{"id":41135,"date":"2020-11-27T07:31:52","date_gmt":"2020-11-27T12:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timesandseasons.org\/?p=41135"},"modified":"2020-11-26T11:36:32","modified_gmt":"2020-11-26T16:36:32","slug":"kent-p-jackson-on-the-joseph-smith-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2020\/11\/kent-p-jackson-on-the-joseph-smith-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Kent P. Jackson on the Joseph Smith Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph Smith’s translation projects have been a hot topic this year.\u00a0 Among many others, earlier this fall we did two<\/a> posts<\/a> that discussed the possibility that Joseph Smith relied on the Adam Clarke commentaries for some of the changes he made in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible.\u00a0 Recently, Kent P. Jackson (a retired professor of religion at Brigham Young University) published a response<\/a> to the articles that we were discussing, which share evidence of Joseph Smith using the Adam Clarke commentary.\u00a0 In his article, published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship<\/em>, Jackson expressed his conclusion that \u201cnone of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke\u2019s commentary, and almost all of them can be explained easily by other means. \u2026 The few overlaps that do exist are vague, superficial, and coincidental.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Kurt Manwaring sat down with Kent Jackson for an interview to discuss his viewpoint, and what follows here is a co-post\u2014a summary with some quotes and commentary on the interview.\u00a0 To read the full interview, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As is often the case when we discuss the issue of Joseph Smith\u2019s translations, the issue of whether or not they can actually be called translations came up in the interview.\u00a0 Called the \u201cNew Translation\u201d by Joseph Smith and his contemporaries (Jackson explains that the term \u201cJoseph Smith Translation\u201d was devised for the Latter-day Saint edition of the Bible in the 1970s because they needed something that didn\u2019t result in using the abbreviation of \u201cNT\u201d to refer to it), the work that Joseph Smith did was more a revision to the text of the King James Version than a linguistic translation from Greek and Hebrew texts into English.\u00a0 Jackson explained, however, that in addition to this sense of linguistic translation, Noah Webster\u2019s 1828 dictionary of American English does include \u201cother definitions, including\u00a0\u2018to bear, carry or remove from one place to another,\u2019 \u2018to transfer; to convey from one to another,\u2019 and \u2018to change.\u2019\u00a0These\u00a0definitions\u00a0are closer\u00a0to the word\u2019s etymological meaning\u2014’to carry across.\u2019\u201d Hence, Jackson states that \u201cthe\u00a0JST\u00a0is a translation in the sense that it is a re-creation of the Bible, a new incarnation of it. It creates something new out of something old.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for his reasons for not jumping on the Thomas Wayment bandwagon about the Adam Clarke commentary, Kent Jackson had a fair amount to say.<\/p>\n

Clarke\u2019s commentary is massive, consisting of six volumes and about\u00a05,200\u00a0pages. \u2026 His\u00a0was the most philological of the\u00a0commentaries, meaning that it had a greater emphasis on the text, its words, and word meanings.\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026 As a result,\u00a0his\u00a0commentary\u00a0is full of paraphrases, restatements, and wordy discussions, some of which\u00a0include words that\u00a0bear resemblances\u00a0to revisions Joseph Smith made\u00a0to\u00a0the\u00a0biblical\u00a0text.<\/p>\n

Wayment has interpreted those as examples of Joseph Smith borrowing ideas or words from Clarke, but that\u2019s not\u00a0what they are, in my opinion. They\u2019re random and coincidental resemblances,\u00a0mostly\u00a0of unimportant words.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Jackson claims that he doesn\u2019t \u201cfind anything wrong with the idea that Joseph Smith may have\u00a0learned something from a non-revelatory source and\u00a0then\u00a0used\u00a0what he learned\u00a0in making\u00a0JST revisions,\u201d he also feels that \u201call of the convergences Wayment suggested could be explained better in other ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his lengthy Interpreter<\/em> article, Jackson worked to show how the convergences can generally be explain in other ways, examining many of the examples given by Thomas Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemm\u00f3n to support their belief that Joseph Smith was influenced by Clarke\u2019s commentary.\u00a0 In many instances, Jackson indicates that the changes were common sense modernizations or theologically-based revisions that Joseph Smith had made elsewhere before reaching the passage where Clarke might have influenced him, represent harmonization of texts across the different Gospels and the Book of Mormon, or occurred in places where the KJV italicized words (which were regarded as suspect by Joseph Smith and thus invited changes).\u00a0 He also expresses his belief that the changes made were often more tenuous in their connection to Clarke\u2019s commentary than Wayment and Wilson-Lemm\u00f3n state and that Joseph Smith seems to have overlooked some good suggestions made by Clarke that likely would have been incorporated if he had<\/em> been familiar with the commentary.\u00a0 The general point that is made is that if Joseph Smith did rely on Clarke\u2019s commentary, he seems to have done so in minor and haphazard ways at best.<\/p>\n

Inserting my personal opinion for a minute (though admittedly, I am no expert on this topic, so take what I say with a grain of salt), I feel like there are many good points made by Jackson that show how the evidence for reliance on the Clarke commentary is not as strong as indicated in Wayment\u2019s and Wilson-Lemm\u00f3n\u2019s articles, but there are places where Jackson\u2019s work also feels lacking or simply overeager to discredit the Clarke commentary thesis.\u00a0 For example, in several cases, Jackson points out that when Clarke suggests how a passage could be understood in his commentary (but not directly stating that the wording in the Bible should be changed) and similar wording is incorporated in the JST that Wayment and Wilson-Lemm\u00f3n are incorrect in stating that Joseph Smith acted on Clarke\u2019s suggestion to make a change.\u00a0 This is technically true (it was commentary in Clarke\u2019s work, not a suggestion for change), but it doesn\u2019t fully undermine the possibility that Joseph Smith was influenced by the commentary in making his changes.\u00a0 And, as a whole, the article doesn\u2019t directly respond to the underlying issue that led Thomas Wayment to investigate the Clarke commentary in the first place\u2014Joseph Smith seems to have been aware of textual variants in early manuscripts of the Bible, but only those that were known by the 1830s, which indicates that he had some acquaintance with scholarship on the subject.\u00a0 Still, Jackson\u2019s work does show that further consideration and research is probably necessary on this topic.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the scholarly debate over the issue has been overshadowed by a polemical debate about whether Joseph Smith plagiarized Clarke\u2019s work.\u00a0 As summarized by Jackson:<\/p>\n

The charge of \u201cplagiarism\u201d comes\u00a0from\u00a0interviews Wilson-Lemmon has done with aggressive critics of the Church, who have used her and put words into her mouth for their own purposes. She has willingly acquiesced. She\u00a0famously left the Church and has used the Adam Clarke\u00a0idea\u00a0as a means of advertising her disaffection.\u00a0This has made her\u00a0a minor\u00a0celebrity\u00a0among anti-Mormons, and it has brought the Adam Clarke\u00a0notion\u00a0into the mix as evidence that Joseph Smith was a fraud.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He’s careful to differentiate that \u201cWayment hasn\u2019t made this claim, she has,\u201d and expressed frustration about how Wilson-Lemm\u00f3n\u2019s actions are \u201csabotaging the narrative about his research.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that background, Jackson found that when Interpreter <\/em>published his article, it too became wrapped up in the polemical debate about plagiarism.\u00a0 He noted that: \u201cI have had readers congratulate me on doing good apologetic work in my article,\u201d and observed that, \u201cI suppose \u2026 that Wilson-Lemmon\u2019s \u2018plagiarism\u2019 claim \u2026 puts my article in the category of an apologetic response.\u201d\u00a0 Yet, he indicates that apologetics wasn\u2019t his intent while writing: \u201cI don\u2019t view the Adam Clarke thesis to be necessarily an attack on the Church, I don\u2019t view my article as apologetic. It\u2019s simply an article that examines some ideas.\u201d\u00a0 To him, it was just a part of an academic debate with another scholar:<\/p>\n

In researching the JST and\u00a0coming to believe\u00a0that it includes influences from Adam Clarke\u2019s commentary, Professor Wayment was doing what scholars do\u2014establishing a hypothesis, testing it, and drawing conclusions about it.\u00a0It is obviously not uncommon for scholars to have different opinions,\u00a0as he and I do about this matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I am hopeful that the scholastic debate and research into whether scholarly sources like the Clarke commentary influenced Joseph Smith in his work can and will continue, it will likely have the issue of plagiarism looming in the background.<\/p>\n

For more insights into the JST and its history, I recommend going and reading the full interview with Kent P. Jackson at Kurt Manwaring\u2019s site here<\/a>.\u00a0 And, as always, I look forward to discussing the interview and issues raised here.\u00a0 Some of the questions I\u2019m most interested in hearing about are: \u00a0What do you think about the debate going on about Joseph Smith\u2019s possible reliance on the Clarke commentary?\u00a0 If you\u2019ve read the articles, which side of the debate do you find more convincing?\u00a0 Let\u2019s discuss.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Footnote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Kent P. Jackson, \u201cSome Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke,\u201d Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship <\/em>40 (2020): 15-60, https:\/\/journal.interpreterfoundation.org\/some-notes-on-joseph-smith-and-adam-clarke\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joseph Smith’s translation projects have been a hot topic this year.\u00a0 Among many others, earlier this fall we did two posts that discussed the possibility that Joseph Smith relied on the Adam Clarke commentaries for some of the changes he made in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible.\u00a0 Recently, Kent P. Jackson (a retired professor of religion at Brigham Young University) published a response to the articles that we were discussing, which share evidence of Joseph Smith using the Adam Clarke commentary.\u00a0 In his article, published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, Jackson expressed his conclusion that \u201cnone of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke\u2019s commentary, and almost all of them can be explained easily by other means. \u2026 The few overlaps that do exist are vague, superficial, and coincidental.\u201d[1]\u00a0 Kurt Manwaring sat down with Kent Jackson for an interview to discuss his viewpoint, and what follows here is a co-post\u2014a summary with some quotes and commentary on the interview.\u00a0 To read the full interview, click here. As is often the case when we discuss the issue of Joseph Smith\u2019s translations, the issue of whether or not they can actually be called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10397,"featured_media":41136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2890,35,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-desk","category-mormon-studies","category-scriptures"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/41jYgKIIVJL._AC_UL600_SR423600_.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41135"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41138,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41135\/revisions\/41138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}