What If There Were No Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible?
What If There Were No Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible? Thomas E. Sherry Thomas E. Sherry was the director of the Corvallis Oregon Institute of Religion when this was published. When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved west to Utah in 1846, the unpublished manuscripts of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible (JST) were left behind.[1] Thereafter, Church members largely lost access to and use of much of this “crowning achievement”[2] of the Prophet and the rich history related to the translation. For the next 135 years, the resulting deprivation had a rippling effect on the Church and its members who carried on largely as if there were no JST.[3] Without access to the manuscripts, Latter-day Saints were hindered in understanding the intimate interplay between the production of the “new translation” and the making and tutoring of a prophet. In their absence it was more difficult to discern how, in Joseph Smith’s words, “an obscure boy” became a mature spokesman f
