At one level, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith's career can be divided into three periods, each characterised by a distinctive method through which he brought forth the religion of the Latter-day Saints.Footnote ¹ The first period is that of his initial visions. The second is that of his revelations on church organisation, practice and doctrine. The third is that of revelation by public discourse and private conversation.

One factor of Joseph Smith's life that too often is overlooked by historians is the extent to which virtually all aspects of his career involved the Bible. Biographers Fawn M. Brodie and Donna Hill rarely mention the role of the Bible in his life and other studies have similarly not dealt with it.Footnote ² Some more recent works have paid more attention to the matter, but much remains to be examined.Footnote ³ This article will explore how almost every part of Joseph Smith's prophetic career was connected in some way with the Bible. He asserted that he was called by God to bring about the restoration of biblical religion – the religion not only of Jesus and the apostles but also of the Old Testament prophets. While that restoration was the focus of his career, the Bible itself was also part of the process by which it took place.

First Visions and the Book of Mormon

The first of the three periods (1820–30) starts with Joseph Smith's call and concludes with the publication of the Book of Mormon. His initial visions were, among other things, encounters with the Bible. As he told his story, his First Vision, in which he saw God and Jesus, resulted as he prayed in response to promises found in his reading of the New Testament.Footnote ⁴ His next such experience, the appearance of an angel who informed him about his call to translate and publish the Book of Mormon, contains significant biblical references. His primary account of this angelic visit lists five biblical prophecies that the angel quoted to him on that occasion,Footnote ⁵ but the published account of his assistant Oliver Cowdery identifies thirty, virtually all from the Old Testament.Footnote ⁶ According to both accounts, the angel quoted and commented on those Bible passages to teach young Joseph Smith about his life's mission to prepare the world for the coming of Jesus.

The Book of Mormon, published in March 1830, endorses the Bible strongly, although it laments what it sees as imperfections in its preservation through history.Footnote ⁷ The Book of Mormon abounds in references and allusions to the Bible and contains countless examples of biblical vocabulary and phraseology.Footnote ⁸ In its role as a second Bible in Mormonism, it makes frequent mention of the first and yet emphasises its own special role in the restoration of biblical religion. One of its stated purposes is to ‘establish the truth’ of the Bible.Footnote ⁹ In multiple passages, it deals with recognisable biblical concepts, such as the house of Israel, the law of Moses, prophets and scripture and the nature and role of the Bible itself. But more than anything else it teaches fundamental Christianity – salvation from the fall, sin and death through Jesus Christ; faith; repentance; baptism; the Holy Spirit; and spiritual rebirth. All of these are biblical topics in which the Book of Mormon takes for granted the existence and availability of the Bible and the information it contains. Indeed, the book's doctrinal function is not necessarily to break new theological ground but to provide fuller, clearer and better explanations than are found in the Bible. But in doing so – perhaps paradoxically – it attempts to substantiate both the Bible's authority and its basic teachings. It was this combination of familiarity and clarity that attracted its first converts.Footnote ¹⁰ The Book of Mormon's intimate connection with the Bible and the attention it pays to Bible-based theological issues found among contemporary Christians led Alexander Campbell to remark caustically in 1831 that it conveniently dealt with, and provided answers for, all the important religious controversies of his time.Footnote ¹¹

The authority of the Bible and the Book of Mormon have never been in question in Mormonism. The two books preceded the formal organisation of the church, and both are mentioned and endorsed in the canonical document which accompanied that organisation.Footnote ¹² It is perhaps for this reason that, unlike Mormonism's other sacred books, neither the Bible nor the Book of Mormon has ever been canonised formally by the church. Nonetheless, the Bible's authority in Mormonism seems to stem not from the fact that it exists but from the fact that Joseph Smith's revelations and the Book of Mormon endorse it.

Given all this, it is most remarkable that, throughout his life, Joseph Smith seldom quoted or taught from the Book of Mormon nor demonstrated any particular familiarity with its content. As we shall see, his emphasis was on the Bible instead.

Revelations

As the Mormon prophet's restoration continued in the years following the publication of the Book of Mormon, the Bible remained central to virtually everything he did, and subsequent revelations and scriptural texts were to a great degree built on a biblical foundation. But, whereas the Book of Mormon presents basic Christian beliefs much as they are perceived among Christians generally, with most of Joseph Smith's later doctrinal innovations the distance between Mormonism and traditional Christianity increased, eventually resulting in a faith with core beliefs and practices so unique that some have come to see it as outside Christianity altogether.Footnote ¹³

The second stage of Joseph Smith's revelatory career (1830–8) starts with the organisation of the Latter-day Saint church in April 1830. It is characterised by the reception of over one hundred recorded verbal communications from God that set forth the beliefs, organisation and functions of the newly founded church. Those revelations, presented in the words of God in the fashion of Old Testament prophecy, are collected in a third Latter-day Saint book of scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants, first published and canonised in 1835 and then expanded with the reception of later revelations. Most of the revelations, in one way or another, expound on themes already present in the Old and New Testaments, such as God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, faith, repentance, baptism, justice, mercy, the fall, resurrection, the last judgement, spiritual gifts, the last days and the second coming of Jesus. All of these are biblical concepts and none of them are introduced in the revelations as though they were new ideas. Like the Book of Mormon, the revelations take for granted the existence and availability of the Bible. But, unlike the Book of Mormon, the revelations often expand on, elaborate or build on biblical themes to the point that they are no longer clearly recognisable to non-Latter-day Saint readers.

We learn, for example, that Satan had been ‘an angel of God who was in authority in the presence of God, who rebelled against the Only Begotten Son whom the Father loved and who was in the bosom of the Father, [and] was thrust down from the presence of God and the Son’.Footnote ¹⁴ Another example is an explanation of John 5:28–9: ‘The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation’.Footnote ¹⁵ As Joseph Smith and his scribe meditated on the meaning of those words they reported: ‘The Lord touched the eyes of our understandings and they were opened, and the glory of the Lord shone round about. And we beheld the glory of the Son, on the right hand of the Father, and received of his fulness.’Footnote ¹⁶ In the ensuing vision, they learned that the biblical heaven consists of three ‘degrees of glory’, rewarded on the basis of earthly deeds of faith and righteousness. The highest, the ‘Celestial kingdom’, will be the inheritance of those who ‘received the testimony of Jesus, and believed on his name and were baptized after the manner of his burial’, who ‘receive the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the hands of him who is ordained and sealed unto this power; and who overcome by faith, and are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, which the Father sheds forth upon all those who are just and true’.Footnote ¹⁷ The language is very biblical, but the aggregate message of passages like these is uniquely Latter-day Saint.

The revelations often encounter the Bible in very direct ways. One revelation presents a new account of the Olivet Discourse (Jesus’ end-time prophecy in Matthew 24), another an explanation of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares. One is a question-and-answer session concerning the book of Revelation and another is a question-and-answer session concerning Isaiah. Revelations deal with Daniel's visions, the mission of John the apostle, and the lives of Adam, Moses and Aaron. To these lists can be added many examples in which the revelations draw liberally from biblical phrases and biblical images.Footnote ¹⁸

Again, Latter-day Saints see in these communications a fuller and clearer exposition of biblical beliefs than can be found in the Bible itself. Joseph Smith taught the doctrine derived from them yet, as with the Book of Mormon, he rarely used the revelations as texts in his sermons and writings.

Translations

During the years 1830–3, Joseph Smith was regularly engaged in preparing what he called a New Translation of the Bible. With the help of scribes to whom he dictated the text, he worked his way through the Old and New Testaments of the King James translation, examining all of it and making changes in the wording of about 3,400 verses. He also added hundreds of lines of new material for which there is no biblical counterpart.Footnote ¹⁹ ‘God may correct the scripture by me if he choose’, he said.Footnote ²⁰

Joseph Smith's Bible translation quickly diverges from the traditional text and traditional interpretations. One early passage gives Eve's thoughts on why the fall was a good thing: ‘Were it not for our transgression we should never [have] had seed, & should never [have] known good & evil & the Joy of our redemption & the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.’Footnote ²¹ The largest single addition is an account of Enoch, inserted into the narrative at Genesis 5. The few verses in Genesis that discuss Enoch are expanded by over one hundred additional verses which depict his labours to create an ideal society called Zion, his covenants with God relative to his descendants, his visions of the future, his teachings regarding the coming of Jesus and the removal of his sanctified city from the earth. In these and other passages, Joseph Smith's Bible revision shows the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis as Christians who knew of Jesus, obeyed his gospel and looked forward to his coming. This view of pre-Christian Christianity, already seen in the Book of Mormon, was central to Joseph Smith's theology. Later he would write that ‘all that were ever saved, were saved through the power of this great plan of redemption, as much so before the coming of Christ as since; if not, God has had different plans in operation (if we may so express it) to bring men back to dwell with himself; and this we cannot believe.’Footnote ²²

Only some key chapters of the New Translation were published in Joseph Smith's lifetime, and the whole work was not put in print until over two decades after his death.Footnote ²³ The reason was strictly economic; he never was able to raise the funds necessary for the publication of such a large book, and its printing was often second in priority to other projects.Footnote ²⁴ He called this work a translation, although it did not involve any ancient text other than his English Bible. Among the topics in which the New Translation makes its most important contributions to Latter-day Saint beliefs are the nature of God, the cosmic scope of his work, the mission of Jesus, the origin of Satan, the fall, the law of Moses and the antiquity of Jesus’ gospel. Although these may appear to be biblical concepts, in the New Translation they are developed in ways that set Mormonism apart as a unique branch of Christianity.

Another Bible-related text was brought to light after the completion of the New Translation. Joseph Smith announced the Book of Abraham as a translation of ‘some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catacombs of Egypt’.Footnote ²⁵ The translation was made in the summer and fall of 1835, but it was not published until 1842, when it appeared in three instalments in the church's newspaper.Footnote ²⁶ The record corresponds with Genesis 11:27–12:20, but it is about ten times as long and it contains much history and theology not included in the Bible, such as an Abrahamic creation narrative and an account of a meeting in heaven in which God discussed with the spirits (including Jesus, Abraham and Satan before his fall) the forthcoming creation of the world in which they would live:

Along with two excerpts from the New Translation of the Bible and some other narrations by Joseph Smith, the Book of Abraham was later included in a volume called the Pearl of Great Price, the fourth Latter-day Saint scripture, canonised in 1880.

Bible discourses

The third stage of Joseph Smith's revelatory career (the Nauvoo, Illinois, period, 1839–44) is characterised by a sharp decrease in revelations received in the voice of God.Footnote ²⁸ But it is also characterised by the flowering of Joseph Smith's career as a teacher and public speaker. The shift is important, because in this period his conversations and public discourses, in his own words, became the vehicle for the continuing revelation of Latter-day Saint doctrine.

Joseph Smith had taught openly since the beginning, but prior to the Nauvoo period, his public discourses played a much smaller role than did some other aspects of his calling, such as translating and publishing sacred books, organising and administering the church, and establishing communities. He had delegated much of the public speaking to a spokesman, the gifted and experienced orator Sidney Rigdon.Footnote ²⁹ But, beginning in the spring of 1839, he redefined his mission and adopted a new urgency to voice personally the things he believed God had revealed to him. During the years that followed, public preaching and teaching were clearly among his highest priorities.

Over 170 separate discourses of Joseph Smith are recorded in the Nauvoo period, some before small groups and some before thousands.Footnote ³⁰ They were recorded both by official scribes and by other interested listeners in the audience, often incompletely but sometimes with considerable fullness and precision. Although the sermons covered a variety of topics, more than anything else, Joseph Smith used them to teach his theology. ‘Tis my duty to teach the doctrine’, he stated.Footnote ³¹ Characteristically, his primary method for doing that was to quote, paraphrase and reason out of the Bible. Apart from his speeches that dealt exclusively with political matters, the vast majority of his addresses included material from the Bible and were built on biblical themes. Altogether, he touched on hundreds of Bible verses.

Joseph Smith cared deeply about the Book of Mormon and its role in his church, publishing three editions of it during his lifetime. His care for the revelations was just as deep.Footnote ³² ‘Take away the Book of Mormon, and the revelations, and where is our religion? We have none’, he said.Footnote ³³ But again, he virtually never incorporated passages from the Book of Mormon or the revelations into his sermons and writings, and they always remained strangely external to him, as though they were never really part of him. But such was not the case with the Bible, the language of which flowed out of him freely, naturally and often unconsciously. He used biblical phrases, examples and images in correspondence, newspaper editorials, private conversations and especially in public sermons.Footnote ³⁴

Joseph Smith's use of the Bible was not a public communications effort to gain credibility with non-Mormons. With rare exceptions, his sermons and writings were aimed only at Latter-day Saints. Whereas others were sent out on preaching missions and interacted with non-believers, his last half-decade was spent primarily at home in his own communities. It was to his followers that his Bible-based teachings were addressed, and he delivered them in unique and interesting ways. In the records of his discourses from the last five years of his life, there is only one time where it appears that he used written notes for a sermon.Footnote ³⁵ And in all the extant accounts of those discourses, there is little to suggest that he ever took a Bible with him to the stand. He is recorded as having said that, when he spoke publicly, ‘he had to depend entirely upon the living God for every thing he said’.Footnote ³⁶ His audiences believed that they were witnessing something remarkable. One first-time listener wrote, ‘We soon felt & knew we were listening to one that had not been taught of men – So different were all his thoughts & language’.Footnote ³⁷ Another recorded, ‘I have listened to his clear and masterly explanations of deep and difficult questions. To him all things seemed simple and easy to be understood, and thus he could make them plain to others as no other man could.’Footnote ³⁸ Brigham Young later recalled, ‘When I first heard him preach, he brought heaven and earth together . . . . He took heaven, figuratively speaking, and brought it down to earth; and he took the earth, brought it up, and opened up, in plainness and simplicity, the things of God . . . . Would he not take the Scriptures and make them so plain and simple that everybody could understand?’Footnote ³⁹

Joseph Smith's Bible-based sermons became the primary revelatory events and the major means by which he brought new beliefs into the church. Thus when he discussed Bible passages in his Nauvoo discourses, he was not simply using scripture to reinforce the words of biblical writers or to illustrate his own ideas. Instead, he was making known new ideas for the first time. In other words, he was not teaching out of the Bible, he was using Bible passages as the starting point to reveal new beliefs, often going far beyond what was printed on his Bible's pages. Consider the following excerpts from his sermons that stem from passages in the Bible:

The Hebrew word bārā’ is as linguistically and theologically ambiguous as its English counterpart, create. Yet Joseph Smith saw in it a clear refutation of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Creation is organisation, and God had materials to work from prior to his making of ‘the heaven and the earth’. Thus in Joseph Smith's theology, God is the great organiser who imposed function and order on chaotic matter that had existed as eternally as God had. Matter itself is unmade and indestructible, but it can be ‘organized and reorganized’ under God's power.

In these passages, Joseph Smith went well beyond the biblical text to analyse both the nature of God and the nature of man. Adam's creation in God's image is literal, and hence God is not only in the same form as humans but also possesses a tangible body of flesh and bones. Human bodies house pre-existing spirit individuals who lived in the presence of God and embraced in advance the saving work of Jesus.

Joseph Smith here identifies the primary characters in Daniel 7: the ‘Ancient of days’ as Adam and the ‘Son of man’ as Jesus Christ. At the end of time, Adam, who presides over the human family, will gather his children together, particularly those who hold the ‘keys’ that govern the priesthood. After the multitude is assembled, Jesus will appear and Adam will return the keys of his stewardship to his Lord. Those key-holders who have already lived and died will be there. Connecting Hebrews 11:40 and 12:22–3 with the Daniel prophecy, Joseph Smith envisioned people who are already in heaven being involved still in God's work on earth, with the mutual labour of God's servants in both realms necessary for the salvation of all.

Mormonism's claim to authority from God is based on a belief that the ancient apostles, Peter, James and John, gave to Joseph Smith the apostleship and the keys of the kingdom and that the same authority has been passed on to his successors. Thus ‘regular succession’, to cite Joseph Smith, does not mean succession from the apostles through the centuries (as in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions) but rather the conferral of authority under the hands of men who formerly lived on earth and who returned as angelic messengers to restore that authority in ‘the last days’.

Jesus’ answer in the story in Luke 20 was that in the life after death, people ‘neither marry, nor are given in marriage’ (Luke 20:35). Joseph Smith takes the episode in a rather unexpected direction, seeing Jesus’ answer as evidence for Latter-day Saint teaching regarding the eternal duration of marriage, if performed on earth under the powers revealed to Joseph Smith by the resurrected Bible prophet Elijah in 1836.Footnote ⁴⁷

The commentary goes much further than Paul's words to explain why flesh and blood cannot inherit God's kingdom. Blood, a temporary agent of mortality, will be replaced by God's spirit in the veins of resurrected bodies. Joseph Smith emphasised the resurrection as the literal reunion of the preexistent human spirit and the earthly – although now glorified – body of flesh and bones, patterned after the image of God.

Needless to say, these interpretations are not what most Christians see when they read the Bible. But that is precisely the point. Joseph Smith's Bible-based sermons were not merely about the Bible. He said, ‘It is my meditation all the day & more than my meat & drink to know how I shall make the saints of God to comprehend the visions that roll like an overflowing surge, before my mind.’Footnote ⁵⁰ For him the Bible was not the end but a springboard to knowledge reserved in the heavens to come forth in the last days through him. Even so, he did not see himself as reading anything into the Bible but simply drawing through revelation the true meaning out of the Bible. And he presented his interpretations not as departures from the text but as though they should have been obvious to any reader. ‘We teach nothing but what the Bible teaches’, he said. ‘We believe nothing, but what is to be found in this book’. ‘In it the “Mormon” faith is to be found.’Footnote ⁵¹

Joseph Smith's biblical restoration

Almost all of Mormonism's early converts were Christians who believed in the Bible. Thus from the beginning, the Bible – and not the Book of Mormon or the revelations – was the Latter-day Saints’ common corpus of scriptural information. That situation did not change much for decades. In Joseph Smith's day, Latter-day Saints used the Doctrine and Covenants mainly as a source for ecclesiology, and the Book of Mormon was used primarily as evidence that the heavens had again been opened and that God was preparing the world for the second coming of Jesus.Footnote ⁵² The Bible's chapter and verse divisions made access easy and provided a common referencing system. It was not until late in the century that the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants received chapter and verse divisions that made them fully serviceable.Footnote ⁵³ Joseph Smith himself clearly was not as well-versed in the Book of Mormon as he was in the Bible. Aside from his reading of it in preparation for its second printing in 1837, there is scant evidence that he ever read the Book of Mormon after he published it.

But it was not only for reasons of familiarity and accessibility that the Mormon prophet taught and preached out of the Bible. I believe that there was something more involved, something fundamental about who Joseph Smith was and what role he played in the religion he founded.

If nothing else, Joseph Smith must be considered audacious. When he was 23 years old, he produced the manuscript of a book that he claimed was a companion scripture to the Bible. Yet the Book of Mormon itself asserts that, although it is equal in authority to the Bible, unlike the Bible it was preserved in purity since antiquity, written with the explicit needs of future readers in mind, filled with explanations of fundamental Christian tenets more clearly expressed than in the Bible, and was intended by God to be a tangible witness to the calling of a modern prophet. Those are bold claims for a first-time author.

The following year, aged 24, Joseph Smith began making wholesale revisions in the Bible, or ‘correcting’ it, to use his own term. In Christian, Bible-loving, mostly Protestant America of the 1830s, it was indeed audacious for anyone – but especially for someone so young and with no formal academic or ministerial training – to edit and correct the recorded words of Moses, Isaiah, Matthew and Paul. Yet Joseph Smith saw no contradiction in this, believing that it was truth itself that was sacred, not words, and believing also that, as God's prophet, he had both sufficient inspiration and sufficient authority to correct the Bible wherever he felt it necessary.

Joseph Smith's complex use of the Bible demonstrates that, in his vision of reality, his own inspiration trumped what was printed on the Bible's pages. Whether deliberately or not, he was making a statement regarding his prophetic authority and his relationship to prophets and scriptures of the past. His New Translation showed that the Bible was subordinate to what God revealed to him, and his use of the Bible in sermons showed that his revelations made him the Bible's master, not its servant. He and his followers believed that the standard by which to measure religious truth is not the Bible but the revelations that came through Joseph Smith. It is in this that we best see him and his followers as readers of the Bible. But even beyond matters pertaining to scripture, revelation and doctrine, virtually everything he did as founder and leader of the Latter-day Saint faith was grounded in the Bible. Consider such things as the priesthoods of Aaron and Melchizedek, sacred rites, apostleship and the keys of the kingdom, church organisation, the establishment of Zion communities and promised lands, laying out city plans with temples in the main squares, the gathering of peoples and even polygamy. All had their roots in the Bible and in the Mormon prophet's understanding of it.

Joseph Smith saw the work that he started as the culmination of the Bible and the fulfilment of all it contains. He spoke of the ‘last days’ as ‘the dispensation of the fulness of times, when . . . all things shall be restored, as spoken of by all the holy prophets since the world began: for in it will take place the glorious fulfillment of the promises made to the fathers’.Footnote ⁵⁴ He believed that his work was

Thus, in the end Joseph Smith saw his restoration as being in large measure about the Bible – about restoring biblical religion to the world, correcting the biblical text, revealing additional scriptures as witnesses and companions to the Bible, restoring biblical prophecy, biblical apostleship, biblical Christianity, biblical doctrine, the biblical church and biblical salvation through Jesus. He believed it was about finishing the work that the Bible had started, tying together ‘in one’ all that had been revealed by God to the other prophets since the beginning of history. For him it was a process of validating and renewing the Bible, of ‘proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true, [yet] that God does inspire men and call them to his holy work in this age and generation, as well as in generations of old’.Footnote ⁵⁶