Word by word, line by line,

rare documents tell the story of the founding of an American religion now transformed into a worldwide movement.

The personal papers of the man at the core of it all.

Coming up, an inside view of the Joseph Smith Papers project.

Who's doing it and what they are finding.

Part one, an overview next.

Quijas Television presents the Joseph Smith Papers Project,

a weekly series. And now your host , Glenn Rossen.

They are the earliest handwritten texts,

the foundational documents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints revelations, translations, journals and letters,

court cases and business dealings,

they have in common the grand and imposing figure of one Joseph Smith Jr. in this first television edition of the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

It is our aim to introduce you to what the project is all about by bringing the documents themselves to you.

The scholars who have dedicated their professional lives to better understanding,

Joseph will share with us the profound insights that bring color and texture to the history of which these documents testify.

These scholars are of one mind on an important point that the timing is right.

Many American religious scholars see Joseph Smith as being one of the preeminent figures in American religious history.

There have also been sociologists

and other scholars who have looked at

the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and have seen it as the beginning of a worldwide movement whose scope may someday be so extraordinarily large as to be classed with many of the great religious movements of the world.

For that reason, they find great interest in studying

the church in embryo,

because this is the first time in the history of the world that scholars have had an opportunity to do so at close range.

It's really quite incredible that

a religious organization of our size and of our age,

because we're really a relatively young church

as churches go, that we would have such a rich body of of history, a rich collection of documents and artifacts.

The publication of the Joseph Smith Papers is a tremendously large and complicated project.

In order to succeed in publishing a series of this magnitude,

many forces had to come together simultaneously.

And it just happens that at this time in the history of our church,

we have the talent, we have the resources, we have access to the papers, and we have the technology to come together in such a way as to be able to publish these papers before. Now, we didn't have one or more of these factors.

So this is really the first time in the history of the church that we've had the capacity to do this work and do it well. We have as an overriding objective that we're doing that

in order to

help convince the world that Joseph was a true prophet,

that through him, the restored gospel came to Earth,

and that this message has to be carried to all of mankind in an effort to bring them to the true God and to the true savior Jesus Christ.

A relatively few people have had access to the documents directly related to Joseph Smith.

In our series, we will invite you into a secure area to view them with the scholars, along with a couple of friends who have been invited to observe, as you might in this first series.

Historian Ron Espeland, managing editor of the Joseph Smith Papers,

gives us an overview of what the project will cover and contain.

The focus of the Joseph Smith papers is together all of the surviving manuscripts and documents that belong to Joseph Smith by virtue of being part of his office or that he created by dictation by in his own hand or in some way set in motion

a record that were part of his official responsibilities as the president of the church.

And the Joseph Smith papers, then, is a comprehensive addition that will gather all surviving manuscripts that we define as Joseph Smith papers and publish them in their entirety.

There will be no exclusions, no omissions.

All of the papers we have access to and can find will be published in their entirety.

Now, documentary editing has a long tradition,

but professional documentary editing in the United States started right after World War two,

with Julian Boyd beginning a scholarly in a presentation of the Thomas Jefferson papers. And this is still ongoing.

So it's been around for quite a while and not yet finished.

Julian Boyd's work came to the attention of Dean Jesse in the nineteen fifties, late nineteen fifties, early sixties,

and he was immediately struck by the reality that Latter Day Saints needed to have access to the papers of every letter they sent leaders,

just like we Americans want access to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

And so he had a dream from the time that he learned about documentary editing to help do this for Joseph Smith. And that dream now is realized.

DGSE is one of the general editors of this project.

He's been at it himself since the late 1960s

and has published some volumes that are related to what we're doing today. We now have Richard Bushman, Dean Jesse, Ron Asplund as general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, charged with gathering all these things,

getting a team of scholars to associate with us and

and produce what is not a one man project. As Dean, Jesse started out to be right, but a massive undertaking to understand the documentary history documentary record of Joseph Smith and early Latter Day Saints history. And some of those documents are still being found and discovered. We do. We find new documents periodically. Even today, we have folks in the field that go looking in repositories where there might be something we are learning, both from new documents and for new understanding around the. Every month, every year, we have added to our store of knowledge. We are really creating a reference work or a source book from which other people will do histories.

So we're not doing a narrative.

We're not connecting all the books. I see. But we are providing historical research around this wonderful connective tissue of documents that survive that other historians now can immediately grasp and use.

And we are confident that writers and historians in the latter decent community and nonlinearities seem to care about early American religious history. We'll do more work and better work with this set on the shelf than they could possibly do without it. It makes the history of anyone who's telling the story of Joseph Smith more accurate, more

and better, and it makes it easier. I want to describe briefly what our end product is going to be.

We really have to end products. One will be a very rich website where we'll deliver a great deal of content.

But the product we're focused on right now is the published volumes. The series six of them.

Each has a particular focus that helps us look at Joseph Smith Records and in a very in various perspectives.

The first two series are the Journal series and the history series. And we have some examples here from both of those that will help us see the kinds of things that we'll be able to do.

And here in our samples, we have the first two of the Joseph Smith diaries.

The first one, this small little volume is called Book for Record.

This one is a wonderful book because it has

the handwriting of Joseph Smith himself.

He used lots of clerks and scribes that didn't write a great deal in his own hand.

And his own hand always is not only revealing of his personality, it shows somebody who's an effusive and is reaching out to other people and his sensitivity to nature around him in his concerns about his family and and prayerful addressing of the

personal Joseph's personal. Joseph, can we actually see some of that handwriting?

I mean, the idea of just being that close to Joseph Smith's

journal is is is a rush. It begins with his hand. And it also has Frederick G. Williams hand, Sidney Rigdon hand.

Pratt went with Joseph Smith on a journey that was documented in this journal and partly kept

the diary for a while. So it's a wonderful collection. This actual diary, which includes Joseph Smith beginning the inscription, telling why he bought the book, what he hopes to do with it,

and then making a few entries before it's turned over to other people or a gap and then they begin again.

But when you see Joseph own pen to paper,

you do get a sense of his personality. You don't get anywhere else.

The personal writings have a quality and a connection with his personality that you can feel as you read them. We've had scholars who have described Joseph Smith's connection to his religion as as distant or contrived. You can't come away from reading those journals in his own hand and believe that it simply has a quality of earnestness, of religiosity,

a personal connection to the things around him, including God, that comes out in his own writings. In other words, his writings actually show the man himself there's nothing being hidden.

Well, the scholars would say we always hide things when we write.

Every diarist is a little self-conscious.

I don't get that a lot with Joseph. You seem to get somebody who's not trained in literary arts and is not a writer. He's trying to record the feelings of his heart at the moment. And it's very personal and I think it's quite powerful.

So there's history in here, but there's Joseph Smith's daily events. It's open, it's warm.

And through these to this, the Joseph Smith papers and the volumes,

we're going to be able to see his actual handwriting and what he wrote in his journals. We'll see that. You'll see scribes more often than you see Joseph, but you will see Joseph in this particular one.

He's on a mission with Harley Pratt.

He's worried about his family.

How many missionaries have been worried about their families?

He writes, Will God please protect them while he's gone?

And he writes of having a reassurance from God that they'll be OK.

And then when he gets home, he writes his thankfulness to God that they're OK.

The same sorts of things that any missionary might experience right now. This one is a wonderful diary as well.

This larger volume is the second diary started in the spring excuse me, the fall of eighteen thirty five and goes through the spring of eighteen thirty six.

So it's the six months almost daily before the dedication of the Kerguelen Temple.

Some wonderful stuff in there, and it's wonderful about the Hebrew school, it's wonderful about the efforts to prepare the organization and the male leaders, the official members, as they call them, for their experiences in the temple. And then the dedication itself is recorded here.

The very last entry in this diary is the 3rd of April 18. Thirty six, which Latter day Saints will recognize as

the date of Section one hundred and ten that is recorded in our scripture,

which is canonized today, comes from the last entry in this diary.

Section 110 is lifted right out of that book.

It's lifted and edited.

And so the account of Oliver Cowdrey and Joseph Smith in the temple on April 3rd is a third person account which has changed the first

person to make it consistent throughout,

like the rest of the diary and like the rest of the scripture, you're checking and rechecking all of our history. Absolutely. We want to know what

the earliest text was that we have.

And then where did that come from ? Joseph Smith began keeping a history in eighteen, thirty two,

and part of that effort was to keep a history of

the whole movement, including Joseph Smith, personal

experiences. He never put those on paper, as far as we know, until eighteen thirty two.

By then there was so much going around that he thought was misinformation and not only misinformed but malicious information that he wanted to set the record straight

and he wrote his own history.

It was only a brief one that went up to the publication of the.

Can you turn to that page?

But it only goes up to the publication of The Book of Mormon.

So all the early foundation, the foundation of events up to the publication of the Book of Mormon are in this earliest history.

It is a reminiscent history because no records were kept in the 18 20s that would give us that history.

So he begins by telling his earliest story.

The Latter day Saints will know this story from the 1838 account,

the one that was six years later. It's now in the great price.

That's what this is we're looking at, right?

This one is the one written six years earlier.

Oh, this OK, which is a much more personal story.

When he dictated the one that's in the pearl of great price, he was interested in making a record that Latter Day Saints would understand as part of their heritage and their foundation.

OK, here he's giving a personal story of what this meant to him.

Later, it was important to tell the story for the church and the story of the church, and that's what this next volume does.

But in Missouri, just before the difficulties, he started dictating a history of his own beginnings up to

and through the Book of Mormon story and then on to the organization of the church.

OK, this was later picked up in Nauvoo with great enthusiasm and skill once Willard Richards arrived in Nashville in December of eighty forty one. And from that point on,

Joseph Smith and his clerks, including Willard Richards. But others work throughout the novel period to prepare this history.

That entire six volumes of which this is the first will be published in our history series,

going back to the original pioneer narrative that they put together following the format that Joseph Smith provided for them. Let me understand. What we're looking at right here is the actual first draft of the history handwritten in this book. This is the original. This is the original, and it is indeed the first draft of the history, except for the very first part.

We know the first part that started in Missouri was kept in

other hand writings and were copied in to here when they finally got ready in Nauvoo to press forward and finish the job. OK, so we have a fragment of part of this first,

that's in James Mullins hand and then it continues under the scribes. And much of the rest of this is the original manuscript.

And what we will do is not only provide the text, as the historians of Joseph Smith's era wrote it,

we will go behind the text to say, here is the document that were quoted here, quoting, here's the source they found.

So the sources behind the history in order to

help us have confidence in what they compiled,

historians have had difficulties with the history for two reasons.

One is they don't understand what the sources behind it are

and the other is it's a different format than we would do today.

They will take Wilfred Woodruff diary

and Wofford is observing Joseph Smith third hand. Joseph did. Joseph said they'll copy it into the history. I said I did.

And once we can see the documents behind, we can say they didn't make this up.

They were doing it for reminiscence.

They took a diary, an account, a document of the time and fit it into their history.

When I think of history and documents today,

I attend like the baptism of one of my children and

a certificate is filled out and you hand it off to a clerk and it sort of disappears. You know, all that stuff is in here somewhere, not in the history, but in our administrative series. Some of them will be.

The very first documents that were preserved were revelations.

Only later, as the church became more organized and more complex, did it become important to have these other records of membership of ordination. This, for example, is an early license.

Joseph Smith, senior Joseph Smith's father. So this is this is his missionary license to go priest

license says a license, Liberty, Power and authority.

So it's his ordination to the office.

So is your office a priest of this church?

As you can see, it's dated June 9th, 1830. Very early

word. They were kept in this fashion

as separate sheets of paper.

That's a lot of floating pieces of paper. And then it didn't work when the church got larger and more complex. So in the diary that we looked at

for Kirtland, the eighteen thirty five thirty six diary,

they talk about the record keeping initiative to fix this so that they have actually set procedure.

And this gets copied into a central book so they can have control of who are the members and who are the officers. What are the things you mentioned earlier now is that your role as historians is you're finding all of these backup documents to. What was written in the history and what are the other things when we talk about finding new materials, this is the kind of material that we still find today.

Where are these there in the families that have these hidden in the attic somewhere?

Right. And so people will make these available to us. And we have another document that Joseph Smith signed as a license

or as a letter or a note that's been in private possession all these years. When we look early on in Joseph Smith's lifetime,

we see so many looseleaf pages.

But I find it striking that in Joseph Smith early administration as a prophet, it's almost exclusively about scriptures

and scripture taking. And we have a few examples here. This is two pages, two leaves of the Joseph Smith translation. That's not the original.

It's not the copy of the original, but it's a private copy made by Edward Partridge.

So this is in the handwriting of Edward Partridge.

And you can imagine the earliest saints. They hear about this translation of the Bible

and they want to read it. They won't know what's what's in it. So, so often they had to make a copy

because it wasn't published. Joseph wanted to publish the translation of the Bible his whole life, but it never, never actually happened. Surviving copies like this were only manuscripts that

Early Saints could have were from early manuscripts like this that were copied down. You have William MacLellan, for instance, who had several revelations given to him,

and he he made sure to copy those straight into his journal.

Zebedee Coltrane's Journal is another example where while the revelation wasn't to him,

he copied these revelations straight into his journal.

And we have awesome, awesome hide Josef's, his brother, Samuel,

who went on a mission. And before they left,

they thought it would be prudent to take some of these revelations. So they copied into twenty, eighteen,

forty two and a few other revelations they thought necessary to take on their journey.

So it really gives the example of what do you do when you don't have a published scripture?

Well, you make your own private copy in your journal or or

or whatever it is. So, Ron, do you know how many documents we have that will be contained in the Joseph Smith papers? A great question. And we probably will be publishing about 2500 documents.

So it's not 2500 pages. We'll have more pages than that. Right.

But it's about 2500 documents. Wow . Now, this is another example of

the initial record would have been kept in many cases and a separate sheet of paper that gets copied into the minute book.

So this minute book starts out as just a general church meant a book bringing together these various records

and it ends up being a high council and then a book for the first organization of the High Council and Kirtland.

Ron is very similar to our kind of math we used to today

in our meetings, historians would say we don't use minutes very well today and they use that better.

They were better than us. They were better in some respects. Some of the minutes are pretty, pretty short.

They'll have a complex discussion that doesn't get much summary,

just the conclusion. But some of them trace the discussion.

And you have an interesting detail

and conversation that's recorded in the minutes.

So it would be very similar to keeping a record of a minute meeting today that was important enough to keep a record of. Joseph later lamented the fact that records were not better kept. It had we had those records, we wouldn't have some of the problems we have now, he said.

In eighteen thirty five, when he organized the first call of the 12,

he gave them a charge to keep records better than he and his associates had done.

Okay, historians from outside the letter to St. Community have commented on how wonderful it is to be able to see from the records that do exist the birth of a new religious movement.

So as much as historians would like to see the gaps filled in spite of the gaps, it's a marvelous record. That was one of my my questions.

We've emphasized the fact that there's so much missing, but really, we don't need to cry. We have more than we've lost. We've got a rich history with what we have a very rich history. Absolutely.

And indeed, for the time and the place, it's hard to find anything comparable.

So that covers the journals, the history,

the administrative records.

Let's look for a moment of revelations and translations.

We'll have a series that reproduces the early revelations and translations. And how can we do that? Because we have the early manuscripts for the translations. For example, we have surviving part of the original Book of Mormon transcripts.

These were the very pages that Oliver Cowdrey penned

as Joseph Smith dictated.

Talk about getting back to concrete reality at the Foundation of Latter day Saints movement. This sheet represents that better than anything. I can touch this when it's in a plastic sleeve. This one is in this

first Nephi for thirty eight through five fourteen.

This is Oliver

Actuary's Hand and it's as he received the dictation from Joseph Smith.

I've just got to ask you,

what was it like for you the first time you touched this?

Well, Historias love original documents,

but there is nothing more foundational for either Joseph Smith or the Latter-Day Saints than this document.

It's like going to Washington and looking at the Declaration of Independence, signed by composed by Jefferson and signed by those folks.

It's a touchstone for us. And it also makes concrete and real connection with the past. It's not virtual. It's not made up. It's it's the actual sheet that stood before them as they dictated in eighteen, twenty eight.

And then this experience is particularly rare because not many of us will get a chance to actually see this or touch this like we're doing right now. Right. These obviously are fragile.

Lt doesn't do them any favors. It's very rare to be able to see these things and realize that Oliver,

who worked so closely with Joseph and Joseph looking at the plates and translating, has produced this record.

Now the other items in our series will be a document series and a legal series. OK, I'm not going to show you any examples of those for the moment. Let me just say about the documents that what we do with the document series is bring together chronologically all of the Major Joseph Smith documents.

Revelations will be published in our Revelations

series as they appear in the book,

not in order of scripture, not in order of date, but as they appear in the book.

And they're not always in date order in the document series. They will be in the date order.

They were given inter filed with deeds and letters

and certificates. So you can see in the unfolding of the early church how these things fit and worked with one another.

It'll be a core series of about a dozen volumes that will be very important.

When do you expect the project to be completed?

We have learned by hard experience that it's going to be very tough to do more than two, possibly three volumes a year.

So that looks like we're going to be around here for a decade or so. OK, and the first volumes, again, 2008,

the last volumes clearly go into the 20s.

I think if they're going to be used broadly in our community,

people care about this stuff. Right. Lots of folks will be interested.

How is this going to affect

the other teaching aids we have in a church like the teacher manuals and and other material like that? Great question. First, it will affect that because the manuals will be better in part based on this.

And I'm not saying that in theory,

that's the reality of the new Joseph Smith papers, man,

the Joseph Smith manual that we're all using. Right. 2008, that was done with the help of the historical department and folks that are connected to the Joseph Smith papers, including Dean Jessee, providing the people that prepared that manual access to this body of materials.

And that manual is a better piece of scholarship than we've been able to do before. Our history will never have been as reliable as it is now.

That is our hope and our promise.

Well, now we know what's ahead for years to come.

But when the project is done,

there will still be much to learn about Joseph Smith.

You know, and I. Stand, figuratively speaking, at the feet of Joseph Smith. To me , it's a huge mountain.

And I believe what Harold Bloom really said is true, and that is that Joseph Smith remains the

the most unsteady genius of American religious history.

I would really be reluctant to say that.

That we'll ever have done enough on Joseph Smith.

Coming next week on the Joseph Smith Papers Project,

the stock from which the prophet descended the Smiths and the Mac's rugged and true and every bit the idealistic image of America's beginning.

Joseph Smith's beginnings begins next week on the Joseph Smith Papers Project.