The Joseph Smith Papers Project is tasked with gathering all
The Joseph Smith Papers that we can find anywhere in the world
and making them available. To this point,
we have published since 2008 six volumes in three different series:
the Journal series, the History series, and the Revelations
and Translation series.
And to date, the Revelations of Translation series has been
a series focused on the texts, the earliest texts of Mormonism,
the sacred text of the revelations,
and will now be forthcoming
the text of the Book of Mormon translation. Only with
the Documents series can one look at the history from
the beginning through to the end
on all of the existing surviving Joseph Smith documents. Every
Latter-day Saint, every student of Mormonism knows roughly
the story of the angel Moroni and the translation and
the publication in the Grandin Print Shop in Palmyra.
But as you look at this unfolding document by document,
one gets a very different view of the details of that process
and the challenges of that process and the complexities.
And one does feel at the end of going through that,
that you've experienced something totally differently than
the high-level overview we’ve had before.