A Commentary on Joseph Smith's Revision of First Corinthians
Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
Summer 2020
53
2
Champaign, IL
University of Illinois Press
2020
57-105
A persistent question relating to the JST has to do with what its emendations represent. Are they all textual restorations (in English)? Is the text a kind of embedded commentary? Are there different types of changes in different passages and if so, what are the various possibilities?
I propose to attempt a provisional answer to this question by evaluating every JST emendation to an entire book of the Bible, something that I do not believe has been done before (at least not in print). This still will not provide a definitive answer to the question, as the JST can vary considerably in different sections of the project, but it will perhaps at least provide a start toward a better understanding of the types of revisions made in the JST.
For this reason I propose to use the book of 1 Corinthians. This book was dictated just a little over halfway through the project as a whole, so the project was at a mature state by this time, and Smith had not yet experienced the burnout he seemed to feel after he returned to the Old Testament and faced a large number of very lengthy books.