Sadly, I often dread spending time with many LDS members. Every serious theological issue seems to be answered by a platitude. Most feel they understand evil, good, God, etc. — and they have some simple quote to prove it. Typically, a quote we’ve all heard a hundred times.

That is OK for children. But that is not OK for someone who has been a member for 20 years, and has been led to believe that they are following in the footsteps of a real prophet.

Is this intellectualism? Or is it preparation for something very serious? Personally, I can say that I wasn’t prepared for my exposure to real “extra-ordinary” events.

Perhaps it does, for you and for others. But editors have to make decisions, and that is nothing new. Academic disciplines that work with older texts face the same issues all the time, and it’s simply false to think that there is some perfect expression of ideal editorial principles that will solve all the problems of teaching the Canterbury Tales (or whatever) to everyone. Some editions are better than others for some purposes. Sometimes a modern translation is necessary, sometimes a normalized Middle English is preferable, sometimes it’s nice to look at a diplomatic transcription of a particular manuscript, and sometimes it’s necessary to consult a high-quality facsimile or the original.

But what’s useful for whom? What portion of English students are prepared to benefit from a facsimile? It’s the vanishingly small percentage who are both Chaucer specialists and experienced with using manuscripts. Most doctoral-level English medievalists will never need anything beyond a normalized edition, unless they’re dissertating on Chaucer. Most bachelor’s students won’t need anything beyond a modern translation. Requiring an “Intro to Brit Lit” class to look at a facsimile or Middle English edition instead of a translation would be foolish, because it would leave the students with a poorer understanding of Chaucer by presenting it in a way they aren’t prepared to learn from. Sure, a teacher can and should bring in supplementary material so students have an idea about the original form of the text they’re reading, and a really motivated student might seek it out on his or her own, but the primary form of pedagogy has to be in a form that most students are prepared for.

Returning to Joseph Smith, how many members of an average class are prepared to read diplomatic transcriptions of 19th-century documents? Closer to 0 than to 1, I’d guess. Reading texts with non-standard punctuation and spelling is difficult, and liable to be misinterpreted as the sign of substandard intellect rather than as variation typical of the time or a lack of formal schooling. It would hinder the learning of JS’s thought for most people.

For those class members who are interested in original documents, the transcription is available from the church’s own website, as Natalie points out in her post.

They could have, if that were in any way at all the goal of the manual.

“Presenting the statement as if it were a non-millennial, emotionally even-keeled expression of familial love and duty is simply misleading. It if was done deliberately because the millennialism was seen as embarrassing or something, then it crosses the line from misleading to deceptive.”

Garbage. They took out the parts that were off topic. that portion of the letter is presented elsewhere in the manual: In the chapter that is concerned with those issues.

I certainly think the manuals would be better if they took complete discourses so that we got the context of what was being said, and so that we weren’t prooftexting prophets’ statements, but prooftexting is decidedly what these manuals seem designed to do. As others have said, if I want a systematic introduction to the Gospel as JS understood it, I am certainly going elsewhere than the JS manual.

I could, of course, be completely wrong–I’ve been in Primary since the manual came into currency and haven’t read a single paragraph of it–but I have to say, I’m not concerned that it ellipses-out portions of the Prophet’s thoughts.