In spring and summer of 2023, the Joseph Smith Papers will publish its final two volumes, marking the end of a monumental project that has spanned years and goes back decades.
“When we finish the documents series next summer, we will have published 27 books in 15 years,” said Brent M. Rogers, managing historian for the Joseph Smith Papers. “To say that is impressive, I think, is an understatement.”
The Joseph Smith Papers project started out as a one-man project in the 1970s but expanded with new resources around 2001 when historians for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sought to identify all documents created by Joseph Smith or by staff whose work he directed, including journals, revelations and translations, contemporary reports, discourses, minutes, business and legal records, editorials and notices, as well as the Prophet’s correspondence.
The project staff then began transcribing thousands of documents and published the first of 27 thick, scholarly volumes in book form and online in 2008.
“The research findings that people will see in these books, the depth and the breadth of the historical scholarship, is of the highest quality, the highest standard of scholarship,” Rogers said. “It will help people, scholars and Church members to have a better understanding of what happened during that time in the history of Joseph Smith’s life and in the early Church. ... It’s pretty remarkable to think about how much work has gone into transcription, textual analysis, historical research, contextual writing and the editing of all of these books.”
Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey, a general editor, recently sat down with the Church News to review the history of the Joseph Smith Papers, discuss the final two volumes and offer their perspectives on what a former Church historian and recorder, Elder Marlin K. Jensen, called “the single most significant historical project of our generation.”
Timeline of Joseph Smith Papers
The Joseph Smith Papers project was born out of decades of work by Dean C. Jessee, who pioneered the work of collecting, transcribing and publishing documents created by Joseph Smith for the Church History Department.
“Dean is kind of the godfather of the Joseph Smith Papers,” Godfrey said.
Here is a review of some of the key moments in the project’s history:
- Jessee first undertook a project to produce a volume of Joseph Smith’s own writings in the early 1970s, according to the Deseret News. He published “The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith” in 1984 and followed that up with two volumes of “The Papers of Joseph Smith” in 1989 and 1992.
- As Jessee worked on “The Papers of Joseph Smith,” his colleagues Ronald Esplin, Richard E. Turley Jr., Richard Bushman and others discussed with him the idea of expanding the project to give it the attention and resources they felt it deserved, similar to other projects on the Founding Fathers.
- By 2000, a board of scholars had been assembled to provide direction for the project, which started at Brigham Young University as part of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History.
- In 2001, Larry H. Miller, then owner of the Utah Jazz, became an instrumental part of the project when he offered to provide financial support. “Without the help of the Larry and Gail Miller family, there’s no way we would have been able to do this project in the roughly 20 years we have been able to do it,” Godfrey said. “That was a key aspect of it.”
- When the Smith institute disbanded in 2005, the Joseph Smith Papers relocated to Salt Lake City to operate under the Church History Department.
- The first volume of the project, “Journals, Vol 1, 1832-1839,” was published in 2008. The Joseph Smith Papers website, josephsmithpapers.org, was also launched around 2008.
- Around 2010, there was a concerted effort to hire scholars and historians to strengthen the editorial staff and accelerate the project, Godfrey said.
- Among many volumes rich with historical information, the project has published the original (2022) and printer’s manuscripts of the Book of Mormon (2015), Joseph Smith’s journals, the Council of Fifty records (2016), early manuscripts of Joseph Smith’s revelations found in the Doctrine and Covenants and more.
- The first Joseph Smith Papers Conference was in 2017 to invite people to talk about the impact of the project in the scholarly world.
- The same year, the Joseph Smith Papers also launched its first podcast, hosted by Spencer McBride, a historian and volume editor for the papers. Additional podcasts focused on the restoration of the priesthood and the Nauvoo Temple followed to allow Latter-day Saints a way to understand the research of the papers in a more accessible, digestible way.
Final two Joseph Smith Papers volumes
The final two volumes of the project come from its “Documents” series.
- “Documents, Vol. 14, 1 January-15 May 1844,” is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2023.
- “Documents, Vol. 15, 16 May-28 June 1844” covers the final six weeks of Joseph Smith’s life. Despite possible paper shortages, project staff hope this final volume can be released on June 27, 2023, the anniversary of Prophet’s martyrdom.
Readers will be “amazed at the chaos and complexity” facing Joseph Smith as events unravel and lead him to Carthage Jail, the historians agreed.
“I think scholars will have a better understanding of the causes of Joseph Smith’s death,” Godfrey said.
The Joseph Smith Papers website
People can still go to the Joseph Smith Papers website at josephsmithpapers.org as “the” continuing resource, free and available to all, even after the final volume is published.
The project staff is still preparing web content for three series — administrative records, financial records and legal papers.
“It’s kind of a misnomer to say that the Joseph Smith Papers project is going to be completed in 2023,” Rogers said. “There will still be a lot of releases and new content coming that will be available in the years beyond 2023. ... There is still going to be some substantial work ongoing online.”
The Joseph Smith Papers team is already seeing a significant amount of web traffic. The website reported more than 3.5 million page views and nearly 900,000 unique visitors last year as Latter-day Saints studied Doctrine and Covenants with the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum.
This year’s numbers are down somewhat as members study the Old Testament, but Rogers believes the web traffic is “remarkable.” The website also allows visitors to view scans of original documents and images.
“I think that’s a powerful thing to be able to actually see the physical document on the website,” Godfrey said. “That makes the website a very important tool for researchers and the general church public as well.”
Transparency and testimonies
The two Joseph Smith Papers historians complimented the entire staff for their dedication to high-quality work and highlighted three notable takeaways from the Joseph Smith Papers project, which Elder Steven E. Snow, former Church historian and recorder, called the “lunar mission” of the Church.
- Not only have the papers enhanced the overall study of Latter-day Saint history for members and scholars, they have also become a symbol of transparency for Church history, redacting nothing and hitting topics such as plural marriage, the Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon translation and more. Scholars and critics now have a ready resource they need to take seriously in order for their writings of Latter-day Saint history to be taken seriously, Rogers said.
“It’s been a hallmark that’s led the way for the Church and scholars to be transparent with our Church’s history,” Godfrey said.
- The papers have provided a training ground for many young scholars and historians of Latter-day Saint history, and many have spoken about their faith and knowledge of Joseph Smith at academic conferences, firesides, Church meetings, seminaries and institutes, even podcasts.
- The papers have deepened understanding of Joseph Smith and who he was as a human being, as well as all those mentioned in his documents.
“It’s definitely helped me increase my testimony of who Joseph Smith was and of his role as a Prophet,” Godfrey said. “Regardless of all the scholarly plaudits the project gets, or that we may get for working on it, that, to me, is the most important part of my work on this project — how it’s helped me regard Joseph in a new way.”
Rogers said it would be interesting to survey the staff and ask how their faith has been impacted by their work on the Joseph Smith Papers.
“I would venture to guess that we would have a very high percentage saying that their faith has been impacted in a very positive way,” he said. “The closer that you get to Joseph Smith and the things that happened in the early Church, the more you see his prophetic role.”
