The Know

In June 1830 —and with the Book of Mormon off the press and the Church organized—Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery began a second major translation project: the Bible. Equipped with a large King James Bible that they had purchased on October 8, 1829, Joseph and Oliver began going through the biblical text to make corrections and prophetic additions.1 Some of these additions came through visions and revelations of events from the lives of Moses and Enoch.2 Other revealed insights came as Joseph sought to restore the biblical text to its original form or even as he simply sought to modernize some of the archaic language and clarify individual passages.3

After Oliver Cowdery was called to go on a mission to Missouri with three other individuals, Joseph was largely left without a scribe for this project. However, in December 1830, Sidney Rigdon and Edward Partridge came to visit the Prophet. Sidney, who was baptized just the previous month, had been a popular and articulate Reformed Baptist preacher who had constantly sought to find the pure New Testament church. Because of his faith, the Lord revealed to Joseph that Sidney had been “prepared . . . for a greater work” (Doctrine and Covenants 35:3). In this same revelation, the Lord commanded Sidney to serve as the scribe for Joseph during the translation of the Bible: “Thou shalt write for him; and the scriptures shall be given, even as they are in mine own bosom, to the salvation of mine own elect” (verse 20).

Given Sidney’s knowledge of the Bible, among other reasons, some have proposed that Joseph utilized outside sources that would have been familiar to him or Sidney as he translated. One such proposed source was the large, multivolume commentary written by a Methodist preacher named Adam Clarke.4 This commentary was one of the largest and most academic treatises of the day, published between 1810 and 1825 with meticulous notes and interpretations of biblical passages.

According to this theory, Joseph Smith may have gained access to this massive commentary sometime after he received the portions of his translation canonized in the book of Moses. Supposedly, Joseph Smith then studied that commentary before or during the translation process and determined which passages needed to be clarified based on Clarke’s notes and commentary.5 Because Clarke’s commentary was popular among Methodist preachers and Joseph recorded that he had been partial to Methodism prior to his First Vision, in 1820, proponents of this theory have proposed that Joseph would have been predisposed to utilize that commentary.6

However, Kent P. Jackson, a leading scholar of the Joseph Smith Translation, investigated all of the proposed similarities between the Joseph Smith Translation and Clarke’s commentary and concluded that there is simply “no evidence that Joseph Smith ever used Clarke’s commentary in his revision of the Bible,” and none of the proposed similarities “can withstand careful scrutiny.”7 Rather, the similarities are mostly small rewordings that were not necessarily original to Adam Clarke and, in fact, could easily have been made by Joseph on his own in an attempt to modernize the language of the Bible.

While occasional similarities in language between the two do exist, “they are random occurrences that coincide with only a fraction of the comments, rewordings, and restatements that Clarke provides and with only a fraction of the word changes that Joseph Smith made.”8 Furthermore, none of the instances reflect serious doctrinal changes or significant expositions, and occasionally they even reword the Bible in ways that Clarke himself would have personally opposed.9

It is also worth noting that there is no evidence that Joseph Smith or those closest to him during the translation process ever owned a copy of Clarke’s commentary. Even the proponents of this highly speculative theory have noted, “Efforts to locate a copy either owned or used by Smith have so far proven unsuccessful.”10 There is only one secondhand, late, and antagonistic source that references the Clarke commentary in a way that implies Joseph may have been familiar with the work. Nathaniel Lewis, Emma Smith’s uncle, reportedly made a proposition to “make the experiment upon some of the strange languages he found in Clarke’s Commentary” utilizing the Urim and Thummim in Joseph’s possession. If Lewis could translate these languages by the divine instrument, he would believe Joseph translated the Book of Mormon with the same device.11

However, even if this account is accurate, Jackson notes,

There is nothing in the story, even if it did take place exactly as reported, to suggest that Joseph Smith knew what Lewis was talking about when he made reference to Clarke’s commentary, nor that he had ever seen a volume of it. That was not even the point of the story. . . . There is nothing in the story that suggests Lewis was ‘presenting’ the Prophet with anything but a snide proposal.12

But some instances in the Joseph Smith Translation do reflect the possibility that Joseph received support or knowledge from some contemporary sources of his day, although these sources cannot be identified. For instance, in his translation of Isaiah 34:7, Joseph replaced the word “unicorn” with a transliteration of the Hebrew re-em.13 Because Joseph did not study Hebrew until 1835, two years after he had completed his translation of the Bible, it is clear that he gained knowledge of this Hebrew word from somewhere, perhaps from Sidney Rigdon or possibly a commentary of some kind, though not necessarily from Adam Clarke.14

Similarly, Joseph made changes to 2 Chronicles 22:2 and Nehemiah 7 in an effort to correct contradictions in the biblical text. In 2 Chronicles 22:2, the age of King Ahaziah is revised to match the parallel account in 2 Kings 8:26, and in Nehemiah 7 a list of families and numbers is likewise revised to match the parallel account in Ezra 2. As such, Jackson notes that Joseph Smith may have referred to a print source, such as his Bible’s footnotes, indicating the parallel accounts.15

The Why

On three separate occasions in the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord told the Saints to “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (88:118; see also 109:7, 14). Similarly, President Russell M. Nelson has taught, “Good inspiration is based upon good information.”16 Seeking knowledge from the best resources available is something that can dramatically improve our study of the gospel. Thus, Kent P. Jackson has observed, “There is nothing wrong with the idea of Joseph Smith getting some ideas from an external source when revising the Bible.”17

The question ultimately is whether or not seeking out of the best books was a serious part of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible. While some passages do suggest he utilized some outside sources, there is no evidence that Joseph consistently utilized any specific source.

This is also apparent when the Joseph Smith translation is considered in its full context. Jackson notes it contains “three categories of changes: (1) [additions of] blocks of entirely new text without biblical counterpart, (2) revisions of existing text that change its function and meaning, and (3) revisions that change the wording of existing text but not the meaning.”18 Like other commentators, Adam Clarke made changes to the King James Version that fit into the third category: changes in wording but not in the meaning of the text. As such, “if one were to discover that the Prophet was influenced in word changes by other published sources, it would be historically interesting but ultimately of little consequence, because the passages in the third category are not the most important parts of his New Translation.”19

Thus, even if Joseph had somehow utilized these sources, it would in no way diminish the inspired nature of the Joseph Smith Translation. As Kent P. Jackson summarized, “From its beginning, indeed from its very first page, the Joseph Smith Translation is a witness of Jesus Christ. It is about Jesus and his mission as savior of the world. Its subject matter is Christ’s gospel, and its message is that his Atonement is the way to salvation for all humankind.”20 This translation reveals, clarifies, and emphasizes many aspects about Jesus’s premortal and mortal ministries that further invite God’s children to know Him and rely on Jesus’s Atonement. It is, “like all other products of [Joseph Smith’s] prophetic ministry, a testament of Jesus Christ.”21