The
Pearl of Great Price is a canonized book of scripture of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This small book contains a
selection of revelations, translations, and other Joseph Smith documents, though the
book itself did not exist during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. The first edition of the Pearl of Great Price was published
in 1851 by , who was
serving as the president of the church’s British Mission. This new
compilation gave Latter-day Saints in the British Isles ready access
to a select few of Joseph Smith’s revelatory texts. The Pearl of
Great Price was eventually adopted as Latter-day Saint scripture; it
was officially canonized on 10 October
1880 by a vote at a general conference of the church.
Over the years, texts have been added and removed
from the Pearl of Great Price. (For more information on the texts
included in the
original Pearl of Great Price, see the Encyclopedia of Mormonism.) In 1878, for example, the book of Moses was
expanded to include passages Richards did not have access to in
1851. In addition, several
revelations were removed from the Pearl of Great Price in 1902 because they were by then included
in the Doctrine and Covenants.
The present edition of the Pearl of Great Price
comprises five sections, each described below. Hyperlinks lead to
the earliest extant versions of these documents, as found on the
Joseph Smith Papers website.
In June
1830, Joseph Smith
dictated a revelation regarding many important figures from
the Old Testament. The text contains “the words of God which
he spake unto Moses,” including teachings about the Creation
and its purpose, the premortal existence, the Fall of Adam
and Eve, and the introduction of the gospel to Adam and Eve
and their descendants. The opening “visions of Moses” became
the initial pages of Joseph Smith’s ambitious project to
prepare what early Saints saw as an inspired revision of the
Bible, sometimes called the “Joseph Smith Translation.”
This first-person narrative of the Old
Testament patriarch Abraham came from Joseph Smith’s translation
of ancient papyrus scrolls purchased from , an
antiquities dealer who visited , Ohio, in July
1835. The translation was eventually published in
the church newspaper Times and Seasons in
1842, together with
facsimiles of some of the drawings found on the Egyptian papyri.
This inspired revision of Matthew, chapter
24, was part of Joseph
Smith’s larger effort to translate the Bible. Two
copies of Joseph Smith’s revision of the New Testament
exist: an earlier, incomplete manuscript consisting of part
of the Gospel of Matthew; and a later manuscript of the
entire New Testament. For Matthew 24, New
Testament Manuscript 1 represents the original and
New
Testament Manuscript 2 a security copy. Perhaps
because this chapter of Matthew details signs preceding
Jesus Christ’s second coming, Joseph Smith’s revision was
deemed important enough in the eyes of early church leaders
that a broadside of the text was printed, probably around
1835.
The New Testament manuscripts,
including what is now Joseph Smith—Matthew in the
Pearl of Great Price, have now been published on the
website; in coming months, the broadside will be
published. For another early published version of
Joseph Smith’s
revision of Matthew 24, see John Corrill, A Brief History of the
Church.
In 1838, Joseph Smith began a
history of his life and the early days of the Latter-day
Saint movement. Over the next eighteen years, scribes and
church historians extended the account until it covered
Joseph Smith’s entire life. This narrative is found within
the larger Manuscript History
of the Church and comprises six large volumes. It
was published serially in church newspapers beginning in
1842 and, beginning in
1902, was published in book
form by B. H. Roberts as The History of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The excerpt
from Joseph Smith’s history found in the Pearl of Great
Price begins with a summary of the circumstances of Joseph
Smith’s birth and early life leading up to his first vision
of Deity. The excerpt also describes visits from the angel
Moroni, Joseph Smith’s unearthing of the gold plates, his
marriage to , his
translation of the Book of Mormon, the restoration of the through
John the Baptist, and Joseph Smith’s and ’s baptisms.
A long endnote in the current
edition of the Pearl of Great Price includes
excerpts from a series of letters wrote to
about the angel Moroni’s visits with Joseph Smith, the
discovery of the gold plates containing the Book of Mormon, and Cowdery’s
experiences acting as scribe for Smith. The letters
were published in the church newspaper Latter
Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate in
October 1834 and copied into an
earlier Joseph Smith history.
This thirteen-point summary of the beliefs
of Latter-day Saints, now known as the Articles of Faith,
was included in a letter from Joseph Smith to , the editor of
the Chicago Democrat. The original “Wentworth
letter” has not been located, but a copy was published in
the Times and Seasons in March 1842. The Articles of
Faith build on a summary of beliefs presented in ’s A[n] Interesting Account of Several
Remarkable Visions.