On Secondary Source Infuence in the JST

ON SECONDARY SOURCE INFLUENCE IN THE JST

Kevin Barney

    Now that I have completed my informal blog commentary on the JST of Acts through Revelation, I feel as though I need to go back and say a few words on the topic of possible secondary source influence on the JST. I dealt with that issue to some extent in my formal article on 1 Corinthians in Dialogue. There I identified what struck me as four plausible secondary sources (the Clarke Commentary, Wesley’s Explanatory Notes, and the Campbell and Coverdale translations). When I did my first blog commentary (on 2 Corinthians) I didn’t bother with the two translations, as I saw no indication in 1 Corinthians that either of those was an influence on Joseph. Rather I just checked Clarke and Wesley and didn’t see any obvious influences from those sources there. Then when I did Galatians at the last minute I think I did a quick scan of Clarke only (not Wesley) and didn’t see anything. After that I decided to just put the issue up on Camilla Kimball’s proverbial shelf for another day; secondary source influence was rather tangential to what I was doing. But now that I have finished the commentary I feel the need to revisit this topic in general terms.

    1.    My working assumption, and I stress the word “assumption,” is that there is at least some secondary source influence on the JST.

    2.    My personal bias is that, however much secondary source influence may exist in the JST, I would prefer there be more of it. The reason is that I see the use of secondary sources as a scholarly impulse. To me consulting secondary sources would be analogous to Joseph formally and academically studying Hebrew with Joshua Seixas in 1836 Kirtland. I would view such influence as a plus, not a minus.

    3.    There seems to be a common understanding among some members of the Church that secondary source influence on the JST would be plagiarism and therefore unethical. I disagree. Years ago I taught a stake institute course on NT Greek. I asked scholarly bookseller Eisenbrauns to recommend a text, and they suggested William Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek, so that is what we used. It was a good introductory text, and Mounce is obviously an expert on the subject. He also did his own NT translation (which, if you are interested, you may find at the Bible Gateway under MOUNCE). Do I think for even a moment that Mounce didn’t frequently consult other translations to see how they resolved knotty problems? No, I do not. Did he footnote those influences? No, he did not. Do I therefore think he was engaged in plagiarism? No, I do not. The NET Bible (which was explicitly conceived as an internet-based Bible with extensive annotations) excepted, translations don’t usually provide those kinds of footnotes. To the extent Joseph consulted secondary sources in the course of preparing his translation, that consultation was minor and in my view ethical. 

    4.    The debate over this subject is largely represented by the work of Thomas Wayment on the one hand, who suggests that perhaps as much as five percent of the JST may have been influenced by the Clarke Commentary, and Kent Jackson on the other hand, who suggests that there is little if any influence of the Clarke Commentary on the JST. I don’t know either man personally or well, but I know them both through their writings and through some email correspondence I have had with them. I like them both and respect their work. When Bob Matthews died Kent became probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet on the JST. I share a certain connection with Kent, as we were both mentored by S. Kent Brown, a now retired professor of Ancient Scripture at BYU, although Kent Jackson was a young professor and I was an undergraduate student who worked for Professor Brown for a couple of years as his teaching assistant. Kent Jackson and I both contributed to the Kent Brown Festschrift. Although I have had less interaction with Thom Wayment, I have read and enjoyed many of his publications, and he is obviously a fine scholar. He has the job I dreamed of having when I was a student in BYU Classics in the early 80s. I published here on the blog a positive review of his recent LDS Study NT. Kent Jackson and Thom Wayment were long time colleagues at BYU Ancient Scripture, and Kent speaks of Thom with warmth and affection. This is not a personal matter, but a scholarly disagreement, and disagreeing about stuff is kind of what scholars do. In order to lower the temperature a little I am going to refer to both scholars familiarly by their first names, “Kent” and “Thom,” and in my mind’s eye I will envision this as a friendly conversation sitting around a table in the Cougar Eat. (References to “Thom” should be read as being inclusive of his research assistant, Haley Wilson-Lemmon.)

    5.    Kent told me about the Interpreter article he was working on critiquing Thom’s work, so I knew for a long time that it was coming out before it appeared. Given my biases I describe above I quite frankly assumed that I would largely disagree with it, but when it finally came out I had to acknowledge that he did a good job of problematizing the idea that those were all slam dunk Clarke derivations. Importantly, he took the position that it would be fine for Joseph to consult and use Clarke, the only question was whether he in fact had done that, which I thought was the proper framing. I am going to go over a handful of passages as an illustration of some of the complexities involved in this issue. For those interested the link to Kent’s article follows: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/read-offline/38073/some-notes-on-joseph-smith-and-adam-clarke.epub

    6.    Exodus 11:9 

KJV: Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you 

JST: Pharaoh will not hearken unto you. 

The Clarke commentary right out of the gate addresses this issue: 

“Though shall and will are both reputed signs of the future tense, and by many indiscriminately used, yet they make a most essential difference in composition in a variety of cases. For instance, if we translate lo yishma Pharaoh Shall not hearken, as in our text, the word shall strongly intimate that it was impossible for Pharaoh to hearken, and that God had placed him under that impossibility: but if we translate as we should do, Pharaoh Will not hearken, it alters the case most essentially, and agrees with the many passages in the preceding chapters, where he is said to have hardened his own heart; as this proves that he, without any impulsive necessity, obstinately refused to attend to what Moses said or threatened; and that God took the advantage of this obstinacy to work another miracle, and thus multiply his wonders in the land.”  

Now, if I were doing the research and saw that, I would think to myself “Slam Dunk!” But Kent uses his knowledge of the JST manuscripts to point out that the JST at least five times previously in the translation dictation sequence had already changed “shall” to “will,” and none of these was suggested by Clarke. So does this represent a Clarke influence or a JST tendency? It would seem to be the latter.

There is, however, a more specific answer to this question, which I just figured out a couple of nights ago. Thom gets partial credit, because the reason Clarke gives for the change from “shall” to “will” is exactly the reason that Joseph makes the change in this verse. But in the end Kent is still correct that Clarke is not the source for this change. Rather, Joseph made the change based on his independent knowledge of the KJV.

We cannot look at this question in isolation; rather, we must consider it in the context of the Exodus passages that talk about Pharaoh’s heart being hardened. There are ten passages that have the Lord hardening Pharaoh’s heart (4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8, 17). But there are also ten other passages that have Pharaoh hardening his own heart, which frankly I had not previously been aware of (7:13, 14, 22; 8:15, 19, 32; 9:7, 34, 35; 13:15). I always viewed the change from the Lord hardening Pharaoh’s heart to Pharaoh hardening his own heart as a common- sense change based on the injustice of punishing Pharaoh for something the Lord did and he had no control over. If you do a google search, you’ll see lots of people raising this same issue of seeming unfairness even today. The existence of passages explicitly saying Pharaoh hardened his own heart, however, raises the possibility that the JST revisions of the Lord hardening passages was an assimilation to those Pharaoh himself hardening passages.

The JST does not alter any of the Pharaoh hardening his own heart passages, because those passages would not be considered problematic. The JST also does not alter (as to shall v. will) most of the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart passages either, because most of them are framed in the past tense and this specific issue only arises where the modal verbs will and shall are used to create a future tense. 

Most of the other passages Kent mentions are not really relevant to this specific issue. The key passage, which Kent does address, is Exodus 4:21:

“And the Lord said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but and I will prosper thee; but Pharaoh will harden his heart, that he shall will not let the people go.”

This is the first of the Exodus “hardening the heart” passages. Note that the JST makes the same change as in 11:9, from shall—> will. I believe he is making that change for exactly the reason Clarke articulates at 11:9. So I would give Thom partial credit here. But the Clarke commentary was not the source for these JST revisions. We know this because the JST manuscript was sequential, the JST makes this shall—> will change in the context of the hardening the heart passages first in 4:21, but Clarke does not mention this issue in 4:21, but only later in 11:9. Now it’s true that in 4:21 Clarke quotes the text as “But I will harden his heart,” (emphasis added) here without comment changing KJV “shall” to “will,” but his lengthy note at this point does not explain the rationale for “will” here; that will only be explained later at 11:9.

    So the way I see it what Clarke explains at 11:9 is exactly the reason that Joseph made the change, having to do with the proper use of shall and will in KJV idiom. But Clarke is not the source for that change, because the JST made the same change previously at 4:21, where Clarke uses “will” in introducing the text but without further explanation there.

If the impetus for this change didn’t come from Clarke, where did it come from? I suspect Joseph either absorbed it from his extensive reading of the KJV or perhaps learned it formally at school. A Short Introduction to English Grammar articulates the basic principle:

“Will, in the first Person singular and plural, promises or threatens; in the second or third person, only foretells; shall, on the contrary, in the first Person, simply foretells; in the second and third Persons, promises, commands, or threatens.” (The text goes on to state that the reverse is true for interrogative sentences.)

To be honest, I don’t recall learning this distinction in school. But in my first job as a practicing lawyer, the senior partner and mentor to me was a brilliant guy (for the lawyers out there he had been on the University of Chicago Law Review), and had majored in English with minors in Latin and Greek (and he was in fact Greek himself). And he was a real stickler about this distinction and would always mark it with a red pen if we got it wrong. The old idea was that Joseph had barely a third-grade education, if that, but newer research suggests he had maybe a Jethro Bodine-like seventh grade education. So maybe this is a distinction Joseph had learned in school and applied that knowledge to the translation project. That of course is total speculation, but in any event, even though Clarke correctly described the principle, this change does not seem to have come from Clarke.

    7.     Isaiah 34:7 

KJV: the unicorns shall come down 

JST: the re-em shall come down 

Joseph of course had not yet learned Hebrew, and this is Hebrew, so I figured Kent would have no choice but to accept this as secondary source influence. And it turns out he does—just not from Clarke. Clarke gives the singular Hebrew word as reem. Since Joseph hadn’t studied Hebrew yet, he would have taken that as a single syllable word pronounced with a single long e sound like English “ream.” But in Hebrew there is an aleph, a guttural letter, in the middle, which would often be represented with an apostrophe, re’em (pronounced reh-AIM), in transliteration. So it was not a monosyllable but a two-syllable word (the first vowel a shewa, the second a tsere). Clarke gives no hint of this, but the hyphen in re-em seems to be a non-standard diacritic meant to represent the guttural letter aleph (or at least the fact that there are two syllables to the word). How did Joseph possibly know such a thing? That knowledge had to come from whatever secondary source Joseph got it from, but it wasn’t suggested by Clarke. As of now, the source of that transliteration is a mystery, as there are lots of examples of re’em from Joseph’s time period (representing the aleph with an apostrophe), but none that anyone has been able to yet find of re-em with a hyphen. Now on a personal note let me confess that I was long wrong on this subject myself. I assumed that Clarke was the source for re-em, but I hadn’t looked at Clarke carefully and I just never focused on the hyphen. It took me actually looking the Hebrew word up in a lexicon to grasp the significance of the hyphen. So I acknowledge that in the past I myself whiffed on this one.

    8. 1 Corinthians 15:52 

KJV: in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump 

JST: in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the trump

    I had hoped to be able to consult Thom’s contribution to Producing Ancient Scripture before publishing my Dialogue article. That book was long slated to appear in February of 2020, but the pandemic changed things and as it turned out I did not have the benefit of Thom’s chapter for my article. When it finally appeared, I was chagrined to see that I had apparently missed this example of possible Clarke influence in First Corinthians. But when Kent’s article appeared, I actually read Clarke’s commentary on this verse. And I think Kent is correct that Clarke was not suggesting that “last” should be changed to “sound of the.” As Kent writes: 

“Wayment’s statement that Joseph Smith’s revision follows “a clarification first proposed by Clarke” is untrue. Clarke makes no proposal anywhere in this verse, and the words from Clarke that Wayment quotes have to do with a later clause in the verse that Joseph Smith did not revise. The Prophet removed the word “last,” but it is evident that Clarke did not want it removed, because he repeats it in his commentary. That Joseph Smith removed it shows that there is no relationship between his revision and Clarke.”

It is true that Clarke mentions “the sound of a trumpet” but that is referring to the subsequent clause “For the trumpet shall sound” and not the initial clause at issue “At the last trump.” I will quote here what Clarke writes with respect to the subsequent clause: “For the trumpet shall sound—By this the apostle confirms the substance of the tradition, there shall be the sound of a trumpet on this great day. . . .” Now, I suppose it’s possible that Joseph misread Clarke here and thought he was talking about the prior clause. I personally think the explanation I give in my article is more likely, that the insertion of “sound of the” in the first clause was an assimilation to “the trumpet shall sound” in the second clause. As I tried to make clear in my article, assimilation is a common principle of textual criticism that has been underappreciated in the JST. In my Dialogue article I found that over 7% of the revisions were based on assimilation, and in my blog commentary on the JST I have catalogued many additional examples of assimilation. So I think the revision is based on assimilation to the word “sound” later in the verse (or possibly to the expression “sound of the trumpet” that occurs 15 times in the KJV Old Testament). But I suppose it is possible that I am wrong about that and the revision was based on a mistaken reading of Clarke.

    9. 1 Corinthians 15:26

    KJV: The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death

    JST: The last enemy, death, shall be destroyed

    To me there are two possible ways Joseph could have come up with this change. The Clarke Commentary begins “The last enemy – Death, shall be destroyed.” Kent correctly states that Clarke did not intend that to be a revision to the word order of the sentence; the dash indicates Clarke is commenting on the opening three words of the passage, “The last enemy.” While that is certainly true, Joseph may not have fully appreciated the intended import of the dash. The other way to get there is via the italics, by removing the italicized words and reordering the remaining words to make sense. In my blog commentary one thing that became clear was the persistence of Joseph’s concern with italicized text. I see either explanation as plausible, so this will be up to the sensibilities of the reader.

    10. Romans 11:2

    KJV: how he maketh intercession to God against Israel

    JST: how he maketh complaint to God against Israel 

    I still remember when I first read this verse. I had a fairly common experience in that my heart sank. “How in the world am I supposed to make sense of that?” I wondered. But my almost universal experience was that once I dug into it I felt as though I could visualize what Joseph was doing and seeing, and this passage turned out the same way. The Greek word rendered “make intercession” here means to approach, appeal to or plead with an official or person in authority. Think of the Bible movies you have seen; when a delegation goes to the ruler in power, sure, they’ll start by stroking his ego and flattering him, but at some point they will get around to their real reason for coming, which is to complain and petition for better things. So I thought I had an angle for making sense of this revision. But then I found something else; the end of my commentary reads: “Interestingly for the JST revision here, the UBS Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament cites as a possible meaning of the verb “to bring complaints,” citing Acts 25:24, since appeals by the people to leaders often naturally include complaints. The CEV, NIRV and NLT use ‘complained’ here and GW uses ‘complains.’” So I was pretty happy with that discovery.

    Now there were a handful of times during my commentary project where I thought a JST reading was almost too good to be true, so I would check Clarke just in case. I remember checking substance—> assurance in Hebrews 11:1 because the change seemed almost too good (and there was no Clarke influence there). So I looked this passage up in Clarke, and found this line: Elijah “in his addresses to God, made his complaint against Israel.” It is true that Clarke was not suggesting the verse be translated that way; this is just background information. But I did find it a tad suspicious that Joseph just happened to use that specific word that was attested in the Clarke commentary.

    Kent points out that what Elijah was doing in the following verse was in fact complaining, and so the “make intercession” of this verse made no sense and was replaced by the more descriptive “maketh complaint.” I actually like that resolution better than the one I first came up with myself as described above. “Maketh intercession” to me is not adequately descriptive of the Greek text.

    So, between my own reconstruction and that of Kent, you can get to “maketh complaint” without the need for Clarke. But the fact that I originally thought “complaint” was too good to be true but then saw the word in Clarke means I’m not prepared to reject that completely as a possible Clarke influence.

    11.    Conclusion

    The above is just the tip of the iceberg. My overarching sense is that many of the proposed Clarke derivations in the JST do not in fact come from Clarke. But there are other cases that are not so clear, are more ambivalent and can be argued either way. So where does that leave us?

    To me Thom’s original estimate of 5% of JST revisions deriving from Clarke is clearly too high. (In fairness to him, that was explicitly a very preliminary number.) I think Kent has succeeded in arguing that many of the posited Clarke-influenced revisions do not in fact derive from Clarke. There are others, however, that are more equivocal; to extend my “slam dunk” basketball metaphor, some of these strike me as 50/50 jump balls. So 5% is I think definitely too high, but 0% is too low (for re-em if nothing else), and something approaching an exact percentage (even at substantially less than 5%) of Clarke influence is probably indeterminable. So how should we think about and characterize possible secondary source influence (not just limited to Clarke) in the JST?

    Well, sometimes it helps that professionally I’m not an academic but an attorney. And in my area of practice we have a lot of what we call de minimis rules. So let’s say a City wants to build a new municipal building, and they want to finance it with tax-exempt bonds (which can only finance public or charitable purposes). For some reason they want to include a gift shop in the building, which will be leased to and operated by a private, for-profit entity. One option would be to find a different source of financing for the gift shop. But if the gift shop, which is private use unrelated to the municipal purpose of the building, costs less than 5% of the bond proceeds, you can go ahead and finance it with the tax-exempt bonds. Why? Because the Internal Revenue Code considers less than 5% unrelated private business use as de minimis, or in laymen’s terms “not enough to worry about.” The Latin expression de minimis literally means “concerning the least things”; a good English synonym would be “negligible.” That is, it’s not nothing, it exists, but it’s not enough to worry about.    So my suggestion is that we remain open to the possibility of secondary source influence in the JST, but that for the time being at least we think of that influence as de minimis or negligible.