Skousen & Jensen “The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, Volume 5” (Reviewed by Cheryl Bruno)

Review
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Title: The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, Volume 5
Editors: Royal Skousen, Robin Scott Jensen
Publisher: The Church Historian’s Press
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 749
Binding: Hardbound: alk. paper
ISBN: 978-1-62972-971-8
Price: $89.99

Reviewed by Cheryl Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters

What could be better for a Book of Mormon researcher than to own every piece of the surviving pages and fragments of the handwritten manuscript dictated by Joseph Smith? Well, I would say owning Revelations and Translations, Volume 5 might fit the bill. Here’s why—see if you agree!

The story of the discovery and translation of the golden plates is a fascinating one and is featured in the preface to this book with the historical precision we have come to expect from the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers. Much of this story is familiar, but here we have every detail of the translation process, along with its footnoted source. What you may not know is what happened to the handwritten pages after their translation. In 1841, 488 leaves were placed in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House. Over forty years later, during a renovation, Emma Smith’s second husband Lewis Bidamon discovered that the manuscript had been severely damaged, with much of it completely destroyed. Bidamon removed it from its resting place, and, over the next several years, handed out pieces of the manuscript to visitors to Nauvoo. In the 1990s, Royal Skousen began to investigate leads to where the scattered pieces of the manuscript were located. About 28 percent of the original text has been found, photographed, and preserved in this volume.

I very much enjoyed reading the stories about where the fragments traveled. For example, Sarah Granger Kimball visited Nauvoo in 1883 and was shown “a large pasteboard box” containing a stack of paper that was water damaged and falling to pieces. She was told she was welcome to take what she wanted from the box, and she carried away about twenty pages of leaves that were folded and sewn together. Kimball donated these pages, numbered 3 to 22, to Joseph F. Smith, then in the First Presidency of the Church. Another leaf of the manuscript was given to Joseph W. Summerhays, who visited the Bidamons in 1884. Upon his return to Utah, he gave half of the page to Frederick Kesler, because he had been present at the 1841 ceremony when the papers were placed in the Nauvoo House cornerstone. Kesler framed it and hung it in his office. In 1972, Kesler’s papers, including the fragment, were donated to Special Collections at the University of Utah.

This hefty work is of great value to researchers because the images of the leaves were professionally captured using top-quality lenses and sensors, several spectra of light, and computer enhancement. Though faded, torn, and water damaged, they have been preserved to the best that modern technology can produce. Additionally, historical photographs help recover text on the edges of leaves that have since flaked away or were damaged in an early lamination process and later removal. The photographs in Revelations and Translations, Volume 5 are often more readable than the original pages are to the naked eye.

The pages and fragments have meticulously been pieced together in order and annotated with the provenance, the names of the original scribes, and the names of scribes who made revisions. They are placed side by side with a transcription of the document, including transcription of missing portions. I pored over the clear and legible handwriting on some of the better-preserved pages at the beginning of the book. These, the annotations explain, were written by “Scribe 3.” This is the one unidentified scribe in this volume, who some believe to be Christian Whitmer.^[1] The identification of Scribe 2, which appears as John Whitmer, must have recently been verified. Many sites on the internet, including the official Church website, continue to classify this handwriting as unidentified.^[2]

Several things can be learned from a close study of the original handwritten manuscript of the Book of Mormon translation. For example, 1 Nephi contains the first text with handwriting from any of the Whitmer scribes. Since the Whitmers did not assist with the translation until after June 1829, this suggests that after the loss of the first round of translated pages from the plates of Mormon, Joseph Smith completed the translation from Mosiah to the end of the book, before returning to 1 Nephi through the Words of Mormon.

There has been much ongoing controversy over whether the Book of Mormon was dictated or copied from another source, whether that be from the King James Bible or a novel written by Solomon Spaulding. Study of the original manuscript can help shed light on these questions. This book opens up the field of inquiry to a wider group of researchers. Additionally, the images available in this book will be posted on the Joseph Smith papers website in an estimated eighteen months from the publication of the Revelations and Translations, Volume 5.

Royal Skousen, one of the editors of this volume, has meticulously compared the original manuscript with the printer’s manuscript, a copy made between July 1829 and early 1830 and used for setting the type for the Book of Mormon. This JSP Volume 5 makes it possible for researchers and lay readers to make these types of comparisons themselves. Skousen says that there were an average of three natural scribal errors per manuscript page. About twenty of these were corrected in the 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon, but many, relatively minor, were not.

Two leaves from the original manuscript were acquired from the University of Chicago, which has apparently held them in their collection since the 1920s. However, the provenance is uncertain, and there has been controversy as to whether these leaves are authentic. Therefore, they have been included in an appendix, with the editors Skousen and Jensen each writing an examination of the evidence—one with evidence in favor of authenticity and one against. This choice of presentation is another unquestioned strength of the volume and again allows readers to make their own reasoned decisions about the manuscript.

In this beautifully bound volume you can read about the translation of the Book of Mormon, the paper it was written on, the scribal techniques used, the gathering of the extant portions of the manuscript and their preservation, the photographic process, and many other specifics. Finally, in a news release on the Church’s website, President Russell M. Nelson mentioned the devotional value to members of having these pieces of Church history published. “With this new volume now available, anyone can see what remains of that manuscript and how each little piece fits into the whole. To me, it is inspiring to know that these pages with images of the original Book of Mormon text are now available to all. It is a deeply moving experience to look at these pages and see God’s hand moving His work forward.” I, too, found it personally awe-inspiring and satisfying to gaze upon the handwriting of scribes who wrote the words dictated to them by Joseph Smith almost two hundred years ago.

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[1]A source note at the Joseph Smith Papers website explains: “The handwriting of this scribe matches handwriting of a partially extant copy of a 9 December 1830 revelation created in Ohio around early 1831. Thus, the unidentified scribe is narrowed to someone who served as scribe both in Fayette in 1829 and Ohio in 1831. Unfortunately, no known identifiable or significant samples of Martin Harris’s or Christian Whitmer’s handwriting have been found.” https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/book-of-mormon-manuscript-excerpt-circa-june-1829-1-nephi-22b-318a/1#source-note

[2] https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/content/library/book-of-mormon-original-manuscript-1829?lang=eng “The handwriting on the page on display is unidentified.”