Why I hate the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible

I’ve kept quiet about this long enough. 

 

A little while ago, I visited historic Nauvoo Illinois with my family. We enjoyed touring the homes of early Latter-day Saint apostles, trying our hands at temple stone carving, watching young, talented missionaries dance, spin, holler, and sing in a grand celebration of Mormon heritage. My son even accidentally stole a few typesetting letters from the reconstructed printing press.

 

As a part of the experience, I paid $10 to go on a guided tour of the sites owned and operated by the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) while the rest of my family played pioneer games down the road with representatives from my own Utah-based faith. The historical sites intern who guided my tour wore a  uniform that was in noticeable contrast to the 19th century outfits of the missionaries staffed by my church. A cleanly pressed polo was tucked tightly into a slightly above knee-length skirt. On her feet, she wore ankle–length socks and brightly colored, new-looking Nikes. 

 

She discussed her several generations of family history in the reorganized church, her connection to the prophet Joseph Smith, and the internship program she was grateful to be a part of. She walked us over to the Smith family mansion and the home of Emma and her second husband, Lewis C. Bidamon. Bidamon, she told us, was bald, and at his and Emma’s first meeting, his toupee blew off in the wind. “Yes, Emma went from the exuberant and youthful prophet, to a bald old man,” the guide said to a giggling crowd of kids and parents in Nauvoo for a family reunion, and me. But Bidamon was a good man who took good care of the prophet’s widow, even though he never joined her faith. 

 

Eventually she stood on the grass in a sunny spot just beyond some trees and in view of the Mississippi river, as we tour-goers stood in the shade listening. She explained that to our left was the Smith family cemetery, where Joseph, Emma, and Hyrum were eventually buried after the secret location where Emma actually had Joseph originally buried was eventually discovered. Behind her, she said, was the home that Emma shared with her son, Joseph Smith III, near the end of her life. As she spoke about excavations that uncovered members of the Smith family and placed them in their final resting place, something that I still don’t know how to fully process occurred. 

 

With a bright smile on her face, and without even pausing her sentence, the tour guide widened her stance slightly, and then in front of us all, she peed in the grass and onto her beautiful new Nikes below. 

 

She finished her sentence, casually said “sorry,” and continued her smiling speech about the foundation that paid for the cemetery,  the home we were about to enter, and Joseph III’s cane that we would see propped against a wall. Except for the “sorry” it would have been impossible for a blind person to know that anything had happened. Amazingly, as I looked around at my fellow saints, I witnessed them all keep their composure, though there were some looks of concern. I looked down at those colorful shoes, now soaked in urine and then back up at the tour guide’s eyes. She grinned a professional grin and invited us into the historic home. 

 

It wasn’t just because I was offended by the casual pee, but I didn’t go into the house or finish the tour. Instead, I walked around to the Smith cemetery, paid my respects to the prophet, Emma, and the patriarch, and speed-walked back to my family to ask my wife if there was something I just didn’t understand about typical women’s behavior in this situation. As far as she and I can come up with, there wasn’t any explanation other than what I observed: an intern from the Community of Christ had peed in front of a crowd of people on a summer day, and had acted like none of that had happened. OR POSSIBLY HER WATER BROKE?!?!, but that would be even more shocking, especially considering that she didn’t look pregnant at all–AND SHOULDN’T THAT ALSO IMMEDIATELY END THE TOUR?

 

And that’s why I hate the Joseph Smith translation of the Holy Bible. 

 

I started getting annoyed with the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible after studying the Documentary Hypothesis as introduced to me in the book Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliot Friedman and then beginning a 2-year goal to read every page in the Bible in a modern translation in search of new frameworks that would help me better connect to my shifting faith. 

 

I am quite happy to announce that I found those frameworks and I made those connections, though my faith is still shifting and I’m not ready to defend anything to the death. Understanding more fully what the text of the Bible is and is not, and what texts within it are likely to mean and not likely to mean, and what historical fact lies behind the stories within it, has been way more rewarding than I imagined. 

 

The Bible is not

• Inerrant: To me that doesn’t just mean that it isn’t free from transmission errors. Bible authors are just often straight up wrong about God and the world. 
• Univocal: Bible writers often disagree with each other, not just in misremembered details or conflicting emphases, but they explicitly argue with each other about important issues. 

The Bible is

• Tremendously rich: It contains some of the best preserved ancient wisdom that remains meaningful today. And its insights invite deep reflection and challenge its readers to contemplate the inherent mystery of the world in soul-forming ways. 
• Enormously useful: The tension between authors, themes, and theologies allow readers to extract abundantly applicable ideas for so many topics, and often arguments for both sides of controversial questions. 
• Incredibly messy: Individual books in the Bible are made up of interwoven sources, stitched together by later editors. Canonical forgeries and tenuously attributed works are strewn throughout. When ancient Rabbis debated over which books belong in the Hebrew canon, one criterion they used is that a canonical text should “dirty the hands,” in other words, make one ritually unclean after reading. The Bible is rough hewn and it always has been. It is sometimes spiritual smut, sometimes sacred vulgarity, often highly sophisticated yet simultaneously blue-collar in its presentation. 

 

My problem with the Joseph Smith translation is that it smooths over the roughness of the Bible and makes the tacit argument that every part of it always taught the same, unified message, which had just for a time been lost. The Bible is a bald man asking out the Prophet’s wife, and the Joseph Smith Translation insists he staple in his toupee. The Bible is peeing down its leg, and the Joseph Smith translation is casually saying sorry and then pretending that nothing happened. 

 

Unlike other modern Christian churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not have a formal doctrine of inerrancy. We don’t believe in “Sola Scriptura.” We have canonized arguments for not thinking that the Bible was ever perfect, even in its original autographs. But the Joseph Smith translation, in almost every case I’ve encountered, seems to be making the argument that the text should be read as if it were originally inerrant and univocal, and that all it takes is an inspired insertion to make it so. 

 

The thing is, since the Bible is so messy, everyone has to decide what parts of the Bible are going to be authoritative for them and what parts are not. Christian apologists often try to get around that by harmonizing passages that have apparent contradictions. The way this usually occurs is the apologist looks at the opposing texts, and then for the one that they find less authoritative, they make up a plausible scenario that adds context to make that passage match the one they prefer. That makes it seem like there’s no contradiction after all. But really what’s happening is the original meaning of the text that was given “added context” has been blurred out in favor of the other text. The made-up scenario is usually plausible, even if there’s no evidence for it, but this exercise, in my opinion, sidesteps the challenge of scripture. 

 

And the Joseph Smith translation formalizes these sidesteps in a way that Christian apologists can’t: It claims the plausible extra context is revealed context. 

 

Now, like I said, everyone has to do this in one form or another. It’s inevitable if you have a sacred text as hand-dirtying as the Bible, that you are going to have to wrestle with what to adopt and what not to. And I don’t blame Joseph Smith for doing it. I just wish we could confront the Biblical text on its own terms and then study the Joseph Smith version separately. I actually get quite annoyed with Christians who read the Book of Mormon and then say “that’s not in the Bible!” Because of course it’s not! The Book of Mormon reveals truth that wasn’t in the Bible. It recontextualizes Biblical theology. Like the Book of Chronicles, it reframes earlier stories to make different theological points. And I am so stoked to get into the details of those recontextualizations next year when I study the Book of Mormon.

 

And in large part, we get to do that with the Book of Mormon because we own the full copyright. With the Joseph Smith translation, the Community of Christ, funny enough, owns the copyright to the full text, which is one of the reasons that the Joseph Smith translation isn’t formally canonized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another reason it may never be canonized is that the text of the Joseph Smith translation often contradicts the quoted text of the Bible in other canonical books like the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. 

 

Honestly, I think the solution is in a meme I saw once where a baker made a second cake because the first one didn’t meet his expectations. Then the baker’s friend shouts, “Awesome! Two cakes!” Let’s treat the Bible and the Joseph Smith translation, and Biblical quotes in the Book of Mormon, etc., each of which sometimes present the Biblical text in three different ways, as multiple spiritually significant cakes, with rich and abundant sweetness in all of the above. But let’s not throw out the original cake, mess and all, because we have more cakes to eat. 

 

And when the Bible makes a mess all over your collector’s edition neon sneaks, please please please acknowledge the mess instead of smiling brightly and marching right into the prophet’s home. It’s okay to freak out, step out, or at the very least acknowledge that the human condition imposes itself all the time on our tour through the divine.