The JST at My Fingertips

When the LDS Edition of the King James Version of the Bible was published in 1979, I was fascinated to find the bottom of each page of scripture filled with footnotes. Especially exciting to me were the footnote entries of the Joseph Smith Translation (JST).

Then came the day when a teacher mentioned a JST footnote on a scripture we were discussing. I hadn’t noticed it. How many others had I missed? I looked back over our reading assignments and realized there were dozens of JST passages I had overlooked. Not wanting to miss any more, I decided on a method to alert myself to JST textual additions.

Using a colored pencil, I thumbed through each page and marked every JST footnote and corresponding verses throughout the New Testament. It took a bit of time, but soon my New Testament was sprinkled with unmistakable reminders not to overlook the Prophet’s translation at the bottom of the page.

JST entries too lengthy to be included in the footnotes are located in the appendix between the Bible Dictionary and the Gazetteer. Going through the New Testament another time, I found the references to these longer passages and indicated the page in the appendix where they are found.

This process has given me a deeper appreciation of Joseph Smith’s calling as “a seer, a translator, a prophet” (D&C 21:1).—Sandra Lee Sterns, Jakarta, Indonesia