In my “Mormonism and American Culture” class this semester, one of the Latter-day Saint students (there are only two in a group of 36) shared a striking detail about why her grandfather converted to Mormonism. What sealed his decision was 3 Nephi 12:3 in the Book of Mormon: “Blessed are the poor in spirit who come unto me, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.”
Anyone familiar with the New Testament will recognize the similarity of that passage to the first of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3). But 3 Nephi adds the phrase “who come unto me.” As my student explained, this was a revelation to her grandfather, who drew from it that the poor in spirit don’t automatically go to heaven but must seek and follow Christ. The Book of Mormon, in other words, emphasizes human initiative in the process of salvation.
The Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint tradition, made a similar change to Matthew 5:3 in the text known as the Joseph Smith Translation (JST), which technically is not a translation but a series of inspired revisions to the Bible. There, the addition sounds more archaic (“which cometh unto me”), echoing the diction of the King James Bible.
Matthew 5:3 is not the only passage that Smith modified to stress human agency. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (6:44). To the Calvinist preachers Smith encountered during his youth, this was a favorite proof text of predestination because it suggests that a person will have faith in Christ only if God wills it. But in the JST, Smith shifted the priority to the human will: “No man can come unto me, except he doeth the will of my Father who hath sent me.” Likewise, he modified 1 Corinthians 1:24 (“But unto them which are called”) to read, “But unto them who believe,” replacing a predestinarian implication with a voluntaristic one.
By what authority did Smith dictate these changes? To his detractors then and now, his revisions were the height of hubris. Evangelical Protestants—those believers most wedded to a “Bible alone” version of Christianity—accused Smith of violating scripture’s own warning not to add or subtract from its words (Revelation 22:18-19). Never mind that this curse formula, a standard posture among ancient scribes, applies only to the Book of Revelation. For Smith’s opponents, it negates not only the JST but the entire Book of Mormon.
But Joseph Smith wasn’t troubled by Revelation 22:18-19 (which he left intact in the JST) or by his own lack of academic credentials. As he once said, “I [am] a rough stone. . . . I desire the learning and wisdom of heaven alone.” He believed that God had revealed to him all the scriptural emendations as well as the other writings in the Latter-day Saint canon. As the Lord says in the Book of Mormon in logic that is difficult to confute, “Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written” (2 Nephi 29:10).
Philip Barlow, a Latter-day Saint historian at Brigham Young University, explains in his book Mormons and the Bible that Joseph Smith had a “strong sense of prophetic license”: “His dominating concern . . . was not with textual precision but with enlightening the world through revealed truth. He thus did not feel bound by what he took to be the original writings in the Bible, and yet he continued to revere the Bible.”
That sense of prophetic license is what makes Joseph Smith one of the most fascinating figures in American religious history. It puts him in the company of a handful of other American prophets, including the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy.
In her own enlargement of the biblical canon, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), Eddy reworded the Lord’s Prayer to convey what she felt was its proper spiritual sense. Instead of “Our Father in heaven,” she addressed the deity as “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious.” And she changed “Thy kingdom come” to “Thy kingdom is come” to express her belief that God’s power of healing is already present to those who understand it rightly.
To Eddy’s critics, such revisions bespoke arrogance or delusion. But as the late Stephen Gottschalk, a leading scholar of Christian Science, observed, Eddy’s “sense of speaking in the prophetic voice remains a basic fact of her biography and is essential to an understanding of what she wrote.”
What’s the historian to make of prophets like Smith and Eddy? For a long time, their ideas weren’t taken seriously, at least in the subfield of intellectual history, which tended to focus on more conventionally credentialed thinkers. The situation has improved in recent years, thanks in part to the work of believing scholars—for example, Gottschalk among Christian Scientists and Terryl Givens among Latter-day Saints—who have set their traditions within a wider intellectual context.
Outsider scholars also have a role to play, which is one reason I began teaching “Mormonism and American Culture” more than a decade ago. As the title of the course suggests, part of the goal is to understand the Latter-day Saint tradition as a product of its environment. But I also take seriously Joseph Smith’s prophetic vocation and his contribution to the world of religious ideas.
When I see the one-word epitaph on Joseph Smith’s tombstone—“Prophet”—I’m filled not with suspicion but with amazement. What wisdom did this audacious prophet impart, and how did he transcend his own parochial location? If we read between the lines of Joseph Smith’s prophecies, including his revisions to the Bible, we enter doctrinal conversations as old as Christianity itself.
© 2023 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
Thomas A. Wayment, ed., The Complete Joseph Smith Translation of the New Testament: A Side-by-Side Comparison with the King James Version (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 11, 240, 267. On the anti-Calvinism of Joseph Smith’s revisions, see Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 126-29. Joseph Smith’s self-description is quoted in Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), vii. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67. Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 415. For Terryl Givens’s account of Latter-day Saint doctrine, see Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Terryl L. Givens, Feeding the Flock: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Church and Praxis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Illustration credit: Photo of Joseph Smith’s grave by Quinn Dombrowski (via Flickr).