When we consider the apostacy, and the typical criticism of our view of it by traditional Christians, that God would not let his church fall apart, we Mormons need to remember that Christ founded his church and gave it its mission of redemption and missionary work in the Spirit World before he gave it to Peter. Within a few decades, almost all the apostles and the original saints were transferred to the Spirit World, where the great bulk of humanity already waited and where all of the people on earth, whether Christian or not, would eventually come. Since they still don’t have total recall of their premortal existence, missionary work, I assume, still requires the kind of cultural and language bridges we encounter on earth. By adding the members of the Restored Church to the missionary team, we begin spreading the gospel from the modern ages and backward in time, so to speak, as the early saints spread it forward. Perhaps the timing of the Second Coming has something to do with the need to reach a critical mass of conversions in the Spirit World in preparation for the Resurrection of the Just.

The original apostles, the original Nephite 12, and all the Old Testament prophets are there, along with Joseph Smith, BY, and the modern apostles, up through Gordon B. Hinckley. The Church of Christ has had absolute continuity there for two millennia, and no one has missed out on the opportunity for redemption and eternal life because of the faultiness of the Christian churches on earth. The Second Coming can be viewed as the reuniting of the original Church with the earth, with the Restored Church mainly a small bridgehead that facilitates that reunion, when the nice neighborhoods of the Spirit World will be largely emptied of the righteous saints of all ages and they join us on an earth that has been raised to a Paradisaical state where glorified beings can dwell.

This also means that all of the good Christians of past ages, including many of the early Fathers and later scholars, many of the Catholic Saints, are likely to be the fully franchised and ordained Latter-day Saints who are enjoying a more complete understanding of the gospel than they had in mortality. They don’t belong to the Mormons so much as we all belong to the same church, the Church of Jesus Christ that sent some of its members over here on a mission to ordain the locals and establish new branches of the Church back in mortality among people waiting for the fulness of the gospel, just as the priesthood and the Church were taken to Africa. When we consider the limits on ordination of Africans for 150 years, we might want to compare it to what we Mormons assert was the limitation of ordination of ALL mankind of all races for 1730 years. After all, until 1901, none of my Japanese ancestors could get the priesthood either.

Does it seem egotistical that Mormons claim such figures of the past as our own? It obviously bothers some Jews and Catholics, which doesn’t make any sense unless they are at least a little bit afraid that we might be right about our connection to the Church in the Spirit World. After all, how does their own picture of the hereafter allow any room for Mormon vicarious ordinances to function? Their notion that they somehow have a copyright on the names of the dead, even when the dead have Mormon descendants, is itself a bit arrogant and egotistical, not to mention treats the dead as objects rather than real people who live on in the Spirit World and can perceive reality and exercise judgment. We don’t honor the wishes of a Catholic mother about not baptizing her son when he is an adult, so why should it be different when it is her deceased great grandfather, whom the son is receiving vicarious baptism for? Their view seems to be that freedom of religion is something that the dead are not allowed to have. Or is there an element of jealousy, that they cannot offer this kind of ultimate hope to the families of the deceased who did not have salvation as they define it?

Besides, I know you all have nothing better to do with all your free time …

Aaron B

Dave, I don’t know the history well enough to speculate as to what Joseph Smith thought he was doing. I find it interesting, however, that Matthews makes a leap in his article, from giving us a fairly standard definition of what “translation” meant in early 19th-century America to telling us that means “he was also observing that the manuscripts containing the text of the Bible have suffered [. . . ]. ” I don’t disagree that the manuscripts have suffered. Who could? I don’t, however, think that Matthews can get that, as he tries to do, from widening the definition of “translate.” But perhaps I am not looking at Matthews work broadly enough. Perhaps he is not relying only on the definition, as this snippet makes him appear to do.

Joseph Smith often used the words “translated” and “translation,” not in the narrow sense alone of rendering a text from one language into another, but in the wider senses of “transmission,” having reference to copying, editing, adding to, taking from, rephrasing, and interpreting. This is substantially beyond the usual meaning of “translation.” When he said the Bible was not translated correctly, he not only was referring to the difficulties of rendering the Bible into another language but he was also observing that the manuscripts containing the text of the Bible have suffered at the hands of editors, copyists, and revisionists through centuries of transmission. Thus, the available texts of the Bible are neither as complete nor as accurate as when first written.

The contrast Matthews puts on the malleable term “translate” is between transforming text of one language into another language (what he says Joseph was not claiming to do) and some process for recovering the meaning of whatever was contained in “the manuscripts containing the text of the Bible” before they were altered “through centuries of transmission” (what he says Joseph was trying to do). Recovering original text — that’s pretty much in agreement with my short comment in #5 above.

I’m not ignorant of the fact that some modern discussions of the JST prefer to depict Joseph as doing an inspired commentary with no claimed connection to any original text. I just think that approach, however convenient or sophisticated, is not supported by the historical record. As I read it, that simply isn’t what Joseph thought he was doing.

Do you have any links where you have established that the “Inspired Version” may restore ancient text? I am thinking in particular to the three books I am studying – Genesis, Isaiah, and John.

In Webster’s 1828, the first meaning of “translate” is “to bear, carry or remove from one place to another.” Second meaning: “to remove or convey to heaven.” Third: “to transfer from one to another.” Fourth: “to remove from one part of a body to another; as, to translate a disease.” Fifth: “to change.” Not until the sixth definition do we have “to interpret; to render into another language.”

The Inspired Version (I agree that is probably a better name) is a prophetic re-reading of the text, bringing it–bearing it–from its ancient day into ours. It may restore ancient text. It may introduce new text. It may change the meaning of old text to fit the circumstances of the day better.

To my surprise, long ago I heard Elder B. R. McConkie say the same thing about the Inspired Version. That doesn’t make this understanding of what it is true, but it certainly makes believing something like this acceptable.

Other than the typical meaning of the word in translating a text, we have Joseph pulling words out of ancient texts and damaged earthly translations over and again. We also talk in the church about translated beings. Translate is a portmanteau word in the church.