Title: Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism
Author: Samuel Morris Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 320
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-19-005423-6
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Cheryl Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters
Joseph Smith lived in an age, author Samuel Morris Brown tells us, when the human experience of time was changing. Metaphysical experience of time had included liturgical time, “yon time” (the mythically ancient past), and “ready access to God’s temporal frame in the past or present” (53). By the early nineteenth century, time began to be seen as orderly and linear. It was not surprising then, that Smith exhibited both views in his thought and teachings. On occasion, he seemed to embrace a secular view of time, such as when he argued that God’s time was dictated by the orbit of the star nearest him. Yet, Brown states, Joseph Smith “was living the ancient past so dramatically that he and his followers embraced biblical polygamy, anticipated the return of animal sacrifice, and ritually enacted life in the Garden of Eden” (54). Prophets in Smith’s scriptures gazed at the web of time from an otherworldly view, and he “allowed the passage of sacred time into the present” (54).
This bipositional response to a changing world is readily seen in much of Joseph Smith’s philosophy. The Enlightenment era brought ideas about individual liberty and religious Pelagianism, wherein human beings could direct their own salvation. Accordingly, early Latter-day Saints eagerly taught the principle of moral agency and seemed to eschew the outdated Protestant Calvinism. But paradoxically, Smith and his followers were anti-individualistic. Joseph “resisted isolation [and] reconceived the Chain of Being in genealogical terms” [p. 96]. He “theorized and attempted to develop ‘theodemocratic’ utopias to merge individuals into robust and eternal communities” [p. 97].
Joseph Smith believed that pure language, with all its power, had been lost. Smith’s task, Brown writes, was to discover a primordial language which had been lost through human sin. “Through access to the pure language shimmering beneath the surface of conventional language, Smith and his disciples sought access to the divine realm” [p. 21]. In the first half of his book, Brown explores both the innovative and the archaic impulses in Joseph Smith’s theology of language, time, and human identity, which Brown says “crackled with metaphysical power” [p. 121]. With these concepts, Brown interweaves the idea of “translation” in several of its possible meanings. In one sense, translation has to do with “the movement of ideas among peoples,” and in another sense with the movement of humans between states of being (as in Enoch’s translation to a higher plane). Thinking of translation in these two ways beautifully sets up the second half of the book, which deals with Smith’s collection of sacred texts.
The Book of Mormon, an ancient American scripture, “placed the Bible as a regional scripture alongside others of the past, present, and future” [p. 161]. It showed that “every people could experience the direct presence of God and the creation of scripture” [p. 161]. Brown describes how the Book of Mormon exposed the problems and difficulties of the “Protestant Bible” as they existed in the nineteenth century, thus destabilizing the Bible. It then solved these problems, providing a new perception of ancient scripture and “saving” Christianity. Smith and his followers believed that the Bible contained the word of God “as far as it is translated correctly” [p. 130]. “This translation was more than merely linguistic,” Brown states. “Scripture also needed a live prophet to traverse and transgress the constraints of time and location” [p. 130].
Continuing the work of the Book of Mormon “in a natural progression,” Smith turned his attention to a “New Translation” of the King James Bible [p. 163]. In this phase of translation, Joseph Smith recovered lost texts and worked with Sidney Rigdon to perfect the Bible through the spirit of revelation. Brown broadens the scope of the New Translation to include “significant elements of his primary revelations”[1] [p. 173], “visionary revelations of missing books[2] (including a new preface to the Torah), esoteric etymologizing about specific words, and visionary exegesis of John’s Revelation,”[3] [p. 164] as well as Smith’s revisions, annotations, and brief expansions of the King James text. In this work, Brown highlights Smith’s focus on moving past the English text and providing an esoteric reading of scripture, bringing to light its hidden, allegorical aspects in an attempt to approach “primordial scripture.”
In Brown’s treatment of Joseph Smith’s Egyptian project, he perceptively notes that in the nineteenth-century hieroglyphics were seen as pictographs with metaphysical meaning. In his unique take on the catalyst theory, Brown describes them as “graphic glossolalia” Usually glossolalia is a pouring forth of spoken syllables, which require an interpreter to make sense of. Brown depicts Smith and Phelps as connecting hieroglyphs with inscribed syllables beyond human language, which they then interpreted into English. Once the Egyptian language had been deciphered and widely disseminated, it became secularized in the minds of many, stripped of the metaphysical power people of the age perceived it to have. Brown theorizes that within modern Egyptian currents, Latter-day Saints have inherited “a complex collage of old and new” [p. 230].
In a final chapter on the temple ritual, Brown highlights the theme of Joseph Smith’s “blurry dualism that sees the transcendent and immanent realms as deeply interdigitated” [p. 235]. In temple rites, both human and linguistic translation are brought together. Here, the Latter-day Saints participate bodily in temple liturgy, “integrating themselves directly into the cosmos and its most ancient stories” [p. 234].
Joseph Smith’s Translation attempts a scholarly, devotional treatment of Joseph Smith’s latter-day scriptural oeuvre. Its greatest appeal is to faithful intellects of the Restoration movement. These literati will enjoy Brown’s style of writing, including words like “apotropaic” or concepts like “Baconian logic” [p. 110] on nearly every page. Though at times this highly wrought choice of language may obscure his arguments, I find the majority of his ideas well-reasoned. I was less interested in the interpretive leaps that punctuated much of his chapter on the Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example: “a stick figure (Ho hah oop) represents Jesus, an ‘intercessor.’ This figure’s left leg is the glyph for delegation (Jah-ni-hah), anticipating the Abraham 3 account of a savior, Jesus, chosen as God’s legate to earth in the premortal drama” [p. 212]. In another example, “The name for Egypt (Ah meh strah) seems to be a modification of the name of Ham’s son Mizraim, perhaps via Josephus, with the divine particle (ah) prepended. In essence, ah-meh-strah may be equivalent to ah-miz-ra, with the –im at the end of Mizraim dropped because it appeared to be a grammatical plural” [p. 213].
Brown approaches Joseph Smith’s writings from a believer’s viewpoint. Though he insists “I take no position on how Smith translated,” he nonetheless comments “I don’t see persuasive evidence for frank plagiarism, or intentional fraud. Smith really did seem to be having nonordinary experiences when he dictated the English texts that became scripture” [p. 124]. Brown has a propensity for flights of passionate veneration which may weary the more jaded reader.
In his preface, Brown addresses a criticism of his book which will inevitably arise—is it appropriate to create such a complex and full-bodied theological system as Brown has from the rough and disparate ideas of the unschooled Smith? Brown urges the reader to “discover the rich complexities and integrity of the lives [of odd and marginal folk intellectuals] outside the mainstream.” He asks of us “a sympathetic curiosity and a willingness to understand foreign conceptual concepts…across cultural differences” [p. 13].
Overall, I found Joseph Smith’s Translation stimulating. Brown weaves his way through the wide variety of the texts Smith produced to identify common threads of metaphysical transformation and communal ascent. For those with an esoteric bent, he provides satisfying ways of understanding Joseph Smith’s scriptural contributions. Samuel Morris Brown has “translated” Joseph Smith for the reader in a way we have not seen before.
[1] Brown gives as examples Doctrine and Covenants 42, 45-46, 76, 84:77-85, 86, 88, 93:7-17 and 113:1-6.
[2] e.g. the visions of Moses and the prophecy of Enoch published in the Pearl of Great Price
[3] D&C 7