distinctive in emphasizing the preexistence of a fuller gospel law already known to Moses: “the law was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made in the law given to Moses, who was ordained by the hand of angels to be a mediator of this first covenant, (the law).” Then Smith links the covenant even further back to Abraham, reaffirming Abraham’s full knowledge of what the covenant entailed: that “christ is the mediator of life; for this is the promise which God made unto Abraham.”235 In all these contexts, the Everlasting Covenant is the original, primeval articulation of God’s promise to shepherd his people back into the fullness of relationship in a heavenly family. Smith’s revisions reveal the many biblical permutations of this covenant to be recurrent affirmations of the original one, not progressive developments in a growing fullness.

The Joseph Smith Translation as Revelatory Catalyst In addition to the aforementioned significant editorial correctives, a number of visions, doctrinal innovations, and pronouncements came as a result of Smith’s work on the JST. Some, like section 76, were of enormous doctrinal significance that can be directly traced to that project. Many were secondary effects of the prophecy of Enoch, including perhaps a dozen or so that articulate principles connected with gathering, the building of Zion, and the law of the church. Further dozens bear clear traces of verbal borrowing from the biblical texts Smith was simultaneously studying in his translation work. Most surprisingly, at least one example of intertextuality suggests an opposite direction of influence: not only did his translation work directly influence the content of his revelations (the usual rule), but in one instance, a fragmentary revelation was reworked into a new scriptural narrative.

78  The Pearl of Greatest Price

The Joseph Smith Translation and the Doctrine and Covenants as Question and Response Although we can trace many examples of revelations that were almost certainly prompted or influenced by Smith’s work on the JST, he more or less explicitly identified five that came in response to questions engendered by his translation work: texts now known as sections 74, 76, 77, 86, and 91. In January 1832, well into the New Testament revisions, Smith asked the Lord the meaning of Paul’s words that an unbelieving husband or wife is sanctified by a believing spouse. Smith was given to understand that the reason why children of such a union are “holy” was that “they are sanctified through the atonement of Jesus Christ; and this is what the scriptures mean.”236 Trying to fathom the logic of John’s reference to two resurrections, to life and damnation, led to the greatest of Smith’s visions: his vision of future kingdoms (see below). A few months later, bewildered by the Revelator’s apocalyptic imagery, Smith asked for clarification. A set of answers ensued, deciphering much of the symbolism and chronology of ­ chapters  4–​ 11, and Smith published the questions and answers as section 77. At the end of 1832, working through Matthew a second time, he asked the meaning of the parable of the wheat and tares. In response, the Lord interpreted the parable in its historical, rather than personal, dimension. “After [the apostles] have fallen asleep,  .  .  .  Satan  .  .  .  drive[s]‌the church into the wilderness. But behold, in the last days, even now . . . the Lord is beginning to bring forth the word and the blade is springing up and is yet tender.”237 Smith published this as what is now section 86. Finally, after completing his work with the New Testament in July 1832, Smith returned to the Old Testament. When he came to consider the Apocrypha, he prayed for instruction as to whether work on that portion was warranted. Luther had demoted the books of the Apocrypha to their own category of dubious standing in 1534, and Protestants at first had followed suit; then eventually in the English-​speaking world, they began to remove this section from the Bible altogether. In virtually the same years that Smith was moving to affront orthodoxy with substantial additions to the scriptural corpus, Protestants were acting to subtract. In 1804, the British and Foreign Bible Society ceased publication of the Apocrypha in its English-​language Bibles, while a campaign to eliminate those dubious books from all Bibles fractured the Society in the 1820s. The edition of the King James Version that Smith was using, however, retained the section. It was against this backdrop

The Joseph Smith Translation  79 that Smith in 1833 inquired of the Lord about the value of those books. While “many things contained therein” were true, he was told, “many things” were the “interpolations by the hands of men.”238 As a result, Smith did not include the Apocrypha in the version of the Bible he would revise. These five canonized revelations are only those that are the most explicitly interwoven with his translation work, in addition to thirteen sections that make simple reference to his work on the revision.239 Robert Matthews posits another eight sections of the Doctrine and Covenants he believes are directly related to the revision of the Bible.240 Even that, however, is far short of the true number. When one juxtaposes his revelations produced from July 1830 through June 1833 with his known dates of work on the revision, numerous additional examples of intertextuality appear.

New Heavens and New Cosmology The most impactful of the revelations triggered by Smith’s translation work was an elaborate vision that redefined the Christian heaven. Perplexed by what seemed an overly facile dichotomy of “the resurrection of life” and “the resurrection of damnation,” Smith and his scribe and companion at the time, Sidney Rigdon, sought guidance and together experienced the most celebrated vision of Smith’s career (at least until the twentieth century, when his “First Vision” of the Father and Son assumed primary importance in the Latter-​day Saint mind). “The Vision,” as it was known, firmly established one of the most distinctive elements of LDS theology: a quasi-​universalist view of salvation. Morwenna Ludlow has written that “in the early Christian Church there were two important streams of eschatological thought:  a universalist stream, which asserted that all people would be saved, and a dualistic stream, which stressed the two parallel fates of eternal heaven and eternal hell.” The first tradition was represented by Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, his sister Macrina, Maximus the Confessor, and others. “Since about the fifth or perhaps sixth century,” however, the idea of an eternal hell “has been overwhelmingly powerful. This dominance was due partly to the theology of Augustine of Hippo: he denied universal salvation with a forcefulness which had a profound influence on both Catholic and Reformed traditions.”241 Consequently, by Smith’s day, the nearly universal salvation had become nearly universal damnation. One of the most widely read books in early America, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s

80  The Pearl of Greatest Price Progress, announced that “but a few will be saved.”242 George Whitefield in 1740 stoutly defended his similar position that a select few were predestined to salvation while “the rest of mankind  .  .  .  will at last suffer that eternal death which is its proper wages.”243 Only minor universalist countercurrents dented this consensus viewpoint.244 Smith’s 1832 vision turned those numbers inside out. It was prompted by a question that emerged while working his way through the Gospel of John, with its troubling reference to two future states, “the resurrection of life” and “the resurrection of damnation.”245 “It appeared self-​evident from what truths were left,” he considered, “that if God rewarded every man according to the deeds done in the body, the term ‘Heaven’  .  .  .  must include more kingdoms than one.”246 Subsequently, Smith (with Rigdon) experienced one of the most detailed and doctrinally significant visions of his life. In what came to be known as “the Vision,” Smith and Rigdon viewed a heaven that had three tiers, all of them kingdoms of glory. This revelation appeared to make hell’s entrance requirements more difficult than heaven’s. In this schema, only the baptized and catechized, ironically, were even eligible for damnation. Only “having denied the Holy Spirit after having received it,” only “having denied the Only Begotten Son of the Father” after knowing him, could one qualify for hell. Such betrayers of Christ were “the only ones on whom the second death shall have any power; Yea, verily, the only ones who shall not be redeemed in the due time of the Lord.”247 John Young, Brigham’s brother, captured the shock of many when he said in virtual disbelief: “why the Lord was going to save everybody.”248 Hell requires effort; heaven is the default. Such generosity was too much even for some Latter-​day Saints, who parted ways with the church over the liberality of Smith’s God. The three-​tiered nature of the heaven Smith described has been taken by some to effectively replace one set of judgmental distinctions with another, but Smith apparently believed that all entrants into heaven would progress through the levels to eventual fullness of glory.249 Smith’s brother Alvin, who died unbaptized in 1823, met the requirements of the middle, or terrestrial kingdom, being one of the “honorable men of the earth” and dying “without the law” and receiving “not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh.” However, in a subsequent 1836 vision, Smith saw Alvin in the celestial kingdom and seems to have inferred that status in the life to come was endlessly progressive.250 Precisely how such heavenly access was to be granted to non-​Christians and those outside the pale of LDS teaching and sacraments would occupy Smith

The Joseph Smith Translation  81 until the last months of his life. Temples and the monumental challenge of performing vicarious “work for the dead” would become the focus of LDS religious endeavor up to today—​but the prospect of a heaven comprising all one’s kindred, living and dead, was certainly the catalyst behind the theology and program of vicarious salvation. As the Book of Moses had expanded the gospel dispensation temporally backward to Adam, section 76 now expanded its redemptive power in the world to come. Section 76 was perhaps the most impactful fruit that followed on the heels of Smith’s Old Testament revisions of the Bible, but two revelations followed some months later that rivaled “the Vision” in doctrinal richness. As Smith continued to review his edits to the New Testament, he returned to John’s Gospel, considering the opening passages. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” read part of the apostle’s prologue.251 In Smith’s recasting (the present D&C 88), the Johannine metaphor is elaborated into a robust if imperfectly developed theology of the “light of Christ” as a potent force that is the animating principle behind the cosmos, all of life, natural law (“by which all things are governed”), and the moral faculty in humans: “he that ascended up on high, as also he descended below all things, in that he comprehended all things, that he might be in all and through all things, the light of truth; Which truth shineth. This is the light of Christ. As also he is in the sun, and the light of the sun, and the power thereof by which it was made.” This light, the revelation continued, “proceedeth forth from all things,” “is in all things,” and “giveth life to all things.” In fact, says the voice of Christ to Smith, “I am the true light that is in you.”252 The doctrinal significance of those verses was still unfolding early in the twentieth century. The phrase “Light of Christ” had long been in circulation in the works of poets and churchmen (e.g., both Philip Sidney and John Foxe used the term),253 but usually in reference to a kind of general Christian enlightenment (as opposed to pagan benightedness). Others were using the term to refer to conscience, and Quakers used the term synonymously with their more famous expression the “inner light.”254 At the time of this revelation, neither Smith nor his contemporaries seemed to hold that what the revelation described was separate and distinct from the Holy Ghost in nature or function. In the late nineteenth century, Latter-​day Saints still used the term “Light of Christ” frequently but with inconsistent meaning. By 1894, George Q. Cannon, counselor in the First

82  The Pearl of Greatest Price Presidency, lamented “the ambiguity in our printed works concerning the nature or character of the Holy Ghost. . . . However the Presidency deemed it wise to say as little as possible on this or other disputed subjects.”255 Soon thereafter Joseph F. Smith moved toward present LDS teaching. He wrote that though “Holy Ghost” was sometimes used interchangeably with “Light of Christ,” “the Holy Ghost is a personage of the Godhead, and is not that which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”256 Since that point, Latter-​day Saints have more generally understood the Holy Ghost to be a distinct being within the social Trinity; the Light of Christ is seen as a divine influence or power that pervades the universe and is manifest at the personal level as a universal moral faculty. Put more simply, the universal human possession of “conscience is a manifestation of the Light of Christ.”257 A few months after producing section 88, still revising his Bible translation, Smith returned yet a third time to John and again explicitly cast a revelation (D&C 93) as an elaboration of what he read in the fourth Gospel. This is one of the more remarkable instances of Smith’s revelatory imagination, following in almost identical form the production of the Book of Moses. For in recasting the prologue to John’s Gospel, Smith did not simply recast and amplify the text, as he had done with section 88. On this occasion, he interpolated what he presented as portions of an actual text of John, lost from the biblical record. The revelation begins with Christ again self-​identifying as “the true light,” and—​as in John 1—​employs the language of the Word who was “in the beginning.” But then the perspective shifts from Christ to John, who “saw his glory, that he was in the beginning, before the world was.”258 Then, confusingly, John’s testimony begins to recapitulate the Baptist’s rather than the apostle’s New Testament witness. “I, John, bear record, and lo, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove.”259 It is not clear if we are supposed to be hearing the author of the Gospel, the voice of John the Baptist, or the author of the Gospel quoting from an account of the Baptist. What is clear is that these several verses are allegedly portions of a “record of John,” the “fulness of [which] is hereafter to be revealed.”260 Logically, Smith might very well have inserted these portions into the relevant narrative in John; that he instead placed them in the context of an independent revelation does not obscure the fact that the interconnections between the JST and those revelations that make up much of the Doctrine and Covenants are so profound and sustained that at times they are essentially differently labeled productions of the same process.

The Joseph Smith Translation  83 Not only does Smith in this revelation recast the prologue of John to new effect; he extrapolates the preexistence of Christ to apply to the human soul as well. Not for the first time—​that had happened earlier in the Enoch material. But when Smith’s revelation declares “ye were also in the beginning with God,” and then continues “intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made,” Smith has clearly and emphatically likened Christ’s eternal existence to humanity’s eternal existence. At the same time, rephrasing human intelligence as “the light of truth” in parallel to Christ as “the true light” further cements a divine companionability between the divine and the human. Smith’s meditations on John 1, it turns out, become pivotal to his revelatory reformulation and expansion of Christology, of cosmology, and of human origins alike, reinforcing those doctrines first introduced in the prophecy of Enoch.

The Legacy of Enoch I have shown how Smith’s revelation of the “Prophecy of Enoch,” which emerged out of his earliest work translating the Old Testament, galvanized his Zion-​building project. From the moment of this recovery, Smith produced a stream of revelations that launched, developed, and guided that endeavor. He began producing the narrative of Enoch and his Zion in December 1830. At the end of that month, Smith issued to the church a revelation giving “the first commandment concerning a gathering in this dispensation,” at which location the Latter-​day Saints would aspire to construct their own Zion.261 Three days later, Enoch material he was dictating made its way directly into another revelation, which became section 38. I “have taken the Zion of Enoch into mine own bosom,” he recorded in the voice of the Lord. (“Enoch was high & lifted up, even in the bosom of the father,” he had inserted into the Genesis narrative at about this same time.)262 And then the revelation portended a society modeled on Enoch’s. “The poor have complained before me.” To remedy this inequality, in the latter-​day Zion there would be “no laws but my laws when I come,” and his people were commanded to “be one.” Enoch’s people, Smith had just learned from his Old Testament revisions, were called “Zion; because they were of one heart, & of one mind, & dwelt in righteousness. & there were no poor among them.”263 Over the ensuing months, as Smith wrapped up the Enoch material and moved on through Genesis retranslating, he issued revelation after revelation

84  The Pearl of Greatest Price designed to mold and shape his followers into a Zion community. In February a revelation promised to deliver the fullness of the Lord’s laws pertaining to Zion (section 41). Days later, another revelation, “the law of the church,” was received (section 42). The most ambitious moral law ever propounded by Smith entailed that to succor the poor, church members were to “consecrate of [their] properties for their support . . . with a deed and a covenant which cannot be broken.”264 This principle, as already noted, was originally called the Law of Enoch, clearly denoting the direct line of influence from the Book of Moses to the Doctrine and Covenants and to practical implementation. Then in succession, what are now sections 43, 44, and 45, received that spring, reaffirmed principles of the Law of Enoch. More were to come: as spring turned to summer, sections 48, 51, and 54 all addressed the gathering of Saints and their practice of consecration, and then two more in July and August (sections 57 and 58) repositioned Zion from Ohio to Missouri. By now, Smith had moved beyond working on the Old Testament and was turning to the New, and that shift was evident in the language of the revelations he continued to produce. An August revelation reaffirmed the obligation to keep the Lord’s commandments in Zion but borrowed directly from the Book of Matthew, which Smith was editing at that very moment. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Thou shalt not steal; neither commit adultery, nor kill, nor do anything like unto it,” he declared, in language directly borrowed from Matthew 19.265 The pattern was repeated the next day in a revelation admonishing an elder, when Smith had the Lord declare: “thou shalt not idle away thy time, neither shalt thou bury thy talent that it may not be known,” with reference to the parable recounted in Matthew 25.266 The doctrinal repercussions of Smith’s translation work shaped and defined the church profoundly—​but at a tremendously high cost. The two most distinctive social practices of the Latter-​day Saints emerged directly out of Smith’s work revising the Bible, and both proved to be the most inflammatory and alienating features of nineteenth-​century Mormonism, responsible for mobbings, expulsions, exile, martyrdom, and the disincorporation of the church itself. The Church of Jesus Christ’s radically unorthodox variety of Christianity would have aroused skepticism and opposition however it was couched or insulated. However, the new sect’s doctrinal heterodoxy in combination with these two unconventional social practices proved catastrophic. The first was the gathering, a central component of the Enochian legacy. The central role of the gathering in LDS history as a catalyst of pogroms and persecution has been detailed elsewhere, but two incidents are illustrative.

The Joseph Smith Translation  85 After the debacle at Far West, Missouri, at least one central participant in the Missouri persecutions saw “the gathering” as a major factor in the conflict. On the occasion of the betrayal of Smith and his colleagues into the hands of the militia at Far West, Major General John B. Clark of the Missouri State Militia went so far as to prophesy that tragedy would again befall the Saints if they did not give up the practice:  “I would advise you to scatter abroad, and never again organize yourselves with Bishops, Presidents, etc., lest you excite the jealousies of the people, and subject yourselves to the same calamities that have now come upon you.”267 Clark’s advice was echoed in a slightly more humorous fashion in the account of Warren Foote, leader of a Mormon wagon train en route from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Winter Quarters in Nebraska eight years later. The exchange reveals both the estrangement and apprehension that accompanied popular impressions of Mormon solidarity: “She asked, ‘How many do you suppose there are of the Mormons.’ I answered, I cannot tell, some thousands I suppose. She said with surprise, ‘Do you not know them all?’ O no madam, but a few of them I replied. ‘You don’t,’ said she ‘I thought they all knowed one another.’ I said that they were like other folks about that.” She went on to add, tellingly, “If the Mormons would scatter around amongst the white folks, they could live in peace.”268 The gathering of Israel is well entrenched in Old Testament prophecy. But it took the prophecy of Enoch to convince Smith that Zion was not to be achieved through vague aspiration or even committed discipleship alone. Only by laying foundations in a geographically situated location and implementing the literal displacement of the converted and gathering them together would Zion be achieved. That was both the defining essence of early Mormonism and the occasion for outsiders’ suspicion, hostility, and eventually intolerance.

Polygamy Second only to the gathering in its social repercussions, the practice of polygamy emerged from Smith’s translation work on Genesis, soon distinguished the Saints, and soon displaced the gathering as the explosive focus of controversy and persecution. According to both Joseph F. Smith and Orson Pratt, “Joseph actually received revelations upon that principle as early as 1831,” at which time, of course, he was in the thick of working through the

86  The Pearl of Greatest Price Bible.269 Though recorded years later, the most vexing revelation of Smith’s entire prophetic career shows clear origins in his translation work of that period. The revelation begins with the Lord observing: “you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David and Solomon.”270 That phrasing follows the form of a great many other revelations received in response to queries that emerged in the course of Smith’s revising of the Bible. What ensues on this occasion is the scriptural basis for the LDS practice of plural marriage: “God commanded Abraham, and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife. And why did she do it? Because this was the law; and from Hagar sprang many people. This, therefore, was fulfilling, among other things, the promises. Was Abraham, therefore, under condemnation? Verily I say unto you, Nay; for I, the Lord, commanded it.”271 Nothing in the revelation stipulated plural marriage as a general law, but Smith employed the text to justify what he claimed was—​in his case at least—​a clear command to take plural wives. Though he only produced the text in 1843, every indication is that the seeds were planted in his 1831 experience of wrestling with the patriarchal practice noted in Genesis. What other mélange of motives played into Smith’s practice of plural marriage is unclear. Certainly he came to believe that his task included restoring every God-​sanctioned principle and practice ever operative in every dispensation. “Therefore all things had under the Authority of the Priesthood at any former period shall be had again,” in his later words.272 (Even ritual sacrifice of some form is included in Smith’s vision: “these sacrifices as well as every ordinance belonging to the priesthood will when the temple of the Lord shall be built and the sons of Levi be purified be fully restored and attended to in all their powers, ramifications, and blessings.”)273 What is clear, however, is that like the gathering, plural marriage, so long central to LDS identity, was not derived from the “keystone” of Mormonism. (Plural marriage is, in fact, more generally condemned in the Book of Mormon.)274 The rationale for plural marriage, like the template for the gathering, apparently emerged from Smith’s work revising the Old Testament. Curiously, however, if Smith did infer God’s sanction of polygamy from his Old Testament study, he left no trace of his new understanding in his edits. In the original as in his revised text, it is Sarai, not God, who initiates the practice: “behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing; I pray thee go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened unto the voice of Sarai.”275

The Joseph Smith Translation  87 More to the point for our purposes, however, is that fact that it was through the Pearl of Great Price that the revelatory foundations of plural marriage were publicly reaffirmed—​because in the 1878 American edition prepared by Orson Pratt, section 132 was prominently included for the first time. That it had been published two years earlier in a new edition of the Doctrine and Covenants was not, to polygamy’s foremost defender, sufficient apparently. Only as the century of Mormonism’s founding rolled into the next did these two contentious practices—​gathering and polygamy—​cease. And only then could the process of LDS assimilation into a more accommodating American culture begin.

Priesthood Keys Other biblical revisions led to momentous doctrinal foundations that Smith elaborated over the coming months and years. Reviewing Matthew 16 appears to have registered as profound an impact on him as any New Testament passage, judging by the subsequent revelations. He made no textual changes to Jesus’s words to Peter, wherein he gave him “the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” with the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven. At the same time, the language of keys immediately enters into Smith’s dictated revelations in crucial ways. In early September 1831, when he was still working his way through Matthew, he pronounced a revelation in which Christ affirmed that “I have given unto you the kingdom and the keys . . . shall not be taken from my servant Joseph Smith . . . while he liveth, inasmuch as he obeyeth mine ordinances.”276 In October, Smith dictated another affirmation of his possession of those prerogatives (D&C 65) wherein Christ declares that “the keys of the kingdom are committed unto man on the earth, and from thence shall the gospel roll forth.”277 Twice more, in November, Smith’s keys and authority were confirmed. In section 67, those doubting his prophetic preeminence are challenged to produce a revelation comparable to “even the least” revelation he has authored. And then he received a heavenly endorsement of his calling and revelatory productions so striking that it is denominated “the preface to the doctrines, covenants, and commandments” that he has delivered: “I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the earth, called upon my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., and spake unto him from heaven.”278 In March 1832, Smith parlayed the principle of priesthood keys into a church presidency.

88  The Pearl of Greatest Price As Peter seemed to have functioned in conjunction with James and John, so did Smith now conceive of a “First Presidency” over the church, consisting of himself and two counselors. And so a revelation now confirmed that “unto [Joseph Smith] I have given the keys of the kingdom, which belong always unto the Presidency of the High Priesthood.”279 Almost a year later in late 1832, when Smith was making final revisions to his work on the New Testament, he returned yet again to Matthew. In the revelation discussed above (section 86), after glossing the parable of the wheat and the tares he had read in Matthew 13, he once more returned to the topic of his own authority. Perhaps again motivated by the passage in Matthew 16, and this time incorporating language from both the Book of Acts and Paul’s epistles, he dictated this divine guarantee: “therefore, thus saith the Lord unto you, with whom the priesthood hath continued through the lineage of your fathers—​For ye are lawful heirs, according to the flesh, and have been hid from the world with Christ in God—​Therefore your life and the priesthood have remained, and must needs remain through you and your lineage until the restoration of all things spoken by the mouths of all the holy prophets since the world began.”280 More than a simple affirmation of Smith’s divine appointment, the revelation expresses assurance that he will see the fulfillment of his work—​an increasingly meaningful promise, given the growing external opposition and internal dissent alike in these years. It would be no exaggeration to insist that for the period of Smith’s most fruitful revelatory production in the early 1830s, as he laid out the ecclesial and doctrinal foundations of the Church of Jesus Christ, his work on his Bible translation was informing and shaping both the subject of his many revelations and the particular language in which they appeared.

Intertextual Infiltrations The JST was the catalyst and inspiration behind the Church of Jesus Christ’s most profound doctrinal pronouncements, ecclesiology, and Zion-​building enterprise. This was particularly true of the Book of Moses. However, numerous less momentous instances of intertextual influence attest to the fact that Smith’s work of revision seeded his mind with countless phrases, images, and motifs that made their way into the revelations he produced in those months. A few examples will illustrate the pervasiveness of this revelatory symbiosis.

The Joseph Smith Translation  89 In August 1831, Smith was working through the text of Matthew 17, wherein “Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them.” In Smith’s mind, apparently, the transfiguration of Christ elicited images of a future transfiguration of the entire earth, and he cast the connection between the two as a teaching the New Testament record omitted. In a revelation dictated that same month, he quotes the Savior referring to a day yet to come “when the earth shall be transfigured, even according to the pattern which was shown unto mine apostles upon the mount.” Smith then adds the cryptic teaser “of which account the fulness ye have not yet received.”281 Always, Smith worked like a prospector mining nuggets from a mother lode that lay perennially concealed just below the surface. In this case, however, unlike that of the Moses material and the testimony of John, no words from the “fuller account” made their way into the JST or the independent revelation. Smith’s revelations, in other words, did not just move to complement and expand the scriptural record—​they perpetually attested to its radical incompleteness, to the insufficiency of all revelatory efforts to encompass the totality of all that God had and would reveal. Even so, the more encompassing transformation of the earth became a staple of LDS belief, codified in the 1842 Articles of Faith: “the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory” (Article of Faith 10). Sometimes the influence of Smith’s revision work resulted in simple rhetorical borrowing. In October 1831 he was working through the early chapters of Mark. In the third verse, John the Baptist preaches: “prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” That month, Smith dictated a revelation whose opening words were identical: “prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”282 At other times, textual revisions struck him as important enough to recast as revelations in their own right. One such instance touched on the veracity of his own claim to have seen God and Christ. He was translating the Gospel of John, which says in its first chapter: “no man hath seen God at any time.” As noted earlier, Smith adjusted this text in his translation, making such a vision possible but conditional, and consistent with his own experience: “no man hath seen God at any time, except he hath borne record of the son.” Smith then inserted that edited passage into a revelation, with further edits: “for no man has seen God at any time in the flesh, except quickened by the Spirit of God.”283 Another form of borrowing occurred when a New Testament injunction was particularly apt to the immediate situation of Smith’s own flock. As a

90  The Pearl of Greatest Price prophet seeking to emulate the Great Commission of Matthew 28 with urgency and apostolic authority, he found inspired counsel for his own missionaries in Jesus’s directive to his emissaries: “and whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them,” as Mark recorded. “Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city.”284 Reading these words as the calendar turned to 1831, Smith incorporated them into a January revelation, making the threat only slightly less anachronistic: “and in whatsoever house ye enter, and they receive you not, ye shall depart speedily from that house, and shake off the dust of your feet as a testimony against them. . . . And it shall be more tolerable for the heathen in the day of judgment, than for that house.”285 Many early LDS missionaries recorded their compliance with that injunction. The language of rulers and crowns, kingdoms and little children, the desolation of abomination, and signs and crosses—​all can be found in revelations that emerge when Smith is working through those words and motifs as they appear in their New Testament contexts.

The Revelatory Process and the Urtext Most intriguing of all the intertextual relations that emerged from Smith’s work on the Bible are those between the Book of Moses and the September 1830 revelation later published as section 29 of the Doctrine and Covenants. In conjunction with the evidence already presented, a look at this intertextuality allows us to conceptualize Joseph Smith’s revelatory imagination in new ways. The Book of Mormon had prophesied that “the face of this [western hemispheric]” land was “a choice land above all other lands, a chosen land of the Lord. . . . And that a New Jerusalem should be built up upon this land, unto the remnant of the seed of Joseph.”286 A few months after the publication of the Book of Mormon, a revelation inspired by those prophecies indicated that “the decree hath gone forth from the Father that [his people] shall be gathered into one place.”287 The location of that place, however, was yet to be revealed. As noted, after Smith produced the prophecy of Enoch in early 1831, he found the inspiration and clarity of vision to set his Zion-​building plans into motion. This same revelation contained a number of unrelated and intriguing doctrinal innovations—​but this time they seem to have anticipated rather than

The Joseph Smith Translation  91 responded to his work with the Bible revisions, in particular the Genesis material that became the Book of Moses.288 A number of parallels in phrasing make the intertextuality clear. Table 1.1 presents the relevant passages adjacent to their corresponding passages in the JST. What is striking about this juxtaposition is that it suggests something far different from simply borrowing, incorporation, or influence of the types illustrated above. First, the September revelation is a pastiche of seemingly unrelated fragments. It begins in full millennialist mode, establishing the context as a time of final gathering preparatory to Christ’s return. “Ye are called to bring to pass the gathering. . . . The hour is nigh . . . that . . . I will reveal myself from Heaven.” Indications of apocalyptic signs soon to transpire are previewed: “the sun shall be darkened. . . . The great and abominable church shall be cast down. . . . Heaven and earth shall be consumed.” Then we get a sudden, unrelated intrusion (D&C 29:31–​32) referring to a spiritual creation that preceded the temporal creation. Then comes an abrupt mention of Adam (“not at any time have I given . . . a law which was temporal . . . neither [to] Adam” [D&C 29:34]). The gratuitous mention of Adam then becomes an excuse to mention that he was tempted by Satan (D&C 29:36), and then another abrupt digression, this time marked by actual Table 1.1  The Intertextuality of D&C 29 and Moses 3–​6 D&C 29

JST (Book of Moses)

The Lord created “all things both spiritual and temporal, first spiritual, secondly temporal” (29:31–​32) “he rebelled against me, saying, Give me thine honor” (29:36) “they should not die . . . until I . . . should send forth angels to declare unto [Adam and Eve] repentance and redemption, through faith on the name of mine Only Begotten Son” (29:42) “Children are redeemed from the foundation of the world” (29:46) “And it must needs be that the devil should tempt the children of men, or they could not be agents unto themselves” (D&C 29:39)

“all things were before created; but spiritually” (Moses 3:9) “Satan . . . came before me, saying . . . give me thine honor” (Moses 4.1) “an angel of the Lord appeared unto Adam, saying: . . . thou shalt repent and call upon God in the name of the Son” (Moses 5:6–​8 ) “children . . . are whole from the foundation of the world” (Moses 6:54) “And it is given unto them to know good from evil; wherefore they are agents unto themselves” (Moses 6:56)

92  The Pearl of Greatest Price typography (dashes)—​and we suddenly are transported back to a primordial scene in heaven, wherein we are witness to Lucifer’s rebellion and consequent fall, presented as a quick scene excised from a larger cosmic drama (D&C 29:36). This last digression highjacks the revelation, and we have a rehearsal of Adam’s expulsion from Eden and a cryptic reference to a promise God made him of angels who should teach him of repentance (D&C 29:42). The revelation then segues to the universal need for repentance, before one final intrusion of a novel concept: “little children are redeemed” from the world’s foundations (D&C 29:46). The revelation as a whole is long, extending to four and a half closely written manuscript pages. It is a meandering series of pronouncements, leaping from the present moment to a distant heavenly past and back to a present universal, proceeding almost like a stream of consciousness, with oracular pronouncements interrupting the stream with little warning and less elaboration. We get a sense of a prophetic mind that operates with a combination of an acute second sight and flashes, irruptions, really, of concisely framed inspiration. Kathleen Flake has speculated that in working through the Bible, “it appears that when he read he saw events, not words. What he saw, he verbalized to a scribe”;289 this revelation in particular fits that model. If we move from this revelatory event to consider Moses 1–​6, we find many of the same elements but in a radically different form and mode of presentation. One might even, in this light, consider Doctrine and Covenants 29 and Moses 1–​6 to be essentially the same revelation, representing two distinct moments, or phases, of what Harold Bloom calls Smith’s “religion-​making imagination” and believers call his prophetic power. Moses 1—​like Genesis—​begins as a discretely packaged and polished cosmic narrative. This version, however, begins with God’s own words, narrating the story of creation. Rather than two disparate and disjointed accounts, we have the bridging explanation that a spiritual creation precedes the physical. Then, in a perfectly timed flashback, God relates to Moses the story that launched the entire human saga: “Satan . . . was from the beginning. And he came before me saying . . . I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost.” The creation is thus reframed as act 2 of a creation drama subsequent to a conflict-​laden act 1. Smith’s version then rehearses the story of the fall but narrates a radically new account of the exile. He now fleshes out the vague intimation of angelic teachers given in Doctrine and Covenants 29, as an angel appears to Adam, teaches him the meaning of sacrifice, and foretells Christ’s atoning death. Even more dramatically, in the

The Joseph Smith Translation  93 new context of a fully constituted salvation narrative, Adam and Eve both rejoice that God’s plans for humanity are unfolding not in spite of their transgression but “because of . . . our transgression.” When, a few chapters later, Enoch preaches the gospel that Adam received, it is entirely natural to substantiate Adam and Eve’s perspective by clarifying that “the son of God hath atoned for original guilt” and that is why, as was indicated in Doctrine and Covenants 29, “children . . . are whole from the foundation of the world.” So a process that commenced in September 1830—with moments of insight, spontaneous glimpses of past worlds and events, fragmentary irruptions of God’s voice, and inspired pronouncements—​passes through a period of incubation during which Smith’s prophetic imagination sorts out, synthesizes, and weaves the scattered fragments into the mythic narratives that constitute his most important revelatory texts. Something similar to these workings of the prophetic imagination is evident in the most controversial of all Smith’s productions: the Book of Abraham. These twin documents present us with the closest thing we have to a window into the process by which—​at least in some prophetic moments—​Smith transforms fragmentary glimpses across cosmic time into holistic, narrative theology. Even after Smith completed the work of biblical retranslation, he saw his work as seer and translator as barely having begun. He was relentless in promoting a major paradigm shift, a wholesale inversion of the traditional model of biblical fullness and prisca theologia. Rather than finding in the pagans and ancients foreshadowings and tantalizing hints of God’s revelation that will culminate in the Christian canon, Smith works, with growing momentum, backward and outward, as if he conceived of his objective as nothing less than to move in the direction, through the assemblage of myriad worlds he revealed, of a gospel plenitude that transcended and preceded and subsumed any and all earthly incarnations, the Bible included; a vision or an intimation of what one might call an “urtext,” inducing him to transgress linguistic, religious, and other boundaries in its pursuit.290 Prisca theologia (which means “ancient wisdom”), or “fulfillment theology,” was useful to Christian theologians both to account for prevalent archetypes (such as animal sacrifice and the idea of a divine incarnation) that could otherwise impugn the uniqueness and hence the validity of Christian doctrines and to assert God’s justice and mercy in dispensing truth to Christian, Jew, and pagan alike.291 But whereas previous figures had emphasized the fragmentary nature of prior revelation and its final consummation in modern scripture, Smith pushed the principle of prisca theologia in the

94  The Pearl of Greatest Price other direction. “From what we can draw from the Scriptures relative to the teaching of heaven,” he said, “we are induced to think that much instruction has been given to man since the beginning which we do not possess now.”292 It was his calling, he inferred, to retrieve it. Smith’s production of the Book of Mormon was the most conspicuous embodiment of this challenge to scriptural sufficiency—​and the new scripture itself hammered home the message of God’s word as endlessly iterated and endlessly proliferating. As Nephi had God declare, “I shall speak to the Jews and they shall write it, and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of Israel . . . and they shall write it, and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.”293 Still, the Book of Mormon, which Smith produced in 1829, attested not just to biblical insufficiency but also to biblical unreliability. In Alma 45, for example, a New World prophet criticizes a contemporary tradition that Moses was “buried by the hand of the Lord,” even though “the scriptures saith the Lord took Moses unto himself.”294 The text of the Bible, however, accords with the erroneous tradition of Moses’s burial, not the more reliable “scriptures” of which Helaman spoke—​perhaps a set of brass plates mentioned by his predecessors.295 Retelling the story of Joseph’s coat of many colors, the military captain Moroni casts the episode of its bloody remnant as a source of prophetic hope for Jacob rather than the cause of the fatherly despair seen in Genesis.296 And earlier in the Book of Mormon, we encounter a rendering of the story of Eden, with the most crucial elements utterly revised. Whereas the Genesis account depicts the fall as a catastrophe and the couple’s expulsion from the Garden as a fitting punishment, Lehi depicts Adam’s choice as a deliberate gesture essential to humanity’s earthly existence (“Adam fell that man might be,”) and Alma characterizes the expulsion as an act of mercy (“if Adam had put forth his hand immediately, and partaken of the tree of life, he would have . . . [had] no space for repentance”).297 Evidence of so many skewed and deficient biblical narratives would have been a prompt for Smith to entertain the project of a restorative translation. For clearly, the Book of Mormon itself did not fully compensate for the Bible’s deficiencies. The Book of Mormon mentions Old World prophets whose contributions are not in the record but recounts only one parable and snippets of other lost accounts; portions of the Book of Mormon are themselves described as being withheld from the translation process (the sealed plates).298

The Joseph Smith Translation  95 As noted above, before Smith even finished the Book of Mormon translation, he produced what he called “a translated version of the record made on parchment by John” the beloved (D&C 7). No matter that Smith never claimed to have the parchment itself or that the content of the record was not theologically significant (except insofar as it turned the myth of John’s reputed immortality into the history of John’s immortality).299 What mattered was, again, what this fragmentary puzzle piece suggested: the incompleteness of the biblical record and the corresponding totality of something that Joseph was moving toward. Smith was catching glimpses and snippets of something larger, prior, more complete. The fragments that entered his religious making imagination gestated until they were reborn as full narratives, familiar and yet alien, with new contexts and details. Even as he worked to improve and clarify the Bible in his new translation, he found not fullness but a proliferation of ever more gaps, lacunae, and traces of what appeared to him to be an absent fullness. And cardinal moments of the revelations I have surveyed in this chapter suggest how the concept of a master urtext would have gradually evolved in Smith’s mind. In 1832, he received the elaborate revelation long honored with the simple designation “the Vision,” which detailed the kingdoms of glory. The paramount doctrinal significance of this revelation could not obscure the significance of the genealogy he ascribed to it, which fit into this larger pattern: it was, Smith wrote significantly of the document he dictated, “a transcript from the records of the eternal world.”300 One year later, in a similar manner, as noted earlier, Smith recorded an excerpt—​quotations from a first person account—​said to have been written by John. So here we have yet another record that Smith quotes without himself possessing it. He combined, in other words, the work of translator and of oracle, working both from history and from unmediated communion. The Book of Mormon, with its gestures toward ever more abundant narratives; the Bible with its whispers of lost texts by John the Baptist and John the Revelator and of missing accounts of the Transfiguration, of Adam and Eve’s post-​Garden schooling in the gospel, and of scenes from the preexistence; celestial transcripts glimpsed in vision—​all pointed Smith toward a wholeness that appeared to him to have palpable, concrete form, which his earthly efforts were striving toward but could never fully encompass. Seen in this light, “translation” might be better defined in Smith’s case as the ongoing task of transmitting and assembling an earthly counterpart to an original, heavenly urtext, prompted by whatever oracular devices and textual

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fragments were at hand to catalyze, inspire, or trigger his prophetic imagination. Gold plates, seer stones, a King James text, or what would soon become raw material for his next revelatory forays: Egyptian papyri.

Notes 1. Wayne Sentinel, 19 March 1830. In Donald Q. Cannon, “In the Press: Early Newspaper Reports on the Initial Publication of the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 16.2 (2007): 7. 2. “John Murdock Autobiography,” 12. Quoted in Richard Anderson, “Impact of the First Preaching in Ohio,” BYU Studies 11.4 (Summer 1971): 482. 3. Deseret News IX, 153–55, cited in Hyrum L. Andrus, “The Second American Revolution: Era of Preparation,” BYU Studies 1.2 (Autumn 1959): 85. 4. M&A 1.1 (October 1824): 10. 5. Susan Easton Black, Stories from the Early Saints Converted by the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City : Bookcraft, 1992), 44, 62. 6. Journal of Joseph Grafton Hovey, Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. In Grant Underwood, “The Meaning and Attraction of Mormonism Reexamined,” Thetean (March 1977): 3. 7. Letter of “M” to the Salt Lake Tribune, 6 December 1903, in B. H. Roberts, Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Salt Lake City : Deseret News, 1907–1912), 1: 348. 8. This argument is most fully laid out in Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002). For a contrary perspective that argues for its theological impact, see Gerald Smith, Schooling the Prophet, and Janiece Johnson, “Become a People of the Books: Toward an Understanding of Early Mormon Converts and the New Word of the Lord,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 1–43. 9. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2003), 335. 10. Stephen Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 243. 11. John Wesley, The New Testament with Notes for Plain, Unlettered Men who know only their Mother Tongue (London: Boyer, 1755); Anthony Purver, A new and literal translation of all the books of the Old and New Testament; with notes critical and explanatory (London: W. Richardson and S. Clark, 1764); Charles Thomson, Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Covenant, commonly called the Old and New Testament. Translated from the Greek (Philadelphia: Jane Aitkin, 1808; Alexander Campbell, Living Oracles (Buffaloe, Virginia: A Campbell, 1826); Noah Webster, ed., The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Common Version (New Haven:  Durrie and Peck, 1833). 12. John Wesley, The Journal of John Wesley, 8 vols., ed. Nehemiah Curnock (London: Epworth Press, 1938), 6:117.

The Joseph Smith Translation  97 13. John Wesley, preface to Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (London: Thomas Cordeux, 1813), iii. 14. Webster, Holy Bible, preface. 15. Campbell, The Sacred Writings of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ, preface. 16. “To the Elders of the Church,” M&A 2.3 (December 1835): 229. 17. T&S 5.9 (1 May 1844): 513. 18. 1835 D&C 91:3 (D&C 76:15). Revelations he received also referred to his work as a “translation.” See BC 48:54 (D&C 45:60) and 1835 D&C 29:2 (D&C 73:3). 19. Matthew 13:52; “To the Elders of the Church,” M&A 2.3 (December 1835): 229. 20. Thomas A. Wayment and Haley Wilson-​Lemmon, “A Recovered Resource: The Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary in Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation,” c­ hapter 11 in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, ed. Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-​McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, forthcoming 2020). 21. T&S 5.14 (1 August 1844): 592. 22. History Drafts, 1838 circa 1841, JSP-​H1, 225. 23. 1 Nephi 13:34, 28. 24. 1 Nephi 13:29 and 13:40. 25. 1 Nephi, 1830 ed., p. 31 (1 Nephi 13:32). Subsequent editions substituted “blindness” for “woundedness.” 26. 1 Nephi 13:26–​34. 27. BC 5:12 (D&C 6:26–​27). 28. Account of John, April 1829, JSP-​D1, 48. 29. See Kent Jackson, “Joseph Smith’s Cooperstown Bible: The Historical Context of the Bible Used in the Joseph Smith Translation,” BYU Studies 40.1 (2001): 41–​70. 30. “Letter to Church Leaders in Jackson County, Missouri, 21 April 1833,” D3, 68. 31. 1835 D&C 83:3 (D&C 94:10), received 6 May 1833. 32. Milton V. Backman, Jr., The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-​day Saints in Ohio 1830–​1838 (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1983): 156. 33. Prayer, 11 January 1834, JSP-​D3, 406. 34. 1835 D&C 98:10 (D&C 104:58). The 1835 version used the code word “shinelah” in place of “print.” 35. 1844 D&C [103]:28 (D&C 124:89); “Tithings and Consecrations for the Temple of the Lord,” T&S 3.6 (15 January 1842): 667. 36. Emma Smith to her son Joseph III, 10 February 1867, cited in Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible (Independence, MO: Herald, 1970), 11. 37. “Joseph Smith Translation,” Guide to the Scriptures, https://​www.lds.org/​scriptures/​ gs/​joseph-​smith-​translation-​jst?lang=eng&letter=J. 38. Joseph Smith’s “New Translation,”  10–​11. 39. Classification of Scriptures, JSP-​D3, 178. 40. Letter to Church Leaders in Jackson Co., MO, 25 June 1833, in JSP-​D3, 178. 41. See in this regard Kent P. Jackson, The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2005),  20–​38.

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42. CDBY, 3:1620. 43. Some sections of the D&C come from his letters, and some sections had no perceptible revelatory origins, so these numbers are approximate. 44. John 21:25. 45. Numbers 12:8. 46. JSNT, 591 (Moses 1:1–2). 47. JSNT, 594 (Moses 1:41). 48. JSNT, 591, 594 (Moses 1:4, 33, 29). 49. JSNT, 592 (Moses 1:10). 50. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.106 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 187. 51. Lord Byron, Cain: A Mystery, 2.1.44–46, in The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 636. 52. Thomas Dick, Philosophy of a Future State (Philadelphia: Biddle, 1845), 204–205. 53. Parley P. Pratt, “Materiality,” Prophet 1.52 (24 May 1845), reprinted in MStar 6.2 (1 July 1845): 19–22. 54. CDBY, 1:35. 55. CDBY, 1:61. 56. JSNT, 591, 594 (Moses 1:6, 39). 57. Tertullian, Apology 27, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The AnteNicene Fathers, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1976), 3:31; “You were made for God’s Glory,” http://rickwarren.org/devotional/english/you-were-made-for-god-sglory ; John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2012), 29, 192. 58. 1835 D&C 82:5 (D&C 93:33). 59. JSNT, 598 (Moses 3:5). 60. Paul E. Davies, “The Projection of Pre-Existence,” Biblical Research 12 (1967), 36, 34. 61. Menasseh ben Israel, Conciliador, cited in Johannes van den Berg, “Menasseh ben Israel, Henry More, and Johannes Hoornbeeck on the Pre-existence of the Soul,” in Religious Currents and Cross-currents: Essays on Early Modern Protestantism, ed. Jan de Bruijn, Pieter Holtrop, and Ernestine van der Wall (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 66. 62. 2 Nephi 2:22–25. 63. JSNT, 599–600 (Moses 4:1–2). 64. JSNT, 600 (Moses 4:3). 65. Genesis 5:22; JSNT, 603 (Moses 5:10). 66. JSNT, 603 (Moses 5:11–12). 67. JSNT, 102 (Moses 6:59). The 1878 and subsequent editions of the Pearl of Great Price, following OT2, vary slightly: “by reason of transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death.” See Robert J. Matthews, “How We Got the Book of Moses,” Ensign 16.1 (January 1986): 46. 68. John Jaques, Catechism for Children Exhibiting the Prominent Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1855), 31. 69. Andrew Louth, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture:  Genesis 1–1 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 1:100.

The Joseph Smith Translation  99 70. John L. Thompson, ed., Reformation Commentary on Scripture:  Genesis 1–​ 1 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 1:177. 71. Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 7, in Ancient Christian Commentary, 1.101. 72. One can find parallels to Smith’s rewriting of the fall in early Eastern Christianity. For example, both Origen and Irenaeus emphasized the necessity of a fall as setting the stage for humankind’s educative ascent toward godliness. See the discussion and references in Fiona Givens and Terryl Givens, The Christ Who Heals (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2017), 26–​32. 73. The 1851 edition of Moses 6:59. The 1878 edition varies slightly: “by reason of transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death.” Matthews, “How We Got the Book of Moses,” 46. 74. William Hone, The Apocryphal New Testament (London: William Hone, 1820). 75. Thomas Rennell, Proofs of Inspiration, or the Ground of Distinction . . . (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1822), vii, cited in Timothy Larsen, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-​Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 37. 76. Hone, Apocryphal, vi. 77. Hone, Apocryphal, xiv. 78. Since the records only indicate that Smith possessed the book in the Nauvoo era, the date of his acquisition is unknown. Christopher C. Jones, “The Complete Record of the Nauvoo Library and Literary Institute,” Mormon Historical Studies 10.1 (Spring 2009): 192. 79. T&S 4.22 (1 October 1843): 336. 80. T&S 4.22 (1 October 1843): 336. 81. Genesis 4:17; 5:24. 82. N.M.S., “Enoch,” Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, [1996]), 6:793. 83. D. Fl., “Enoch in the Apocrypha,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 6:793. 84. Hebrews  11:5. 85. Jude 1:14–​15. 86. Y.M.G., “Enoch, Ethiopic Book of,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 6:705. 87. Margaret Barker, The Lost Prophet: The Book of Enoch and Its Influence on Christianity (Sheffield, UK: Phoenix Press, 2005), 1. 88. “Enoch,” in Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, ed. John McClintock and James Strong (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981), 3:226. 89. Barker, Lost Prophet,  14–​15. 90. John M. Butt, The Genuineness of the Book of Enoch Investigated (London: Seeley and Son, 1827). 91. Butt, Genuineness, 2. 92. Richard Laurence’s preface, cited in Butt, Genuineness, 9. 93. Algernon Herbert, Nimrod:  A Discourse on Certain Passages of History and Fable (London: Thomas Davison Whitefriars, 1828), 1:36. 94. George English, Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary . . . (Boston: George English, 1813), 7. 95. See for instance Johan Hug, An Introduction to the Writings of the New Testament (London: C. & J. Rivington, 1827), 2:621.

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96. 1 Enoch 89:73; 93:9, cited in Barker, Lost Prophet, 19. Barker employs the translation by Robert Charles, The Book of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). 97. Barker, Lost Prophet, 2. 98. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City : Signature, 1998), 191–192. 99. See some of the arguments in Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and David J. Larsen, “Ancient Affinities with the LDS Book of Enoch, Part I,” in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 4 (2013):  1–27. Their review is an update of Hugh Nibley’s voluminous but now partially dated corpus of work on the topic. See also Jed Woodworth, “Extra-biblical Enoch Texts in Early American Culture,” in Archive of Restoration Culture:  Summer Fellows’ Papers, 1997–1999 (Provo, UT:  Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, 2000), 185–193. 100. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 98–101. 101. “Extract from the Prophecy of Enoch,” EMS 1.3 (August 1832):  18. The extract consists of Moses 7 only. W. W. Phelps, Oliver Cowdery, and John Whiter were doing the printing. It is unknown whether Smith, or one of them, made the decision. 102. Augustine, De Diversis Quaestionibus Ad Simplicianum, n.2, in Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Augustine’s Confessions:  Critical Essays, ed. William E. Mann (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 122. 103. Richard Bauckham, “‘Only the Suffering God Can Help’:  Divine Passibility in Modern Theology,” Themelios 9.3 (April 1984): 6. 104. Marcel Sarot, God, Passibility, and Corporeality (Kampen, Netherlands: Pharos, 1992), 1–2. Sarot gives more than a half dozen examples of defenses of impassibilism by contemporary theologians, suggesting that the doctrine may be experiencing a revival. 105. M’Calla in Isaac C. Goff, A Faithful Report of the Theological Debate Held at Milford, New Jersey, December, 1830, by Rev. W. L. M’Calla of the Presbyterian, and Elder W. Lane, of the Christian Connexion (New York: Mitchell, 1831), 39. 106. The 1801 Book of Common Prayer restored the term “passions,” and the American branch of Methodism (the Protestant Episcopal Church of America) also reaffirmed the precise, earlier language in its 1801 Articles of Religion. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.” However, the Methodist Book of Discipline of 1808 again omitted passions, describing “one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.” Then the Methodist Magazine reverted to the older form (God is “without body, parts or passions”), and the formula persisted into the twentieth century. Book of Common Prayer (London: W. Bulmer, 1801), n.p.; Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds (New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1877), 3:486. The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 14th ed. (New York: John Wilson and Daniel Mitt, for the Methodist Connection, 1808), iii; Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine 37 (1814): 169. 107. JSNT, 105–106, from OT1 (Moses 7:28). 108. JSNT, 618 (Moses 7:28).

The Joseph Smith Translation  101 109. “The Lord said unto Enoch . . .” JSNT, 618 (Moses 7:32). 110. JSNT, 618 (Moses 7:35; compare 7:24, 47, etc.). 111. JSNT, 618 (Moses 30–​31); Moses 7:31 in all versions of the published text. In OT2, Smith wrote, and appears to have then crossed out, the second instance of the query, but it too appeared in the 1851 and subsequent editions. 112. JSNT, 618–​619 (Moses 7:33–​37). 113. John Calvin, Isaiah, ed. Alister McGrath and J. I. Packer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 75. 114. BC 29:38 (D&C 29:32). 115. JSNT, 611–​6 12 (Moses 6:36, 51). 116. A Sample of pure Language given by Joseph the Seer, JSP-​R&T, 265. 117. Undated broadside, photocopy, Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 118. Sang by the gift of Tongues and Translated, Kirtland Revelation Book 2 (27 February 1833), in JSP-​R&T, 509. 119. EMS 1.12 (May 1833): 96. 120. 1835 D&C 82:5 (D&C 93:29). 121. Parley P. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled: Zion’s Watchman Unmasked (New York: Pratt & Fordham, 1838), 27. 122. See the discussion in Givens, Wrestling the Angel:  The Foundations of Mormon Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 156–​163. 123. For a treatment of how these characters link the two concepts, see Givens, When Souls Had Wings:  Pre-​mortal Existence in Western Thought (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010), 12–​13, 58–​59, 151–​156, 268–​270. 124. JSNT, 621 (Moses 7:59). 125. BC 41:2 (D&C 39:4). 126. 1835 D&C 91:5 (D&C 76:58, 67). 127. 1835 D&C 7:107 (D&C 88:107). 128. “On Perfection,” T&S 3.6 (15 January 1842): 655. The essay was reprinted from an earlier version in the Gospel Reflector. 129. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled, 27. The reference to “Gods, the sons of God” is from 1835 D&C 91:5 (D&C 76:58). 130. Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1855), 33. 131. Augustine, Confessions, 4.15, trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis:  Hackett, 2006),  68–​69. 132. 2 Peter 1:4 NRSV; the KJV has the more ambiguous “partakers of the divine nature.” 133. Dionysius the Areopagite, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 1.3, in Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1. 134. See Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 256–​264. 135. JSNT, 619 (Moses 7:41). 136. 2 Enoch 41, in James H. Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983), 1:166.

102  The Pearl of Greatest Price 137. “Three things are necessary, in order . . . [to] exercise faith in God unto life and salvation. . . . Secondly, a correct idea of his character, perfections, and attributes.” Lectures on Faith 3.2, 1835 D&C 36. 138. Genesis 3:22. 139. BC 22:8–​9 (D&C 21:7–​8). 140. BC 5:3 (D&C 6:6). 141. BC 10:3, 11:3, 12:3 (D&C 11:6, 12:6, 14:6). 142. Steven L. Olsen, The Mormon Ideology of Place: Cosmic Symbolism of the City of Zion, 1830–​1846 (Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-​day Saint History and BYU Studies, 2002), 26. 143. D&C 28:9. Earlier printings have the revelation’s 1830 phrasing “no man knoweth where the city shall be built.” BC 30:8 and 1835 D&C 51. 144. JSNT, 617 (Moses 7:19). 145. JSNT, 617 (Moses 7:18, 23). 146. Adolph Jellinek, ed., Bet Ha-​Midrasch (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1967), 4:129–​ 131, cited in Hugh Nibley, Enoch the Prophet, in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1987), 252–​253. 147. JSNT, 622 (Moses 7:62–​64). 148. BC 40:3 (D&C 38:4). 149. Orson Pratt, 16 August 1873, JD, 16:156. 150. BC 48:11, 58–​61 (D&C 45:10–​12, 64–​67). 151. JSNT, 620 (Moses 7:45). 152. T&S 5.4 (15 February 1844): 434. 153. “Before 8 August 1839,” WJS,  9–​10. 154. Revelation 12:6, 14. 155. Alexander Fraser, A Key to the Prophecies of the Old and New Testaments, which are not yet accomplished (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1802), 157. 156. BC 4:5; 1835 D&C 32:3; D&C 5:14. 157. Further evidence of Smith’s indebtedness to Fraser is that immediately following the language borrowed from Revelation 12, he adds to BC 4:5 the same Solomonic language Fraser employs, about a church “clear as the moon, and fair as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners” (Song of Solomon 6:10). 158. Fraser, Key, 164. A few decades later, in 1825, an article in the Telescope, an independent religious journal, picked up Fraser’s argument, giving its interpretation of the woman’s flight into the wilderness. “Whenever a people become organized into a visible body,” the unnamed author agreed, “they are no longer the true church of Christ but fall in with the grand apostasy.” “The Early Degeneracy of the Methodists,” Telescope 1.48 (30 April 1825): 189. 159. “12 May 1844. Temple Stand,” WJS, 367. 160. “30 March 1842. Upper Room, Red Brick Store,” WJS, 110. 161. Smith is called Enoch in 1835 D&C 75, 93, 96, 98, and 100 (D&C 78, 92, 96, 104, and 133). 162. T&S 5.9 (1 May 1844): 513; D&C 76:15.

The Joseph Smith Translation  103 163. Amos S. Hayden, Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio (Cincinnati:  Chase and Hall, 1875), 183. Cited in Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 25. Underwood’s is the best treatment of millenarianism in the Mormon tradition. 164. M&A 3 (November 1836): 403. Underwood, Millenarian World, 26. 165. Robert Richardson, ed., Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: Standard, 1913), 2:345–​246, cited in Underwood, Millenarian World, 25. 166. In Grant Underwood’s study of Book of Mormon usage in pre-​1846 Mormon publications, he finds fifty-​ nine references to “the restoration of Israel.” The next highest incidence is for “Prophecy Relating to Gentiles,” with thirty-​seven occurrences. See his chapter “The Book of Mormon and the Millenarian Mind,” in Millenarian World. 167. BC 35:16; 36:8; 37:31, etc. (D&C 33:18; 34:12; 35:27). 168. As I have shown, these verses were published in the 1851 Pearl of Great Price but not in the D&C until 1876 (now D&C 77:12). 169. D&C 130:17. First canonized in the 1876 D&C. 170. Graham Doxey, “Missouri Myths,” https://​www.lds.org/​ensign/​1979/​04/​ missouri-​myths?lang=eng. 171. 1835 DC 27:1 (D&C 57:1–​2). 172. “6 April 1855. SLC Tabernacle,” CDBY, 2:919. 173. Fred C. Collier and William S. Harwell, eds., The Kirtland Council Minute Book (Salt Lake City: Collier’s, 2002), 34. 174. The revelation was not published until the 1844 edition of the D&C (D&C 105:9). See JSP-​R2, 375–​79. 175. “6 April 1845, Nauvoo, Illinois,” CDBY, 1:79. 176. Pearl of Great Price, Being a Choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1851), preface. 177. MStar 11.5 (1 March 1849): 66–​69 and MStar 11.6 (15 March 1849): 81–​85. 178. Franklin D. Richards, “Introduction to the New Year,” MStar 13.1 (1 January 1851): 2–​3. 179. “20 October 1849, SLC Bowery,” CDBY, 1:363. 180. “15 August 1852, SLC Tabernacle,” CDBY, 1:571. 181. “Fourth General Epistle,” MStar 13.4 (15 February 1851): 54. 182. “Fifth General Epistle,” MStar 13.14 (15 July 1851): 210. 183. “7 October 1863, SLC Bowery,” CDBY, 4:2159. 184. Orson Pratt, “Latter-​day Kingdom of God . . . ,” JD, 13:138. 185. Orson Pratt, “Consecration,” JD, 15:362. 186. John Taylor, “The Position the Saints have Occupied . . . ,” JD, 17:66. 187. The quotations from Woodruff and following are cited in Dan Erickson, As a Thief in the Night: The Mormon Quest for Millennial Deliverance (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 214–​218. 188. Photocopy of letter, on official-​looking letterhead, in author’s possession. 189. JSP-​H1, 212.

104  The Pearl of Greatest Price 190. JSNT, 398 (see Luke 11:52). 191. See discussion and sources in Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 185–​188. 192. Elders Journal 1.3 (July 1838): 43. 193. “11 June 1843. Temple Stand,” WJS, 211. 194. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (New York: Classic Books, 2010), 24–​25. 195. Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 77. 196. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New  York:  Bantam, 1984), canto 7, ll. 97–​101. 197. Cited in George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 112. 198. Cardinal Walter Kasper, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), 44. 199. JSNT, 603 (Moses 5:7). 200. JSNT, 604 (Moses 5:18). 201. JSNT, 624–​625 (Moses 8:17, 20, 23). 202. JSNT, 630 (JSTB Genesis 9:10–​11). 203. Jean Bottéro, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), 100. 204. Genesis 1:1–​4, NRSV. 205. JSNT, 634 (see Genesis 11:7). 206. JSNT, 687 (see Exodus 4:21). 207. JSNT, 713 (see 1 Samuel 16:14). 208. JSNT, 729 (see 2 Chronicles 18:22). 209. JSNT, 241 (see Matthew 4:1). 210. JSNT, 246 (see Matthew 6:13). 211. De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, paraphrased by Robert J. O’Connell, The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine’s Later Works (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987), 91. 212. For documentation and examples, see Givens, Wrestling the Angel,  70–​71. 213. Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 140. 214. See both David Paulsen and Stephen Webb in this regard. David Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in an Embodied God,” BYU Studies 35.4 (October 1995): 40–​79. Stephen H. Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 215. JSNT, 608 (Moses 6:8–​9). 216. David Paulsen, “The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment:  Restoration, Judeo–​ Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives,” BYU Studies 35.4 (1995–​96): 21. 217. M&A 2.17 (February 1836): 265. 218. Truman Coe, “Mormonism,” Ohio Observer, 11 August 1836, cited in Milton V. Backman, Jr., “Truman Coe’s 1836 Description of Mormonism,” BYU Studies 17.3 (1977): 5–​6. It is true, nonetheless, that only with time did Smith fully explicate the meaning and precise terms of divine embodiment. 219. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled, 31.

The Joseph Smith Translation 220. 221. 222. 223.

224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233.

234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239.

240. 241. 242. 243. 244.

245. 246.

105

JSNT, 450 (see John 4:24). JSNT, 701 (see Exodus 33:20). JSNT, 443 (see John 1:18). “But those little ones have no need of repentance” (JSNT, 278); “Jesus hath said such shall be saved” (JSNT, 280); “children are not accountable before me until they are eight years old” (JSNT, 646). JSNT, 483 (see Romans 4:16). JSNT, 487 (see Romans 7:18. JSNT, 487 (see Romans 7:20). 1835 D&C 7:8 (D&C 88:35). JSNT, 631 (see Genesis 9:16). JSNT, 643 (see Genesis 15:5–6). JSNT, 709 (see Deuteronomy 10:2). JSNT, 701 (see Exodus 34: 1). 1835 D&C 4:3 (D&C 84:22). The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Richard B. Hays (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 11:266, for instance, notes at least five options: the transgressions are those produced by the law; are those identified by the law; are those restrained by the law; are those remedied by the law; are those associated with the golden calf episode. New Interpreter’s Bible, 11:266. JSNT, 517 (see Galatians 3:20). 1835 73:2 (D&C 74:7). 1835 D&C 6:1–2 (D&C 86:3–4). 1835 D&C 92:1 (D&C 91:1–2). Robert J. Matthews, Joseph Smith’s Revision of the Bible:  Notes, History, and Comparisons (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University Press, 1969), 21. Matthews lists sections 35, 37, 41, 42, 45, 73, 90, 93, 94, 104, and 124. We would add section 24, with its reference to Smith’s work “expounding the scriptures,” and section 26, with its injunction that he continue his work in “studying the scriptures,” both at a time when he is in the early stages of his revision. Matthews, Joseph Smith’s Revision, 21. He cites sections 84, 86, 88, 93, 102, 107, 113, and 132. Morwenna Ludlow, Universal Salvation (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–2. John Bunyan, “The Strait Gate; or, Great difficulty of Going to Heaven,” in Works (Edinburgh: Sands, Murray, Cochran, 1769), 6:375. George Whitefield, Works (London: Edward and Charles Killy, 1771), 4:55–58. Some of these views, which Smith inherited from his forebears, doubtless influenced his capacious heaven. See Casey Paul Griffiths, “Universalism and the Revelations of Joseph Smith,” in The Doctrine and Covenants, Revelations in Context, ed. Andrew H. Hedges, J. Spencer Fluhman, and Alonzo L. Gaskill (Salt Lake City : Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, Deseret, 2008), 168–187. John 5:29. Vision, 16 February 1832, JSP-D2, 180.

106

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247. 1835 91:4 (D&C 76:35, 37–38). 248. Joseph Young, Deseret News (18 March 1857):11, cited in Griffiths, “Universalism and the Revelation of Joseph Smith,” 168–187. 249. For progression through the kingdoms in Smith and his successors, see Givens, Wrestling the Angel, 313–315. 250. 1835 D&C 91:6 (D&C 76:72–75); Visions, 21 January 1836, JSP-D5, 158–59 (D&C 137:1–6). 251. John 1:5–9. 252. D&C 88:6–7, 12–13, 50. 253. Philip Sidney, “Defence of Poesie,” in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney (London:  William Ponsonby, 1595), 34; John Foxe, Fox’s Book of Martyrs (Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1830), 534. 254. Edward Burrough, Truth, the strongest of all  .  .  . (London:  Giles Calvert, 1657), 25; George Whitehead, The Divine Light of Christ in Man (London:  Thomas Northcott, 1692). 255. James E. Talmage Diary, 5 January 1894. In Minutes of the Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1894–1899 (Salt Lake City :  privately printed, 2010), 1. 256. Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine, ed. John A. Widtsoe (Salt Lake City :  Deseret, 1919), 60–61. 257. True to the Faith:  A Gospel Reference (Salt Lake City :  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2004), 96. 258. 1835 D&C 82:1 (D&C 93:2, 7, 8). 259. 1835 D&C 82:2 (D&C 93:15). 260. 1835 D&C 82:1 (D&C 93:6). 261. D&C 37:1, heading. 262. JSNT, 617 (Moses 7:24). 263. BC 40:14, 18, 22 (D&C 38:16, 22, 27); JSNT, 617 (Moses 7:18). 264. BC 44:26 (D&C 42:30). 265. BC 60:10–14 (D&C 59:5–6). 266. BC 61:18–19 (D&C 60:13). 267. B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1965), 1:496–497. 268. Warren Foote, Autobiography of Warren Foote, 3 vols. (Mesa, AZ:  Dale Arnold Foote, 1977), 1:96. 269. Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith to President John Taylor, 17 September 1878, MStar 40.50 (16 December 1878): 788. 270. The revelation is first published in the 1876 Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 132:1). 271. D&C 132:34–35. 272. “5 October 1840,” WJS, 42. 273. “Instruction on Priesthood, 5 October 1840,” http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/ paper-summary/instruction-on-priesthood-5-october-1840/19. Joseph Fielding Smith held that “sacrifice by the shedding of blood was instituted in the days of

The Joseph Smith Translation  107 Adam and of necessity will have to be restored.” Doctrines of Salvation (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1956), 3:94. 274. Jacob 2:23–​30. 275. Genesis 16:2. 276. BC 65:6–​7 (D&C 64:4–​5). 277. 1835 D&C 24:1 (D&C 65:2). 278. BC 1:4 (D&C 1:17). 279. 1835 D&C 79 (D&C 81:2). 280. 1835 D&C 6:3 (D&C 86:9–​10); see Acts 3:21 and Galatians 3:29. 281. BC 64:23 (D&C 63:21). 282. 1835 D&C 24:1 (D&C 65:1). 283. JSNT, 443 (see John 1:18); 1835 D&C 25:3 (D&C 67:11). 284. Mark 6:11. 285. 1835 D&C 87:3 (D&C 75:20, 22). 286. Ether 1:1; 13:1, 6. 287. BC 29:9 (D&C 29:8). 288. This revelation was received 29 September 1830. Smith’s production of Moses 2–​ 5:43 was received sometime between that June and 21 October, so it is possible that portions preceded rather than followed D&C 29. However, Moses 5:52–​8:30 is definitely dated after—​so the narrative as a whole is clearly a post-​section 29 product. My argument also rests on the fact that the question that occasioned section 29 was a disagreement about the meaning and consequence of Adam’s transgression (JSP-​ R&T 43). The revelation gives a very incomplete answer (temptation is necessary for agency) and refers to a need for angelic teachings in Adam’s rehabilitation. The Moses material fully fleshes out a felix culpa, and details a particular angelic ministry to Adam, indicating that material grew out of section 29, and not the other way around. A fragmented answer would not have been given if a more complete treatment (the Moses narrative) already existed. 289. “Translating Time: The Nature and Function of Joseph Smith’s Narrative Canon,” Journal of Religion 87.4 (October 2007): 507. 290. Hugh Nibley has used this term in the context of temple rituals, where he has referred to “a God-​given Urtext which has come down to the present day in many more or less corrupt forms.” The “ur” denotes a proto-​or primeval originating text that embodies the plenitude of gospel fullness. See his What Is a Temple? The Idea of the Temple in History (Provo, UT: BYU Extension Publications, 1963; reprint, 1968), ii. 291. See, for instance, Augustine, Confessions, 4:15, page 63. 292. Joseph Smith to the Elders of the Church, EMS 2.18 (March 1834): 143. I have treated Joseph Smith’s conception of the prisca theologia theme in “Joseph Smith: Prophecy, Process, and Plenitude,” in The Worlds of Joseph Smith, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2006), 55–​68. 293. 2 Nephi 29:12. 294. Alma 45:19.

108  The Pearl of Greatest Price 295. “Moses . . . died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord” who “buried him.” Deuteronomy 34:5–​6. 296. Alma 46:23–​24; Genesis 37:33. 297. 2 Nephi 2:25; Alma 42:5. 298. A parable and numerous passages are attributed to one Zenos (Jacob 5; Alma 33:3, 13, 15, etc.). Prophecies of Zenock are frequently alluded to (1 Nephi 19:10; Alma 34:7; Helaman 8:20, etc.); 2 Nephi 27:10 is the first reference to portions of the Book of Mormon that will not be translated “until the own due time of the Lord.” 299. In the Gospel of John, Jesus rebukes Peter, saying “if I  will that [John] tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” and hence the story began to circulate “that that disciple should not die” (John 21:22–​23). 300. T&S 5.14 (1 August 1844): 595.

2 “Written by His Own Hand” The Book of Abraham

Joseph Smith and Seership One of the Church of Jesus Christ’s many nineteenth-​century newspapers, launched at the time of Smith’s 1844 campaign for the presidency, was named, with no attempt at subtlety, the Prophet. That was the name by which Smith was reverentially known to his people. When Orson Pratt launched another journalistic effort to defend Mormonism to a skeptical public after the 1852 announcement of the church’s sanctioning of polygamy, he renamed the paper the Seer. It is likely that Smith more closely identified with the latter designation, in spite of its less frequent use in Mormon circles. For in translating the Book of Mormon in 1829, he had learned that that record, also, used the latter designation in pointing to his particular role in providential history. It did not refer to him as a prophet. It called him a “seer . . . a choice seer.”1 The Old Testament employs the word in reference to Samuel, Amos, and some half dozen lesser-​known figures, while indicating that “he that is now called a Prophet was beforetime called a Seer.”2 The Book of Mormon, however, makes a distinction between the two terms that would have registered deeply on Joseph Smith. In that text, when a king pronounces his judgment that “a seer is greater than a prophet,” his teacher agrees: “a seer is a revelator and a prophet also; and a gift which is greater can no man have.” He continues to explain why: “a seer can know of things which are past, and also of things which are to come, and by them shall all things be revealed, or, rather, shall secret things be made manifest, and hidden things shall come to light, and things which are not known shall be made known by them, and also things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known.” What distinguishes the seer from a prophet more particularly is his gift to translate—​or to render through divine aid—​lost languages into current idiom. A seer can “translate [ancient records] . . . for he has wherewith that he

Fig. 2.1  First page of Book of Abraham Manuscript-​C. Top portion (in darker ink) is in the handwriting of W. W. Phelps. © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

The Book of Abraham  111 can look, and translate all records that are of ancient date; and it is a gift from God. And the things are called interpreters . . . and whosoever is commanded to look in them, the same is called seer.”3 In this light, Smith could only see the gift of prophecy as inferior to seership. The gift of prophecy was available to all, and Smith, like Paul, had encouraged all to seek that gift. The Holy Ghost, with its attendant visions and revelations, was “the gift of God unto all those who diligently seek him,” in the words of Nephi; “every soul” who followed the prescribed path “shall see my face” promised a revelation Smith dictated in 1833.4 But Smith, alone of the Latter-​day Saints and their apostles, was charged with bringing into the light the voices of people and prophets and civilizations long lost. Smith believed that he had exercised just such seership, using oracular instruments he found buried with the gold plates. He came to associate those “interpreters” with sacred instruments the Old Testament related to the prophetic office and called Urim and Thummim. The Urim and Thummim, as Smith also came to call his instruments, means “lights and perfections” in Hebrew; they are first mentioned in Exodus in the set of instructions pertaining to Aaron’s priestly garments.5 There the instrument is associated with a breastplate (the “breastplate of judgment”). Although the specifications for most of Aaron’s accoutrements are quite detailed, the Urim and Thummim are not described. They are rather introduced as an already familiar given: “thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and Thummim.”6 In Numbers, they are mentioned in connection with Joshua’s elevation to the leadership of Israel, though again somewhat cryptically. The high priest, it is indicated, shall use them in receiving heavenly guidance for Joshua. (“The priest . . . shall ask counsel for him after the judgement of Urim before the Lord”).7 A reference in 1 Samuel more clearly establishes their connection to seership. Saul’s famous encounter with the witch of En-​ dor, we learn, is the result of his failure to obtain revelation by “dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.”8 Nevertheless, these and a few other scattered references reveal little concerning the puzzling origin, description, or operation of the ancient oracles. Adam Clarke, an older contemporary of Joseph Smith, discusses the mysterious Urim and Thummim in his magisterial commentary first published in 1810: “What these were has, I believe, never yet been discovered. 1.  They are nowhere described. 2.  There is no direction given to Moses or any other how to make them. 3. Whatever they were, they do not appear to have been made on this [their first mentioned] occasion. 4. If they were the work of man at all, they must have been the articles in the

112  The Pearl of Greatest Price ancient tabernacle, matters used by the patriarchs, and not here particularly described, because well known.”9 Cornelius van Dam, in his study of the term, concludes that the instrument “consisted of a single gem” and involved “the phenomenon of a (supernatural) light in close conjunction with the [Urim and Thummim].” He also notes that “priesthood and prophecy” are more closely connected to each other and to the Urim and Thummim “than biblical scholarship has recognized since the early nineteenth century.”10 Joseph Smith claimed that at the time he retrieved the gold plates from the Hill Cumorah in upstate New York, he was also given just such instruments. Latter-​day Saint elders were referring to Smith’s use of Urim and Thummim as early as 1832, and W. W. Phelps, editor of the Evening and the Morning Star, used the term in print in 1833.11 Smith had been told by the angel Moroni that the device was what “constituted seers in ancient times,”12 so he would have seen himself as thereby connected with a venerable tradition of seership. The very indeterminateness of such an ancient allusion was an invitation to Smith to give it concrete shape and purpose. In this case, it was precisely this circumstance of a sacred artifact apparently known anciently but not any more, of the survival in the scriptural record of tantalizing hints and shadows of ampler realities and contexts no longer present, that helped frame the particular prophetic role Smith set about defining and enacting. Restoration, as Smith came to define the process, builds on the fragmentary remains of eternal truths and thus diminishes the sense of historical and conceptual distance that separates one biblical dispensation from another. The golden plates were a remarkable relic—​but one without any biblical or historical precedent.13 The Urim and Thummim on the other hand he understood to be the actual embodiment of a connection to specific canonical scriptures, to vaguely understood but divinely sanctioned oracular practices, and to remote but recognizable moments of the past. Significantly, in the initial euphoria of his first successful return from the hill where he recovered the plates (later called Hill Cumorah), Smith’s focus was not even directed to the plates; his excitement was all for the interpreters. Both chroniclers of that morning’s events agree on that point. Lucy Mack recorded that on that historic morning, Smith showed her the (thinly veiled) instrument “but did not tell me anything of the record.”14 And Joseph Knight, describing his closeted conversation with Smith about the visit to the hill, concluded that “he seamed to think more of the glasses or the urim and thummem then he did of the plates [sic].”15

The Book of Abraham  113 Even as Smith engaged full time in his translation of the Book of Mormon, the idea had taken root that this might be just the beginning of a series of similar endeavors. For before the new scripture even went to press, Smith had received a provocative promise from God that “other records have I” that he would receive “power . . . to translate.”16 No other records had yet come into his possession, but he would doubtless have been anticipating them. And so in the years after producing the Book of Mormon and working his way through the English texts of the Bible, thoughts of ancient records and the languages of the past would have percolated in his mind. Egyptian antecedents, seership—​even the Urim and Thummim themselves—​form part of a continuing thread that will link his work on the Book of Mormon to ancient texts in his future.

Language and Godly Access William Mulder said of Joseph Smith that “his was the perennial despair of visionaries striving how to say the unsayable.”17 Well, not exactly. Because Smith was convinced that God was no ineffable mysterium tremendum but an embodied being of flesh and bones, that Zion was a brick-​and-​mortar community, not an invisible society of the elect, and that the heavens had been opened to his gaze and he had come to “know for a certainty of eternal things.”18 To him the oracles had been committed, and he had indeed said and written of “things new and old.”19 Still, language did remain a barrier to full and perfect understanding. Like all mystics who have known a fullness they have experienced but cannot perfectly express, he sought deliverance from what he called “this prison . . . of a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language.”20 The Christian narrative suggests that our language, like Adam, and like the physical creation generally, operated in the aftermath of a catastrophic fall; that an original purity of expression, a pristine correlation between res and verba, had once obtained. God spoke to Adam in the Garden in such a tongue, presumably p ​ erfect before the confusion of Babel. The Genesis account Smith recuperated in 1830 gave rich emphasis to what had been mere inference about an Edenic tongue: “a Book of rememberance was kept, in the which was recorded in the language of Adam. For it was given unto as many as called upon God, to write by the spirit of insparation; And by them their

114  The Pearl of Greatest Price children were taught to read & write, Having a language which was pure & undefiled.”21 Biblical prophecies of Israel’s eventual restoration suggested that a redeemed language would be included in a whole series of healed ruptures: “for then I will turn to the people a pure language,” said Zephaniah.22 And Smith’s reconstituted Genesis made the same promise, giving assurance that Adam’s language—​which Smith’s text refers to significantly but cryptically as a “Priesthood”—​“which was in the beginning, shall [be in the] end of the world also.”23 So both biblical and Restoration scriptures recounted, after Babel, the scattering and degeneration of language but also foresaw its eventual recuperation. In the meantime, one could at least move toward reconstituting a holier and purer language, insofar as that was possible. For Smith, the labor would include not only recourse to spiritual gifts but also old-​fashioned study and intellectual toil.

The Ancient Language Quest Several aspects of Smith’s visionary experiences gave more particular shape to the direction of his efforts to recuperate treasures of the past, focusing on language—​and Egyptian in particular—​as the key to the prophetic role. He had always seen the work of prophecy as, to a large extent, a linguistic problem. He knew that his primary role was seership—​recovering the past through the decipherment of ancient tongues. George Steiner spoke for many in the liberal theological tradition when he said that “attribution to God of ‘speech acts’ such as we know and use them . . . only offends reason and historical evidence.”24 (“The revelation to Moses as recorded in the OT can hardly be taken literally as an event in which the Divine handed over or dictated to Moses Ten Commandments,” adds W. D. Davies.)25 For Smith on the other hand an embodied God spoke in discernible syllables to a listening Adam, as well as to Smith himself in the Sacred Grove. To trace the divine gift of language back in time was to ever more nearly approximate the language of a God whose medium of communication went far beyond vague impressions or vivid dreams and into the arena of concrete speech acts. This was not mere conjecture but was explicitly stated in the Mosaic text Smith had produced. The language in which Adam maintained the “book of

The Book of Abraham  115 rememberance” was “according to the pattern given by the finger of God” and was “pure & undefiled.”26 On one occasion, in a revelation recorded as “A Sample of pure Language given by Joseph the Seer,” Smith revealed a small sampling of that very Adamic tongue: Question What is the name of God in pure Language

Answer Awmen. Q The meaning of the pure word A[w]‌men

A It is the being which made all things in all its parts. Q What is the name of the Son of God.

A The Son Awmen. Q What is the Son Awmen.

A It is the greatest of all the parts of Awmen which is the Godhead the first born. Q What is man.

A This signifies Sons Awmen. the human family the children of men the greatest parts of Awmen Sons the Son Awmen Q What are Angels called in pure language.

A Awmen Angls-​men Q What are the meaning of these words.

A Awmen’s Servants Ministerring servants Sanctified who are sent forth from heaven to minister for or to Sons Awmen the greatest part of Awmen Son. Sons Awmen Son Awmen Awmen27 On other occasions, fellow Latter-​day Saints broke forth in tongues, which Smith and others identified as the Adamic language. In November 1832, Young journeyed to Kirtland, Ohio, to meet Smith. On the evening of his introduction a small group convened, and Smith asked Young to pray. “In my prayer,” he recorded, “I spoke in tongues.” In response to questions about what the group had witnessed, Smith asserted that what they heard “was the pure Adamic language” and that “it is of God.”28 Women, too, had access to the primordial language. Presendia Kimball recorded an instance at Winter Quarters, Nebraska, when Eliza Snow, following an instance of speaking in an unknown “Indian language,” spoke “in the pure language

116  The Pearl of Greatest Price of Adam, with great power” (though Snow herself referred to it as “Eve’s tongue”).29 In Smith’s day, many scholars were arguing that the Adamic language was in fact biblical Hebrew. John Hutchinson in the mid-​eighteenth century had argued that the Babel story suffered from a mistranslation. It was not languages that were confounded, he wrote, but religious confessions—​or belief. Hence, as scholars such as James Moody reasoned, “the language spoke before the affair at Babel was the language of Adam, so of paradise,” and since Babel represented “not a confusion of languages, but of confessions,” then the ancient language continued uncorrupted through the era of Moses, “wherefore biblical Hebrew is the language of paradise.”30 The Adamic tongue, in brief, is biblical Hebrew. Smith did not believe that Hebrew was Adamic, but it was the most ancient language he knew of, with the possible exception of Egyptian. And so he hired a Hebrew instructor to teach him and the elders of the church. His intention, he wrote to the wife of Joshua Seixas, was to acquire “those languages in which the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were originally written as our only object is to do good to lay aside error when we discover it forsake evil and follow righteousness and truly be the better prepared and qualified to render assistance to our fellow men and glorify the name of the Lord.”31 In Smith’s cultural milieu, the link between Hebrew and Egyptian was a commonplace, and he believed that he had personal verification of that connection. The plates of gold he first claimed to glimpse in 1823 were not written in the language of the Bible. “These records were engraven on plates which had the appearance of gold. Each plate was six inches wide and eight inches long and not quite so thick as common tin. They were filled with engravings in Egyptian characters and bound together in a volume, as the leaves of a book with three rings running through the whole.”32 The second sentence of the volume corroborated his description: “I make a record,” declares the prophet Nephi, in a language that is an amalgam of “the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.”33 Subsequently, Moroni, the reputed final editor of the gold plates, described the language as “reformed Egyptian.”34 Orson Pratt, in his 1840 recounting of Smith’s personal history, referred to these plates as “filled with Egyptian characters and hieroglyphics.”35 Champollion had decoded Egyptian on the Rosetta Stone in the early 1820s, and his work was already known in the New England area by 1830.36 However, there was no Egyptian linguistic science before the 1850s.

The Book of Abraham  117 Egypt was also at the heart of Smith’s conception of an antiquity redolent with gospel plenitude. The land of Egypt was, in his mind, the source from which a great many streams of inspired truth and wisdom flowed. His contemporary environment was ablaze with a fascination for all things Egyptian. And he felt a deeply personal affinity for Egypt as well, conceiving of it as his own homeland in more than metaphorical ways. These connections were traceable to his work on the Book of Mormon and were reinforced by the crucial role language occupied in his religious imagination.

Personal Connections In the closing weeks of dictating the text of the Book of Mormon, in June 1829, Smith dictated a passage that would have turned his imagination even more powerfully to the land of pharaohs and pyramids, the refuge of famished Israelites and an infant Christ. The narrative’s first patriarch, Lehi, is giving fatherly blessings to his sons. To his youngest, named Joseph, he quotes an ancient prophecy, bringing two more Josephs into his blessing—​ the Israelite patriarch of that name and a prophet yet to come. To his son Joseph, Lehi says: For behold, thou art the fruit of my loins; and I am a descendant of Joseph who was carried captive into Egypt. And great were the covenants of the Lord which he made unto Joseph. Wherefore, Joseph truly saw our day. . . . For Joseph truly testified, saying: A seer shall the Lord my God raise up, who shall be a choice seer unto the fruit of my loins. Yea, Joseph truly said: Thus saith the Lord unto me: A choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins; and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of thy loins. And unto him will I give commandment that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren, which shall be of great worth unto them, even to the bringing of them to the knowledge of the covenants which I have made with thy fathers.

Not only would this future seer be a guide to the descendants of Joseph of Egypt but also this future prophet would himself come “out of the fruit of loins” of Joseph of Egypt, producing writings “unto the confounding of false doctrines and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace among the fruit of thy loins, and bringing them to the knowledge of their fathers in

118  The Pearl of Greatest Price the latter days, and also to the knowledge of my covenants, saith the Lord.” Finally, Lehi attested:  “thus prophesied Joseph [of Egypt], saying:  Behold, that seer will the Lord bless. . . . And his name shall be called after me.”37 The effect of these words on Smith’s self-​conceiving is not hard to discern, and several points would have been evident to him. First, he had just experienced firsthand the truth of the often-​repeated refrain in the Book of Mormon that many “plain and precious things” had disappeared from the biblical record. Here now was one of those missing portions: a prophecy that the patriarch Joseph had pronounced on a future descendant but that was not contained in any version of the Bible then or now. Second, Smith would have been riveted by the reference to a modern descendant of Joseph of Egypt who would perform a work of scriptural restoration, to be conjoined with “that which shall be written by the fruit of the loins of Judah,” that was critical to the gathering of Israel and their restoration as a covenant people. That, of course, could only refer to the Book of Mormon, which he was in process of restoring as he dictated those words in June 1829. In other words, he, Joseph Smith, was that promised figure; the words of prophecy had tracked him across 3,000 years, across time and oceans to this farmhouse in Harmony, Pennsylvania, and revealed to him his true heritage as the namesake and descendant of Joseph—​Joseph of Egypt.

Egyptian Artifacts and the Rise of Egyptomania Further setting the stage for Smith’s foray into his Egyptian studies, antebellum America was in the throes of its own love affair with Egyptian antiquities. Following Napoleon’s advance into Alexandria, Egypt, in 1798, a robust fascination with all things ancient Egyptian became a hallmark of the first half of the nineteenth century in America. In the early 1800s, England and France competitively began unearthing the secrets of ancient Egypt that had lain hidden under sand for centuries. Artifacts increasingly began to appear, first in Europe and then ultimately in the United States, that gave rise to a booming Egyptomania in antebellum America.38 Egyptomania in New  York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the most populous cities in the nation in the early nineteenth century, began as Egyptian artifacts arrived in the early 1800s, owing to enthusiastic interests in scientific discoveries and in the new and mysterious culture of the ancient Egyptians. Much of that mania manifested itself in a related mummymania,

The Book of Abraham  119 which began as early as April 1823 with the arrival of the mummy known as Padihershef.39 Throughout the nineteenth century, mummymania led to “scientific” cranial investigations and to questionable commercial practices such as using mummy dust as medicine and making mummy paint, mummy paper, and mummy rags.40 One mummy was exhibited for a few months in 1827 in Ithaca, New York, about fifty-​five miles southeast of Palmyra, where the Smith family had moved some eleven years before. An eight-​page brochure was created for the exhibit containing a plate for the coffin, certificates, and a description of the mummy.41 Joseph Smith himself would likely have at least heard about various mummies making their way through the New England area. In 1835, his personal experiences and self-​understanding of his role, Book of Mormon prophecies and backgrounds, and immediate circumstances all converged in a perfect storm that he must have seen as divinely orchestrated. In late June or early July of that year, Michael Chandler,42 a traveling antiquities dealer, entered the Mormon town of Kirtland, Ohio. He had in his possession four mummies, “two rolls of papyrus . . . two or three other small pieces of papyrus, with astronomical calculations, epitaphs, &c.”43 These mummies and papyri represented a portion of a larger cache of eleven mummies that the Italian Antonio Lebolo (under the direction of the French consul, Bernardino Drovetti) probably discovered in a tomb in Thebes, Egypt, sometime between 1817 and 1822.44 Before his death in 1830, Lebolo had arranged to have the artifacts shipped to the United States.45 The artifacts were then exhibited up and down the eastern seaboard for the next few years; it is not known who precisely oversaw these exhibitions.46 Seven of the eleven mummies had been sold between the time the mummies had been exhibited in the eastern states and their arrival in Kirtland with Chandler.47 Oliver Cowdery relates that Chandler first opened his precious purchase when it arrived in New York City in early 1833. “In connection with two of the bodies” he found “something rolled up with the same kind of linen, saturated with the same bitumen, which when examined proved to be two rolls of papyrus.”48 Cowdery also relates that before Chandler even left the Custom House, where the mummies were revealed, having expressed disappointment that nothing more valuable than ancient scrolls accompanied them, he was told by a gentleman that one “Mr Joseph Smith, jr.” might be of assistance, since he “possesses some kind of power or gifts by which he had previously translated similar characters.” After exhibiting the treasures in Philadelphia, still stymied in his efforts to find a competent translator for

120  The Pearl of Greatest Price the papyri, Chandler was once again “referred to bro. Smith for a translation of his Egyptian Relic.” In July 1835, Chandler made his way to Kirtland and presented himself and his “relics” to Smith.49 Arriving in Kirtland with his Egyptian artifacts, Chandler stayed at the Riggs hotel and requested an audience with Joseph Smith. According to a later recollection of John Riggs, he “was present when the Prophet first saw the papyrus from which is translated the Book of Abraham.” In examining the papyrus, the Mormon prophet was struck by what he perceived as a similarity between some of the Egyptian characters and characters of “Reformed Egyptian” that he had previously copied from the gold plates. Smith was given permission to take the papyrus home; and “the morning following Joseph came with the leaves he had translated.” Riggs relates that Chandler now compared Smith’s translation with Charles Anthon’s translation. Smith had earlier sent some Reformed Egytpian characters from the gold plates to that New York scholar for verification of his translation. What happened in that meeting is disputed, but no account credits Anthon with providing his own translation, so Riggs apparently misunderstood. However, his impression on this occasion was that the Anthon episode together with Smith’s ad hoc translation of the papyrus secured Smith’s credibility, and it was now apparent that “there was one language Professor Anthon could not translate which the Prophet did.”50 In Orson Pratt’s account, Smith took some of the fragments to his room “and inquired of the Lord concerning them. The Lord told him they were sacred records, containing the inspired writings of Abraham when he was in Egypt, and also those of Joseph, while he was in Egypt.”51 Smith paid the asking price of $2,400 for both mummies and papyri. Subsequently, Chandler provided Smith, “unsolicited” and “previous to any purchase,” with an affidavit attesting to his competence: “this is to make known to all who may be desirous, concerning the knowledge of Mr. Joseph Smith, jr. in deciphering the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic characters, in my possession, which I have, in many eminent cities, shown to the most learned: And from the information that I could even learn or meet with, I find that of Mr. Joseph Smith, jr. to correspond in the most minute matters. Michael H. Chandler.”52 Given Chandler’s desire to unload his inherited mummies and papyri on a prospective buyer, his ignorance of ancient languages, and the unlikelihood that strangers in New York and Philadelphia would refer him to the presumed charlatan Joseph Smith, we do well to see in Chandler more flattery than sincerity. However, genuine scholars of Egyptian were not exactly

The Book of Abraham  121 abundant, Smith’s contested status as prophet and translator may have been the best option available to one as curious as Chandler, and Smith’s earnestness and self-​confidence may have won Chandler’s genuine regard. In any case, Chandler concluded the sale, and both parties were satisfied with the transaction. The mummies of themselves instantly became celebrated artifacts among both residents of and visitors to Kirtland. Chandler had been unwilling to sell the papyri alone,53 so Smith displayed them with their accompanying mummies in the unfinished temple, charging visitors 25 cents to see them (perhaps in the hope of recouping some of the church’s investment). One prospective convert journeyed to Kirtland to see the prophet, but it would appear that his interest in the mummies took precedence: “we hired a man to take us to that place for $5.00—​distant 12 miles. We arrived there about noon. In the afternoon we went into the [Kirtland] Temple, and saw the mummies and the records which were found with them (we [then] went to the prophet’s house to see him. This is the first I saw him, and shook hands with him).”54 Wilford Woodruff, too, considered those artifacts a high point of his return to Kirtland in late 1836: “we then visited the upper rooms [of the temple] & there viewed four Egyptian Mumies & also the Book of Abram Written by his own hand & not ownly the hieroglyphicks but also many figures that this precious treasure Contains are Calculated to make a lasting impression upon the mind which is not to be erased.”55 The mummies had all the appeal of ancient spectacle, but Smith’s attention was consumed by the papyrus scrolls and fragments he acquired with them. For he now found himself, for the second time in his life, in the possession of ancient records that God or fate had conspired to bring into his orbit. The difference this time was that by this year, 1835, the title “seer” was a part of his formal identity, having twice been divinely confirmed as his title by revelation; the second confirmation of his calling as “seer” and “translator” came mere weeks before the arrival of these “other records” to which the Lord had cryptically pointed in 1829.56 With the treasure in his possession, he immediately set to work.

The Book of Abraham and Temple Theology The New and Everlasting Covenant The Book of Abraham that Smith produced was a small text, but it was seminal in the development of his mature theological enterprise. One

122  The Pearl of Greatest Price contemporary remembered Smith relating a crucial detail about his First Vision: according to Levi Richards, Smith said that on that occasion, the Lord had confirmed to him that the “Everlasting covenant was broken.”57 As Smith’s conception of the meaning of “restoration” took shape, it had two essential components. First, it must recuperate the entirety of the great cosmic narrative that originated in heavenly councils, entailed a gospel fullness known to Adam, and meshed Old and New Testament practices and principles. Second, the project of Restoration must reestablish the saving ordinances and the authority to administer those sacraments within this more coherent framework. Thus, the Everlasting Covenant, reinaugurated and relegitimized, would become the “new and everlasting covenant.” And the work emanating from the Egyptian papyri was integral to this recovery. Within months of acquiring the papyri, Smith had produced little more than the first chapter of a text he called the Book of Abraham and a portion of the second. Even so, important seeds of Smith’s vast expansion of the gospel timeline appear in these efforts but are not yet developed. Abraham is introduced as a “follower of righteousness” in search of greater happiness and knowledge. Key in this regard is Abraham’s reference to a priesthood that “was conferred upon [him] from the fathers.” Much like the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ teaches that Jesus Christ established a pattern of formal ordination to a priesthood through which sacraments of salvation are administered. Smith’s conception of priesthood, however, transcends ecclesiastical authority and temporal duration. The first indications of such a conception were in the Book of Mormon, with Alma’s reference to a priesthood order “without beginning of days or end of years, being prepared from eternity.”58 Alma’s description of the preparation of this order as taking place “according to [God’s] foreknowledge,” however, makes its actual origin uncertain. This status is now clarified:  “it came down from the fathers,” Abraham continues, “from the beginning of time, yea even from the beginning, or before the foundation of the earth.”59 This right to the priesthood, in fact, and not promised land or unspecified blessings to dispense upon posterity, is identified as the essence of Abraham’s inheritance in Smith’s revised version of the covenant God makes with him. “In thee (that is, in thy Priesthood) and in thy seed (that is, thy Priesthood) . . . shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal.”60 Smith’s work on the JST is again shown to be an essential precursor

The Book of Abraham  123 to this narrative, as it had attested that this covenant had come to Abraham through the ancient patriarchs Noah and, unsurprisingly, Enoch.61 If the Book of Mormon introduced Joseph Smith to the centrality of covenant theology, it was the Book of Abraham that economically refashioned it by unambiguously conflating the old covenant of works and the new covenant of grace, the old dispensations and the new, into one continuous, seamless gospel narrative, linked by a priesthood possessed by Adam, Abraham, and the New Testament apostles (as well as God himself, Smith determines). In Smith’s rephrasing of the Abrahamic covenant, typology disappears under the weight of Abraham’s literal Christianizing. Just as Smith told of Adam being catechized and baptized in the Garden of Eden, the Abraham of the Old Testament here becomes an actual minister of the gospel and Father of both literal and spiritual Israel. This development represented a radical departure from both Catholic and Protestant understanding of salvation history and dispensationalism. In the light of the Abraham text, the New Testament is not truly “new,” and supersessionism is effectively precluded; God’s covenant with humankind is universalized from the beginning. Abraham is not father of the old dispensation but of the one and only covenant that exists between God and man, and one with roots remote in time. As noted, the Book of Moses established the foundations of a comprehensive theology, which expressed the Church of Jesus Christ’s radical novelty and distinctness from Christian frameworks. It replaced the orthodox account of Edenic disaster and repair with a cosmic narrative seen nowhere else on the religious landscape. Its story traces back to premortal worlds with unembodied human spirits and the book interprets mortality as the indispensable gateway to embodiment (“seed”), maturation (“know[ing] good and evil”), “joy,” and “the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.”62 The Book of Moses also declares the gospel to be an ancient gospel, taught to Adam and Eve, and dispels the myth of an impassible Father God beyond emotional pain. The Book of Abraham exhibits significant overlap with the Book of Moses. Its principal theological contributions are the expansion and further illumination of the time before creation (declared off limits to speculation by Augustine, among other writers),63 the recuperation of ancient traditions of heavenly councils, the assigning of a participatory role to premortal humans in these primordial events, and the redefinition of the creation. The fruit of Smith’s Egyptian labors bore a passing resemblance to his earliest work on the revision of the Bible. There we found a greatly expanded

124  The Pearl of Greatest Price biblical narrative that both enlarges the story of Adam and Eve and develops a full-​blown ministry of Enoch, including in the first instance a Christianizing of Eden and in the second a powerful ascension narrative in which a weeping God is discovered. Similarly, the Book of Abraham consists primarily of an expanded account of the patriarch’s life, describing or enlarging four principal episodes:  his place in premortal councils, his flight from Chaldea, his sojourn in Egypt, and his tutoring by God in cosmology. The Book of Abraham is Smith’s most controversial production; it is also the most critical to understanding the totality of his gospel conception, as its production spans the final decade of his life. One of his last public discourses—​given in January 1844, mere months before his martyrdom and in the shadow of the rising Nauvoo Temple—​serves as the best summing up of what he believed he had been ordained to accomplish and gives essential context for the last revelatory project of his life. The keys are to be deliverd the spirit of Elijah is to Come, The gospel to be esstablished the Saints of God gatherd Zion built up, & the Saints to Come up as Saviors on mount Zion but how are they to become Saviors on Mount Zion by building thair temples erecting their Baptismal fonts & going forth & receiving all the ordinances, Baptisms, Confirmations, washings anointings ordinations & sealing powers upon our heads in behalf of all our Progenitors who are dead & redeem them that they may Come forth in the first resurrection & be exhalted to thrones of glory with us, & here in is the chain that binds the hearts of the fathers to the Children, & the Children to the Fathers which fulfills the mission of Elijah & I would to God that this temple was now done that we might go into it & go to work.64

Smith was not tinkering around the edges of Christian theology and ecclesiology. He was remaking Christianity from the bottom up, propounding an entirely new ex materia cosmology, a covenant theology that put preexisting human souls alongside heavenly parents as members of a divine family, a soteriology that designed and intended an ascent rather than descent into the mortal condition, and a human destiny as celestial beings fully incorporated into an eternal chain of belonging, with bonds both horizontal and vertical, equal parts anthropocentric and theocentric. The temple ordinances that consummated these designs Smith had unfolded only to a select group in May 1842. These sacramental rites in Smith’s temple project followed immediately on the heels of his translation and publication of the bulk of the Book

The Book of Abraham  125 of Abraham. For it was the Book of Abraham that served to complete the picture of this heavenly chain that it was his task to reconstitute. This grand theological project and the role the Book of Abraham was made to play in Smith’s temple theology explain the significance of this scripture in Latter-​day Saint thought. We can best understand the import of the Abrahamic narrative Smith reconstructs within the actual plenitude of the temple theology toward which all his labors were directed—​from the physical engineering of sacred structures modeled on Old Testament (and Book of Mormon) precedent to the plural marriages that only unfolded on that ground of revised Abrahamic conceptions about innumerable posterity; from Smith’s restoration of priesthood authority, which began with visits by John the Baptist and Christ’s three apostles Peter, James, and John, to his subsequent claims to possess the keys of Moses, Elijah, and Elias, along with a patriarchal priesthood. For Joseph Smith, the temple and its ordinances were the summit, the culmination, of his entire work of Restoration. Smith’s conception of the temple mirrored that of ancient Israel: a “cosmic mountain,”65 a point of orientation that is, in Levi Sorenson’s words, “the center of the center,” the point “from which everything takes its bearings,” and that in that sense is “the physical representation of transcendent reality.” At the same time, it is “a point of junction between heaven, earth, and hell . . . a kind of fulcrum for the universe” and “the vehicle that conveys” one “into the supernal Temple, the real Temple, the Temple of YHWH and his retinue.”66 In short, temple theology provides a master plan that plots cosmic time and heavenly space and offers a means of traversing the chasm that impedes human union with the divine. This was how Smith conceived of his project for a reconstituted temple theology, and the Book of Abraham was key to its articulation.

Councils, Creation, and Cosmology

Human Preexistence and the Divine Assembly The plurality of divine beings intimated in Genesis (“let us make . . .”) has been explained away by resort to “the royal we,” foreshadowing of the Trinity, or a reflection of God’s infinitely multiple perfections.67 Smith’s rendering of the creation in the Book of Abraham takes a more direct solution: “the Gods . . . went down to organize man in their own image, in the image of the Gods,” he wrote unambiguously.68 That he had depicted a singular God as responsible in his Book of Moses shows that the Book of Abraham marked

126  The Pearl of Greatest Price an important evolution in his conception of a divine plurality—​doubtless influenced by his study of Hebrew. The first person plural follows from more than one god being present. What gods are intended is not clarified, but in the Book of Abraham, we find an array of beings, some divine and some human, brought together in an assembly setting. Multitudinous premortal humans, like plural gods, appear vaguely in Smith’s redaction of Genesis. The two biblical creation narratives (Genesis 1 and 2) have been explained, according to the Documentary Hypothesis, as a simple juxtaposition of two incompatible versions inherited by an early biblical editor.69 At Smith’s hands, Moses explains the two accounts as referring to a physical and a spiritual creation, respectively. “For I the lord God Created all things of which I have spoken Spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the Earth.” More specifically, the voice of the Lord adds: “I the Lord God, had created all the Children of men & not yet a man to till the ground.”70 Scholars have alleged that ancient Jewish versions of a “spiritual creation” may signify no more than an effective twinkle in God’s eye. Paul Davies insisted that the Hebrew emphasis on the unity of body and spirit precluded an independent or prior existence for that spirit. He relegated apparent references to such, as in Psalm 139 and Jeremiah, to “ideal existence in the mind and purpose of God.”41 This is where the Book of Abraham makes its significant contribution to the Latter-​day Saint theology of the preexistence. For if Moses leaves the meaning of a spiritual creation vague and imprecise, Abraham treats premortal humans as clearly existing agents who act independently: “now the Lord had shewn unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones; And God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said, these, I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me, Abraham, thou art one of them, thou wast chosen before thou wast born.”71 In a further refinement of the idea, Abraham teaches not only that souls existed before the earth’s creation, but that they are coeternal with God. Human “spirits . . . have no beginning, they existed before; they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are . . . Eternal.”72 Thus in Abraham we find the Christian idea of the spirit, that immortal part of human identity, to be an equivalent for intelligence or soul—​and that core constituent of human identity extends eternally backward as well as forward in time.

The Book of Abraham  127 Biblical references to fallen ones, morning stars, angels, and sons of God are but ghostly remnants of an entire cosmology now mostly lost to us. One form this heavenly order assumed was the council of the gods or the divine assembly, a common motif in Mesopotamian texts, that passed into the Ugaritic tradition (fl. fourteenth to thirteenth centuries bce) and survived clearly in Hebraic religious texts. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit point out that in early monotheistic traditions, “the world of divinity becomes a kind of complex bureaucratic system, or an emanated chain of being. . . . Hierarchical and organic conceptions of the world of divinity stand in opposition to the picture of simple unity of the philosophers.”73 The council scene described in the Abraham account is consistent with a standard motif in Mesopotamian and Ugaritic literature wherein a heavenly council convenes to consider a problem and a series of proposals is offered, often with the one making the proposal demanding all power and glory (as Marduk demands in the Babylonian creation narrative Enuma Elish).74 In the present instance, God stands surrounded by a number of exalted figures, who are referred to as “rulers.” (It is significant that Smith recasts the first verse of Genesis as “the Head God brought forth the Head Gods in the grand, head council.”)75 As is the case in Mesopotamian texts, the council discusses the creation of a human world. (“We will make an earth whereon these may dwell.”)76 As in the accounts in Kings and Isaiah, God consults members of the assembly. Here, too, he asks: “Whom shall I send?”77 (Compare “Who will [go]?” [1 Kings 22:20] and “Whom shall I  send?” [Isaiah 6:8]). Further similarities with antecedents only heighten the family resemblance. The challenge of a Marduk or the schism among the gods described in Nag Hammadi texts are paralleled in Smith’s Mosaic account by a premortal Lucifer attempting to supplant God. (“Give me thine honor,” he demands).78 Now, the Book of Abraham’s retelling adds more detail. Refused the role of Savior, a rebuffed Lucifer departs in fury, creating a schism in the heavens. (“The second was angry, and . . . many followed after him.”)79 The context for this dispute, the expanded narrative makes clear, was what Latter-​day Saints have come to refer to as the Council in Heaven—​not just an instance of the divine assembly but a particular convocation, or what Smith called “the first organization in heaven,” in which “we were all present and saw the Savior chosen and appointed, and the plan of salvation made and we sanctioned it.”80 The terms of the Everlasting Covenant, the system of covenants and ordinances that define and shape humankind’s incorporation into a heavenly family were here established. Or, as Smith taught, “the

128  The Pearl of Greatest Price Order & Ordinances of the Kingdom were instituted by the Priesthood in the council of Heaven before the World was.”81 Further indication that human spirits functioned in these premortal realms in ways comparable to earthly existence came in the Book of Abraham’s description of the educative purposes of both: “and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; and they, who keep their first estate, shall be added upon; and they, who keep not their first estate, shall not have glory in the same kingdom, with those who keep their first estate; and they, who keep their second estate, shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.”82 As Joseph Smith would summarize the burden of this council: “what was the design of the Almighty in making man, it was to exalt him to be as God, the scripture says ye are Gods and it cannot be broken.”83 A principal contribution of the Book of Abraham was to firmly establish not just the premortality of the human soul but humankind’s participation in celestial councils that planned for a mortal sojourn en route to divinization. And the Book of Abraham provided the theological material that allowed Smith to reconstitute the temple in the sense in which it had been understood anciently—​mapping human origins and destiny in the context of premortal covenant-​making. The Temple Scroll discovered at Qumran envisions an eventual return to this ancient temple function: “renewal of the covenant made at Sinai, i.e., the temple ordinances that were present before; from the beginning, the building was necessary to accommodate them.”84 That covenant, a Jewish Midrash indicates, was made by “all the souls that existed from the time of Adam the first man until the end of time. . . . And all of them were in the Garden of Eden, and all of them were present at the giving of the Torah [on Sinai].”85 The theme of councils and collaboration carry into the actual implementation of God’s grand creative design as well.

Creation Ex Materia—​by Committee One scholar of religion notes that today “the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is regarded as the linchpin of Christianity, the truth on which theism stands or falls.”86 This has not proven to be so with the Church of Jesus Christ, for as a Catholic theologian argued, Mormonism’s “intellectual audacity” in espousing the eternalism of matter offers an emphatic challenge to a Christian orthodoxy rooted in a metaphysics of spirit. The

The Book of Abraham  129 church’s theological foundation of creation ex materia surfaces in this same Abrahamic account. The uncreated eternity of human spirits is posited in the clear assertion, noted above, that they “have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are . . . eternal.”87 (Smith had declared that principle years earlier, though only in reference to spirit, in virtually identical language:  “for man is spirit. The elements are eternal.”)88 In Abraham, this eternalism is more clearly extended to the universe itself, as indicated in the divine decision to “go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an Earth whereon these may dwell.”89 The creative activity consists of reordering—​not conjuring out of the void—​the physical world. As Smith rewrites the opening lines of the biblical narrative: “and they went down at the beginning, and they organized and formed (that is the Gods,) the heavens and the earth.”90 Smith was here, again, clearly influenced by his Hebrew studies. As he told an audience in 1844, the word rendered “create” in translations of the Old Testament does not mean “out of nothing. . . . It means to organize.”91 This point was the Book of Abraham’s fourth assault on the sovereignty of God, as defined by the Christian creeds—​that is to say, a God who is wholly Other, transcendent, the source of all existence and whose will determines all events. The prophecy of Enoch, with its depiction of a God weeping over the misery of his children, is clearly inconsistent with a God whose universe unfolds in a manner fully conformable to his will and desires. That was the first challenge to sovereignty. Second, a heaven populated by countless other eternal spirits undermines his standing as the sole independently existing being in the cosmos, in Tertullian’s language “the only Being who is unborn and not-​made.”92 Third, a casual reference (repeated several times) to “Gods” present at the morning of creation is a blatant departure from the monotheism that underlies virtually any concept of sovereignty. The Catholic Church is accurate in its Vatican pronouncement: “the differences are so great that one cannot even consider that this [LDS] doctrine is a heresy which emerged out of a false understanding of the Christian doctrine [of the Trinity]. The teaching of the Mormons has a completely different matrix.”93 The Book of Abraham emphasizes the collaborative implications of a heavenly council, by emphatically affirming the joint nature of the creation. “And the Gods took counsel among themselves” to organize the human race, the text reads. Later, they “counselled among themselves to form the heavens and the earth.” Five more times the text affirms that “the Gods counseled among

130  The Pearl of Greatest Price themselves to form” the earth and its flora and that in fact the entirety of creation is “our work, which we have counselled.”94 Finally, this Book of Abraham’s making of God into an organizer and artificer of already existing materials is precisely the assault on God’s sovereignty that the Gnostics threatened and that the creedal statements of the Christian churches explicitly precluded. Irenaeus protested against those Gnostics who “do not believe that God (being powerful, and rich in all resources) created matter itself. . . . For, to attribute the substance of created things to the power and will of Him who is God of all, is worthy both of credit and acceptance. . . . While men, indeed, cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing, yet God is in this point pre-​eminently superior to men, that He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”95 And so the Lateran Council in 1215 pronounced the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which in the formula of the Westminster Confession signifies that God “is the alone fountain of all being.” From a Latter-​day Saint perspective, these challenges to divine sovereignty, so-​called, have not diminished God but have diminished the “infinite qualitative divide” that once separated the divine and the human.96 Two additional changes Smith made to the Genesis narrative in the Book of Abraham were subtle but significant. First, Smith’s version refers to each period designated a “day” in Genesis as an indefinite “time.” The phases of creation unfold according to a “second time,” a “third time,” and so forth.97 Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the scientific world’s first devastating attack on young earth creationism, appeared in three volumes beginning in 1830.98 Lyell’s contribution to orthodoxy’s demise was his compelling geologic evidence for an antiquity of the earth that far exceeded the mere six days (or millennia) Genesis suggested. The overwhelming evidence for an earth age measured in millions of years meant that literal readings of the Bible were no longer tenable. “He did more than any other scientist,” writes one scholar, “to disturb the religious faith of the 1830s and the century that followed.”99 At this precise historical moment, Smith was creating a space to avoid the pitfalls of Genesis literalism by taking twenty-​four-​hour periods out of the creation narrative. W. W. Phelps recognized that Smith’s teachings in this regard conformed to the new science of geology rather than conflicting with it. Writing to William Smith, Phelps noted that Joseph Smith had learned from his work on the papyri that “eternity, agreeably to the records found in the catacombs of Egypt, has been going on in this system (not this world) almost two thousand five hundred and fifty five millions of years: and to know

The Book of Abraham  131 at the same time, that deists, geologists and others are trying to prove that matter must have existed hundreds of thousands of years;—​it almost tempts the flesh to fly to God, or muster faith like Enoch to be translated.”100 The second change Smith introduced was of ambiguous import. The Gods (plural) “ordered the expanse,” so that it divided the waters, then they “ordered, saying: let the waters under the heaven be gathered,” and finally they “organized the earth to bring forth” its array of flora; in all three cases they “saw that they were obeyed”—​whether by subordinate agents or by the natural elements themselves is not clear.101 Orson Pratt chose the second option, taking this language to mean that “an unintelligent particle is incapable of understanding or obeying a law, while an intelligent particle is capable of both understanding and obedience. It would be entirely useless for an Intelligent Cause to give laws to unintelligent matter.”102 In the Seer, Pratt argued further that the law of gravity made more sense if articulated in terms of active self-​propulsion rather than passive attraction “by which every particle of matter in the universe has a tendency, not to attract, (for such a mode of action is, in all cases, impossible), but to approach every other particle with a force varying inversely as the square of its distance.”103 John Widtsoe echoed Pratt’s language in 1908, writing that “life is nothing more than matter in motion; that, therefore, all matter possesses a kind of life. . . . Matter . . . [is] intelligent . . . hence everything in the universe is alive.”104 Like Pratt, Widtsoe believed that intelligence was a precondition of adherence to law. Though the Church of Jesus Christ has never declared panpsychism to be a doctrinal position, it has continued to emerge in Latter-​day Saint thought. In 1925, scientist-​philosopher W.  H. Chamberlin, developing Pratt’s and Widtsoe’s ideas in his own quest to reconcile contemporary science with Mormon theology, held that “mind is inherent in all Nature in the form of innumerable spiritual agents or selves, which are free causes.”105 And LDS biologist Steven Peck finds rich possibilities in this view that “the conditions in which God and a society of minds find themselves as individuals include both ourselves and all of matter that is spiritual.”106

Priesthood Smith had noted, in an 1832 revelation, that the “Holy Priesthood” in ancient times had been conveyed primarily through patrilineal lines. It passed from Adam to Abel to Enoch and so on down to Noah and Abraham “through the

132  The Pearl of Greatest Price lineage of their fathers.”107 Smith established the office of patriarch as one patterned on the Old Testament patriarchs: an office to be held by a person, in Smith’s understanding, who was “the oldest man of the Blood of Joseph or of the seed of Abraham.”108 Smith may have said that the patriarch should be “the oldest man of the blood of Joseph,” but in fact Smith came to understand the patriarchal prerogative as particularly applying to a person who belonged to his own family. In December 1834, he ordained his father to the office of patriarch, with particularly significant phrasing: “blessed of the Lord is my father, for he [Joseph Smith, Sr.] shall stand in the midst of his posterity and shall be comforted by their blessings when he is old and bowed down with years, and shall be called a prince over them, and shall be numbered among those who hold the right of Patriarchal Priesthood, even the keys of that ministry.”109 When he later ordained his brother Hyrum to the office, he employed vocabulary with that same emphasis on rights, priesthood, and lineage: “this order of priesthood was confirmed to be handed down from father to son, and rightly belongs to the literal descendants of the chosen seed, to whom the promises were made.”110 As Alma Allred has pointed out, this is the same language that will appear in the opening verse of the Book of Abraham.111 In June 1835, Smith was still working out his understanding of the patriarchal (or “evangelical,” as he called it interchangeably) order. On 22 June, he preached on “the evangelical order.”112 Mere days later, he acquired the Egyptian papyri and began their translation. In the very opening lines, we hear Abraham describing his own rights to the priesthood based on patriarchal lineage. The first verses of the Book of Abraham refer to Abraham’s inheritance of the priesthood, “holding the right belonging to the fathers. It was conferred upon me from the fathers; it came down from the fathers, from the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning or before the foundation of the earth, down to the present time, even the right of the firstborn . . . through the fathers unto me.”113 In conjunction with his working through these early Abraham passages, Smith’s conception of the patriarchal order develops substantially. Clearly, it would seem, the Book of Abraham has a dialectical relationship to Smith’s developing theology, with influence moving in both directions: developing priesthood ideas find expression in the Abraham text, and the Abraham text directs subsequent theological development. Specifically, the Abraham text founds the priesthood theology that endows priesthood with cosmic, eternal status rather than a merely ecclesiastical function (“before the foundation

The Book of Abraham  133 of the earth”). Of more immediate import for Smith, the language here reinforces his understanding of a patriarchal office inherited by patrilineal succession. At some point soon thereafter, the authority to pronounce blessings and prophecies on one’s posterity, as the patriarchs did in the Old Testament, morphed into a conception of priesthood authority that had the power to seal the blessings of salvation on one’s posterity—​and on others as well. Invoking a patriarchal office on one occasion, Smith told James Ivins: “I seal thee up unto eternal life,” and the patriarch Joseph Smith Sr. frequently sealed up to eternal life the Saints he blessed.114 Young complained in 1877 that elders were occasionally usurping the prerogative of the patriarch to “seal all the blessings upon” new members that it was his province to seal.115 As Smith’s temple theology evolved, salvation was itself construed specifically in terms of eternal bonds of kinship, and the patriarchal priesthood became the power to establish those eternal links in the chain of belonging. Hence “it is necessary to have Patriarchs to bless the people that they may have blessings by the spirit of prophecy and revelation sealed upon their heads and their posterity and know what awaits their posterity.” And this same patriarchal authority, Young added, was the power “necessary in order to redeem our dead and save our children,” that the Abrahamic promises may be ours, with seed “as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands of the seashore.”116 As a theology of eternal marriage took shape, against the backdrop of Abraham the patriarchal polygamist and the promises made to him of eternal seed as numerous as the stars, the unfolding of plural marriage in association with the patriarchal order becomes entirely logical, if not inevitable. It was with Abraham, and God’s particular covenant with him, that the full scope of priesthood blessings was made clear. The emphasis, in Smith’s iteration, on “literal seed” and “all the families of the earth” falling within its covenantal orbit convinced Smith that “Abraham’s covenantal blessings and rights do not come only by relation to God but also and necessarily in relation to Sarai. Without her, however grand these promises were, they were unrealizable. . . . What he learned was that none of the gifts were possible outside of marriage.”117 The only revelation Smith produced on the doctrine of eternal marriage made this connection explicit: “their exaltation and glory . . . shall be a continuation of the seeds forever and ever,” just as “Abraham received promises concerning his seed, of the fruit of his loins.”118

134  The Pearl of Greatest Price With the institution of temple marriage, or the sealing of man and woman for time and eternity, Smith moved a step closer to bringing the New and Everlasting Covenant to its fullest realization. For these rites, the higher or Melchizedek priesthood was necessary, and the “endowments of the fulness of the Melchizedek Priesthood” he denominated the patriarchal, or “Abrahams patriarchal,” order.119 In Smith’s understanding, this Abrahamic priesthood entailed the practice of polygamy. For it could be no coincidence, he reasoned and revelation confirmed, that the patriarch to whom these words of covenant were given was also the first man—​of whom we have record—​authorized to practice plural marriage (he was given Hagar “to be his wife”)120 en route to such a numerous posterity. Hence the actual reference of Young and others to plural marriage as the “patriarchal order.”121 In the twentieth century, the plural dimensions of eternal marriage would fade but not marriage’s centrality or endless duration in the Latter-​day Saint scheme of salvation. This Abrahamic or patriarchal priesthood, Kathleen Flake has argued, “is therefore the order of priesthood that is effectively secured over the marriage altar. As the final ordinance necessary to qualify for exaltation, the sealing rite joining a man and woman in eternal marriage constitutes ordination to this priesthood.”122 Smith actually made the connection explicit in a canonized revelation: “in order to obtain the highest [kingdom of glory], a man must enter into this order of priesthood (meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage).”123 Here we see an emphatic differentiation from Catholic conceptions of priesthood in which priestly power is essential to mediate salvation and is delegated to a special class of men. In Smith’s conception, priesthood is indeed the power to access the fullest measure of godliness, but it is an order into which each and every saved individual must be initiated, granting that individual direct access to God’s presence and powers.

A Priesthood Restricted The Book of Abraham is the Latter-​day Saint scripture that most emphatically and thoroughly diminishes the radical alterity of God, even as it firmly establishes the eternal prehistory of the human soul. If Abraham created a foundation for Mormonism’s optimistic assessment of human potential, it also laid the seeds for the church’s most tragic justification for human inequality. It did this in two ways. First, the very model of a human preexistence

The Book of Abraham  135 invites a speculative theology that relates present circumstance to prior merit or status (just as the work of theology constructs a relation between present merit or standing before God and future circumstance of blessedness or damnation). In other words, the temptation is irresistible to explain one’s present place in the world by recourse to supposed conduct in the prior state of existence. B. H. Roberts made the obvious inference: if a wider survey be taken of mankind, and those advantages and disadvantages under which whole generations, nations and races of men have lived be taken into account; if the fact of their pre-​existence be considered in connection with that other fact that the spirits of men before coming to this earth were of unequal intelligence and of every degree of nobility; if it be remembered that in the pre-​existent state all spirits had free agency, and that they there manifested all degrees of fidelity to truth and righteousness, from those were valiant for the right to those who were utterly untrue to it, and rebelled against God; if it be further remembered that doubtless in this earth-​life these spirits are rewarded for their faithfulness and diligence in that pre-​existent state—​if all this, I say, be considered, much that has perplexed many noble minds in their effort to reconcile the varied circumstances under which men have lived with the justice and mercy of God, will disappear.124

This was a temptation known to Plato, who similarly espoused a doctrine of premortal existence. However, Plato posited an explanation opposite to that of nineteenth-​century Latter-​day Saints. Recognizing that the purpose of mortality is the acquisition of virtue, Plato deduced that one should call “a life worse if it lead[s]‌the soul to become more unjust, a[nd] better if it leads the soul to become more just.”125 Accordingly, Plato suggested that lives of deprivation and hardship and disadvantage might be indicative of a noble soul’s willed decision to embrace a more arduous path in mortality than the way of ease and privilege chosen by others less daring. Consistent with an all-​too-​human tendency to equate blessedness with virtue (manifest in variants, from Job to Puritanism to prosperity theology), Latter-​day Saint leaders were inclined to see present privilege as following from premortal righteousness. It didn’t help that the Book of Abraham, like the Old Testament, reinforced such a logic. The “souls that . . . were good” in the premortal world, God declared to the patriarch, would be made his

136  The Pearl of Greatest Price “rulers.”126 By the same measure, Latter-​day Saints were prone to see present cursedness as the fruit of past misconduct. Catastrophically for the development of church policy, the Book of Abraham was interpreted to convey that exact message in the case of the black race. Antebellum Americans had for some time been reading the curse of Ham, Canaan’s father, as a divine warrant for slavery. (“Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be,” intones Noah, after Ham’s mockery of his father.)127 Passages in the Book of Abraham were read into this preformed context: “now, Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood, notwithstanding the Pharaohs would fain claim it from Noah, through Ham, therefore my father was led away by their idolatry.”128 As Hugh Nibley (and others) pointed out, the passage is not about racial lineage. Ham was not the firstborn but the third of Noah’s sons. Therefore, the issue is one of a right to preside in the priestly office, which is passed through the firstborn. Ham’s lineage is wrong by virtue of his birth order, not his race.129 In addition, the claim the Pharaoh made through Ham was by appeal to a matriarchal, rather than patriarchal, lineage (tracing his descent to “a woman, who was the daughter of Ham”).130 Unfortunately, nineteenth-​century Latter-​day Saints—​already predisposed by the religious culture of the era to associate Ham with a cursed race—​read the verse as referring to a racial lineage. Since the biblical curse associated with Ham had migrated by the nineteenth century from Jewish connection to the black race, the next step was almost inevitable. Writing in 1845, the apostle Orson Hyde was apparently the first to develop the two Abrahamic passages in combination into a racial doctrine. He opined that some spirits in the premortal realm had been neutral in the “war in heaven” and as a consequence “were required . . . to take bodies in the accursed lineage of Canaan; hence the Negro or African race.”131 Two years later, Parley Pratt went beyond interpreting the “accursed lineage” as the black race to see the curse itself as precluding ordination to the priesthood. In reference to a black member, he stated that he was a “black man who has got the blood of Ham in him which lineage was cursed as regards the priesthood.”132 In 1900, the First Presidency considered a query from a mission president wanting to know what to do about two black men who claimed they had been ordained to the priesthood by LDS elders. In considering the issue, counselor George Q. Cannon “read from the Pearl of Great Price showing that negroes were debarred from the Priesthood.”133 In the years following, those Book of Abraham passages were invoked repeatedly to explain the practice, even

The Book of Abraham  137 as leadership expressed perplexity over Smith’s ordination of a black man as high priest.134 In 1912, a doubtful member queried the First Presidency about the basis of this prohibition. He was “referred to the Pearl of Great Price, Book of Abraham, Chapter 1, verses 26 and 27, going to show that the seed of Ham was cursed as pertaining to the priesthood; and that by reason of this curse they have no right to it,” even if “there is no written revelation going to show why the negroes are ineligible to hold the priesthood.”135 By the mid-​ twentieth century, following a long history of mixed signals relating the curse to the preexistence, the prevailing folk understanding in the church was that those subject to the ban had been neutral or less than valiant in the War in Heaven.136 When the ban was reversed in 1978, no mention was made of its grounding in the Book of Abraham. The church today explains: “over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.”137

Higher Knowledge Harold Bloom referred to Joseph Smith as a gnostic. (Gnosticism is loosely defined as a belief system in which salvation is dependent on hidden or higher forms of knowledge.)138 Certainly, there are gnostic elements in LDS theology, as there were in early Christianity. (As one scholar notes, “based on Jesus’s instructions in Matthew 7:6, the ‘discipline of the secret’ guarded Christian practices and doctrines amid a skeptical pagan populace but also marked them as potentially subversive.”)139 Smith repeatedly and explicitly linked the acquisition of knowledge to the salvational quest. His most emphatic proclamation of gnostic thought came, significantly, in the month between his finishing work on the Book of Abraham and his inauguration of the temple endowment. He said: “a man is saved no faster than he gains knowledge.”140 Thereafter, the point became a common theme: “what I am after is the knowledge of God & I take my own Course to obtain it,” he told an audience in 1844.141 Later, he said that “the relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge,” and “if a man has knowledge he can be saved.”142 In a revelation that had clearly gestated for years before he dictated it in 1843, he made Abraham a prototype: “Abraham received all things, whatsoever he received, by revelation and commandment, by my

138  The Pearl of Greatest Price word, saith the Lord, and hath entered into his exaltation and sitteth upon his throne. . . . Go ye, therefore, and do the works of Abraham.”143 Abraham, clearly, was Smith’s model in regard to the pursuit of wisdom. Smith had described the patriarch as “possessing great knowledge” but embarking on a quest for even “greater knowledge.”144 Plural marriage became, controversially, one such work attributed to Abraham. But in Smith’s mind, that was but one principle among myriad higher teachings God had vouchsafed to Abraham. These teachings took three forms in the Book of Abraham, all intimately connected to temple theology. First, the text describes a kind of ascension narrative experienced by Enoch (and by many of the other figures who populate early Jewish and Christian teachings). Employing the Urim and Thummim, Abraham communes with God and experiences firsthand the range and vastness of the cosmos. God explains to him the arrangement of the heavens with their stars and planets in their various orders and systems, in what is an infinite progression, along with the reckoning of their days, months, and years. He approaches God’s abode, and he learns the name of the star near his dwelling place (Kolob) and learns that intelligences, like stars, exist in a timeless and never-​ending chain of great and greater.145

Fig. 2.2  Facsimile 3, as published in the Times and Seasons, 16 May 1842.

The Book of Abraham  139 In a second reference to these higher teachings of God, Smith interprets a vignette in the papyrus as referring to Abraham, seated on Pharaoh’s throne, “reasoning upon the principles of Astronomy, in the king’s court.”146 This motif, as I will show, appears in many ancient traditions. Third, connecting this cosmic orientation directly to the temple, Smith interprets the hypocephalus included among the papyri as depicting God himself “revealing through the heavens the grand Key-​words of the Priesthood . . . unto Abraham.” (A hypocephalus is a papyrus disc placed under the head of an embalmed Egyptian.) Other portions of the hypocephalus, Smith indicates, “cannot be revealed unto the world; but is to be had in the Holy Temple of God.”147 As Nibley has written, Smith believed that “temple ordinances are as old as the human race and represent a primordial revealed religion that has passed through alternate phases of apostasy and restoration which have left the world littered with the scattered fragments of the original structure.”148 As the figure most fully identified with God’s covenant with the human family, and residing at the intersection of the two ancient cultures and languages at the heart of biblical history, Abraham was the logical nexus for the

Fig. 2.3  Brian Hauglid and Terryl Givens examining papyri fragments at the Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

140  The Pearl of Greatest Price reconstituting of the “original structure” of gospel fullness. The map of reality revealed to Abraham, the priesthood power to seal humans to each other and into a divine family, and the higher principles and promises associated with that communal theosis were the elements out of which Smith wove the sacraments of LDS temples.

The History of a Controversy Shortly after Smith acquired the papyri, he pronounced that “one of the rolls [in his papyri collection] contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt,” and he anxiously embarked upon his second major work of translation.149 From contemporary records we know that about half a dozen translation sessions took place between early July and late November 1835,150 which likely produced the three Book of Abraham manuscripts that cover the first chapter and a half of the Book of Abraham (Abraham 1:1–​2:18). Between late 1835 and early 1842, no translation work seems to have occurred, although some sources suggest that Smith did not consider the translation finished. In the High Council’s minutes for 20 June 1840, for instance, we find that soon after arriving in Illinois, Smith expressed the desire to find time to “engage, more particularly, in . . . the translating of the Egyptian Records.”151 Then, about a year later, in a discourse on 16 August 1841, he said that after settling the emigrants and dealing with other church business he was looking forward to having time “to attend to the business of translating.”152 In early 1842 Smith took over the printing press and became editor of Times and Seasons,153 in which he published the Book of Abraham in three separate installments. The first installment (the ninth number) contained Abraham 1:1–​2:18 (precisely what we find in the 1835 manuscripts) and Facsimile 1, with the publication date 1 March 1842. A second installment consisted of Abraham 2:19–​5:21 and Facsimile 2 and was published with the date 15 March 1842. The third installment published Facsimile 3 on 16 May 1842. A small school of LDS scholars believe that these 1842 references to translation were actually revisions of 1835 work, and that all his translation was completed in that year.154 However, his 1842 recommencement is abundantly attested in his own journals, wherein several entries refer specifically to his work “translating” the Book of Abraham. “Commenced translating from

The Book of Abraham  141 the Book of Abraham for the 10[th] no[.]‌of the Times and seasons” (i.e., Abraham 2:19–​5:21) and “continued translating & revising” read his March 8 and 9 entries.155 In addition to the journal entries, reference to the resumption of translating in 1842 appears in a draft of an unpublished editorial apparently intended for the Times and Seasons issue of 1 March 1842. In Smith’s voice but in the handwriting of his principal scribe, Willard Richards, this document reads: “in the penst [present] no. will be found the Commencmet of the Records discovered in Egypt. some time since, as penend by the hand. of Father Abraham. which I shall contin[u]e to t[r]anslate & publish as fast as possible till the whole is completed.”156 This document shows that as of 1 March Smith had not yet completed his translation of the Abraham text or even the portion that was published in the second installment (15 March).157 Finally, on 9 March, Smith dictated a letter to Willard Richards to one Edward Hunter of Pennsylvania, corroborating that he was still enmeshed in a work-​in-​progress: “I am now very busily engaged in Translating, and therefore cannot give as much time to Public matters as I could wish.”158 Also, as discussed below, much of his Nauvoo translation (i.e., Abraham 3–​5) bears the clear imprint of his Hebrew studies, which took place after his initial 1835 work on Abraham. The Book of Abraham represented for Smith both a foundation and a framework out of which the full scope and power of an eternal covenant God made with premortal humanity could come to fruition. This framework finds dramatic exposition in the rites of the LDS temple. The Book of Abraham thus occupies an ironic position—​for it is at one and the same time the LDS Church’s most theologically foundational text and most controversial scripture. The Book of Abraham is the linchpin of the temple theology that is the heart and soul of the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of the LDS Restoration, and Smith’s translations of the Book of Abraham are the most conspicuous lightning rod provoking the disbelief and ire of his critics. Like the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham is sacred scripture to members of the Church of Jesus Christ. Both records purport to derive from ancient sources, and both were allegedly translated through the prophetic powers of Joseph Smith. These two scriptures have also been the objects of both ridicule and academic assault from the days when they first appeared. In the case of the Book of Mormon, however, the source documents are nowhere to be found. In the LDS telling, the metal plates from which Smith made that translation were returned to an angelic messenger.

142  The Pearl of Greatest Price From a disbeliever’s perspective, that is a convenient out. In any case, there is no smoking gun to definitively assert fraud by comparing originals to Smith’s finished product. The case of the Book of Abraham is rather more complicated—​and problematic. In this section, I  will examine the controversies—​ the attacks and explanations—​that have been proffered pertaining to the veracity of Joseph Smith’s work as a translator, by focusing on four questions in particular. First, how does Smith fare as a translator in light of the source documents that exist? Copies were made of three vignettes that were part of the original cache of papyri, and Smith interpreted the scenes and translated the glyphs appearing thereon. Second, what additional light is shed on that question by the recovery of some of the fragments of the original Joseph Smith Papyri from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967? Evidence suggests that at least some of the original documents from which Smith translated the Book of Abraham have been recovered, but the question is far from settled. Third, how does the Book of Abraham itself appear in the context of what is known of ancient Egyptian religion and culture? Does such a comparative analysis further impugn or reinforce the work of Smith as translator? Fourth, what exactly do we know about the process by which Smith produced the Book of Abraham? How might a greater understanding of how he worked on this Egyptian project, especially in comparison with his other translation projects, reframe the status and meaning of the resulting work?

Assessing Joseph Smith’s Translations: The Facsimiles In the case of the Book of Mormon, as noted, Smith never presented an original text to the public against which his translation could be compared and assessed. In the case of the Book of Abraham, by contrast, in addition to publishing the aforementioned pages of translated text in March and May 1842, Smith did publish three facsimile reproductions of material from the papyri in March and May 1842, together with his “explanation” and “translation” of the images and scenes depicted thereon. The controversy first finds its foothold with these facsimiles. For at this early point, identifying the source papyri was not necessary because those adept in reading Egyptian hieroglyphs and the later hieratic were able to assess Smith’s accuracy as a

The Book of Abraham  143 translator-​explicator by recourse to the facsimiles of the original vignettes he provided. He had identified the three scenes as Abraham being offered on an altar as a human sacrifice (Fac. 1); God sitting on his throne, with symbols and glyphs representing the celestial body Kolob, the earth, and other planets (Fac. 2); and Abraham seated on Pharaoh’s throne, teaching astronomy (Fac. 3). In 1845, the hostile newspaper the Warsaw Signal reported on the mummies and papyri, writing: “not a circle, serpent, altar, ibis, or any of the familiar and now understood idiographic character of the Egyptian, but this shrewd yet ignorant knave had given his own interpretation to, and so committed the latter to his followers, not only braving but confidently defying inevitable exposure.”159 European dissemination of Smith’s Egyptian work came with its inclusion in the 1851 first edition of The Pearl of Great Price. From there, a copy found its way to Paris and into the hands of M.  Théodule Devéria, a prominent scholar of ancient languages, including Egyptian. He was asked to take a look at the facsimiles and to offer his opinion on Joseph Smith’s explanations. Although many of the characters were drawn poorly and were unrecognizable, he was able to identify a few Egyptian names and to classify the vignettes as common Egyptian funerary documents. He wrote up a figure-​by-​figure commentary for each of the facsimiles and published these in 1860. His conclusion was that Joseph Smith’s explanations did not at all match up with his own understanding of the Egyptian vignettes.160 Louis Bertrand, an LDS mission president in France with no knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, soon challenged the triumphalism of Devéria’s conclusions about the three facsimiles, arguing that science was fickle and time would vindicate Joseph Smith.161 George Reynolds, Brigham Young’s former secretary and an influential seventy of the church (but not a scholar of Egyptian), also challenged Devéria’s conclusions, making two main points: (1) that the Egyptian language had two (or three) meanings: one comprehended by the masses and the other by those initiated to sacerdotal knowledge, and (2)  that the science of Egyptology was still in its infancy.162 Back in America, the first severe blow against Smith’s credibility came in 1912. Franklin S. Spalding, Episcopal bishop of Utah, published a pamphlet titled Joseph Smith, Jr. as a Translator, in which he declared: “this matter [the Book of Abraham] is far too important to depend on the opinion of a youthful amateur [Théodule Devéria]. Such an important matter deserves

144  The Pearl of Greatest Price the thoughtful consideration of mature scholars—​ of the world’s ablest orientalists.”163 Spalding contacted eight Egyptologists of his day, who examined the three facsimiles, compared them to Smith’s explanations, and then each in turn issued a statement regarding Smith’s accuracy.164 Spalding felt that “the honest searchers for truth among the Latter-​day Saints will welcome the opinions of authoritative scholars, and, if necessary, courageously readjust their system of belief, however radical a revolution of thought may be required.” From the statements of these scholars, some rather harsh in their dismissal, Spalding concluded that “there is practically complete agreement as to the real meaning of the hieroglyphics, and that this meaning is altogether different from that of Joseph Smith’s translation.”165 The authenticity of The Pearl of Great Price “has been destroyed,” Spalding wrote, and he proclaimed that the evidence “would signal the end of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.”166 Bishop Spalding, along with Samuel Mercer, scored a public relations coup when the New York Times published Spalding’s critique with the headline “Museum Walls Proclaim Fraud of Mormon Prophet.”167 Spalding’s pamphlet drew immediate attention from the highest echelons of the church; twelve separate responses to his criticisms appeared in the Improvement Era in 1913, ranging from President Joseph F. Smith’s to that of the church’s leading intellectual, B. H. Roberts. A non-​Mormon also weighed in, protesting that the Spalding attack was no “scholarly production, showing evidence of some original research,” but merely an attack on Smith’s character lacking “counter-​proofs” or specific rebuttals.168 Some of the responses pointed to what were often very divergent readings of the facsimiles given by eminent scholars of Egyptian, including those of E. A. W. Budge, a renowned authority, and Henry Woodward of the British Museum. As a Latter-​day Saint serving in Liverpool wrote, “with the divergence of opinion among the learned, we think it not unreasonable to accept the Prophet’s views.”169 Prudently, these defenders did not engage in an inflexible defense of Smith’s linguistic credentials. So J. M. Sjodahl, Deseret News editor and author, noted that in the Book of Abraham the Saints had a product quite unlike the Book of Mormon. The latter scripture was produced by “the direct operation of the spirit” and was beyond reproach. The Book of Abraham, however, “was given, also by the power of the Spirit of God but [also] through the usual channels of research.” Therefore, “if a mistake should be proved in the

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translation of the Egyptian documents . . . such a mistake might be due to the channel through which the inspiration flowed.”170 Roberts, who openly confessed his lack of expertise in Egyptology, weighed in with a thoughtful reply that invoked the principles of biblical Higher Criticism, in order to provisionally accept Spalding’s critique without embracing its conclusions. In biblical studies, he reasoned, “these questions that concern themselves with objective existences, historicity, or any translation at all, are merely matters of minor importance, the mere scaffolding of realities, and not the realities themselves.” Or, as he quotes one such biblical critic, K. C. Anderson, as saying: “in almost . . . every part of scripture . . . what we have is not history proper . . . the author’s purpose was . . . to give the world not history or biography, but spiritual allegory or drama.” Thus, Roberts concluded reasonably, “I believe that in the translations Joseph Smith has given to the world—confessedly not by scholarship but by inspiration, by his own spirit being quickened by contact with God’s spirit—that in those translations are truths that are part of a mighty system of truth, the like of which is not found elsewhere among men.”171 It was a remarkable stance for an early twentieth-century leader of the Church of Jesus Christ to take. Not that he was conceding the failure of Smith as translator, he insisted. He was merely asking why Spalding applied a standard to Mormon scripture he did not apply to his own.172 John Evans, a biographer of Joseph Smith, seconded Roberts. Evans, too, hoped that time would vindicate Smith or show that he was “a poor copyist rather than a poor translator.” (Smith had filled in missing parts of Facsimile 2 and perhaps also Facsimile 1.) But in the end “it does not matter . . . so far as philosophical or practical purposes are concerned, where or how he got them. The only questions we may properly ask about them [is] are they true? Are they consistent with one another? Do they produce good results in the lives of those who accept them?”173 Most striking in all these responses was the openness of so many of the LDS writers to the criticisms leveled by experts. Junius Wells, a prominent LDS journalist, took it upon himself to duplicate in part Spalding’s tactic and wrote to some of these experts asking their opinion of Smith. Quoting the appraisal of Budge (“bosh,” “idiotic”) and of Woodward (“all rubbish!”), Wells nonetheless writes that his “inquiry with its responses from Egyptologists of eminence . . . at least serves to show that we have not been lax, nor afraid to learn from whatever light the wisdom of the world might throw upon the illustrations of the Book of Abraham and their translation

146  The Pearl of Greatest Price by the Prophet Joseph.”174 In sum, early twentieth-​century Latter-​day Saints were remarkably—​and unexpectedly—​sanguine about the ultimate unimportance of Smith’s possible deficiencies as a translator of Egyptian. More recently, controversy was reignited by the publicity surrounding the LDS Church’s 1967 recovery of the Joseph Smith Papyri: surviving fragments from the original collection he possessed. However, those newly publicized documents did nothing to alter the fact that the source documents for some of Smith’s translations, that is, the three vignettes, had been available in published form since 1842. Non-​Mormon Egyptologists who have examined the three facsimiles since 1967 have unanimously agreed that they are common Ptolemaic period funerary vignettes and have nothing to do with Abraham. These Egyptologists also agree that Smith’s explications of the three vignettes do not accord with modern Egyptology. More specifically, scholars who have examined the vignette shown in Facsimile 1 and the papyrus now labeled Fragment-​A (original Papyrus XI) have concluded that these fragments come from a Ptolemaic period “Book of Breathing for Horos” (between 238 and c. 153 bc),175 an afterlife guide to passage through the underworld to attain resurrection. The vignettes in Facsimile 1 and Facsimile 3 form the bookends to the papyrus roll. As one of the first LDS scholars with some training in the Egyptian language, Nibley took on the defense of Smith’s explication of Facsimile 1, first by arguing against the non-​LDS Egyptologists’ contention that it was a common funerary document that depicted a typical embalming scene, not a sacrifice of Abraham. According to Nibley, it was anything but common: the vignette in Facsimile 1 “departs from the standard patterns in so many particulars as to render it worthy of closer attention.”176 He enumerates several peculiarities that distinguish this vignette from others in the genre, such as the number of hands raised and their positions, the position of Anubis, the manner of clothing, the presence of lotus and offering table, and so on.177 Nibley accepts the sacrificial scene in all the ways Smith describes it, defending Smith’s explanations with an array of historical and linguistic points, referencing ancient lion-​couch scenes, sacrificial themes and resurrection motifs, and numerous parallels to Smith’s rendition.178 At the same time, Nibley points out that Smith does not present the facsimiles as actual illustrations from the life of Abraham but as “symbolic diagrams describing not so much unique historical occurrences as ritual events.” This, Nibley argues, is implied by the language of the Book of Abraham, wherein Abraham purports to resort to vignettes that are, in Abraham’s words, “designed to represent” his own story by employing

Fig. 2.4–2.5  Fragment of Book of Breathings for Horos-​A (top) (fig. 2.4) was originally attached to the right of the Fragment of Book of Breathings for Horos-​B (bottom) (fig. 2.5). © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

148  The Pearl of Greatest Price representations “as understood by the Egyptians” [his emphasis].179 In other words, Nibley is conceding that the illustrations do not depict Abraham in various scenes, as Smith’s explanation implies, but argues that the author of the papyri on which the Book of Abraham is based (presumably Abraham himself) clearly indicates he is using or adapting typical funerary illustrations to this narrative.180 More recently, John Gee, a well-​published student of Nibley trained in Egyptian, provides what he sees as additional evidence of Smith’s accurate reading of the scene, beyond Nibley’s contributions. Gee points to another Egyptian vignette that he believes “displays a scene similar to Facsimile 1” and that contains “the name of Abraham under it.” Gee correctly describes the text as a “love charm, and the instructions say that the picture and the inscriptions go together.”181 Critics point out that the figure on the altar is a female and that Abraham’s name is just one name among others used to invoke the love spell. In addition, the names are all written in Greek, suggesting that the date of this vignette is centuries later than that of Facsimile 1.182 Gee also argues that the “ancient Egyptians connected scenes like Facsimile 1 with both human sacrifice and Abraham.”183 The LDS Egyptologist Stephen Thompson agrees with Klaus Baer, who was an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, that the vignette shown in Facsimile 1 “depicts the god Anubis (Fig. 3 in Facs. 1) officiating in the embalming rites for the deceased individual, Horus (Fig. 2 in Facs. 1), shown lying on the bier.” This scene, Thompson concludes, does not portray a sacrifice of any sort. Another Egyptologist, Edward Ashment, concurs with Thompson and Baer in his analysis of Facsimile 1.184 LDS scholar Michael D. Rhodes, also trained in Egyptology, finds some agreement with Baer, Thompson, and Robert K.  Ritner of the Oriental Institute. Smith identified the figure preparing to sacrifice Abraham as the “idolatrous priest of Elkenah.”185 Rhodes writes that “at the foot of the couch stands a figure wearing a leopard skin and kilt. His left arm is extended over the person on the couch, although the hand is missing. The head too is missing, but the black coloring of the skin helps us, with reasonable certainty, to identify the figure as Anubis.”186 However, Rhodes points to examples of Egyptian priests wearing masks of Anubis, and archaeologists have found such actual masks.187 Rhodes departs from Baer and others in their interpretations of other details.188 The second of the two vignettes (Fac. 2) depicts a hypocephalus. A drawing of this vignette (from either the Kirtland or Nauvoo period) strongly

The Book of Abraham  149

Fig. 2.6  Facsimile 2, a hypocephalus, as first published in the Times and Seasons, 15 March 1842. Smith explained this scene as “Abraham sitting upon Pharaoh’s throne, by the politeness of the king.”

suggests that when Smith purchased it, it was damaged in several places. Consequently, there is no unanimous agreement among LDS or non-​LDS Egyptologists concerning the original form of the unedited vignette or the identification of its figures and other elements.

150  The Pearl of Greatest Price Since Nibley, the most ardent defender of this vignette has been Rhodes, who argues in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism that Smith’s “explanations of each of the facsimiles accord with present understanding of Egyptian religious practice.”189 Rhodes has also argued that Smith’s renderings fall within the general range of meaning implied by modern translations of this vignette.190 However, Thompson, referring to Rhodes’s statement in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, says: “this is a remarkable statement in view of the fact that non-​Mormon Egyptologists who have commented on Joseph Smith’s interpretation of the facsimiles uniformly agree that [Smith’s] interpretations are not correct from the perspective of the Egyptologist.”191 This is the case, for instance, with fi ­ gures  1, 22, and 23 of Facsimile 2, which the non-​LDS Ritner interprets as “a seated figure of Re-​Atum . . . worshipped by two apes crowned by lunar disks. . . . The image is the creator god himself.” In his published version, Smith describes the same three figures as referring to the non-​Egyptian word “Kolob,” which signifies “the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of the Earth.”192 Rhodes finds the two readings congruent: Kolob, since it signifies the first creation and is associated with the residence of God, “agrees well with the Egyptian symbolism of God endowed with the primeval creative force seated at the center of the universe. The name Kolob is right at home in this context.” Furthermore, the apes have “solar and lunar associations” and can also be found “associated with stars and constellations.” Since these figures were positioned to receive light from Kolob, Smith’s reading “is in harmony with our understanding of their symbolism in Egyptian.”193 Nibley offers further details to substantiate Smith’s accuracy. “As early as the pyramid texts,” he writes, the apes “are designated as ‘the Beloved Sons’ of Sothis/​Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.” And the ancient author Horapollo tells us that “the special office of the apes was to function as timekeepers or time-​reckoners.”194 To take another example of how differently non-​LDS and LDS Egyptologists can render the same elements, Ritner reads Figure 4 as “a standard image of the mummiform god Sokar in his barque.” Smith reads the same figure as “signifying expanse, or the firmament of the heavens; also a numerical figure, in Egyptian, signifying one thousand, answering to the measuring of the time of Oliblish, which is equal with Kolob in its revolution and in its measuring

The Book of Abraham  151 of time.” Rhodes writes that Smith’s reference to “the revolutions of Kolob and Oliblish agrees favorably with what we know of the use of the Sokar-​ boat in the festival of Sokar to represent the revolutions of the sun and other celestial bodies.” Rhodes also finds Egyptian agreement with the numerical ­figure 1,000.195 As Nibley elaborates, “the bird in the boat is sometimes exchanged for the sky-​goddess Nut.” And she has a particular epithet: “the same name as that given to the ship in fi ­ gure 4 . . . which means literally, ‘a Thousand Are Her Souls,’ or ‘The One with a Thousand Souls.’ ”196 Thompson, however, disagrees with Nibley and Rhodes, noting that “there is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians ever depicted the sky (firmament of the heavens) as a ship of any sort.” Thompson also disagrees with their interpretations of the numerical ­figure 1,000, arguing that “there is no evidence that any ship was ever used as a numerical figure to represent 1,000 or any other number.” Of “those who wish to equate the figure from the facsimile with the so-​called ‘ship of 1000,’ none has ever produced an image of this ship and then compared it to the facsimile. It is simply assumed that if a ship of 1,000 can be found in an Egyptian text, it must be the one Joseph Smith was talking about.”197 In other instances, Rhodes believes that Smith correctly ascertains details that Egyptologists have ignored. Of Figure 3, for instance, Ritner writes that the scene “often contains two registers of barques, with Isis and Nephthys in a boat flanking the ba-​spirit of Osiris on a shrine in the upper field, and a solar barque with Re and the scarab Khepri below.”198 Smith renders the scene as “God, sitting upon his throne, clothed with power and authority; with a crown of eternal light upon his head; representing also the grand key-​words of the Holy Priesthood.” Rhodes draws attention to the was-​scepter, which “represents power and authority, adding that the sun certainly qualifies as a crown of eternal light.”199 (Nibley, too, cites multiple sources that connect the scepter to ultimate “power and authority.”)200 Edward Ashment, however, writes: “Fig. 3 is almost entirely missing in the CH copy . . . the small trace possibly indicating the prow of a boat. At any rate, a falcon-​headed figure in a boat was apparently copied from Papyrus Joseph Smith IV and inserted into this spot, with the text behind the seated figure closely resembling rubrics from BD [Book of the Dead] 104 and 106 on the same papyrus—​the same deity appears in that spot in other Egyptian hypocephali, but in none of them is he seated on a throne with an offering table in front of him.”201 Thus, while Rhodes believes that “many of the prophet’s explanations of the hypocephalus illustrated in Facsimile 2 are supported by present

Fig. 2.7  Fragment of the Book of the Dead for Ta-​Sherit Min. Bottom right figure drawn as Figure 3 in Facsimile 2. © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

The Book of Abraham  153 understanding of ancient Egyptian religion, and are in fact especially typical of Late Egyptian religious writings,” his observations are contested by other Egyptologists, LDS and non-​LDS alike.202 Facsimile 3 presents perhaps the greatest challenges to Smith’s defenders, since in this instance he translates actual Egyptian characters, not scenes or symbols. For instance, he interprets Figure 2 as “King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head”; Figure 4 means “Prince of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, as written above his hand”; and Figure 5 means “Shulem, one of the king’s principal waiters, as represented by the characters above his hand.” However, both Rhodes and Ritner translate those same characters as “Isis the great, the god’s mother,” “Maat, mistress of the gods,” and “The Osiris Hor . . . justified forever.”203 If Smith was indeed in some oracular manner deciphering elements originating with Abraham in the papyri he possessed, the consensus is that his powers apparently failed him when it came to the actual translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics—​at least in this case. No LDS Egyptologist disputes the standard translations of those particular symbols, and they are quite unlike Smith’s rendering. The majority of scholarly opinion, in sum, is dismissive of Smith as an “explainer” of the three facsimiles.204 Regarding his efforts as a translator of particular glyphs, the consensus finds even fewer dissenters from the nearly universal rejection. In sum, little has changed from the early twentieth-​century assessment presented earlier.

1967: Complicating the Book of Abraham Controversy—​Do We Have the Source Documents? With the recovery of the Joseph Smith Papyri from the Metropolitan Museum in 1967, the stakes were raised considerably. The three facsimiles were illustrations accompanying a narrative—​the Book of Abraham. That Smith had not accurately translated characters on those facsimiles was damaging to his claims to be a translator; however, the Book of Abraham was itself the critical text, insofar as it constituted the scriptural record Latter-​ day Saints elevated to a par with the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The facsimiles of the two vignettes and the hypocephalus had long been the sole focus of controversy, since no originals for the Abraham narrative itself existed by which to assess the validity of Smith’s narrative translation. All this changed in 1967 with the transfer of the papyri fragments from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art to the LDS Church and their

154  The Pearl of Greatest Price subsequent publication. Questions remain as to how much of the original collection obtained by Smith is now extant and what—​if any—​relationship any of the surviving fragments may have to the text of the Book of Abraham. The earliest report on the papyri, as noted, was Oliver Cowdery’s 1835 newspaper account of the collection as including two rolls of papyrus, mentioning that “two or three other small pieces of papyrus, with astronomical calculations, epitaphs, etc., were found with others of the mummies.”205 Another account published at the same time added a few details, reporting that one of the rolls was “dark as the bones of the Mummies, and bore very much the same appearance; the opened sheets were exceedingly like thin parchment, and of quite a light color. There were birds, fishes, and fantastic looking people, interspersed amidst hyeroglyphics.”206 Presumably, after Smith acquired the papyri, because some of the fragments were deteriorating, they were placed under glass to preserve them. Sometime later, Smith gave the mummies and papyri into the keeping of his mother, Lucy Mack. (Small but continuing fees paid by the curious added to the widow’s modest income.) They remained with her when the Saints under Brigham Young migrated to Utah; when she died in 1856, her daughter-​in-​ law Emma sold the lot to Abel Combs. He sold two mummies and the scrolls to the St. Louis Museum, and they were then acquired by the Colonel Woods Museum in Chicago, which burned in the Great Fire of 1871. All was not lost, however. Combs had sold at least some of the mounted fragments to Edward and Alice Heusser, who in turn sold them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. By way of a Utah scholar visiting the museum in 1966, an offer was extended to the Church of Jesus Christ to repossess the papyri. To this day, it is often misreported that this marked a surprising rediscovery in a museum collection of what had been thought lost to history. That is not true. The Metropolitan’s curators always knew that they held some of Smith’s papyri in their Egyptian collection, though very few scholars in the academy knew they were there.207 On acquiring the fragments in late 1967, the LDS Church immediately published photographs of all the recovered pieces in their official magazine, the Improvement Era.208 It turns out that the Met’s curators did not know precisely what their fragments of Joseph Smith’s papyri contained and believed that they were a run-​of-​the-​mill version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Some of the materials did indeed consist of that kind of material, but, as Nibley was the first to realize, two of the papyri actually came from the Document of Breathings Made by Isis (and appear to be the earliest copy of this text in

The Book of Abraham  155 existence).209 This was a significant discovery but did not obviate the immediate problem the publication of the papyri portended: they were not texts authored by Abraham, they did not concern his life, and they were from the Greco-​Roman era, a period centuries removed from the Abrahamic era (late second millennium bce). This posed a problem on a few fronts. In the first place, some accounts indicate that Smith believed that he was in possession of actual papyri that Abraham had himself authored. Smith’s views of the papyri appear in contemporary sources. An 1835 statement that the Book of Abraham was “written by his own hand, upon papyrus,” still prefaces the scripture in the 2013 edition.210 In Smith’s 1842 draft letter mentioned earlier, he referred to the Abrahamic record “as penned by the hand of Father Abraham.”211 Latter-​day Saint scholar Stephen Smoot argues that “by the hand,” at least as a Hebraic expression, is generally translated to mean simple authorship. Nibley and Gee make similar observations.212 Sources do have Smith “pointing to a particular character on the Abraham papyri” and saying “that is the signature of the patriarch Abraham.”213 These sources were not sympathetic, however, and may have confused “written by the hand of Abraham” (authorship) with “handwriting of Abraham” (his personal penmanship). Nevertheless, in the minds of many, the identification of the papyri as fragments of the Book of the Dead (and Document of Breathings Made by Isis) was the nail in the coffin of Smith’s legitimacy as a translator. That they were funerary texts meant that their translation as writings of Abraham was not even in the ballpark—​at least so it would seem. In the second place, while the originals for the other two facsimiles were never recovered, their grouping together in the Book of Abraham still presented a problem. Klaus Baer noticed that each of the three facsimiles is titled by Smith “A facsimile from the Book of Abraham,” but Facsimiles 1 and 3 are scenes generally related to the Document of Breathings Made by Isis, whereas Facsimile 2 has no relation to that text.214 In other words, the three facsimiles, which in Smith’s Book of Abraham formed a kind of triptych integrally related to the text, appeared to derive in reality from at least two different sources. More troubling, Facsimile 1 is specifically referenced twice within the Abraham narrative. In Abraham 1:12 the text reads, referring to Abraham being placed on an altar: “I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record.” In the next verse, Abraham 1:14, referring to the representations of certain Egyptian gods under the altar, the text reads: “that you may have an understanding of these gods, I have given

156  The Pearl of Greatest Price you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning.” This immediately suggests that the recovered Fragment-​A, which was attached to the recovered Facsimile 1, should contain the text of the Book of Abraham. Indeed, some of the 1835 Book of Abraham manuscripts had Smith’s translations juxtaposed with Egyptian characters that appear to be transcribed from Fragment-​ A. Working papers surrounding the translation include, on one page, two characters from the vignette and the rest from the papyrus fragment in question (Fragment-​A), and those characters correspond, respectively, to Smith’s translation of Abraham 1:1–​3 and Abraham 1:4–​2:18. Baer translated as many of the characters in the left margin of that manuscript as he could read, but his translations showed no correspondence to the Abraham text.215 However, two possibilities need to be considered. First, as Kerry Muhlestein has argued, “Abraham 1:12 and 14 refer to the drawing known as Facsimile 1 . . . as being ‘at the beginning’ of the text, which strongly suggests that it was not right next to the text.” Furthermore, “examining similar papyri from the same period reveals a similar pattern. Frequently the drawing associated with a text is not adjacent to the text.”216 Second, Smith himself may have simply assumed that the vignette pertained to the text it accompanied and so attempted to match that text to the translation he produced as part of his efforts to construct the Egyptian grammar and alphabet. Still, the prevailing impression is that Fragment-​A is the source document for the Book of Abraham. In his conclusion Baer stated: “this is as far as an Egyptologist can go in studying the document [Fragment-​A] that Joseph Smith considered to be a ‘roll’ which ‘contained the writings of Abraham.’ The Egyptologist interprets it differently, relying on a considerable body of parallel data, research, and knowledge that has accumulated over the past 146 years since Champollion first deciphered Egyptian—​none of which had really become known in America in the 1830s. At this point, the Latter-​day Saint historian and theologian must take over.”217 Latter-​day Saint Egyptologists have disagreed among themselves over how best to resolve the apparent disconnect between the Book of Abraham and what appear to be the source documents. Some accept the 1967 papyrus as the source of Smith’s Book of Abraham and defend the translation in whole or in part; others insist that neither Fragment-​A nor any other surviving papyrus is the source document. They argue that because most of the original papyri were destroyed in the 1871 Chicago fire, we are unlikely to ever have the original papyrus from which Smith worked. The urgency of the problem for the church as a whole is manifest in a 2012 survey that reveals

The Book of Abraham  157 that challenges to the Book of Abraham (along with polygamy) are a major factor in the decision of those members who have chosen to disaffiliate.218 At first Nibley appeared to be accepting of the notion that the Fragment of Book of Breathing for Horus (Fragment-​A) was a source for Joseph Smith’s 1835 Book of Abraham documents (with characters from this fragment in the left margin).219 Even though the characters do not accurately correspond to the text of the Book of Abraham, Nibley opined that “it has long been known that the characters ‘interpreted’ by Joseph Smith in his Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar are treated by him as super-​cryptogams.”220 (The supercryptogram theory is that each hieratic character on the three 1835 Abraham manuscripts is imbued with complex meaning, accessible through priestly or revelatory power—​a theory that has a long eighteenth-​ and nineteenth-​century genealogy, as detailed below.) Earlier in 1968 Nibley said: “you very often have texts of double meaning . . . it’s quite possible, say, that this ‘sensen’ papyrus, telling a straight forward innocent little story or something like that, should contain also a totally different text concealed within it. . . . They [the Egyptians] know what they’re doing, but we don’t. We don’t have the key.”221 In 1968, two graduate students, Richley H. Crapo and John A. Tvedtnes, published “A Study of the Hor Sen-​sen Papyrus,” suggesting “(1) that the Sen-​Sen Papyrus was used as a memory device by Abraham (and perhaps by his descendants), each symbol or group of symbols bringing to mind a set number of memorized phrases relating to Abraham’s account of his life or (2) that the hieratic words in the ‘Alphabet and Grammar’ are simply related to core-​concepts in the corresponding English story of Abraham.” For the 1835 Book of Abraham manuscripts in particular, these authors argued that “in every case the meaning of the hieratic word shows up in some relevant way in the juxtaposed verses from the Book of Abraham.”222 Nibley believed it plausible “that what we have here is a mnemonic device to aid in oral recitation. This would make the ‘Sen-​sen’ papyrus a sort of prompter’s sheet.”223 Both the hidden meaning and the memory device theories lacked staying power but reflected early efforts by LDS scholars to establish an integral connection between what Egyptologists see as two unrelated texts: the Book of Abraham and Fragment-​A.224 By the 1970s, Nibley had rejected the idea that the papyri contained a hidden text or that Smith used Fragment-​A as a memory device. In his most seminal work on the papyri, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri:  An Egyptian Endowment, he writes that the Book of Breathings of Hor is not

158  The Pearl of Greatest Price the source of the Book of Abraham. He even takes Baer to task for titling his article “A Translation and Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham,” noting that there would be nothing wrong with that if Baer “had been good enough to explain to his readers why it is apparent to him that his text is the source of the Book of Abraham.”225 In laying out his case for why Fragment-​A does not fit as the source document, Nibley argues that “the Prophet Joseph himself has supplied us with the most conclusive evidence that the manuscript today identified as the Book of Breathings, J.S. Papyri X and XI [Fragment-​A], was not in his opinion the source of the Book of Abraham. For he has furnished a clear and specific description of the latter: ‘The record of Abraham and Joseph, found with the mummies is (1) beautifully written on papyrus, with black, and (2) a small part red, ink or paint, (3) in perfect preservation.’ ”226 This description, actually Oliver Cowdery’s, was derived from an even earlier description of the papyri found in a certificate Michael Chandler received in Philadelphia from a half dozen of “the scientific of that city.” The description in this certificate—​ which refers to the collection and not any particular roll—​says that “the papyrus, covered with black or red ink, or paint, in excellent preservation, are very interesting.”227 Of course, this description does not accord with the “coarse appearance” of Fragment-​A.228 Rhodes agrees that the absence of red ink on Fragment-​A and its poor condition (“it must have been in much the same condition in Joseph Smith’s day when . . . glued haphazardly to other totally unrelated papyri”) make a strong case for noncorrespondence between Fragment-​A and the Book of Abraham.229 Gee also argues that the text of the Book of Abraham narrative does not come from the surviving papyri but from a long roll (one of the “two rolls” mentioned in early accounts), primarily on the basis of his reading of the following eyewitness accounts. In a letter dated 19 February 1843 (published in 1890), Charlotte Haven wrote of visiting Nauvoo and meeting Lucy Smith. The prophet’s mother took her and several others up to the attic of her log house. There, Haven observed that Mother Smith “opened a long roll of manuscript saying it was ‘the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit’ and read several minutes from it as if it were English.”230 Haven’s account also briefly refers to Lucy Smith reading hieroglyphs from “another roll” in which she refers to a serpent on legs tempting Eve, a reference that matches a vignette at the top of another surviving papyri fragment.231

The Book of Abraham  159 One early twentieth-​ century reminiscence from Jerusha Blanchard, granddaughter of Hyrum Smith, describes playing hide-​and-​seek at Emma Smith’s house. She said her “favorite hiding place was in an old wardrobe which contained the mummies, and it was in here that I would creep while the others searched the house. There were three mummies: The old Egyptian king, the queen and their daughter. The bodies were wrapped in seven layers of linen cut in thin strips. In the arms of the Old King, lay the roll of papyrus from which our prophet translated the Book of Abraham.”232 Notably, Blanchard’s account does not mention two rolls or any details about length. Yet another late recollection—​though of dubious authenticity—​refers to a scroll that “when unrolled on the floor extended through two rooms of the Mansion House.”233 Gee supported his thesis of the “long roll” as source by applying a formula proposed by Friedhelm Hoffman to determine scroll length based on measurements of the extant scroll. Gee concluded that surviving fragment of the scroll of the Book of Breathing was originally about forty-​one feet. He remains convinced that “the Book of Abraham was translated from a long roll of papyrus that was still a long roll in the 1840s and 1850s.” The current fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri, however, were all mounted on heavy paper and placed in glass frames in 1837. None of them can be the long roll described in the 1840s and 1850s. Gee concludes that “these fragments are specifically not the source of the Book of Abraham.”234 Hence, while non-​LDS Egyptologists discount the Book of Abraham as a fraudulent translation from Smith’s Book of Breathing papryi, not all LDS Egyptologists are convinced that their church even possesses the source document with which to make an evaluation.

The Egypticity of the Book of Abraham Following the onslaught of critical scholarship coming with the 1967 acquisition of the eleven papyri fragments, as noted above, the defense of Joseph Smith and the Book of Abraham fell largely on Nibley, a brilliant graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (doctorate from Berkeley), with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things ancient.235 Praised by the likes of non-​LDS scholars Raphael Patai, Jacob Neusner, James Charlesworth, Cyrus Gordon, Jacob Milgrom, and former Harvard Divinity School dean George MacRae (“it is obscene for a man to know that much,” he grumbled, hearing

160  The Pearl of Greatest Price Nibley lecture), Nibley did more than any Latter-​day Saint of his era to provide an intellectual basis for continuing faith in the Book of Abraham as an inspired work.236 Nibley—​and others sharing his faith commitments—​have adopted three responses to the critics. First, as Nibley argued above, has been his stance that we do not possess the necessary source document with which to evaluate Smith’s finished product. Second, Nibley has argued that the content of the Book of Abraham is too rich in authentic historical detail to dismiss as simple fraud; Smith’s work bears striking evidence of some ancient provenance. (“It is against the wider background of religious traditions and ceremonies common to most of the ancient Near East that the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham begin to make sense and that Joseph Smith’s explanation of them scores one bull’s eye after another,” in one typical formulation.)237 In addition, Nibley maintains, Smith’s revelatory process makes the actual source materials largely irrelevant to his work as a “seer and translator.” Or, in one of Nibley’s formulations, “why not admit . . . that the test of the Book of Abraham lies in what it says, not in the manner in which it may have been composed?”238 To put it another way, the terms “seer and translator,” as applied to Joseph Smith, may merit deeper reconsideration. Clearly, these approaches do not meet the criticisms of Egyptologists head-​on but via other means. So questions directly concerning the facsimiles and the 1967 source papyri become subsumed into vigorous efforts to demonstrate the historicity of the Book of Abraham, to argue for a missing source document, or to view the papyri as a catalyst of the revelation that Smith called the Book of Abraham. Regarding the historicity of the Book of Abraham, Nibley’s voluminous writings demonstrate the belief common in his day that history, ancient to modern, had unfolded from a pristine Adamic era when pure cosmology, cosmogony, rites, rituals, myths, temples, theocratic governing, and so on held sway, and that all civilizations since have preserved through their sacred texts certain parts of these originals in their religious systems, via a sort of trans-​religio-​cultural diffusion. For example, Nibley argues that “taken as a whole, the apocryphal accounts of Abraham—​ whether in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Old Slavonic, etc., and whether recorded in manuscripts of early or later date—​agree in telling essentially the same story. This story is not found in the Bible, but is found in the Book of Abraham.”239 As described above, such a conception of a primeval gospel fullness once known to Adam, which has been reduced to scattered fragmentary remains

The Book of Abraham  161 that Joseph Smith reassembled and repaired, is the guiding paradigm of the LDS project of Restoration. Nibley’s approach has thus comported with the theories of prominent early twentieth-​century comparative mythologists like Mircea Eliade and the so-​called myth-​ritual school, while aligning with the core LDS understanding of the relationship between antiquity and modernity. Nibley’s vast scholarly corpus limning ancient parallels and antecedents to LDS Restoration teachings explains the powerful and enduring influence he has had in LDS apologetics generally and Book of Abraham studies in particular. The approach Nibley pioneered earlier with his studies of the Book of Mormon was to ask of it: “does it correctly reflect ‘the cultural horizon and religious and social ideas and practices of the time’? Does it have authentic historical and geographical background? Is the mise-​en-​scène mythical, highly imaginative, or extravagantly improbable? Is its local color correct, and are its proper names convincing?”240 Few if any scholars outside the Church of Jesus Christ embrace the supernaturalism associated with or the antiquity of the Book of Mormon, but excavation of its compositional complexity, its chronological and geographical consistency, and its myriad apparent Hebraisms has at least engendered rich conversation. The same level of engagement has not been achieved with regard to the Book of Abraham, though Nibley and fellow LDS apologists have pursued the same approach. Rhodes, the coauthor of Nibley’s magnum opus on the subject, for example, claims that “a magnificent tapestry of evidence” suggests that “the Book of Abraham and its facsimiles represent actual ancient materials and traditions that have come to light long after Joseph Smith published them.”241 I noted that Harold Bloom, bracketing the question of the Book of Abraham’s origins, agrees. He remarks that the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham are among the “more surprising” and “neglected” works of LDS scripture,242 with themes “strikingly akin to ancient suggestions” pointing to “the archaic or original Jewish religion, a Judaism that preceded even the Yahwist.” While making “no judgment, one way or the other, upon the authenticity” of the text, Bloom sees “enormous validity” in the way these writings “recapture . . . crucial elements in the archaic Jewish religion.”243 Catholic theologian Stephen Webb has agreed, writing that Smith “knew more about theology and philosophy than it was reasonable for anyone in his position to know, as if he were dipping into the deep, collective unconsciousness of Christianity with a very long pen.”244

162  The Pearl of Greatest Price Trying to prove ancient provenance by appeal to contemporary sources—​ or their absence—​is a kind of “God of the gaps” version of apologetics, finding evidence only where scholarship (or science) fails to provide an alternative explanation. Since scholarship, like science, is progressive and its findings always provisional, the space for God (or in this case, a prophet’s inspiration), is always diminishing and always insecure. Still, for Latter-​day Saints, the objective seems to be one articulated by the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer (and often quoted by LDS apologists): “what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”245 Hence, as Gee urges, “one can compare the Book of Abraham with what is known of Abraham’s time and place, and thereby situate the book in its ancient historical context.”246 The first point that LDS apologists make in this regard is that the identification of the Joseph Smith Papyri as funerary texts does not itself discredit Joseph Smith. On the contrary, they argue, Egyptian funerary documents are in fact fully consistent with the temple theology to which the Book of Abraham contributes. In Nibley’s view, “a common theme of all Egyptian funerary literature is the resurrection of the dead and their glorification and deification in the afterlife, which is certainly a central element of [the LDS] temple ceremony.” As one Egyptian mythos holds, “every man has power to turn to God and with his help go to the other side in death and in time become a god.”247 More concretely, Nibley and others have found numerous specific points of convergence between the details of the Book of Abraham and ancient temple texts, such as the priestly dimensions of both. Stephen Smoot and Quinten Barney have recently made this argument at length in “The Book of the Dead as a Temple Text and the Implications for the Book of Abraham.”248 They argue that the Book of the Dead “can no longer be simply designated as a ‘funerary text,’ ” since it was employed in both “tomb and temple, among both the living and the dead.” In fact, the documented “number and range of utterances [from the Book of the Dead] used by the living” show its use in “rites, temple hymns, [and] temple texts” to be a commonplace.249 Smith’s father remarked on this temple dimension to the papyri, a dimension he understood to be evident in the very pigments of the writing. “Joseph Smith Sen. explained them to us, and said the records were the writings of Abraham & Joseph, Jacob’s son. Some of the writing was in black, and some in red. He said that the writing in red, was pertaining to the Priesthood.”250

The Book of Abraham  163 Red ink, derived from iron oxide, was often used in ancient papyri for titles or headings or to introduce particular sections, interspersed with the more common black ink. That Smith associated these red characters with priesthood is consistent with the connections he believed he was seeing between the texts he was working with and the sacerdotal underpinnings of LDS temple theology. Abraham does, in fact, appear in a number of ancient texts and traditions pertaining to temple worship. Nibley pointed out decades ago that Maimonides attributed to Abraham the dedication of the site on Mount Moriah where the future temple would stand. More to the point, “God also showed him the future temple service and the law.”251 Louis Ginzberg also notes Abraham’s instruction in temple ritual and his concern for his descendants “after the Temple is destroyed.” His covenant with God, Abraham is taught, entails the twin duties of Torah study and “the service in the temple.”252 Other ancient traditions associate Abraham with the dead, seeking as their intercessor to bring about their salvation in the temple. The Apocalypse of Abraham, first published in Russian in 1863, recounts how “Abraham, on Mt. Horeb, had his people stand around in a ring to learn the ordinances and to sacrifice unto the Lord.”253 The figure of Abraham might in this regard be considered the father of temple knowledge. Nibley found what he saw as many such points of convergence between the Book of Abraham and ancient textual traditions, though they date much later than the papyri.254 He notes the story, rooted in Jubilees, that during the time Joseph lived in Egypt he would read to his sons “the words which Jacob, his father, used to read from amongst the words of Abraham.”255 Building on this suggestive foundation, Nibley claims that the Book of Abraham, “far from being nonsense, tells a story of Abraham which subsequent documentary discoveries have confirmed in detail; and this, along with the now well-​ established tradition that Abraham did write an autobiography about his Egyptian experiences and that it was preserved and read by his descendants in Egypt, makes a very strong case for the proposition that the Book of Abraham was indeed taken from ancient writings.”256 Nibley finds in ancient traditions particular details of the expanded biography of the patriarch provided in the Book of Abraham. In Genesis, Abraham’s story begins with a reference to his father, Terah, leading his family out of the land of the Chaldees (southeast Babylon) en route to Canaan. No explanation is given for Terah’s exodus. Smith’s Abraham account is set in a world of Egyptian religion involving the human sacrifice of children, of virgin women—​and of Abraham himself, whose prayer frustrates the Egyptian

164  The Pearl of Greatest Price priests’ designs: “and as they lifted up their hands upon me, that they might offer me up and take away my life, behold, I lifted up my voice unto the Lord my God, and the Lord hearkened and heard, and he filled me with the vision of the Almighty, and the angel of his presence stood by me, and immediately loosed my bands.”257 The priests and their altars are destroyed, and a famine ensues, precipitating Terah’s repentance. Subsequently, Abraham is commanded to leave Chaldea, with his father following (unlike the Genesis account, which has the departure taking place under Terah’s instigation in ­chapter 11). In both versions there is a stopover in Haran, where Terah dies, Genesis records. Not so in Smith’s version; Terah is distracted by his prosperity there, reverts to idolatry, and so is left behind by Abraham and his followers. Nibley notes that the idolatry of Abraham’s father is paralleled in texts such as the Apocalypse of Abraham, which appeared in an English translation in 1897 at the hands of two Latter-​day Saints, doubtless excited to make the parallels widely known.258 “My fathers . . . turned their hearts to the sacrifice . . . unto these dumb idols, and hearkened not unto my voice,” Smith’s version reads. “My father was very angry with me because I  had spoken hard words against his gods” reads the Apocalypse of Abraham 4:6.259 (The Book of Jasher also chronicles Terah’s idolatry; Latter-​day Saints noted in the church newspaper an English translation appearing in 1840.)260 The Apocalypse of Abraham also parallels the Book of Abraham in describing a heavenly “Council” and throngs of “pre-​formed . . . beings . . . and the aeons prepared before” (compare with Smith’s “intelligences that were organized before the world was” presided over by God in a divine council).261 Both texts refer to spirits in that council who are to become “rulers” among men, and both texts reference the foreordained coming of Christ. (“The man you have seen . . . is the Salvation . . . to the people,” declares the Apocalypse of Abraham. “Whom shall I send? And one answered like unto the Son of Man: Here am I, send me,” is found in Smith’s account.)262 In addition, both texts represent Abraham as being schooled in the mysteries of celestial organization. An angel tells Abraham in the Apocalypse of Abraham: “I will ascend . . . to show you what is in the heavens . . . in the abyss, and in the lower depths . . . in the fullness of the universe. And you will see its circles in all.”263 In the Book of Abraham, the patriarch is empowered to see the multitudinous stars, including one “nearest unto the throne of God,” the reckoning of cosmic times and seasons, including “the set time of all the stars that are set to give light,” and “those things which his hands had made, which were many; and they

The Book of Abraham  165 multiplied before mine eyes, and I could not see the end thereof.”264 Nibley lays out more than a dozen other parallels between the two texts. Another text, the Testament of Abraham, first appeared in Greek versions in 1892 and describes Abraham’s post-​mortal ascent toward heaven. As in both the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Book of Abraham, Abraham wishes “to see the whole of the inhabited world and all the creations which you established.” And so he is taken “right up to the vault of heaven, and . . . above the cloud” for what Nibley calls his “instructional tour of the universe.”265 Twentieth-​century scholars argued that “a number of elements point to Egypt as the place of origin” of the Testament of Abraham.266 Even more striking in light of the Joseph Smith Papyri is the conclusion of Francis Schmidt that “an Egyptian judgment scene” is the “model” for the Testament of Abraham. In Nibley’s view, this means that “the Egyptian book of the Dead—​was the inspiration for the Testament of Abraham.”267 That the Book of the Dead in Smith’s possession finds these points of intersection with the Book of Abraham suggests that though the Book of Abraham is not in any conventional sense a translation of the Book of the Dead, a connection of some kind is indicated. As Nibley sums it up, “an authentic Abraham apocryphon should not be without visible affinities to the Book of the Dead.”268 Another episode in the Book of Abraham with ancient textual parallels concerns his sojourn in the land of Egypt. The biblical account is fewer than a dozen verses: And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land. And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon: Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife:  and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee. And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair. The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. And the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram’s wife. And Pharaoh called Abram, and said, What is this that thou hast done

166  The Pearl of Greatest Price unto me? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife? Why saidst thou, She is my sister? so I might have taken her to me to wife: now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way. And Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him: and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had. (Genesis 12:10–​20, KJV)

This sojourn of Abraham, so briefly narrated in Genesis, has for centuries provided material for abundant speculation on the scope of interaction between Abraham and the court of Pharaoh, or links between the Hebraic and Egyptian cultures. Jewish traditions place the length of Abraham’s residence in Egypt at anywhere from three months to twenty years, indicating mutual influences ranging from minor to substantial.269 In Joseph Smith’s version of Abraham’s visit, he adds little in the text itself; one of the Egyptian illustrations, however, he interprets as “Abraham  .  .  .  reasoning upon the principles of Astronomy” while “sitting upon Pharaoh’s throne, by the politeness of the king, with a crown upon his head, representing the Priesthood, as emblematical of the grand Presidency in Heaven; with the scepter of justice and judgment in his hand.”270 Abraham’s role as instructor of astronomy survived in many ancient textual traditions. Priestly learning is a part of this tradition. Ginzberg recounts how in Egypt, Abraham “became acquainted with the wisdom of the priests and, if necessary, g[a]‌ve them instruction in the truth.  .  .  . Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt was of great service to the inhabitants of the country, because he  .  .  .  taught them astronomy and astrology, unknown in Egypt before his time.”271 He was so proficient in astrology that in reprimand of his not living up to his promise, the Lord on one occasion “raised Abraham above the vault of the skies, and He said, ‘Thou art a prophet, not an astrologer!’ ”272 In Josephus, Abraham is widely renowned for his knowledge of the heavens, and he teaches the Pharaoh’s leading wise men. The more obscure Artapanus, writing in the century or two before Christ, describes Abraham coming with his family to Egypt, where he taught “the Egyptian king Pharethothes . . . astrology.”273 Nibley considers the attempted sacrifice of Abraham and his astronomical learning only two of myriad correspondences between Smith’s text and what is increasingly known of Egyptian traditions emerging from apocryphal and other sources. Nibley summarizes his case at length:

The Book of Abraham  167 The apocryphal literature tell us, for instance, of idolatry and child sacrifice; of the threat to Abraham’s life by his family; of his strange sacrifice on a mountain and his mounting up to be shown a wonderful picture, a circular plan of the cosmos, whose key was transmitted by the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove; of how Abraham takes up where Noah leaves off; of how Abraham, on undertaking a dangerous journey, was admonished to remember how God had delivered him from the altar; of how Abraham is sore afflicted at Sarah’s plight and prays for her deliverance from Pharaoh’s bed or displeasure. The Book of Abraham also contains important and peculiar details not found in the Bible but occurring in both the Hebrew and Egyptian reports, such as Pharaoh’s offering human sacrifice in a time of drought—​the victims being members of his own family; the leading role of the hierodules [temple slaves] and the putting to death of royal virgins; the peculiar type of altar on which the sacrifice was made; the victim on the altar praying fervently for deliverance, in reply to which an angel appears; at the same time the voice of God is heard from heaven, the victim being miraculously delivered by an earthquake that overthrows the altar and kills the priest; after which the liberated victim mounts the throne; how being on the throne he teaches astronomy to the royal court; how he writes an autobiographical account in the first person for the instruction of his posterity; how he examines the records of the fathers to establish his own line; how the king of Egypt had serious doubts about his own divine descent and right to rule; how the king was much concerned with the study of the stars; how Abraham preferred astronomy to astrology, though they were closely related; how cosmology is a fundamental part of basic ritual and doctrine; how Abraham used a circular drawing showing the relationship of ruling powers in the cosmos—​a chart represented by Hebrew cabalistic drawings and the Egyptian hypocephalus; how the doctrine of premortal existence is essential to the creation story; how the cosmic drama begins with a great council of the gods in heaven; how the four canopic figures are like apocalyptic beasts, indicating the four quarters of the earth; how the two opposing halves of the circle show the duality of light vs. dark, peace vs. war, etc.; how Sirius and the Sun were worshipped together as Shagreel, for the relief of drought; how the main theme of the whole Abraham history is the rivalry for the priesthood and the kingship, the periodic showdown that is at the heart of the ubiquitous year-​rite. All this and much more you will

168  The Pearl of Greatest Price find in the Book of Abraham, the traditions of Canaan and Israel, and the records of the Egyptians.274

Such approaches as that of Nibley can produce striking—​but tenuous—​ results. At least some of the details found in Smith’s Abraham narrative can be found in works available in Smith’s day, including, in addition to the Book of Jasher:  Symon Patrick et  al., A Critical Commentary and Paraphrase on the Old Testament (1809), Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible: Commentary and Critical Notes (New York, 1832), and Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (London, 1811).275 Another challenge to the apologetic approach surveyed above is that some scholars have seen in Nibley an unfiltered embrace of “parallelomania,” that is, “the overuse or improper use of parallels in the exposition of a text.”276 Nibley’s diffusionism approach has garnered some criticism even within the LDS scholarly community. Kent Jackson, a professor of religion at Brigham Young University, argues that Nibley’s writings “betray a sweeping non-​ discriminatory methodology,” in which he “shows a tendency to gather sources from a variety of cultures all over the ancient world, lump them all together, and then pick and choose the bits and pieces he wants.” In this way, “he is able to manufacture an ancient system of religion that is remarkably similar in many ways to our own” (i.e., Mormonism). Indeed, he concludes, “there are serious problems involved in this kind of methodology.”277 Even so, the list Nibley constructs—​and documents in numerous articles and some substantial monographs—​is daunting and, of itself, explains the conclusion of LDS faithful that, in the words of one LDS scholar, “numerous ancient sources—​ apocryphal, pseudepigraphical, Egyptian and otherwise . . . overwhelmingly confirm the antiquity and authenticity of the Book of Abraham.”278 The inattention to exact contemporaneity in the documents Nibley invokes as evidence—​many of the texts he references are centuries later than the epoch of Abraham—​would seem to follow from an assumption that Nibley shares with Joseph Smith and subsequent leaders, which I have described above as his version of prisca theologia (“ancient wisdom”). In Joseph F. Smith’s formulation, “if we find truth in broken fragments . . . it may be set down as an incontrovertible fact that it originated at the fountain, and was given to philosophers, inventors . . . reformers, and prophets by the inspiration of God.” Using the same language, Hugh Nibley made this view his guiding hermeneutic, writing that Smith “recognized a primal archaic

The Book of Abraham  169 order which had produced all manner of broken fragments and scattered traditions.”279 More recent LDS scholarship has taken a less sweeping approach than Nibley employed but similarly asserts the existence of historically accurate counterparts to key textual elements in the Book of Abraham. John Gee and Kerry Muhlestein, another credentialed and published LDS scholar of Egyptian, employ a more surgical method that focuses on certain events or terms. In a 2011 article, for example, Gee and Muhlestein propose that the near sacrifice of Abraham under the knife of an Egyptian priest “matches remarkably well with the picture of ritual slaying in the Middle Kingdom.”280 Gee has tentatively argued that the place Olishem (Abraham 1:10) may have been discovered in southern Turkey.281 Not so tentatively, he suggests in another article that Idrimi, a near contemporary of Abraham, wrote an autobiography much like the one we find in the Book of Abraham, concluding with the question “How did Joseph Smith manage to publish in the Book of Abraham a story that so closely matched a Middle Bronze–​age Syrian autobiography that would not be discovered for nearly a hundred years?”282

The Abraham/​Egyptian Papers and the Mechanics of Translation Alone among all of Joseph Smith’s vast scriptural production, the Book of Abraham apparently emerged out of a confluence of prophetic and scholarly efforts—​with no clear indication of which approach took precedence or exactly how they are related. (As documented above, this point was first made in 1912, when J. M. Sjodahl noted that, in contrast with the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham “was given . . . by the power of the Spirit of God but [also] through the usual channels of research.”)283 In 1967, the recovered papyri were added to the church’s archives, which already contained a collection of Abraham and Egyptian manuscripts, most of which had been in the church archives since the Saints’ removal to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. These manuscripts and working papers are frequently titled the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. However, the evidence suggests that the project of which they are a baffling and fragmentary record carried over into Smith’s years in Nauvoo; therefore, I  will refer to these papyri and manuscripts as the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers.284 Lending more mystery than clarity to the process, this paper trail Joseph Smith produced in working with the Egyptian

170  The Pearl of Greatest Price papyri includes the actual Book of Abraham manuscripts and a curious set of documents titled “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.” Around the same time that Smith’s translation of the Book of Abraham commenced (in the second half of 1835), he and his scribes undertook a concurrent project to produce a key to deciphering Egyptian, a kind of lexicon or dictionary. The Abraham/​Egyptian Papers include three 1835 “Egyptian Alphabet” documents, one written in Joseph Smith’s hand, another in the hand of “O. Cowdery,” and another in the hand of “W. W. Phelps.”285 Like a lexicon, these documents contain hieratic characters in a column on the left with meanings juxtaposed in another column to the right. The Abraham/​Egyptian Papers also contain an 1835 Egyptian grammar book, mostly in Phelps’s hand, which expands the lexical alphabet manuscripts into a five-​degree grammatical system; two notebooks, mostly in the hand of “O. Cowdery,” with notes and drawings; and two pages with characters drawn from an unidentified papyrus.286 Also in the collection are three 1835 manuscripts that roughly contain the first chapter and a half of the Book of Abraham. (One of these 1835 manuscripts was acquired by the church in 1937 from Wilford Wood.)287 Curiously, all of these three 1835 manuscripts have the same hieratic characters drawn in the left column, juxtaposed to Book of Abraham text to the right. After 1967, as noted above, it was adjudged by many that these characters came from one of the papyri fragments (Fragment-​A) that had at one time been preserved under glass. Another Nauvoo period document (1842), with roughly the same text as the one of the 1835 manuscripts (Abraham 1:1–​2:18), likely functioned as a printer’s manuscript for the installment in the 1 March 1842 edition of Times and Seasons.288 In addition, on the back of one of the pages of this document is written the explanation to Facsimile 1, and a separate manuscript includes the explanation to Facsimile 2.289 Finally, we also find in the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers a drawing of the vignette for Facsimile 2,290 probably from the Nauvoo period, showing that portions of the vignette were missing at the time it was in Smith’s possession and were incorrectly restored from other papyri fragments. How were the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers produced, and what, then, was the actual process in which Smith engaged in producing the text known as the Book of Abraham? As with the Book of Mormon, we have only a few contemporary descriptions of his method. One comes from Warren Parrish, in 1838, after he had left the Church of Jesus Christ. “I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphicks as he

Fig. 2.8  First page of Egyptian Alphabet-​A in handwriting of Joseph Smith. © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

Fig. 2.9  Book of Abraham Manuscript-​B, page 3, is in the handwriting of Warren Parrish. © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

The Book of Abraham  173 claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of Heaven.”291 Wilford Woodruff, a reliable journalist, recorded on 19 February 1842 that “the Lord is Blessing Joseph with Power to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom of God; to translate through the urim & Thummim Ancient records & Hyeroglyphics as old as Abraham.”292 If Lucy Mack Smith was remembering correctly (and she was often unreliable), the Book of Abraham translation process could be quite similar to Smith’s process of translating the Book of Mormon. According to a group of Quakers who visited Nauvoo in September 1846 and met with her, she “said, that when Joseph was reading the papyrus, he closed his eyes, and held a hat over his face, and that the revelation came to him; and that where the papyrus was torn, he could read the parts that were destroyed equally as well as those that were there; and that scribes sat by him writing, as he expounded.”293 That Smith employed the Urim and Thummim, or seer stone, is entirely likely. However, his employment of such a device should in no way obscure the fact that the process by which he produced the Book of Abraham was of a different category altogether from that of his 1829 production of the Book of Mormon. He fluently dictated the five-​hundred-​page Book of Mormon to scribes in a matter of weeks, with no edits or reworking of the text. It was an oracular feat, devoid of any attempt to intellectually grapple with an unknown language or rely on the learning of the day, linguistic or otherwise, and he declared the product to be the Word of God, more perfect than the Bible. He wrestled with the Book of Abraham, using seer stones or not, on and off for seven years, attacking the task as an amateur linguist and working cooperatively with colleagues, and as far as we know he never declared the work complete or imputed to it the status of scripture. What seems clear from the 1835 historical record and an analysis of the 1835 Abraham manuscripts and the grammar and alphabet manuscripts is that they were created roughly at the same time;294 and their interconnectedness suggests some relationship between the production of both sets of documents. In the most conspicuous instance, there is a clear correspondence between Abraham 1:1–​3 and the grammar and alphabet book.295 This is not to say that we know how these two projects were related to each other in the minds of Joseph Smith and his contemporaries and, therefore, exactly how the translation of the Book of Abraham came about.296 The question for historians is: how were the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers related to the completed text of the Book of Abraham, and do they reveal anything about the translation process?

174  The Pearl of Greatest Price Documents translated from a lost language and a lexicon or grammar of that language can be related in one of two ways: one can begin with a document already translated and then reverse engineer it to derive the vocabulary and grammar (as with the Rosetta Stone, or in this case, a text translated by spontaneous inspiration or creation). Or one can begin with a grammar and alphabet and apply them to a foreign document to decipher the ancient text (as when a student translates Virgil using a dictionary and Latin grammar). The mystery surrounding the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers is a chicken-​and-​ egg problem: did Smith first channel the Book of Abraham and then engage in the work of constructing a key to Egyptian? Or did he more gradually posit the meaning of Egyptian symbols from study and revelation and then employ his key to decipher the papyri? Both views have evidence in their favor, and the most likely scenario may be a simultaneous and interwoven development. Initially, it would appear more logical to assume a process of working backward from the Book of Abraham, for three reasons. First is the fact that when Smith translated the Book of Mormon earlier, he streamed the dictated text as a finished product; he did not work from a self-​produced grammar or lexicon. It is of course possible that Smith, growing in confidence and ambition, sought to implement more emphatically the Lord’s injunction to “study . . . out in [his] mind” the linguistic problem before him, and so he now worked to produce a key to decipherment prior to or along with his translation.297 Nevertheless, the possibility that he dictated the text in a flow of oracular inspiration cannot be entirely ruled out. Second, comporting with this scenario, is the fact that Smith did produce a completed text (through Abraham 5:21), whereas the grammar and alphabet documents are clearly fragmentary and represent a project that was aborted before reaching even a preliminary stage of completion. In fact, years after Smith had published his completed portions of the Book of Abraham, he still expressed the hope “of preparing a grammar of the Egyptian language.”298 That is not to say, however, that he had not developed in his own mind a sufficient grammar to accomplish his purposes. Third, it is tempting to see the Book of Abraham as a prophetic production and the “grammar and alphabet” as an academic undertaking. In that case, the inspired production of the Book of Abraham would have priority and would be used as an authoritative source from which to deduce the principles of translation.

The Book of Abraham  175 On balance, however, it appears that the two endeavors, translating the papyri and producing a “grammar and alphabet,” were too integrated and interdependent to separate in such fashion. For while we have no direct proof that Smith referred to this grammar and alphabet while translating the Book of Abraham,299 there are indications that he did, and we do know that he was working on both projects simultaneously. We find in the alphabet and grammar documents several textual similarities to parts of c­ hapter 1 of the Book of Abraham, to parts of c­ hapter 3, and to some of Smith’s explanations to Facsimile 1. Smith’s Egyptian alphabet document also contains a paragraph from the Book of Abraham that appears to initiate what Smith portrayed as a five-​degree system in which the definition of a word is amplified through five “degrees” or levels of meaning from the most basic to the most elaborate. This takes place at the end of the Smith version in an inscription added by Cowdery: “in the first degree Ah-​broam—​signifies The father of the faithful, the first right, the elders second degree—​same sound—​A follower of rightiousness—​Third degree—​same sound—​One who possesses great Knowledge—​Fourth degree—​same sound—​A follower of righteousness, a possessor of greater of Knowledge. Fifth degree—​Ah-​bra-​oam. The father of many nations, a prince of peace, one who keeps the commandments of God, a patriarch, a rightful heir, a high priest.”300 This five-​degree text in Smith’s alphabet manuscript was incorporated in the bound grammar book and then plausibly reworked in the opening lines of the Book of Abraham: “I sought for the blessings of the fathers, and the right whereunto I should be ordained to administer the same: Having been a follower of righteousness; desiring to be one who possessed great Knowledge; a greater follower of righteousness; a possessor of greater Knowledge; a father of many nations; a prince of peace; one who keeps the commandments of God; a rightful heir; a high priest.”301 Here it can be seen that the text of the Book of Abraham closely resembles the meaning of Ah-​broam/​Ah-​bra-​oam in the fifth degree. Another passage from early in the Book of Abraham with corresponding material in the grammar and alphabet documents concerns the origins of Egypt. In table 2.1, for the character called “Iota toues Zip-​Zi,” the meaning of the character again generally increases in detail through the five degrees.302 These definitions can be compared with a passage in the Book of Abraham: “the land of Egypt being first discovered, by a woman, who was the daughter of Ham, and the daughter of Zeptah, which in the chaldea, signifies Egypt, which signifies that which is forbidden. When this woman discovered

176  The Pearl of Greatest Price Table 2.1  Sample of Five-degree Grammatical System Degree

Definition

1st 2nd 3rd

The land of Egypt The land which was discovered under water by a woman The woman sought to settle her sons in that land. she being the daughter of Ham The land of Egypt discovered by a woman, who afterwards settled persons in it The land of Egypt which was first discovered by a woman while underwater, and afterwards settled by her Sons she being a daughter of Ham

4th 5th

the land. it was under water, who after settled her sons in it, and thus from Ham, sprang that race, which preserved, the curse in the land.”303 This passage in the Book of Abraham corresponds with the meanings of the character named “Iota toues Zip-​Zi” and most closely corresponds with it in its fifth degree of meaning. About half of the Egyptian grammar book contains astronomical information that corresponds with the explanations of various parts of the second illustration published as part of the Book of Abraham. The original of this illustration, presented under the title “A Fac-​simile from the Book of Abraham, No. 2,” was likely a disk-​ shaped piece of papyri that included several subsections or registers, each of which included characters or illustrations (or both). As published, the “figures” in these subsections were numbered and keyed to accompanying explanations. Smith and Cowdery may have begun associating the original papyri source for the second illustration with astronomy even before they purchased it from Chandler. In December 1835, Cowdery recounted that when Chandler came to Kirtland that summer he related that he had already sold seven mummies and “a small quantity of papyrus, similar, (as he says), to the astronomical representation, contained with the present two rolls.”304 One of the Egyptian characters copied into the grammar book is named “Kolob” and is explicated in all five degrees. In the fifth degree, “Kolob” is defined as “the first creation nearer to the celestial, or the residence of Lord, first in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time, the measurement according to celestial time which signifies, one day to a cubit which day is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this Earth or Jah=oh=eh.”305 In the second illustration, the

The Book of Abraham

177

explanation for Figure 1 matches the fifth-degree definition of “Kolob” almost verbatim.306 In sum, the Abraham/Egyptian Papers emerge against a blaze of activity that did not differentiate the oracular from the academic, or the intellectual from the spiritual—such a demarcation was anathema to the synthesis that Smith’s revelations continually enjoined. He had been urged in late 1832 to “seek . . . out of the best books words of wisdom; [to] seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). The counsel came as part of a revelation decreeing the establishment of a “school of the prophets” wherein students would study “things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of the countries and of kingdoms.” To this list of subjects was shortly added the injunction to “become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people.” So in the School of the Prophets, Smith and other men studied the scriptures and theology—but also German and Hebrew. The school actually commenced operation in January 1833, in Kirtland, with fourteen elders and high priests in attendance on the second floor of the Newel K. Whitney store, and ran successfully only until April. In November 1834, the school reopened as the Elders School, with a more general membership, and lasted until March 1835. The session was repeated the next year, when the winter gave respite from farm work and missionary labors. During these years of Smith’s intense efforts to educate himself and the Saints, the study of languages featured prominently in his journal entries. “Attended school during school hours” he recorded on 13 November 1835.307 A few days later, he noted that Oliver Cowdery had returned from New York, “bringing with him a quantity of Hebrew books, for the benefit of the school. He presented me with a Hebrew Bible, Lexicon, and Grammar, also a Greek Lexicon, and Webster’s English Dictionary.”308 The next day, Smith recorded, he “spent the day at home in examining my books and studying the hebrew alphabet.” That night, he attended Hebrew class and made arrangements to replace the Hebrew teacher, one Dr. Peixotto, with an experienced scholar, Joshua Seixas, who was apparently more reliable and better qualified to instruct the elders in Hebrew.309 In January 1836, Smith accordingly organized what he called the Hebrew School, which would comprise well over 100 eager but older students. “Spent the day reading,” “spent

178  The Pearl of Greatest Price the day studying German,” and “spent the day studying Hebrew” became common entries. This study was in addition to the intense work Smith had been doing over the past months to fashion an “Egyptian grammar” at a time when the study of that ancient language was still in its infancy. The wonder is that Smith, having already demonstrated to his followers’ satisfaction his power to translate an unknown language (“Reformed Egyptian”) by “the gift and power of God,” felt it necessary to add linguistic credentials to his already heralded prophetic gifts. Smith’s intellectual agenda, according to a visiting elder from Missouri, inspired the members with “an extravagant thirst after knowledge.”310 Even a hostile critic acknowledged that “the Mormons appear to be very eager to acquire education. Men, women and children lately attended school, and they are now employing Mr. Seixas, the Hebrew teacher, to instruct them in Hebrew; and about seventy men in middle life, from twenty to forty years of age, are most eagerly engaged in the study. They pursue their studies alone until twelve o’clock at night, and attend to nothing else. Of course many make rapid progress. I noticed some fine looking and intelligent men among them. They are by no means, as a class, men of weak minds.”311 Overseeing the Hebrew school was a committee consisting of Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Frederick G. Williams, and Oliver Cowdery. Work on the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers appears to have ceased by the end of 1835, at which point the elders’ linguistic ambitions turned almost exclusively to Hebrew for the following months. Smith may have brought his prophetic credentials to bear on the textual production of the Book of Abraham, but the larger, collaborative Abraham/​ Egyptian Papers project reflected an ambitious, enthusiastic effort by Smith the language student, joined by eager colleagues, to secure a comprehensive key to the most ancient of tongues. As Smith’s modern editors sketch the multifaceted energies converging now on the papyri, in late May 1835, William W. Phelps penned a letter to his wife, Sally, that included six characters that he classified as “a specimen of some of the ‘pure language’ ” [all of these characters subsequently appeared in Smith’s Egyptian alphabet]. . . . Sometime in late 1835, Oliver Cowdery produced a document that featured several unknown characters paired with what appear to be translations; Frederick G. Williams later copied and identified them as “characters on the book of Mormon.” The existence of these character documents, along with Phelps’s sample of the pure language,

The Book of Abraham  179 suggests that Joseph Smith and his associates were experimenting with various kinds of language study during this period. Joseph Smith, Phelps, Cowdery, Williams, Warren Parrish, and others began working with Egyptian characters from the papyri in summer 1835, and later that year they also began to study and translate Hebrew as a way to “understand his [the Lord’s] word in the original language.”312

Given the close connection that Smith inferred between Hebrew and Egyptian, it is not surprising that when he returned to his Egyptian project in 1842, he injected his Hebrew learning into the work. Matthew Grey has demonstrated that this was no coincidental timing: “he went into his Hebrew studies looking . . . for ways in which Hebrew could enhance and inform not only his Abraham translation, but also his understanding of the nature of God, the creation of the world, and even the cosmos itself.”313 When Smith returned to his Egyptian translation work in 1842, the impact of his Hebrew studies was manifest in the passages of the Book of Abraham he translated at that time. Grey gives examples of Smith’s reliance on his familiarity with Hebrew in his employment of Hebrew terms to explain images from the papyri, his use of Hebrew terms to translate certain Egyptian symbols, and his use of insights gained from his Hebrew study of Genesis 1–​2 (for example, where he saw that elohim meant literally “gods” and so described “the gods” as working together in the Book of Abraham’s version of creation). Smith’s forays into Hebrew did little to nothing to equip him for the task of translating Egyptian. Viewed as part of an ambitious project to recuperate the language of Moses, of the Pharaohs, and eventually of Adam in the Garden, Smith’s efforts reflect both the cultural milieu of his era and a typically ambitious project of a man who boasted that “forasmuch as I know for a certainty of Eternal things if the heaveans linger, it is nothing to me.”314 In the face of doubtful evidence that Smith attained to any linguistic proficiency, and in spite of the fact that no certain evidence exists that we have the source documents in light of which we can definitively resolve the mystery of his translation method, it seems prudent to return to the conclusion of Baer: “at this point, the Latter-​day Saint historian and theologian must take over.”315 Many Latter-​day Saints may find mere faith, unsupported by scholarly confirmation of Smith’s Egyptian proficiency, insufficient to the challenge of continued discipleship. As Higher Criticism took (and has continued to take) its toll on biblical literalists, so has Smith’s seeming failure as a linguist been

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a cause of concern and disaffection among the Latter-day Saints. Prophetic paradigms more accommodating of Smith’s humanity have been taking shape in the Church of Jesus Christ for some time now. Richard Bushman’s landmark biography of Joseph Smith broke new ground in 2005 as an unstinting portrait of a flawed leader written by a faithful believer.316 With similar frankness, the church now acknowledges on its website that prophetic misunderstanding and prophetic inspiration may coexist in the same person even at the same moment. Smith certainly believed that he was successfully rendering the actual Egyptian symbols into their English counterparts. In the case of the facsimiles he was apparently wrong, and in the case of the Book of Abraham narrative he may have been as well. Yet the church website—in a striking return to the position first articulated in the church’s 1912 responses to the Egyptologists—proposes the possibility that “even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri . . . they catalyzed a process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham.”317 Invoking such a “catalyst” theory of revelation may empower the believer with a more accommodating model of Smith’s seership, even as it strikes the skeptic as evasive. The value of such a possibility, however, is that it brackets the questions of historicity and accuracy altogether and enables a new range of questions to emerge. Instead of evaluating Smith’s work by looking back through the lens of contemporary Egyptology, we may learn the workings of Smith’s prophetic imagination and his own unique cultural moment by entering more fully into his nineteenth-century context. By doing so, we move the question of seership and translation out of the domain of linguistic proficiency altogether.

From Mummies to Scripture: Rethinking Translation It is commonly known, that in Egypt there were Hieroglyphics inscribed on the columns and walls of temples and buildings; it is acknowledged however at this day, that no one can determine their signification. Those Hieroglyphs were no other than Correspondences expressive of things Spiritual by things Natural. The Egyptians, more than any people in Asia, cultivated the Science of Correspondences; but in process of time they lost the Science in idolatry—forgetting the Substance in the Symbol. The science became extinct. . . . Should

The Book of Abraham  181 it be desired, I am willing to unfold the meaning of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and to publish their explanation—​a work which no other person could accomplish. —​Emanuel Swedenborg to the Swedish Royal Academy, c. 1771

Probably no aspect of the modern Church of Jesus Christ has provided so much fodder for critics of the church and of Joseph Smith’s purported prophetic powers as the Book of Abraham. The “Book of Mormon Wars” characterizing that scripture’s reception history have, in recent years, been superseded by scholarship that moves beyond questions of historic authenticity to assess the text itself and the role of the Book of Mormon in Smith’s own religious formation.318 In a similar way, the Book of Abraham may be ripe for treatment that moves beyond the purview of Egyptologists assessing its linguistic provenance to an exploration of the cultural factors informing its creation and reception and its place in Smith’s own self-​conceiving as a seer and revelator. The Book of Abraham emerged out of a confluence of Smith’s profoundly held convictions about his prophetic gifts and prerogatives and a cultural moment steeped in a rich lore about Egypt and hieroglyphs. Evaluating his production in the light of modern Egyptological expertise may tell us something about his linguistic abilities—​or lack thereof; it will reveal nothing about the religious world out of which the Book of Abraham came or the mind that rendered it in ways that came to profoundly shape the religious values and precepts of an entire people. We cannot begin to comprehend the motive and mechanics behind Smith’s production of the Book of Abraham if we do not see his work in the context of a linguistic mystery that was in his day still more enshrouded in the high romance of ancient religion and priestly powers than in the scholarly efforts of academicians and royal institutes. Mystics, as well as scholars, were claiming hieroglyphics as their rightful province, as the epigraph from Swedenborg indicates.319 I  have already suggested that Smith understood his place in providential history as being perhaps best captured in his role as “seer.” In retranslating the Bible, he had encountered a reference to the gift of seership as the capacity to “beh[o]‌ld also things which were not visible to the natural eye.”320 Confident in this self-​understanding, Smith encountered the Egyptian relics at a pivotal moment in America’s cultural history. Before proceeding to examine the mechanics and process by which Smith produced the Book of Abraham,

182  The Pearl of Greatest Price therefore, we might lay out more fully an entire set of assumptions and contextual understandings—​regarding hieroglyphs, the prophetic imagination, translation, and authority—​as they operated in the America of Smith’s era. To that end, I will consider the cultural environment out of which Smith’s ambitious project emerged, in order to suggest fresh ways of understanding his prophetic imagination and the conceptual category of inspired translation. The “Egyptomania” that was sweeping the cultural landscape of nineteenth-​century America led Smith to purchase the mummies and papyri and continued to inform his work in general and particular ways. Years after this acquisition, he continued to look for more opportunities to expand his grasp of antiquity and his comprehension of the papyri in his possession. The Times and Seasons announced in early 1843: “according to a Revelation, received not long since, it appears to be the duty of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to bring to Nauvoo their precious things, such as antiquities . . . as well as inscriptions and hieroglyphics, for the purpose of establishing a Museum of the great things of God, and the inventions of men, at Nauvoo.” The collection of “ancient records, manuscripts, paintings and hieroglyphics,” like the city library, was to be housed in the Seventies Hall.321 The Egyptian materials Smith had procured in 1835 were aglow with possibilities he had not been able to exploit fully. After he had produced little more than a chapter, he was faced with the Kirtland crisis of 1837, the Missouri debacle of 1838, and imprisonment and retrenchment in 1839. Then, in 1840, word came that other ancient sacred materials were coming to light. Times and Seasons (borrowing from the New York Star) reported that June on “The Book of Jasher”: “we shall shortly have a literary, or rather a Biblical curiosity, to present to the American reader, which we feel confident in predicting, will excite great interest among those who take pleasure in reading and studying the Scriptures. It is the Book of Jasher referred to in the Bible . . . and which has been in the progress of translation from the Hebrew for several years in England and is now completed.” A subsequent description was perfectly evocative of the story of the brass plates, so familiar to a Latter-​day Saint readership, and would have evoked the same sacred aura of voices speaking from the dust: “the preface to the Hebrew edition speaks of it as having been brought from Jerusalem with other sacred scrolls and manuscripts, at the destruction of that city. . . . It is full of interest, and written with a warmth of piety and sacred devotion, worthy of taking equal rank with any of the missing books, not strictly canonical.”

The Book of Abraham  183 The article then lists another find, again with particularly powerful significance for the ears of Latter-​day Saints, in a growing catalogue of scriptural plenitude: “recently the Book of Enoch has been discovered, translated from the Ethiopic, and published in England. . . . The discovery of missing books referred to in Scripture, and the many yet to be discovered, joined to the singular signs of the times in relation to the chosen people, give great interest to this and similar works.”322 No wonder that Smith, just days after this article appeared, felt a redoubled imperative to make his contribution to the recovery of the ancient archive of sacred truth. On 20 June, he petitioned the church’s High Council, “praying that the Council would relieve him from the temporalities of the Church which he necessarily had to engage . . . —​That he felt it his duty to engage, more particularly, in the spiritual welfare of the Saints & also, to the translating of the Egyptian Records—​the Bible—​& wait upon the Lord for such revelations as may be suited to the condition & circumstances of the Church.”323 Enthusiasm for recovered ancient writings was pervading the church. From England, Brigham Young wrote that fall to say:  “we have lately visited a museum, where we saw an E. Mummy, on the head stone &c are many ancient & curious characters, & we asked the privilege of copying them for translation but have not received an answer, yet, Shall we copy them & send them to you for translation?”324 Months later, a poem summarized the collective euphoria of the Latter-​day Saints on the topic of antiquities:325 “Inspired Writings” Revelations now coming forth. Are sublime and eternal truth; In them Jehovah’s voice proclaims, This is my church, enroll your names . . . Embalmed records, plates of gold, Glorious things to us unfold; Though sealed up they long have been, To give us light they now begin. . . . Judah’s writings, and Joseph’s too, Each testifies the other’s true:  . . .  The book of Jasher has been found, And many more hid in the ground; All these, with Enoch’s book unfold And spread true light from pole to pole. —​Samuel  Brown

184  The Pearl of Greatest Price The Book of Abraham is the child of a tumultuous and complicated parentage. On one side was American fascination with antiquities, ancient civilizations, mummies, hieroglyphics, and lost books of the Bible. On the other side were Smith’s revelatory proclivities: a voracious appetite to recover, reconstruct, and reconstitute lost worlds and celestial realms alike. Like the householder of the parable, Smith said, he aimed to bring forth promiscuously “out of his treasure things new and old.”326 Those “revelatory proclivities” themselves involved a tremendous range of methods, means, and devices in his role and his understanding of himself as seer or “translator.” Divining rods, seer stones, and Urim and Thummim as medium; heavenly transcripts, celestial dictation, gold plates, Egyptian papyri, and a contemporary edition of the King James Bible as source; visions, dreams, spontaneous dictation, linguistic study of Hebrew, and Egyptian grammar creation as mechanism or mode. Clearly, Smith was engaged in a range of activities that are simply not captured by the quaint analogy of George Chapman dutifully translating Homeric hexameters into Elizabethan verse. While there is obvious value in attempting a definition of translation as the term might have operated in Smith’s mind, this section attempts to paint a picture of a dynamic, conceptual universe, much of which may have been within his cultural orbit, that may go some way to enlarge and enrich our view of the term as it operated in Smith’s mind and historical moment alike. Four historical and conceptual frameworks may illuminate Smith’s intellectual universe pertaining to seership. This is not to suggest that he was responding directly or self-​consciously to any or all of these—​only that they may help elucidate conceptual shifts in his particular historical moment, each of which may broaden or complicate reductive ways of thinking about translation. These frameworks are (1) the cultural valence associated with the notion of the hieroglyph, a notion of greater mythic than rigorously linguistic weight; (2) the practice of bricolage (in Levi-​Strauss’s sense) that was a leitmotif in the Book of Mormon, as a practice of repurposing fragments of the past to new mythologies; (3)  the specific claim about translation championed in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work, one that sees the translator as a mediator who works not via innocent vacuity but as a dynamic interlocutor, moving the audience toward the author; and (4) the destabilizations and reconfigurations of narrative authority that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Of these, the first framework historicizes a term of particular importance to Smith’s Book of Abraham project, the second emerges

The Book of Abraham  185 as a pattern in Smith’s own revelatory practice, the third derives from a philosopher-​contemporary, and the last pertains to more general historical developments.

The Hieroglyph before Champollion spacious field, and worthy of the Master: he, whose hand with hieroglyphics elder than the Nile Inscribed the mystic tablet, hung on high —​Anna Laetitia Barbauld

We have seen how Egyptomania, the public fascination with pharaohs and pyramids and mummies, came to a head in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One scholar treats the phenomenon as “a theme in the history of taste.”327 The problem, as one critic points out, is that the fascination with things Egyptian goes far deeper than interior design fashions. Egyptomania is, as Whitney Davis argues, a “problem in the history of modern thought.”328 One topic in particular engendered new conceptual models with special relevance for thinking about language and translation. Specifically, the quasi-​mythic value and mysterious workings long associated with those sacred symbols known as hieroglyphs suggest a provocative cultural context that may be essential in probing Smith’s thinking about their translation into English. “The prevailing understanding of hieroglyphics,” notes one authority, “enunciated first by Athanasius Kircher (1602–​80), was that they were not a language as we would understand it, but a direct visual expression of thought.”329 In his Oedipus Aegyptiacus he argues that each Egyptian hieroglyph has a potent and esoteric meaning. The mysterious power and aura attached to the hieroglyph made of Egyptian more than just another linguistic puzzle. The Italian rhetorician-​ historian Giambattista Vico, the French philosophe Denis Diderot, and the English poet Percy Shelley all believed the hieroglyph was a particularly potent representational medium that was untranslatable in any conventional sense. G. F. W. Hegel, a contemporary of Smith, considered Egyptian “artificers” working with hieroglyphs to have been exploiting an “Ur-​form of human consciousness.”330 Hieroglyphs embodied a quasi-​magical, quasi-​mystical power that many such intellectuals attempted to explicate with innovative theories of representation that

186  The Pearl of Greatest Price eventually culminated in a Romantic aesthetic. These conceptual schemas informed the intellectual universe into which Smith was born. Giambattista Vico, in his New Science (1725), saw his task in large measure as that of rescuing language—​and language theory—​from the Cartesian ideal of clarity, simplicity, and univocality, or singleness of meaning. Language, Vico argued, was impoverished—​not improved—​to the extent that words were made to correspond to one and only one referent, in a simple, arbitrary labeling of objects in the universe (as in Adam’s naming of animals). As if in a game of linguistic pin the tail on the donkey, members of England’s Royal Academy aspired to make language function with the unambiguous exactitude of mathematical notation. Vico, by contrast, located the ideal he sought in a past Golden Age of primitive society: “mutes make themselves understood by gestures or objects that have natural relations with the ideas they wish to signify. This axiom is the principle of the hieroglyphs by which all nations spoke in the time of their first barbarism.”331 For Vico, if language was to serve as true revelation of rather than sharp alienation from the world, then this ideal system, the hieroglyph, must condense the myriad ideas and responses engendered by a single experience, “by contracting into a single word, as into a genus, the parts which poetic speech had associated.” In addition, language must be built on experience that is “natural, eternal, and common to all mankind.” As an example, he offered “the poetic phrase ‘the blood boils in my heart.’ . . . They took the blood, the boiling, and the heart, and made of them a single word. . . . Following the same pattern, hieroglyphics . . . were reduced to a few vulgar letters.”332 For Vico, the hieroglyph thus stood for the vanished immediacy that obtained between the world and human attempts to articulate it. It was a densely packed symbol that was like a corridor to a moment and world lost in time. For Diderot (1713–​1784), the hieroglyph offered a kindred hope but more specifically the hope of rescuing representation from the limitations inherent in the temporal, linear, syntactical structures of language. In other words, language imposed artificial order and constraint on the immediacy and fullness of sensory experience. This critique of artistic representation (mimesis) was becoming a commonplace of the era. Gotthold Lessing’s (1729–​1781) was the most famous exposition on the lamentable way language inevitably fragments and temporally dislocates the totality of original experience into discrete, syntagmatic structures, stretched out in time.333 Thus, modern languages especially were said to be incapable of capturing the manifold richness and complexity of any phenomenon. Diderot nostalgically yearned for a

The Book of Abraham  187 primitive language that would compensate for such disassembling of original experience by the compactness of its symbols: “But to see an object, to judge it beautiful, to experience a pleasant sensation, to desire to possess it, this is the state of the soul at a given instant, and is what the Greek and Latin render with a single word.”334 The Egyptians, he believed, were the true masters of linguistic art. By this simple logic, the further back in linguistic history one moved, the closer one approached to an almost incomprehensibly economical saturation of meaning in potent, meaning-​packed utterance. This is why, as Sam Brown notes, it was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for some to reason that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs contained remnants of the pure language of Adam.335 A divine language would not founder in the morass of clumsy, verbal grasping for the unadorned immediacy of perfect communication. As Diderot imagined the nearest known approximation of such linguistic perfection, “things are said and represented at the same time; at the same moment the understanding seizes upon them, the soul is moved by them, the imagination sees them, and the ear comprehends them; and language is no longer simply a sequence of terms . . . but is also a tissue of hieroglyphs.”336 Swedenborg’s conception of the hieroglyph was the same. He believed that “it should be possible to design a kind of writing that would contain almost everything, with which one could write more in a single line than can now be done on several pages.”337 Smith’s younger English contemporary Percy Shelley wrote the age’s most famous defense of the poetic vocation. He argued that painting and sculpture and music were inferior media that never managed to break free of the constraints their own materials imposed. Only a special kind of language could move us in the direction of transcendent realities, what he called “the before unapprehended relations of things”; could “imagine and express th[e]‌indestructible order”; and, at its most sublime achievement, could “create  .  .  .  anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.” Those who have achieved such an end “have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts.”338 The notion of hieroglyphs, in Enlightenment and Romantic circles alike, carried echoes of priestly powers of expression and discernment. This is why, for Bishop William Warburton, writing a few decades before Joseph Smith, “the prophetic style seems to be a speaking hieroglyphic.”339 The term was almost universally taken to imply an almost mystical concision and economy of expression unknown to modern languages. For one setting

188  The Pearl of Greatest Price out to render hieroglyphics into the fallen language of the moderns, the act of translation would necessarily require the inspired expansion and recuperation of these sacred, magical symbols into lost worlds of meaning. From Smith’s perspective, the original editor of the Book of Mormon had himself attested to this hieroglyphic concision: “if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew,” he wrote, explaining the Nephite choice of (reformed) Egyptian.340 That Smith fully embraced this cultural preconception seems manifest in the earliest manuscripts of the Book of Abraham. To the left of the text that records the narrative account of Abraham, single glyphs are inserted that are taken to correspond to paragraph-​length sections. The correspondence of such singular symbols to lengthy textual portions is repeated in the alphabet and grammar that were produced at the same time. In other words, one sees visually and immediately the inflation of each symbol into extensive narrative passages, exploding the latent, compact meaning. Though the relationship between the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers and the Book of Abraham is far from settled, Smith or those working to assemble the grammar and alphabet appear to have been operating within the existing cultural assumptions of the time about how hieroglyphs concisely embedded substantial discursive meaning.

Levi-​Strauss and Bricolage “Bricolage,” a term popularized in recent decades by the theorist Jacques Derrida, is particularly apt as a near equivalent to the process of scriptural formation that Smith both describes in the Book of Mormon and then himself enacts. (Admittedly, this is using a product of translation to ground the theory by which that product appeared—​but the Book of Mormon was early enough in Smith’s history that it bears on his evolving understanding and practice.) “Bricolage” in the sense we employ it here originated with the French anthropologist Claude Levi-​Strauss.341 Derrida took the term from anthropology and applied it to discourse generally in his seminal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” (1966).342 However, as Levi-​Strauss originally used the term, understood as a habit of mind as well as of language, it may have much richer potential for understanding the prophetic vocation.

The Book of Abraham  189 Levi-​Strauss’s project was to validate nonscientific ways of ordering reality. His discovery was that other ways of “rationally ordering” the universe exist than those that are dependent on “sensible intuition.” Modes of correlation—​ other discursive systems that lie beneath the surface qualities of our objects of experience—​often emerge with our careful attention to them. Levi-​Strauss was therefore prepared to announce that simple dichotomies like science/​ magic or logic/​irrationality must be challenged. He wrote:  “myths and rites are far from being, as has often been held, the product of man’s ‘myth-​ making faculty,’ turning its back on reality.” On the contrary, such narrative constructions often are “precisely adapted to discoveries of a certain type.” He proceeded to rehabilitate one survival in particular of these alternate discursive activities (which he called “prior” rather than “primitive”): the activity called bricolage. He defined mythological thought as a kind of bricolage, a process of adapting whatever objects are available to “the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal.” As he explained, the bricoleur’s “universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say, with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous.”343 Suggestive possibilities regarding Joseph Smith may be noticed as Levi-​ Strauss continues in his explanation of bricolage. Given a pressing “project,” the bricoleur’s “first practical step is retrospective. He has to turn his back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials . . . to engage in a sort of dialogue with [them], to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem.” More specifically, “the bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavors.”344 Because the engineer is free to move beyond the limits of a given civilization, she can work by means of concepts. The bricoleur, by contrast, working within the constraints of a particular civilization, must resort to signs. This is another way of saying that the bricoleur, the thinker of mythological thought, transcends the limits of material circumstance by resort not to new materials but to his repertoire of familiar objects, employed in symbolic ways. This may describe, as an example, Smith’s use of the three facsimiles, apparently deriving from two or more sources, to make up a triptych economically encapsulating his temple theology. In their original context, the two vignettes referred to as Facsimiles 1 and 3 and the hypocephalus called Facsimile 2 are related to Egyptian funerary texts. Facsimile 1 is a “breathing permit” depicting the embalming and resurrection of the god Osiris, laid out on a lion couch by Anubis, god of embalming. Facsimile 3 represents the

190  The Pearl of Greatest Price deceased human Hor completing his journey after death into the presence of Osiris, seated on a throne. Nibley has pointed out the way Smith’s particular use of the three facsimiles makes up a cosmic triptych that captures with perfect economy his temple theology, in a gesture of prophetic appropriation making Abraham the focus of an eternal journey. Speaking of Facsimiles 1 and 3, Nibley notes: “here we have two scenes: (1) Abraham on an altar in Facsimile 1 and (2) Abraham on a throne in Facsimile 3. Something sensational must have happened between the events.  .  .  . The placing of the hypocephalus (Fac. 2) between earth and heaven (Facs. 1 and 3) points to its function as a link between the two. In this it performs the same function as the temple.”345 In other words, if the first vignette captures a moment related to death (either a sacrificial death or an embalming) and the third captures exaltation in a heavenly sphere, the second, like the temple itself, is the transitional bridge that ensures the passage from death to eternal life. This linkage is explicitly rendered in Smith’s interpretation of the hypocephalus, with its schema of the heavenly order, God’s abode, “grand key words of the Priesthood,” and self-​identification with the “Holy Temple of God.”346 In a passage even more directly relevant to Joseph Smith, Levi-​Strauss explains:  “mythical thought can be  .  .  .  scientific, even though it is still entangled in imagery. It too works by analogies and comparisons even though its creations . . . always really consist of a new arrangement of elements. . . . Mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and . . . new worlds . . . built from the fragments.”347 But he adds a crucial caveat: the “earlier ends . . . are called upon [now] to play the part of means.” With Smith, this would mean that in the service of his own ends—​a reconstituted New and Everlasting Covenant—​he may have repurposed Egyptian funerary texts in such a way as to constitute a new narrative that places fragmentary images and passages of death and resurrection into a fuller cosmic scheme, one that bridges premortality with future worlds. In sum, “the characteristic feature of mythical thought, as of ‘bricolage,’ . . . is that it builds up structured sets . . . by using the remains and debris of events . . . fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society.”348 The result of this process, Levi-​Strauss added, is often “brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane.”349 It is hard for one acquainted with Smith’s work not to see an uncanny resemblance between the scriptural production of Joseph Smith and this Levi-​ Straussian characterization of the mythopoetic imagination. We have seen this most clearly in the transformation of the fragmentary motifs of Doctrine

The Book of Abraham  191 and Covenants 29 into the fully realized narrative premortal history of Moses 3–​6. The further examples from the Book of Abraham, just posited above, may have been simple echoes of the many instances of appropriation and adaptation in the narrative of the Book of Mormon itself. Consider, as illustration, this passage about the Book of Mormon prophet Alma: “And now it came to pass that Alma, who had fled from the servants of King Noah, repented of his sins and iniquities, and . . . began to teach . . . concerning that which was to come, and also concerning the resurrection of the dead, and the redemption of the people, which was to be brought to pass through the power, and sufferings, and death of Christ.”350 This raises the question: how did Alma obtain this knowledge of Christ? He heard the prophet Abinadi preach, we are told, and he “did write all the words which Abinadi had spoken.”351 Where did Abinadi get that knowledge? In ­chapters 13–​14 of Mosiah, we find him reading the words of Moses and of Isaiah to Noah’s court and finding in them clear foreshadowing of a “God [who should] himself . . . come down among the children of men, and . . . redeem his people.”352 From where did Abinadi obtain those scriptures? He was a member of the Zeniff colony, and the narrative would apparently have us understand that Zeniff ’s offshoot group took copies of the Nephite records with them when they departed Zarahemla and resettled in the land of Lehi-​ Nephi. And those Nephite records? As we learn early in the Book of Mormon, Nephi and his brothers absconded from Jerusalem with Laban’s brass plates, which contained the writings of Moses, Isaiah, and several other Hebrew prophets. So we have a clear line of transmission from prophetic utterance to brass plates and then to Nephi’s small plates, to Zeniff ’s copy, to Abinadi’s gloss, to Alma’s transcription. And that is only half the story. From Alma, we learn that those teachings became a part of his written record. When he and his band of exiles arrived in Zarahemla, King Mosiah read to the assembled people “the account of Alma and his brethren.”353 King Mosiah, as guardian of the large plates, presumably incorporated the record into his own record. Those plates were subsequently abridged by Mormon and then transmitted by Joseph Smith. What is enacted in this example is the continual appropriation and repurposing of texts and scriptural records to new audiences, new contexts, and—​most important—​new meanings, not an original intention. More than once, New World prophets urged New World followers to repurpose the words of ancient texts to their own historical circumstances and spiritual needs. The foregoing example emphasizes the twists and turns of transmission history more than reformulation and reconstitution. But

192  The Pearl of Greatest Price consider also various passages from the writings of the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi. In the narrative of the opening chapters of 1 Nephi, the books of Moses were reproduced on brass plates carried out of Jerusalem, read by wilderness refugees, transported to the New World, and assimilated into gold plates. In the first half of 2 Nephi, passages of Isaiah were incorporated wholesale—​not, the record emphasizes repeatedly, to simply preserve in eternal stasis an unvarying version of God’s word, like the Decalogue in the ark. To the contrary: Isaiah was repeatedly wrenched out of its Old World mise en scène and its biblical context and reinterpreted, repurposed, and emphatically stripped of any possibility of closure or fixity. Suddenly God’s word, delivered to ancient peoples in a particular historical moment and place, became part of an utterly new narrative, offering consolation and direction and identity to a refugee sect: “I did liken them unto us,” Nephi wrote of his bricolage. And then he commanded his audience to do likewise: “liken them unto yourselves.”354 Jacob, too, had encouraged his flock to take such license, seeing this as an appropriate method of scriptural adaptation: the words “spoken by Isaiah . . . may be likened unto you.”355 These would seem fitting instances of Levi-​Strauss’s allusion to fragments of prior worlds and constructions that are resuscitated not in order to recuperate original meaning (what he calls its signified) but in order to point the way to a new meaning that could not be anticipated from or embodied in the old (the “earlier ends . . . are called upon [now] to play the part of means”; or in more fashionable jargon, the signified becomes the signifier). Rachel Elior describes a comparable kind of process that took place in the last centuries bce and first centuries ce among Jewish writers. In these years, writers “gradually replaced the Temple ritual priestly, angelic tradition, with its reliance on heavenly sources and priestly custody over written tradition, by a mode of worship based on . . . changeable human interpretation and understanding of the eternal divine law . . . within the context of changing time and place.”356 Consequently, she remarks, two categories of literature emerged, and “the literature discovered at Qumran reflects [these] two corpuses, definable as ‘preserved’ and ‘produced.’ The first, ‘preserved,’ category represents the ancient, centuries-​old priestly literature. . . . The second, ‘produced,’ category reflects the viewpoint of the displaced.”357 Both claim scriptural authority, but the first is rooted in a static notion of unadaptable originality, and the second repurposes sacred writ to new circumstances. One can see the applicability of the first category in the early phase of Smith’s “new translation” of the Bible; in that project, he presents the Book of Moses

The Book of Abraham  193 as the restoration of an actual missing ancient text—​what Elior calls a “preserved” text. Smith’s transposition of the Egyptian papyri into the Book of Abraham may model the second, “produced” type of text. He may very well have imbibed, in the process of producing the Book of Mormon, a view of scripture that went beyond the simple recuperation of lost texts. Like some of his biblical edits, and rather like the Jewish “produced” texts, his Book of Abraham texts may reflect a practice of scriptural fluidity, versatility, adaptability, and malleability that constituted one key facet of his self-​conception as translator. Both the notion of bricolage and Elior’s textual transformation seem in keeping with David Bokovoy’s hypothesis of the Book of Abraham as “inspired pseudepigrapha,” which he argues is a legitimate—​that is, nonfraudulent—​form of “scriptural attribution.” He writes: “the Prophet took theological constructs that were in chaos and provided them with an inspired structure.” Like the Lord’s own creative process, Smith’s work was not creation ex nihilo. Rather, it may be seen as “providing order to pre-​existent material.”358 Bokovoy concludes that within an ampler view of scripture that accommodates such an understanding, one “need not believe that the Book of Abraham is a supernatural, though traditional, translation of an ancient text written by the patriarch Abraham, nor the translation of a Hellenized pseudepigraphic book of Abraham originally written in the first century bc.” Instead, he explains, “it can make even more sense that by engaging the ancient papyri, the Prophet Joseph was inspired to produce this book of scripture as author, or in his vernacular, ‘seer/​translator.’ ”359 Robert Alter makes the same general point that sacred history “is rather different from that of modern historiography. There is, to begin with a whole spectrum of relations to history in the sundry biblical narratives. . . . Writers exercised a good deal of freedom in articulating the traditions at their disposal.”360 Using this model to make sense of Smith’s Book of Abraham work returns us to the position we saw was first invoked by B. H. Roberts over a century ago: “in the translations Joseph Smith has given to the world—​ confessedly not by scholarship but by inspiration, by his own spirit being quickened by contact with God’s spirit—​that in those translations are truths that are part of a mighty system of truth, the like of which is not found elsewhere among men.”361 “Bricolage” may be taken to describe an entire habit of mind, by which Smith conceived vast recreations of ancient worlds and cosmic structures alike. This approach was the very basis of his methodology of Restoration.

194  The Pearl of Greatest Price Smith and his fellow founders all shared the firm belief that an original church, “once indeed beautiful, pure, and intelligent;—​clothed with the power and spirit of God,” was by their day “a picture of ruin and desolation.” It now lay “in broken fragments scattered, rent, and disjointed; with nothing to point out its original, but the shattered remnants of its ancient glory.” For those with eyes to see, however, the world was replete with these scattered “fragments of Mormonism.” It was Smith’s task to reconstitute them.

Schleiermacher and Translation The manner in which the Divine inspiration has been granted to the sacred writers, is a question of more than mere curiosity. . . . We must take heed not to confine him to one particular form, and say, it must be thus and thus or not at all. . . . He has spoken at sundry times to . . . the prophets and other inspired men . . . in diverse manners; ever adapting the manner to time, place, circumstance. —​Adam Clarke, The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

The most important translation theorist of Joseph Smith’s age was Schleiermacher, and his most important work was “On the Different Methods of Translation,” published in 1813, a decade before Smith’s encounter with Moroni, the herald angel of the Book of Mormon. One of Schleiermacher’s major contributions was to emphasize the incapacity of the translator to produce conceptual equivalents across cultures. Another was his attention to psychology’s being equal in importance to diction, as an inseparable dimension of language use. He asked: “are we not often compelled to translate for ourselves the utterances of another who, though our compeer, is of different opinions and sensibility? Compelled to translate, that is, wherever we feel that the same words upon our own lips would have a rather different import than upon his.” Consequently, “would we express just what he intended, we must needs employ quite different words and turns of phrase.”362 Schleiermacher also thoroughly anticipated such moderns as Ferdinand de Saussure and Martin Heidegger in recognizing that we inhabit more than we possess a language: the thinker “cannot think with complete certainty anything that lies outside [language’s] boundaries; the form of his ideas, the manner in which he combines them, and the limits of the combinations are all preordained by

The Book of Abraham  195 the language in which he was born and raised: both his intellect and his imagination are bound by it.”363 Here is the birth of modern translation theory. The task that challenges the translator is more than linguistic; words are but the medium for the replication of particular effects: cognitive, affective, and experiential. Efficacy of translation cannot be achieved by the simple substitution of one vocabulary for its equivalent across language. As a result of these insights, Schleiermacher concluded that the translator must choose either of two options, both of which remove any possibility of transparent mediumship in the act of translation: “either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.”364 In other words, the translation wrenches the audience from their world to transport them into another, or the translator reformulates the author’s world in terms relevant to the audience. In the case of Latter-​day Saint scripture, one might formulate this dictum as follows: “either the translator leaves God (or Nephi or Moses) alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward God (or Nephi or Moses), or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves God (or Nephi or Moses) toward the reader.” I will take it as a provisional axiom that Smith saw his task as the former: “thy mind, O Man . . . must stretch.”365 In the words of Abraham Heschel: An analysis of prophetic utterances shows that the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos. The typical prophetic state of mind is one of being taken up into the heart of the divine pathos. . . . The prophet hears God’s voice and feels His heart. He tries to impart the pathos of the message. . . . As an imparter his soul overflows, speaking as he does out of the fullness of his sympathy.366

Heschel, in other words, sees genuine prophetic communion as a wrenching displacement into the divine perspective; and this is what the weeping prophet Enoch experienced, in Smith’s recasting of Genesis. The point of translation then is not to make God relevant but to reorient the reader in a direction to which she is unaccustomed, to coerce an uncomfortable engagement with an alien universe. Note that in either case, according

196  The Pearl of Greatest Price to Schleiermacher, the translator is engaged in an act of reconstruction and reconstitution. In neither case is the translator “more faithful to the original.” The question is how to bridge the gap between that original utterance in a foreign tongue and the disparate language of the audience. And for Smith, that meant not defamiliarizing the wonderful or domesticating the sacred but leading the reader into new modes of perception and comprehension that would enable an initiation into eternal realms and perspectives. In practice, this could entail something as simple as the implementation of a diction borrowed from sacred discourse (the King James Version) or as complicated as reconstituting a source document into an inspired and inspiring temple text, of which the original would then appear as a pale reflection.

Authors and Authority In our contemporary world, public outrage at “memoirs” that turn out to be fiction and “documentary” films that turn out to be fables attest to the tenuous links between authors and authority. In fact, however, textual authority is largely a matter of generic convention. A sworn affidavit is more credible than a romance novel because of the differing claims on our belief that both have acquired through legal and literary precedent. In the early nineteenth century, however, the conventional array—​and implications of reliability—​of various forms of the written word was disrupted by a number of factors: the rapid rise of literacy and the growth of a reading public, the plummeting costs of paper and book publishing, the proliferation of experimental and confessional literary forms, the powerful cultural work literature was suddenly called on to perform, the novelty of writing as a lucrative career, and of course the lack of robust copyright law. These and related developments spawned a veritable flood of publications as the nineteenth century progressed. This flood took place in blatant disregard for preexistent categories formerly considered adequate to order, to characterize, and to systematize written works or to police the parameters of new expression. This rampant destabilization of narrative authority had a relevant, if indirect, bearing on matters of translation. For this destabilization historicized and complicated the question of who was speaking, with what authority, and how the answers to these questions were to be known. Was the source of an author’s authority historicity, moral earnestness, congruence with an alleged truth, or authorial intention and sincerity? Examples from this period of genre anarchy illustrate

The Book of Abraham  197 the chaotic strategies with which authors of the early nineteenth century and decades following struggled to reposition themselves as arbiters of the Good and the True in a newly crowded and disorganized discursive universe. In the mad scramble for position and influence and in the rush to appropriate literary media to the religious wars and moral crusades of the era, fairly remarkable consequences ensued. For instance, gothic horror merged with Protestant polemic to give birth to the anti-​Catholic novel. Puritan captivity narratives merged with the anti-​Mormon crusade to produce a new subgenre of sexual bondage novels. Sentimentality merged with abolitionism to beget Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But the conflation and confusion went much further. Truth claims, credibility, legitimacy, influence—​all were shaped and conditioned by perceived rules governing the particular literary forms in which narrative authority was grounded. But never has the world witnessed the proliferation of genre and media that characterized the early and middle nineteenth century. Consequently, narrative authority, or the degree of belief a given text commanded, became increasingly unclear. As a result, many of the era’s works grounded their appeal to authority in ways that today would be seen as dishonest, irresponsible, implausible, and self-​contradictory. In this new world, authentic sentiment and moral fervor, not credentials or documentary evidence, became the supreme ground of moral authority.367 When Orestes Brownson published The Spirit-​Rapper, his Faustian morality tale opposing spiritualism, he gave expression to this new phenomenon: “if the critics undertake to determine, by any recognized rules of art, to what class of literary productions the following unpretending work belongs, I think they will be sorely puzzled. . . . I am puzzled myself to say what it is. It is not a novel; it is not a romance; it is not a biography of a real individual; it is not a dissertation, an essay, or a regular treatise.”368 Moral earnestness has clearly displaced formal criteria here in grounding narrative authority. The scramble for new labels and categories of demarcation is only one sign of this eclipse of the conventional rules that had guided discourse. In the case of a Brownson, an author could subtitle his work “An Autobiography” while simultaneously claiming that it was not “a biography of a real individual.” George Lippard chose the popular “memoir” label even though his Memoirs of a Preacher was not even written in the first person. The author of the harshly anti-​Mormon Father Solon; or the Helper Helped attempted in his preface to forestall criticism that his account was clearly fictitious: “why term such books ‘novels’? Are they merely light and strange? Are they love and passion pictures, designed only to please and

198  The Pearl of Greatest Price entertain? . . . Should not such works be designated according to their intention and effects? Are they not dramatic parables—​life lessons in portrayal? Certainly they are not novels.”369 That such authors were taken at their word is evident from the fact that legislative debates such as the one surrounding the Cullom Bill (legislation designed to strip the Utah Territory of self-​governance) was informed by “facts” garnered from “reliable sources” that turn out, on inspection, to be various specimens of these novelized exposés. Senator Aaron Harrison Cragin, in his testimony of 18 May 1870, quoted liberally from largely fanciful works by John Hyde (Mormonism:  Its Leaders and Designs, 1857), Catherine Waite (The Mormon Prophet and His Harem, 1866), and numerous others he did not name (“I have read of some women . . . ”) to impute to the Mormons’ corruption, licentiousness, and theft by fraud of “hundreds and thousands of dollars.” Only his most bizarre charges, like human sacrifice, found no novelistic support.370 The Fate of Madame La Tour vividly demonstrates the utter mayhem that resulted from this new discursive landscape with no familiar boundaries. Though this book was a novelized account of life in Utah, its format included an appendix with “sworn affidavits” alleging the discovery of a burial pit containing “rawhide thongs” and the battered skulls of several children.371 Other “affidavits” imputed to the Mormons a variety of equally grisly crimes and atrocities perpetrated against rebellious members. Frequently these “affidavits” had a rather dubious twist to them. In 1872, for instance, citizens opposed to Utah’s petition for statehood filed with Congress a “Memorial . . . Against the admission of that Territory as a State.” Dozens of affidavits were included, alleging all manner of crime and criminality to the Mormons. But these sworn affidavits invoked popular novels as material evidence. (“Affiant further says that he has read ‘Bill Hickman, the Danite Chief ’s Book,’ and he believes it true; also, Beadle’s book, and he believes that true: also Mrs. Ward’s book, and he believes that true.”)372 We may wonder if such a reading list has the effect of substantiating or discrediting the force of the complaint, if the testimony is buttressed by or extracted from such accounts. Affidavits cited affidavits, memoirs cited affidavits, and affidavits cited memoirs. Dozens more examples of this genre anarchy could be given; these few examples convey some of the ways the radical reconstitution and renegotiation of genre, authority, testimony, history, and more were at play in shaping the meaning of authorial acts in the nineteenth century. Anyone entering on

The Book of Abraham  199 this bedlam of voices would be hard-​pressed to stake out an authoritative voice amid the din. In such a context, the strictures governing the memoirist, the chronicler, the biographer, the essayist, and the historian have become interchangeable. Truth, sincerity, morality, and genuineness are in many cases still paramount, just the same. As the first modern autobiographer proclaimed in his own self-​portrait, to the astonishment of sensibilities like ours in the twenty-​ first century, “the profession of veracity I imposed on myself is rather built on sentiments of uprightness and equity than the reality of things, and . . . in practice I have rather followed the natural dictates of my conscience than abstract notions of what was true or false.”373 In light of the foregoing array of examples, it is clear that writers of the era were not operating under the same constraints that govern writing today. As E. E. Evans-​Pritchard reported in his famous study of the Nuer, “if I speak of ‘spear’ or ‘cow’ everybody will have pretty much the same idea of what I speak of, but this is not so when I speak of ‘Spirit,’ ‘soul,’ ‘sin,’ and so forth.”374 Religion is not the only domain where crucial concepts are not susceptible of the simple substitution of one language, or one culture or epoch, for another. Given the complex linguistic and literary environment of the early nineteenth century, a word with the potency and high stakes of “translation” cannot be adequately circumscribed within the confines of Noah Webster’s 1828 definition: “to render into another language.”375 In the same entry, however, Webster also gave another, idiosyncratic usage of the term “translation”: “the removal of a person to heaven without subjecting him to death.” Smith himself used the term in such a way, as when he said that “Enoch was translated that he should not see death.”376 That Smith called such translation “a power which belongs to the priesthood,” just like his calling as seer—​a power to make ancient documents speak from the dust—​hints at an expansiveness to his conception of translation that we cannot fully fathom. But in both cases, rescuing a prophet like Enoch or Moses from mortal corruption or recuperating a temple theology from the fragmentary remains of a vanished civilization, one is giving new life to that which was on the cusp of oblivion. That may be the single most potent key to Smith’s understanding of his divinely commissioned seership. Exactly what was entailed in his understanding and practice of translation was a mystery to his contemporaries, perhaps even to himself. The four ideas here surveyed—​translation as exploded meaning of a hieroglyph’s concision, translation as bricolage, and translation as displacing the audience into the

200  The Pearl of Greatest Price realm of the divine, and the nineteenth-​century discursive anarchy in which authorship and authority acquire new and contradictory meanings—​expand the semantic possibilities of this term that is so central to an understanding of Joseph Smith and his religious legacy. In this ampler field of the translator’s task, Smith’s project assumed a shape specific to his larger quest. “I have the truth & I am at the defiance of the world to contradict,” he said weeks before his death.377 He may have provided a clue to his thinking when he differentiated the content from the source of his teachings, the package from the wrappings, and the effect from the prompt, asking: “why do not my enemies strike a blow at the doctrine, they cannot do it, it is truth.” There was a “power of truth in the doctrines which I have been an instrument in the hands of God of presenting.”378 Conventional modes of appraisal or verification were simply irrelevant. “Will 1000 testimonies destroy your knowledge of a fact? No.”379 This was the case especially when it came to his revelations and translations, for the gift of seership and translation seemed to carry its own rules. Reading against an intellectual and cultural universe like the one we have here sketched in brief, one can understand why, in the words of one scholar of Smith’s corpus, viewing his Egyptian work through “any standard linguistic metric is beside the point.”380 If Smith was not proceeding using the tools and methods of a typical translator simply rendering ancient words into their modern equivalent, how did he proceed? One point immediately emerges from the paper trail left behind from his Book of Abraham work—​and that is that something quite unlike the process of translating the Book of Mormon was taking place. Several essential differences stand out. With the Book of Mormon, Smith never pretended or aspired to do more than channel an inspired translation of the gold plates—​ first through the medium of the Urim and Thummim, then through his seer stone, and then without the apparent aid of any instrument. He proclaimed the work a product of prophetic authority achieved “by the gift and power of God.”381 The plates themselves were holy relics retrieved under angelic guidance and returned to a heavenly messenger, and not subject to public scrutiny or subsequent study by himself or others. Finally, the Book of Mormon manuscript, as the printer attested, was a single, unmodified stream of text produced orally and spontaneously, without any aids or revisions (“closely written and legible, but not a punctuation mark from beginning to end”).382 By the time Smith acquired the Egyptian papyri, by contrast, he was turning to the study of ancient languages and obtained the papyri as an ancient, historical artifact which he publicly displayed; he then spent years trying not

The Book of Abraham  201 only to decipher their content but also to build therefrom a working knowledge of Egyptian. The Book of Abraham manuscripts, unlike their Book of Mormon counterpart, bear clear evidence of reworking, revising, and editing. This was no spontaneous channeling of a finished product by any stretch. Smith’s tools were not that of the traditional linguist, but his approach was one that combined prolonged and collaborative intellectual effort along with “direct inspiration of Heaven,” as one transcriber noted.383 He did not refer to this work as something he was called of God to do or as “a branch of his calling,” as was true of his other translations. Neither did he, as in those other cases, claim scriptural status for the resulting product. Canonization was never likely in his conceiving, either. What the surviving documents reveal is a remarkably complex, multilayered grammar that Smith constructed en route to deciphering the hieroglyphics. His system has no basis in linguistics and does not pass muster with any Egyptologist; but the considerable labor and sheer inventiveness evident in the project provide a remarkable window into his methodology and imagination. Regarding the Book of Mormon, some believers and nonbelievers alike have sought to find alternatives to Smith’s designation as either translator of authentic ancient records or conniving con man. In the believer category, Blake Ostler, for instance, posits that Smith likely found something ancient in his upstate New York environs but that the activity of inspired translation renders the relationship between an original artifact and a finished text of the Book of Mormon difficult to discern.384 Religious scholar Ann Taves disbelieves the reality of Smith’s angels and pre-​Christian gold plates. However, finding precedent in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the consecration of holy oil, and a Book of Mormon story wherein God sacralizes common stones selected by one “brother of Jared,” she hypothesizes that Smith similarly reconstituted a material object into holy relics that he then transformed into sacred history.385 The Book of Mormon presents its own unique set of circumstances and challenges, which are not this discussion’s immediate concern.386 However, Ostler and Taves exemplify a shift in emphasis that is especially instructive here. In Taves’s words, “viewing Smith in this way takes seriously his claim to have been a seer and allows us to consider the seer alongside the artist as the creator of things that, in Heidegger’s sense open up new worlds.”387 More than a century has elapsed since the New  York Times declared: “Museum Walls Proclaim Fraud of Mormon Prophet.”388 It is impossible to know how many church members’ defections have ensued from

202  The Pearl of Greatest Price the Book of Abraham controversies, but it is safe to say that the church’s obituary has been prematurely announced more than once—​and that the LDS faithful will continue to derive meaning and inspiration from the Book of Abraham, regardless of the Egyptological storms. The “Egypticity” of its themes and motifs; the belief in a missing source papyrus; the recasting of the Book of Abraham as “inspired Pseudepigrapha”; comparisons with Jewish Midrash;389 a more expansive understanding of Smith’s role as seer and translator—​these and other adjustments to nineteenth-​century paradigms have offered millions of believers a way forward, relying on faith without forsaking reasonableness.

Notes 1. 2 Nephi 3:6–​7. 2. 1 Samuel 9:9. 3. Mosiah 8:13–​17. 4. 1 Nephi 10:17; 1835 D&C 82:1 (D&C 93:1). 5. Initially, Smith used the term to refer to the object buried with the plates, which he described as two crystals held in a figure-​8-​shaped frame. Later he used the term to refer to a seer stone that became his preferred medium of translating. See Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 22–​24, 34–​35.While most scholars follow the Septuagint’s translation “lights and perfections” for the Hebrew terms Urim and Thummim, the idea is not universally accepted. John Tvedtnes, for example, sees in them an Egyptian origin: “iri, ‘do, act, achieve, perform’ and the negative particle, tm, ‘don’t.’ We can thus read, very simply, ‘DOs and DON’Ts.’ ” John A. Tvedtnes, “Egyptian Etymologies for Biblical Religious Paraphernalia,” in Sarah I. Groll, ed., Egyptological Studies, Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 28 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 1982), 219. 6. Exodus 28:30. 7. Numbers 27:21. 8. 1 Samuel 28:6. 9. Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with a Commentary and Critical Notes, 3 vols. (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1837), 1:446. 10. Cornelius Van Dam, The Urim and Thummim: A Means of Revelation in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 229–​230. 11. The Boston Investigator published Orson Pratt’s claim that the Book of Mormon’s interpretation was “made known . . . through the Urim and Thummim”; “Questions Proposed to the Mormonite Preachers,” 10 August 1832, 2; reference courtesy of Robin Jensen (personal communication). “The book of Mormon,  .  .  .  was translated by the gift and power of God, by an unlearned man, through the aid of a pair of

The Book of Abraham  203 Interpreters, or spectacles—​(known, perhaps, in ancient days as Teraphim, or Urim and Thummim)”; EMS 1.8 (January 1833): 58. Once Smith began to employ the term, he apparently used it to refer to both the interpreters and the seer stone. 12. History Drafts, 1838–​circa 1841, JSP-​H1, 223. 13. The closest parallel at the time would have been a reference in the Apocrypha (still included in many editions of the King James Bible in Joseph’s Smith’s era). There, we read, a tribute to Simon, son of Mattathias, and his sons was inscribed on “tables of brass” and placed within the precincts of the temple (1 Maccabees 14; see also 8:22). Of course, numerous examples of ancient writings on metal plates have emerged since 1827. See, in this regard, the overview by H. Curtis Wright, “Ancient Burials of Metal Documents in Stone Boxes,” in By Study and Also by Faith: Essays in Honor of Hugh W. Nibley, ed. John M. Lundquist and Stephen D. Ricks, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1990), 2:273–​334. 14. Scot Facer Proctor and Maurine Jensen Proctor, eds., The Revised and Enhanced History of Joseph Smith by His Mother (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996), 139. 15. Dean Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” BYU Studies 17.1 (Autumn 1976): 33. 16. BC 8:1 (D&C 9:2). The promise is that Oliver will “assist to translate,” indicating Smith will be, again, doing the work of seership. 17. William Mulder, “‘Essential Gestures’: Craft and Calling in Contemporary Mormon Letters,” Weber Studies 10.3 (Fall 1993): 7. 18. Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean C. Jessee, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2002), 449. 19. Matthew  13:52. 20. To William W. Phelps, 27 November 1832, in Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 287. 21. JSNT, 608 (Moses 6:5–​6). 22. Zephaniah  3:9. 23. JSNT, 608 (Moses 6:7). 24. George Steiner, “The Scandal of Revelation,” in Keith E. Yandell, ed., Faith and Narrative (New York: Oxford, 2001), 85. 25. W. D. Davies, “Reflections on the Mormon ‘Canon,’” Harvard Theological Review 79 (January 1986): 64n. 26. JSNT, 612, 608 (Moses 6:46, 6). 27. JSP-​R&T 265. 28. MS 25.28 (11 July 1863): 439. 29. Presendia Kimball biography, cited in Woman’s Exponent 12.1 (1 June 1883):  2; Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “The Eliza Enigma,” Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 38. 30. James Moody, The Evidence of Christianity Contained in the Hebrew Words Aleim and Berit (London: E. Withers, 1752), 92. Hutchinson’s argument can be found in John Hutchinson, A Summary of His Discoveries in Philosophy and Divinity (London: E. Withers, 1755), 22. For another example of a proponent of his reading, claiming that “Hebrew was the language of Paradise,” see Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (London: T. Becket and P. A. Dehondt, and T. Cadell, 1770), 37. 31. Joseph Smith et al. to Henrietta Raphael Seixas, 13 February 1836, in JSP-​D5, 159.

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32. From Joseph Smith’s letter to newspaper editor John Wentworth, published in T&S 3.9 (1 March 1842): 707. 33. 1 Nephi 1:2. 34. Mormon 9:32. 35. Orson Pratt, An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hughes, 1840), 1. 36. See Greppo, J. G. H., Essay on the Hieroglyphic System of M. Champollion, Jun. And on the Advantages which it Offers to Sacred Criticism, translated from the French by Isaac Stuart (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), 114. 37. 1 Nephi 2:4–1 5. 38. For a survey of how Egyptomania became popularized see Bob Brier, Egyptomania:  Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs (New  York:  St. Martins, 2013). For an examination of Egyptomania in terms of its historical context of colonialism and race in the nineteenth century see Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 39. S. J. Wolfe, Mummies in Nineteenth Century America (Jefferson, NC:  McFarland, 2009), 7–34. 40. Wolfe, Mummies, 141, 173–200. 41. Wolfe, Mummies, 35. 42. According to H. Donl Peterson, The Story of the Book of Abraham:  Mummies, Manuscripts, and Mormonism (Salt Lake City :  Deseret Book Company, 1995), 84, “Michael H. Chandler had the eleven mummies in his possession in Philadelphia and was displaying them by April 3, 1833.” Peterson is here following a late 1835 letter, printed in M&A 2.3 (December 1835):  234–237, in which Oliver Cowdery wrote to William Frye that Lebolo willed his collection to his nephew Chandler, who supposedly took possession of the Egyptian artifacts in Philadelphia in 1833. However, Peterson was never able to make a family connection between Lebolo and Chandler or find any evidence to place Chandler in Philadelphia. “Mysteries of the Mummies: An Update on the Joseph Smith Collection,” interview with Brian L.  Smith by Philip R. Webb, Religious Studies Center Newsletter 20.2 (2005): 3. 43. Oliver Cowdery to William Frye, 23 December 1835, in Oliver Cowdery Letterbook, 113, CHL. 44. Peterson, Story of the Book of Abraham, 45. 45. In an 1824 letter, a specific Egyptian artifact collection is mentioned that Lebolo is interested in taking to America. The letter also suggests that the collection is worth 60,000 francs but would probably be sold for twice that amount in America. Although this may not be the actual collection that included the mummies and papyri that found their way to Kirtland, Ohio, it is important to see that money was a motivating factor in moving these artifacts from Europe to the United States. See Bernardino Drovetti to Pierre Balthalon, 7 February 1824, in Lettres de Bernardino Drovetti, consul de France, Alexandrie (1803–1830), présentées et commentées par Sylvie Guichard (Paris:  Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003), 459. See also Peterson, Story of the Book of Abraham, 78–79.

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46. Smith, “Mysteries of the Mummies,” 3; Peterson, Story of the Book of Abraham, 86–89. 47. Peterson believed that “five of the original mummies were sold in Philadelphia and Baltimore areas within the first four months after Chandler obtained them. Between September 1833, when he left Harrisburg, and February 1835, he sold two others, for that is the number he had when we next pick up his trail in Hudson, Ohio.” Story of the Book of Abraham, 91. Although Chandler cannot be connected to the exhibitions in any of the eastern states, Brian Smith agrees that by the time the mummies reached Baltimore on 20 July 1833 “there were six mummies left in the collection.” Joseph Smith then locates another exhibition of the mummies in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on 9 September 1833, and yet another during October and November 1833, in Pittsburgh. At the end of 1835 and the beginning of 1834, the mummies were displayed in the Western Museum in Cincinnati and then in the Louisville Museum in Kentucky on 10 January 1834. It appears that two of the six mummies stayed behind in Kentucky, having been sold to Junius Brutus Booth (father of John Wilkes Booth). The final four mummies were displayed in New Orleans in April and May 1834. The whereabouts of the mummies from May 1834 until February 1835 (Ohio) remains unknown at present. For more details, see Smith, “Mysteries of the Mummies,” 2–4. 48. Oliver Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records,” M&A 2.3 (December 1835): 234. 49. Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records,” 234–235. 50. Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine 3.3 (July 1884): 283. 51. Orson Pratt, “The Book of Mormon . . . ,” JD, 20:65. 52. Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records,” 235. 53. According to Orson Pratt, “Chandler told [Smith] that he would not sell the writings, unless he could sell the mummies, for it would detract from the curiosity of the exhibition.” “The Book of Mormon . . . ,” JD, 20:65. 54. Warren Foote, Autobiography of Warren Foote, 3 vols. (Mesa, AZ: Dale Arnold Foote, 1977), 1:8. 55. Wilford Woodruff Journal, ed. Scott G. Kenney (Salt Lake City : Signature, 1983), 1:107. 56. BC 22:1 (D&C 21:1); 1835 D&C 3:42 (D&C 107:92). 57. Levi Richards Journal, cited in Dean C. Jessee, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” in Opening the Heavens:  Accounts of Divine Manifestations 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 2005), 24. 58. Alma 13:7. 59. THBA, 225–226 (Abraham 1:3). 60. THBA, 32 (Abraham 2:11). 61. JSNT, 631–632 JSTB Genesis 9:21). 62. JSNT, 603 (Moses 5:11). 63. Augustine, Confessions, 4.12, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 218. 64. 21 January 1844. Front of Robert D. Foster’s Hotel, WJS, 318. 65. See Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), chaps. 4 and 7 especially. 66. Levenson, Sinai and Zion, 123.

206  The Pearl of Greatest Price 67. Brigham Henry Roberts, “Of the Unity of God,” in The Mormon Doctrine of Deity: The Roberts-​Van Der Donckt Discussion (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1903), 137–​ 147, mentions the first two explanations. A  modern commentary mentions the “plural of majesty” as “without parallel,” finding its divine council antecedents more plausible:  New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck et  al. (Nashville:  Abingdon, 1994), 1:345. 68. THBA, 40 (Abraham 4:26–​27). 69. Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed (New York: HarperOne, 2003),  33–​37. 70. JSNT, 598 (Moses 3:5). See Genesis 2:5. 71. THBA, 37 (Abraham 3:22–​23). 72. THBA, 36 (Abraham 3:18). 73. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4. 74. S. B. Parker, “Council,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (New York: Brill, 1995), 204–​208. 75. Stan Larson, “The King Follett Discourse: A Newly Amalgamated Text,” BYU Studies 18.2 (Winter 1978), 202. 76. THBA, 37 (Abraham 3:24). 77. THBA, 37 (Abraham 3:27). 78. JSNT, 599 (Moses 4:1). 79. THBA, 37 (Abraham 3:28). 80. William Clayton, L. John Nuttall Journal, JSP-​D7, 495. 81. Franklin D. Richards, “Scriptural Items,” WJS, 215. 82. THBA, 37 (Abraham 4:26, 3:25–​26). 83. James Burgess Notebook, WJS, 247. 84. Hugh Nibley is here paraphrasing Yigael Yadin’s discussion in The Temple Scroll (New York: Random House, 1985), 112–​115, cited in Nibley, Temple and Cosmos (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1992), 52. 85. Midrash Tanhuma Pekude 3.11, in Avrohom Davis, trans., The Metsudah Midrash Tanchuma: Shemos II (New York: Judaica Press, 2004), vol. 2, pt. 2, 402. 86. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Anchor, 2010), 105. 87. THBA, 36 (Abraham 3:18). 88. 1835 D&C 82:5 (D&C 93:33). 89. THBA, 37 (Abraham 3:24). 90. THBA, 39 (Abraham 4:1). 91. Larson, “King Follett,” 203. 92. Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 224, in The Ante-​Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 3:202. 93. Luis Ladaria, S.J., “The Question of Validity of Baptism Conferred in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints,” L’Osservatore Romano, 1 August 2001, 4. In Gerald E. Smith, Schooling the Prophet: How the Book of Mormon Influenced Joseph Smith and

The Book of Abraham  207 the Early Restoration (Provo, UT:  Neal A.  Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2015), 118. 94. THBA, 40, 43 (Abraham 4:26; 5:2–​3, 5). 95. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.10.3–​4 (Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-​Nicene Fathers, 1:370). 96. The expression “infinite qualitative divide” is Soren Kierkegaard’s: Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 459. 97. JSP-​R4, 721 (Abraham 4:8, 13, 19, etc.). 98. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830–​33). 99. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: Norton, 1999), 178–​179. 100. W. W. Phelps, “The Answer,” Times and Seasons 5.24 (1 January 1845): 758. 101. T&S 3.10 (15 March 1842): 721 (Abraham 4:7–​12, Pearl of Great Price). 102. Orson Pratt, Great First Cause, or the Self-​Moving Forces of the Universe, 10, in A Series of Pamphlets (Liverpool: R. James, 1851). 103. “Powers of Nature,” Seer 2.3 (March 1854): 226. 104. John A. Widtsoe, Joseph Smith as Scientist (Salt Lake City:  Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations, 1908), 62–​65. 105. Ralph V. Chamberlin, Life and Philosophy of W.  H. Chamberlin (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1925), 320, cited in Steven L. Peck, Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2015), 61–​62. 106. Peck, Evolving Faith, 62. 107. 1835 D&C 4:1 (D&C 84:6–​16). 108. An Evangelist, WJS, 6. 109. “Appendix 5, Document 1.  Blessing to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith, c.  15 and 28 September 1835,” p.  9, The Joseph Smith Papers, http://​www. josephsmithpapers.org/​paper-​summary/​appendix-​5-​document-​1-​blessing-​to-​ joseph-​smith-​sr-​and-​lucy-​mack-​smith-​b etween-​circa-​15-​and-​28-​s eptember-​ 1835/​1. 110. 1835 D&C 3:18 (D&C 107:40). 111. Alma Allred, “Traditions of Their Fathers,” in Black and Mormon, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 46. 112. MHC B-​1, 595. 113. JSP-​R4, 309 (Abraham 1:2–​3). 114. JSP-​D7, 95. For examples of such blessings given by Smith Sr. see Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, comp. H. Michael Marquardt (Salt Lake City: Smith-​Pettit Foundation, 2007). 115. CDBY, 5:3131. 116. CDBY, 1:242. 117. JSP-​R4, 313 (Abraham 2:11); Kathleen Flake, “Learning by Study, Even Religious Studies,” lecture, first delivered at Brigham Young University, 21 October 2017, adapted in Neal A.  Maxwell Institute for Religions Scholarship, Annual Report (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2018). 118. This revelation was published in the 1876 D&C (D&C 132:19, 30).

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119. 10 March 1844. At Temple, WJS, 329; Franklin D.  Richards “Scriptural Items,” WJS, 245. 120. Genesis 16:3. 121. See for instance CDBY, 2:992. 122. Kathleen Flake, “The Development of Early Latter-day Saint Marriage Rites, 1831–5 3,” Journal of Mormon History 41.1 (January 2015): 77–102. 123. This section was first canonized in the 1876 D&C (D&C 131:2). 124. B. H. Roberts, “Religious Faiths,” Improvement Era 1.11 (September 1898): 827–828. 125. Plato, Republic 10.617e, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1221. 126. JSP-R4, 319 (Abraham 3:23). 127. Genesis 9:25 (NRSV). See David Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 128. JSP-R4, 311 (Abraham 1:27). 129. “It remained for more careful scholars of a later century to point out that a more probable reading of the text was that the problem with Ham’s claim to the priesthood was not that he was cursed by race but by primogeniture. The biblical right to preside as a patriarch fell naturally to Shem, the firstborn of Noah, not Ham, being third-born.” W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color:  Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 205–206. See also Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 1981), 427–428. 130. JSP-R4, 311 (Abraham 1:23). 131. Orson Hyde, Speech of Elder Orson Hyde  .  .  . (Liverpool:  James and Woodburn, 1845), 30. 132. Parley Pratt, recorded in General Minutes, 25 April 1847, cited in Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 133. 133. 18 August 1900; Journal History of the Church, CHL; First Presidency Office Journal, in Minutes of the Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835–1951 (CD-ROM) (Salt Lake City : privately published, 2015). 134. In one presidency meeting, “President [John] Taylor said it seemed . . . in Brother Abel’s case; that he, having been ordained before the word of the Lord was fully understood, it was allowed to remain. The matter [was] then dropped”; 2 June 1879, L. John Nuttall, Diary, Minutes of the Apostles. 135. First Presidency to Milton H. Knudson, 13 January 1912, Minutes of the Apostles. Several similar examples are found in the minutes. 136. See Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 205. 137. “Race and the Priesthood,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/ essays?lang=eng. 138. Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 123. 139. Spencer J. Fluhman, “Secrets and the Making of Mormon Moments,” in Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics, ed. Matthew Avery Sutton and Darren Dochuk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 219. 140. 10 April 1842. Grove, WJS, 113–114.

The Book of Abraham  209 10 March 1844. At Temple, WJS, 329. Wilford Woodruff Journal, WJS, 346–​347. First canonized in 1876 (D&C 132:29, 32). JSP-​R4, 309 (Abraham 1:2). JSP-​R4, 315–​319 (Abraham 3). Facsimile 3, Pearl of Great Price. Facsimile 2, Pearl of Great Price. Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2005), xxvii. 149. History of Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​Day Saints: A Source-​ and Text-​Critical Edition, ed. Dan Vogel (Salt Lake City: Smith-​Pettit Foundation, 2015), 2:240. Vogel notes that Willard Richards inserted this entry into the MHC B-​1 (596), likely with the help of W. W. Phelps, on 15 September 1843 (see 2:240, note 22, and 1:lxxxix). Another mention of the Book of Joseph occurs in “Egyptian Mummies,” M&A 2.3 (December 1835). In this account, Oliver Cowdery says: “the inner end of the same roll (Joseph’s record), presents a representation of the judgment” (2:236). His further description identifies some of the figures in the scene as Jesus Christ, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and even Michael the archangel. Interestingly, Nauvoo Mormons provided Henry Caswall with a somewhat similar description when he viewed this same piece of papyrus in 1842. See Henry Caswall, The City of the Mormons, or, Three Days at Nauvoo (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1842), 23. These descriptions correspond to one of the ten fragments of papyri (Joseph Smith Papyri III) returned to the Mormon Church in 1967, which has been found to be a vignette of the Book of the Dead c­ hapter 125, the Egyptian judgment scene of the weighing of the heart. See Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri:  A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City:  Smith-​ Pettit Foundation, 2011), 205–​207. 150. Two mentions in July 1835 are in MHC B-​1, 595–​596. For 7 October, see JSP-​J1, 71; for 19, 20, 24, and 25 November 1835, see JSP-​J1, 107, 109, 110. 151. Minutes, 20 June 1840, JSP-​D7, 299. 152. 16 August 1841, WJS, 75. 153. The Papers of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean C. Jessee (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 2:358, note 1. 154. Some LDS scholars argue that these two translation sessions were merely revising the text that had been translated in 1835. John Gee notes: “while Joseph slightly revised the translation preparatory to its publication in 1842, there is no other evidence that he worked on the translation of the existing Book of Abraham after 1835”; A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri (Provo, UT:  Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2000), 4. More recently, Kerry Muhlestein and Megan Hansen have taken a similar position, stating that if these two days had been spent in translating the Book of Abraham Smith would have had to translate “frantically” to get it done. Muhlestein and Hansen posit that “it is reasonable to suppose that when Joseph said he was ‘translating’ between the first and second installments of publication, he was actually revising.” “‘The Work of Translating’: The Book of 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

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155. 156. 157. 158.

159. 160.

161.

162.

163. 164.

165. 166.

167.

168.

The Pearl of Greatest Price Abraham’s Translation Chronology,” in Let Us Reason Together: Essays in Honor of the Life’s Work of Robert L. Millet, ed. J. Spencer Fluhman and Brent L. Top (Salt Lake City :  Deseret, 2016), 142, 149. Those arguments seem unpersuasive in light of his journal entries to the contrary. 9 March 1842 and 10 March 1842, JSP-J2, 42. Editorial draft, c. 1 March 1842, [1], www.josephsmithpapers.org. “The Book of Abraham,” T&S 3.10 (15 March 1842): 719–722. The letter to Hunter was written on both 9 and 11 March. The passage regarding Smith being “very busily engaged in Translating” is in the part of the letter written on 9 March. Joseph Smith to Edward Hunter, 9 and 11 March 1842, [2], www. josephsmithpapers.org. Warsaw Signal [Illinois] 2.25 (10 September 1845). Devéria’s comparison and translation is in Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley, A Journey to Great-Salt-Lake City (London:  W. Jeffs, 1861), 2:540–546. Devéria’s critique was republished in 1873 by T. B. H. Stenhouse in The Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons (New  York:  D. Appleton and Company, 1873), 507–522. See L. A. Bertrand, Mémoires d’un Mormon (Paris: n.p., n.d.), 216–217. Bertrand had been a mission president for the LDS Church in France. See Richard D. McClellan, “President Louis Bertrand and the Closure of the French Mission, 1859–1864,” in Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History, Europe, ed. Donald Q. Cannon and Brent L. Top (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University, 2003), 23–46. For Remy and Brenchley see Rev. Franklin S. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator (Salt Lake City : Arrow Press, 1912), 19. George Reynolds, The Book of Abraham: Its Authenticity Established as a Divine and Ancient Record: With Copious References to Ancient and Modern Authorities (Salt Lake City, UT:  Deseret News, 1879), http://sacred-texts.com/mor/tboa/ chap09.htm. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator, 19. Dr. A. H. Sayce, Oxford, England, Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, London University, James H.  Breasted, Ph.D, University of Chicago, Dr.  Arthur C.  Mace, Assistant curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York, Dr.  John Peters, University of Pennsylvania, Rev. Prof. C.  A. B.  Mercer, Ph.D, Western Theological Seminary, Dr. Edward Meyer, University of Berlin, and Dr. Friedrich Freiheer Von Bissing, University of Munich. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator, 19. Janne M. Sjodahl, “A Final Word,” Improvement Era 16.11 (September 1913): 1100, cited in Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 2009), 55. New York Times, 29 December 1912, magazine sec., pt. 5: 1, 3; for p. 1 see https:// newspaperarchive.com/new-york-times-dec-29-1912-p-29/; for p.  3 see https:// newspaperarchive.com/new-york-times-dec-29-1912-p-31/. Robert C. Webb, “Joseph Smith, Jr., as Translator,” Improvement Era 16.5 (March 1913): 435.

The Book of Abraham  211 169. Junius W. Wells, “Scholars Disagree,” Improvement Era 16.4 February 1913): 341–​ 343. He quotes from correspondence with Budge, Woodward, and Joseph Cannon. 170. J. M. Sjodahl, “The Book of Abraham,” Improvement Era 16.4 (February 1913): 326–​327. 171. B. H. Roberts, “A Plea in Bar of Final Conclusion,” Improvement Era 16.4 (February 1913): 309–​325. 172. Roberts, “Plea,” 314. In another criticism Roberts juxtaposed Facsimile 2 against a somewhat similar hypocephalus from the Berlin Museum, thinking that they should be more identical, not cognizant of the fact that every hypocephalus is tailored to the individual (316–​320). He also was innocently unaware that significant parts of Facsimile 2 had been incorrectly restored from portions of other Joseph Smith Papyri, a fact that would not come to light until 1967. 173. John Henry Evans, “Bishop Spalding’s Jumps in the Logical Process,” Improvement Era 16.4 (February 1913): 345. 174. Wells, “Scholars Disagree,” 343. 175. See JSP-​R4, 8. 176. Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 154. 177. Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 152–​153. John Gee had expanded these distinctions in Gee, “Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 20.1 (2008): 113–​137. 178. See Nibley’s chapter “Facsimile 1: By the Numbers,” in Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 179–​374. 179. Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 174. 180. An LDS non-​ Egyptologist (but supported by Mormon Egyptologists) posits the notion that an Egyptian-​Jewish redactor (probably around 150 bc) adapted these illustrations to Abraham. “In this case, the facsimiles would have both an Egyptian context . . . and a Semitic context.” This could then explain why “Joseph’s explanations for the most part could relate to the Semitic context of the figures as illustrations of the Book of Abraham.” Kevin L. Barney, “The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources,” in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, ed. John Gee and Brian M. Hauglid (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2005), 114, 125. 181. John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2017), 150–​151. Gee is here referring to P. Leiden I 384, found in H. D. Betz et al., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation. Including the Demotic Texts (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1986). See 12: 474–​479. 182. See Edward Ashment, “The Use of Egyptian Magical Papyri to Authenticate the Book of Abraham,” http://​mit.irr.org/​use-​of-​egyptian-​magical-​papyri-​ authenticate-​book-​of-​abraham-​part-​1. “The fundamental issue,” Gee replies, “is whether or not the name Abraham appears in Egyptian papyri. To this the answer is without question in the affirmative.” Review of Edward H. Ashment, “The Use of Egyptian Magical Papyri to Authenticate the Book of Abraham: A Critical Review” (Salt Lake City: Resource Communications, 1993), 3.

212  The Pearl of Greatest Price 183. Gee, Introduction to the Book of Abraham, 151. See his response to the criticisms of Edward Ashment in “Abracadabra, Isaac and Jacob,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 7.1 (1995): 19–​84. 184. Stephen E. Thompson, “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 28.1 (Spring 1995):  144–​145. See Edward Ashment, “The Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham: A Reappraisal,” Sunstone Magazine (December 1979): 33–​48. 185. Facsimile 1, Figure 3, Pearl of Great Price. 186. Michael D. Rhodes, The Hor Book of Breathings: A Translation and Commentary (Provo, UT:  Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2002), 18. 187. Michael D. Rhodes, “Teaching the Book of Abraham Facsimiles,” Religious Educator 4.2 (2003): 115–​123. 188. The “assumption that the missing portion would show an erect phallus with a hawk above it representing the conception of Osiris is not likely since the figure on the couch is wearing a kilt.” Rhodes also disagrees that “the traces with the hand below are the wing of a bird,” noting that “the tip of the bird’s wing to the right makes it quite clear that it is the other hand of the deceased.” Rhodes, Hor Book of Breathings, 19. 189. Michael D. Rhodes, “Facsimiles from the Book of Abraham,” in The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:136–​137. 190. Michael Dennis Rhodes, “A Translation and Commentary of the Joseph Smith Hypocephalus,” BYU Studies 17.3 (1977): 259–​274. Rhodes later revised this publication in his “The Joseph Smith Hypocephalus . . . Twenty Years Later” (unpublished), in which he takes a firmer stance defending Smith’s explanations of Facsimile 2; https://​docs.google.com/​file/​d/​0B0LuDGvEmEgJM0g1dkxwRTlqME0/​edit. 191. Thompson, “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham,” 143. 192. Facsimile 2, Figures 1, 22, 23. 193. Rhodes, “Joseph Smith Hypocephalus,” 8. 194. Horapollo, Hieroglyphica 1.16, in Hugh Nibley, One Eternal Round (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2010), 244. 195. Rhodes, “Joseph Smith Hypocephalus,” 10. 196. Nibley, One Eternal Round, 282, citing Erik Hornung, Tal der Konige, 135. 197. Thompson, “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham,” 151–​152. 198. Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 19. 199. Rhodes, “Joseph Smith Hypocephalus,” 9. 200. See Nibley, One Eternal Round, 271. 201. Ashment, “Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham,” 40, 42. 202. Rhodes, “Joseph Smith Hypocephalus,” 12. Nibley’s last work, although somewhat outdated, was a 700-​page opus focusing on the Joseph Smith hypocephalus, seeking to demonstrate how Smith’s rendering of that image, together with his other Abrahamic materials, was congruent with ancient traditions unknown in Joseph Smith’s day. 203. Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 149. See also Rhodes, Hor Book of Breathings, 25.

The Book of Abraham  213 204. One exception might be John Gee, who believes that all verdicts on Facsimile 3 are premature: “most of what has been said about this facsimile is seriously wanting at best and highly erroneous at worst” because “the basic Egyptological work on Facsimile 3 has not been done, and much of the evidence lies neglected and unpublished in museums.” “Facsimile 3 and the Book of the Dead 125,” in Gee and Hauglid, Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, 95. 205. Cowdery, “Egyptian Mummies—​Ancient Records,” 234. 206. Friends’ Weekly Intelligencer (3 October 1846): 211. 207. The Metropolitan Museum noted its acquisition of the papyri that were “once the property of . . . Joseph Smith” in a 1948 publication, and Klaus Baer saw photographs of them in 1963. See Gee, “Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri,” 115. 208. “Colored Photographs of Egyptian Papyri,” Improvement Era 71.2 (February 1968): 40  (a–​i). 209. See John Gee, introduction to Approach to the Book of Abraham, xxv; Marc Coenen, “The Ownership and Dating of Certain Joseph Smith Papyri,” in Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 63. 210. In the T&S version of the Book of Abraham, the preface reads: “A Translation Of some ancient records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catecombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.” Interestingly, the phrase “purporting to be” was dropped when the 1878 edition was revised. See JSP-​R4, 309. 211. Editorial draft, c. 1 March 1842, [1]‌. 212. Stephen O. Smoot, “‘By His Own Hand, upon Papyrus’: Another Look,” Interpreter, 14 November 2013. https://​interpreterfoundation.org/​by-​his-​own-​hand-​upon-​ papyrus-​another-​look/​. 213. “A Glance at the Mormons,” Alexandria (VA) Gazette, 11 July 1840, 2. For similar accounts see Henry Caswall, The City of the Mormons: or, Three Days in Nauvoo, in 1842. (London Rivington, 1843), 22–​23; and Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past from the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1883), 386. 214. Klaus Baer, “The Breathing Permit of Hor: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham,” Dialogue 3.3 (Autumn 1968): 127. 215. Baer, “Breathing Permit,” 130–​132. 216. Kerry Muhlestein, “The Explanation-​Defying Book of Abraham,” in A Reason for Faith, ed. Laura Hales (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2016), 82. 217. Baer, “Breathing Permit,” 133. 218. “Understanding Mormon Disbelief,” http://​www.whymormonsquestion.org/​wp-​ content/​uploads/​2012/​05/​Survey-​Results_​Understanding-​Mormon-​Disbelief-​ Mar20121.pdf. 219. The Fragment of Book of Breathing for Horus (Fragment-​A) was formerly known as Joseph Smith Papyri XI. This book will follow the designations set out in JSP-​R4. 220. Hugh Nibley, “Getting Ready to Begin, An Editorial,” BYU Studies 8.3 (Summer 1968): 249. 221. Hugh Nibley, address delivered at the University of Utah, 20 May 1968, reported in Salt Lake City Messenger 19 (June 1968): 3.

214

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222. Nibley, address, 20 May 1968, 3, 4. 223. Hugh Nibley, “As Things Stand at the Moment,” BYU Studies 9.1 (1968): 101. 224. For a critique, see Charles M. Larson, By His Own Hand upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri (Grand Rapids:  Institute for Religious Research, 1992), 116, 118 (emphasis in original). 225. Hugh Nibley, The Joseph Smith Papyri:  An Egyptian Endowment (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 1975), 1. 226. Nibley, Joseph Smith Papyri, 2 (emphasis in original). In citing this description, Nibley may not have been aware that the author was not Joseph Smith but Oliver Cowdery in a letter to William Frye in late 1835. Nibley was citing from Joseph Smith, Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols., ed. James Mulholland, et al. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1902–12; 2nd revised edition, 1951), 2:348. In a note to this entry B. H. Roberts provides the citation to the Cowdery letter. It is from M&A 2.3 (December 1835): 234. 227. M&A 2.3 (December 1835): 235. 228. Nibley, Joseph Smith Papyri, 3. 229. Michael D. Rhodes, “Why Doesn’t the Translation of the Egyptian Papyri Found in 1967 Match the Text of the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price?,” https:// www.lds.org/ensign/1988/07/i-have-a-question/why-doesnt-the-translation-ofthe-egyptian-papyri-found-in-1967-match-the-text-of-the-book-of-abraham-inthe-pearl-of-great-price?lang=eng. 230. Charlotte Haven to her Mother, 19 February 1843, printed in “A Girl’s Letters from Nauvoo,” Overland Monthly 16.96 (December 1890): 624. 231. Haven to her Mother, 624. Oliver Cowdery also refers to the serpent on legs. “Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records,” 236. 232. Jerusha W. Blanchard, “Reminiscences of the Granddaughter of Hyrum Smith,” Relief Society Magazine 9.1 (1922): 9. 233. Cited in Hugh Nibley, “The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: Phase One,” Dialogue 3.2 (1968): 101. 234. Gee, Introduction to the Book of Abraham, 84–85. To show the possibility that the Book of Abraham may have been on the missing papyri, John Gee has estimated that there may have been up to forty-one feet (1,250 centimeters) of the Hor papyri in the possession of Joseph Smith. See Gee, “Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri,” 121. However, Andrew W.  Cook and Christopher C.  Smith have calculated that the Hor papyrus was no longer than fifty-six centimeters (1.8 feet). “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hor,” Dialogue 43.4 (Winter 2010), 36. 235. For a bibliography see Louis Midgley, “Hugh Winder Nibley:  Bibliography and Register,” in Lundquist and Ricks, By Study and Also by Faith, 1:xv–lxxxvii. 236. The first five of these scholars contributed to Nibley’s festschrift, Lundquist and Ricks, By Study and Also by Faith. Evangelicals Carl Mosser and Paul Owen mention those names, as well as the now legendary MacRae remark, in “Mormon Apologetic, Scholarship and Evangelical Neglect:  Losing the Battle and Not Knowing It?,” Trinity Journal (Fall 1998): 184. 237. Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 581.

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238. Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 598. 239. Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 379 (emphasis in original). 240. Hugh W. Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 1988), 5:4. 241. Nibley, One Eternal Round, xiv–xv. 242. Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 25. 243. Bloom, American Religion, 98, 99, 101. 244. Stephen H. Webb, Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 253. 245. Austen Farrer, “Grete Clerk,” in Light on C.  S. Lewis, comp. Jocelyn Gibb (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1965), 26. 246. Gee, Introduction to the Book of Abraham, 86. 247. Nibley, One Eternal Round, 327, 78 (quoting Hornung, Der Agyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh, cols. 152–153, p. 42). 248. Stephen O. Smoot and Quinten Barney, “The Book of the Dead as a Temple Text and the Implications for the Book of Abraham,” in The Temple Ancient and Restored, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and Donald W. Parry (Salt Lake City :  Eborn Books, 2016), 183–209. 249. Smoot and Barney, “Book of the Dead,” 183, 187. 250. Foote, Autobiography, 1:8. 251. Nibley, Temple and Cosmos, 89. 252. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia:  Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 1:198–199. 253. Nibley, Temple and Cosmos, 317. 254. Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 1981), 8–25, reprinted as volume 14 of Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, 11–33. 255. Jubilees 39:6, cited in Nibley, Approach to the Book of Abraham, 9–10. 256. Nibley, Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 57. 257. JSP-R4, 309 (Abraham 1:15). 258. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 12. 259. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 13. He is quoting Edward H. Anderson and R. T. Haag, “Book of the Revelation of Abraham,” Improvement Era 1.10 (August 1898):  704– 714, 793–806. Anderson and Haag were translating from G. Nathanael Bonwetsch’s German version of the original. 260. The Book of Jasher (1840; reprint, Salt Lake City: Parry, 1887) was noted in T&S 1 (June 1840): 127. See discussion and excerpts in Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham, ed. John A. Tvedtnes, Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2001), 135–153. 261. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 21, citing Apocalypse of Abraham 21–22 and Abraham 3:22. 262. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 25, citing Apocalypse of Abraham 29 and Abraham 3:27. 263. Apocalypse of Abraham 12.10, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Garden City : Doubleday, 1983), 1:695.

216 264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275.

276.

277.

278. 279. 280.

281. 282.

The Pearl of Greatest Price JSP-R4, 315 (Abraham 3:2, 10, 12). Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 36. So argues Mathias Delcor, cited in Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 27. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 28. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 67. Hugh Nibley cites sources for the various estimates in “Dispensations and Axial Times,” in One Eternal Round, 64–65. “A facsimile from the Book of Abraham. No. 3. Explanation,” accompanying the text of Abraham 4, Pearl of Great Price. Ginzberg, Legends, 1:190. Ginzberg, Legends, 1:198. Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham, 7. Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 648–650. Wesley P.  Walters, Extra-Biblical Details in the “Book of Abraham” Compared with Parallels in Published Sources Available to Joseph Smith in Early 19th Century America. http://mit.irr.org/extra-biblical-details-in-book-of-abraham-comparedparallels-in-published-sources-available-joseph. See also the entry “Abram,” in A New Complete English Dictionary, ed. John Marchant et al. (London: J. Fuller, 1760). Douglas F. Salmon, “Parallelomania and the Study of Latter-day Scripture: Confirmation, Coincidence, or the Collective Unconscious?,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33.2 (Summer 2000):  131. For a rebuttal, see Jared Ludlow, a Berkeley-trained scholar specializing in Near Eastern religions, who argues that many of these Abrahamic traditions, though not appearing in texts contemporaneous with the Joseph Smith Papyri, may nonetheless be “authentic accounts of Abraham passed down through the generations and not solely creative additions by later writers.” See his “Abraham’s Visions of the Heavens,” in Gee and Hauglid, Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, 57–74. Kent P. Jackson, review of Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 1, Old Testament and Related Studies, BYU Studies 28.4 (October 1988): 115–116. In a review of the same book, Keith E. Norman lauds Nibley’s writings on social issues but struggles with his apologetics. “His glib freedom in wrenching hitherto unimagined insights and novel connections from ancient documents makes more methodological scholars cringe, including many who are equally devoted to Mormonism.” “Zeal in Quest of Knowledge,” Sunstone (March 1987): 33–34. E. Douglas Clark, foreword to Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, xxii–xxiii. Smith, Gospel Doctrine (Salt Lake City : Deseret News, 191), 38. Nibley, Temple and Cosmos, 82. Abraham 1:12–1 5; Kerry Muhlestein and John Gee, “An Egyptian Context for the Sacrifice of Abraham,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 20.2 (2011): 72. John Gee, “Has Olishem Been Discovered?,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 22.2 (2013): 104–107. John Gee, “Abraham and Idrimi,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 22.1 (2013): 38.

The Book of Abraham  217 283. J. M. Sjodahl, “The Book of Abraham,” Improvement Era 16.4 (February 1913): 326–​327. 284. The Abraham/​Egyptian Papers have been called the Kirtland Egyptian Papers since the 1970s. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers,” in Approach to the Book of Abraham, 502–​568. See also John Gee, “Joseph Smith and Ancient Egypt,” in Approaching Antiquity:  Joseph Smith and the Ancient World, ed. Lincoln H. Blumell, Matthew J. Grey, and Andrew H. Hedges (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2015), 427–​448; and Gee, Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri, 21–​25. Assuming that Smith had nothing to do with these papers, as some do, is problematic in light of the fact that one of the Egyptian alphabet manuscripts is in his handwriting. In addition, his journal entries for the last half of 1835 quite clearly refer to his involvement. 285. JSP-​R4, 55–​94. No Egyptologist finds any linguistic validity in the Abraham/​ Egyptian Papers, however imaginative and complex the evolving system appears to have been. 286. JSP-​R4,  27–​39. 287. JSP-​R4, 191–​137. 288. JSP-​R4, 245–​275. 289. JSP-​R4, 276–​284. 290. JSP-​R4,  50–​51. 291. Letter to the editor, Painesville Republican, 5 February 1838. 292. Wilford Woodruff Journal, 2:155. 293. Friends’ Weekly Intelligencer (Philadelphia), 3 October 1846, 211. 294. The two entries in MHC (B-​1, 595–​596) indicate that both the translation of the Book of Abraham and the creation of the alphabet documents occurred in July. Between October and November 1835, translation and Egyptian study took place as well (see entries in JSP-​J1: 67, 71, 76, 107, 109, and 110). For a cursory look at what parts of the Book of Abraham can be found in the Egyptian manuscripts, see appendix 2 in THBA, 225–​231. 295. See Christopher C. Smith, “The Dependence of Abraham 1:1–​3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 29 (2009): 38–​54. 296. There are many questions regarding the Book of Abraham and its relationship to the Abraham/​Egyptian Papers. Some of these questions are addressed in the Latter-​day Saint Church’s Gospel Topics essay titled “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham,” https://​www.lds.org/​topics/​translation-​and-​historicity-​of-​the-​book-​ of-​abraham?lang=eng. Although many observers have assumed that the papyri functioned as the literal source for the Book of Abraham, most of this research has not yet seriously considered the manuscript evidence as part of the translation process; see Kerry Muhlestein and Megan Hansen, “ ‘The Work of Translating,’ 139–​162. See also Gee, Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Much more work needs to be done to bring the manuscripts into the larger translation conversation. Some analyses of both the Abraham and Egyptian manuscripts appear in THBA and in Brian M. Hauglid, “The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian Project: ‘A Knowledge

218

297. 298. 299.

300. 301.

302.

303. 304.

305. 306. 307. 308. 309. 310.

311. 312.

The Pearl of Greatest Price of Hidden Languages,’ ” in Blumell, Grey, and Hedges, Approaching Antiquity, 473–511. See also Brian M. Hauglid, “Thoughts on the Book of Abraham,” in No Weapon Shall Prosper: New Light on Sensitive Issues, ed. Robert L. Millet (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 2011), 242–253. The quotation “study . . . out in [his] mind” is from BC 8:3 (D&C 9:8). Entry for 15 November 1843, An American Prophet’s Record:  The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith, ed. Scott H. Faulring (Salt Lake City : Signature, 1989), 427. For one hypothesis to this effect, specifically that the first three verses of Abraham 1 were “cobbled together” from the germinating dictionary, see Christopher C. Smith, “The Dependence of Abraham 1:1–3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 29 (2009): 38–54. Egyptian Alphabet—A, 5, in JSP-R4, 70–71 (see character 5.28). Book of Abraham Manuscript, c.  July–c. November 1835–C, 1, in JSP-R4, 219 (Abraham 1:2). For an in-depth study of the textual relationship between the Egyptian-language documents and the opening lines of the Book of Abraham, see Smith, “Dependence of Abraham 1:1–3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” 38–54. Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, c. July–c. November 1835, 5 (5th degree), 10 (4th degree), 14 (3rd degree), 18 (2nd degree), 21 (1st degree), in JSP-R4, 125 [1.15]. Book of Abraham Manuscript, c.  July–c. November 1835–C, 5, in JSP-R4, 227 (Abraham 1:23–24). Oliver Cowdery to William Frye, published in M&A 2.3 (December 1835):  236. Christopher C.  Smith and Don Bradley, “ ‘The Reckoning of Time’:  Toward a Production Chronology for the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers” (unpublished typescript, n.d.), 3 (copy in the author’s possession). The author expresses appreciation to Smith and Bradley for sharing their unpublished article. Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, c. July–c. November 1835, 26, JSP-R4, 167. Explanation of Facsimile 2, c.  15 March 1842, [1], in JSP-R4, 279 (Abraham, Facsimile 2, Figure 1). JSP-J1, 99. JSP-J1, 107. JSP-J1, 107. John Corrill, “Pride and Apostasy in Ohio,” in Among the Mormons:  Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers, ed. William Mulder and Russell Mortensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 87. James H. Eells to Br. Leavitt, Kirtland, Ohio, 1 April 1835, in Mulder, Among the Mormons, 88. William W. Phelps, [Kirtland, OH], to Sally Waterman Phelps, Liberty, Missouri, 26 May 1835, William W.  Phelps, Papers, BYU; William W.  Phelps, Kirtland, OH, to Sally Waterman Phelps, Liberty, Missouri, 20 July 1835, Journal History of the Church, CHL; Albert Brown to “Dear Parents,” 1 November 1835, Amos L. Underwood Correspondence, CHL; Oliver Cowdery, Kirtland, Ohio, to William

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313.

314. 315. 316. 317. 318.

319. 320. 321. 322. 323. 324. 325. 326. 327.

328.

329. 330. 331. 332. 333.

219

Frye, Lebanon, Illinois, 22 December 1835, in Oliver Cowdery, Letterbook, 71–74; Characters Copied by Oliver Cowdery, c. 1835–36, in JSP-D1, 361–365; Frederick G.  Williams, Characters, Revelations Collection, CHL; see also in JSP-D1, 363; Joseph Smith, Journal, 19 January 1836, in JSP- D1, 164; see also Joseph Smith, Journal, 21 November 1835 and 26 January 1836, in JSP-D1, 107–109, 173. All citations and identification of the six characters as part of the Abraham/Egyptian Papers are from JSP-D5, 82. Matthew J. Grey, interview with Laura Hales, LDS Perspectives Podcast, episode 50: Joseph Smith’s Study of Hebrew, http://www.ldsperspectives.com/wp-content/ uploads/2017/08/50LDSP-Josephs-Study-of-Hebrew.pdf. Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 449. Baer, “Breathing Permit,” 133. Richard L. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling:  A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder (New York: Knopf, 2005). Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham, https://www.lds.org/topics/ translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham?lang=eng. See, for example, Givens, By the Hand of Mormon; Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gerald Smith, Schooling the Prophet: How the Book of Mormon Influenced Joseph Smith and the Early Restoration (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2015). The epigraph to this section is from William White, Emanuel Swedenborg: His Life and Writings (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1867), 2:497–498. JSNT, 611 (Moses 6:36). T&S, 4.13 (15 May 1843): 201. “The Book of Jasher,” T&S 1.8 (June 1840): 127. JSP-D7, 299. JSP-D7, 345. T&S 2.14 (15 May 1841): 421. Matthew 13:52; “To the Elders of the Church,” M&A 2.3 (December 1835): 229. James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival; A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste (New York:  Manchester University Press, 1994). The quotation in the epigraph to this section is from Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” in Poems (London: Joseph Johnson, 1773), 133. Whitney Davis, review of James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival; A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste, American Historical Review 101.3 (June 1996): 810. Benjamin Penny, “Egyptology,” in Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93. Cited by Davis, review of Curl, Egyptomania, 810. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), paras. 225–226. Vico, New Science, para. 460. See his Laokoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766).

220  The Pearl of Greatest Price 334. Denis Diderot, “‘Lettre sur les sourds et muets,” in Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. J. Assezat, 20 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 1:369, translations mine. 335. See Samuel Morris Brown, “Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden,” Church History 78.1 (March 2009): 36–​40. Brown deftly demonstrates a wider nineteenth-​century context of Joseph Smith’s interest in connecting ancient Egyptian with the pure language of Adam in the Garden of Eden. 336. Diderot, “Lettre sur les sourds et muets,” 1:374. 337. David Duner, The Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg:  A Study in the Conceptual Metaphors of the Mechanistic World-​View (Lund, Sweden:  Springer, 2012), 123. 338. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger lngpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1965), 7:111, 137, 113. 339. Bishop Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses, cited in Edwin Paxton Hood, Swedenborg: A Biography and Exposition (London: Arthur Hall, 1854), 361. 340. Mormon 9:33. 341. Levi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 342. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–​294. 343. Levi-​Strauss, Savage Mind,  16–​17. 344. Levi-​Strauss, Savage Mind, 19. 345. Nibley, One Eternal Round, 587–​588. 346. Facsimile 2, Pearl of Great Price. 347. Levi-​Strauss, Savage Mind, 21. In this passage he is citing Franz Boas. 348. Levi-​Strauss, Savage Mind,  21–​22. 349. Levi-​Strauss, Savage Mind, 17. 350. Mosiah 18:1–​2. 351. Mosiah 17:4. 352. Mosiah 18:1. 353. Mosiah 25:6. 354. 1 Nephi 19:23–​24. 355. 2 Nephi 6:5. 356. Rachel Elior, The Three Temples:  On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 6. 357. Elior, Three Temples, 11. 358. David Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament:  Genesis-​Deuteronomy (Salt Lake City: Kofford Books, 2014), 171. 359. Bokovoy, Authoring the Old Testament, 172. 360. Robert Alter, “Sacred History and Prose Fiction,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature, ed. Richard Elliott Friedman (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1981), 8. 361. B. H. Roberts, “A Plea in Bar of Final Conclusion,” Improvement Era 16.4 (February 1913), 309–​325. 362. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 3rd ed.

The Book of Abraham

363. 364. 365. 366. 367. 368. 369. 370.

371. 372.

373. 374. 375. 376. 377. 378. 379. 380. 381.

382. 383.

384.

221

(New York:  Routledge, 2012), 43. The quotation in the epigraph to this section is from Adam Clarke, The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ . . . with a Commentary (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 3. Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods,” 46. Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods,” 49. Joseph Smith, from Liberty Jail, to the church at Quincy, Illinois, 20 March 1839, in Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 436. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 26. The most emphatic statement of this new orientation was William Wordsworth, appendix to Lyrical Ballads (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800). Orestes Brownson, The Spirit Rapper (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), v. De Los Lull, Father Solon; or the Helper Helped (New  York:  Wilbur B.  Ketcham, 1888), 3–4. Aaron Harrison Cragin, Speech of Hon. Aaron H.  Cragin, of New Hampshire, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, 18 May 1870 (Washington, DC: F. & J. Rives & Geo. A. Bailey, 1870). Mrs. A.  G. Paddock, The Fate of Madame La Tour; A  Tale of Great Salt Lake (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1881), 349–350. “Against the Admission of Utah as a State. Memorial of Citizens of Utah, Against the Admission of that Territory as a State,” Congressional Globe, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, 6 May 1872, 70, 61, 72, 79. J. J. Rousseau, The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau: with the Reveries of a Solitary Walker (London: J. Bew, 1783), 208–209. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), vi. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New  York:  S. Converse, 1828), s.v. “translation.” 5 October 1840, WJS, 41. Thomas Bullock Report, WJS, 354. 24 March 1844. At Temple Stand, WJS, 337. 6 August 1843. At Temple Stand, WJS, 237. Samuel Brown, “Joseph (Smith) in Egypt:  Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden,” Church History 78.1 (March 2009): 30. That expression appears frequently in early LDS literature describing Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon. See, for instance, the title page itself, as well as such sources as EMS 1.8 (January 1833): 58 and D&C 135:3 (dated 17 June 1844 and added to the 1835 D&C in that year). John H. Gilbert to James T. Cobb, 10 February 1879, in Early Mormon Documents, ed. Dan Vogel, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City : Signature, 1996), 2:522–523. Warren Parrish, letter to the editor, Painesville Telegraph, 15 February 1838. Parrish’s is the only contemporary, firsthand account of Smith’s translation method, and it gives no details other than the quoted expression. For one inventive possibility that does seek a middle ground, see Blake Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20.1 (Spring 1987): 66–123.

222  The Pearl of Greatest Price 385. Ann Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation:  Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates,” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 61.2 (2014): 182–​207. 386. For reasons too complex to enter into fully here, the bracketing of historicity in the case of the Book of Abraham—​itself difficult—​may be well-​nigh impossible in the case of the Book of Mormon. The figure of Moroni as the author of the text, who—​according to Smith—​appeared to him repeatedly as a resurrected being and affirmed his life as a pre-​Columbian Christian and his personal authorship of much of the Book of Mormon, renders such a move more problematic, as do numerous other factors. See Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 89–​116. 387. Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation,” 187. 388. New York Times, 29 December 1912, magazine sec., pt. 5: 1, 3; for p. 1 see https://​ newspaperarchive.com/​new-​york-​times-​dec-​29-​1912-​p-​29/​; for p.  3 see https://​ newspaperarchive.com/​new-​york-​times-​dec-​29-​1912-​p-​31/​. 389. See Anthony Hutchinson, “A Mormon Midrash?:  LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered,” Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1988): 11–​74.

3 “Owing to the Many Reports” Historicizing Mormonism

Recentering Joseph The first major exposition of Mormonism, Parley Pratt’s 1837 Voice of Warning, was the most potent evangelizing text that nineteenth-​century Mormon missionaries employed, outside the Book of Mormon itself. In 1870, dissident Edward Tullidge commented on its influence: “ask the people what brought them into the church, and you would hear from every direction Parley Pratt’s ‘Voice of Warning’ or ‘Orson Pratt’s Tracts,’ until it would almost seem to you that the Pratts created the church. Indeed the best part of Mormon theology has been derived to a great extent from them, and so it may be said that they also, to a great extent, originated Mormonism.”1 Yet, as noted, Pratt neglected to make mention of Smith in his first edition. Nowhere, in this volume of over 200 pages devoted to “the faith and doctrine of the Church of the Latter Day Saints,” was the founder of Mormonism even named—​an astonishing fact given that Smith’s preeminence in the church today extends to monuments, central positioning in missionary discussions, and hymnody. It was only after his brother Orson’s publication of Smith’s visionary accounts that Parley emended his text accordingly. But the fact that Mormonism’s first—​and most successful—​substantial introduction to the church neglected to mention Joseph Smith at all is hugely suggestive of a road not taken. Outside the New Testament canon itself, no Christian denomination has elevated its founder’s biography to scriptural status, and it is worth considering what this does and does not mean in the case of Mormonism. Given that so few Latter-​day Saints were familiar with Smith’s visionary experiences in the church’s first decade, and that no special status was accorded those narratives for the first half century and more of the church’s existence, they clearly were not essential to either a comprehension or acceptance of the gospel as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ. Why did Smith’s personal

224  The Pearl of Greatest Price encounters with Deity come to be seen as more germane to the truth claims of his religion than the spiritual experiences of Martin Luther or John Calvin or John Wesley were to the traditions they founded? The simplest answer is that Luther and Calvin and Wesley pointed their followers to the Bible as the ground of authority. Scripture, not personal experience or calling, was the basis of their religious enterprises. A World Council of Churches study locates additional or supplementary sources of ecclesiastical authority in reason (Anglican), the congregation (Baptist), or the Spirit (Independent).2 For George Fox, the inner light loomed large. But the Bible itself is the supreme source of ecclesiastical authority in Protestantism. The Church of Jesus Christ, by contrast, could be said to have begun with a pointed and emphatic rejection of sola scriptura. The entire possibility of a biblically based Christianity is rendered incoherent in Joseph Smith’s personal experience, which was his—​and his movement’s—​entire rationale for a newly revealed religion. As Smith recounts in his personal narrative, “teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passage of Scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question [of religious truth] by an appeal to the Bible.”3 What may appear a simple description of his frustrated search for scriptural direction becomes, in light of what follows, evidence of the utter failure of the grand Latter-​day Reformation project. The great turn from apostolic succession to biblically derived authority is effectively repudiated by Joseph Smith on the basis not of his personal experience alone but also of the historical record of Protestant fragmentation and endless schism. The Bible had proved insufficient. The original ground of apostolic authority would have to be reinstantiated, in Smith’s simple logic. Rather than locating his authority in scripture, then, Joseph Smith rooted his commission as prophet and translator in an angelic visitation and based his authority to restore a church on his ordination at the hands of heavenly messengers. In his first autobiographical narrative, he made this explicit: “the church of Christ . . . the Lord brought forth and established by his hand he [Joseph Smith] receiving . . . the holy Priesthood by the ministring of—​Aangels to administer the letter of the Gospel the Law and Commandments.” Thus were “the Kees of the Kingdom of God confered upon him.”4 Luther and Calvin and Wesley and Fox could fade into the background of their movements, leaving the evidentiary foundations of the theology they espoused intact. But because the Church of Jesus Christ took a decisive turn in the direction of an ordained rather than a biblical

Historicizing Mormonism  225 or spiritual authority (or congregational or rational), the claims to that authority became inseparable from the person in whom that authority was allegedly vested. Inescapably, then, it has proven well-​nigh impossible to separate, in the minds of critics and adherents alike, the message of the Restoration from the messenger. As Catholicism’s edifice of apostolic succession rests on scriptural affirmation of Christ’s personal bestowal of keys on Peter, so Mormonism’s foundations rest on a new scriptural affirmation of comparable keys delivered to Joseph Smith. Placing Smith’s visionary encounters at the very root of the church has also had the effect of recentering the principal object of faith and putting Smith’s life and legacy into equivalence with Moses’s and, seemingly, near equivalence with Christ’s. (Indeed, an LDS scripture places Smith second to “Jesus only” in effecting “the salvation of men in this world.”)5 Even so, Latter-​day Saints are certainly clear in their insistence that Smith was but a man and their worship is of the Savior alone. One consequence of Smith’s foundational role is that because the ground of his religious authority is traceable to alleged historical encounters in space and time occurring between him and heavenly messengers, the language of Latter-​day Saint testimony has come to be shaped more in terms of assent to intellectual propositions than as confession of spiritual transformation—​as in the Puritan or evangelical traditions. Church of Jesus Christ leaders have even advocated a witnessing template that gives priority to the truthfulness (i.e., historicity) of the Book of Mormon, or of Smith’s calling (i.e., historically specific appointment) as prophet, rather than to the spiritual rebirth occasioned by these discoveries.6 In addition to introducing Smith’s name into worship services via hymnody and explicitly ranking him next to Christ in salvific importance, Brigham Young went so far as to situate Smith as a gatekeeper of heaven.7 At the same time, as Christopher Blythe has chronicled, in the generation after Smith’s passing, Young—​otherwise Smith’s most enthusiastic celebrant—​had to dispel creeping heresies that would assign roles to him that ranged from supreme angel in the Midrashic hierarchy of seventy to an incarnate Holy Ghost, our Savior, even “our God.”8 Flake has argued that the elevation of Smith’s personal narrative to mythic stature took place in the context of the controversial Reed Smoot hearings, in part as a strategy to redirect unwelcome national attention that was increasingly riveted on congressional revelations of postmanifesto polygamy in Utah.9 That may be so, but the groundwork was laid long before, when a boy’s personal conversion experience became LDS scripture.

226  The Pearl of Greatest Price It is well established that Smith’s visionary encounter with Deity in 1820 was both typical of those experienced by many seekers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and something he seldom shared publicly. By 1760, for example, the Swedish mystic Swedenborg was widely known to have experienced multiple visions; not only was he visited by entities from beyond the veil, he was soon comfortable making repeated visits to beyond the veil himself, virtually at will. Closer to home and a few years later lived Jemima Wilkinson. While suffering a fever from typhus or some other malady, she experienced the first of several visions: “the heavens were open’d,” she later recorded, “and She saw two Archangels descending from the east, with golden crowns upon their heads, clothed in long white Robes, down to the feet; Bringing a sealed Pardon from the living God.”10 Closer to Smith’s visitation by Deity, as Donna Hill points out, was Lorenzo Dow’s experience. He had a dream-​vision of God and Jesus in 1791; Charles Finney and Elias Smith had visions of Christ preceding their ministries; John Samuel Taylor, a Palmyra neighbor of the Smiths, heard Christ call him to a public ministry in a dream; and in the same year that Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith, Asa Wild received one of several revelations confirming Smith’s information that all Christianity had gone astray.11 Richard Bushman has found over thirty-​two pamphlets relating personal visions in the period 1783 to 1815—​and those are just the published ones.12

The Story of a Story The textual history of the Joseph Smith story begins with a fragmentary allusion recorded on 10 April 1830. A revelation that Smith dictated declares that “after it truly was manifested unto this first elder, that he had received a remission of his sins, he was entangled again in the vanities of the world; But after repenting, and humbling himself sincerely, through faith, God ministered unto him by an holy angel, whose countenance was as lightning, and whose garments were pure and white above all other whiteness.”13 Here, in embryo, are the two episodes that later constitute the essential core of Joseph Smith’s spiritual odyssey leading to the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ: a visionary, redemptive encounter with God and the appearance of an angel charging Smith with the production of the Book of Mormon. It is telling—​and entirely to be expected—​that Smith’s religious journey begins with the experience of sin and forgiveness. Many denominational

Historicizing Mormonism  227 traditions have begun with the spiritual pilgrimage of a devout—​or merely anxious—​seeker. “My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no assurance that my merit would assuage him,” wrote Luther, in providing the spiritual backgrounds to his own work as a reformer.14 John Wesley, too, found his spiritual quest one of perpetual anxiety until a decisive moment when, he recorded, “I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”15 So, also, Joseph Smith recorded in his earliest autobiographical sketch of 1832 that he was concerned as a young boy “for the welfare of [his] immortal soul.”16 Oliver Cowdery, claiming Smith’s assistance for his 1834 narrative, wrote that Smith hungered for “that assurance which the Lord Jesus has so freely offered.”17 Religious revivalism in his upstate New York neighborhood exacerbated his anxieties. “I had become convicted of my sins,” he explained, “I felt to mourn for my . . . sins,” and he felt the Christianity of his day “had apostatized from the true and living faith.” In spite of a plethora of claimants to true Christianity, he found “no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Seeking guidance directly from God instead, he related that he “cried unto the Lord for mercy . . . and the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness. . . . A pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day came down from above and rested upon me.” Vision became revelatory encounter when he “saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying, Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee.” Two other pivotal communications ensue in which the Lord confirms to Smith his perception of a general apostasy: “none doeth good no not one they have turned aside from the gospel,” followed by a cryptic prophecy: a promise to “bring to pass that which hath been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Apostles.”18 Although Smith refined this narrative in subsequent years, four central themes are all present in this first version: personal spiritual turmoil, a quest for religious truth, divine assurance of a generalized Christian apostasy, and a promise of some kind of coming restoration. Virtually without a pause, Smith continues his story to include the next two developments that will be closely associated with this “first vision”: he admits to subsequently falling “into transgressions” in the years following his first vision and records that following renewed repentance, he was visited by “an angel of the Lord” who described engraved “plates of gold” written by “Maroni” that contained a

228  The Pearl of Greatest Price history of an ancient people.19 A few years after that visitation, Smith said, he secured the plates and the translation of the Book of Mormon got under way. The entirety of this first autobiographical account is under 2,000 words; the portion describing Smith’s first penitential prayer in the grove through Moroni’s visit is a scant 500. It is a bare-​bones account, with few details and even less reflection on the remarkable events related. The brevity and lack of rhetorical trappings suggest an effort that is almost perfunctory and dutiful, rather than persuasive or self-​exhibiting, in intent. This is consistent with Smith’s apparent view that his encounter with the Lord in particular was an entirely personal episode, not for general consumption, and not directly related to his calling as First Elder in the church. The proof of this is threefold. First, even after sensing the importance of chronicling his early experiences, he did not publish or disseminate the account, even though a church newspaper was available for sharing important developments and revelations with his followers. He made the record but appears not to have made it available in any way. Second, he later dated his labor in the work of gospel restoration to his work with the gold plates, not this first encounter with God.20 Third, he apparently did not even share the visitation from God in private with his close friends and colleagues. This fact is most evident in the garbling and conflation of his two first heavenly encounters (with God and with Moroni) by third parties attempting to tell his story for him.21 Why Smith felt the need to make any record at all of his divine encounters is not clear. A revelation given on the day of the church’s founding two years earlier had instructed that “a record [be] kept among you.” Oliver Cowdery was appointed to the task as “church recorder,” but if he or anyone else in the movement maintained a history that early, it is not extant.22 After Cowdery departed for a mission to Indian Territory, John Whitmer was appointed “to keep the Church record,” with an important addition: “Joseph Smith Jr. said unto me you must also keep the Church history.”23 Whitmer was reluctant to assume the job but acquiesced when Smith produced a revelation in March 1831 that directed that Whitner “should write and keep a regular history, and assist . . . Joseph Smith, in transcribing all things which shall be given” him.24 On 12 June 1831, Whitmer commenced the record but backdated his account no more than a few months. The next year, Smith continued to sense the importance of a detailed history of the new religious movement. He enlarged on the recorder’s charge that November: “it is the duty of the lord[’s] clerk whom he has appointed to keep a hystory and a general church reccord of all things that transpire

Historicizing Mormonism  229 in Zion . . . and also [the] manner of life and the faith and works.”25 Since the dating of Smith’s first account is unclear (sometime between July and December 1832),26 we can assume that either the November revelation was the immediate incentive or that it reflected an acute attention to history in that period that motivated both the revelation and the account. On commencing his first journal that same November, Smith stated his intention “to keep a minute account of all things that come under my observation.” However, his editors note, “the history ended after six pages, and the journal keeping lapsed after ten days.”27 After recording only nine more entries, Smith “abandoned journal keeping for ten months.”28 A final motive for his 1832 recording of foundational events may have been an alarming episode that transpired that summer. Sidney Rigdon, a counselor in the First Presidency, had recently suffered a head trauma; subsequent brain injury has long been suspected. In July, the still influential Rigdon “burst into a Kirtland prayer meeting crying that the ‘the keys of the kingdom are rent from the church.’ ”29 Smith’s control was not seriously threatened at that time, but he may have felt that a record of how he came to be possessor of those keys was imperative for the future security of his prophetic claims. Hence the 1832 account’s preamble emphasizing that the “Kees of the Kingdom of God [were] conferred upon him and the continuation of the blessings of God to him” (emphasis added).30 Smith’s close associate Oliver Cowdery was the first to attempt a publicly disseminated recitation of Smith’s visionary experiences, telling the readers of the Messenger and Advocate, which Cowdery was editing in 1834, that “we have thought a full history of the rise of the church of the Latter Day Saints, and the most interesting parts of its progress, to the present time, would be worthy the perusal of the Saints.”31 In making this proposal, Cowdery wrote that “our brother J. Smith jr. has offered to assist us.” But somewhere the communication about support miscarried, ​and Smith seems to have reconsidered whatever assistance he promised—​if indeed he had. For two months later, he noted in a published letter that he had been surprised to learn from Cowdery’s October announcement that he was “about to ‘give a history of the rise and progress of the church.’ ”32 Smith apparently had shared enough personal background that Cowdery was able to recreate the revivalist background to Smith’s spiritual turmoil, crediting one Reverend (George) Lane in particular with “awakening” the young boy’s religious mind. Some elements overlapped with Smith’s 1832 account (which in its entirety Smith does not seem to have provided to Cowdery), including

230  The Pearl of Greatest Price Smith’s assessment of the deplorable state of the Christian world (apostate in the 1832 version; contentious and hypocritical in Cowdery’s description)33 and the failure of any available source to guide him in his quest.34 But at this point in the story that Cowdery is relating to subscribers, and just before any parting of heaven’s curtain takes place, Cowdery suddenly and unaccountably aborts the narrative. When he picks it up two months later, he unexpectedly jumps forward in time from 1820 to 1823, claiming that his earlier dating had been an error. In the narrative he then continues, he makes Smith’s quest for spiritual relief the occasion of Moroni’s visitation—​ not of the appearance of the Father and Son familiar to modern readers of the official version.35 Cowdery here relies on what he says is Smith’s “own description,” which must have been verbal, of a night when Smith’s home was suddenly “filled with consuming and unquenchable fire,” followed by the appearance of a personage whose countenance was “as lightning.” The angel conveyed the welcome news that Smith’s “sins were forgiven” and called him “as an instrument in [the Lord’s] hand to bring . . . to pass a marvelous work and a wonder.” He then foretold Smith’s translation of “a history of the aborigines of this country” by means of a Urim and Thummim. With these details, Cowdery terminates his narrative.36 What has happened? Why did Cowdery skip over the 1820 First Vision, in which Smith personally beheld God, and instead merge the background story with an angelic visitation that occurred three years later? The absence from Cowdery’s account of the 1820 theophany and his clumsy claim of a dating error and subsequent segue to 1823 suggest the possibility that Smith simply withheld cooperation from Cowdery, leaving him to abandon a narrative he was insufficiently familiar with to accurately narrate. Much more likely, it seems, is that Smith intervened to prevent his first vision’s public dissemination at this time. In either case, the clear implication is that in 1834, Smith was still considering his visitation in the grove an entirely personal matter and not an essential episode in the unfolding of a larger religious project. And so he let stand a version that conflated his early quest for spiritual forgiveness, resulting in a vision of God, with the much later pleas for renewed forgiveness, resulting in an angel bearing an ancient record. As indicated above, Smith distinguished the two in both his 1830 revelation and his 1832 personal history. At any rate, the compressed narrative Cowdery published was the only version publicly available, and no one at that time seems to have been privy to the fuller account. Parley Pratt, another of Smith’s colleagues, one of the first

Historicizing Mormonism  231 apostles called, eyewitness to the opening chapters of the Latter-​day Saint Restoration and generally reliable as a chronicler of early Mormonism, could do no better than to repeat Cowdery’s version of events in his 1836 “Epistle” written from Toronto to the people of England. Young Joseph, Pratt had written, “seeing the confusion of the churches,” prayed in order to “assertain which was right.” In response, “he was visited By a Holy Angel whose garments where [were] whiter than snow And whose countinance was as Lightning.” The Angel informed him that America had once Been Peopled By a remnant of the seed of Israel” who “had left a Record Behind them which was writen By the spirit of Prophesy and revelation . . . engraven on Plates of Precious metal.”37 The context of Smith’s 1832 written recitation explains its brevity and the details he chose for emphasis. In 1832, he had a scant few thousand followers, and his impact on the national scene was slight. Mormons’ experience of religious intolerance was essentially limited to a few skeptical ministers and mocking neighbors. One exception was a physical assault at the hands of a dozen men a few months earlier, in Hiram, Ohio, when he was tarred and feathered and Sidney Rigdon was knocked senseless. Mere months after Smith produced the brief 1832 history, the world of Mormonism tipped upside down. In April 1833, a mob of 300 assembled to demand the expulsion of Latter-​day Saints from Jackson County, Missouri—​ the Saints’ presumed New Jerusalem. Weeks later, a large group determined to remove the Saints by force if necessary and followed up by destroying their printing press and assaulting members of the church. Armed mobbers burned crops and buildings, forcing thousands of Saints to flee north to Clay County. By 1835, Smith was beginning to share his earliest theophany with others. The first evidence of this is a scribal entry by Warren Parish in Smith’s 1835 journal, saying that Smith gave a visitor (Robert Mathews, aka “Matthias”) “a relation of the circumstances connected with the coming forth of the Book of Mormon”—​and shared details of his earlier vision as well.38 Here we find the first reference to a specific biblical passage that prompted his 1820 prayer in the grove (James’s inducement to ask of God “who giveth to all men liberally”), as well as the detail of the dark power that bound his tongue on that occasion. As in his 1832 recital, Smith then describes a “pillar of fire” that descends on him, enshrouding a divine personage. For the first time, he adds here a third and controversial detail: that this first personage introduces a second (“like unto the first”) who assures the boy that his sins are forgiven.39

232  The Pearl of Greatest Price Some readers have detected in this new detail in particular a suspicious embellishment, on the grounds that the appearance of two distinct personages of the Trinity would have been too significant to pass over in silence the first time. That is a reasonable charge; it is equally reasonable to see that detail as secondary from Smith’s perspective. After all, his paramount purpose at this time was to find “mercy” and forgiveness, relief from spiritual anxiety. It was the Lord and not any other divine personage who pronounced the words of forgiveness upon Smith in his 1832 account, and that divine assurance likely occluded other details: the scripture prompt, the demonic opposition, and the second holy personage—​as well as the “many angels” he also mentioned now but not previously. Some Latter-​day Saint historians believe that the 1832 account may in fact refer to two personages as well. In response to his “cr[y]‌for mercy,” Smith recorded in 1832, “the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” Perhaps, these scholars argue, the two instances of “Lord” refer to two beings in succession.40 In any event, once the two divine personages explicitly entered the narrative, they remained a constant in all subsequent retellings. A few days later, on 14 November, Smith repeated to one Erastus Holmes the story of his “first visitation of angels” when he “was about 14 years old” but did not record the details.41 By 1836, the immigration of thousands more converted Latter-​day Saints created tensions and fears, and opponents forced their flight northward again, now to Caldwell County and other places of refuge. As the nucleus of his followers swelled in size and petty persecution grew to violence and expulsion and national attention, Smith came to see himself as “a disturber and an annoyer of [Satan’s] kingdom,” and his appraisal of his earliest spiritual visions—​and their relevance to contemporary developments—​fueled a growing willingness to make his private pilgrimage more public. Parley Pratt wrote a letter in November to John Taylor describing “one of the most Interesting Meetings I ever attended.” The week prior, he told Taylor, “word was Publicly given that Br J Smith Jr would give a relation of the comeing forth of the Records and also of the rise of the Church and of his Experience”: acordingly a vast Concourse assembled at an Early hour Every seat was crouded and 4 or 5 hundred People stood up in the Aisles Br S gave the history of these things relating many Particulars of the manner of his first vissions &c the Spirit and Powr of God was upon him in Bearing testimony In somuch that many if not most of the Congregation were in tears—​as for my self i can say that all the Reasonings in uncertainty and all

Historicizing Mormonism  233 the conclusions drawn from the writings of Others (who Could only give a small scetch of what they saw and heard) however great in themselves dwindle into insignificence when Compared with Living testimony when your Eyes sea and your Ears hear from the Living Oracles of God.42

Sadly, no record of these late 1836 remarks exists—​but the reference to a plurality of his “first vissions” that surpassed any previous narration of those events tells us that here, at last, Smith was telling his own story in full to assembled audiences. Pratt’s excited response to the event, with no further dissemination of the details, paints a picture of a prophet gradually and tentatively extending the range of those to whom he entrusted his account of his first visionary encounter. In 1837, the failure of the church’s bank back in Kirtland along with other factors precipitated large-​scale revolt and hostility against Smith, who resided there. The Kirtland Temple, the holiest edifice of the movement, fruit of immense sacrifice and focus of the group’s spiritual and priestly aspirations, was appropriated by Smith’s enemies, and he fled for his life with the dawning new year. Joining the Saints in Far West, Missouri, he found a nightmare scenario about to repeat itself, as the influx of Latter-​day Saints to counties adjoining Caldwell alarmed and then infuriated residents there. Smith could not help but realize that the small 1832 religious outlier he led had now become the most hotly opposed and persecuted group of Christians in American history. At the same time, the standing of the Church of Jesus Christ in the larger religious world had changed radically as well. Membership had exploded into many thousands; mission work had spread to Canada and across the Atlantic to the British Isles. The movement Smith founded had grown from a local phenomenon into an aspiring and hotly controversial player on the international religious scene. Now, opponents were actively instigating hostility toward the Saints through journals and newspapers. An exasperated Smith fumed: “I have been in their mill. I was ground in Ohio and [New] York States—​a Presbyterian smut machine—​and [the] last machine was in Missouri and last of all I have been through [the] Illinois smut machine.”43 Ezra Booth, a one-​time Methodist preacher, had published nine letters in the Ohio Star in Ravenna, from 13 October to 8 December 1831, denouncing Mormonism. They were widely circulated and reprinted in Eber D. Howe’s popular Mormonism Unvailed, published in 1834. Of particular concern to Smith were not just Booth’s general condemnations (“a deeply laid plan

234  The Pearl of Greatest Price of craft and deception . . . pernicious in its influence”) or even the personal attacks (“Smith gets a commandment that . . . the Church shall build him an elegant house, and give him 1000 dollars”) but the garbled portrayals of Smith’s founding revelatory experiences, relating to Moroni and the translation of the Book of Mormon (a “handsome man, with a bright pillar upon his head,” and translation done by means of a “dark glass”).44 From Smith’s perspective, claims that his sacred encounters were “revelations which . . . emanate from his own weak mind” and from “spurious visions” demanded rebuttal, for they struck at the foundations of the church itself. These provocations doubtless convinced him that his private encounters with the Deity demanded public exposition. On 27 April 1838, Smith and Rigdon embarked on a new history, while residing in Far West. With the foregoing background in mind, Smith’s opening line in his expanded narrative of 1838 is a transparent appeal to new stakes and motives for writing a personal history, almost entirely conditioned by developments since 1832: “owing to the many reports which have been put in circulation by evil disposed and designing persons in relation to the rise and progress of the Church of Latter day Saints . . . I have been induced to write this history so as to disabuse the public mind, and put all inquirers after truth in possession of the facts as they have transpired in relation both to myself and the Church.”45 Smith’s 1832 account focused on his personal quest for assurance of salvation, because that was the operative motive in the mind of a fourteen-​year-​old boy. By 1838, both recent history and public debate had made the authenticity of his heavenly encounters and the alleged commission he received the central elements in the story. From this newly emergent perspective, his personal wrestle with sin and damnation was but a prelude to a greater, cosmic struggle between the forces of apostate Christendom and God’s purposes of Restoration. It is that contest that now assumes priority in his telling. In 1832, the Lord referred to the Christian world as having “turned aside from the gospel” and “draw[n]‌near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me.”46 In 1832 Smith also lamented the character of contemporary clerics: exposed to teachers of various denominations, “I discovered that they did not adorn their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation.”47 (A gazetteer of the period noted of clergy on the frontier: “some are very illiterate, and make utter confusion of the word of God. Such persons are usually proud, conceited, fanatical, and influenced by a spirit far removed from the meek, docile, benevolent, and charitable spirit of the

Historicizing Mormonism  235 gospel.”)48 The perceived disharmony of their conduct and teachings with the scriptures “was a grief to my soul,” and Smith concluded in 1832 that humankind “had apostatized from the true and living faith.” Cowdery in 1834 added the detail that competing revivalists at that time were fomenting “a general struggle . . . for proselytes.” In 1838, however, doubtless influenced by recent traumas inflicted by opponents of the Church of Jesus Christ, the rhetoric intensified considerably. Smith elaborated on the sectarian turmoil, calling it a general “war of words, and tumult of opinions” with much “bad feeling” and contention. Verbal violence created an “extraordinary scene of religious feeling,” pitting priest against priest, convert against convert. “Confusion and strife” tainted the whole religious landscape. Finally, Smith’s words have Christ adding the harsh details that “their Creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt” and that he was not “to join with any of them.”49 This more brutal indictment was doubtless shaped in Smith’s telling by his experiences with clergy between 1832 and 1838. Of particular significance in shaping his 1838 interpretation of events was that the forces of violent opposition to the Church of Jesus Christ appeared to be operating largely at the behest of ministers of the Christian religion. Smith recorded that in the 1833 Missouri persecutions, Isaac McCoy, a Baptist reverend, “headed a co[mpany] & was a leader in the mob.”50 It was in that same conflict that “the Rev. Finis Ewing, the head and front of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, published this statement:  ‘The “Mormons” are the common enemies of mankind and ought to be destroyed.’ ”51 “The leaders of this mob,” noted one source, included “Sashiel Woods, a Presbyterian clergyman. . . . The Mormons were therefore compelled, at great loss of property, to evacuate the place, and fly to Far West, in Caldwell County.” Subsequently, “a large mob had collected to the south of Far West, in Ray County, under the command of Samuel Bogart, a methodist clergyman.”52 In October, an affidavit signed by three representatives of the church recorded that when Smith was court-​martialed by the Missouri Militia at Far West and sentenced to death in October 1838, “seventeen preachers of the gospel were on this court martial; and, horrible to relate, were in favor of this merciless sentence.”53 This clerical involvement in mob actions, taking place between the composition of the two personal narratives—​and the indifference of the Christian populace to their fellow Christians’ sufferings—​explains Smith’s willingness to turn the earlier account’s implicit indictment of Christian hypocrisy in the 1832 account into an explicit condemnation in 1838. Not only had his recent

236  The Pearl of Greatest Price experiences with the clergy been traumatic for him and thousands of suffering Saints, but in 1838, the larger of the two imperatives—​God’s agenda of Restoration rather than his personal consolation—​was now clearly evident to Smith. The Restoration in its full scope, with the envisioned building of Zion and Christ’s return, had elicited expulsion from the New Jerusalem and faced a precarious future. In the midst of these large-​scale conflicts and institutional uncertainties, Smith’s personal, boyhood quest for truth was still intact but took second place in significance. The 1832 recollection began with a despair he projected onto the state of Christendom: it seemed to him that “no society or denomination [was] built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.” What path should an anxious disciple pursue? The answer he found, in addition to obtaining forgiveness of his sins, was “to go thy way and walk in my statutes.” At the same time, nothing in this visionary experience contradicted his expressed assumption that true religion did not exist in the Christian world, though no explicit confirmation of a general apostasy was recorded. In 1838, he repeated his earlier judgment about Christianity, wondering if the sects were “all wrong together,” even though such a conclusion “had never entered into my heart,” that is, had not met unqualified acceptance in his soul. The underlying theme was unchanged: how could he best pursue his own spiritual welfare through a life of personal sin and a darkened Christendom? “What is to be done?” However, in this retelling of the divine answer, the injunction to pursue his own way in peace of mind was lost in the emphatic condemnation of religious systems as having more of corruption than truth and purity in them. “They were all wrong; . . . all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; . . . those professors were all corrupt; . . . ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’ ”54 Events had convinced Smith of the necessity for an unequivocal depiction of Christianity as not just adrift but apostate and endangering the gathering momentum for God’s corrective initiative with Smith in a pivotal role. In neither version is anything said to Smith that pointedly casts this event as the opening of a new dispensation, assigns to him the role of God’s prophet, or clearly bodes the restoration of a Christian church. However, the suggestive possibility of such significance appears in both. In 1832, the Lord alludes to a future visitation that will “bring to pass that which hath been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Apostles,” evoking Peter’s reference to a “restitution of all things.”55 In 1838, the Lord’s appraisal of an apostate Christendom

Historicizing Mormonism  237 is followed by unspecified “other things  .  .  .  which I  cannot write at this time.”56 The year 1838 ended with bloodshed, more expulsions, a massacre at Haun’s Mill, Missouri, and a sentence of death illegally pronounced upon Joseph Smith. It would be the summer of 1839 before Smith again took up his history, and in 1842 he made the decision to provide a newspaper with the details of Mormon history and belief. It was at this time that he decided to fully incorporate the complete account of his spiritual encounters with divine beings as an integral part of that history. After preparing his narrative, which included an abbreviated version of his 1838 history, he published it in the March 1 issue of the church’s newspaper, immediately following his first installment of the Book of Abraham, under the title “Church History.” With one simple line, Smith established the First Vision as more than a private spiritual encounter. His personal quest for truth as a fourteen-​year-​old boy, he related, had been met with the promise that “the fullness of the gospel should at some future time be made known unto me.”57 This fullness, he came to know, was the burden of the ministry that would define his life. And having reconsidered the abbreviated account published on 1 March, he decided that nothing less than the full extent of his experience that morning in upstate New York would suffice to convey the foundations of that fullness. And so, he wrote two weeks later in the 15 March issue, “in the last number I gave a brief history of the rise and progress of the Church, I now enter more particularly into that history, and extract from my journal.”58 “History of Joseph Smith,” the revised title read. And so the personal became public, and biography took a crucial step toward canonization.

Notes 1. New York World, 25 September 1870, cited in Stanley P. Hirshson, The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young (New York: Knopf, 1969), 323. 2. Tamara Grdzelidze, ed., Sources of Authority:  Contemporary Churches, vol. 2 (Geneva: WCC, 2014). 3. History Drafts, 1838–​circa 1841, JSP-​H1, 212. 4. History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-​H1, 10. 5. This encomium was written by John Taylor and first appeared scripturally in the 1844 D&C (D&C 135:3). 6. Bruce R. McConkie was one of the first LDS leaders to propound a template to which every testimony “must” conform: Jesus as Son and Savior; Smith as “Prophet of God”;

238

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

The Pearl of Greatest Price

the LDS Church as “only true and living church.” Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City : Bookcraft, 1966), 785–786. In one of countless slightly varying iterations, the apostle Dieter F. Uchtdorf named as elements of testimony, in addition to the reality of God and Christ, Joseph Smith’s status as prophet, the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, and the standing of the church president and apostles as “prophets, seers, and revelators.” “The Power of a Personal Testimony,” Ensign 36.11 (November 2006): 38. “Praise to the Man” is hymn number 27 in the 1985 LDS hymnal; Doctrine and Covenants 135 declares that “Joseph Smith . . . has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived”; and Young declared: “no man or woman in this dispensation will ever enter into the celestial kingdom of God without the consent of Joseph Smith.” Brigham Young, “Intelligence, etc.” (9 October 1859), JD, 7:289. Christopher James Blythe, ‘‘Would to God, Brethren, I Could Tell You Who I Am!’ Nineteenth-Century Mormonisms and the Apotheosis of Joseph Smith,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18.2 (November 2014): 18. She writes: “the First Vision contained the elements necessary to fill the historical, scriptural, and theological void left by the abandonment of plural marriage.” Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 118. Herbert A. Wisebey, Jr., Pioneer Prophet:  Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 12. Donna Hill, Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (Salt Lake City : Doubleday, 1977), 53–54. Bushman’s tally does not include visionary experience embedded in longer narratives. “The Visionary World of Joseph Smith,” BYU Studies 37.1 (1997–98): 183– 204. For several examples of revelations and visions in the Puritan era, see Michael G. Ditmore, “A Prophetess in Her Own Country: An Exegesis of Anne Hutchinson’s ‘Immediate Revelation,’” William and Mary Quarterly 57.2 (April 2000): 352 note 5, 354. In assessing the intensely private experience of Joseph Smith against the context of so much prior visionary experience, Leigh Eric Schmidt’s observation about the abundance of “extraordinary revelations” in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is pertinent: “from Shotts to Cambuslang to Booth Bay to Gaspar River, ecstatic religious experience was part of the communion occasion” associated with “festival events.” Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 145. BC 24:6–7 (D&C 20:5–6). Martin Luther, quoted in Roland Bainton, Here I  Stand:  A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon, 1950), 65. John Wesley, 24 May 1738, in The Heart of Wesley’s Journal (New Canaan, CT: Keats, 1979), 43. History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-H1, 11. Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps, M&A 1.3 (December 1834): 43. History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-H1, 11–13. History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-H1, 13–14.

Historicizing Mormonism  239 20. “I have been laboring in this cause for eight years,” he wrote in a letter “To the Elders of the church” published in M&A 1.12 (September 1835): 179. 21. See for instance the account of Smith’s own mother, wherein she confuses the visit of Deity with that of the angel, whom she misidentifies as Nephi. Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Luck Mack Smith’s Family Memoir, ed. Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), 335–​338. 22. BC 22:1 (D&C 21:1). 23. From Historian to Dissident: The Book of John Whitmer, ed. Bruce N. Westergren (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1995), 55. 24. BC 50:1 (D&C 47:1). 25. Joseph Smith to W. W. Phelps, 27 November 1832, JSP-​D2, 318. 26. Steven C. Harper, Joseph Smith’s First Vision: A Guide to the Historical Accounts (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2012), 101. 27. General Introduction, JSP-​J1, xxxvi. 28. Historical Introduction, JSP-​J1, 4. 29. Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 186. 30. History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-​H1, 10. 31. [Announcement,] M&A 1.1 (October 1834): 13. 32. Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps, M&A 1.3 (December 1834): 40. 33. Compare Smith’s “apostatized from the true and living faith” (History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-​H1, 11) with Cowdery’s “all professed to be the true church; and if not they were certainly hypocritical”; M&A 13 (December 1834): 43. 34. Compare Smith’s “there was none else to whom I could go” (History, circa Summer 1832, JSP-​H1, 12) and Cowdery’s “some source was wanting to settle the mind and give peace”; Oliver Cowdery to W. W Phelps, M&A 13 (December 1834): 43. 35. Some writers have alleged that Smith initially refers to the visiting angel as Nephi. In fact, a scribal error inserted Nephi for Moroni in Smith’s 1838 retelling of his story, and the error was perpetuated through numerous published progeny (JSP-​H1, 223). However, Smith consistently referred to the angel as Moroni, beginning with an 1830 revelation received in August 1830 and published in EMS 1.10 (March 1833): 155. 36. Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps, M&A 1.5 (February 1835): 79. 37. [Parley P. Pratt], “An Epistle Written by an Elder of the Church of Latter Day Saints,” Parley P. Pratt Collection, CHL. In similar fashion, Oliver Cowdery combined elements from Joseph Smith’s 1820 theophany (as he later related them) with the story of Moroni’s 1823 visitation. See Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps, M&A 1.3 (December 1834): 42–​43, and 1.5 (February 1835): 78–​79. 38. History, 1834–​1836, JSP-​H1, 115. 39. History, 1834–​1836, JSP-​H1, 116. 40. Dean Jessee argues that since all hearsay and official accounts subsequent to this version mention two beings, “Lord” can plausibly be read here as referring first to the Father and then to the Son in its second mention. See his “Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–​1844, ed. John W. Welch with Erick B. Carlson (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2005), 1–​33. See also Harper, Joseph Smith’s First Vision,  91–​92.

240  The Pearl of Greatest Price 41. History, 1834–​1836, JSP-​H1, 124. 42. Parley P. Pratt to John Taylor, 27 November 1836, John Taylor Collection, CHL; typescript in R. Steven Pratt Files, CHL. 43. 21 February 1843, JSP-​J2, 275. 44. Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed: Or a Faithful Account of that Singular Imposition and Delusion . . . (Painesville, Ohio: E. B. Howe, 1834), 177–​187, 203. 45. History Drafts, 1838–​circa 1841, JSP-​H1, 204. 46. JSP-​J1, 13. 47. JSP-​J1, 11. 48. J. M. Peck, A Gazetteer of Illinois (Jacksonville, IL: Goudy, 1834), 92. 49. History Drafts, 1838–​circa 1841, JSP-​H1, 208, 214. 50. 2 January 1843, JSP-​J2, 211. 51. B. H. Roberts, Missouri Persecutions (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon, 1900), 73. 52. John P. Greene, Facts Relative to the Expulsion of the Mormons or Latter-​day Saints, from the State of Missouri, Under the “Exterminating Order” (Cincinnati: R. P. Brooks, 1839),  20–​21. 53. Clark V. Johnson, ed., Mormon Redress Petitions:  Documents of the 1833–​1838 Missouri Conflict (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1992), 407. 54. History Drafts, 1838–​circa 1841, JS-​H1, 214. 55. Acts  3:21. 56. History Drafts, 1838–​circa 1841, JSP-​H1, 215. 57. “Church History,” T&S 3.9 (1 March 1842): 707. 58. “History of Joseph Smith,” T&S 3.10 (15 March 1842): 726.

4 “Not to Be Trammeled” To Creed or Not to Creed

One might trace Christian creeds to the Jewish Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”1 Jews recited the words twice daily and eventually expanded the recitation to include other biblical passages.2 In the Middle Ages, Maimonides fashioned a creedal statement for the Jewish faith consisting of thirteen principles of faith.3 Creeds have been at the core of Christian self-​definition and self-​understanding since the earliest Christian centuries, a phenomenon some would trace to Peter’s confession that Jesus was indeed the Messiah—​a pronouncement that continues as the most foundational element of Christian understanding. In the early Christian centuries, creeds were formulated as boundary markers to elucidate heresy, as well as to codify ambiguous or newly emergent doctrines, even if that meant employing—​or inventing—​highly esoteric distinctions like homoousios versus homoiousios, employed at the Council of Nicaea to characterize a sameness rather than similarity of substance shared by Christ and the Father. With the coming of the Reformation, creeds were increasingly formulated with an eye to distinguishing Protestant positions from Catholicism or from rival emergent sects. Creeds increasingly became sources of contestation and division rather than harmony and unity. Some in this era protested the trend, holding that the products of human councils inevitably aggravated fractures rather than resolving them. The schoolmaster Erasmus Johannes, for instance, considered that “all the councils . . . since the death of the Apostles, were infected with antichristian errors, not excepting the famous council of Niceia.”4 By the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration was advancing the cause of freedom of conscience (for Protestants) throughout Europe. Locke enjoined “voluntary” association with the religious society conformable to one’s conscience and saw creeds as divisive and of questionable value. (“Of what use and necessity is it among christians that own their scripture to be the word of God and

242  The Pearl of Greatest Price rule of faith to make and impose a creed?”) While the three historic creeds were well and good, he couldn’t help asking why, in the ages since, “one doctrine of the scripture is put into the creed and articles, and another as sound left out?”5 Protestants’ hostility to creeds only increased with the dawn of the eighteenth century. The issue exploded at a debate in London at Salters’ Hall in 1719, where three dissenting sects (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Independents) met to confer on the matter of a preacher’s alleged Arianism. A proposal emerged that the Nonconformists could make a show of unity and orthodoxy with a statement affirming the Trinity. By a narrow margin, a majority (“nonsubscribers,” as they came to be called) resisted—​not on doctrinal but on moral grounds. They objected, a contemporary recorded, to “the imposition of any Thing of humane Contrivance” as “the highest Affront possible to the inspired Writings.”6 Another reporter explained: “it was carried in a meeting of above an hundred ministers, at Salters-​Hall, that no human tests, articles, or interpretations should be urged as the trial of a man’s orthodoxy; and that no minister should be condemned as heterodox, or an heretick, unless he taught, &c. contrary to express scripture.”7 And so began a pamphlet war arguing not points of doctrine, the norm in religious pamphleteering, but the appropriateness of any creeds or confessions at all. Samuel Savage, writing five years after the fracas, warned of the nefarious tendency of creeds to “expose the Dissenters to ridicule,” “to risque the peace of the church,” and “to alienate men’s affections from one another.” The alternative was clear: with regard to creeds, Christianity was “in [no] need of such mean shifts as these. . . . The sacred scriptures are a safer rule  .  .  .  than human confessions.”8 John Abernethy, the “father of nonsubscription in Ireland,” went further, defining “nonsubscription to humanly formulated creeds as the sine qua non of true Christianity.”9 Slightly later, the Dissenter Thomas Amory was lamenting the “great misfortune to the Protestants, that their confessions should abound with explanations of so many minute points of scholastic theology, which . . . tended so manifestly to narrow their original foundation.”10 In the early nineteenth century, Unitarians and restorationists rekindled the old flames of anticreedalism. Alexander Galbraith in 1822 wrote: “one of the original intentions of Christianity was to free the world from all human systems, creeds, and confessions. Whenever constraint to moral authority begins, the religion of God . . . must of necessity end.” Like Erasmus Johannes, Galbraith dated what he saw as the decline of Christianity to the

To Creed or Not to Creed  243 creeds of the fourth century, when “Christianity was much altered for the worse.”11 Clearly Alexander Campbell was correct when he said in 1827 that the “Creed Question” “has been long and warmly contested in the United States.”12 Indeed, it was a burning topic of debate throughout the nineteenth century. From the other side of the question, an alarmed Methodist minister protested a few decades later that without creeds, which he saw as “this bond of union and sympathy,” denominations would be “but ropes of sand. History has long ago demonstrated,” he insisted, “that creedless churches are impossible.”13 To which John Shackelford, editor of the Independent Monthly, replied: “I hold that a number of men and women can unite on the New Testament as a creed.”14 This was of course the motto of the restoration movement, traceable to Barton Stone, Alexander Campbell, and others, who made a “plea for the Bible as our only creed.”15 In lieu of human contrivances, Campbell espoused “one divine and infallible creed,” that is, the Bible.16 (“Creeds of human framing were especially his abomination,” noted one Baptist writer.)17 This argument had remained unchanged since its emergence more than a century before. Savage had called the Bible “a safer rule . . . than human confessions.”18 Slightly earlier, a “Mr Tong” had argued in print that the “very plain and obvious” meaning of scripture rendered creeds redundant.19 So Galbraith’s argument that the Word of God was “certainly the . . . all-​sufficient rule of faith” adequate “to bind a Christian society together” was well established.20 It was also, of course, question-​begging of the most flagrant sort, for the obvious reason that it was precisely the general availability of the Word of God, made possible by printing, that had precipitated not the unity but the shattering of Christendom. Joseph Smith’s report of God’s verdict about contemporary creeds would thus not have been as shocking to his contemporaries’ ears as to ours: “all their Creeds were an abomination in his sight.”21 Latter-​day Saints, poorly versed in ecclesiastical history and originally products of a Protestant culture, have long equated Catholicism with the Great Apostasy and have seen the Reformation as a partial palliative. In actual fact, developments in Protestantism almost uniformly expanded the rift with Latter-​day Saint doctrines:  antisacramentalism, hostility to priesthood, Bible-​ based authority, biblical infallibility, permanent judgment at death, noninvolvement of the living in the condition of the dead, human depravity, predestination, salvation by grace alone—​these and kindred innovations were all anathema to Restoration theology. This fact and Smith’s specific language clearly point

244  The Pearl of Greatest Price to the Westminster Confession, not the medieval creeds, as the target of divine reproach. Smith, the Pratts, and other church writers repeatedly singled out that creed’s definition of a God “without body, parts, or passions” as the heresy that the Restoration’s doctrine of Deity corrected. As we saw above, Pratt in particular mocked the God of the Christian creeds for being incapable of defending himself from Latter-day Saint blasphemy, “seeing he has no mouth.” In contrast with this immaterial and bodiless entity, Pratt declared the Mormon God “who has both a body and parts; who has eyes, mouth, and ears.” That language, together with the weeping seen by Enoch, was deliberately and emphatically un-Protestant.22 Smith’s personal hostility to creeds was couched in terms that superficially resemble the reasons the first nonsubscribers invoked; constraint, not content, was the target of his animus. He called it “the first and fundamental principle of our holy religion” to be free “to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another.”23 Constriction and finality, more than error per se, were what Smith feared in creedalism. “I want to come up into the presence of God & learn all things but the creeds set up stakes, & say hitherto shalt thou come, & no further.—​which I cannot subscribe to.”24 Eighteen months before his murder, he told Governor Thomas Ford: “I have no creed to circumscribe my mind therefore the people do not like me because I  do not cannot circumscribe my mind to their creeds.”25 Finally, in reply to one Mr. Butterfield, he wrote: “I stated that the most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter-​day Saints and sectarians was, that the latter were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter-​day Saints have no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.”26 That phrase, “from time to time,” is where Smith’s anticreedalism is revealed as a decisive break with virtually all other independently minded Christian clerics. Galbraith had written that “creeds and confessions are subversive of the general interests of Divine Revelation.”27 Smith added a hearty “Amen” but of course had something very different in mind in his use of the term “revelation.” For Galbraith it meant the supremacy and finality of canon, God’s revealed word; for Smith it meant the opposite: the supremacy of an ever-​unconstrained Spirit. Revelation implied a boundless plenitude that creeds and scripture were alike incapable of encompassing. How, then, does the Church of Jesus Christ come to have a creed that, with the canonization of the Pearl of Great Price, acquired the authority of scripture?

To Creed or Not to Creed  245 In its most extreme form, anticreedalism entailed hostility to any extrabiblical canon whatsoever. Campbell believed in “no creed save the Bible,” but once the back cover of the Bible was figuratively torn off, Latter-​day Saints were hard-​pressed to apply the brakes. David Whitmer, erstwhile LDS stalwart and witness to the gold plates, cited as one reason for his disaffection a tendency for continuing revelation to become de facto creed-​building. He protested: “I consider the Book of Doctrine and Covenants a creed of religious faith. You can see from the first edition (Kirtland, 1835) that men, on the authority of other men, and no authority from God, ‘arranged the items of the doctrine of Jesus Christ’ in that book, and in August, 1835, adopted it as the doctrine and covenants of their faith by a unanimous vote of the high council, thus making it a law to the church for the first time. . . . The Doctrine and Covenants is a creed, as much so as any sectarian creed.”28 Attempting to forestall such criticisms, of which he was well aware, Smith wrote in the preface to the Doctrine and Covenants: “there may be an aversion in the minds of some against receiving anything purporting to be articles of religious faith, in consequence of there being so many now extant; but if men believe a system and profess that it was given by inspiration, certainly, the more intelligibly they can present it the better. It does not make a principle untrue to print it.”29 Pragmatism, in other words, ultimately makes anticreedalism an impossible position—​ especially in a movement that considers its divine mission to be worldwide evangelization. Writing in 1855, Isaac Pray opined of Mormonism that it was because “of the sect having craftily removed to regions on the outer borders of civilization, where the power of the Press cannot be felt, [that] the progress of this strange community has been wonderfully rapid.”30 In actual fact, Smith had courted journalists and heaped honors on the supportive ones. In December 1841, the Nauvoo City Council published a declaration thanking James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, “for his very liberal and unprejudiced course towards us as a people, in giving us a fair hearing in his paper, thus enabling us to reach the ears of a portion of the community who otherwise would have remained ignorant of our principles and practices.” Smith went so far as to confer on Bennett “the freedom of the City” and, through the University of Nauvoo, the honorary degree of LLD. Rather excessively, he named him a brigadier general and aide-​de-​camp in the Nauvoo Legion.31 James Arlington Bennet, another New York publisher, was similarly honored. He was “appointed Inspector General of the Nauvoo Legion, with the rank and title of Major-​General.”32

246  The Pearl of Greatest Price Around this same time, a Mr. John Wentworth of Chicago contacted Smith. Chicago, on the opposite side of Illinois from Nauvoo, was a town of some 5,000 on the verge of explosive growth; Wentworth was a rising politician who edited and then owned the city’s first newspaper, the Chicago Democrat. Wentworth invited Smith to provide him with an account of the church’s history and doctrine not for his own purposes but on behalf of his friend George Barstow, who was publishing a history of New Hampshire.33 In the event, neither Barstow nor Wentworth used the material, but Smith did publish the text he had prepared in Times and Seasons in March 1842; the text included Smith’s personal story, as described in c­ hapter 3.34 When Israel Daniel Rupp, a historian of religion, made a similar request the next year for an article to be included in his encyclopedia of religion, Smith submitted a slightly revised version of the same text, which saw print in 1844.35 Smith’s Articles of Faith, however, had a long genealogy. As an evangelistic religion, the Church of Jesus Christ had long worked to condense its core tenets to a succinct outline. Oliver Cowdery, whom Smith often deferred to in written exposition and whom he appointed editor of the church’s new newspaper in 1834 (the Messenger and Advocate, a successor to the Evening and Morning Star, whose print office had been destroyed by a mob the previous year), offered to the public the church’s first list of distinctive teachings in 1834, “that our principles may be fully known.” The occasion was the inaugural issue of the new paper. We believe in God, and his Son Jesus Christ. We believe that God, from the beginning, revealed himself to man; and that whenever he has had a people on earth, he always has revealed himself to them by the Holy Ghost, the ministering of angels, or his own voice. We do not believe that he ever had a church on earth without revealing himself to that church: consequently, there were apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, in the same.—​We believe that God is the same in all ages; and that it requires the same holiness, purity, and religion, to save a man now, as it did anciently; and that as HE is no respecter of persons, always has, and always will reveal himself to men when they call upon him. We believe that God has revealed himself to men in this age, and commenced to raise up a church preparatory to his second advent, when he will come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. We believe that the popular religious theories of the day are incorrect; that they are without parallel in the revelations of God, as sanctioned by

To Creed or Not to Creed  247 him; and that however faithfully they may be adhered to, or however zealously and warmly they may be defended, they will never stand the strict scrutiny of the word of life. We believe that all men are born free and equal; that no man, combination of men, or government of men, have power or authority to compel or force others to embrace any system of religion, or religious creed, or to use force or violence to prevent others from enjoying their own opinions, or practicing the same, so long as they do not molest or disturb others in theirs, in a manner to deprive them of their privileges as free citizens—​or of worshiping God as they choose, and that any attempt to the contrary is an assumption unwarrantable in the revelations of heaven, and strikes at the root of civil liberty, and is a subversion of all equitable principles between man and man. We believe that God has set his hand the second time to recover the remnant of his people, Israel; and that the time is near when he will bring them from the four winds, with songs of everlasting joy, and reinstate them upon their own lands which he gave their fathers by covenant. And further: We believe in embracing good wherever it may be found; of proving all things, and holding fast that which is righteous. This, in short, is our belief, and we stand ready to defend it upon its own foundation when ever it is assailed by men of character and respectability. And while we act upon these broad principles, we trust in God that we shall never be confounded! Neither shall we wait for opposition; but with a firm reliance upon the justice of such a course, and the propriety of disseminating a knowledge of the same, we shall endeavor to persuade men to turn from error and vain speculation; investigate the plan which heaven has devised for our salvation; prepare for the year of recompense, and the day of vengeance which are near, and thereby be ready to meet the Bridegroom! OLIVER COWDERY. Kirtland, Ohio, October, 1834.36

As we will trace the metamorphoses of these core tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ through to the present day, it will help to distill the foregoing to the following key tenets: 1. Belief in God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit 2. Affirmation of the principle of special revelation by which God reveals his purposes to humankind and to questing individuals

248  The Pearl of Greatest Price

3. 4. 5. 6.

Salvation not by faith alone but by “holiness, purity, and religion” The gathering of Israel and Christ’s imminent return Freedom of religion as inherent to humankind A commitment to “prove all things” and hold fast to the good

All six propositions came to be refined through future evolutions. A seventh principle was hinted at, in Cowdery’s pointing out that “there were apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, in the [primitive church],” but he stopped short of claiming that the same organization was indicated in the modern era. Two years later, Brigham Young’s brother Joseph prepared a written statement of the “creed, doctrines, sentiments or religious notions” of the church for a Boston editor. Joseph Young enumerated five doctrines. His fifth, resurrection and judgment, did not figure in future versions of the creed. But his sketch was the first to specifically invoke Christ’s Atonement as a core doctrine, to enumerate the first four principles and ordinances (borrowed from the restorationists), and to make both proper authority and spiritual gifts identifiable as key Mormon claims.37 Further development came in 1840, when leading theological tactician Parley Pratt condensed portions of his 1839 History of the Late Persecution (themselves reworked from his 1837 Voice of Warning) into a summary of beliefs, which was subsequently recast as a four-​page pamphlet (“An Address to the Citizens of Washington”) to correct “erroneous notions which are abroad concerning” the Saints. In four pages, Pratt covered rather more territory than Cowdery, adding three tenets that Smith then preserved. These included the inappropriateness of infant baptism (which Smith rephrased as rejection of original sin); belief in the Bible and the Book of Mormon as scripture; and the pursuit of Christian virtue. Together, those three templates provided by Cowdery, Young, and Pratt constitute the core materials of Joseph Smith’s 1842 version, as table 4.1 demonstrates. Only respect for law remained to be added by Smith, which is explainable as a timely response to allegations that Saints in Nauvoo were subverting or openly breaking the law and setting up a theocracy with Smith as ruler. Shortly after Pratt’s publication, his brother Orson published in Edinburgh his landmark Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions (1840). His fifth section, “A Sketch of the Faith and Doctrine,” contributed nothing substantial by way of ideas but did crystallize the formulation of prior versions, much of which Smith borrowed verbatim. One distinctive exception is the second Article of Faith; Pratt’s emphasis on the universal inheritance of death and banishment served as a prompt for Smith to emphasize what we do not inherit from Adam and Eve’s action: personal guilt.

Atonement; eligibility for redemption

it requires the same holiness, purity, and religion, to save a man now, as it did anciently

God, and his Son Jesus Christ . . . He always has revealed himself to them by the Holy Ghost

Belief in God, Jesus Christ, Holy Ghost

Original sin; baptism

Cowdery, 1834

Topic

through the atonement thus wrought out, all men may come to God and find acceptance

one true and living God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, and in his Son Jesus Christ

J. Young, 1836

O. Pratt, 1840

Smith, 1842

infant baptism is of no use

all mankind, by the transgression of their first parents, and not by their own sins, were brought under the curse and penalty of that transgression through the . . . atonement of Jesus Christ, all mankind, without one exception, are to be completely, and fully redeemed

Continued 

through the atonement of Christ all men may be saved by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel

men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression

the true and living God, God the Eternal Father, God the Eternal and in Jesus Christ, the son and in his Son Jesus Christ, Father, and in his of God and in the Holy Ghost son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost

P. Pratt, 1840

Table 4.1  Comparison of the Articles of Faith and Precursors, 1834–​1842

Church offices/​roles

there were apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, in the [primitive church]

those who have authority to administer in the ordinances of the gospel, have this right and authority

Qualifications for priesthood

J. Young, 1836 repent of all sins . . . be baptized. . . [by] immersion. After which, the individual has the promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit

Cowdery, 1834

Way to redemption

Topic

Table 4.1 Continued O. Pratt, 1840

first condition to be complied with . . . is, to believe in God . . . the second condition is, to repent . . . the third condition is, to be baptized by immersion . . . for remission of sins; And . . . the fourth condition is, to receive the laying on of hands . . . for the gift of the Holy Ghost the ambassador of This ordinance is to be Christ . . . must be specially administered by one who sent, or commissioned to is called and authorized of minister in his name Jesus Christ

believe the gospel, repent of their sins, and to be immersed in water in the name of Jesus Christ for remission of sins. And we hold that all who do this . . . are legally entitled to the . . . gift of the Holy Ghost

P. Pratt, 1840

a man must be called of God by prophecy, and by laying on of hands, by those who are in authority to preach the gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof the same organization that existed in the primitive church, viz. apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, &c.

these ordinances are: 1st, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; 2d, Repentance; 3d, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; 4th, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost

Smith, 1842

Prophetic revelations

Canonical texts

Spiritual gifts

whenever he has had a people on earth, he always has revealed himself to them by the Holy Ghost, the ministering of angels, or his own voice

as men anciently saw visions, dreamed dreams, held communion with angels, and conversed with the heavens, so it will be in the last days

The peculiar gifts and blessings which were so abundantly bestowed upon the church in ancient times . . . to prophesy, to speak with tongues, to interpret, to relate their visions, revelations, &c. besides the Bible . . . we have implicit confidence in the “Book of Mormon”

Many revelations and prophecies have been given to this church. . . . We believe that God will continue to give revelations . . . until the saints are guided unto all truth.

It is the duty and privilege of the saints . . . [to] enjoy . . . the gifts of revelation, prophecy, visions, the ministry of angels, healing the sick . . . and, in short all the gifts The gospel in the “Book of Mormon,” is the same as that in the New Testament

Continued 

believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and we believe that he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God

the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, &c.

God has set his hand the second time to recover the remnant of his people, Israel; and that the time is near when he will bring them from the four winds . . . and [he has] commenced to raise up a church preparatory to his second advent, when he will come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory all men are born free and equal; that no man, combination of men, or government of men, have power or authority to compel or force others to embrace any system of religion, or religious creed

Restoration; Second Coming

Freedom of religion

Cowdery, 1834

Topic

Table 4.1 Continued P. Pratt, 1840

God will, in the last the great restoration of days, gather the Israel, and the rebuilding of literal descendants Jerusalem, in Palestine, of Jacob to the and that, when that time lands anciently comes, the Saviour will possessed by their come in the clouds of fathers . . . the time Heaven will come when the Lord Jesus will descend from heaven

J. Young, 1836 God has raised up this church, in order to prepare a people for his second coming

O. Pratt, 1840

the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may

the literal gathering of Israel, and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes. That Zion will be built upon this continent. That Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisal glory

Smith, 1842

embracing good wherever it may be found; of proving all things, and holding fast that which is righteous

abstain from all immorality: such as injustice, pride, vanity, dishonesty, evil speaking, falsehood, hatred, envy, avarice, in-​ temperance, adultery, fornication, lasciviousness, &c; and to practice all the virtues

being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul; we believe all things: we hope all things: we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is any thing virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praiseworthy, we seek thereafter

Sources: Oliver Cowdery, Address, M&A 1.1 (October 1834): 2; Joseph Young, “The Leading Principles of the Religious Faith of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, vulgarly called Mormons,” in John Hayward, The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States . . . (Boston: John Hayward, 1836), 139–​140. Elias Higbee and Parley P. Pratt, An Address by Judge Higbee and Parley P. Pratt, . . . to the citizens of Washington (Washington, DC: Parley P. Pratt, 1840); Orson Pratt, Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions (Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hughes, 1840); Joseph Smith, “Articles of Faith,” in Daniel Rupp, He Pasa Ekklesia [The whole church]: An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States (Philadelphia: J. Y. Humphreys, 1844).

Christian virtue

Obeying the law of the state

254  The Pearl of Greatest Price

The Articles of Faith in Their Context and Since If Smith spoke so energetically and frequently against the creeds, why does the church he founded have one? He clearly felt that the Articles of Faith were merely explanatory rather than binding or meant to be used as a test of orthodoxy. It is significant that most such formulations were explicitly produced for informational purposes. As Cowdery wrote in introducing his own version, he was publishing it in order “that our principles may be fully known.”38 Joseph Young provided his version in response to a journalist’s request, as did Smith himself in 1842. Still, the 1880 canonization of the Pearl of Great Price, using Smith’s version, elevated the Articles of Faith from being a summary suitable for a newspaper report or encyclopedia entry to serving as a de facto creedal statement. And to this day, Latter-​day Saint children are consequently encouraged to memorize them, as if they had the function and force of a catechism. Perhaps, as the eighteenth-​ century Methodist minister protested, “creedless churches are impossible.”39 Even the figure most associated with anticreedalism, Alexander Campbell, himself published his own creed, which has substantial overlap in form and content with the articles Joseph Smith enumerated four years before. Although Campbell begins—​ pointedly—​with “I believe” rather than “we believe,” his prominent leadership of the restorationist movement meant that his credo carefully crafted for public dissemination, however personal, had the efficacy of an influential creedal statement. His synopsis comprised ten tenets: 1. “All Scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable”; 2. God is one God “in nature, power, and volition”; 3. “Every human being participates in all the consequences of the fall of Adam,” including frailty and depravity; 4. God became flesh “to make an expiation for sin”; 5. Justification is not by faith alone but “by the obedience of faith”; 6. Faith and repentance are prerequisite to baptism, and the Holy Spirit sanctifies the sinner; 7. We have the right to “our own judgment in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures”; and 8. The ministry is of divine origin, as are the two “institutions” of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; 9. The Lord’s Day “is a New Testament observance”; and 10. “The Church of Christ—​not sects—​is a divine institution.”40

To Creed or Not to Creed  255 When Orson Hyde published his own version of church articles of doctrine in the same year as Smith, he made clear that he had not “written it as a law binding on the . . . Saints, but . . . to illustrate and set forth the true principles of doctrine to them.”41 When Smith’s contemporary Alexander Galbraith blasted the practice of creed-​making, he complained that “although the Protestants changed the doctrines of Popery, they retained the spirit of it,” adding that “no man, or body of men, has a right to make articles of faith, and impose them upon others.” The imposing is the key here. The sinister danger of creeds, according to these protests, had always been their employment as an “imposition in religious matters,” their use as an instrument to exclude, persecute, or proscribe.42 The Church of Jesus Christ does not enforce orthodoxy except when questionable propositions are publicly maintained; with a few exceptions, even admission to the highest rites of the faith are not contingent on assent to the Thirteen Articles of Faith. Of those propositions, only assent to belief in the Godhead and the efficacy of Christ’s Atonement are required for temple admission. In any case, the Articles of Faith lack both the completeness and the clarity to qualify as an accurate summation of distinctive Latter-​day Saint doctrines. Rodney Stark has famously observed that “new religious movements are likely to succeed to the extent that they maintain a medium level of tension with their surrounding environment—​ are strict, but not too strict.”43 The final product of Smith’s creedal statements illustrates that principle perfectly. In almost alternating fashion, the articles affirm some core Christian tenets while repudiating others, seldom proclaiming the most radical and distinctive teachings, and leaving an impression of Christian orthodoxy in cases where it is utterly absent. The lead article, affirmation of belief in God the Father, in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost, establishes the essentially Christian character of Mormonism—​with the critical difference between orthodox Trinitarianism and Latter-​day Saint tritheism entirely elided. While most Protestants espouse belief in a God “without body, parts, or passions,” the Latter-​day Saint God possesses all three. The refusal of Catholics and many Protestant denominations to recognize LDS baptisms as valid is largely predicated on the faith’s rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity—​but the first Article of Faith betrays no such nonconformity. The Church of Jesus Christ has from its inception proclaimed an embodied God the Father who is physically distinct from the Son, explicitly endowing this same Father with passibility, that is,

256  The Pearl of Greatest Price susceptibility to a fully shared pain and anguish of human suffering—​as evident in the Enoch texts. It is unclear whether Smith’s prudence in regard to a tritheistic, physically embodied, and passible Deity was an effective trade-​off. Latter-​day Saints thereby appeared at first glance to be in line with orthodox conceptions of the Deity but failed to fully exploit the Christian turn under way, even then, toward a God fully steeped in a shared human suffering. Thomas Weinandy observed in First Things that “toward the end of the nineteenth century a sea change began to occur within Christian theology such that at present many, if not most, Christian theologians hold as axiomatic that God is passible, that He does undergo emotional changes of states, and so can suffer.” Ronald Goetz has referred to the surge in “theopaschism” (the affirmation of a suffering god) as a “revolution” marking a “structural shift in the Christian mind.” Paul L. Gavrilyuk states that there is now “a remarkable consensus” behind the claim that “God suffers.” Yet the weeping God of Enoch, however revolutionary as a doctrinal declaration, was slow in seeping into LDS consciousness, and never attracted the notice its nineteenth-​century unorthodoxy merited.44 Curiously, the church’s emphasis on a bodily incarnate God the Father, though arguably of no greater theological import than a God subject to suffering, has been prominently and unapologetically conspicuous from the church’s founding—​though the first Article of Faith leaves both unaddressed. Clearly, in the first article, Smith’s focus was on commonality rather than difference. Smith was less reticent about proclaiming, in his second article, total dismissal of the doctrine of original sin—​which was already suffering loss of support by the mid-​nineteenth century. Wesley believed that “infants are guilty of original sin . . . [and] need to be washed from original sin; therefore they are proper subjects of baptism.” At the same time, he confessed “we cannot comprehend how this work [of new birth] can be wrought in infants” but said weakly that “neither can we comprehend how it is wrought in persons of riper years.”45 Baptists saw baptism as an act of obedience and an outward demonstration of a cleansing that has already been effected on cognizant adults—​with mixed views on the effects of Adam’s sin on children. Nineteenth-​century trends were clearly in the direction of further weakening the doctrine of original sin, or at least emphasizing inherited disposition rather than actual accountability (vitium or vice rather than reatus or guilt). Consequently, Protestants increasingly associated baptism with a personal rather than inherited sinfulness.

To Creed or Not to Creed  257 Reformed Baptists like Thomas Campbell and Barton Stone went further than almost all others, rejecting altogether the original sin that had so long been the rationale behind the baptism of children and adults alike. Unlike more conservative Baptists, Campbell and Stone practiced baptism for the remission of personal sins and therefore considered baptism essential only to adult salvation. So the Church of Jesus Christ was merely aligning itself with growing numbers of dissenters from the historic position on original sin, which Charles Hodge would unconvincingly insist in the 1870s was still “part of the faith of the whole Christian world.”46 Article 3 was a particularly dexterous formulation for several reasons. To predicate salvation on the Atonement of Christ was to center Jesus in familiar, Protestant language. At the same time, to add the crucial caveat of “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel” was a thinly veiled repudiation of both Protestantism’s sola gratia and its general antisacramentalism. Also noteworthy in this article is the emphatic assertion that “all” men may be saved. Many non-​Calvinists were already on board with rejecting a limited Atonement and parsimonious salvation. Smith was in this instance taking a highly partisan position in a raging debate. In 1738, Wesley had delivered an iconoclastic sermon in which he decried the “blasphemy contained in the horrible decree of predestination.” He rejected the Calvinist teaching on election for consigning “the greater part of mankind [to] abide in death without any possibility of redemption.”47 George Whitefield published his response in 1740, attacking Wesley for asserting that “God’s grace is free to all.” This was tantamount to “propagating the doctrine of universal redemption,” he protested, blaming the influence of “arminianism, [which] of late, has so much abounded among us.” He stoutly defended his position that only a select few were predestined to salvation while “the rest of mankind . . . will at last suffer that eternal death which is its proper wages.”48 Smith was retreating slightly from Orson Pratt’s universalist proclamation that “all mankind, without one exception, are to be completely, and fully redeemed” while still holding that out as a possibility. Smith would continue to elaborate a kind of “conditioned universalism” in which all would eventually find their way back into the divine presence.49 Nothing in article 4, specifying the first “ordinances” of the gospel as faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, would have aroused widespread objections. Other popular restorationists taught the same. Walter Scott, a Scottish immigrant who urged a restoration of New Testament practices and forms, became, after Barton Stone and the Campbells, the most

258  The Pearl of Greatest Price influential figure in the emerging Disciples movement, best known for his “five-​finger exercise,” a mnemonic for teaching the essential gospel principles of faith, repentance, baptism, the remission of sins, and the gift of the Spirit. With Scott’s impassioned preaching, the Campbellites gained enormous traction in the Western Reserve.50 To assert that a minister of the gospel “must be called of God” (article 5) was nothing new; the laying on of hands had both Jewish and New Testament precedent, and while Luther dismissed it as unnecessary, the influential Anglican Richard Hooker insisted the practice was indeed important, even if for its symbolism rather than its than intrinsic value.51 While the laying on of hands was phrasing familiar to Protestants, the conception of such literal and manual transmission of authority was Catholic, not Protestant. The “floating and transient notions of Protestant reformers” about authority, in Orson Hyde’s language, would never suffice.52 Only direct apostolic authority—​not by succession but by immediate bestowal through their resurrected selves—​ met Smith’s definition of an authoritative foundation. Affirming an organization modeled on the New Testament, along with the spiritual gifts (articles 6 and 7), was not uncommon among those in the primitivist or restorationist camps, though Latter-​day Saints carried both beliefs further than most others. Bishops, deacons, and elders were of course already common. One rare effort, besides the Latter-​day Saints, to restore a church on the authority of newly called apostles took shape ten years before Smith formulated these tenets, when the first apostle was called to the Catholic Apostolic Church (the Irvingites). They, too, considered Christianity to be in a state of apostasy, primarily because Christians lacked apostolic organization and the spiritual gifts.53 Christianity had fractured over the question of spiritual gifts as early as the second century, when Montanus—​a Christian convert from Asia Minor—​ claimed the gift of prophecy and made controversial pronouncements under the purported influence and authority of the Holy Spirit. In suppressing laypersons’ claims to prophecy inspired by the Holy Ghost, the official church opted to privilege apostolic authority over “the ecstasy and prophecy that the Paraclete granted” to seemingly random, self-​selected members of the laity. And so the canon, the creed, and the episcopate came to supplant “the Spirit’s extraordinary gifts.” The spiritual gifts promised in the New Testament were thereafter considered to refer “primarily to the Pentecostal event” itself.54 Recurrently over succeeding centuries, individuals and groups claimed a renewal of charismatic gifts, but only in the eighteenth century did

To Creed or Not to Creed  259 Protestants take up the practice seriously. As a result, the Latter-​day Saints were not alone among Christian denominations claiming such gifts—​though they were more emphatic in declaring them to be essential evidence of God’s favor and authority. Subsequently, the LDS Church affirmed that “the spiritual gifts which always accompany the Church of Christ and are the signs of its verity, are properly exercised under the power of the Priesthood.”55 For Latter-​day Saints, however, spiritual gifts were vital to the purposes of the church in much more important ways than as mere witness of its divine origins. Orson Pratt most fully and eloquently made the case for the centrality of these gifts to the carrying out of the church’s role as the vehicle for God’s purposes in saving and exalting the human family: any gospel destitute of supernatural power is destitute of God. It is barely on a level with other human Systems. . . . Take away the power of the gospel and you take away the remission of sins and the healing of diseases and the spirit of prophecy; take away the power of the gospel and you take away the ministry of angels, and the illuminations of visions and dreams and the doctrines of miracles, &c. But when these things shall be taken from the New Testament what will there be left? What a feeble and contemptible relic of a system would the New Testament become without these things? . . . From whence comes the hope of harmonizing the adverse spirits of the animal and human race and of establishing familiar intercourse between the heavens and earth and of causing a perfect conformity to the divine will and celestial order on the face of the whole earth?56

Article 8, proposing to elevate the Book of Mormon to scripture alongside the Bible, was Smith’s boldest move in these articles, and unavoidable since even their common appellation bore witness to that core belief. And declaring scripture “the word of God” was sufficiently vague to offend no one and to leave Latter-​day Saints themselves to struggle with mixed signals that continue to the present day. The caveat “as far as it is translated correctly” put to rest any potential belief in absolute inerrancy. And the Book of Mormon itself attested to corruptions and subtractions from the biblical text. All the foundations were in place for Mormonism to follow eighteenth-​ and nineteenth-​century trends toward a more cautious approach to confidence in biblical texts. Most recently, in 1823 John Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana was discovered and quickly popularized in William Channing’s 1826 Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton. In that widely

260  The Pearl of Greatest Price read work, the literary giant is quoted as asserting that the Bible “has been liable to frequent corruption, and in some instances has been corrupted, through the number, and occasionally the bad faith of those by whom it has been handed down.”57 However, competing tendencies were already at work among the Latter-​ day Saints, leading to biblical interpretative approaches more fundamentalist than liberal in nature. These seeds were planted early on by Parley Pratt, who thought that “spiritualized” readings of scripture were a form of priestcraft and that non-​literal interpretations of an imminent Second Coming diluted the truth of scripture generally.58 As a consequence, not just Higher Criticism but biblical scholarship generally—​including such staples as the Documentary Hypothesis—​has registered little impact in the Church of Jesus Christ generally. If queried, many Latter-​day Saints would point to belief in modern prophets and continuing revelation (article 9)  as the sine qua non of the Church of Jesus Christ’s exceptionalism. Pratt certainly believed that this was the case. In an early satire, “A Dialogue Between Joe Smith and the Devil,” Pratt imagined an accord almost reached between the two adversaries when Satan declares himself “decidedly in favor of all creeds, systems and forms of Christianity, of whatever name and nature,” with one caveat: they must steer clear of the one abominable principle with the power to bring his whole kingdom to ruin:  “direct communication with God, by new revelation.” Smith, of course, teaches this very principle—​and incurs the devil’s fanatical opposition as a consequence. In actual fact continuing revelation is perhaps not the unique religious claim Latter-​day Saints often believe it to be. Catholics affirm an original deposit of faith given to the apostles that their church must teach and protect, even while acknowledging that this deposit of faith unfolds and develops over time, subject to the Holy Spirit’s guidance.59 Some openness to change is shared with all but the most recalcitrant fundamentalists. Still, Latter-​day Saint teaching asserts that the original deposit of faith is itself expanding, that is, the canon is never closed. The belief espoused by the Congregationalist minister George Macdonald thus takes institutional form in the Church of Jesus Christ: “to the man who would live throughout the whole divine form of his being . . . a thousand questions will arise to which the Bible does not even allude. . . . They that begin first to inquire will soonest be gladdened with revelation; and with them he will be best pleased, for the slowness of his disciples troubled him of old.”60

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Besides the affirmation of belief in God, only some form of latter-day gathering was espoused in every version of the Articles of Faith—pointing to the paramount centrality of millennialism in nineteenth-century Mormonism. Smith did not contradict Parley Pratt’s promise of “the great restoration of Israel, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem,” but in article 10 he clarified that Zion was essentially a New World enterprise. As early as 1831, he had gestured toward a Latter-day Saint role in the gathering of the Jews, directing Orson Hyde to proclaim the gospel in “synagogues” of the Jews and blessing him to “facilitate the gathering together of that great people.”61 In 1841, Hyde arrived in Palestine and dedicated that land for the return of the Jews. At the same time, whereas it was a Christian commonplace to understand the work of evangelizing to be tantamount to gathering scattered Israel, the Latter-day Saints were unusual in believing that American Indians along with most converts were literally of Israelite blood. Therefore, they expected the gathering of Israel so often biblically prophesied as a sign of the latter days to have a dual fulfillment—the gathering of American Indians under the Indian Removal Act and of converts gathered to “Zion” both comported with their understanding of millennial prophecy. The arrival of the Millennium, which such gathering portended, was a pervasive expectation in nineteenthcentury America. However, Smith’s espousal of this belief emphasized its particular articulation in Latter-day Saint belief. For Smith did not envision a vague imperative to prepare spiritually for Christ’s return but added literal, geographical congregating of the believers and brick-and-mortar plats to his plans for a Zion to be built on “this”—that is, the American—continent. In Smith’s restatement of Oliver Cowdery’s celebration of religious freedom, there is both irony and concealed tension. The irony is that Cowdery and Smith’s expressed concern is with the conflict between religious choice and external persecution. Indeed, the Saints had personally experienced the devastating consequences of religious intolerance through several forced expulsions, losing property and life alike. To no religious group in America at this moment was the promise of religious liberty more vital. The concealed tension in their formulation is that within the movement itself, religious liberty could at times be threatened by religious authority. Cowdery himself was accused by a church council in Far West, Missouri, of “virtually denying the faith by declaring that he would not be governed by any ecclesiastical authority or revelations whatever in his temporal affairs.” Cowdery readily admitted the offense: “I will not be influenced, governed, or controlled, in my temporal interests by

262  The Pearl of Greatest Price any ecclesiastical authority or pretended revelation whatever, contrary to my own judgment.”62 In the spirit of American republicanism, Cowdery invoked his “constitutional privileges,” the rights adumbrated by Locke, and his Plymouth, Massachusetts, ancestors. That the High Council rejected the charge against Cowdery suggests the extent to which Smith’s authority to dictate in temporal matters was still a matter of controversy, uncertainty, and discontent midway through his exercise of his role as prophet.63 In a religious culture where prophets and apostles maintain an extraordinary degree of influence over religious practice, even while that religion exhibits what one observer calls an “obsessive . . . concern for free moral agency,” the tension may never be fully resolved.64 Article 12, as indicated above, was Smith’s only Article of Faith with no precursor version. It was the particular circumstances in 1842 Nauvoo that elicited this unequivocal affirmation of civil obedience and loyalty. Rumors spread that the Saints in Nauvoo were engaging in criminal enterprises, lawlessness, and counterfeiting. Not all the rumors were baseless. As the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers note, “theft committed by some Latter-​day Saints [in Nauvoo] was a large problem in 1841, leading to conflict” with those outside the faith.65 Some Saints claimed that scripture gave them right to an “inheritance” of that area. Hence, scriptural misappropriation, as well as simple greed, were at work. In November of that year, Smith and his brother Hyrum, the church patriarch, both felt a public statement was necessary to set the record straight in this regard and published affidavits in the church newspaper disavowing such lawlessness: “the transpiration of recent events [both excommunications and negative press on the subject] makes it criminal for me to remain longer silent,” wrote Smith. “I disfellowship the perpetrators of all such abominations—​[they] are devils and not saints, totally unfit for the society of Christians, or men. It is true that some professing to be Latter Day Saints have taught such vile heresies, all are not Israel that are of Israel; and I wish it to be distinctly understood in all coming time, that the church over which I have the honor of presiding will ever set its brows like brass, its face like steel, against all such abominable acts of villany and crime; and to this end I append my affidavit of disavowal.”66 A public exposition of the church’s creed was the perfect opportunity for Smith to reassert lawfulness as a religious principle. Article 13 repeated a Pauline embrace of the virtuous, lovely, and praiseworthy. It was, in this regard, an uncontroversial catchall for the embrace of all good things. And summing up the creedal mix with a recognizably

To Creed or Not to Creed  263 Pauline formulation was an economical way of claiming membership in the larger, orthodox Christian community. So what was the sum effect of this synopsis of beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ? According to Smith’s articles, Latter-​day Saints were a relatively conventional Christian group, embracing Primitivist church organization and gifts, fervently expecting the Lord’s Second Coming, and espousing religious freedom and civic and personal virtue. Their sole conspicuous distinction was belief in the Book of Mormon. Omitted from Smith’s litany of beliefs were the church’s unique and compelling declarations about the nature of God, of humans, and of the salvific state. As E. Brooks Holifield remarks, the scope of Smith’s theological innovations leads to “realms of doctrine unimagined in traditional Christian theology”67—​but no inklings of such adventuresomeness were present in the published Articles of Faith. As argued above, however, the Book of Moses sufficed to cover the ground of the Restoration’s religious innovation if Smith’s thirteen Articles of Faith did not. Latter-​day Saints believe in the physical embodiment and distinctness of both the Father and his divine Son and believe that both are possessed of body, parts, and passions. This break with Trinitarianism on the one hand and Unitarianism on the other is passed over in silence in the Articles of Faith. The doctrine of human preexistence was introduced with biblical revisions Smith produced in 1830, was developed further in 1832 and 1835, and was being preached publicly—​but it is absent from this exposition. A published revelation declared the possibility of being “made equal with [God]” and Pratt publicly defended that “doctrine of equality”68 but—​ perhaps still smarting from an 1838 attack on that doctrine by the journalist La Roy Sunderland—​Smith left the doctrine out of public expositions. The Book of Moses also revealed that the gospel centered in Jesus Christ was taught to Adam in the Garden of Eden and was an eternal plan rather than a New Testament invention. Though the Saints considered this one of the most astonishing revelations to come through Joseph Smith, it received no mention in the Articles of Faith. Orson Pratt had proclaimed a universal apostasy of Christendom in his ninth Article of Faith, but Smith prudently neglected to include this claim in his version. For Smith, the culminating purpose of the Restoration was to provide the priesthood and temple ordinances that would seal men and women into eternal marriages and link them in an eternal, familial chain of belonging. But he was still developing that sacramental temple theology at this time, so not a trace of that overarching vision appears in the Articles of Faith. Nor does the practice of proxy ordinances for

264  The Pearl of Greatest Price the dead, launched in 1840, receive mention, or the related teaching that virtually all humankind would be saved in a heavenly kingdom of glory—​which even many Latter-​day Saints found hard to swallow. Other key doctrines are absent because they were in the process of formulation or soon would be, but it is likely that they would have been left out in any case. Characterizing the celestial kingdom as a web of eternal relationships and sociality, including eternal marriage and the promise of “eternal increase” through spirit adoption or creation, came a year later. So did the related doctrine that man cannot be saved separate and apart from woman, in such a union. Espousal of belief in a Divine Mother in heaven first saw print in 1844.69 In sum, those doctrines Smith neglected to articulate were not peripheral doctrines or teachings of ambiguous standing, like Smith’s assertion that the Garden of Eden was located in Missouri or God’s residence near the planet Kolob. The cosmic scope of the gospel, its antiquity in premortal councils, its culmination in the theosis of humans and their integration into a heavenly family, the universal reach of God’s plan for the human race extending across time, culture, and death’s barrier, and in which light the fall was an ordained path rather than a cosmic catastrophe, with life cast as an educative process of ascent rather than punitive exile—​this panoramic sweep was not even attempted. What Smith mostly expounded in these Articles of Faith was ecclesiology—​how the church was organized and what its ordinances, scriptures, and spiritual practices entailed—​touching only on those theological points shared with many, if not most, in the Christian fold. Some observers have inferred from this fact a misrepresentation of “true Mormonism,” a holding in reserve of the higher or more controversial teachings. There may be some truth in that claim. The Latter-​day Saints had already experienced repeated persecutions, displacements, and exiles. Life in Nauvoo was precarious, with the stirrings of opposition once again manifest. Smith’s practice of polygamy—​not even known to most Latter-​day Saints in 1842—​would engender fierce denunciation and be a factor in his coming martyrdom. Stark’s observation about the needfulness of “maintain[ing] a medium level of tension with their surrounding environment” to optimize success has even greater relevance when survival, not mere success, is at stake.70 Smith had personal experience of inciting too much tension with a profoundly Protestant environment at the frontier of Jacksonian America. Smith’s own record of anticreedalism suggests that in addition to being an indictment of religious oppression in Jacksonian America, his own article

To Creed or Not to Creed  265 11, enjoining respect for the “dictates of our conscience,” may have been intended to forestall orthodoxy tests in his own church. As he made the point emphatically, “Methodists have creeds which a man must believe or be kicked out of their church. I want the liberty of believing as I please, it feels so good not to be tramelled.”71 When Smith did dictate a revelation addressing the practice of excommunication, he phrased it carefully: “all religious societies have a right to deal with their members for disorderly conduct, according to the rules and regulations of such societies,” and have the right to “excommunicate them from their society, and withdraw from them their fellowship.” The crucial caveat is that membership can be withdrawn for conduct. Inevitably, however, early Saints did move to excommunicate members who were conspicuous in their rejection of some doctrines of the LDS Restoration. Smith may have been willing to countenance men like Elder Pelatiah Brown, who “erred in doctrine,” but high councils drew the line at “teaching doctrine injurious to the church,” and one David Rogers was sanctioned accordingly. So also was Almon Babbit disfellowshipped for teaching “doctrine contrary to the revelations of God, and detrimental to the interests of the Church.”72 In 1837, thirteen members lost their standing for “giving heed to revelations said to be translated” by one Collins Brewster.73 Five years later, Gladden Bishop was similarly cut off for promulgating “revelations” he claimed to receive, which were “not consistent with the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church.”74 Sometimes discipline was employed against too firm an embrace of heresy or rejection of orthodoxy—​but context suggests this was when private positions tilted toward public advocacy. Warren Foote noted in his journal that “[Ezra] Landon and others had been cut off for rejecting the vision concerning the three glories” (D&C 76).75 In none of these or numerous other instances of church courts were the Articles of Faith invoked as a standard by which orthodoxy was measured. When the articles were included in Franklin D. Richards’s pamphlet, his intention, as indicated, was directed both to “all careful students of the scriptures” and to those just “beginning in the gospel.” The Articles of Faith were, in other words, explanatory in the nature of a very brief catechism. As late as 1911, a religious historian took up the question of subscription to creeds and asked if they made of the minister of religion “a hireling advocate of a prescribed set of propositions, of a dogmatic cause laid down three centuries ago. . . . Has the Word of the Lord no need of channels nowadays for its fresh outpouring?”76 Fortunately, he concluded, in the modern church creeds did not really constrain belief, making space for A. B. Bruce’s

266  The Pearl of Greatest Price dictum “the pulpit is the place of the prophet.”77 Indeed, a hundred years later, studies reveal little congruence between creeds and typical Christians: “most American evangelicals hold views condemned as heretical by some of the most important councils of the early church,” found one 2014 report, citing Arianism and Pelagianism as examples.78 A  subsequent survey expanded this disconnect to include Americans of all faiths. “Basic Christian theology is easy to find on a church’s beliefs webpage, yet most Americans don’t understand how the pieces are related,” commented one researcher.79 The Church of Jesus Christ, by contrast, has seen no perceptible disconnect between the sketch produced by Smith and the current state of doctrine. Because the Articles of Faith were incomplete, rather than inaccurate, as an outline of Mormon doctrine, Smith may or may not have applauded their canonization. His own inclinations, in any event, were certainly in the direction of challenging, rather than indulging, the theologically faint-​hearted. He himself was obviously frustrated with the constraints that Christian orthodoxy—​ and the limited theological imagination of LDS converts themselves—​imposed on his iconoclastic revelations. The caustic Charles Dickens could be forgiven for alleging in 1851 that “what the Mormons do seems to be excellent; what they say is mostly nonsense.”80 But Smith despaired that “even the Saints are slow to understand. I  have tried for a number of years to get the minds of the saints prepared to receive the things of God, but we frequently see some of them, after suffering all they have for the work of God will fly to pieces like glass, as soon as anything comes that is contrary to their traditions.”81 The theological conservatism of the Articles of Faith may have been made with these cautious Saints, as well as a skeptical world, in mind.

Notes 1. Deuteronomy  6:4–​5. 2. These verses include Deuteronomy 6:6–​9 and 11:13–​21 and Numbers 15:37–​41. Scott Hahn, The Creed: Professing the Faith through the Ages (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2016), 17–​18. 3. Hahn, Creed, 16. 4. Alexander Galbraith, Human Creeds and Confessions (Glasgow:  R. Chapman, 1822), 34. 5. John Locke, Letters on Toleration (Bombay: Education Society, 1867), 137, 380.

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6. Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas, Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c. 1650–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 90. 7. Roger Thomas, “The Non-subscription Controversy amongst Dissenters in 1719: The Salters’ Hall Debate,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 4.2 (October 1953): 162–186. 8. Samuel Savage, Considerations on the Nature and Use of Human Creeds and Confessions (London: John Noon, 1722), 38, 12. 9. Richard B. Barlow, “The Career of John Abernethy (1680–1740):  Father of Nonsubscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty,” Harvard Theological Review 78.3/4 (July-October 1985): 410–411. 10. Amory is quoted in Galbraith, Human Creeds, 33. 11. Galbraith, Human Creeds, 12–13. 12. Alexander Campbell, “The Creed Question,” Christian Baptist 4 (Bethany, VA:  A. Campbell) (1827): 201. 13. “The Creed Question,” Independent Monthly 1.5 (1 May 1869): 173. 14. [John Shackelford], “The Creed Problem Stated,” Independent Monthly 1.3 (1 March 1869): 82. 15. “Creed Question,” 173. 16. Alexander Campbell, “Creed Question,” 201. 17. Baptist Quarterly 9 (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society) (1875): 192. 18. Samuel Savage, Considerations on the Nature and Use of Human Creeds and Confessions (London: John Noon, 1722), 38, 12. 19. Savage, Considerations, 11. 20. Galbraith, Human Creeds, 19. 21. JSP-H1, 214. 22. Parley P. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled: Zion’s Watchman Unmasked (New York: Pratt & Fordham, 1838), 31. 23. Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean C. Jessee, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 2002), 458. 24. 15 October 1843. Temple Stand, WJS, 256. 25. 31 December 1842, JSP-J2, 205. 26. MHC D-1, 1433. 27. Galbraith, Human Creeds, 16. 28. David Whitmer, An Address to all Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: D. Whitmer, 1887), 51. 29. 1835 D&C, preface. 30. Isaac Clark Pray, Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), 416. 31. New York Herald, 21 May and 14 June 1842; New York Herald, 13 August 1842. 32. “Military Appointment of James Arlington Bennet, 12 April 1842,” in The Wasp, 30 April 1842, [4], Joseph Smith Papers, https://josephsmithpapers.org/papersummary/military-appointment-of-james-arlington-bennet-12-april-1842/1. 33. “Church History,” 1 March 1842, JSP-H1, 489. 34. “Church History,” T&S 3.9 (1 March 1842): 706–710.

268

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35. Daniel Rupp, He Pasa Ekklesia [The whole church]:  An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States (Philadelphia:  J. Y. Humphreys, 1844). 36. “Address,” M&A 1.1 (October 1834): 2. 37. Joseph Young, “The Leading Principles of the Religious Faith of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, vulgarly called Mormons,” in John Hayward, The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States . . . (Boston: John Hayward, 1836), 139–140. 38. “Address,” M&A 1.1 (October 1834): 2. 39. “Creed Question.” 40. Millennial Harbinger, ser. 3, vol. 3, ed. A. Campbell and W. K. Pendleton (Bethany, VA: A. Campbell, 1846), 385. 41. O. Hyde to President Smith, 15 June 1841, MHC C-1, 1208. 42. Galbraith, Human Creeds, 14, 11. 43. Rodney Stark, “Why Religious Movements Succeed or Fail:  A Revised General Model,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 11.2 (May 1996): 137. 44. No attention to this most heterodox position is apparent in the literature before Eugene England’s important essay “The Weeping God of Mormonism,” Dialogue 35.1 (Spring 2002):  63–80. See, more recently, Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life (Salt Lake City : Deseret, 2012). 45. John Wesley, “The New Birth,” Sermons on Several Occasions, ed. Thomas Summers (Nashville: Stevenson & Owen, 1855), 2:273. 46. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 2:192. 47. John Wesley, “Free Grace,” in Sermons on Several Occasions (London:  J. Kershaw, 1825): 2:10–11, 3. 48. George Whitefield, Works (London: Edward and Charles Killy, 1771), 4:55–58. 49. In addition to his personal teaching that a spirit in the lowest kingdom “constantly progresses in spiritual knowledge until safely landed in the Celestial,” he described his brother Alvin, consigned by one revelation originally to the terrestrial kingdom, as later ensconced in the celestial. Franklin D. Richards, “Words of the Prophets,” CHL; Charlotte Haven, 26 March 1843, “A Girl’s Letters from Nauvoo,” Overland Monthly 16.96 (December1890): 626; D&C 76:71–74; D&C 137:1–6. In Pratt’s case, it is possible he was referring to redemption from death, not hell. 50. William E. Tucker and Lester G. McAllister, Journey in Faith: A History of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1975), 132–134. 51. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London:  John Walthoe, et al., 1723), 236, 276–277. 52. MHC C-1, 1208. 53. For a full treatment, see P. E. Shaw, The Catholic Apostolic Church; Sometimes Called Irvingite (Morningside Heights, NY: King’s Crown Press, 1946). 54. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 106–108. 55. John A. Widtsoe, Priesthood and Church Government (Salt Lake City :  Deseret, 1954), 38.

To Creed or Not to Creed

269

56. Orson Pratt, “The Gospel Witness,” MS 10.11 (1 June 1848): 164. 57. William Ellery Channing, Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1828), 42. 58. See Givens, Feeding the Flock: The Foundations of Mormon Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 263. 59. The term is a translation of “depositum fidei” and is rooted in the epistles to Timothy, which admonish him to “keep the deposit” (“depositum custodi” in the Vulgate; 1 Tim. 6:20 and 2 Tim. 1:14). The idea of balancing the development of doctrine with the church’s responsibility to guard this original deposit is generally attributed to the fifth-century Vincent of Lerins. 60. George Macdonald, “The Higher Faith,” in Unspoken Sermons, 1st ser. (Whitehorn, CA: Johannesen, 2004), 35–37. 61. 1835 D&C 22:1 (D&C 68:1); T&S 2.23 (1 October 1841): 553. 62. The nine formal charges against Cowdery and his letter of response are in B. H. Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1957) 1:431–434. 63. Cowdery’s reply to the charges was largely confined to the one issue of the limits of ecclesiastical authority. As a result, he was excommunicated for those charges to which he had not deigned to respond, including legal harassment of church leaders and dishonesty. See Roberts, Comprehensive History, 1:432. 64. Sterling McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, 1965), 52. See also Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 65. JSP-D8, xxxiii. 66. “Pres’t. Smith’s Affidavit,” 29 November 1841, JSP-D8, 380–381. 67. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2003), 335. 68. 1835 D&C 7:107 (D&C 88:107); Parley P. Pratt, Mormonism Unveiled:  Zion’s Watchman Unmasked (New York: Pratt & Fordham, 1838), 27. 69. See Givens, Wrestling the Angel:  The Foundations of Mormon Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 109. 70. Stark, “Why Religious Movements,” 143–133. 71. 8 April 1843. William Clayton Report, WJS, 183–184. 72. MHC C-1, 1227–1232. 73. MHC C-1, 777–778. 74. MHC C-1, 1287. 75. Autobiography of Warren Foote (Mesa: Dale Arnold Foote, 1997), 1:5. 76. William A. Curtis, A History of Creeds and Confessions of Faith (Edinburgh:  T. & T. Clark, 1911), 451. 77. Curtis, History of Creeds, 452. 78. LifeWay Research for Ligonier Ministries Survey, reported in Kevin P. Emmert, “New Poll Finds Evangelicals’ Favorite Heresies,” Christianity Today (28 October 2014), http:// www.christianitytoday.com/ ct/ 2014/ october- web- only/ new- poll- findsevangelicals-favorite-heresies.html.

270  The Pearl of Greatest Price 79. “Americans Love God and the Bible, Are Fuzzy on the Details,” 27 September 2016, http://​lifewayresearch.com/​2016/​09/​27/​americans-​love-​god-​and-​the-​bible-​are-​ fuzzy-​on-​the-​details/​. 80. The judgment appears, unsigned, in a periodical “conducted” by Charles Dickens. See “In the Name of the Prophet—​Smith!,” Household Words 3.69 (1851): 385. 81. MHC E-​1, 1867.

 Epilogue The canonization of the Book of Moses gave to the church its comprehensive doctrinal framework, systematically disassembling the Sovereign God of tradition, collapsing the infinite qualitative distance separating the divine from the human, and subsuming prior Christian narratives within a mythological expansion that reached from premortality to human theosis. The Book of Abraham’s influence was more subtle, but equally profound. For Smith found in a reconstituted Abrahamic story the basis for an eternal priesthood that went far beyond ecclesiology, reaching into premortal pasts and extending its reaching into the eternities ahead. Although priesthood in the Latter-​ day Saint mind has largely shifted to its administrative functions in a visible church, for Smith it was the matrix on which the plan of salvation, with its focus on eternal lines of association that gather us into a complex web of belonging, was mapped. And the temple theology which expounded and reified those associations, found its deepest scriptural roots in the Book of Abraham. The canonization of the Joseph Smith story definitively shattered the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura in a way more profound than simple expansion of canon. True, the Book of Mormon had challenged the doctrine, but by way of supplement, or addendum. As Brigham Young and countless others noted, the new scripture accorded with New Testament teachings; it did not challenge their truth or efficacy. It was left for Smith’s visionary encounters with God—​themselves made into scripture in the Pearl of Great Price—​to emphatically and explicitly displace biblical revelation as the ground of church and doctrinal authority. Ironically, it is that very centering of religious authority in Smith’s calling as prophet of God that has been thrown into its most severe crisis by the Abrahamic account with which Smith’s biographically based authority shares canonical space. It is in this realm of tension that the past and future of the Church of Jesus Christ collide. What this means is that the vitality of the church has, since the closing decades of the nineteenth century especially, resided in a potent conception of “modern revelation,” “continuing

272  The Pearl of Greatest Price revelation,” an “open canon,” “living prophets,” and kindred expressions of a principle that imbues LDS prophets with revelatory powers on a par with Moses on the mount—​but the model and ground for such prophetic power is most dramatically and fully instantiated only in Joseph Smith. Only Smith is referred to as “the prophet” of the Restoration, possessing such unparalleled claim to that title that in the aftermath of his death, no one ventured to assume his calling. As William Smith, himself aspiring to succeed him, hedged, he did not wish to be “prophet in Joseph’s place for no man on Earth can fill his place he is our prophet seer revelator Priest & King in time & in Eternity.”1 Even Young, who waited three years to assume the presidency, would be known as Brother Brigham or President Brigham, but never “the prophet Brigham.” In other words, Latter-​day Saint conceptions of Smith’s revelatory gifts have tended to be relatively monochromatic. While Smith continually agitated for greater freedom to express his speculative imagination, unburdened by the expectations of infallibility and flawless execution, his people have persisted in painting him as an air-​brushed creature in the heroic mold. Regarding his own fallibility, he sanguinely remarked, in the aftermath of a failed prophecy, “Some revelations are of God: some revelations are of man: and some revelations are of the devil.”2 “I [am] but a man,” he reminded the Saints on another occasion, “and they must not expect me to be perfect; if they expected perfection from me, I should expect it from them.”3 Of the demand that he meet their standards of prophetic performance, he complained that “he did not enjoy the right vouchsafed to every American citizen—​that of free speech. He said that when he ventured to give his private opinion on any subject of importance, his words were often garbled and their meaning twisted, and then given out as the word of the Lord because they came from him.”4 Alberto Manguel has written that “Writing . . . is the art of resignation. The writer must accept the fact that the final text will be but a blurred reflection of the work conceived in the mind, less enlightening, less subtle, less poignant, less precise. Then comes the descent into language, and in the passage from thought to expression much—​very much—​is lost. To this rule there are hardly any exceptions.”5 Smith clearly agreed; even in those words he pronounced with the imprimatur of divine authority, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” he was transparent about their imperfect expression. By enlisting several colleagues to participate in the editing of his revelatory declarations—​at least half a dozen hands are evident in the revelation manuscripts—​he was acknowledging that giving shape to divine impressions could be a daunting

Epilogue  273 endeavor—​even for one proclaimed a prophet. Smith had no more fervent disciple than Brigham Young, but even Young knew that “it is impossible for the poor, weak, low, groveling, sinful inhabitants of the earth to receive a revelation from the Almighty in all its perfections. He has to speak to us in a manner to meet the extent of our capacities.”6 Believing Smith to be exempt from such an indictment has placed the Church of Jesus Christ in the difficult spot where it now finds itself: renegotiating the status—​and the etiology—​of a document whose meaning and value depend on the expectations that enshroud it. Was the Book of Abraham a transparent product of hubris, by a New  York farmer claiming scholarly capacities he never possessed? A word for word, inspired translation from an original we may never hope to recover? An ingenious if eccentric chapter in an audacious project to chart a linguistic path back to the language of Adam? Or the irruption of inspiration, prompted by the smell of ancient mummies and the feel of crumbling papyrus, woven into a provocative tapestry that effected God’s purposes in restoring a cosmic narrative of human origins and destinies? The irony of the Pearl of Great Price is that it is the source, at one and the same time, of Mormonism’s theological treasures and its most vexing historical dilemmas. The Book of Mormon, for which the church is more widely known, has presented little of either. It is doctrinally rather benign—​ in the sense that it proclaims no direct doctrinal challenges to Christian orthodoxies—​and without source documents (or plates) it is not subject to conclusive disproof. The Pearl of Great Price opens up immense vistas both troublesome and creative. The city of Enoch became the template for the practice of gathering that both bolstered a persecuted sect and drew a cyclone of suspicion and fury upon their heads. The Abrahamic order that developed into polygamy created a lasting legacy of pain and marginalization from the American mainstream, with lingering stereotypes that the church seems powerless to efface completely. A misconstrual of racial prohibition became the scriptural rationale for a racialist policy that still taints the Latter-​day Saint past. And the very claim of Egyptian papyri as the source of these latter texts continues to be a leading cause of ridicule from without and disaffection from within. At the same time, Mormonism as it came to develop would not be recognizable separate and apart from the Pearl of Great Price. It potrays of a God who literally mourns the misery of his creation; human origins traceable to heavenly councils in which they participated; an inauguration of human

274  The Pearl of Greatest Price history that celebrates, rather than condemns, the decision to leave Eden behind in quest of greater glories; a promise of coparticipation with God, sharing his future dominions; the hope of a Zion to be realized this side of heaven, constituting a community knit together in one heart and mind. For Latter-​day Saints, the pearl continues to be worth the price.

Notes 1. William Smith to Brigham Young, 27 August 1844, quoted in D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844,” BYU Studies 16.2 (Winter 1976): 202. William Smith soon reconsidered, making his own bid for the leadership position. 2. David Whitmer, Address to All Believers in Christ, 31, cited in JSP-​D1, 110. 3. 29 October 1842. Red Brick Store, WJS, 132. 4. Hyrum L. Andrus and Helen Mae Andrus, They Knew the Prophet: Personal Accounts from over 100 People Who Knew Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1974), 140. 5. Albert Manguel, Curiosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 9. 6. 8 July 1855. SLC Tabernacle, CDBY, 2:986.

Sources Scriptures All Bible citations are from the King James Version, as that is the version employed by Joseph Smith and in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Citations from the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) are given according to the edition in which they were first published or the church newspaper where they first appeared. The present (1981) version is always given parenthetically. When Doctrine and Covenants citations are given in the text, they refer to the current (1981) edition. Two manuscripts of Smith’s reworking of the Old Testament exist, published in JSNT. The KJV follows in parentheses the JSNT passages, since the LDS Church does not have a canonical version of the JSNT. Unless otherwise indicated, passages are cited, first, from JSNT, using the later of the two manuscripts, OT2. Parenthetically, the current published version of the passage is generally given, using the Book of Moses for those published in the Pearl of Great Price, and JSTB for others. Two manuscripts of Smith’s reworking of the New Testament also exist, though MS2 does not contain all the passages he reworked in the prior version, MS1. Therefore MS2 is cited, unless the cited passage exists only in MS1. All citations from the Book of Abraham are from the first published versions, in the Joseph Smith Papers edition (JSP-R4), followed by the current citation from the Pearl of Great Price.

Abbreviations BC CDBY

Book of Commandments for the Government of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Independence, MO: W. W. Phelps, 1833. The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young. Ed. Richard S. Van Wagoner. Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2009.

276

Sources

CHL EMS JD JSNT

JSP-D1

JSP-D2

JSP-D3

JSP-D5

JSP-D7

JSP-D8

JSP-H1

JSP-J1

JSP-J2

JSP-R&T

JSP-R2

Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. Evening and Morning Star. Journal of Discourses. 26 vols. Reported by G. D. Watt et al. Liverpool: F. D. and S. W. Richards et al., 1851–86. Reprint, Salt Lake City: n.p., 1974. Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts. Ed. Scott H. Faulring, Kent P. Jackson, and Robert J. Matthews. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 2004. Joseph Smith Papers: Documents. Vol. 1. Ed. Michael Hubbard MacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2013. Joseph Smith Papers: Documents. Vol. 2. Ed. Matthew C. Godfrey, Mark Ashurst-McGee, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, William G. Hartley. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2013. Joseph Smith Papers: Documents. Vol. 3. Ed. Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Brent M. Rogers, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2014. Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Vol. 5. Ed. Brent M. Rogers, Elizabeth A. Kuehn, Christian K. Heimburger, Max H Parkin, Alexander L. Baugh, and Steven C. Harper. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017. Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Vol. 7. Ed. Matthew C. Godfrey, Spencer W. McBride, Alex D. Smith, and Christopher James Blythe. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018. Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Vol. 8. Ed. Brent M. Rogers, Mason K. Allred, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, and Brett D. Dowdle. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2019. Joseph Smith Papers: Histories. Vol. 1. Ed. Karen Lynn Davidson, David J. Whittaker, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2012. Joseph Smith Papers: Journals. Vol. 1: 1832–1839. Ed. Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen. Salt Lake City: Church Historians Press, 2008. Joseph Smith Papers: Journals. Vol. 2: 1841–1843 Ed. Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011. Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations. Facsimile ed. Ed. Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper. Salt Lake City: Church Historians Press, 2009. Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations. Vol. 2. Ed. Robin Scott Jensen, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Riley M. Lorimer. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011.

Sources  277 JSP-​R2 Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations. Vol. 2. Ed. Robin Scott Jensen, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Riley M. Lorimer. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011. JSP-​R4 Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations. Vol. 4. Ed. Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018. JSTB  Joseph Smith’s ‘New Translation’ of the Bible (Independence, MO: Herald House, 1970). M&A Latter-​day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate MHC Manuscript History of the Church, Church History Library, Salt Lake City. MStar The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star T&S Times and Seasons THBA Brian H. Hauglid, A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010. WJS The Words of Joseph Smith. Ed. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook. Orem, UT: Grandin Book, 1991.

Index Note: For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.   Abernethy, John, 242 Bible and, 30–​31 Abraham cycle of, 59–​60 as author of papyri, 155 First Vision and, 227, 234–​37 covenant of, 122–​23, 133–​34 LDS view of, 243–​44 gained knowledge, 137–​40 apostles, 258 practiced plural marriage, 85–​86 Articles of Faith priesthood and, 121–​23, 131–​34 audience of, 246, 254, 266 sojourn in Egypt of, 165–​68 distinctive doctrines left out of, 263–​64 temple and, 163 precursors to, 246–​48, 249t vision of, of creation/​cosmology, Ashment, Edward, 151 128–​31,  165 astronomy/​astrology, 165–​66,  176–​77 vision of, of premortal existence, Augustine, 48–​49, 54, 72–​73, 79–​80 125–​28,  164–​65 authority Abraham/​Egyptian Papers, 169–​80, 187–​ ecclesiastical, 87–​88, 223–​25,  271–​73 88. See also Fragment-​A narrative,  196–​99 Adam and Eve. See also Fall Awman, 50–​52. See also “Sample of pure expelled and visited by angels, 10, 91–​93 language, A” fortunate fall of, 40–​42   law given to, 91–​92 Babel,  71–​72 Adamic/​original language, Baer, Klaus, 148, 155–​56 113–​16,  186–​87 baptism,  256–​57 “Address to the Citizens of Washington, Barker, Margaret, 45–​46 An,” by Parley P. Pratt, 248 Barney, Quinten, 162 Allred, Alma, 132 Bennet, James Arlington, 245 Amory, Thomas, 242 Bennett, James Gordon, 245 Anderson, K. C., 145 Bertrand, Louis, 143 angel Bible visited Adam and Eve, 10, 92–​93 in LDS thought, 68–​69 visited Joseph Smith, 30–​31, omissions and corruptions of, 29–​31, 227–​28,  230–​31 37, 94–​95,  259–​60 antiquities,  181–​84 translations of, 28–​30 Apocalypse of Abraham, 163, 164–​65 types of revisions to, in JST, 32, 35, 69 Apocrypha, 42–​44, 78–​79,  166–​67 Blanchard, Jerusha, 159 Apocryphal New Testament, The, by Bloom, Harold, 47, 92, 137–​38, 161 William Hone, 42–​44 Blythe, Christopher, 225 apostasy Bokovoy, David, 193 as basic tenet, 246–​47, 263–​64 Book of Commandments, 9–​10

280 Index Book of Enoch, 45–​47, 183 Book of Jasher, 182 Book of Mormon bricolage in, 190–​92 challenged biblical sufficiency, 94–​95 declared scripture, 259–​60 as doctrinally benign, 3–​4, 27–​28, 273 as sign of preparation for Millennium, 63 translation of, 200–​1 used in proselytizing, 8–​9, 13, 27–​28 Book of the Dead/​Book of Breathing, 146, 154–​56,  165 Booth, Ezra, 233–​34 bricolage,  188–​94 Brown, Samuel, 186–​87 Bruce, A. B., 265–​66 Bruce, James, 45–​46 Bushman, Richard, 47 Butt, John, 46   Cain, 70 Calvin, John, 50 Campbell, Alexander, 28–​29, 30, 62–​63 Campbell, Thomas, 257 Cannon, George Q., 1–​2, 20, 81–​82 canonization, 2–​3, 51 Chamberlain, Solomon, 8–​9 Chamberlin, W. H., 131 Chandler, Michael, 119–​21 children, salvation and, 74–​75, 256 Chrysostom, 41 Cirillo, Salvatore, 47 Clark, John B., 173 Clarke, Adam, 111–​12 consecration,  57–​58 cosmology,  138–​40 Council in Heaven, 127–​28 covenant, people of the, 60 covenant theology, 5, 39–​40, 75–​77, 121–​25,  133–​34 Cowdery, Oliver, 31–​32, 226–​27, 229–​30, 246,  261–​62 Cowdery, Warren, 73–​74 Crapo, Richley H., 157 Creation as organization, 128–​29 periods of, 130–​31

spiritual, before physical, 39, 126 creedalism, 241–​45, 254–​55,  265–​66   Dante, 70 Davies, Paul, 39, 126 Davies, W. D., 114 De Doctrina Christiana, by John Milton,  259–​60 Devéria, Théodule, 143 “Dialogue Between Joe Smith and the Devil, A,” by Parley P. Pratt, 260 Dickens, Charles, 266 Diderot, Denis, 186–​87 Dionysius, 54 Doctrine and Covenants anticreedalism and, 245 revised edition of, 2 Doctrine and Covenants section 29, 90–​92 Doctrine and Covenants section 76. See Smith, Joseph, Jr., “Vision, the,” of Doctrine and Covenants section 88, 81 Doctrine and Covenants section 93, 82–​83 Doctrine and Covenants section 132,  85–​87 Documentary Hypothesis, 39, 126   earth, age of, 130–​31 education. See knowledge Edwards, Henry, 33 Edwards, Jonathan, 70 Egyptian language, 116–​17, 157, 169–​77,  178–​79 as compressed language, 185–​88 Egyptomania, 118–​19, 181–​82, 185 Elior, Rachel, 192–​93 emanation,  52–​53 English, George, 46 Enoch asks why God weeps, 49 city of, 57, 83 experienced godly love, 54–​55 hymn about, 50–​52 mentioned in Bible, 44–​45 Enoch, law of, 57–​58, 83–​84 “Enoch, Prophecy of,” 47–​48 Ephrem the Syrian, 41 Evans-​Pritchard, E. E., 199 Evans, John, 145

Index  281 Evening and the Morning Star, The, 9, 47–​48,  60–​62 excommunication,  264–​65   facsimiles, 140, 142–​53, 155–​56, 176–​77,  189–​90 faith, deposit of, 260 Fall, 39–​42, 70, 91–​93, 94 Farrer, Austin, 162 Fate of Madame La Tour, The, 198 five-​degree system,  175–​77 Flake, Kathleen, 92, 134, 225 Foote, Warren, 85 Fragment-​A,  155–​58 Fraser, Alexander, 59–​60 funerary literature, 146, 162   Galbraith, Alexander, 242–​43, 244, 255 gathering, 15–​16, 56–​57, 65, 66–​67, 85, 261 Gavrilyuk, Paul L., 256 Gee, John, 148, 158, 162, 169 Genesis 1–​5,  39–​41 gifts, spiritual, 258–​59 Ginzberg, Louis, 163, 166 glory,  38–​39 God allows human choice, 50 embodiment of, 73–​74, 243–​44, 255–​56,  263 glory of, 38–​39 judgment of, explained by JST edits,  70–​73 love of, 54–​55 passibility of, 48–​50, 255–​56 sons of, 53 sovereignty of, 129–​30 Goetz, Ronald, 256 gospel, eternal nature of, 5, 10, 75–​76,  263–​64 grace, 75 Grey, Matthew, 178–​79   Halbertal, Moshe, 127 Ham, 136 Haven, Charlotte, 158 Hebrew language, 116, 177–​79 Hegel, G. F. W., 185–​86

hell, 80 Herbert, Algernon, 46 Heschel, Abraham, 195 Hieroglyphs. See Egyptian language Hodge, Charles, 257 Holifield, E. Brooks, 28, 263 Hone, William, 42–​44 Hooker, Richard, 258 hubris,  71–​72 Hutchinson, John, 116 Hyde, Orson, 14, 136, 255, 258 hymn, about Enoch, 50–​52 hypocephalus,  139–​40   Improvement Era, 144 Infants. See children Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, by Orson Pratt, 13, 248 Isaiah,  191–​92 Israel, Menasseh ben, 39   Jackson County, Missouri, 64–​67 Jackson, Kent, 168–​69 Jerome, 77 Johannes, Erasmus, 241–​42 John the Beloved, lost text of, 31–​32, 82–​83,  95 Joseph of Egypt, 117–​18 Joseph Smith Translation canonization and, 68–​69 as catalyst for revelations, 35–​36, 77–​96 doctrinal types of edits in, 69 preparation for publication of, 32–​34 reasons to not publish, 34–​35 Joseph Smith, Jr. as a Translator by Franklin S. Spalding, 143–​44 journalists,  245–​46   Kelsey, Eli, 15 Key to the Prophecies, by Alexander Fraser,  59–​60 keys, 87–​88,  228–​29 Kircher, Athanasius, 185–​86 Kirtland Egyptian Papers. See Abraham/​ Egyptian Papers Knight, Joseph, 112 knowledge, 137–​40, 177 Kolob, 150–​51,  176–​77

282 Index Laurence, Richard, 45–​46 law, respect for, 248, 262 laying on of hands, 258 Lebolo, Antonio, 119 Lectures on Faith, 10 Lehi,  117–​18 Lessing, Gotthold, 186–​87 Letter Concerning Toleration, by John Locke,  241–​42 Levi-​Strauss, Claude, 188–​89, 190, 192 light of Christ, 81–​82 literature, fluidity of genre and authority in,  196–​99 Luther, Martin, 223–​24, 226–​27 Lyell, Charles, 130–​31   Macdonald, George, 260 Manguel, Alberto, 272–​73 Margalit, Avishai, 127 marriage, eternal, 133–​34, 264 Marsh, Thomas, 8–​9 Mathews, Robert (“Matthias”), 231 matter eternal nature of, 128–​29, 130 intelligence of, 131 Matthew 17, 89 Matthew 24, 63–​64 Matthew 28, 89–​90 Matthews, Robert, 79 M’Calla, W. L., 48–​49 Melanchton, Phillip, 41 Messenger and Advocate, 229, 246 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 154–​55 Millennial Star, 15, 66–​67 millennialism, 18, 62–​64, 66–​67, 246, 247, 261 Miller, William, 63, 242–​43, 245, 254 Milton, John, 40, 259–​60 Moody, James, 116 Mormonism Unvailed, by Eber D. Howe,  233–​34 Moroni, 30–​31,  230–​31 mortality, purpose of, 128 Mosaic law, 76–​77 Moses, 76, 94 vision of, not recorded in Bible,  37–​4 1 Muhlestein, Kerry, 155–​56, 169

Mulder, William, 113 mummies,  118–​21   New Translation. See Joseph Smith Translation Nibley, Hugh on antiquity of temple ordinances,  139–​40 on content and historicity of Book of Abraham, 160–​61, 162, 163–​65,  166–​69 on correspondences between Book of Abraham and Egyptian traditions,  166–​69 on facsimiles as triptych, 189–​90 qualifications of, 159–​60 on temple connections to Book of Abraham, 163 on translation of source papyri, 146–​48, 150–​51,  157–​58 Noah, 70–​71,  75–​76   officers, sustaining of, 1–​2 Olsen, Steve, 56–​57 ordinances,  257–​58 ordination, 258 Ostler, Blake, 201   pamphleteering, 15 papyri. See also facsimiles acquired by Joseph Smith, 119–​21, 140 controversies about translation of,  153–​59 description of, 154, 158–​59 disposition of, after Joseph Smith’s possession,  153–​55 publication of, 154 parallelomania,  168–​69 Parrish, Warren, 170–​73 patriarchs,  131–​32 Patton, David W., 50–​51 Paul,  76–​77 Paulsen, David, 73 Pearl of Great Price pamphlet audience for, 6, 19, 265 contents of, 2–​3, 6–​8, 17–​18 publication of, 2–​3, 5–​7, 18–​19 use of, 19–​20, 21–​22

Index  283 Peck, Steven, 131 Pellikan, Konrad, 41 persecutions, contributing to different purposes/​audiences of theophany accounts, 224, 231, 232, 233–​34,  235–​36 Phelps, William W., 27–​28, 130–​31,  178–​79 Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, 79–​80 Plato, 135 polygamy, 85–​87,  133–​34 poor,  83–​84 Pratt, Orson on Bible, 27–​28 conducted sustaining of officers, 1 edited 1878 edition of Pearl of Great Price, 21 on intelligence of matter, 131 on Jackson County, 67 as president of British Mission, 15 published early church history, 13, 17 quoted from Pearl of Great Price in General Conference, 20 on revelations about polygamy, 85–​86 on spiritual gifts, 258–​59 wrote summary of beliefs, 17–​18, 248 Pratt, Parley P. on being driven out of Jackson County,  65–​66 criticized belief in noncorporal God, 73–​74,  243–​44 on cursed lineage, 136 defended theosis, 53–​54 didn’t write about First Vision, 230–​31 learned about First Vision, 232–​33 on non-​literal interpretation of scripture, 260 on organizing worlds, 38 published early church history, 10–​11, 13, 223 used language of Enoch hymn and revelation, 51–​52,  53–​54 wrote summary of beliefs, 248 Pray, Isaac, 245 premortal existence, 39–​40, 50–​52, 83 divine assembly and, 125–​28 implies divinization/​theosis,  52–​53 speculation on, 134–​36

priesthood, 121–​23, 131–​37, 271 keys of, 87–​88 restriction of, 134–​37 prisca theologia, 93–​94,  168–​69 publications of LDS scriptures, 9–​10, 21–​22, 32–​34, 47–​48, 60–​62,  140–​41 need for, 9–​14   Quinn, D. Michael, 47   race, priesthood and, 136–​37 religion, freedom of, 247, 261–​62, 264–​65 Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton, by William Channing,  259–​60 Rennell, Thomas, 42 Restoration end of need for, 60 of gospel given to Adam, 5, 139–​40 revelations are same now as anciently, 246 continuing, 260, 271–​72 imperfect expression of, 272–​73 about keeping record/​history, 228–​29 process of receiving, 90–​96 publication of, 9–​10, 18 as result of Bible revision work, 35–​36, 78–​84, 85–​86, 87–​88,  89–​90 unconstrained by creeds, 244 revivalists, 229–​30,  234–​35 Reynolds, George, 143 Rhodes, Michael D., 148, 150–​53, 158, 161 Richards, Franklin Dewey brief bio of, 14–​15 compilation of Pearl of Great Price by,  5–​6 publications in Britain and, 15–​17 second edition of Pearl of Great Price pamphlet and, 21 as travelling agent, 15–​16 Rigdon, Sidney, 62–​63, 228–​29 Riggs, John, 120 Ritner, Robert K., 148, 150–​51, 153 Roberts, B. H., 134–​35, 145 Rupp, Israel Daniel, 246

284 Index sacrifice of Cain, 70 taught to Adam and Eve, 10 salvation, 74–​75, 79–​81, 133, 137–​38, 257 “Sample of pure language, A,” 50–​51,  114–​15 Satan, 40, 127 Savage, Samuel, 242, 243 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 194–​95 Schmidt, Francis, 165 school of the prophets/​elder’s school/​ Hebrew school, 116, 177–​78 Scott, Walter, 257–​58 scriptures non-​literal interpretations of, 260 sufficiency of, 94–​95, 259–​60 unique additions to theology in, 3–​4,  47–​48 Second Coming, 62–​64 seer, 109–​11, 181–​82, 199–​200 Shackelford, John, 243 Shelley, Percy, 187 sin anxiety about, 30–​31, 226–​27, 232, 234 original, 40–​41, 47, 248, 256–​57 Sjodahl, J. M., 144–​45, 169–​70 Smith, Alvin, 80–​81 Smith, Joseph, Jr. acquired papyri and mummies, 120–​21 anticreedalism of, 244, 264–​65 authority of, 224–​25, 271–​73 autobiographical narratives of, 224–​25 biographical narratives of, 226–​37 blended scholarly and prophetic tools, 29–​30,  181–​82 as bricoleur, 189–​91 claimed fallibility, 272 disavowed lawlessness, 262 equivalent to Moses, 225 inverted prisca theologia,  93–​94 learned of deficiencies in Bible, 30–​31 personal prominence of, in pamphlets, 6 recordkeeping of, 228–​29, 234, 237 revelations received by, 9–​10, 18, 31–​32, 35–​36, 37–​38, 50–​51, 53, 55–​58, 78–​ 84, 85–​86, 87–​88, 89–​90,  228–​29 theophany of, 4, 17, 227, 231–​32 as type of Old-​Testament prophet, 59

“Vision, the,” of, 35–​36, 79–​83, 95 visited by Moroni, 30–​31, 227–​28,  230–​31 Smith, Joseph, Sr., 131–​32, 162 Smith, Joseph F., 82, 85–​86 Smith, Lucy Mack, 112, 154, 158, 170–​73 Smith, William, 271–​72 Smoot, Stephen, 162 Snow, Eliza R., 115–​16 Snow, Lorenzo, 67 sola scriptura, 37, 68–​69, 223–​24, 271 Spalding, Franklin S., 143–​44 spirit, eternal nature of, 39, 126, 128–​29 Stark, Rodney, 255 Steiner, George, 114 Stone, Barton, 257 Sunderland, La Roy, 53 supercryptograms, 157 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 186–​87, 226   Tanner, Annie Clark, 21–​22 Taves, Ann, 201 Taylor, John, 1–​2, 67 temple antiquity of ordinances of, 139–​40 bricolage and, 192–​93 cosmology and, 138–​40 funerary texts and, 162–​63, 189–​90 as peak of theology, 4, 124–​25, 263–​64 Temple Scroll, 128 Terah (father of Abraham), 163–​65 Testament of Abraham, 165 testimony, 225 Thaumaturgus, Gregory, 48–​49 theft, 262 theosis, 41, 52–​55, 263 Thompson, Stephen, 148, 150–​51 Times and Seasons, 140–​41, 246 transfiguration, 89 translation process of, for Book of Abraham, 170–​75 process of, for Book of Abraham compared to Book of Mormon,  200–​1 ways to understand, 184–​85, 187–​88, 189–​91, 193–​96, 199–​200 Tvedtnes, John A., 157 Twain, Mark, 69–​70

Index  285 Urim and Thummim, 111–​13, 170–​73, 184 urtext, 93–​94,  95–​96   van Dam, Cornelius, 112 Vermigli, Peter, 41 Vico, Giambattista, 186 virtue, Christian, 247, 262–​63 visions, 226 Voice of Warning, A, by Parley P. Pratt, 10–​11,  223   Warburton, William, 187–​88 Warsaw Signal, 143 Wayment, Thomas, 29–​30 Webb, Stephen, 28, 161 Webster, Noah, 28–​29 Weinandy, Thomas, 256 Wells, Junius, 145–​46 Wentworth, John, 246 Wesley, John, 28–​29, 223–​24, 226–​27, 256 Westminster Confession, 243–​44 Whitefield, George, 79–​80 Whitmer, David, 245 Whitmer, John, 228 Whittaker, David, 15 Widtsoe, John, 131

Wilkinson, Jemima, 226 Willet, Andrew, 41 Williams, Frederick G., 178–​79 Wilson, Haley, 29–​30 Woodruff, Wilford, 67, 170–​73 worlds,  37–​38   Young, Brigham asked about translating Egyptian, 183 created Perpetual Emigrating Poor Fund,  15–​16 on creating worlds, 38 didn’t publish New Translation of Bible, 20–​21,  34 didn’t use title of prophet, 271–​72 on Jackson County and millennial hopes, 65, 66–​67 on language of revelation, 272–​73 on patriarchs, 133 prayed in tongues, 115–​16 on reverence for Joseph Smith, 225 Young, John, 80 Young, Joseph, 248   Zion, 55–​60, 83–​85, 261 Zion’s Camp, 65–​66