The Transcendent Immanent Temple

Smith culminated his metaphysics of translation in the rites of the Nauvoo temple in the early 1840s. The temple rites were a striking combination of Smith’s targums, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Freemasonry, ancient mystery religions, and his sense about the connections of humans and texts. This liturgy was Smith’s final rereading of the Hebrew Bible’s primeval history, and it pulled his followers to Eden and thence to heaven as transformed, divine beings. These rites were an apotheosis not just of Smith’s followers but also of his metaphysics of translation. In the temple, Smith worked to define space and time in terms of human beings. In an echo of Hebrew genealogies, Smith measured time in parental bonds effected by a force he called priesthood. These bonds at the base of time tied God to humanity and humans to each other.

Human and Divine Selves

Joseph Smith and his early Mormon followers loved and embraced many Enlightenment ideas of selfhood—human agency, freedom of religious expression, and an extremely high anthropology. In this respect, they sound modern, even emphatically so. But they also saw modern individualism as an oppressive prison. They sought a mechanism to transform themselves into the best of both humans and gods. The mechanism by which they achieved these ontological changes was what Smith—following and modifying generations of Christian thought—called translation. He elaborated multiple avenues out of the prison of modern individualism, including sacred movement through space, even to a physical heaven, and establishment of otherworldly communitarian settlements based on the model of a primordial city called Zion and led by the mystical hero Enoch. The ways Latter-day Saints navigated the incipient tensions of church versus state reflected their position, standing askew to the usual positions of modern Western thought.

Epilogue

Joseph Smith’s mode of thought expressed his avid interest in ideas, concepts, and possibilities that openly defied American norms and expectations. He was especially prone to reject dualisms (matter and spirit, immanent and transcendent, profane and sacred) in a way that merged complementary realms without using them up in the process. Early Latter-day Saint theology argued by its presence and its sensibilities that the cultural trade-offs and limitations that seem necessary to us on the other side of the twentieth century were not inevitable. There was no mandatory compromise between this-worldly flourishing and other-worldly happiness, between human agency and divine presence, between the mechanisms of human life and their eternal meanings.

The Nature of Time

The wild time of the Bible’s primeval history became progressively less accessible across the nineteenth century. Many philosophers and cultural agents intended time to be flat, linear, and homogeneous. Joseph Smith disagreed, strenuously. He encouraged his followers to live a different form of time, inhabiting the past and present simultaneously, even as he was coy about his relationship to traditional Christian understandings of eternity. Smith’s effort to bind time into a sacred simultaneity famously included attempts to live anciently biblical lives, which included polygamy and apparently never-realized plans for animal sacrifice. These efforts at sacred simultaneity were intended to create and strengthen relationships between the living and the dead and to free Latter-day Saints from the prison of flat time.

The Quest for Pure Language

Modern philosophical positions have restricted or eliminated the power and scope of the “language beyond language” once thought to have existed at the origins of the world. In this view, mortal language is the only language—either there is no primordial sacred language, or it exists but humans have no access to it. Joseph Smith saw these postures as capitulation to the curse of language at Babel (Genesis 11), which haunted him. The quest for pure language was a central aspect of his religious career and is a direct rejection of modernist assumptions about the potential of language. This quest for pure language—focused especially on the power of the hieroglyph—extended across Smith’s career, including extensive explorations of the Edenic language and traditions about powerful, nonordinary language.

Introduction

Joseph Smith and his Latter-day Saints are caught out of time; they are much like living fossils. Their religious tradition is at once ancient and profoundly modern. While the movement arrived in the nineteenth century, it situated itself in the ancient past and the millennial future. Smith mediated between those times with scriptural translations best understood as targums—oral expansions, revisions, and interpretations that achieve the status of scripture—of the Bible, especially the first eleven chapters of Genesis and their primeval history. These targums reconfigure the Bible and create the possibility of a biblical world occupied by the Latter-day Saints. Smith’s targums and his metaphysics of translation were together concerned with escape routes from three modern prisons: mortal language, flattened time, and individualism.

The Egyptian Bible and the Cosmic Order

The Latter-day Saint Book of Abraham is an excellent test case for understanding Smith’s complementary modes of translation. Both insiders and outsiders have used a narrow linguistic model to understand Smith’s encounter with ancient Egyptian papyri he purchased in Ohio in 1835. But, according to the logic of early Mormon thought, the translation problems at hand were metaphysical as well as linguistic. The written texts of Smith’s Egyptian project were a subset of the spiritual gift of glossolalia, in this case graphic glossolalia. This spiritual gift generated an Egyptian Bible that became central to the Nauvoo temple liturgy, which served as the ritual infrastructure of Smith’s Chain of Belonging (his recasting of the traditional Chain of Being). The Egyptian Bible was thus an important example of the metaphysics of translation and the connective tissue between Smith’s early scriptures and the ultimate ritual system that merged humans and texts.

Rereading the Bible

In the aftermath of the Book of Mormon, Smith and his disciples saw that the King James Bible itself needed to be more directly repaired, in a project they called the New Translation. The project encompassed three phases: (1) visionary work on the primeval history, (2) direct repair of the English text, and (3) marvelously literal exegeses that extended through Smith’s entire career. Contrary to prior treatments, this New Translation project also included large sections of the scripture called Doctrine and Covenants. This chapter on Smith’s Bible translation activities more clearly integrates them with his other scriptures and his ongoing work of targumizing the Bible.

The Task of the Book of Mormon

Joseph Smith saw himself as a seer called to rescue the Bible from Protestantism. Smith’s first scripture, his Book of Mormon, repaired, expanded, and revised the Protestant Bible in order to tell America’s primeval history. This Mormon scripture pointed out and exploited the Bible’s weaknesses even as it relied on the infrastructure of that very Bible. The Book of Mormon demonstrated strength where the Bible showed weakness—access to original manuscripts, plain language, canonization, transmission, ecclesiastical direction, and translation itself. The Book of Mormon wasn’t ever intended to be an independent scripture, but instead to be integrated with the Bible it had transformed. Through the Book of Mormon, Smith translated the Bible from one world and vision of scripture to another, in a way that obliterated the temporal separation of the generations of human history. He became thereby a time traveler, with scripture as his time machine.