Samuel Morris Brown, "Joseph Smith's Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 5, 2020 · 56m

Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have translated ancient scriptures. He dictated an American Bible from metal plates reportedly buried by ancient Jews in a nearby hill, and produced an Egyptian "Book of Abraham" derived from funerary papyri he extracted from a collection of mummies he bought from a traveling showman. In addition, he rewrote sections of the King James Version as a "New Translation" of the Bible. Smith and his followers used the term translation to describe the genesis of these English scriptures, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day…