Review
Title: Joseph Smith: History, Methods, and Memory
Author: Ron Barney
Publisher: University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction/History
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 423
Binding: Hardback & Paperback
ISBN: Hardback, 9781607817703; Paperback, 9781607817550
Price: Hardback, $75.00; Paperback, $40.00
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association For Mormon Letters
What are we to make of Joseph Smith? More than 175 years following his death, historians, church members, and investigators are still trying to come to terms with the enigmatic founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many biographies of Joseph Smith have been written; some are openly hostile; others are blatantly open in their whitewashing of his image. A few occupy the middle ground, trying to capture the reality of Smith as a charismatic prophet who also possessed many of the failings and struggles of an ordinary person. All of these representations contain elements of truth, leaving us in the same position as Josiah Quincy, a distant cousin to US presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams and visitor to Nauvoo in 1844. Not convinced by Joseph Smith’s story, he still was fascinated by Smith’s devoted followers. He wrote:
“Fanatics and impostors are living and dying every day and their memory is buried with them; but the wonderful influence which this founder of a religion exerted and still exerts throws him into relief before us, not as a rogue to be criminated, but as a phenomenon to be explained.” [p116]
Ron Barney, longtime church history archivist, historian, and associate editor of The Joseph Smith Papers Project (JSPP) has assembled not another biography of Joseph Smith, but a different sort of volume, based on what we have learned about Smith in the last couple of decades. The JSPP represents a veritable tsunami of documents about Joseph Smith’s life, his work in translating the Book of Mormon and establishing a new church. The total output, when complete, will exceed more than twenty volumes of documents, journals, business records, revelations, and other papers. Yet in reality, of all of these tens of thousands of pages, only a tiny percentage are written directly by Joseph himself. We in fact, have very little to go upon to determine what Joseph Smith thought and felt. It is mostly in the writings and memories of others that we have based our understanding of the Church’s founder. What Barney has written is a historiography of Joseph Smith, an explanation of how we know what we think we know, and the limitations of that knowledge.
Barney frankly acknowledges that the Church in the past has been uncomfortable with some of the history of Joseph Smith. He writes:
“…most Latter-day Saints don’t want to read about the sometimes crooked though progressive course of the faith with its warts and all. Yet it is in the course correction, the stumbling while climbing, along with the remarkable successes portrayed in the historical record that JS in his unsanitized appearance is best understood…But when pressed to defend…JS ‘s life, the polished, whitewashed image becomes easy prey for some who delight in picking at the blemishes that exist. This is especially so when they can show that the church has not been forthright in the past dealing with features of its history.” [p31]
Early in his book, Barney explains his own approach. While relying on the textual record as it now exists, he tries to navigate as much as possible an objective path about the first prophet’s life and work. He does not shy away from the contradictions and complexities of his subject, while also respecting Smith’s claim to have experienced remarkable spiritual events. It is too easy, he explains, to come down on one side or the other when it comes to Joseph Smith. He quotes Paul Nagel, a respected biographer of the Adams and Lee families in American history, as saying:
“The story should be complete, but it should also be told with affection rather than with ruthlessness, encouraging the readers to peer for themselves into the darkened corner of a life.” Such writing, Nagel continues, “is an awesome task, so one must proceed with a gentleness from knowing that the subject and the author share the frailties of human mortality.” [p47]
What follows is a crash course at the graduate level on historical method, the use and limitations of memory, and the challenges of the historian in dealing with often contradictory accounts and recollections. Barney includes a quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw regarding this difficulty. “When an historian had to rely on one document he was safe, but if there were two to be consulted he was in difficulty, and if there were three his situation was hopeless.” [p58] To navigate this flood of information, Barney provides us with some tools to make sense of it all. He has organized his book into sections. The first three chapters review historical methodology, including past treatments of Joseph Smith with their contributions and limitations. Section II includes two chapters on the context of the early 19th century, including the religious environment of the times, and how Smith was remembered by his contemporaries. Section III focuses on Smith’s initial attempt to record his own history with the help of scribes, and the piece by piece construction of a church with new concepts of priesthood authority, the limits of scriptural literalism, an expansive nature of God, and how those concepts grew and changed over Smith’s life. In Section IV, Barney turns to trying to understand Joseph Smith’s personality and character, and what he thought and taught. A final chapter examines Smith’s revelatory experience and output, including the Book of Mormon, the Books of Abraham and Moses, and the revelations included in the Doctrine and Covenants, along with others previously unpublished.
A particular item of note is an explanation of why, from 1842 on through the end of the 19th century, an account of Joseph Smith’s early divine visitations incorrectly identifies the angel that appeared to Smith in 1823 as Nephi, not Moroni. Written as a first-person account by a scribe, and published in The Times and Seasons, the error was not corrected, providing those who wanted to discredit Smith evidence that has been used down to the present times. Only through the work of the JSPP and analysis of the handwriting was the written account attributed to Joseph Smith’s scribe, James Mulholland. [p73] It serves as an example of how work by scribes or in publications have been misinterpreted as first-person writing.
Barney also points out that it is nearly impossible to separate Joseph Smith from the religious context of the early 19th century. “Most modern believers in Mormonism come from a tradition that has saluted the premise that from the start, JS moved in all things by the direction and inspiration of Jesus,” he writes:
“Because Mormons have been reluctant to acknowledge cultural influences upon JS, some critics have combed the countryside searching for components of Mormonism that show up in the environment…this methodology has become a threat to many believers who have built a substantial belief system without the necessity of historiographical augmentation…in reality it may offer greater insight into the prophet and how he adeptly negotiated the world around him.” [p90-91]
His chapter on the environment of Joseph’s early life summarizes current research into a brief but comprehensive account.
Despite being a non-narrative volume, Ron Barney has provided in this book a highly readable text and helpful guide to understanding the flood of information that has come from the Joseph Smith Papers Project and offers a starting point for a better appreciation of Joseph Smith’s position in historical context.