Joseph Smith began his Bible translation project by June of 1830.

Rather than a new translation from an ancient language,

he made the biblical text more easily understood for his followers.

This project helps us to think about translation more broadly.

The Joseph Smith papers described what we call the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible,

or the JST, as an inspired process of revising, clarifying, and augmenting the text of the Bible.

Joseph began with the Old Testament and then moved to the New Testament when prompted by the Lord in a March 1831 revelation,

the one we know is Section 45. Though never prepared

for publication, Joseph changed more than 3,000 verses of the biblical text. During the month of March

1832, Joseph worked on the translation as they neared the end of the New Testament with the Book of Revelation.

Though Joseph later said the Book of Revelation is one of the plainest books God ever caused to be written,

he still had questions, like many 19th century Christians and many of the saints.

My name is Denise Johnson. I'm a Willis Center of Research Associate at the Maxwell Institute, and I, along with Joseph

Stewart, the public communication specialist at the Institute, will be discussing each

week's block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints come full of the

curriculum.

We aren't here to present a lesson, but rather hit on a few key things from the

scripture block that we believe will help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to

inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the historic gospel of Jesus Christ

and to engage the world of religious ideas. And I want to start with, questions are good. If we want to learn

anything from Joseph in Section 77, questions are good. Something I think is crucial to understand

is that many of us have been taught that there are bad questions, or we have heard the cliche that

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