This book is a must have for anyone interested in reading the Bible the way it is supposed to read, with many of the translation errors corrected. The Prophet, Joseph Smith, was directed by the Lord to translate the Bible. He went through the entire Bible making inspired corrections, which clarify many points of doctrine. He restored some 4,000 verses. This reference work is ideal for Sunday School, seminary, missions, & personal Bible study. Its 5x8x3/4 size makes it a convenient, easy reading companion to the Bible.
Other books on the market require us to make word-for-word comparisons or to look in an index to find the corrections. Now we can see all of the corrections the Prophet made right in the Bible text, without digging through footnotes or indexes.
This book was compiled by using an original edition of the Inspired Version of the Bible, which was published by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1867. It includes the Joseph Smith Translation (JST). By making word-for-word comparisons with the King James Version of the Bible, it was possible to determine the corrections.
Dr. Robert J. Matthews of Brigham Young University studied the JST for about 25 years. He reviewed what had been published and compared it to the original manuscripts. His conclusion was that what has been printed is very accurate, aside from a few publication errors. He listed the errors in his book entitled, A Plainer Translation: Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible, A History and Commentary. The publication errors Matthew noted are corrected in this book; so now we are as close as we can get to what Joseph actually corrected.
He deleted portions of Bible verses that were incorrect, added parts that had been left out, and revised many verses to clarify them. For example, in Matthew, he revised over 55% and added 10%. It's interesting to note that experts say that the revisions in Matthew are in fact Matthew's style of writing; and the revisions in John are in John's style.
We can see from the example at the beginning, some of the "plain and precious things which have been taken away" (1 Nephi 13:40) and why the Lord directed Joseph Smith to translate the Bible:
. . . wherefore I give unto you that ye may now translate it, that ye may be prepared for the things to come. For verily I say unto you, that great things await you; (Doctrine and Covenants 45:60-62)
Joseph Smith considered the translation to be ". . . part of his divine calling as a prophet of God." He accomplished it in about three years, during 1830-1833 and spent the remainder of his life (about 11 years) making improvements. Although he went through the entire Bible, he did not correct everything, nor was he permitted by God to restore some parts. However, he did intend to publish what he had done and in fact did print extracts from the translation.
The Holy Bible and The Pearl of Great Price, published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1979 and 1981, respectively, contain parts of the translation but not all. These works do make it much easier to read some large, extracted portions of the translation and to find many of the corrections by checking the footnotes. However, it is rather tedious to check each verse of the Bible to see if there is a Joseph Smith translation for that verse and then, if it exists, to find it and mentally insert the correction into the Bible verse.
As Robert J. Matthews wrote in his book, A Plainer Translation:
. . . to obtain maximum benefit from the New Translation one must read . . . in large segments, to catch the flavor and flow of the language. . . . Much is lost when one reads only isolated passages, or only from a commentary.
This work was organized to fill the need to be able to read the Bible with Joseph Smith's translation contiguously.
Bruce R. McConkie wrote:
Such Biblical revisions as have been made may be used with safety, and parts of these are now published by the Church in its standard works.
At last, we have a companion book to our Bible, that allows us to easily read the Bible passages with the Joseph Smith restorations clearly indicated. As a bonus, we can see the words attributed to Jesus while he was on the earth. Reflection upon the corrections and the words of Christ can l ead to significant improvements in our understanding of the Bible and, hopefully, the way we live. What could be more important as we approach the time of the Second Coming of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?
