Joseph Smith Translation: A Scholarly Defense

Responding to ldsdiscussions.com’s “Joseph Smith Translation Problems” — a point-by-point analysis of the Adam Clarke thesis, the nature of prophetic translation, and compelling ancient textual convergences that cannot be explained by nineteenth-century borrowing.

Overview of the Criticism

The ldsdiscussions.com article on “Joseph Smith Translation Problems” centers its critique on a single claim: that a 2017 BYU study by Thomas Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon demonstrates Joseph Smith plagiarized substantial portions of the Joseph Smith Translation (JST) from Adam Clarke’s widely available Methodist Bible commentary. The article presents this as decisive evidence that the JST is a human fabrication rather than inspired scripture, and attempts to link it to a broader pattern of alleged deception running through the Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham, temple ceremonies, and the three degrees of glory.

This response addresses each layer of that argument. We will show: (1) the Adam Clarke thesis is methodologically flawed and has been systematically refuted by the foremost living JST scholar; (2) the ldsdiscussions critique fundamentally misrepresents what the JST claims to be; (3) the JST contains substantial bodies of original material with no conceivable nineteenth-century source; and (4) post-1830 archaeological discoveries — particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls — have produced stunning convergences with JST content that make accidental derivation statistically indefensible.

I. The Straw Man: What the JST Actually Claims to Be

The ldsdiscussions argument implicitly assumes a target that the JST never actually claims. Before evaluating the critique, we must clarify what the JST is — and what it is not.

The official Church description defines the JST as: “A revision or translation of the King James Version of the Bible begun by the Prophet Joseph Smith in June 1830. He was divinely commissioned to make the translation and regarded it as ‘a branch of his calling’ as a prophet.” An 1972 Ensign article further specified: “It appears that the work was to be a revelatory experience, through which Joseph would come to an understanding of things that he had not previously known.”

Crucially, mainline Latter-day Saint scholars who have spent careers studying the JST — scholars such as Robert J. Matthews and Kent P. Jackson — are unanimous that the JST is not intended primarily or solely as a restoration of ancient lost text. The Church’s own language says it “to some extent assists in restoring the plain and precious things” (emphasis added), acknowledging a partial restoration function among several others.

The JST serves multiple functions simultaneously:

Harmonization: Reconciling apparent contradictions between Gospel accounts — for example, resolving the tension between Matthew’s “judge not” and John 7:24’s “judge righteous judgment.”

Inspired Commentary: Expanding theological meaning through revelation, functioning analogously to a prophetic midrash.

Restoration of Lost Content: Recovering specific historical and theological material genuinely absent from the biblical record — such as the extensive Enoch narratives in Moses 6–7.

Doctrinal Clarification: Resolving ambiguities that had generated centuries of theological controversy.

This multi-purpose character is not a modern apologetic invention to explain away problems. It is the position stated by the Church, reiterated by senior apostles, and confirmed by dedicated academic study. The ldsdiscussions critique attacks a target — the JST as a word-for-word restoration of ancient manuscripts — that no informed Latter-day Saint scholar has ever defended. This is, by definition, a straw man.

Kent P. Jackson, perhaps the world’s foremost living expert on the JST, describes the work precisely: “It creates something new out of something old.” That framing — not “restoration of ancient manuscripts” — is the operative claim against which the critique must be measured.

II. The Adam Clarke Thesis: A House of Cards

The ldsdiscussions article quotes Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon as finding “hundreds” of parallels between the JST and Clarke’s commentary, with Wilson-Lemmon claiming Joseph “plagiarized Clarke about thirty times in his New Testament translation.” The article then presents this as settled, and uses it to bootstrap a sweeping conclusion about all of Joseph Smith’s prophetic output.

There are multiple serious problems with this presentation.

A. The Wayment-Wilson-Lemmon Study Was Not Peer-Reviewed When Cited

The ldsdiscussions article relies heavily on a paper that was pre-publication and available only through a podcast recording at the time of citation. Wilson-Lemmon herself acknowledges in that podcast that the paper had not yet been formally released. Presenting unreviewed preliminary research as a definitively settled finding is not responsible scholarship.

B. Kent Jackson’s Systematic Demolition of the Thesis

Kent P. Jackson, a BYU professor and co-editor of the standard academic reference on the JST, published a detailed, methodologically rigorous response in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (2020). Jackson examined every single proposed parallel between the JST and Clarke’s commentary and reached a definitive conclusion: there is no Adam Clarke-JST connection.

“They’re random and coincidental resemblances, mostly of unimportant words.” — Kent P. Jackson

Jackson’s refutation rests on multiple independent lines of analysis:

1. The Commentary Is Too Large for Meaningful Comparison

Adam Clarke’s commentary spans six volumes and approximately 5,200 pages of dense, discursive prose — full of paraphrases, restatements, and wordy theological discussions. When a commentary of this size is compared to any sufficiently long religious text, superficial resemblances are statistically inevitable. Jackson notes that any two texts discussing the same biblical passages will share common terminology and concepts. Finding overlap is not evidence of dependence; it is what probability predicts.

2. Joseph Smith Consistently Ignored Clarke’s Recommendations

Jackson identifies a devastating methodological failure in the Wayment thesis: if Joseph Smith was actively consulting Clarke, he should have incorporated Clarke’s textual suggestions at a high rate. The data shows the opposite. In Mark 8, Clarke recommended revisions for four different passages — yet none of those recommendations appear in the JST, despite Joseph making over thirty changes to that same chapter. In John 2:24, Clarke’s commentary contains over 3,000 words with ten distinct suggested textual changes; only one superficial resemblance exists with Smith’s work among thirty-plus revisions. These are not the patterns of a man consulting a source. They are the patterns of independent composition.

3. Joseph Smith’s Changes Contradict What Clarke Recommended

In a number of specific instances, Joseph Smith’s JST changes directly oppose what Clarke’s commentary recommended. Jackson documents cases where Smith preserved deleted words that Clarke explicitly wanted removed — “the opposite of what Clarke wanted.” This pattern of systematic divergence is incompatible with the dependency hypothesis.

4. All Proposed Parallels Have Independent Explanations

For every specific case Wayment proposed, Jackson demonstrates that the JST change can be explained by patterns already visible throughout the rest of the JST — including Joseph Smith’s well-documented practice of removing KJV italicized words (which he viewed as editorial insertions lacking authority), harmonizing across Gospel accounts, and aligning passages with theological principles developed through the Restoration. Jackson concludes: “Joseph Smith didn’t need Adam Clarke to influence him in passages like those.”

5. The Isaiah 34:7 “Re’em” Example Examined

Wilson-Lemmon highlights Isaiah 34:7 as a particularly compelling case — where the JST renders the Hebrew word re’em transliterated, which she attributes to Clarke. But this example actually illustrates the methodological weakness of the thesis. The Hebraized transliteration demonstrates sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew text, consistent with Joseph Smith’s known engagement with original language sources throughout his prophetic career. Moreover, Clarke himself was uncertain about the word’s referent, offering multiple possibilities. That the JST chose a Hebraized form rather than any of Clarke’s specific English suggestions undermines rather than supports the copying hypothesis.

Scholar Kevin Barney, who examined the Clarke thesis independently, characterized the likelihood of direct Clarke influence as “negligible,” reinforcing Jackson’s conclusions. The ldsdiscussions article presents none of this counter-scholarship. It presents only the Wayment-Wilson-Lemmon thesis, without disclosure that it faced immediate and substantive peer challenge from an expert in the same field.

III. The Scribes Never Mentioned Clarke — Because There Was Nothing to Mention

The ldsdiscussions article raises what it considers a clever subsidiary argument: if scribes never mentioned Joseph using Clarke during the JST process, how can we trust their accounts? The implication is that the scribes were either lying or had implausibly poor memories.

But this argument presupposes the very conclusion it is trying to reach. It assumes Clarke was used, then treats scribe silence as evidence of a cover-up. The far simpler and more historically defensible explanation is that scribes did not mention Clarke because Clarke was not used. Jackson’s detailed analysis shows the internal evidence of the JST does not support Clarke dependence. The absence of scribe testimony about Clarke is therefore not suspicious silence — it is consistent silence with all available evidence.

The argument also proves too much. If we dismiss scribe testimony whenever it fails to report sources critics want attributed to Joseph Smith, we have adopted an unfalsifiable methodology that no historical claim could survive.

IV. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Enoch Prophecy: Evidence the Criticism Cannot Answer

The most powerful evidence for the JST’s authenticity is not a defense against the Adam Clarke thesis — it is a positive evidentiary case that the ldsdiscussions article does not engage at all. The JST’s Enoch material (Moses 6–7 in the Pearl of Great Price) presents a challenge to the skeptical narrative that has never been adequately answered.

In December 1830, Joseph Smith — with no access to relevant ancient texts — dictated approximately 110 verses of previously unknown material about the patriarch Enoch. This material was incorporated into what became Moses 6 and 7 in the Pearl of Great Price, a portion of the JST. Beginning in 1948, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, ancient texts began emerging that contained remarkable parallels to Joseph Smith’s 1830 Enoch material.

The Mahijah/Mahujah–Mahaway Correspondence

In Moses 6:40 and 7:2, Joseph Smith names a specific character “Mahijah” (also rendered “Mahujah”) — a character who approaches Enoch, questions him, and receives his prophetic call. This name appears nowhere in the canonical Bible, in any biblical commentary available in 1830, in Clarke’s six-volume commentary, or in any Jewish text accessible to Joseph Smith.

In 1948, Cave 4 at Qumran yielded fragments of the Book of Giants — an ancient text entirely unknown to Western scholarship until that discovery. Among the named characters in the Book of Giants: a figure called “Mahaway” (MHWY in Aramaic), who serves a functionally identical role to Joseph Smith’s Mahijah — approaching the prophet Enoch, serving as an intermediary, and delivering a message that prompts Enoch’s call to repentance.

Scholar Salvatore Cirillo, cited by Jeffrey Bradshaw and David Larsen in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, states directly that “the name Mahawai in the Book of Giants and the names Mahujah and Mahijah in the Book of Moses represent the strongest similarity between the Latter-day Saint revelations on Enoch and the pseudepigraphal books of Enoch.”

Hugh Nibley — who spent decades studying ancient Enoch texts — personally discussed this convergence with Matthew Black, one of the world’s foremost Dead Sea Scrolls translators. Black, a non-Latter-day Saint scholar, fell silent when shown the Mahujah parallel. Nibley reported that Black offered no naturalistic explanation for how Joseph Smith could have known a name found only in texts discovered 118 years after the JST was dictated.

Eighteen Thematic Parallels with the Book of Giants

The name convergence is only the beginning. Bradshaw and Larsen’s study identifies eighteen distinct thematic elements shared between Moses 6–7 and the Book of Giants that are “rare or absent elsewhere in Jewish tradition” — meaning they do not appear in any of the Enoch literature that was available to Joseph Smith:

• Righteous individuals gathered to divinely prepared cities in westward-lying mountains
• Those individuals ultimately taken “up into” God’s direct presence
• Enoch’s preaching mission specifically targeting wicked adversaries before heavenly ascent
• A “Book of Remembrance” containing divine words and human actions as witness documents
• A “wild man” descriptor used in specific sarcastic context (Moses 6:38; BG, Ohya passage)
• Prison/imprisonment imagery for the wicked (Moses 7:38; BG prison passages)
• The “roar of the lions”/“roar of the wild beast” in battle-description passages
• Enoch’s throne imagery paralleling heavenly enthronement in 3 Enoch

The crucial methodological point is not merely that these parallels exist — it is that they appear with “remarkable sequential correspondence” between Moses 6–7 and the Book of Giants. The patterns are not scattered; they follow the same narrative order. This level of structural correspondence dramatically increases the statistical improbability of accidental convergence.

The Unavailability Timeline

The ldsdiscussions argument relies on the claim that Joseph Smith borrowed from available sources. For the Enoch material, this claim faces a chronological wall:

Joseph Smith’s Moses 6–7 dictated: December 1830
Dead Sea Scrolls discovered (Cave 1): 1947
Book of Giants fragments (Cave 4): 1948 — 118 years after Moses 6–7
2 Enoch first translated into English: Late 1800s — after Smith’s death
3 Enoch (Hekhalot) available to Western scholars: Late 1800s — after Smith’s death

The one ancient Enoch text available in 1830 was Richard Lawrence’s 1821 English translation of 1 Enoch. But Bradshaw and Larsen’s analysis shows the Moses 6–7 Enoch material is least similar to 1 Enoch — and most similar to 2 Enoch, 3 Enoch, and the Book of Giants, none of which were accessible. Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith’s preeminent biographer, concluded it was “scarcely conceivable” that Joseph Smith knew of or used Lawrence’s translation even for the limited 1 Enoch parallels.

This is not a peripheral point. It is the evidentiary heart of the matter. If Joseph Smith fabricated the JST from available sources, how do we explain specific names, specific narrative sequences, and specific rare theological concepts appearing in his 1830 dictation that are found only in texts sealed underground in a cave in the Judean desert until 1948? The ldsdiscussions article does not address this question because it has no answer to it.

V. The Mesopotamian Etymological Evidence

The scholarly analysis of the Book of Giants character names provides an additional layer of evidence. Bradshaw and Larsen demonstrate that the names in the Book of Giants fall into distinct categories: some are Hebrew wordplay inventions, some are drawn from Mesopotamian epic tradition for polemical purposes, and a few — specifically Enoch and Mahaway — possess plausible ancient Mesopotamian etymological roots with no apparent literary motivation for invention.

The Mahaway name potentially connects to the Akkadian mahℏû, denoting a class of priests and seers — a Mesopotamian religious office. This etymology differs fundamentally from the Hebrew wordplay evident in other Book of Giants character names, suggesting the Mahaway figure preserves authentic ancient memory rather than literary invention. That Joseph Smith, in 1830, independently arrived at a phonologically similar name for a character playing an identical functional role is a convergence requiring explanation — and that explanation is not available to the critic.

Bradshaw characterizes the cumulative case as reflecting “a common well of ancient traditions” from which both texts draw. The most parsimonious explanation — the one requiring the fewest ad hoc assumptions — is that Joseph Smith had access, through the mechanism he claimed, to authentic ancient material.

VI. The “Pattern of Deception” Argument Fails Entirely

The ldsdiscussions article attempts to leverage the JST critique into a broader claim: that Joseph Smith exhibited a consistent “pattern of deception,” borrowing from Swedenborg for the degrees of glory, from Masonry for temple ceremonies, from the Bible for the Book of Mormon, and so on. Several decisive observations apply:

Convergence is not derivation. The fact that two thinkers independently arrive at similar theological conclusions — such as Swedenborg and Joseph Smith both describing degrees of heavenly glory — does not establish borrowing. The Book of Revelation itself describes three levels of heavenly experience. The question is not whether parallels exist; it is whether those parallels require a copying relationship rather than independent reception of similar truths or access to common ancient traditions.

The BYU-cited Swedenborg article explicitly argues the opposite of what ldsdiscussions claims. The article states that both Swedenborg and Joseph Smith appear to have received their understanding through study of the same biblical texts. If the same biblical source material can independently produce similar conclusions in two different people, that is evidence of the source’s richness — not of Joseph Smith’s fraud.

The “why does God allow His prophet to look like a fraud?” argument proves too much. Every major biblical prophet operated in a context where naturalistic explanations for their activities existed. Moses performed signs similar to Egyptian magicians. Isaiah’s prophecies could be attributed to political savvy. The question is whether the evidence, examined rigorously, points toward or away from the prophetic claims — and in the case of the JST’s Enoch material, the evidence points unambiguously toward them.

The Occam’s Razor appeal is inverted. The article invokes Occam’s Razor to suggest natural fabrication is simpler than divine inspiration. But the actual application of the principle requires us to select the hypothesis that accounts for all the data — including the Mahijah-Mahaway name correspondence, the eighteen Dead Sea Scrolls thematic parallels, the Mesopotamian etymological evidence, and the sequential structural correspondence between Moses 6–7 and texts sealed underground until 1948. The hypothesis of fraud requires positing either a series of extraordinary coincidences or an untraceable mechanism of access to unavailable ancient materials. The hypothesis of genuine inspiration accounts for all the data more simply.

VII. Original Material Without Parallel: The Broader Case

Even setting aside the Enoch evidence, the JST contains extensive original material that the Adam Clarke thesis cannot account for under any configuration of the evidence. Robert J. Matthews — who spent more than two decades producing the definitive scholarly edition of the JST — observed that the text contains “very specific statements about Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, John the Baptist, and Jesus that are not known to be written in any other document.”

Clarke’s commentary, however large, is a commentary on existing biblical text. It does not invent entirely new narrative episodes, new named characters, new theological cosmologies, or new prophetic accounts. The claim that Joseph Smith derived the lengthy Enoch narrative in Moses 6–7 — with its specific names, its sequential thematic structure, its Mesopotamian etymological connections, and its Dead Sea Scrolls parallels — from a Methodist Bible commentary is not merely unproven. It is logically incoherent.

Hugh Nibley, after decades of comparative study, wrote that the Enoch material in the Book of Moses “offers the nearest thing to a perfectly foolproof test — neat, clear-cut, and decisive — of Joseph Smith’s claim to inspiration.” Nibley’s extensive analysis in Enoch the Prophet documents the convergences with texts unavailable in Joseph Smith’s day in exhaustive scholarly detail. That work remains unanswered by critics.

Additionally, the linguistic signature of the JST Enoch material is itself anomalous. Analysis of the language reveals it is independent of Genesis language, not pseudobiblical in the way a human imitator would write, not characteristic of Joseph Smith’s own prose style, and not derivative of any known contemporary source. This linguistic independence is itself a form of evidence.

Conclusion: The Criticism Fails at Every Level

The ldsdiscussions critique of the JST fails on its own terms and leaves the most powerful evidence for the JST entirely unaddressed.

It fails on its own terms because the Adam Clarke thesis — its central factual claim — has been systematically demolished by Kent P. Jackson, the preeminent academic expert on the JST. The thesis is based on a 5,200-page commentary so expansive that superficial overlap is statistically inevitable; on proposed parallels that evaporate under careful analysis; on cases where Joseph Smith demonstrably did the opposite of what Clarke recommended; and on an absence of evidence of Clarke usage from every contemporary witness. The thesis was not peer-reviewed when cited, was later refined substantially by Wayment himself, and has no scholarly consensus behind it.

It leaves the most powerful evidence unaddressed because the ldsdiscussions article makes no mention of the Dead Sea Scrolls parallels, the Mahijah-Mahaway name correspondence, the Book of Giants thematic convergences, or the Mesopotamian etymological evidence — all of which post-date Joseph Smith’s dictation by decades to more than a century. These are not minor footnotes. They are the core evidentiary case, and their omission is not oversight; it is the only way to make the critical narrative appear plausible.

The straw man framing undermines the entire enterprise because no informed Latter-day Saint scholar has ever claimed the JST is a word-for-word restoration of ancient manuscripts. The JST is an inspired revision — a prophetic re-creation of biblical text that functions simultaneously as harmonization, clarification, inspired commentary, and partial restoration. Criticizing it for not matching manuscripts is like criticizing a sermon for not being a transcript.

The evidence, examined honestly, points in one direction. Joseph Smith in December 1830 dictated material containing a specific rare name, a specific narrative role for that character, and a specific set of thematic elements that appear together, in sequence, only in ancient texts discovered 118 years after his death. That is not the profile of a nineteenth-century fraud drawing on available sources. It is the profile of a prophet drawing on something older.