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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2020 conference, held in August. If you would like to watch the video of this and all the other presentations from our 2020 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.
Mark Ashurst-McGee, Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, His Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary, and the Question of Plagiarism
Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity is available from the FairMormon Bookstore.
Mark Ashurst-McGee is a senior historian in the Church History Department and the senior research and review editor for the Joseph Smith Papers, where he also serves as a specialist in document analysis and documentary editing methodology. He holds a PhD in history from Arizona State University and has trained at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He has coedited several volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers and is also coeditor of Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is also the author of several articles on Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint history published in scholarly journals and popular venues.
I encourage those who have listened to this audio file to also read Kent P. Jackson’s article at Interpreter. It is outstanding and clarifies misstatements made here.
Simply put, there is no borrowing (not even 5%) from Clarke in the JST. Wayment and Lemon are wrong.