The founding claims

The Bible Joseph Rewrote

He revised 3,410 verses of the King James Bible. You have about a third of them. What the rest shows is the test case for everything else.

What the Joseph Smith Translation is

Between June 1830 and July 1833, Joseph Smith went through the King James Bible making changes: additions, deletions, rewordings. He called it the New Translation. The Church calls it the Joseph Smith Translation, or JST, and prints selections from it in the footnotes and the appendix of every copy of its scriptures.

Two facts about it are not disputed by anyone. First, he worked from an English King James Bible, not from ancient manuscripts, and the Church has never claimed otherwise. Second, revelation directed the work and then directed its publication. Doctrine and Covenants 73:3-4: "it is expedient to translate again... continue the work of translation until it be finished." Nine years later, Doctrine and Covenants 124:89 instructed a member to "publish the new translation of my holy word unto the inhabitants of the earth."

It was never published in his lifetime. Emma kept the manuscripts after his death. The Reorganized Church published the full text in 1867, and when the Church prepared its own edition of the Bible in the 1970s it asked the RLDS Church for permission to use portions.

The scale, and how much of it you actually have

Those numbers come from the Church’s own scholars, not from critics. Robert J. Matthews of BYU counted 1,289 changed verses in the Old Testament and 2,096 in the New, plus the material added at the front of Genesis. Writing for BYU’s Religious Studies Center, Precious Truths Restored states it plainly: "Of the 3,410 verses changed in the JST, the LDS edition contains notes to about one-third of them."

The same article gives the reasons, and they are reasonable ones: the RLDS Church owned the manuscripts, the volume was already near twenty-five hundred pages, and leaders judged that changes teaching doctrines already found elsewhere in scripture did not need duplicating. Take all three at face value. Then notice what the arrangement means in practice. Someone decided which of a prophet’s corrections to scripture you would see, on grounds of space and redundancy.

And the Church did not adopt the revision as its Bible. It uses the King James Version, reaffirmed by a First Presidency statement carried in the August 1992 Ensign. The corrected Bible exists, a revelation commanded its publication, and the Church still preaches from the uncorrected one.

What it fixes, stated at full strength

Some JST changes solve real problems, and any honest treatment says so first.

God regretting. Genesis 6:6 in the King James: "it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." In Joseph’s version, published as Moses 8:25, it becomes "it repented Noah, and his heart was pained that the Lord had made man on the earth." One word moves and a genuine theological problem disappears. That problem has a whole page here, and this is a real answer to part of it.

Divine beings and human women. Genesis 6:4 has "the sons of God" coming in unto "the daughters of men." Moses 8:14 makes them "the sons of men," and the mythological reading is gone.

Whether God can be seen. Exodus 33 says both that the LORD spoke to Moses "face to face" and that "no man shall see me, and live." JST Exodus 33:20 resolves it: "No sinful man hath at any time, neither shall there be any sinful man at any time, that shall see my face and live." That is a clean fix to one of the sharpest contradictions in the Bible, and it matters doctrinally, since the First Vision requires that a man can see God.

Add to that the Book of Moses and the Enoch material, which are among the most admired things Joseph produced. Judged as theology or as devotional literature, parts of this revision are genuinely good work. That belongs on the record before anything else.

What it does not fix

The ancient sky survives. Joseph rewrote the creation account completely, and Moses 2:7 still reads: "I, God, made the firmament and divided the waters, yea, the great waters under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament." A solid dome with an ocean on top of it is the clearest piece of obsolete cosmology in Genesis, it sits in the chapter he worked hardest on, and it came through untouched.

God still nearly kills Moses. The King James Exodus 4:24 has the LORD meeting Moses on the road and seeking "to kill him," with no reason given. The revision does not remove it. JST Exodus 4:24-26: "The Lord was angry with Moses, and his hand was about to fall upon him, to kill him; for he had not circumcised his son," and Moses ends the scene saying "I have sinned before the Lord." The revision supplies a motive for the killing rather than removing it.

The hard chapters were never reached. The commands about captives and conquest, the stoning laws, the burning of a priest’s daughter, Jephthah’s vow, the sun standing still: none of it is revised. The page of verses nobody reads aloud walks through which ones the JST touches and which it leaves. The answer is three out of a long list.

None of that is a complaint about a man who died at thirty-eight with the work unfinished. It is a description of the shape of the changes. They cluster where a well-read American in 1831 would notice a problem, and they are absent where he would not.

Where some of the changes appear to come from

This is the part that is actively argued inside the Church, and it should be presented as the live dispute it is.

Thomas Wayment, a professor at BYU, and his research assistant Haley Wilson-Lemmón compared the JST to Adam Clarke’s Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, a Methodist commentary in wide circulation in Joseph’s America. They reported two to three hundred points of overlap, some verbatim, concentrated after Genesis 24, and published the work first in BYU’s Journal of Undergraduate Research in 2017, then in the university-press volume Producing Ancient Scripture and the Journal of Mormon History in 2020.

The rebuttal, in full, because it is serious. Kent P. Jackson, a BYU professor who spent much of his career on the JST manuscripts, rejects the thesis outright, saying he does not believe there is an Adam Clarke connection at all and that the proposed examples do not survive scrutiny. Kevin Barney puts the likelihood at negligible. FAIR hosts both sides, which is where a member should start.

Notice the thing neither side disputes. Both of them agree that the way to settle whether a prophet’s revision of scripture came from a Methodist commentary is to lay the two texts side by side and compare the wording. Nobody in the argument proposes praying about it. When the question is real, everyone reaches for the same method this site keeps asking about.

The Sermon on the Mount problem

This one does not depend on Adam Clarke, on critics, or on any disputed research. It is internal.

In 1829 Joseph translated the Book of Mormon, and it contains the Sermon delivered at the temple in Bountiful, 3 Nephi 12 through 14, presented as the words of Jesus and produced by the gift and power of God. Two years later he revised Matthew 5 through 7 in the JST. Two restorations, one sermon. They should converge.

Writing for BYU’s Religious Studies Center, David A. LeFevre states the result: "at least 58 of the 86 verses changed by Joseph Smith’s translation of Matthew 5-7 differ from the account in 3 Nephi."

His explanation is the standard one and deserves to be quoted rather than paraphrased: "Joseph Smith did not feel bound by the 3 Nephi version but felt free to translate the New Testament texts as the Spirit led him." Sit with what that concedes. A restored text was freely revised into a different restored text of the same words. If restoration can do that, the word is not doing the work it appears to be doing when it is used to defend the Book of Mormon.

The book he said was not inspired

In July 1832, working through the Old Testament, Joseph wrote on the manuscript that "The Songs of Solomon are not Inspired writings." BYU’s Religious Studies Center quotes the note and its date. The Song of Solomon is still printed in the Church’s Bible, and it is the only book in the standard works carrying a prophetic judgment that it does not belong there.

The same BYU article adds the complication, and it cuts against the simple version of the story: Joseph drew on Song of Solomon 6:10 in three revelations now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 5:14, 105:31, and 109:73. Quoting a phrase is not endorsing a book, and that imagery was ordinary religious language at the time. Hold both facts. A prophet marked a book uninspired, the Church keeps printing it, and his own revelations borrow its lines.

The standard answers

"It is a restoration of lost text, not a translation." That is the Church’s framing and it is the right one to argue with, because it makes a checkable prediction: somewhere there should be manuscript support for these readings. More than a century of manuscript discovery since, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, has not produced a text that carries them. Absence is not proof. But a restoration is the kind of claim that could have been confirmed, and it has not been.

"He never finished it." True, and it fully explains the untouched books. It does not explain the chapters he did finish, and Genesis 1 is the one he rewrote from the ground up.

"Only part of it is canonized, so the rest is not binding." Also true, and worth following through. It means someone graded a prophet’s corrections to scripture and printed the passing ones.

"The Adam Clarke research is disputed." It is, by a BYU professor with a career in the manuscripts, and that dispute is stated above in his own words. The Sermon on the Mount count is not disputed by anyone, and it comes from BYU as well.

Why this should make you question

Every other founding claim asks you to evaluate a translation of something nobody can check. The gold plates are gone. The papyri were thought lost for a century. The First Vision has no witnesses. The Joseph Smith Translation is the one case where the source text is sitting on your shelf, the output is printed in your own scriptures, and you can compare them yourself this afternoon.

What the comparison shows is a revision that improves exactly what an intelligent, devout, well-read man in 1831 would flag as a problem, leaves untouched what he would have no reason to notice, keeps the bronze-age sky in the chapter he rewrote most carefully, and diverges from his own earlier restoration of the same sermon in 58 of 86 verses. That is a coherent picture. It is just not the picture of a text being restored to what it originally said. It is the picture of a good man improving a book he loved, with the tools and the knowledge his century gave him.