In a recent book, James Wayne Wardell (Protestant) forwarded the following argument:
Joseph Smith reports on his
brother’s death in the 1978 edition of the Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith
2:4, as follows, “Alvin (who died 19 November 1824, in the 27th year of his
age).” This is also the way this passage read in all previous editions of
Joseph Smith 2. However, in the 1981 edition of the Pearl of Great Price
this verse was altered to say, “Alvin (who died 19 November 1823, in the 26th
year of his age.” Note how both the date and the age are changed. This section
is supposed to be a verbatim extract from the History of the Church,
Volume 1, Chapter 1. When you examine the parallel verse in Volume 1, Chapter 1
of the History, it too says Alvin “died 19th November 1824, in the
27th year of his age.” So here plainly, we don’t have exact
quotations.
The reality is Joseph Smith said
his brother died in 1824 at twenty-seven years of age. Both the date and age
were changed in the 1981 edition because both were wrong. The details on Alvin’s
gravestone in Palmyra, which are still discernible, demanded such changes to be
consistent with the facts. Alvin is buried in the graveyard of the former
location of the old Palmyra Presbyterian Church. I saw the gravestone myself
and note the date of Alvin’s death written on the stone as 1823, and a few
brief additional facts about his life are there as well. Others like Willard
Bean have also seen this inconsistency in Joseph Smith 2:4 many years ago. There
is no getting around it, Prophet Smith made a mistake that was corrected by the
1981 editors of the LDS Pearl. That is a fact, through that fact is hard for Mormons
to accept. Prophet Smith’s Pearl of Great Price is supposed to be “inspired”
of God and is taken to be holy scripture. Does God make such mistakes that need
to be corrected? Surely God does not, but evidently Joseph Smith does. (John Wayne
Wardell, The Footprints of Mormonism [London: Austin Macauley
Publishers, 2025], 24-25)
There are many problems with this.
Firstly, Joseph Smith did not present his history as being divinely
inspired. The author is reading his Protestant presuppositions into things. If
Joseph Smith confused ordinal and cardinal numbers with one another in this
instance, and it was later corrected (by himself or another), no Latter-day
Saint will lose sleep. It is not a case of God Himself making a mistake. For
Latter-day Saints, something being in the canon does not mean it is God-breathed
or inspired, and just because something is not in the canon does not mean it is
not inspired of God. This is more of the author’s (false) sola
scriptura being read into “Mormon” texts.
For example, D. Michael Quinn noted how Joseph Smith (and
many people, even today) confused cardinal and ordinal numbers:
When comparing accounts of the
1820 vision with the 1823 visions, both Mormons and non-Mormons have commented
on the contrast in details. None of Smith’s known narratives of his first
vision were precise about dates: “the 16th year of my age,” “I was about 14
years old,” and “my fifteenth year.” Smith even required Cowdery to change his
age at the first vision from “15th year” to “17th” in the first published
history. The most detailed dating in the final version of official history is
still less than wholly satisfying: “in the spring of Eighteen hundred and
twenty.”45 Like many people today, Joseph Jr. was confused by the distinction
between stating his age (“fourteen years old”) and its equivalent year-of-life
(“fifteenth year,” which begins on one’s fourteenth birthday). (D. Michael
Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View [rev ed.; Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 1998], 141)
In a lengthy endnote to the above, Quinn addresses the issue
of Alvin’s death and how the confusion of cardinal and ordinal numbers is probably
the cause:
Aside from Joseph Jr.’s confusion
about how to describe his age at a particular time of his youth, he and his
family had the same trouble describing his brother Alvin’s age at death. Alvin
Smith was born in February 1798 and died at age twenty-five in November 1823
(the twenty-sixth year of his life). However, his family incorrectly inscribed
Alvin’s gravestone as: “In memory of Alvin, son of Joseph and Lucy Smith, who
died November 19,1823, in the 25 year of his age.” When they began recording
their reminiscences twelve to twenty-two years later, the Smiths clearly
remembered the gravestone’s error (“25 year”) which caused them to misremember
and misstate the actual year of Alvin’s death. When Joseph Jr. gave the Smith
family’s genealogy to Oliver Cowdery in 1834, he missed Alvin’s actual death by
two years, claiming 1825. Upon dictating a longer history in 1838 (added to the
draft of 1839), Joseph said Alvin died in 1824, a year’s error. In 1839 Joseph
Smith dedicated the “Manuscript History of the Church” to his deceased brother:
“In Memory of Alvin Smith, Died the 19th Day of November, In the 25th year of
his age year 182,” with 3, 4, and 5 written over each other as the last digit
of the year. This was uncertainty in dating by two brothers, since Hyrum Smith
wrote the inscription. The Smith family Bible also incorrectly gave Alvin’s
death date as 1825. In 1845 his mother Lucy Mack Smith made the same kind of
dating error when she remembered Alvin’s death as 1824. See Vermont general
index to vital records (early to 1870), entry for birth of Alvin Smith (11 Feb.
1798), microfilm, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter LDS Family History Library); Joseph
Smith’s inscription, Manuscript History of the Church, Book A-l, inside cover,
Joseph Smith papers, microfilm at LDS archives, at Marriott Library, at
Department of Archives and Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham
Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter Lee Library), at Library-Archives,
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Independence, Missouri
(hereafter RLDS library-archives), at Library, Utah State Historical Society,
Salt Lake City; Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the
Prophet and His Progenitors for Many Generations (Liverpool: S. W. Richards,
1853), 87; Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Reliability of the Early History of Lucy
and Joseph Smith,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Summer
1969): 25; Jessee, Papers of Joseph Smith, 1:19, 265 (who perceived 3
and 4 as the only overwritten numbers), 282; Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and T.
Jeffrey Cottle, A Window To the Past: A Photographic Panorama of Early
Church History and the Doctrine and Covenants (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft,
1993), 56; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1:67,300, 576. (Ibid., 460 n. 46)
Perhaps more devastating for his arguments, is that this is
not a mistake that originates with Joseph Smith, but Willard Richards (at least
how it appear in the History of the Church and, as a result, “Joseph Smith—History”
in the Pearl of Great Price).
In the March
15, 1842 issue of the Times and Seasons, the offending line
reads simply “. . . my brothers, Alvin, (who is now dead,) . . . “
“History,
circa 1841, fair copy, page 1,” reads “my brother, Alvin, (now dec[e]ased,)
. . .”
“History,
circa June 1839–circa 1841 [Draft 2], [page 1]” reads “. . . my brothers
Alvin (who is now dead) . . .”
The addition of the age of Alvin at his death was not introduced
by Joseph Smith. Instead, it was an insertion made by Willard Richards. It
appears in “History,
1838–1856, volume A-1 [23 December 1805–30 August 1834], page 1”:
my brothers Alvin (who is now
dead <died Nov. 19th: 1823 in the 25 year of his age>
This is also acknowledged by critic Dan Vogel:
Book A-1, 1: “(who is now dead
<died Nov. 19th: 1823 in the 25 year of his age>)” (WR), which was copied
as emended into Book A-2, 3. DHC 1:2: reads “(who died November 19th, 1824, in
the 27th year of his age,).” BHR probably followed the incorrect dating in the
genealogy of church presidents compiled by OC in 1834 that appears in JSj
[1834-36], 10 (PJS 1:19). (History of Joseph Smith and The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 8 vols., ed. Dan Vogel [Salt Lake City:
The Smith-Petit Foundation 2015], 1:5 n. 33)
In note 67 of his article, “The
Alvin Smith Story: Faction and Fiction,” Ensign (August 1987), Richard
Lloyd Anderson acknowledged this change in the text of the Pearl of Great Price,
noting that:
The 1824 date in this verse
(also History of the Church, 1:16–17) is now corrected to 1823
to conform to the gravestone, Dr. Robinson’s daybook, and the September 1824
newspaper notice of Joseph Smith, Sr.
No matter how you cut it, this is not a major issue for
Latter-day Saints, only those who labor under the false a priori
assumption that Joseph Smith—History is (1) inspired scripture, and, as a
result, (2) inerrant.
