Changes to the Doctrine & Covenants: A Scholarly Apologetic Response
The textual development of Joseph Smith’s revelations is not evidence of fraud — it is evidence of how authentic revelation works.
Introduction: What the Critics Claim
LDSDiscussions.com has published an overview arguing that changes made between the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants constitute evidence that Joseph Smith fraudulently altered the word of God to suit his evolving theology and personal interests. Specific claims include: the D&C 5 change regarding Joseph’s gifts was self-serving; the D&C 8 change from “rod” to “gift of Aaron” obscured magical origins; D&C 18 was changed to grant Joseph unauthorized authority; D&C 20 and 27 were retrofitted with priesthood content introduced by Sidney Rigdon; D&C 42 was changed for political reasons; D&C 7 was expanded to match a fabricated priesthood narrative; and that apostles who denied these changes were made represent systemic dishonesty.
These arguments are serious and deserve serious answers. This response does not dodge the documented changes — it examines them in their proper historical, theological, and scholarly context, applying the same critical rigor the critic demands.
The central finding is this: the pattern of textual development in the Doctrine and Covenants is precisely what we would expect from authentic, living revelation communicated through a fallible human vessel — and is strikingly paralleled in every other religious scriptural tradition the world has known.
Argument I: The Lord Himself Explained the Process
The most powerful response to the entire ldsdiscussions.com argument is one that comes directly from the text of the Doctrine and Covenants itself. In the very preface the Lord gave to his book of commandments, he explicitly addressed the nature of the revelations being recorded:
“Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.”Doctrine and Covenants 1:24 (emphasis added)
This single verse demolishes the critic’s entire framework before the argument even begins. The Lord himself disclosed, at the very outset, that these revelations were not celestial dictation in a perfect language but were accommodated to human weakness and human language. The phrase “that they might come to understanding” signals an ongoing communicative process rather than a one-time, fixed, inerrant utterance.
BYU scholar Steven C. Harper, writing in “That They Might Come to Understanding: Revelation as Process,” explains that D&C 1:24 establishes two inescapable realities: (1) the Lord as a “flawless, divine encoder” communicates with mortal “decoders” hindered by “noise” — particularly semantic and psychological limitations; and (2) revelation is therefore inherently a process, not a product. Joseph Smith himself felt this weight: he pleaded with the Lord to “deliver us in due time from the little narrow prison almost as it were totel darkness of paper pen and ink and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language.”
If God himself, in scripture, said these revelations were given “in weakness” and “after the manner of their language,” then the critic cannot simultaneously use the existence of imperfections and revisions as evidence of fraud. The claim proves too much: it contradicts what God declared in advance.
Argument II: The Textual Development of Scripture Is Universal
The ldsdiscussions.com critic treats textual revision as a uniquely damning Mormon problem. This reflects a fundamental ignorance of how every major scriptural corpus in history came to exist. Consider the following:
The Bible
The New Testament alone contains more than 400,000 textual variants across its manuscripts — more variants than there are words in the entire New Testament. Scholars including Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary acknowledge this openly. Entire passages — such as the long ending of Mark (16:9–20) and the pericope adulterae (John 7:53–8:11) — are absent from the earliest and most reliable manuscripts, yet are included in the King James Bible that Joseph Smith and his contemporaries held as the word of God. If textual growth and addition disqualify a text from divine origin, then Christianity itself stands disqualified on the same grounds.
Redaction criticism — one of the established tools of mainstream biblical scholarship — holds that the biblical authors themselves were editors who reworked earlier sources. The Gospel of Matthew extensively rewrites Mark. The Chronicler rewrites Samuel and Kings with significant theological additions and omissions. Isaiah contains layers of composition covering multiple centuries. No serious biblical scholar today argues that textual development disqualifies divine inspiration. Raymond E. Brown, the pre-eminent Catholic New Testament scholar, stated plainly: “The fact that the ‘word’ of the Bible is human and time-conditioned makes it no less ‘of God.’”
The critic applies a standard of scriptural inerrancy to Joseph Smith that they do not — and that scholars do not — apply to the Bible. This is not intellectually honest analysis. It is a special pleading fallacy.
The Quran
The compilation of the Quran under Caliph Uthman (c. 650 CE) involved the systematic collection and standardization of oral and written traditions, with variant manuscripts ordered destroyed. The canonical Quran is the result of an editorial process. Muslim scholars have never concluded that this process undermines the Quran’s divine origin.
The Pattern of Prophetic Literature
Old Testament prophetic books regularly underwent editorial development after the prophet’s initial utterance. Jeremiah’s book exists in two significantly different Greek and Hebrew versions. Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Daniel show clear signs of compositional layering. Grant Underwood of BYU, writing in BYU Studies Quarterly, observed that revelation texts are “fully divine and fully human” — a theological framework that has governed Christian understanding of scripture for two millennia. The D&C fits squarely within this universal pattern.
Argument III: The Revision Process Was Supervised, Transparent, and Sanctioned
The ldsdiscussions.com narrative implies that changes were made secretly and deceptively. The historical record is precisely the opposite. The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants was published with a formal preface signed by Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams — the First Presidency of the Church. The preface openly stated that the revelations had been reviewed and prepared for publication. A Church conference in November 1831 formally authorized the publication effort and the review of texts.
Oliver Cowdery himself affirmed regarding the 1835 revisions: “We believe they are now correct. If not in every word, at least in principle.” Orson Pratt, writing in The Seer (1854), explained: “By revelation line was added upon line to several of the sections and paragraphs about to be published.” These were not secret alterations — they were acknowledged, conference-approved, publicly-signed acts of prophetic stewardship over living revelation.
Joseph Smith himself set explicit boundaries on the revision process. In July 1832 he wrote to W. W. Phelps, warning him to “be careful not to alter the sense” of the revelations. This instruction — preserve the sense, refine the language — is exactly the hermeneutical principle that underlies all responsible scriptural transmission. The same principle governs every major Bible translation committee today.
Grant Underwood’s meticulous analysis of the Book of Commandments and Revelations manuscripts (published in BYU Studies) demonstrates that most revisions were made by members of the Literary Firm — Rigdon, Whitmer, Cowdery, and Phelps — with Smith’s knowledge and oversight. Joseph himself recorded on December 1, 1832 that he “wrote and corrected revelations.” This is not fraud. This is exactly what a prophetic community responsible for transmitting living revelation does.
Argument IV: Examining the Specific Changes
D&C 5 — “No Other Gift”
The critic argues that the addition of “until my purpose is fulfilled in this” to the phrase “I will grant him no other gift” was a self-serving change allowing Joseph to produce further scripture. But this framing is circular: it assumes Joseph had no divine mandate for further revelatory work, then uses the change as evidence he lacked that mandate. The logical question is: if God did authorize Joseph to produce further scripture — as Joseph claimed — then the clarified version of D&C 5:4 is precisely what we would expect God to have intended. The original phrasing was an early, incomplete articulation of a more nuanced divine instruction. The revision did not change the core principle; it temporally bounded it with an important qualifier. This is linguistic refinement of the kind D&C 1:24 anticipates.
D&C 8 — The “Gift of Aaron”
The evolution of D&C 8 from “sprout” to “rod” to “gift of Aaron” is treated as an embarrassing cover-up of folk magic. But note what the text is doing theologically: it is progressively elevating and sanctifying a gift that was real, that multiple contemporaries confirmed Oliver possessed, and that BYU historian Marvin S. Hill acknowledged. The “gift of Aaron” framing is not an erasure of the original gift — it is a biblical contextualization of it. Aaron himself used a rod that performed miraculous works (Exodus 7:10–12; Numbers 17). Far from hiding the rod, the final text connects it to authoritative biblical precedent. Grant Underwood’s analysis shows the revision shifted focus from the object to the divine power animating it — a theologically mature development, not a deception.
D&C 20 — “First Elder” and Church Organization
The addition of “first elder” and “second elder” designations is cited as Joseph consolidating illegitimate power. But as B.H. Roberts documented in the History of the Church (1:173, note), additions to D&C 20 were made expressly to reflect the ecclesiastical offices and quorums revealed by 1835 that did not exist in 1830. This is precisely what we would expect of a living, revelatory church growing into its full organizational structure. The 1830 Church of Christ was an embryonic institution. By 1835 it had deacons, teachers, priests, elders, high priests, bishops, high councils, and the First Presidency. It would have been dishonest to leave the foundational Articles and Covenants silent about an organization that now existed. The additions are not a power grab; they are accurate documentation of a developing institution.
D&C 27 — The Priesthood Restoration Additions
The argument that priesthood restoration details were fabricated by Oliver Cowdery in 1834 and then back-inserted into D&C 27 in 1835 is examined in detail in our dedicated Priesthood Restoration response. Here the critical point is textual: the 1835 additions to D&C 27 appear in a chapter that was always a revelation about priesthood administration. The addition of Moroni, Elias, John the Baptist, Elijah, and Peter, James, and John is an expansion, not a reversal, of the original text’s content and theme. The critic’s argument depends on assuming the later text is fabricated — which is the conclusion he is trying to prove, not a premise he has established.
D&C 42 — “Consecrate All” vs. “Consecrate Of”
The change from “consecrate all” to “consecrate of” is presented as Joseph caving to political pressure. But the Law of Consecration as actually administered in the early Church never required total forfeiture of all personal property — members received stewardships back from the bishop. The revised phrasing more accurately reflects how the revealed Law actually functioned. The original phrasing created a misreading; the revision corrected it. This is exactly the kind of textual clarification the literary committee was authorized to make.
D&C 7 — The John Parchment
The expansion of D&C 7 from 143 to 252 words is treated as impossible if the revelation was a “tight translation” from an actual parchment. But D&C 1:24 already established that these revelations came “after the manner of their language.” Joseph himself never claimed to be mechanically transcribing visible words off a literal parchment; the revelation was about the content of the parchment, mediated through the Spirit. FAIR has further noted that Matthew Brown’s textual analysis identifies a likely scribal dittography in one of the changes. More broadly: if the critic insists on a “tight translation” model for D&C 7, he must answer why the original reception process itself produced a 143-word account that was apparently incomplete — which means the tight translation was already imperfect from the start, precisely as D&C 1:24 acknowledges.
D&C 101:4 and Polygamy
The ldsdiscussions.com overview conflates the 1835 D&C 101:4 monogamy statement (which Joseph did not personally author as a revelation) with the later D&C 132. It is historically documented that D&C 101:4 was a statement added by committee to distance the Church from polygamy rumors — it was never presented as a revelation received through seer stone, nor as God’s final word on marriage. D&C 132, whenever its practice began, was a full revelatory document addressed to a new situation. The removal of 101:4 was not a deceptive erasure but a recognition that the statement had been superseded by a later, substantive revelation — the same process by which the early Christian church superseded Levitical dietary laws under new revelation.
Argument V: David Whitmer Is Not a Reliable Neutral Witness
The ldsdiscussions.com overview relies heavily on David Whitmer’s 1887 pamphlet An Address to All Believers in Christ as a privileged insider testimony against the D&C changes. Several critical points must be made about this source:
1. Whitmer had become a hostile witness. By 1887 Whitmer had been excommunicated for over fifty years. He had deep personal grievances against Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and the institutional Church. His pamphlet was written precisely to undermine the Church’s truth claims. Courts of law disqualify witnesses for far less demonstrable bias.
2. Whitmer himself acknowledged the spiritual validity of the process. Even in the pamphlet, Whitmer did not deny that Joseph received revelations; he argued that only the pre-1835 revelations were valid. His testimony is thus about which revelations to trust, not about whether Joseph received revelation at all — a distinction that does not support the skeptic’s conclusion.
3. Whitmer’s account contains internal problems. He wrote that the Book of Commandments was “printed just exactly as they were arranged” by Joseph — yet we know the Book of Commandments itself contained variants from the earliest manuscript texts. The picture of pristine original revelations untouched until 1835 is not historically accurate even on the terms Whitmer sets.
4. Whitmer’s theological agenda drives his narrative. He believed revelation should have stopped after the Book of Mormon. This theological commitment, not historical evidence, drove his opposition to the D&C revisions. A witness whose conclusion was predetermined by theological preference cannot serve as an objective historical arbiter.
Argument VI: The “Tight vs. Loose Translation” Framework Is a False Dilemma
The ldsdiscussions.com argument repeatedly invokes a “tight translation” model — citing witnesses like Parley P. Pratt — to argue that revisions are inconsistent with the claimed revelatory process. There are multiple problems with this argument.
First, the witnesses cited describe how revelations were received and dictated, not how they were later reviewed and refined for publication. These are different stages of a multi-stage process. Modern apostle Elder Richard G. Scott described his own experience of receiving revelation as a process of receiving impressions, writing them down, and then making “minor changes” after further pondering — demonstrating that revision is an intrinsic part of prophetic reception, not evidence against it.
Second, the accounts of seamless, unrevised dictation come primarily from admirers describing specific sessions. They cannot be generalized to preclude all later review. Even Paul’s epistles — universally treated as inspired scripture — were composed, sent, and at some points revised or supplemented (Galatians 6:11; 2 Thessalonians 3:17).
Third, D&C 1:24 settles the question theologically: these revelations came “in weakness, after the manner of their language.” A “tight” word-for-word dictation model is not what God claimed to be doing. The critic is defending a model that the scripture itself rejects.
Argument VII: Church Leaders’ Statements and the Question of Dishonesty
The ldsdiscussions.com overview cites statements from leaders such as Legrand Richards, Joseph Fielding Smith, John A. Widtsoe, and Hugh B. Brown appearing to deny significant changes, and concludes they were lying. This framing is both uncharitable and logically flawed.
In context, these statements were typically addressing the claim that Joseph Smith made substantive theological reversals — that teachings were contradicted and doctrines overturned. In that narrow sense, Boyd K. Packer’s statement that “nothing fundamental has been altered” is defensible: no core doctrine of the Restoration was reversed by the textual revisions. That some leaders overstated the case reflects a failure of historical awareness, not a conspiracy of deception. The Church has now published the Joseph Smith Papers in their entirety, making every original manuscript of every revelation publicly accessible. An institution engaged in cover-up does not fund decades of scholarship designed to make its own historical record fully transparent.
Moreover, Elder Packer acknowledged in 1974 General Conference: “Of course there have been changes and corrections. Anyone who has done even limited research knows that.” This is not a church hiding its history; it is a church whose leaders had varying levels of historical literacy — a condition shared by every religious institution that has ever existed.
Argument VIII: The Pattern Argument Cuts Both Ways
The ldsdiscussions.com overview concludes that the D&C changes form part of a pattern demonstrating Joseph’s authorship of the revelations. This “pattern argument” deserves direct engagement, because the pattern cuts both ways.
The critic argues: Joseph changed revelations to benefit himself; the changes track his evolving theology; therefore he authored the revelations. But this argument has a fatal flaw: every genuine prophet whose writings we possess shows exactly the same pattern. Jeremiah’s oracles were edited after his death by his secretary Baruch and later editors. Isaiah’s book grew across generations. The Psalms were collected and revised over centuries. Paul revised his understanding of the Second Coming between 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians. If “the changes track evolving theology” proves fraud, then every biblical prophet is a fraud by the same logic.
Furthermore, the claim that changes “almost exclusively benefit Joseph Smith” is not sustained by the textual evidence. The revisions added organizational clarity (D&C 20), refined legal procedures (D&C 42), connected Oliver Cowdery’s gift to biblical precedent (D&C 8), and temporally qualified an early prophetic instruction that was incomplete (D&C 5). These are not the fingerprints of a self-aggrandizing fraudster; they are the fingerprints of a living institution refining its foundational documents as it grew and as understanding deepened.
Blake Ostler’s model of “creative co-participation” in revelation — which ldsdiscussions.com dismisses as arising “out of necessity” — is in fact one of the most sophisticated and academically defensible models of prophetic inspiration in religious studies. It aligns precisely with how mainstream biblical scholars understand prophetic literature. The critic dismisses it because it resolves the problem; that is not a counter-argument, that is question-begging.
Argument IX: The Joseph Smith Papers — Evidence of Institutional Transparency
The ldsdiscussions.com overview credits Jerald and Sandra Tanner for bringing D&C textual changes to public attention as if the Church had been suppressing them. This narrative is no longer tenable. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has invested tens of millions of dollars and decades of scholarly effort into the Joseph Smith Papers project — a multi-volume, fully peer-reviewed academic series that publishes the earliest manuscripts of every revelation in facsimile, with full transcriptions and annotations, making every textual variant publicly available to anyone in the world.
The Joseph Smith Papers project expressly documents the manuscript history of the revelations (Revelations and Translations, Volumes 1, 2, and 5), the exact wording of every early draft, and the nature of every editorial change made before publication. Gerrit Dirkmaat’s 2013 Ensign article “Great and Marvelous Are the Revelations of God” brought these findings to a general Church audience. Marlin K. Jensen published a full analysis of the manuscript revelation books in the Ensign in July 2009.
A church engaged in systematic deception about its foundational documents does not publish those documents in scholarly editions and fund the world’s most comprehensive historical archive of its own founding era. The Joseph Smith Papers project is the most powerful institutional refutation of the ldsdiscussions.com framing: the Church does not hide the changes. It publishes them.
Conclusion: What the Changes Actually Demonstrate
When we assess the D&C textual changes using the full body of historical and theological evidence, a coherent picture emerges that is consistent with — and indeed predicted by — the Church’s own founding documents:
Revelation came through a fallible human vessel in a crooked, broken, imperfect language (D&C 1:24). A divinely-authorized committee reviewed and refined these texts under Joseph’s supervision, in public, with signed prefaces, pursuant to conference authorization, with the explicit instruction to preserve the sense while clarifying the expression. The changes reflect the growth of a living institution receiving further light and knowledge line upon line. Every major scriptural tradition in history shows precisely this pattern. The Church now publishes every original manuscript in full scholarly editions. This is not the behavior of fraud. This is the behavior of a living prophetic tradition that takes its own history seriously.
The ldsdiscussions.com argument asks: “If any other religious leader was knowingly changing the revelations he claimed were from God, what would your reaction be?” The answer is: we would check whether God himself had disclosed that the revelations came through human weakness and language. We would check whether the process was transparent and authorized. We would check whether the changes were consistent with a growing understanding of an expanding church. We would compare the pattern with every other scriptural tradition we know. When we do all of that with the Doctrine and Covenants, the conclusion is not fraud. The conclusion is a precisely documented, historically paralleled, theologically coherent instance of living revelation.
The changes to the Doctrine and Covenants are not a problem for Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling. They are evidence of it.
Scholarly Sources
Steven C. Harper, “That They Might Come to Understanding: Revelation as Process,” in You Shall Have My Word, Religious Studies Center, BYU.
Grant Underwood, “Revelation, Text, and Revision: Insight from the Book of Commandments and Revelations,” BYU Studies Quarterly.
Grant Underwood, “Relishing the Revisions: Joseph Smith and the Revelatory Process,” BYU–Hawaii Devotional, October 13, 2009.
Marlin K. Jensen, “The Manuscript Revelation Books,” Ensign, July 2009.
Gerrit Dirkmaat, “Great and Marvelous Are the Revelations of God,” Ensign, January 2013.
Melvin J. Petersen, “Preparing Early Revelations for Publication,” Ensign, February 1985.
Robert J. Woodford, “How Our Doctrine and Covenants Came to Be,” Ensign, December 1984 – January 1985.
B.H. Roberts, ed., History of the Church, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1957), 1:173, note.
Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005).
Blake Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20 (Spring 1987): 66–123.
Raymond E. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981).
Orson Pratt, The Seer (1854).
Joseph Smith Papers Project, Revelations and Translations, vols. 1, 2, 5 (josephsmithpapers.org).
FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Doctrine and Covenants / Textual Changes” (fairlatterdaysaints.org).
Marvin S. Hill, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Winter 1972.
Boyd K. Packer, “We Believe All That God Has Revealed,” Ensign, May 1974.