Review: Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.

Authors

Sonia Hazard

Keywords

translation, Joseph Smith, Book of Mormon, ancient texts, scripture

Abstract

Joseph Smith was, among much else, a translator. One of the most distinctive qualities of early Mormonism is that saving knowledge came not only from revelations—though Smith received plenty of those— but also through texts from the ancient past. In order to be useable as scripture, those texts required translation, and Smith tackled the office of translator with relish. What did translation mean for Smith and early Saints?

The editors of Producing Ancient Scripture—Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid—set out to answer that question with a comprehensive treatment of Smith’s translations, and they delivered. Among the seventeen chapters are analyses of the marquee projects like the Book of Mormon, the King James Bible, and the Book of Abraham, as well as of the texts less often investigated in terms of translation, including the Parchment of John, the “pure language” document, and the lost Anthon transcript. We also learn of a translation-that-never-was of the Apocrypha. The editors even include a final chapter on the fraudulent Kinderhook plates (of which Smith decoded only one character). The result is a rich collection of over five hundred pages, showcasing a diversity of methods, all evidenced to high documentary standards.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Hazard, Sonia (2022) "Review: Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 20.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol9/iss1/20