Introduction
Canonization and Background
Canonization
Winter came early that year, arriving with bluster—but not daunting enough to dampen enthusiasm for Utah’s latest attraction. “Notwithstanding the inclement weather last night,” reported the Salt Lake Daily Herald on 10 October 1880, “there was a fair attendance at Jennings’ Hall to witness again the entertainment being given there nightly, ‘The Egyptian Mysteries.’ ” “The applause was frequent,” the journalist added, “and showed that the audience appreciated the entertainment. It will be repeated at the same place and hour tomorrow evening.”1 A few blocks away, as the troupe prepared for their repeat performance, America’s fascination with all things Egyptian was manifesting itself among a more sober audience, and to rather more lasting effect for America’s religious history. Shortly after 2 p.m., in the Sunday afternoon session of the fiftieth semiannual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,2 Elder Orson Pratt rose to begin the ritual of the sustaining of church officers. The conference had begun five days before. Now, as Pratt took the stand, the first name he pronounced was familiar to everyone sitting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle—the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the last surviving Latter-day Saint who had been present at Joseph Smith’s 1844 assassination in Carthage, Illinois. “It is moved and seconded,” intoned the venerable Pratt—the only living apostle called with the original group in 1835, and the man who would himself be now presiding had Young not demoted him five years earlier3 “that President John Taylor be a prophet, seer, and revelator and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all the world.”
The announcement was eagerly anticipated and long overdue. Brigham Young, the “Lion of the Lord,” had passed more than three years ago, and Taylor had been functioning as the de facto leader of the church, but from his position as the senior apostle. After a hiatus lasting for years, the throngs
filling the tabernacle hoped to see at last a new leader appointed in Young’s stead. At the Friday session two days before, George Q. Cannon, an apostle and former counselor to Young, had told a disappointed assemblage that such a step would only be forthcoming “when it shall be the counsel of our Heavenly Father that a First Presidency shall be again organized.” In the meantime, he chided, “you can wait, as well as we, for the voice of the Lord.”4 But they didn’t have to wait long at all. Wilford Woodruff recorded in his journal that the very next evening, “the Apostles then met in Council at 6 oclock and Decided to Organize the first Presidency of the Church. Wilford Woodruff Nominated John Taylor to be the President . . . and it was Carried unanimously. President John Taylor then Chose George Q Cannon as his first Councillor and Joseph F Smith as his Second councillor.”5 (In his journal, Cannon expressed his shock at the call: “before the names of the counselors were called I had a presentiment that my name would be mentioned and I trembled all over. My nerves twitched all over my body and I could scarcely control myself. When my name was mentioned I rose to my feet and begged of the brethren to excuse me from filling that position.”)6
Now on this Sunday afternoon, the men of the church were seated according to their priesthood offices, following the protocol for a solemn assembly when a new leadership was seated. Voting by priesthood quorums, they unanimously raised their right hands to sustain Young’s successor. The congregation next sustained the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Presidents of Seventy, and so on, down to the temple architect and the auditing committee, ending with the church reporter. After this conference highlight—only the third such sustaining in half a century7 apostle George Q. Cannon rose to the stand. With no fanfare, no sense of drama or historic development, he matter-of-factly said: “I hold in my hand the revised edition of the Doctrine and Covenants one which the members and certainly all the officers of the church have seen and read; also the Pearl of Great Price. In Kirtland, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, in its original form, was submitted for the acceptance of the officers and members of the church; and as some additions have been made of revelations since the first publication it was deemed advisable to submit it now for the acceptance of the members of the church if they so choose.” Joseph F. Smith then moved that the volumes be so endorsed by the congregation, and the motion carried unanimously.8
And so the proposal to canonize a new book of scripture, as reported by the Salt Lake Herald two days after the conference, took the form of a sixword parenthetical—“also the Pearl of Great Price”—with not a word of
commentary, explanation, or motive. This is ironic because the elevation to canonical status of a work first published as a pamphlet twenty-nine years earlier by the president of the British Mission was vastly more significant than the mere expansion of the Doctrine and Covenants, and more farreaching in its effects than John Taylor’s assumption of the title of church president. A set of texts attributed to Abraham and deriving from Egyptian papyri, along with purported writings of Moses and Enoch the prophet, in addition to autobiographical elements from Joseph Smith’s personal writings, constituted the bulk of this new compilation, giving canonical status to the tradition’s richest—and most controversial—theological writings and to an autobiographical narrative written by its founder, Joseph Smith. The church had reprinted the original fifty-six-page pamphlet in 1878 with a particularly important addition: Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage. (The 1878 edition also included additional portions of Smith’s Book of Moses, making a total page count of seventy-one.) In one abrupt and unanticipated gesture, the entirety of that volume was now made scripture. Why was so little attention given to the addition to the Latter-day Saint (LDS) canon of the first— and only—scriptural volume since the founding decade, one that betokened such enormous doctrinal significance? The virtual stealth by which it became the fourth “standard work” of the Church of Jesus Christ on that October afternoon typifies its subsequent history: it is the least studied, written about, understood, and appreciated book in the LDS canon, but it outweighs in theological consequence and influence all the rest.
Without the Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ would lose its principal evangelizing tool and its most conspicuous sign of Smith’s prophetic vocation but relatively little of its doctrine. (By itself, noted one religious scholar, “the Book of Mormon . . . may not have added enough doctrinal novelty to the Christian tradition to have made Mormonism more than a Protestant sect.”)9 With the Doctrine and Covenants, the church would lose a good bit of its ecclesiology—organizational templates and guidelines for church government and its offices—but would not suffer a devastating loss of the deeper theological underpinnings of the faith. In fact, the entire section of that volume of scripture that was denominated “Doctrine” (commonly known as the Lectures on Faith) was decanonized in 1921. Even less relied on for distinctive Latter-day Saint teachings is the Bible, which the Latterday Saints embrace as scripture but with the caveat embodied in Smith’s creedal statement “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.”10 Its very inadequacy as a guide to definitive religious
truth was, in fact, the catalyst that led Smith to the spiritual quest that culminated in the “Restoration,” or the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It is, rather, in the pages of the Pearl of Great Price that we find the essential foundations of a radically new religious tradition. Here Old Testament narratives are totally recast as human ascent rather than fall, a new covenant theology is propounded that reaches back to human premortality, God’s nature is redefined in ways diametrically opposed to Christian creedal formulations, Trinitarianism is undone, the possibilities of human theosis are first limned, and the template of the Zion society Smith was called to build is first laid out.
Finally, LDS religion is a religion of the temple. Perplexed by competing religious claims, anguished by fears for his own soul, and finding no clarity from his biblical study, Smith followed the injunction of James to seek wisdom directly from God.11 Kneeling in secluded prayer, he sought an assurance of personal salvation. In response, he wrote, “I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee.”12 The question is, why was this not the end of the story? Why did Smith not, following Luther and Wesley and myriad others, feel his quest at an end and thereafter share the good news of his and humanity’s salvation? Perhaps the single most distinctive hallmark of Smith’s religion-making was his subsequent conviction that salvation was collective and collaborative, not personal and individual. His conception culminated in discerning God’s grand design of providing a means to redeem the entire human family, incorporating them into an eternal chain of belonging through sacramental rituals and binding covenants. The locus for the earthly consummation of these preparations is to be found within the temples that crowned Smith’s religious project. And the Pearl of Great Price is the scriptural text that largely informs and guides that temple theology.
Mormonism, in other words, is absolutely inconceivable apart from this collection of scriptural texts that provided the faith’s theological core from the beginning but only received canonical recognition in 1880. At the present moment, controversies regarding multiple accounts of Smith’s “First Vision,” as well as the origins of the text of the Book of Abraham, have brought unprecedented attention to this hitherto largely neglected work. The consequence is that the Pearl of Great Price represents at one and the same time the greatest vulnerabilities and the greatest strengths of the Church of Jesus Christ.
The Pearl of Great Price is a seemingly incongruous mélange of texts that include not only those of purported ancient authorship (of Enoch, Moses, and Abraham) along with Smith’s autobiographical texts but also his extensive emendations to Matthew 24 and a creedal summary of Mormon beliefs he provided to a Chicago newspaper editor. Franklin Dewey Richards, president of the British Mission and an apostle since 1848, compiled these scattered writings and published them for the use of British Saints and his missionaries in 1851, months after his call to preside. He wrote to his uncle that his intention was not “to pioneer our doctrines to the world, so much as for the use of the Elders and Saints to arm and better qualify them for their service in our great war.”13 Richards elaborated his purposes in a preface to the first published edition. He intended to demonstrate that the “doctrine and ordinances” of the Church of Jesus Christ were “the same as were revealed to Adam for his salvation after his expulsion from the garden, and the same that he handed down and caused to be taught to his generations after him, as the only means appointed of God by which the generations of men may regain his presence.”14
This is a perhaps surprising feature of Smith’s manifold teachings to single out for unique emphasis in a diverse compendium. Clearly, Richards felt that the key to understanding Joseph Smith’s mission was not to perceive it as the contributing of a few missing pieces to the gospel puzzle or a redirection more in consonance with Holy Writ. On the contrary, by identifying the Restoration with the recuperation of an Adamic rather than merely Christian dispensation, Richards was signaling an entirely new understanding of Christian covenant theology. Positing Adamic foundations to the gospel meant the collapse of all those polarities on which traditional Christian understanding was based: the Old and New Testaments, covenants of works and of grace, historic and spiritual Israel, typology and fulfillment—even catastrophic fall and reparative redemption—were now newly integrated into a seamless vision of a premortally conceived plan delivered in the Garden and made new again in Smith’s day, in the era Saints refer to as the dispensation of the fulness of times. The very first sentence ever published from Smith’s biblical revision put the case baldly: “and it came to pass that Enoch continued his speech, saying: Behold, our father Adam taught these things, and many have believed and become the sons of God.”15
Although he was in most regards a meticulous record-keeper, Richards’s journals offer no details of what was passing through his mind in regard to this project that would outshine in significance all his other manifold labors.
“He doesn’t mention the gathering of material, the decision to publish or any other details,” one of his editors notes. Little wonder; at this time in his life,
he had just become the emigration agent for the Church, was constantly counseling with the other members of the Twelve who were in Europe at the time—John Taylor in France and Germany (who were printing the Book of Mormon and other periodicals while Lorenzo Snow in Italy and Erastus Snow in Denmark were also publishing). Richards was coordinating the reprinting of the Book of Mormon, the hymnal, Parley Pratt’s Voice of Warning, and other works. He was moving the Millennial Star to a weekly production and was writing an editorial each week, reflecting an insatiable appetite among the British members for church literature. He was gratefully reprinting the Official Communications from the First Presidency as official information and instruction for the Saints.16
Apparently, his assembly and printing of the Pearl of Great Price was, in his estimation, just one more project among myriad works he was ushering into print, not deserving of any particular notice in the larger field of his endeavors.
From his introduction to the work, we know that Richards believed that the availability of the documents he selected—principally the recovered Mosaic text along with the firsthand accounts of Smith’s encounters with heavenly beings calling him to his work—would serve to impress readers “with a sense of the Divine calling, and holy ordination, of the man by whom these revelations, translations, and narrations have been communicated to us.”17
In this regard, Richards’s strategy was part of a growing trend in Mormon evangelizing, the foregrounding of Joseph Smith’s particular role in the project that Latter-day Saints refer to as the Restoration—a role that is as seemingly obvious today as Martin Luther’s role in Lutheranism. However, Smith’s personal prominence was not always emphasized in early presentations of the church and its beliefs. Like many pamphlets published in far-flung missions, Richards’s compilation was directed both to “all careful students of the scriptures” as well as those just “beginning in the gospel.” In other words, he envisioned it as a tool for evangelizing the openminded, and for edifying the already converted. Like all LDS tracts of the day, it also contained what the author considered “confirmatory evidence of the rectitude” of the LDS teachings. The precise contents of this first edition were as follows.
1. Extracts from the prophecy of Enoch, together with some writings of Moses. Both of these sections were interpolations added to the Book of Genesis in Smith’s reworking of the Bible. Portions had been printed previously in the church’s newspaper, The Evening and Morning Star.
2. The Book of Abraham: writings arising from Smith’s work with Egyptian papyri that he acquired in 1835. Portions of these writings had been published in the church newspaper, Times and Seasons
3. A reworking of Matthew 24, from Smith’s new translation of the New Testament.
4. Two revelations that would be added to the Doctrine and Covenants in 1876 (D&C 77 and 87);18 a partial key to the Book of Revelation; and a prophecy about an impending civil war. The first had been published in Times and Seasons in 1844.
5. Extracts from the life story of Joseph Smith. These portions recounted the essentials of Smith’s 1820 theophany and the origins of the Book of Mormon and had already been published serially in Times and Seasons.
6. Extracts from the Doctrine and Covenants, consisting principally of the Articles and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ (pertaining to sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper; offices and organization of the Priesthood) and a revelation affirming the contemporary era as the last dispensation. These revelations (D&C 20, 27, and 107) had been in print since 1835.
7. The Articles of Faith: a creed consisting of thirteen affirmations, first published in 1842.
8. A concluding poem, “What Is Truth,” by British convert John Jaques, which appeared in the British hymnal Richards was publishing at that time.
After the 1878 republication of The Pearl of Great Price—which in that year also included the plural marriage revelation (D&C 132)—was canonized in 1880, the other Doctrine and Covenants excerpts were removed as redundant, as was the concluding poem, which was little more than a typographical adornment. That left the five principal sections I will deal with in this book. Each presents its own questions and dilemmas, as follows.
First, the Genesis material. Why was it not published earlier in its entirety?19 And given its theological significance, why did it take half a century to become canonized? And how do these portions fit into Smith’s larger project, the “New Translation” of the Bible?
Second, the Book of Abraham chapters. How were they produced, and does their unique manner of production bear on their scriptural status? What are the challenges to their standing as inspired scripture today?
Third, Matthew 24. Why was such special significance accorded to one New Testament chapter out of the dozens Smith reworked?
Fourth, Joseph Smith’s personal history. What does its elevation to scriptural status signify? Why this particular version—and how significantly does it vary from other versions?
Fifth, the Articles of Faith. Given Smith’s often-expressed disdain for creeds, why did the church move to canonize these expressions of church belief, and why at this time? How do they, and how do they not, function as a church creed?
By way of background, however, it will be useful first to establish what was new and what was old in Richards’s decision to make and publish this compilation.
Backgrounds and Precedents
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began with a book. Missionaries had been going abroad to share the news of the Book of Mormon before its signatures were even bound into final form. Unwilling to wait for the finished volumes, Christian Whitmer, brother to the witness to the gold plates, David, “copied from the manuscript the teachings and doctrine of Christ, being the things which we were commanded to preach.”20 Similarly anxious, others took signatures as they came off the press in the fall of 1829 and used them in preaching or distributed them to the curious. Thomas Marsh journeyed from Lyons, New York, to inquire about the “Golden Book.” He said that he “found Martin Harris at the printing office, in Palmyra, where the first sixteen pages of the Book of Mormon had just been struck off, the proof sheet of which I obtained from the printer and took with me. . . . After staying there two days I started for Charleston, Mass., highly pleased with the information I had obtained concerning the new found book.” Another visitor from Lyons, Solomon Chamberlain, had had a vision in 1816 of “a book to come forth, like unto the Bible.” Smith’s brother Hyrum took Chamberlain to the printing office in Palmyra, and gave him not one but four sixteen-page signatures. Convinced that he had found the book of his vision, Chamberlain “took them with their leave and pursued my journey
to Canada, and I preached all that I knew concerning Mormonism, to all both high and low, rich and poor, and thus you see this was the first that ever printed Mormonism was preached to this generation.”21
Joseph Smith and his scribe Oliver Cowdery also took loose sheets from the printing to share with their own relatives. From Smith’s perspective, the value of these previews was not so much as preaching guides or distillations of gospel truths but as tangible evidence that his disputed claims about a magnificent record were about to be realized: “there begins to be a great call for our books in this country,” he wrote in October 1829. “The minds of the people are very much excited when they find that there is a copyright obtained and that there is really books about to be printed [sic].”22
Once the completed volume came off the press, Samuel Smith filled his rucksack with the volumes and departed as the first officially called missionary of the new church. Members of the new church were not nicknamed after their founder, like Lutherans, or after distinctive practices, like the Quakers and Shakers and Baptists, or after their approach to salvation, like the Methodists. They were named after their book. Mormon missionaries could preach from the Bible and frequently debated Protestant preachers using that shared scripture. But the Book of Mormon was the basis of their claim to be recipients of a new revelation from heaven, and it was by that designation that they came to be known.
However, well before Smith presented his “gold Bible” to a dubious world, he had received the word of God in theophanies, visions, personal revelations—and the organization of the church and the publication of the Book of Mormon accelerated, rather than abrogated, that stream of revelation. As Smith declared at the time of the church’s formal incorporation, God had much more to say “by way of commandment to the church.”23 The challenge was in how to disseminate those new directives pouring through the mind and voice of Smith and onto paper. So two years after founding, Smith mustered the resources to procure a press and began publication of the Evening and the Morning Star, a new church paper. As the opening words of the inaugural issue explained, “the Star will borrow its light from sacred sources and be devoted to the revelations of God as made known to his servants by the Holy Ghost.”24 Twenty-six revelations, in whole or in part, were published in the newspaper’s first thirteen issues.25
A collection of almost all the revelations received to date was assembled as the Book of Commandments in 1833 and published in an incomplete version (sixty-five of a likely seventy-seven),26 after a mob destroyed the press
and scattered the work-in-progress. In 1835, the Latter-day Saints published an even larger collection, this time containing 100 revelations (along with meeting minutes and “explanations”), titled the Doctrine and Covenants. However, even with the Book of Mormon as the principal evidence of a new era in God’s dealing with mankind, and even with the revelations that describe the “principles for the regulation of the church” and the “law” of the church, LDS missionaries and leaders felt the lack of materials that would provide an introduction to the church—its founding, its core theology and basic teachings—in an efficient and accessible way.27
The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants attempted in part to answer that need with a set of seven “lectures on theology” (more often called the “lectures on faith”) which made up the “Doctrine” section of the volume. Much of the material was basic Christian catechism on the necessity for faith and on the attributes of God. Two radical, distinctive doctrines found their way in. One was a detailed definition of salvation as theosis—the process of becoming like God, hinted at in the Enoch text Smith had produced in 1830. The second was also a doctrine born of Smith’s 1830 work on retranslating Genesis. Lecture 2 recounts how an angel visited Adam and Eve and taught them the principle of sacrifice and its significance as a type of a Savior yet to come, the only begotten of the Father. Thus, the lecture continues, “the plan of redemption [was] revealed to man,” and “from this we can see that the whole human family, in the early age of their existence, in all their different branches, had this knowledge.”28
In the mission fields of England, where written LDS resources were inadequate to the demand, elders produced their own pamphlets. (Such publications also helped fund their missions.) The apostle Orson Hyde began the practice with a single-sheet broadside in 1836: “A Prophetic Warning to all the churches of Every Sect and Denomination.” Like most jeremiads, it is unlikely that it proved very effective, asserting that Christianity was in apostasy and that “the great body of the clergy are acting without authority from God.” As proof, Hyde cited the dearth of spiritual gifts. Then, rather tendentiously, he urged readers to “REPENT! REPENT!” and “Pray, therefore, that God may send unto you some servant of his, who is authorized from on high, to administer to you the ordinances of the gospel.”29 The next year, apostle Parley Pratt went to the other loquacious extreme and published a work of 216 pages, A Voice of Warning. 30 An incredibly effective polemical work, it was the most widely distributed book of Mormon authorship well into the twentieth century. The most curious omission in Pratt’s otherwise
substantial treatment of Mormonism was the name “Joseph Smith.” Smith had not achieved the fame or notoriety he would in following years. But in an 1837 saga of the LDS project of Restoration, with a whole chapter devoted to the Book of Mormon, one would expect at least a mention of his name.31 Apparently, Pratt considered Joseph Smith the messenger, not the message. Antebellum America, as well as England, was in the throes of a fervent millennialism, and the term “restoration” was on many tongues. Missionaries were preaching a gospel restored, and LDS evangelizing was oriented around the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and the return of spiritual gifts— not the particular instrument of those developments.
The printing press facilitated the spectacular early growth of the Church of Jesus Christ, but that rapid growth in converts in turn spurred the need for more and better vehicles for the evangelization and indoctrination of the newly converted. The LDS center of gravity was shifting from America to Great Britain. In 1837, the first Mormon missionaries departed for England. In three years, membership was over 3,500,32 more than were yet settled in the church’s gathering place of Nauvoo, Illinois.33 British membership increased thereafter by thousands yearly, exacerbating the acute need for printed materials. Smith was bombarded with urgent requests for permission to reprint church scriptures and hymnals for use in the far-flung mission fields. Pleas came from elders in New York, Germany, and England, as missionaries found themselves underequipped to preach to the unconverted and firm up the newly baptized. Smith assessed the critical need, which had now grown beyond requiring a third printing of the Book of Mormon alone. (The second had been an 1837 printing of 3,000–5,000).34 Hymnals were needed for congregations abroad, as well as a new edition of the Doctrine and Covenants. (Inventory had been long depleted since its 1835 printing.) And now weighing heavily on Smith were crucial details of an Adamic dispensation and Enoch texts he had brought to light in the process of reworking the Bible into his own “new translation,” only portions of which had seen print in church newspapers and the 1835 Lectures on Faith.
In July 1840, these concerns were articulated in this announcement in Times and Seasons: “the spread of truth for a few years past, has been so exceedingly rapid, that, amid the conflicting winds of persecution, that has rolled with unexampled fury upon the heads of the saints; it has been impossible to keep the public supplied with books: and, inasmuch as the universal cry has been ‘Books,’ ‘Books,’ ‘we want Books,’ &c. and none could be had: we announce with pleasure, that effectual measures are now taking
to accomplish the long desired object of getting books once more into circulation.”35 A third edition of the Book of Mormon, already in press, was announced, as well as a new hymnal. More groundbreaking, however, was Smith serving notice that funds were needed “for spreading before the world other Books, which are very much desired,” singling out “the necessity of Publishing the new translation of the scriptures” and urging “the saints in general to act the liberal part in subscribing and paying in advance for these valuable works.”36 At the same time, in Nauvoo the church’s High Council appointed two members, Samuel Bent and G. W. Harris, “to go on a mission to procure money to be applied to the purpose of printing” those “valuable works.”37
A few months later, as a new edition of the Book of Mormon was beginning to roll off the presses, Smith was still envisioning the full array of gospel resources about to pour forth:
connected with the building up of the kingdom, is the printing and circulation of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Hymn book and the new translation of Scriptures. It is unnecessary to say any thing respecting these works; those who have read them, and who have drank of the stream of knowledge, which they convey, know how to appreciate them, and although fools may have them in derision, yet they are calculated to make men wise unto salvation, and sweep away the cobwebs of superstition of ages, throw a light on the proceedings of Jehovah which have already been accomplished and mark out the future in all its dreadful and glorious realities; those who have tasted the benefit derived from a study of those works, will undoubtedly vie with each other in their zeal for sending them abroad throughout the world, that every son of Adam may enjoy the same privileges and rejoice in the same truths. Here then, beloved brethren is a work to engage in worthy of arch-angels; a work which will cast into the shade the things which have heretofore been accomplished; a work which kings and prophets and righteous men, in former ages have sought, expected, and earnestly desired to see, but died without the sight: and well, will it be for those who shall aid in carrying into effect the mighty operations of Jehovah.38
A modest third printing of the Book of Mormon came off as planned (2,000 copies), and the First Presidency was confident that, regarding the other books in demand, “those works will soon be supplied.”39 Further light on
the prevailing state of affairs came in November. Even as Times and Seasons announced a new printing of the Book of Mormon for sale, it attempted to remedy the deficit of the other desperately desired materials by proposing to publish (for the second time) the “Prophecy of Enoch,” along with accounts of “the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the rise of the church, and the restoration of the Priesthood”; since “these three subjects excite more curiosity, create more enquiry, and cause more labor to answer, than any others of our faith.”40 This is a telling remark, confirming a pattern first evident in the promulgation and reception of the Book of Mormon: the reconstituting of a Christian community in ways that replicated early Christian practices (scriptural production, spiritual gifts, communitarianism, etc.) directed public attention not to content as much as to forms, not to theology as much as to praxis, and less toward institutional norms and more toward origins and development. In responding to public appetite for such details, proponents of the new faith embarked on a course that continues to the present: Joseph Smith, visions, angels, gold plates, persecution, and gathering—these themes were coming to assume a prominence in Mormon messaging that continues unabated.
Cowdery had published his account of “some few incidents immediately connected with the rise of this church” in the church’s Messenger and Advocate in 1834 and 1835,41 and it was such a narrative that was now needed for wider dissemination abroad. The apostle Orson Pratt agreed that an account of the Book of Mormon’s origin, the rise of the church, and the restoration of the priesthood was imperative, and he produced a pamphlet of his own to that end in 1840. I have noted that his brother Parley had conspicuously omitted mention of Smith in his own account of the LDS Restoration. Parley Pratt had referred to the Book of Mormon as the keystone of Mormonism, but it was Orson Pratt who recognized that it was the credibility of Smith’s own visions that were really the pivot on which the message of the LDS Restoration rose or fell. Accordingly, Orson Pratt was the first to publicize Smith’s “Several Remarkable Visions,” in an Edinburgh publication. (Pratt was in the British Mission at the time.)42 Smith’s theophany, in which he claimed a personal visitation from God the Father and Jesus Christ, had registered in Smith’s own self-conceiving as a private, personal conversion experience, more along the lines of John Wesley than Moses (and was accordingly absent from Cowdery’s account). In Orson Pratt’s hands, the sacred encounter of the boy Joseph Smith established his bona fides as a true prophet and came to be publicly proclaimed as such.
At about the same time, Orson Hyde and fellow apostle John Page had been appointed to a mission to Palestine and had evangelized extensively through several states en route. From Cincinnati they wrote to Joseph Smith, proposing “to write a set of Lectures upon the faith and doctrine of [our] church, giving a brief history of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and an account of its contents, in as clear and plain style as possible; together with the out lines and organization and government of the church of Latter Day Saints, drawn from the ‘doctrine and Covenants.’ ”43 Two weeks later, on 14 May 1840, Smith responded, “In answer to your inquiries, respecting the translation and publication, . . . History of the church, &c, &c; I would say, that I entirely approve of the same; and give my consent. . . . With respect to publishing any other work, either original, or those which have been published before, you will be governed by circumstances; if you think necessary to do so I shall have no objections whatever.”44 Smith’s plan to publish “the new translation of the scriptures” did not come to fruition, but his intention had been made clear and public, and other willing hands were taking up the task. “Are we at liberty to translate and publish any work, that we may think necessary, or that the circumstances in which we are placed seem to require whether original or works published by the Church?” Hyde had asked, and Smith had given the approval.
The need for an overview of Joseph Smith’s mission and the core elements of church government and theology, combined with the imperative to assemble and disseminate Smith’s growing corpus of ancient translations, was made ever more acute by a membership base now growing at an explosive rate. By 1851, British membership had soared to 33,000, almost triple the number of Saints now settled in Utah.45 All that was lacking at this point was an individual with the resources and drive to take the next step in developing an effective overview of the origins and essential beliefs of the LDS Church— and that role was to be filled by Franklin D. Richards.
Brigham Young introduced Richards to the church when Richards was a fifteen-year-old youth. He joined two years later, gathered with the Saints, and was on his way to a mission in England when he learned of Joseph Smith’s murder and returned to Nauvoo. There Richards commenced work with his uncle Willard Richards, who was the church historian. This employment would have given Richards firsthand exposure to crucial documents in LDS history, which background would have served him in good stead for his future work as a pamphlet writer. As the exiled Saints were crossing the Mississippi in 1846, Richards outfitted his wife and young daughter and then
left them in order to complete his own interrupted mission to England. He rejoined his family at Winter Quarters, Nebraska, two years later and then led them to the Saints in Salt Lake City, where in early 1849 Young called him as an apostle at the age of twenty-eight. Months later, Richards was called to return to the British Mission, arriving in the spring of the next year.46
In October 1850, Richards was sustained to replace Orson Pratt as president of the British Mission.47 Richards assumed the new position in January, when his name appears as editor of the new year’s first issue of the Millennial Star, a newspaper Parley Pratt had founded eleven years earlier.48 Orson Pratt, a principal engine of both providing and disseminating missionary tracts, had driven circulation of the periodical from 3,800 to over 20,000 semimonthly copies in the two brief years of his presidency.49 If the inheritor of the periodical thought this was the culmination of a trend, he was quickly disabused of the idea. A few months later, Eli Kelsey, called in October as the new president of the London Conference (mission field equivalents of stakes, diocese-like church units), shared with Richards his “plans for the more extensive circulation of the printed word,” accompanied by a “mammoth order for books [and] pamphlets.” He proposed a central distribution center for the sale of LDS publications (to be called the Latterday Saints’ Book and Millennial Star Depot), with elaborate plans for publishing, subscribing to, and disseminating church literature more widely.50 There were plenty of writers to fill the need. David Whittaker notes that “from Mormonism’s organized beginnings in 1830 to the eve of the Civil War about ninety Mormons wrote and published religious pamphlets and books.” While Parley and Orson Pratt were the most prolific and doctrinally influential, many others expounded original ideas in exposition, elaboration, and defense of core tenets and practices.51
To accommodate demand, Kelsey proposed enlisting 400 distributors and requested an immediate inventory of 25,000 tracts, just for the London Conference alone.52 Richards was fully on board. As he wrote in a subsequent issue of the periodical, “as an index to our views of enlargement we will state that in 1847 an edition of four thousand hymn books was considered ample for the promised demand; in 1849 the eighth edition of ten thousand was published and the ninth edition now in press [1851] consists of twenty five thousand.”53
At that moment in 1851, however, other matters trumped publishing concerns. As Pratt was transferring the leadership of the mission to Richards, Brigham Young’s Fourth General Epistle (issued in late September
1850) arrived.54 Young exuberantly proclaimed an anticipated doubling of the Salt Lake Valley population in the coming year (and subsequent years) thanks to the work of the Perpetual Emigrating Poor Fund, and called on converts abroad to “come in flocks, like doves to their windows.” This ambitious forecast and command had in mind one particular audience: “we feel to say to the Saints in England . . . the Lord hath done a great work in your midst, and speedily a greater responsibility must rest upon your shoulders.” Concluding the epistle was the announcement that Franklin D. Richards, in addition to presiding over the British Mission, was one of the “Travelling Agents” of the Fund, charged with helping fulfill the gathering of British converts to Utah.
Richards replied to the epistle in mid-February and was clearly troubled by the scope of the challenge. (“The further the subject [of emigration] is explored, the more dark and forbidding it appears in every aspect.”)55 This paramount obligation left him only a little time, he noted, to attend to other matters—the most pressing of which was to address the other “constantly increasing branch of our business”: publishing. As he explained, “the present editions of the Hymn Book and the Book of Mormon are almost out of print,” missionary work was “spreading on every hand,” and subscriptions to the Millennial Star which he was editing—were surging past 22,000. He had purchased Orson Pratt’s remaining stock of pamphlets to help fill the void, and he noted to Young that Lorenzo Snow had recently written and published two pamphlets as a missionary in Italy (“The Voice of Joseph” and “The Gospel Restored”).56
It was in this context that Richards took the measure of a burgeoning church membership that was centered not in Utah but in Great Britain, where 73 percent of the combined total resided.57 Relying on both printed sources and his own copies of documents he had had access to as assistant to the church historian,58 he quietly went about compiling his own contribution to the cause. Most preceding pamphlets had been written with an eye to introducing the doctrines of the church or defending the faith. Richards had a different audience in mind. He told his uncle that he had in mind a work “for the use of the Elders and the Saints to arm and better qualify them for their service in our great war.”59 He made a prepublication announcement in July 1851, similarly describing a “new work” intended to help Saints “be more abundantly qualified to set forth and defend the principles of our Holy Faith.”60
In mid-August, Richards’s 7,000 copies of a salmon-colored booklet of fifty-six pages were offered for sale at 1 shilling per copy. (A year and a half later he would announce its availability in a Welsh translation.)61 He had clearly discerned the needs of the growing church and where the lacunae in church publications were and had produced a work that surpassed all others in collating a remarkable collection of useful documents—with special attention to the founding events of the church. Cowdery had produced the first attempt at a brief history in his “Letters to W. W. Phelps,” recounting, as the title continued, “the origin of the Book of Mormon and the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (1834–1835).62 Orson Pratt, as I have mentioned, published a narrative history in his 1840 Several Remarkable Visions. Following Pratt’s example, Richards republished accounts of the most important of Smith’s visions—his 1820 theophany and his encounters with the angel Moroni, leading to the publication of the Book of Mormon. Pratt had composed his own version of Smith’s visions; Richards essentially reprinted Smith’s own account, which the prophet had published serially in Nauvoo, beginning in March 1842 in Times and Seasons.
As Hyde had suggested, Richards included “the out lines and organization and government of the church of Latter Day Saints, drawn from the ‘doctrine and Covenants.’ ”63 And consistent with Joseph Smith’s expressed intentions, Richards printed many of the most significant portions of the Moses material from Smith’s new translation of the Bible. Not having a complete manuscript, Richards reprinted those portions that had been available through printed church newspapers, also using handwritten copies of portions he likely had had access to when he worked in the church historian’s office. Since Smith had also produced ancient writings attributed to the patriarch Abraham, Richards included those as well, relying on portions published earlier in the church’s Times and Seasons.
Finally, LDS writers had struggled since 1834 to provide a concise summary of church beliefs, a succinct confession of faith that would serve as a standard nucleus of doctrine for members and an economical advertisement to the nonbeliever. The need was particularly acute since the public narrative was dominated by overt hostility and distorted press reports arising from the conflicts the Saints had experienced during their residence in Missouri. Published exposés like E. D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834) had especially stoked the fires of persecution, with its affidavits attacking Smith’s character and alleging that his claim to have authored the Book of Mormon was fraudulent.64 Orson Pratt had attempted such a summary in his Several
