“Not to Be Trammeled”

Christian creeds go back to the first Christian centuries. Catholics produced creeds largely to establish the lines demarcating orthodoxy and heresy. Protestants at first were hostile to creeds and often invoked the Bible as the lone and sufficient creed for Christians. Joseph Smith’s hostility to creeds was common, especially among other restorationists. Eventually virtually all Protestants realized that without a creed, boundary maintenance was impossible. Early missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found it necessary to summarize and define the uniqueness of their message—effectively creating the first creeds. Joseph Smith, explicitly hostile to creeds as too circumscribing of belief, found himself forced by the same imperative to articulate his own summation of Mormon teachings. His Thirteen Articles of Faith are, however, wholly inadequate as a creed, since they omit many of the most core doctrines of the church. They are best understood, in Rodney Stark’s formula, as establishing an optimum tension with competing religious faiths—not too radical and not too familiar.

“Owing to the Many Reports”

In 1832, Joseph Smith first recorded an encounter with God, now commonly referred to as his “First Vision.” In 1838, he recorded a more detailed account. Other, secondhand recitals exist as well. In recent years, critics have pointed to apparent discrepancies in the narratives. For example, angels appear in some but not others. Smith’s first version appears to reference one divine figure; the 1838 version describes two. His personal spiritual standing is the focus of the 1832 version, and the state of the Christian world the focus of the second. This chapter elucidates the varying contexts for the production of the different narratives, seeks to understand the conditions of their creation, and identifies features common and consistent to all of them.

“Written by His Own Hand”

In 1835, Joseph Smith acquired four mummies and a trove of papyri from an antiquities dealer. He claimed that the papyri included a narrative of the patriarch Abraham, and over the following years he translated the Book of Abraham. It describes a creation presided over by “gods” and details a premortal council in which human “intelligences” are present and a Savior is chosen. Controversy over Smith’s “translation” erupted almost immediately and reignited in 1967 when some of the original papyri were made public. Egyptologists identify those fragments as Egyptian funerary documents, unrelated to Smith’s Book of Abraham chronologically or thematically. Some Latter-day Saint apologists disagree, finding the Egypticity of Smith’s narrative credible. Other apologists agree that his work fails as translation in the conventional sense but succeeds as genuinely inspired scripture.

Epilogue

The Pearl of Great Price has an importance in the Church of Jesus Christ far out of proportion to its size. The Book of Moses is the foundation for its most important doctrinal claims. The Book of Abraham undergirds its understanding of priesthood and its entire temple theology that is oriented around the eternal binding together of human families. Canonizing Joseph Smith’s autobiographical writings effectively dismantles the doctrine of sola scriptura. The controversies around the Book of Abraham mean that this canonical book of scripture represents the church’s greatest strengths and greatest vulnerabilities. However, the church is likely to weather these storms, as it has those of the past.

Re-visioning the Bible

Joseph Smith considered his “re-translation” of the Bible (actually a revision) to be one of the most important “branches of his calling.” The most important product of this effort was a Mosaic narrative, utterly absent from Genesis, that described such new doctrines as the Christian gospel being taught to Adam and Eve, as well as their baptism—effectively collapsing and redefining Christian covenant theology. Smith also introduced a narrative of the prophet Enoch, who encounters a God weeping over humankind’s misery. His other edits to the Bible made significant changes to the presentation of original sin, predestination, and the nature of sin and salvation. Of equal importance, his work on the Bible prompted an outpouring of canonized revelations on a host of topics.

Introduction

The proposal to canonize the Pearl of Great Price in 1880 took the form of a six-word 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 far-reaching 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. There were several precedents to this volume of scripture, but none achieved its breadth or theological significance.