How do Latter-day Saints View the Bible?
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“Indeed, if the bible itself is true, it is but a portion of the inspired writings that God intended for the world.”
~ Benjamin Winchester, early LDS writer
Samuel H. Smith didn’t believe his older brother’s message. The restoration of Christianity, angelic visitations, new scripture? It all seemed a bit much. Joseph Smith tried everything to convince Samuel, even by “appealing to the Holy Bible for the truth of the doctrines” he shared. But no matter how much Joseph reasoned with his brother, he wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t until Samuel retreated to the privacy of a forest in prayer that he decided to join his brother’s church. In the end, the Bible didn’t convince him; it was a spiritual experience.
In a way, Samuel’s conversion to Mormonism foreshadowed the relationship his new religion would develop with the Bible. As an authority, it was foundational but not final, and as a source of revelation, it was required but needed reinforcement. This perspective ran contrary to most Protestant convictions in Smith’s day, which viewed the Bible as the greatest source of revelation. But as one LDS scholar observed, early Mormonism “demoted scripture to the status of stream rather than fountain.” The fountain, of course, was a re-opened heaven pouring out revelation in myriad ways, especially through the mouth of a living prophet.
Still, it’s a mistake for traditional Christians to assume Latter-day Saints do not swim in a biblical stream. Three-fourths of LDS scripture is the Bible, which saturates the other texts with citations and allusions. Every few years, members of the LDS Church study the Bible collectively. BYU leverages its ancient scripture department to publish its own commentary, and fortunate students can even study the Bible in the Holy Land at the university’s Jerusalem campus. In terms of content, it’s difficult not to find the Bible in Mormonism. LDS disagreement with the broader Christian community isn’t whether the Bible is important, but why.
So, what is the Latter-day Saint view of the Bible? Before we can answer this question, we need to ask a more basic one: What is the Bible?
The Inspiration of the Bible
God delights to reveal himself in the “handywork” of his creation (see Ps. 19:1–6; Rom. 1:16–32) and in the “divers manners” he communicates (Heb. 1:1). Theologians call these general and special revelation, respectively. General, because it is available generally to all people across time and culture; special, because it is more comprehensive, concrete, and clear than natural forms of revelation. At the core of divine revelation is the Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate (see John 1:1, 14; Heb. 1:1–3). All general revelation was “created by him, and for him” (Col. 1:16), and all special revelation readies, reveals, and reminds us of him (see Luke 24:25–27, 44–49; John 5:39). Throughout centuries, Christians have recognized this message in the special revelation that is the Bible—the word of God proclaimed by his Spirit, penned by inspired writers, and providentially preserved by him who illuminates faithful reading in the hearts of believers.
The Bible is a library of books that collectively testify of God’s work to bring about redemption for his glory. The New Testament declares that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” and every passage has the quality of being inspired or “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). The Old Testament is often self-consciously aware of its inspiration as a record of the very voice of God (e.g., “Thus saith the Lord”), recognizing that prophecy did not come “by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:21). The NT frequently draws upon the OT while recognizing its own content as being among “the other scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16).
Joseph Smith affirmed general revelation, teaching that all those of “common intellect” can gaze upward to see “the power of Omnipotence inscribed upon the heavens,” and he affirmed special revelation, believing all can “see [God’s] own hand-writing in the sacred volume.” Biblical material peppers Smith’s writings, and throughout his life, his sermons incorporate the Bible far more often than the Book of Mormon. For Smith, the Bible was an inspired collection of God’s word and prominent among LDS scripture.
Early Latter-day Saints were well-versed in the Bible and won converts from Protestantism primarily by arguing from their common holy text, as seen in Parley P. Pratt’s influential A Voice of Warning (1837). One Protestant minister of Smith’s day remarked how impressed he was with the Mormons, “a people who read the Bible so much, and who could so readily quote any part of Scripture” that they put Protestants to shame. In my personal experience, I’ve found the same to be true of many Latter-day Saints today, who are grateful inheritors and students of this work of “divinely inspired authors.”
So, Latter-day Saints and traditional Christians generally agree that the Bible is inspired, but they disagree about its sufficiency.
The Sufficiency of the Bible
Is the Bible sufficient special revelation from God? To answer this question, we must go back to the formation of the biblical canon. The Greek word kanon refers to a measuring stick that provides the standard for an ideal length. Christians use the term as a metaphor to describe the list of written scripture, which they fix at either 73 for Roman Catholics or 66 for Protestants; no more, no less. Generally, early Christians adopted the Hebrew Bible while discerning the authenticity and recognizing the authority of the 27 books of the NT by the late fourth century, although most NT texts functioned scripturally much earlier. But is the canon sufficient, and ought there be more added?
Joseph Smith was prepared for a skeptical reception of the Book of Mormon when he published it. The text itself told him what to expect, that “fools” would turn their noses up at it, retorting: “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible” (2 Nephi 29:3, 6). The Book of Mormon wondered why traditional Christians would not receive more from God and found the answer in disbelief. “Ye need not suppose that it [the Bible] contains all my words,” cautioned God in the text, “neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written” (2 Nephi 29:10). In other words, the Book of Mormon would be rejected because traditional Christians would not expand the canon. Of course, such an argument for the Book of Mormon is necessary; the book forfeits its place among scripture otherwise. If the Bible is genuinely sufficient, then the Book of Mormon—and modern prophecy and other LDS scriptures—are canonical excess.
The issue of biblical transmission also bothered Smith, as it did his contemporaries. While many people believed in the Bible’s inspiration, they wondered how the English Bible could be trusted if fallible or unscrupulous men controlled the translation process, let alone the degraded and corrupted state of biblical manuscripts. Discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls were generations away, and the embarrassingly rich manuscript evidence to trust the Bible was not nearly as known then as it is today. So, Smith held the popular opinion that the original documents were inspired, but textual variations among manuscripts—the result of “careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests”—were evidence enough to reject the notion that contemporary Bibles were as faithful representations as possible of the originals. LDS apostle Orson Pratt reflected this sentiment that biblical manuscripts had been so “mutilated, changed, and corrupted,” he wondered if anyone could be sure “that even one verse of the whole Bible has escaped pollution, so as to convey the same sense now that it did in the original?”
Still, the Bible was essential for Mormons; it was inspired but inadequate by itself. A self-stated mission of the Book of Mormon is to “establish the truth” of the Bible (1 Nephi 13:40). Early LDS missionaries were frequently asked whether they believed it. “If we do,” they replied, “we are the only people under heaven that does. For there are none of the religious sects of the day that do.” In this sense, Latter-day Saints thought of themselves as more biblical than traditional Christians precisely because their movement sought to restore and reveal the “plain and precious parts” of the Bible they believed had been stripped out by an abominable church (1 Nephi 13:26–29, 32, 34) or gone unseen due to spiritual blindness (Jacob 4:14). They weren’t rejecting the Bible; instead, they were restoring it. Through no fault of its own, the Bible could only offer a blurry vision for faith and practice, which explained to them why denominations disagreed at so many theological junctures. For these reasons, Smith taught that his church believed “the bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.”
But from his prophetic vantage point, Smith thought that any attempt to produce a correct translation was impossible because of corrupted manuscripts. As he explained rather bluntly, there were “many things in the bible which do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the Holy Ghost to me.” Only divine intervention could remedy the problem.
As early as 1830, Smith began working on a new translation for his church, although the scene was quite unlike actual translation. Smith was untrained in biblical languages and did not appear to have consulted linguistic tools available to him at the time. Instead, he revised a King James Version of the Bible according to his decisions and revelations. As one LDS scholar explained, Smith’s view “was not so much that his revelations needed to be tailored absolutely to biblical data but, rather, that an imperfect Bible ought to be conformed to his more current and direct revelations.” The Bible must conform to Smith, not the other way around because “I have [the] Key by which I understand the scripture,” he said. Consequently, as another LDS scholar pointed out, “Smith understood his Bible rereading as revelation from God that superseded as necessary the printed text.”
Without the aid of lexicons and linguistic training, Smith began his revision with the book of Genesis and concluded the bulk of his project by 1833. But he died without publishing his “new translation.” The manuscripts were delivered to the Reorganized Church (today, the Community of Christ), which published the “Inspired Version” in 1867, but the LDS Church has never seriously considered replacing the KJV. As a result, only portions from the book of Genesis and the Gospel of Matthew were canonized in LDS scripture, and those not until 1880.
The Authority of the Bible in Mormonism
Early Latter-day Saints esteemed the Bible as an inspired text but viewed it as insufficient because its source material was corrupted and English translations lacked accuracy. Joseph Smith attempted to rehabilitate the Bible, according to his revelatory standards, but never finished. The LDS Church has not veered far from its earliest perspective on the Bible, continuing to regard it as inspired but insufficient. It is nestled among the three other standard works of the LDS canon: the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. The Church officially recognizes the KJV but not to the extent that it rejects other quality translations. LDS leaders encourage their members to study the Bible, especially when a four-year rotation through their scriptures focuses on the Old and New Testaments during two of those years. Latter-day Saints read the Bible in light of LDS scripture, aided by interpretations from their leaders and personal discernment.
In the end, the greatest difference between traditional Christian and LDS views on the Bible orbits its nature. Is the Bible a sufficient source of special revelation, or does it need supplementing by an expanded canon? Of course, Latter-day Saints have long believed in the need for additional scripture. But most Christians see supplemental revelation as suspect at best and a threat to their tradition at worst. For conservative Protestants, the denial of the Bible’s sufficiency is tantamount to rejecting sola scriptura because the “authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired [if] total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded.” Worse yet, to tamper with the word of God is to jeopardize the gospel. They read the spirit of Christ’s warning in the book of Revelation against addition or subtraction across the entire canon (Rev. 22:18–19). “Every word of God is pure,” says the Proverb; “Add thou not unto his words” (Prov. 30:5–6).
The print edition will include footnote sources.
