In his book
on KJV quotations in the Book of Mormon, Royal Skousen has a chapter on the
Joseph Smith Translation (JST). I happen to agree with much of Skousen’s
understanding of the nature of the JST when he writes:
In dealing with King James passages that were
quoted in the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith decided, as a general procedure, to
revise the biblical text in accord with how those passages appeared in the Book
of Mormon. And it was the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon that was used to
make those alterations in the biblical readings. To be sure, a copy of the 1830
edition was much more convenient in making revisions than using the Book of
Mormon manuscripts, either the original manuscript (O) or the printer’s
manuscript (P). As a result, errors that
had entered the Book of Mormon text in its transmission of biblical quotations,
from handwritten manuscripts to the 1830 type setting, often show up in the
Joseph Smith Translation. (Royal Skousen, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, Part 5: The King James
Quotations in the Book of Mormon [Provo, Utah: The Foundation for Ancient
Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Press, 2019], 132,
emphasis added)
And again when
he concludes the chapter thusly:
From a larger perspective, the evidence from
the JST manuscripts themselves clearly suggests that not everything in the JST
is of equal value. The beginning work that revised Genesis 1-6 appears to
involve a word-for-word revelation (much like the Book of Mormon itself), but
later work in the JST usually reflects the use of very human methods to alter the biblical text (including wholesale
copying into the JST version of Isaiah 50 a defective text from the 1830
edition of the Book of Mormon). (Ibid., 140, emphasis added)
On the issue
of Isa 50 in 2 Nephi 7 and the JST, Skousen wrote:
For six of the eight 1830 transmission
differences, the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon has the King James
reading. In five of those cases, Oliver Cowdery simply misread the text when he
copied it from O into P:
verse 2 when
I came > when I come
I make the river a wilderness > I make their rivers a wilderness
I make the river a wilderness > I make their rivers a wilderness
verse 4 he
wakeneth morning by morning > he waketh morning by morning
he
wakeneth mine ear > he waketh mine ear
verse 5 the
Lord God hath opened mine ear> he
waketh mine ear
In the sixth case, Oliver initially copied
the text correctly into P, but then later decided to emend the non-standard “they
dieth” (the correction in P from dieth to
die is in heavier ink flow):
verse 2 and
they dieth because of thirst >
and they die because of thirst
In the two remaining cases, a conjectured
original reading agrees with the King James text:
verse 6 I
gave my back to the smiters > I
gave my back to the smiter
verse 11 all
ye that kindle a fire > all ye
that kindleth fire
In his editing for the second edition of the
Book of Mormon (Kirtland, 1837), Joseph Smith restored the correct King James
reading in two cases: “when I came”
in verse 2 and “the Lord hath opened mine
ear” in verse 5, thus removing the two most egregious and obvious errors, “when
I come” and “the Lord hath appointed mine ear”. Mistakes like these argue that for at
least this part of his biblical work Joseph Smith was not receiving a revealed
text, but was simply transferring the 1830 Book of Mormon text, including its
errors. Joseph knew that the Book of Mormon was a revealed text, and he
apparently assumed that the 1830 edition reflected that text, without worrying
about the possibility that errors had entered in during the transmission of the
text. (Ibid., 135-36, emphasis in bold in original, emphasis in italics and
underlining added)
The work of
Skousen and other scholars really should lay to rest the utterly bogus belief,
sadly held by many LDS today, that the JST represents a textual restoration of
the Bible. While popular, with very few exceptions, it is, to be blunt,
nonsense and setting up our members for spiritual fail when they learn the
truth.
For a
previous article Skousen published on the JST, see:
