Brown, Samuel Morris. Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Davis, William. Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

This past year saw a number of important publication on Joseph Smith’s translation; in addition to the ones above, also Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 2020) in which Brown has an essay.

But first I want to compare Brown and Davis. In this post, I give a summary of their works and then discuss the implications more in a follow up.  

Brown has been working on the issue of Smith’s translation for a number of years, and his Joseph Smith’s Translation follows up on both his 2009 Church History article on Smith’s quest for the pure language, and 2012 Journal of Mormon History article arguing that scholars are better off thinking of Smith’s translation as glossolalia, the language of heaven, rather than xenoglossia, the miraculous speaking and translating of human languages. Brown goes so far as to think of translation as central to Smith soteriology: “Translation was also concerned with the transformation of human beings and the worlds they were capable of inhabiting. These twin senses of translation run together in early Latter-day Saint thought” (4).

The Adamic language and the language of heaven, Brown argues, were the central quest of Smith’s language study. “This glossolalia isn’t so terribly different from the experience Joseph Smith had with translation: a mystical encounter beyond words, followed by an attempt to reduce that ecstatic revelation into human language” (48). Brown sees Smith’s attempt to translate the Egyptian papyri in the same light. “The papyri contained hieroglyphic portals into the pure language of the primeval Bible and the words, authority, and person of Abraham. They called forth an experience probably best considered graphic glossolalia” (231).

And yet, Brown seems more direct in his article in Producing Ancient Scripture, “Seeing the Voice of God: The Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation.” There Brown argues that the “panoramic visions” or extensive historical overviews that the Book of Mormon prophets have suggest that Smith learned the Book of Mormon narrative through a similar process. Just as Smith would declare Christ’s words though his revelations, Brown asserts, “Whatever experience or authority allowed Smith to speak in the first-person voice of Jesus could allow Smith to speak similarly on behalf of Nephi, Jacob, Alma, Mormon, and Moroni.” “The famous Book of Mormon opener, ‘I, Nephi,’” Brown continues, “could be read differently in light of panoramic visions and first-person vicarious revelation. One could imagine Smith seeing Nephite history through Nephi’s eyes and reporting what he saw using Nephi’s voice” (163).

William Davis argues that since Smith dictated the Book of Mormon, it’s best to think of its production as an oral performance. Davis therefore looks at a number of mnemonic techniques that preachers of the day used, like “laying down heads,” or giving a verbal outline of the material that will follow, and then mentioning those heads along the way (17). Davis also notes that a considerable portion of the Book of Mormon is sermons and that just as preachers of the day learned how to preached the essentials of Christianity extemporaneously, Smith could likely do the same based on his time as a Methodist exhorter. Davis finds sermons taking up 40 percent of the Book of Mormon (119). For the large portion of the Book of Mormon that is narrative, Davis wonders if Smith could have had made an outline of the text, “Smith could have easily written the entire plan of the Book of Mormon on roughly a dozen sheets of paper” (159).

Davis offers very valuable insights, but naturally leaves some questions. Authors giving introductory summations is a fairly standard practice, Davis does it himself in the book. Claims of Smith’s physical outline will no doubt elicit debates as well.

The translation is certainly a historical puzzle and Brown and Davis go a long way at putting many possible pieces together. In part 2, I want to talk about Brown’s and Davis’s attempts at transcending disputes between believers and critics.