The Joseph Smith Project

The way things are going, this could be bigger than The Alan Parsons Project. BYU Newsnet published a short article giving a welcome overview of this ongoing effort to publish all of Joseph Smith's writings, every last document. It is a great way to get documents out of musty, inaccessible archives and into the hands of interested readers like you and me. Not that we'll ever read even a fraction of the 5000+ documents they are compiling, but it's nice to know we could if we wanted to! See also recent posts on the project at Mormon Wasp, here and here.

Comments

[Ann]

How complete are these papers going to be? Are they really going to publish everything?

[Geoff J]

No way Dave -- Nothing could get bigger than the Alan Parsons Project. (I have several of APP songs in my iPod as we speak...)

[RoastedTomatoes]

Geoff,

I'm sure Dave was actually referring to the giant laser that Dr. Evil built to destroy the Earth in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. That was definitely the bigger of the two Alan Parsons Projects.

Sorry to disappoint you...

[Nate Oman]

Ann: I suspect that the answer to your question is no. There are three basic issues here. The first goes to how you define "the papers of Joseph Smith." Does this include only holographic documents? Documents dictated to scribes? Documents written by scribes? Documents published under Joseph's name? Transcriptions of now lost documents into other documents, such as letters and diaries, etc.? Minutes of meetings where Joseph Smith presided? Was present? Participated? Repetitive documents? Do you publish every single marriage liscense with Joseph's signature on it? Every negotiable note? Every mortgage? Any definition will leave some matters out.

The second issue has to do with documents related to temple ordinances. In particular, there is a diary/ledger/revelation book called "The Book of the Law of the Lord" from the Nauvoo period. Large portions of this have already been published by both Signature and Deseret Book. My understanding is that certain portions of this book contain materials relating to the endowment and other temple ceremonies that probably won't be published.

Third, I suppose that a final issue would be with disciplinary councils. For example, a couple of years ago the Church published a huge number of documents to DVDs. These included records of Church disciplinary councils. In these records names were blacked out. I've no idea how this will be handled in the papers.

The bottom line is that the Papers will inevitably be incomplete in certain ways.