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LDS Perspectives Podcast LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 43: The Lectures on Faith with Noel Reynolds (Released on July 5, 2017) Laura Hales: Hello and welcome to the LDS Perspectives Podcast. This is Laura Harris Hales, and I am here today with Noel Reynolds to talk about an article that was published back in 2005 from a lecture he gave at the 2003 Mormon Historical Association meetings entitled, “The Case for Sidney Rigdon as Author of the Lectures on Faith.” Noel, tell us a little bit about your background because you taught political science at BYU, but you’re known for you research in Book of Mormon and historical studies. Noel Reynolds: You’re exactly right, BYU hired me in 1970 to teach philosophy, particular political and legal philosophy classes, which were my specialty. I did continue to teach that throughout my career there. But I also was involved in teaching Book of Mormon classes, one a semester usually. This led to involvement with a lot of other topics, church history and so forth. Over time, I’ve actually published a couple of articles in church history in addition to quite a few things in Book of Mormon studies. Those kinds of things, even though they were more my hobbies than my main line of scholarly research, obviously attracted a lot more attention from an LDS community, things on the rule of law and legal philosophy. Laura Hales: Oh, I bet. Noel can you start us out by reviewing a little background. Noel Reynolds: The Lectures on Faith come out of the Kirtland School, it was called, the winter of 1834, 1835. There is almost no documentation on this school. We have a few reports about it in the journals of some of the participants and the most interesting reports were written 50 years after the fact. It’s really uncertain what exactly it was, even who taught it. It was presided over on all accounts by Sidney Rigdon and included simple things like handwriting and grammar. This was an attempt to help the brethren be a little more sophisticated; most of them did not have a strong educational background. But one dimension of it was to discuss gospel topics, and faith was one that was featured by those accounts. That school has since gained the label of School of the Elders or School of the Prophets, but at the time it was just called the Kirtland School. LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 43: The Lectures on Faith with Noel Reynolds Laura Hales: How does what they were doing in that Kirtland School end up as something that we know as the Lectures on Faith? Noel Reynolds: That’s very controversial. Different people have different theories about what that connection might be. We do have the seven lectures that were published in 1835 that were combined with Joseph Smith’s revelations and in a new book called Doctrine and Covenants. The seven lectures were prepended to Joseph’s revelations in the 1835 publication and were subsequently removed from the Doctrine and Covenants in 1921 when the church did a major overhaul of the scriptures. After they were removed, they gained the title Lectures on Faith. That’s in the 20th century and since then that is how we know them. You can buy them separately now. If you buy them from Deseret Book, it will say they’re written by Joseph Smith. If you buy them through Seagull, it says probably written by Sidney Rigdon. That’s getting to my topic. Laura Hales: Isn’t it true that it was the original “doctrine” of the Doctrine and Covenants? Noel Reynolds: The name title doctrine was added in 1835 to account for the lectures. That is correct. Laura Hales: I’m just going to segue here and talk about the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants. When it was canonized, it was a unique situation. Quite an interesting situation. I’m sure you’re aware of it. Do you want to go over that and how that might fit into how the Lectures on Faith even got into the Doctrine and Covenants? Noel Reynolds: Yes, it’s actually a long and complicated story. I hope I can make sense of it in a brief way. With the failure of the attempted publication in Missouri in 1833, the Brethren knew that they needed to produce the revelations of Joseph Smith in some kind of usable format for the members of the church. So in 1834, a committee was formed consisting of the members of the first presidency of the church to pursue that publication. These were Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams. At the time the project was undertaken, it was focused on just Joseph Smith’s revelations. By the time it came to fruition, it had grown to include not only his edited revelations but also the seven lectures from the Kirtland School and two additional sections, we would call them today, written by Oliver Cowdery, probably with some help from some other people. One of those is an article on marriage and the second one is in our LDS Perspectives Podcast at www.ldsperspectives.com Page 2 of 10 Episode 43: The Lectures on Faith with Noel Reynolds present Doctrine and Covenants on politics, both written primarily by Sidney Rigdon. Sidney Rigdon as we’ve come to understand now was the author of the lectures. The 1835 edition, now called Doctrine and Covenants, actually included writing from each of those three members of the first presidency. Interestingly, with Sidney Rigdon’s lectures put at the front in spite of the fact that there was a Lord’s preface revealed in now our section one of the Doctrine and Covenants. But all that gets pushed back and Sidney’s lectures go at the front. It should be mentioned in this regard that for months during the last stages of publication Sidney and Oliver were alone in Kirtland. Joseph and nearly all of the 12 apostles were off on missions. So there is this interesting phenomenon that their word becomes prominent. The canonization that you refer to occurs for some reason a week before any of these other general authorities return to Kirtland. It’s pretty complicated, and in retrospect pretty clear that Sidney and Oliver had gotten some ideas that are pretty ambitious promoting some of their own work here, trying to temper some of Joseph’s work. These Brethren had been involved in earlier attempts to improve Joseph’s revelations, and in Sidney’s case to actually take over leadership of the church when Joseph had been out of town for an extended period. Things aren’t as smooth in Kirtland as they are in Salt Lake City in 2017. Laura Hales: Oh, definitely. But that context is really interesting. It seems less weird that they have things in the Doctrine and Covenants after you pointed out that they were each members of the first presidency. Then also we know that there was this kind of tug and pull as they tried to figure out their roles. At first, Oliver and Joseph were co-presidents, and then Joseph kind of said, “No, Oliver. I need to be the head here.” Noel Reynolds: I think this is not easy for modern church members to appreciate. Joseph had never been the head of a church. All they had for examples were the Protestant churches around them, frontier Protestant churches by the way, which themselves were very fluid in their organization. It’s not until 1838 that Joseph understands the necessity of establishing his own priority as president of the church. Laura Hales: When did you first become interested in the authorship question in regard to the Lectures on Faith? LDS Perspectives Podcast at www.ldsperspectives.com Page 3 of 10 Episode 43: The Lectures on Faith with Noel Reynolds Noel Reynolds: I think I probably read the Lectures on Faith or read in them when I was a freshman at BYU 100 years ago and was kind of surprised at the philosophical and kind of lofty rhetorical tone that the lectures take. Because I study philosophy, I probably wasn’t very impressed with the lectures at that time. But I think I probably just accepted what other people had said, that Joseph Smith was the author of them. Then after being on the faculty at BYU for really almost 20 years, I was approached to do a book review on a book that had been written and edited, assembled by a group that was becoming pretty aggressive in their promotion of the Lectures on Faith. I thought if they want me to review the book I’ll review it. And not knowing a whole lot about it, I read the book and especially the historical section, which gives the background on the Lectures on Faith and the reasons why they thought Joseph Smith wrote the lectures and was almost stunned to see how thin that evidence was. At that time, I wrote a kind of a long review. I mentioned the fact that there seemed to be a lot of questions in the air unresolved. Then that kind of set me going over the next 10, 15 years just thinking about it. I came up with a second version after I had accumulated a lot more research on the topic. Then in 2004, I stumbled across what had always been lacking and that is some real concrete evidence one way or the other on who was the author. So I rewrote all this for this paper that was then published in the Journal of Mormon History to show that in fact we have very clear evidence that it was Sidney Rigdon that wrote it, which corresponds to all the circumstantial evidence that had been assembled previously.
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