I’ll leave the “From the Life of Joseph Smith” section out of my comments this week: marvelous experiences, but they don’t seem to me to shed any light on the teachings in the lesson. So far as the “Teachings of Joseph Smith” section goes, in this chapter, I find it interesting that so much of the material comes from the pre-Nauvoo era. That is, at least so far in this manual, rather unusual: because Joseph wrote and spoke publicly much more often in Nauvoo than in New York, Ohio, or Missouri, and because many more saints were keeping a careful record of what Joseph had to say in Nauvoo than previously, a great deal more of Joseph’s teachings have survived from the Nauvoo era, and the lessons in the manual reflect these facts generally. This lesson, however, is an exception. In fact, nearly half of the lesson’s teaching come from a single letter Joseph wrote to his uncle in 1833. The result: this lesson provides, the section on personal revelation excepted, a view primarily of Mormonism minus the “Nauvoo theology.” But I imagine that I should explain what I mean by that just a bit. Read the rest of this entry »

The great majority of this lesson comes from a single editorial published in the Church’s Nauvoo periodical, the Times and Seasons. I’ll confess I was disappointed to see this, because many of the editorials published while Joseph was editor of the paper were not written by Joseph. This one, however, I was pleased to discover, seems actually to have been his work. The style of argumentation, the manner of using scripture, and the conclusions drawn are much more like Joseph’s recorded sermons and canonized writings than other editorials cited in the manual thus far. I’ll proceed, then, with the assumption that everything in this lesson came from Joseph himself. Read the rest of this entry »