This book includes a mixture of scholarship about all of Joseph Smith’s translation projects, including the highly anticipated paper by Thomas A. Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon on the use of the Clarke Commentary in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. We had the opportunity to discuss the book with Michael Hubbard MacKay and Mark Ashurst-McGee. A review of the book will be forthcoming.
Q1: What is the purpose of the book?
Mike and Mark: The book was conceived as an attempt to cover all of the various Joseph Smith translation projects—not only the Book of Mormon and the “New Translation” of the Bible and the Book of Abraham but also the excerpt from the new account of John (D&C 7), the excerpt from the “record of John” (in D&C 93), the Kinderhook plates, and anything else. This had actually never been done before—at least not at this depth. [Read more…] about Q&A with editors of Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity
John W. Welch is the Robert K. Thomas Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, where he teaches various courses, including Perspectives on Jewish, Greek, and Roman Law in the New Testament. Since 1991 he has also served as the editor in chief of BYU Studies. He studied history and classical languages at Brigham Young University, Greek philosophy at Oxford, and law at Duke University. As a founder of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, one of the editors for Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism, and co-director of the Masada and Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at BYU, he has published widely on biblical, early Christian, and Latter-day Saint topics.
Jeannie Welch graduated from BYU with an MA in French and Spanish, with her master’s thesis on comic theory in Moliere. For over 25 years she taught French, first in private schools and then on the faculty at BYU, where she was also the Director of the BYU Foreign Language Student Residence for 13 years. She has directed a BYU study abroad to Paris, and has traveled widely visiting numerous art museums in Europe. In addition to serving in leadership and teaching positions in church and public schools, she has organized European and Church History tours, has published in the Mormon Historical Studies journal and co-authored two books with her husband, John Welch, The Doctrine and Covenants by Themes, and The Parables of Jesus: Revealing the Plan of Salvation.
Wendy Ulrich, Ph.D., M.B.A., has been a psychologist in private practice, president of the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists, and a visiting professor at Brigham Young University-Provo. She founded Sixteen Stones Center for Growth, which offers seminar-retreats for Latter-day Saint women and their loved ones (see 