Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Royal Skousen on the JST


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

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: