This volume--the work of a lifetime--brings together all the Joseph Smith Translation manuscript in a remarkable and useful way. Now, for the first time, readers can take a careful look at the complete text, along with photos of several actual manuscript pages. The book contains a typographic transcription of all the original manuscripts, unedited and preserved exactly as dictated by the Prophet Joseph and recorded by his scribes. In addition, this volume features essays on the background, doctrinal contributions, and editorial procedures involved in the Joseph Smith Translation, as well as the history of the manuscripts since Joseph Smith's day.

The complete text of the Bible revision made by Joseph Smith, the Latter-day Saint prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presented with modern punctuation and spelling and with the original chapter and verse divisions created by Joseph Smith and his scribes. In his lifetime, he and his contemporaries referred to this work as the New Translation. Since the late 1970s it has most often been called the Joseph Smith Translation. Published in parallel columns with the corresponding verses of the King James Bible.

SUB TITLE:A Side-By-Side Comparison with the King James Version

Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have translated ancient scriptures. He dictated an American Bible from metal plates reportedly buried by ancient Jews in a nearby hill, and produced an Egyptian "Book of Abraham" derived from funerary papyri he extracted from a collection of mummies he bought from a traveling showman. In addition, he rewrote sections of the King James Version as a "New Translation" of the Bible. Smith and his followers used the term translation to describe the genesis of these English scriptures, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Whether one believes him or not, the discussion has focused on whether Smith's English texts represent literal translations of extant source documents. On closer inspection, though, Smith's translations are far more metaphysical than linguistic. In Joseph Smith's Translation, Samuel Morris Brown argues that these translations express the mystical power of language and scripture to interconnect people across barriers of space and time, especially in the developing Mormon temple liturgy. He shows that Smith was devoted to an ancient metaphysics--especially the principle of correspondence, the concept of "as above, so below"--that provided an infrastructure for bridging the human and the divine as well as for his textual interpretive projects. Joseph Smith's projects of metaphysical translation place Mormonism at the productive edge of the transitions associated with shifts toward "secular modernity." This transition into modern worldviews intensified, complexly, in nineteenth-century America. The evolving legacies of Reformation and Enlightenment were the sea in which early Mormons swam, says Brown. Smith's translations and the theology that supported them illuminate the power and vulnerability of the Mormon critique of American culture in transition. This complex critique continues to resonate and illuminate to the present day.

A detailed look at the Book of Moses in the Latter-day Saint scriptures as well as discussion of how it fits in whith the Joseph Smith Translation manuscripts.

Editor H. Wayne House introduces a lively debate on varying Christian views of divorce and remarriage. Contributors include J. Carl Laney, William Heth, Thomas Edgar and Larry Richards.

The gripping narration of a life fore-ordained for greatness coupled with breathtaking photographs make Joseph Smith, Praise to the Man and extraordinary book. Enjoy a visual look into the Prophet's humble beginnings. Bask in the serenity of the sacred in New York, learn of revelations in Ohio, and witness the heartache of Missori. See the grandeur of restored Nauvoo and sense the pathos of Carthage.