Mark Ashurst-McGee is a friend of the JI and the Senior Research and Review Editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He holds a Ph.D. in American History from Arizona State University and has published broadly on Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint history. He co-edited, along with Michael Hubbard MacKay and Brian M. Hauglid, Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, which was recently published by the University of Utah Press.

This collaborative volume is the first to provide in-depth analysis of all of Joseph Smith’s translation projects. The compiled chapters explore Smith’s translation projects in focused detail and in broad contexts, as well as in comparison and conversation with one another. The various contributors approach Smith’s sacred texts historically, textually, linguistically, and literarily to offer a multidisciplinary view. Scrupulous examination of the production and content of Smith’s translations opens new avenues for understanding the foundations of Mormonism, provides insight on aspects of early American religious culture, and helps conceptualize the production and transmission of sacred texts.

Further introduction to this carefully curated collection, several years in the making, can be found at the book’s official webpage at the University of Utah Press:

I’ve had a few people ask about the meaning of the main title. Here is an excerpt from the book’s introduction that explains just that:

Whatever the original source of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith rendered its text in the Modern English of the last half millennium, so the book is certainly modern. And it is thus further modern because of the heavy freight of cultural baggage and even historical connotation that is unavoidably carried along by any language. The Book of Mormon is also modern in that some of its prophets foresee the contemporary age and even directly address its current readers. The question of whether the text is also ancient will not be debated in this volume. Although most of the contributors to this collection are practicing Latter-day Saints who believe that the Book of Mormon and Smith’s other translation texts are both ancient and modern, this book only explores their modern aspects. Smith claimed to have translated “by the gift and power of God” while also leaving an inordinate amount of historical and textual evidence behind—with which his own role in the production of Mormon scripture can be examined. This, then, is what is meant by the title Producing Ancient Scripture: the volume takes advantage of this extant evidence and epistemologically focuses on what was observed at the time of Smith’s production of what was considered translation, as well as on what can be observed now regarding the nature of the resulting products. It analyzes the texts that Smith produced in terms of his personal practices and experiences, his immediate environment and circumstances, his biographical background and cultural context, and the broader contours of early American history. Investigating the modern and human dimensions of Smith’s translation projects does nothing to strip them of their intrinsic religious value, their profound influence on millions of believers, or even the possibility of their genuine antiquity and divine inspiration. Though religion tends to either presuppose or demand a real and fundamental connection to the divine, it is also inevitably defined and shaped by those engaged in the pursuit of that connection. In this book, the purpose of a modernist approach is to move past the polarizing effects of belief or skepticism that Smith’s translations naturally tend to provoke.

From its inception, the book was meant to be a scholarly work that anyone could read and engage in—whether in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or any other branch of the Restoration or of Christianity or from any other faith or no faith. Due to this intentional editorial decision, there is nothing in the book asserting supernatural involvement and there is nothing in the book excluding supernatural involvement. Because we have taken this scholarly position, I fully expect that on the non-scholarly spectrum of faith and doubt it will get hit from both poles. I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t matter at all where contributors are coming from, but all of the contributed chapters have been through the book’s conscious and diligent editorial process of removing both assertions and exclusions of supernatural influence in Joseph Smith’s translations. Though not all of the contributors are historians or Americanists, the compilation is ultimately an American history book about Joseph Smith’s translations, sharing what we can know about them based on the 19^th-century sources. Again, it is a work of scholarship that should be able to communicate historical evidence and argument to any other scholar of any faith or no faith. So, each chapter has passed muster—at least in the minds of the editors—in terms of its scholarly content and tone.

CONTENTS

1. Introduction

Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid

PART I: CONTEXT AND COMMENCEMENT

2. “By the Gift and Power of God”: Early Mormon Charismata and the Gift of Translation

Christopher James Blythe

4. Translated Bodies as a Model for Translated Texts

Jared Hickman

5. Performing the Translation: Character Transcripts and Joseph Smith’s Earliest Translating Practices

Michael Hubbard MacKay

6. Reconfiguring the Archive: Women and the Social Production of the Book of Mormon

Amy Easton-Flake and Rachel Cope

PART II: TRANSLATING THE BOOK OF MORMON

7. Seeing the Voice of God: The Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation

Samuel Morris Brown

8. Joseph Smith, Helen Schucman, and the Experience of Producing a Spiritual Text: Comparing the Translating of the Book of Mormon and the Scribing of a Course in Miracles

Ann Taves

9. Nephi’s Project: The Gold Plates as Book History

Richard Lyman Bushman

10. The Book of Mormon in Comparison with Joseph Smith’s Other Revelations

Grant Hardy

PART III: TRANSLATING THE KING JAMES BIBLE

11. The Tarrying of the Beloved Disciple: The Textual Formation of the Account of John

David W. Grua and William V. Smith

12. The Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary in Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation

Thomas A. Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon

13. Joseph Smith, “Translation” of Lost Scripture, and the Revelation on the Apocrypha

Gerrit Dirkmaat

14. Translation, Revelation, and the Hermeneutics of Theological Innovation: Joseph Smith and the Record of John

Nicholas J. Frederick

PART IV: PURE LANGUAGE, THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM, AND THE KINDERHOOK PLATES

15. “Eternal Wisdom Engraven upon the Heavens”: Joseph Smith’s Pure Language Project

David Golding

16. “Translating an Alphabet to the Book of Abraham”: Joseph Smith’s Study of the Egyptian Language and His Translation of the Book of Abraham

Brian M. Hauglid

17. Approaching Egyptian Papyri through Biblical Language: Joseph Smith’s Use of Hebrew in His Translation of the Book of Abraham

Matthew J. Grey

18. “President Joseph has Translated a Portion”: Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates

Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee

What chapter(s) are you most excited to read?