BYU Studies
Alphabetical by Title

Most Latter-day Saints take for granted the existence of portraits of the Three Witnesses, but in fact no likeness of Oliver Cowdery was available to the Church until 1883, and then it was touch-and-go whether one would be obtained. Had it not been for the faith and tenacity of James H. Hart, who pursued the portrait when others had failed, we might never have known just what Oliver Cowdery looked like. In the course of following the trail of the portrait, Hart was also able to conduct important interviews with David Whitmer.

Called to the Japan Mission at age eighteen, Alma O. Taylor and his parents would have been shocked had they known his mission would last nearly nine years. Alma, the eighteen-year-old lad, would return a twenty-seven-year-old man, having served one of the longest continuous missions in Church history. For eight and a half years (August 1901–January 1910), Alma worked with intense fervor, keeping a detailed journal of his experiences and impressions. Alma’s journal recaptures early Mormonism in Japan through the eyes of a young missionary. The body of this book is devoted to making his writings available for the first time to all those interested in the foundational events of the Church in Japan. Alma’s many accomplishments included learning both the spoken and written Japanese word; assisting in the translation of missionary tracts, Church hymns, and the Book of Mormon; serving as president of the Japan Mission from his early to late twenties; opening new proselyting areas throughout Japan; and finding, teaching, converting, and strengthening many of the early Japanese Saints. Shortly before Alma left his mission, he recorded his feelings about his final year in Japan: “During the year I have had many experiences some the most pleasant in life and some the most bitter that humans are called upon to experience. . . . Great is the debt of gratitude I owe to the Lord for His many blessings.”

This comparison of Joseph Smith and John Milton focuses on their literary output and especially the preparation each had for dictating a long religious work, in Milton’s case Paradise Lost and in Smith’s the Book of Mormon. Most notable authors, including Milton, had a long apprenticeship that involved writing several “try works,” practice works that served as tutorials and stepping stones preparing their authors for their magnum opus. Joseph Smith had no such trial period for learning how to weave together intricate subplots, multitudes of characters, and historical background detail. Milton, in particular, had all the advantages of a first-rate English education. Smith, by contrast,had the most meager of educational opportunities. According to his wife, at the time he dictated the Book of Mormon, he “could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter.” In spite of these disadvantages, Smith dictated most of the Book of Mormon over a period of less than three months, whereas Milton’s dictation of Paradise Lost took place over more than a decade. While it has been popular since 1830 for critics to debunk or diminish the Book of Mormon, it has stood the test of time in more ways than one.

This compilation of groundbreaking articles comparing Joseph Smith’s theology with the views of other religions and individuals is selected from over fifty years of LDS scholarship published by BYU Studies. This volume features articles on the Shakers, the making of a global religion, the problem of evil, the corporeality of God, Søren Kierkegaard, open and relational theology, preexilic Israelite religion, Calvinism, Catholic liturgy, divine embodiment, and more. Contents “Joseph Smith Challenges the Theological World” David Paulsen “‘Is Mormonism Christian?’; Reflections on a Complicated Question” Jan Shipps “What Does It Mean to Be a Christian? The Views of Joseph Smith and Søren Kierkegaard” David Paulsen “Open and Relational Theology: An Evangelical in Dialogue with a Latter-day Saint” Clark H. Pinnock and David Paulsen “What Does God Think about America? Some Challenges for Evangelicals and Mormons” Richard J. Mouw “Joseph Smith and Preexilic Israelite Religion” Margaret Barker “Joseph Smith Encounters Calvinism” Robert L. Millet “Early Mormon and Shaker Visions of Sanctified Community” J. Spencer Fluhman “The Catholic Liturgy and the Mormon Temple” Marcus von Wellnitz “The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives” David Paulsen “Conversation in Nauvoo about the Corporeality of God” Jacob Neusner “A New Pneumatology: Comparing Joseph Smith’s Doctrine of the Spirit with His Contemporaries and the Bible” Lynne Hilton Wilson “Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil” David L. Paulsen “Joseph Smith and Modern Mormonism: Orthodoxy, Neoorthodoxy, Tension, and Tradition” Robert L. Millet “Joseph Smith’s Christology: After Two Hundred Years” Robert L. Millet Review of Sterling M. McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion Reviewed by Truman G. Madsen Review of Louis Midgley, Beyond Human Nature: The Contemporary Debate over Moral Natural Law Reviewed by Dante Germino Review Essay: “Jesus Was Not a Unitarian” David Paulsen, Jacob Hawken, and Michael Hansen

This compilation of groundbreaking articles about Joseph Smith is selected from over fifty years of LDS scholarship published by BYU Studies. This volume features articles on Kirtland, the chronology of the Ohio revelations, the Book of Commandments and Revelations, the United Firm, the Kirtland Temple, Mormon political involvement in Ohio, and more. Contents “Kirtland: A Perspective on Time and Place” Robert L. Layton “From Manuscript to Printed Page: An Analysis of the History of the Book of Commandments and Revelations” Robin Scott Jensen “Joseph Smith and the United Firm: The Growth and Decline of the Church’s First Master Plan of Business and Finance, Ohio and Missouri, 1832–1834” Max H Parkin “Newel and Lydia Bailey Knight’s Kirtland Love Story and Historic Wedding” William G. Hartley “Joseph Smith’s Performance of Marriages in Ohio” M. Scott Bradshaw “An Introduction to the Kirtland Flats Ashery” Benjamin C. Pykles “Sweet Counsel and Seas of Tribulation: The Religious Life of the Women in Kirtland” Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery “The Appearance of Elijah and Moses in the Kirtland Temple and the Jewish Passover” Stephen D. Ricks “The Apostle Peter and the Kirtland Temple” Lyndon Cook “Joseph Smith and the 1834 D. P. Hurlbut Case” David W. Grua “Mormon Political Involvement in Ohio” Max H Parkin “The Waning of Mormon Kirtland” Davis Bitton

My thoughts on Joseph Smith’s interest in past worlds cluster into three sections. The first deals with the challenge of evaluating and assessing Joseph Smith’s recoveries of texts or views from past worlds or civilizations.The second develops a list of ways in which the past functioned in Joseph Smith’s process of continuing revelation. The third focuses on the dynamic link between the past and the present in Joseph Smith’s concept of priesthood authority and its restoration.

Richard Bushman’s wonderfully expansive paper “Joseph Smith’s Many Histories” reminds us in forceful ways of the historical complexity that helped create the Mormon Prophet, Joseph Smith. Bushman also reminds us that while historical complexity is embedded in history, it embeds itself as well in the hearts and minds of human beings who discover the various realities of history and then appropriate those realities for their own purposes. As an illustration of this point, Bushman tells the story of Christopher Columbus—how his standing as the grandfather of the United States was neither acknowledged nor celebrated until after 1776.

My subject is Joseph Smith in a personal world. My lens is primarily a personal one—his impact on me and believers I have known during my lifetime. I will also discuss Joseph Smith’s own personal world and his impact on his acquaintances and friends. A major focus will be Joseph Smith’s role as a prophet and his teachings on the reality of revelation. By prophet I mean one who speaks for God in revealing divine truth to others. By revelation I mean God’s communication to man—to prophets and to every one of us, if we seek.

This compilation of groundbreaking articles about Joseph Smith is selected from over fifty years of LDS scholarship published by BYU Studies. This volume features articles on young Joseph Smith’s leg surgery, the historical setting and early accounts of the First Vision, friends’ and family members’ recollections of Joseph’s early religious experiences, Joseph’s 1826 trial, and more. Contents “Joseph Smith’s Boyhood Operation: An 1813 Surgical Success” LeRoy S. Wirthlin “Awakenings in the Burned-over District: New Light on the Historical Setting of the First Vision” Milton V. Backman Jr. “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision” Dean C. Jessee “Katharine Smith Salisbury’s Recollections of Joseph’s Meetings with Moroni” Kyle R. Walker “The Colesville Branch and the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon” Larry C. Porter “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History” Dean C. Jessee “Joseph Smith and the Manchester (New York) Library” Robert Paul “Money-Digging Folklore and the Beginnings of Mormonism: An Interpretive Suggestion” Marvin S. Hill “Joseph Smith’s 1826 Trial: The Legal Setting” Gordon A. Madsen

Joseph Smith was an explorer, a discoverer, and a revealer of past worlds. He described an ancient America replete with elaborate detail and daring specificity, rooted and grounded in what he claimed were concrete, palpable artifacts. He recuperated texts of Adam, Abraham, Enoch, and Moses to resurrect and reconstitute a series of past patriarchal ages, not as mere shadows and types of things to come, but as dispensations of gospel fullness equaling, and in some cases surpassing, present plenitude. And he revealed an infinitely receding premortal past—not of the largely mythic Platonic variety and not a mere Wordsworthian, sentimental intimation—but a fully formed realm of human intelligences, divine parents, and heavenly councils.

During the last decade, a recurring question has been posed to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Is the church “changing?” In addition, it is asked,Is there some effort on the part of the church leadership to have the church and its teachings, particularly those concerning Jesus Christ, become more acceptable to and thus more accepted by other Christians? The natural Latter-day Saint inclination is to react sharply that the church’s doctrines concerning Jesus Christ are intact and even eternal, that doctrines of Joseph Smith’s day and the doctrines of our own day are one and the same, that little of consequence has been altered.

In 1828, the H. and E. Phinney Company in Cooperstown, New York, published a quarto-size edition of the King James Bible. This is the version that Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, used in his work when he created a new translation of the Bible. Here the author examines Joseph Smith’€™s marked-up copy of the Phinney Bible as an artifact important to Mormonism’€”some of Smith’€™s corrections and additions appear in footnotes of the Bible that Mormons use today. The author notes that the Phinney Bible’s updated language is more modern than the version of the Bible Latter-day Saints officially use (the King James), and the modernization may or may not have influenced Joseph Smith’€™s word choice in creating his translation. The author also gives biographical information on the Phinneys, describes how their Bible may have made its way into Joseph Smith’€™s hands, briefly traces the history of the English Bible in America, and describes the printing process employed by the Phinneys.

The biographer of Joseph Smith’s early life will know his subject when he relies on sources that know their subject. This truism is more obvious in statement than application, for non-Mormon biography has not faced the severe limitations of the uniformly hostile affidavits taken by a sworn enemy of the Mormon Prophet. The image thus obtained is sharply discordant from the Joseph Smith documented in the 1830’s: a leader of physical prowess and vigorous manhood, a profound idealist with spontaneous humor and warmth, who displayed personal courage under tremendous odds. A similar youth in the 1820’s is discovered, not by editing out non-Mormon sources, but finding those non-Mormon sources that reflect definite contact with Joseph Smith. Such a study shows that collecting informed statements about the Prophet will produce a substantial favorable judgment. Although initial collection of statements against Joseph Smith is an oft-told story, its outline is a necessary background for the affidavits to be analyzed. D. P. Hurlbut, excommunicated twice by LDS tribunals for immorality; became so personally vindictive that he was put under a court order restraining him from doing harm to the person or property of Joseph Smith. He was next “employed” by an anti-Mormon public committee to gather evidence to “completely divest Joseph Smith of all claims to the character of an honest man. . . .” To achieve this goal he traveled to New York and procured statements at Palmyra Village, the largest business center adjacent to the Smith farm and also at Manchester, the rural district that included “Stafford Street.” Cornelius Stafford, then twenty, later remembered that Hurlbut arrived at “our school house and took statements about the bad character of the Mormon Smith family, and saw them swear to them.” The Painesville, Ohio, editor, E. D. Howe, replaced Hurlbut as a respectable author, and published the affidavits in Mormonism Unvailed (1834), laying the cornerstone of anti-Mormon historiography. Howe lived to see the solidity of the edifice, observing forty-four years afterward in his memoirs that the book “has been the basis of all the histories which have appeared from time to time since that period touching that people.” More accurately, Howe’s writing was insignificant, but the Palmyra-Manchester affidavits published by him have introduced Joseph Smith in every major non-Mormon study from 1834 to the present. Yet even supposedly definitive studies display no investigation of the individuals behind the Hurlbut statements, nor much insight into their community.

In his published dialogue with the Evangelical theologian Craig Blomberg, Stephen Robinson observed that one of the factors that makes it so difficult for Mormons and Evangelicals to understand each other is the issue of terminology. The theology of the Latter-day Saints, he noted, has not been shaped by the same developments that Protestants have experienced since the days of the Reformation. This means, Robinson said, that “Latter-day Saints are generally quite naïve when it comes to the technical usage of theological language.”

Mormonism began with a single family—the family of Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. Just how did this family operate, and what characteristics did they exemplify? Although much has been written about this family, little has been produced with the intent of sifting through the historical records to reveal what kind of family this was. Through careful research, marriage and family therapists have developed several paradigms or models to facilitate family assessment, and these constructs can be used to evaluate a historical family. While there are certain limitations, there also are many constructs that can be successfully evaluated in a historical family. Kyle Walker uses five family process concepts—cohesion, resiliency, religiosity, conflict management, and family work and recreation—to examine historical sources that identify how the Smith family operated.

For years, William E. McLellin (1806–1883) has been a mystery to Mormon historians. Converted in 1831, he served missions with Hyrum Smith, Samuel Smith, Parley Pratt, and others. He was also ordained one of the twelve original Latter-day Saint Apostles in 1835. Yet seeds of doubt and difficulty were already evident in his brief period of excommunication in 1832 and in various points of tension and later conflict with Church leaders. In the early 1980s, the fabled McLellin journals were reportedly located by the infamous document forger, Mark Hofmann. Little did anyone know that they were soon to be found in the holdings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which had acquired the journals in 1908. These six detailed and fascinating journals, written from 1831 to 1836 during McLellin’s most faithful years, now shed new light on the nature of early Mormon worship and doctrine, as well as on religious attitudes in America in the 1830s. They document his daily travels, meetings, preachings, healings, sufferings, and feelings. They offer many clues toward solving the mystery of McLellin in early Mormon history. McLellin died in Independence, Missouri, in 1883. Although no longer affiliated with any LDS church or party, he held firm to his testimony of the Book of Mormon and to the events he experienced and reported in these remarkable journals. “McLellin’s unusually full and literate journals open to view another side of Mormonism that was flourishing in the tiny hamlets and small towns of America.” — Jan Shipps “In early Mormon documents like McLellin’s journals, one finds all of the makings of a modern Acts of the Apostles.” — John W. Welch An essential source for anyone interested in the beginnings of Mormonism and the religious history of America. Copublished by the University of Illinois Press and BYU Studies, with permission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.