SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – Critics will find no bombshells in the new 640-page book of early historic documents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but scholars and the faithful will discover a much more complex Mormon founder than they ever knew.
At least that’s the hope of the scores of church historians who worked on the book, called Documents, Volume 1: July 1828-June 1831, released this month at a news conference in the Church History Library in downtown Salt Lake City.
This book covers the early days of Mormonism – including when Smith published the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, and officially organized the church in 1830 in upstate New York.
It includes Smith’s “revelations,” minutes of meetings, letters he wrote, sermons he gave, legal and business documents, and even licenses and receipts – all arranged in chronological order.
The picture of Smith and the early LDS movement that emerges, said LDS historians, is more nuanced, more contextualized and more layered than either believers or skeptics have recognized.
“There is the perception (among Latter-day Saints) that Joseph walked out of the Sacred Grove with the Handbook of Instructions on how to run the church,” Steven E. Snow, LDS Church historian and recorder, said at the conference. “That did not happen.”
Many of the revelations included in this volume, Snow said, “help us understand how the church was to be organized and run.”
This volume allows readers to move “from document to document and see history as it unfolded,” said Ronald Esplin, a Mormon historian who is the general editor of the ground-breaking Joseph Smith Papers Project. “You get a sense of being eyewitnesses to this history. It is very powerful.”
Smith will always be “a disputed figure,” said Matthew Grow, director of publications for LDS Church history. “It was our job to make all the documents available so scholars and critics can see for themselves.”
Richard Turley Jr., assistant church historian and recorder, said the aim was transparency.
“We are laying it all out,” Turley said. “You get Joseph Smith straight up without any intervening interpreters like historians or biographers.”
Documents, Volume 1, the eighth published work in the Joseph Smith Papers Project, is expected to be in bookstores within the next few weeks.
