The Joseph Smith Papers

In that capacity, he leads a team of history professionals who collect documents and artifacts, preserve them, and promote understanding of the church's past through a publishing program, a research library, a museum, and many historic sites.

Matthew also serves as a general editor of The Joseph Smith Papers and Saints: The Story of The Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days.

He is published widely on Latter-day Saint history and American religious history.

Matthew received his PhD in American history from the University of Notre Dame.

That was kinda my PhD dissertation turned into a book.

Since then, I've co-authored books or I've wor- I, I've worked at the Church History Department for a number of years, and we tend to be very collaborative in our books.

So on the Joseph Smith Papers, you might have five people working on the book as authors, and then other editors involved as well.

So there was kind of a sense of, you know, I'm the solo author here, a sense of a vulnerability in terms of President Holland is a master.

At the bottom of the page, he writes, I pondered these things in my heart.

About that time, my mother, but after many days, on the Joseph Smith Papers website, the church has an interesting footnote for this section.

Yeah, so about that time, my mother, these parts have been crossed out.

And so, there's this footnote on the Joseph Smith Papers website that says, "...this cancelled fragment may refer to the Presbyterian affiliation of Joseph Smith's mother and three of his siblings." And then they talk about that.

So but like the church is also trying to say, oh, this is probably about his family joining the church, the Presbyterian church.

But this this would not have happened until 1824.

She said, "Emma was the elect lady." I don't think we'd even talked about some of the difficulties surrounding Emma.

I looked at her, and I thought, "And you are the elect lady right now, and I need to listen to you." And so I started to take a deep dive on Emma, and at one point, we talked about doing the papers of Emma Smith, kind of like the Joseph Smith papers, with the Church History Department and the Church Historian's Press, and they decided that we didn't have enough to do.

A couple years later, Deseret Book reached out to me and said, "Would you be interested in writing a short book about Emma Smith, including as many of her words as you can?" I was delighted, and I said yes.

And I spent a lot of time tracking down everything.

No book had ever been done like that before.

It really is an incredible book.

And one of the great things now is that we have the Joseph Smith papers, so we can access a lot more of Emma than we could before.

There are so few words of hers that exist today.

So that's... what the angel says to Joseph that he records.

This part of the Revelation is recorded in the manuscript Revelation books, which you can find on the Joseph Smith Papers website.

It's included in the 1833 Book of Commandments.

The rest of the Revelation was written according to Joseph in the September following.

Any other controversies we need to tackle from this before we conclude section 27?

One more,

and I bring this up because I'm really grateful to the Joseph Smith Papers, the good people that work there, in pointing out that this revelation is really received in three parts.

There's the original revelation that's given when Joseph is going to seek wine, an angel appears to him, speaks to him.

Publication was authorized, and in 2016, 172 years after those first meetings, the Nauvoo minutes were published.

The Joseph Smith Papers project had committed to publishing all of Smith's surviving papers, which gave church historians a reason to reconsider access.

A transcript was reviewed for church leaders in 2012.

The first presidency approved publication in 2013, and the church announced it that September.

As I said, they published major studies in 1980 that all built on records that came from outside those restricted meeting books.

Reviewers have been measured about what the minutes changed.

What did opening them and making them public via The Joseph Smith Papers project actually, uh-

Do

Members of the Twelve themselves were questioning Joseph.

The Joseph Smith Papers records show that by May 1837, reports had reached Thomas Marsh, and Boynton and other apostles were openly opposing Joseph Smith.

Luke Johnson, Lyman Johnson, and others actually preferred charges against Joseph and his counselors.

Boynton was disfellowshipped from the Twelve on September 3rd, 1837, and intriguingly, he was restored only a week later.

Uh, on the right-hand side here, we've got a couple of documents.

So the top one, 16 November, 1832.

This is a record from the Joseph Smith Papers project showing that there was a conference of elders assembled, and Brother John Boynton, uh, they've got his name different there in the, in the writing, Boynington, uh, which I can't even...

Boynington? That's sort of strange, but he's ordained by Elder Brother Joseph Smith, and so it is strange.

Joseph is an interesting thing.

So I spent a whole summer, and with a small army of research assistants, just looking at this question, because I think that the Joseph Smith papers have given us more, and that we see more there.

But yeah, Joseph doesn't know the book as well as some people do.

He does not know the book as well as Orson Pratt does.

I think his argument still very definitely holds when we're talking about published materials, but I also think there are a couple things that we need to keep in mind.

Published materials were used as proselytizing materials.

One of the recent, more, more recent Joseph Smith Papers finds, a letter that we know really well from 1841 that Joseph wrote to the Twelve in Great Britain, we kn- knew the letter for a long time from the copy of it that was published in the Millennial Star.

But the Joseph Smith Papers actually found the original version of it, and it includes a whole section on baptism for the dead, that Joseph explicitly says, "This is not ready to go out to the world, so I want you to not put this part in the newspaper." You know, the newspaper is for the Church, but it is very definitely, if not its central purpose, but one of its primary purposes are to use it as a missionary tool.

Is this about the first ceilings in a study you've been

doing? So this is just one of those things that I found from the Joseph Smith papers.

And I'm going to open this up to feel however you want to feel about it because it's kind of weird.

This is...

A sealing ceremony that was allegedly written by Joseph Smith himself.

So this would be according to the historical introduction from the Joseph Smith papers.

Joseph Smith's base.

It was a revelation on a plural marriage ceremony.