Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity

Abstract

Joseph Smith was, among much else, a translator. One of the most distinctive qualities of early Mormonism is that saving knowledge came not only from revelations—though Smith received plenty of those—but also through texts from the ancient past. In order to be useable as scripture, those texts required translation, and Smith tackled the office of translator with relish. What did translation mean for Smith and early Saints?The editors of Producing Ancient Scripture—Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid—set out to answer that question with a comprehensive treatment of Smith's translations, and they delivered. Among the seventeen chapters are analyses of the marquee projects like the Book of Mormon, the King James Bible, and the Book of Abraham, as well as of the texts less often investigated in terms of translation, including the Parchment of John, the “pure language” document, and the lost Anthon transcript. We also learn of a translation-that-never-was of the Apocrypha. The editors even include a final chapter on the fraudulent Kinderhook plates (of which Smith decoded only one character). The result is a rich collection of over five hundred pages, showcasing a diversity of methods, all evidenced to high documentary standards.One theme that stands out across Producing Ancient Scripture is its robustly material and social approach to “translation” as a category. Translation is defined not only as the communication of meaning from one language to another or the text produced by that process. Instead, the authors take a wide-angled view of the array of practices, artifacts, spaces, social networks, and sensory experiences through which translations were mediated. The religious studies scholar David Chidester's observation, that religion is “more like cooking than like philosophy,” provides an apt metaphor for the spirit of this collection: its authors investigate the many social and material ingredients, which, when mixed together, catalyzed translations that cannot be understood in textual isolation.1A fitting place to begin is with Rachel Cope and Amy Easton-Flake's chapter, “Reconfiguring the Archive: Women and the Social Production of the Book of Mormon.” They argue that Smith's reading of the gold plates unfolded within an assemblage of actors, many of them women. A series of biographical case studies demonstrates how women contributed as patrons, witnesses, scribes, and in Mary Whitmer's case, as a binder. Whitmer likely sewed the manuscript gatherings herself using yarn she had twined. According to Cope and Easton-Flake, her homemade binding was not merely supplemental to the text but ought to be “accepted as a text in its own right” (124). Such critical attention to material objects, and the ways in which materiality bears on meaning, recur throughout the volume. (That the cover of Producing Ancient Scripture features an image of Smith's upturned hat serves as a perfect emblem for the book.)Similar concerns animate Michael Hubbard MacKay's chapter, “Performing the Translation: Character Transcripts and Joseph Smith's Earliest Translating Practices.” Focusing on the Book of Mormon, MacKay, too, cracks open the concept of translation beyond textual transmission alone. A wider set of “embodied practices” (82) comes into view, including the scripting of the characters transcripts, which Smith allegedly made from the gold plates, and the dispatching of Martin Harris to canvass language scholars. Drawing on performance studies, MacKay shows how these episodes constituted a “validating performance” (88), in that Smith staged the actions of a translator according to cultural and academic norms as he understood them. This chapter also makes a key observation that appears in others as well, namely that Smith embraced translation in the ordinary, nonreligious sense of the term—as with Anthon's translation—alongside those forms enabled by his spiritual gifts. In the last chapter about the Kinderhook plates, for example, Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee come to the same finding. They argue that Smith attempted to decipher these sham plates using a Hebrew lexicon.Samuel Morris Brown's chapter, “Seeing the Voice of God: The Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation,” furnishes a variation on the theme by exploring Smith's phenomenology as a translator. “What, exactly, was Smith experiencing when he dictated the text of the Book of Mormon?” (137), asks Brown. Pace the so-called teleprompter theory of Royal Skousen, who had it that Smith saw written words on his seer stones, Brown argues that Smith probably saw in the stones “events, locations, and objects rather than words,” much like other nineteenth-century sages (152). Smith's dictation, meanwhile, is better understood to have been oral and extemporaneous. Among his evidence drawn from the Book of Mormon, Brown points to passages that syntactically conform to speech patterns, such as the “verbal false starts and missteps” of Mosiah 7:8 in which prisoners are “permitted, or rather commanded” to speak (142).I wish I had the space to describe all the chapters in this volume, but in lieu of that I will highlight one more that is especially striking. In “Approaching Egyptian Papyri through Biblical Language: Joseph Smith's Use of Hebrew in His Translation of the Book of Abraham,” Matthew Grey reconstructs the events following the Egyptian papyri's arrival in Kirtland. Going on a popular orientalist assumption of the day that Egyptian and Hebrew were related, Smith had hired the scholar Joshua Seixas to teach Hebrew in the Kirtland Temple. This course of study inflected the Book of Abraham in all sorts of ways. One of Grey's most remarkable theses is that elohim—the word for God used in Genesis, which uses the plural morpheme -im—likely inspired Smith's doctrine of the plurality of gods (437–40). (I am still marveling at this.) Among other illuminating parts is a discussion of how the Hebrew classes and Smith's papyri translation occurred inside the temple's dedicated “translation room,” which also served as a chamber for anointing rituals modeled after those in the Hebrew Bible (408–9). Again, we see the authors opening up onto the social and material surrounds of translation.As I admired what I read in Producing Ancient Scripture, I reflected on questions of audience. One of the book's strengths is its acuity in applying methods from across the disciplines to Mormon studies, including social history, material culture, textual criticism, gender studies, performance studies, and more. Amid all of this coruscating energy focused on bringing the outside in, I noticed some missed opportunities for the opposite movement. What do the editors and authors want to say to translation studies more largely? To critical archival studies? To material religion? To phenomenology? More broadly stated, what would it look like to offer the insights of Mormon studies as theory for other fields (rather than only the other way around, importing various theories and methods for analyzing the data of Mormon studies)? The citational practices and framing remarks of the majority of the essays do not look outward in this way. They keep a steely-eyed focus on the empirical questions of interest to a specialized group of scholars. Knowing one's audience is a good thing, but ambitious books like this one could poise themselves to speak more loudly and to more readers. Producing Ancient Scripture has plenty to offer other fields, but it is too modest about its potential contributions.A commitment to expansion in audience could start by bringing in more diverse conversation partners during the initial phases of a project's development. This early-stage attention would also present an opportunity to diversify according to gender, race, institution, and region. Of twenty authors, sixteen are men. To my knowledge, all are White. Ten are researchers at Brigham Young University and three more are employed by the church's Church History Department. Partly these are structural issues beyond the ability of any editorial team to ameliorate with one volume. Still, diversification is possible, and moreover it is essential if scholars want their conversations to have effects beyond the walls that Mormon studies has sometimes been put behind, but equally has built around itself. This is not to take anything away from the achievement of the editors and authors. Producing Ancient Scripture is a remarkable contribution. It should be read by anyone with a serious interest in early Mormonism.