The Authorship Debate Concerning Lectures on Faith: Exhumation and Reburial
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The Authorship Debate concerning Lectures on Faith: Exhumation and Reburial Noel B. Reynolds In 1835, Joseph Smith’s revelations, given for the direction of the restored church, were published a second time under the title Doctrine and Covenants. This publication contained signicant additions to the original 1833 Book of Commandments. Prominently placed at the beginning of this sacred collection were seven “lectures” derived from presentations at the School of the Elders in Kirtland the preceding winter. These seven lectures were apparently conceived as the rst installment in a projected “course of lectures designed to unfold . the doctrine of Jesus Christ.”1 All seven lectures take up the doctrine of faith as “the rst principle in revealed religion and the foundation of all righteousness.”2 There is no evidence of subsequent efforts to follow through with similar treatments of other basic gospel principles. The seven lectures were included in subsequent editions of the revelations until the 1921 edition, when they were discontinued with the explanation that they were not really part of canonical LDS scripture because “they were never presented to nor accepted by the church as being otherwise than theological lectures or lessons.”3 These lectures were only rarely used by scripture scholars and were almost never mentioned or quoted in general conference talks. Known in their subsequently separated state as the Lectures on Faith, these lectures were published and attracted a small and devoted following.4 While there have been rumors that the lectures might be resurrected for inclusion in an enhanced edition of LDS scripture, nothing has ever materialized. More recently, in 1990, BYU professors Larry E. Dahl and Charles D. Tate Jr. produced a new edition of the lectures, which they published with supplementary chapters on each lecture drawn from a special conference designed to promote them and to enhance our awareness and understanding of them.5 It is worth noting that the title of the 1835 publication, Doctrine and Covenants, was actually devised to accommodate these lectures. The 1833 publication of Joseph Smith’s revelations was variously referred to as the Book of Commandments, the Book of Covenants, or the Articles and Covenants of the Church, following the name of its lead section as it was circulated principally in handwritten copies. In 1835, when the lectures (part 1), under the title “On the Doctrine of the Church of the Latter Day Saints,” were combined with Joseph’s revelations (part 2), under the title “Covenants and Commandments,” the resulting volume was labeled Doctrine and Covenants to signal the two major divisions of the contents.6 The range of reactions to the lectures within the LDS community is not easy to explain. From the beginning, there appears to have been a rather general disinterest on the part of most church members and leaders.7 Also, there have been doubts about the lectures evident in the judgment of those who found them to be excessively “Protestant” in tone or content and to contain teachings not easily reconciled with standard Latter-day Saint doctrinal understandings. Indeed, this perspective played some role in the decision of the church to abandon the lectures in the 1921 re-editing of the Doctrine and Covenants.8 Supporters of the lectures, on the other hand, found them to be among the most sublime of all religious writings and fortied with doctrines that were essential to a clear grasp of the true LDS position. The church never chose to enter this debate in any ofcial or public way. These differing views over the value of the lectures in the intellectual tradition of the Latter-day Saints were sometimes developed and expressed in terms of a debate about authorship. Those who disliked the lectures usually attributed them principally to Sidney Rigdon. Their promoters assumed Joseph Smith to be the author. No one has yet produced solid historical evidence from the 1834–35 time period to establish or refute either view. The 1990 volume on the Lectures on Faith presents a good example of this. The historical background presented there underplays the evidence for Rigdon’s leading role. Most contributors assumed Joseph Smith’s authorship as an unquestioned fact. Recognizing the impossibility of settling this question with certainty on the basis of information available to scholars at this time, I wish to offer a more vigorous exploration of the thesis that Sidney Rigdon may have been the sole or principal author of the lectures. While this analysis makes the Rigdon thesis look more promising than the alternatives, the full truth of the matter is likely sealed in the memories of the actual participants in the key events of 1834 and 1835, during which time period these distinctive compositions were produced. Recognition of Sidney Rigdon’s probable leading role in the writing of the lectures would not, however, settle the question of their worth or importance for Latter-day Saints. It would only serve as a warning that the discussion of those issues should not proceed on the assumption that Joseph Smith was their author, an assumption that has helped to elevate the lectures to something near scriptural status in the eyes of some interpreters. The Authorship Issue The issue that continues to provoke the most interest relative to the Lectures on Faith is their authorship. Who wrote them? The available evidence tends to undermine the view that Joseph Smith was primarily responsible for them. It is unfortunate that some feel so strongly about maintaining Joseph Smith’s authorship or responsibility for these lectures. This makes it difcult for other faithful Latter-day Saints to assess the evidence critically, and it also plays into the hands of critics of the church and Joseph Smith. Critics nd much in the lectures and in the church’s eventual exclusion of them from the scriptural canon with which to embarrass faithful Mormons.9 Insisting that Joseph was responsible for the lectures only makes the critics’ task easier. For example, Lecture 5 provides Dan Vogel with his principal evidence for an evolving Mormon concept of God that in 1835 reected “Sidney Rigdon’s Primitivistic background and not the orthodox LDS view of three distinct personages in the godhead.”10 Opinions on the authorship and status of the lectures in Latter-day Saint literature have varied widely among both scholars and church authorities. Elders Bruce R. McConkie and Joseph Fielding Smith both saw Joseph Smith as a principal author of the lectures and believed he had approved them in full, having revised and prepared them for publication.11 However, that view does not appear to have been generally shared by the church leadership that discontinued ofcial publication of the seven lectures in 1921, allowed the copyright to lapse, and explicitly reiterated that these lectures were not scripture but merely “helps.”12 The “Explanatory Introductions” of subsequent editions have included such explanations as this one from page v of the 1966 edition: Certain lessons, entitled “Lectures on Faith,” which were bound in with the Doctrine and Covenants in some of its former issues, are not included in this edition. These lessons were prepared for use in the School of the Elders, conducted in Kirtland, Ohio, during the winter of 1834–1835; but they were never presented to nor accepted by the Church as being otherwise than theological lectures or lessons. At least some of the presiding brethren possibly held the view published later by Elder John A. Widtsoe, who believed they were “written by Sidney Rigdon and others.”13 Three independent authorship studies conducted in recent decades and using different reputable techniques all conclude that Sidney Rigdon was the primary author of the lectures. Based on these studies, not a single lecture can conclusively be attributed to Joseph Smith. Authorship Studies The rst authorship study on the lectures was done at the request of the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1976. Elinore H. Partridge performed a traditional qualitative stylistic analysis on Joseph Smith’s holographic writings and compared these to the lectures. She identied a set of clear differences between the writing styles of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and used these as guides in her analysis of the lectures. While she could nd possible inuences of Joseph Smith in the images, examples, scriptural references, and phrasing of the lectures, she was “quite certain that Joseph Smith neither wrote nor dictated the major portion of the lectures.”14 Similarly, some passages reminded her of Oliver Cowdery’s argumentative style, while other passages and features of the lectures did not seem to t any of the potential authors she considered. Unfortunately, she did not extend her analysis to include contemporary Protestant lectures of this same type that might have provided stylistic elements possibly borrowed by the Kirtland lecturers. While she found Sidney Rigdon’s style to be dominant throughout most of the seven lectures and thought he most likely prepared them for publication, she warned that the style was not consistently his throughout.15 At about the same time, Alan J. Phipps was writing a master’s thesis on the authorship of the lectures at Brigham Young University.16 Phipps used the quantitative technique of counting “function words” in the writings of several candidates for authorship of the lectures and then compared their frequency ratios with frequencies in the seven lectures as a whole. He concluded that of the possible authors considered, the function word frequency of the lectures most nearly matched the writings of Sidney Rigdon. In spite of the brevity of the individual lectures, the same technique was invoked to assess their authorship, one at a time.