The Standard Works: Latter-day Saint Scripture

Near its end, the Book of Mormon invites readers to ask God in prayer, with a sincere heart and real intent, whether it is true. It promises that the Holy Ghost will make its truth known (Moroni 10:4).²

In August 1835, a general assembly met to decide whether to approve the first Doctrine and Covenants as a law and a rule of faith for the church.¹³

Casey Paul Griffiths wrote as a visiting assistant professor at Brigham Young University (BYU), which the church founded, supports, and guides. He traces how members' use of the Book of Mormon changed. It was first cited mainly as proof of Joseph Smith's calling, then taught more often for its doctrine from the 1950s and 1960s.¹²¹⁴

The editors of the Joseph Smith Papers, a project staffed by employees of the church's Church History Library, write that the 1835 volume was meant in part as a current guide to how Latter-day Saints should live their religion.¹³¹⁵

Joseph Smith reported that an angel named Moroni told him in 1823 of a record on gold plates. He said he received them in 1827 and translated almost all of the text between April and June 1829. Witnesses said he read English words from a seer stone or a pair of stones called the interpreters, often with his face in a hat.¹⁸ Smith said he translated the book by the gift and power of God¹⁸.¹⁸

The Latter-day Saint scholar Richard Bushman accepts that the plates existed. He cites the eleven witnesses, whose statements, he writes, were never repudiated, the people who handled the plates, and the book itself, which he cannot imagine Smith writing alone.¹⁹ In an interview published on PBS's website in 2007, Daniel Peterson of BYU said the book's word "horse" might name another animal, though he called the case there not strong.²⁰

Klaus Hansen writes, in an encyclopedia entry with no date on the page, that critics said from the start that Smith wrote the book himself. Modern scholars, he adds, rejected the charge of plagiarism and concluded that Smith was its author.¹⁶

Bushman notes that skeptics doubt the plates existed, since Smith showed them only to chosen witnesses. He adds that the skeptical historian Dan Vogel concluded that Smith had some object with the plates' shape, size, and weight, perhaps tin plates Smith made.¹⁹ In an interview conducted in 2006 and published on PBS's website in 2007, the Yale archaeologist Michael Coe said no one has found bones of horses or cattle, or remains of wheat or rye, in sites from the book's period.²⁰²¹ He said the book is explicit that the Nephites brought such animals and crops.²¹

The church's essay says no eyewitness account of the translation survives and suggests that studying the papyri may have prompted a revelation about Abraham. It lists details it holds consistent with the ancient world, such as the place name Olishem, and says the book's standing rests on faith, not scholarly debate.²² Kerry Muhlestein of BYU states in an abstract that the objection that Smith's translation and reading of the drawings do not match Egyptologists' views rests on false assumptions and bad information.²⁴

The Joseph Smith Papers editors, who work for the church, write that modern Egyptologists identify the fragments as funerary texts made for people who died in the third or second centuries BCE. Egyptologists, both Latter-day Saints and others, regard the 1835 attempts by Smith and his clerks to understand Egyptian as of no actual value.²³¹⁵ The church's essay says Latter-day Saint and other Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation.²²

The church's introduction says the revelations came in answer to prayer, and that early Latter-day Saints viewed them as messages from God. It adds that a mob destroyed the print shop for the first collection, the Book of Commandments, in 1833.⁶ The Doctrine and Covenants presents God as saying that his word is the same whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same (Doctrine and Covenants 1:38)².

The Joseph Smith Papers editors, who work for the church, report that Smith dictated most of his written revelations between 1828 and 1834 and that scribes copied them into manuscript books.²⁵¹⁵ They report that most changes made for publication were copyediting, and that the 1835 printing of one 1830 revelation included updated and expanded doctrine on priesthood keys that was not known when it was first dictated.¹³

The church teaches that Smith was divinely commissioned and regarded the revision as part of his calling as a prophet.²⁷ Robert Matthews, whom Kevin Barney calls the church's foremost authority on the revision, believes it restores the intent of the original to some extent.²⁹

The church's history page notes that Smith used no Hebrew or Greek sources and began with a King James Bible.²⁸ Kevin Barney, a Chicago attorney writing in the independent journal Dialogue in 1986, finds no ancient parallel for most changes apart from about a dozen passages. He says some scholars read the revision as inspired commentary.²⁹³⁰³¹