[Editor's Note:  With the landmark publication of the second volume in the Joseph Smith Papers project this week, it seemed an appropriate time to share excerpts from Ron Barney’s talk, presented at the eleventh annual FAIR Conference, 6 August 2009.  Just how thorough and open is Mormon history produced by the LDS Church? The talk in its entirety can be read here.

I want to talk really in some general terms about the reliability of Mormon history produced by the Church. I think there has been in years past the sentiment that the Church hedged on the way that it did business; that it was not forthright in what was published; that it was afraid of its past and unwilling to hold our heritage and our historical past up to the kind of scrutiny that other disciplines were subjected to.
I'm only going to talk about a couple of projects in which I have been involved, so I can speak with some confidence of knowing the trouble that we went through to ensure that what was done was done properly…

The Joseph Smith Papers

The new project, which has had as many as fifty-nine people at one time working on the project, of which I believe there are twenty-two full-time people working on it today, the first volume of diaries, the journals, came out last fall and [the second volume was just published] on the significant date of September 22.

I know something of the rigor that has been applied to ensure that these volumes will stand for a long time and will have a long shelf life. I don't believe we have to make any apologies to anybody about the quality of the work given the scrutiny that has been applied the work by outside readers.

The fact that we have had literally dozens of reviewers go through the material to ensure that we have a product that is very defendable and can be relied upon, especially the featured texts themselves. And we're very comfortable in that process…

Scanned to DVD

I want to talk briefly about something else that the church did that is not perhaps as widely known but I believe it to be one of the most significant things regarding our past that the church has done in its history. There was a new copyright law that went into effect on January the 1st, 2003. In order to undermine the efforts of people who did not own the church documents, who had unrestricted publication prerogatives to some of the things that we believe are very important and to which we had rights, we decided to publish many of our documents in a way that we could create a copyright for them that would serve our purposes for a generation or so.

And so, a very ambitious project was undertaken to produce Selected Collections from the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This is a two-volume DVD set… Thirty-one collections within the church archives are represented here including the totality of the Joseph Smith collection, the totality of the George A. Smith collection and many others.

It also includes things like the Church Historian's Office journal, the manuscript of what became the History of the Church, which covered the period into the 1880s. It would be hard to overstate the importance of these documents to the church and to the study of Mormon history. Also, the "Journal History" of the church, a 1000-plus volume collection of materials, is published.

All together we have seventy-four DVDs. The scanned documents were initially burned to CDs (there were over 700 CDs of documents scanned) that were then compressed into DVDs at a ratio of 10:1). So, there are seventy-four DVDs that include about 450,000 scanned images of documents in the church archives. The documents are completely accessible and purchasable by anyone. Most of the purchases have come from research institutions but a number of private individuals have purchased copies of these DVDs that are very user friendly, high definition, scanned images that in many cases are easier to use than if you had the original volume in front of you…

Derivative Products

There were some derivative products that are part of our work on the Joseph Smith Papers and I want to mention just a couple of those. One of the things that occurred was the creation of a new press. The Church Historian's Press, which will likely be documentary in nature for the first while and then I think we'll see narrative history that will come out from the Church Historian's Press. It will be the official press of the Joseph Smith Papers.

There are several other projects that are lined up that are not documentary in nature that will also find publication through that press. We have a website, josephsmithpapers.org, that has been created and will, probably to no one's surprise, include everything that we produce in textual print.

Obviously there will be a time lapse between when it is published in book form and when it shows up on the web, but eventually everything that we do and more will end up on the website. This will be the source in the next generation for what is done on the Joseph Smith Papers. It is a living website so that we can make additions and adjustments as needed.

All of these are in the spirit of other documentary editions that have been produced about important Americans, the Founding Fathers papers of which many of you are aware. So, we're not trying to do something that has an untried tradition.

We're doing things that fit right in the norm of the most recent and the most careful scholarship done in American historical studies. We'll do about 30 volumes that are planned. They will be between 500 and 700 pages a piece, although the volume [that just came out]… is 750 pages, something to that effect…

We have 11 volumes that are currently in production…We've got the hope of two volumes per year that will be published. The next book printed after the revelations volume will be the first volume of the history series.

We've received generous funding from Larry H. Miller, something widely known, but Larry Miller's family is also underwriting the website and then for the last year-and-a- half they have also underwritten the documentary that we have on KJZZ 14 television, a weekly broadcast on Sunday nights focusing on the scholarship and research that our writers and editors have produced. BYUTV is now rebroadcasting the series so that the distribution reaches beyond the Wasatch Front. The intent is that the same day that Revelations 1 comes out next month, the first season of the Joseph Smith Papers, the television series with 52 episodes, will also be published by Deseret Book.

Care Taken with Joseph Smith Manual

I want to [talk] a little bit about the care that was taken to produce the Church's current priesthood and Relief Society manual…I want…to ensure that you have an understanding of how much care and attention went into the production of this volume. It was developed with the intent that it would be able to withstand any scrutiny that was applied to it, and I witness to you that as much rigor that you can imagine was, indeed, applied.

The Church History Department provided the documents that were somewhat derivative from the Joseph Smith Papers. They were prepared and handed off to a Church curriculum committee and the manual was produced in the same style and somewhat the same format as the other Teachings of the Presidents of the Church volumes…
A book that influenced me concerned the scholarship surrounding Abraham Lincoln, whom I have studied most of my adult life. This being the 200th anniversary of his birth, some of you may have caught, on C-Span or a similar station, a Lincoln scholar who said that he had done a survey and estimated that one book per week was scheduled for publication in 2009 about Abraham Lincoln. Can you imagine that? And you've seen a lot of those, and they are still coming out.

In 1996, a Lincoln scholar, an important one, named Don Fehrenbacher and his wife Virginia published through Stanford University Press, The Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln. (Don Fehrenbacher died the next year.) In this book he took the words that Lincoln's contemporaries and others had reported that Lincoln said and applied with some scrutiny a list of criteria to determine if these reports were reliable or not. And he came up with this little list of categories.

Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher would give an A to "a quotation cast in direct discourse and recorded contemporaneously—that is within a few days after the words were spoken." So, that sounds pretty authentic.

They would give a B to "an indirect quotation recorded contemporaneously," a C to "a quotation recorded non-contemporaneously," a D to "a quotation about whose authenticity there is more than average doubt," and an E to "a quotation that is probably not authentic," all put together in a huge volume.

Once you look at that list of criteria it creates in your mind a certain level of expectation about what you read, and you think twice about the texts that you maybe normally accept just because it appears in print. You generally give the printed word, especially something about Abraham Lincoln, a certain level of credibility, and maybe the credibility is not merited. The Fehrenbacher book was designed to help the reader better understand the scope of material attributed to President Lincoln.

Because I was the one who was given the primary charge to assemble together for the Curriculum Department writing committee the Joseph Smith documents from manuscript sources, along with my colleague Mel Bashore who gathered material from the print sources, I decided to do something similar to the words attributed to Joseph Smith that the Fehrenbachers had prepared for those understood to be Lincoln quotes.
So, with several other members of our staff - Steve Sorensen, Glenn Rowe, and Grant Anderson—we formed a little committee determined to produce something that a curriculum committee could look at at a glance to know whether this was something that they could include with confidence in the compilation of the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church manual. And so, we came up with a system of document classification for accounts that contained teachings of Joseph Smith. And ours was a bit different than the one created by the Fehrenbachers.

We, for example, assigned a capital A for documents about Joseph Smith that seemed to fall into groupings of accounts attributed to Joseph Smith. So, for material said to have been written, dictated, or spoken by Joseph Smith we would give that material a capital letter A.

Then we had sub-groups classified in lower case letters, such as a lowercase "a" that would represent a holograph, something that was written by him; that was as good as it got. We know that this document came from the pen of Joseph Smith and therefore reflected the mind of Joseph Smith.

We gave a lowercase "b" to something that was created by one of his clerks that he had signed so that there was his endorsement of what was written or published. We give a lowercase "c" to a contemporary document that included Joseph Smith but may have been attributed to others, for example, something signed by the entirety of the First Presidency.

We would give a lowercase "d" to a contemporary document that included something prepared by Joseph Smith and others where the writer is clearly someone other than Joseph Smith but where he likely influenced the text. An example of this would be something like the "Lectures on Faith." Where did they fit?

Long attributed to Joseph Smith, we've learned a whole lot about the "Lectures on Faith" and without going into a lot of the detail, we determined that it was not a Joseph Smith document and gave it a classification based on this judgment. Church leaders approved the decision not to include the "Lectures on Faith" in the manual.

We would give a lowercase "e" to items that were attributed to Joseph Smith without a signature or an endorsement, such as a couple of items that came out of Kirtland that are very important, one attributed to "The Elders of the Church in Kirtland" that we believe were influenced by Joseph Smith and will be included, interestingly, in the Joseph Smith Papers because we believe these epistles were part of Joseph's commission.

Well, what about the things that others said that Joseph said? We would give a capital letter B to those who were intimate associates of Joseph: his family members and members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, for example.

We would give a C to supportive Church members, people who were in the audience who heard him speak, who took notes about what he said. (It is worthwhile to note the warning that Joseph Smith did not, to our knowledge, speak from prepared texts, perhaps with one exception.

The sermon on "Priesthood" that was given on the 5th of October in 1840, one of his clerks describes the circumstance of how Joseph dictated the text and then interestingly did not deliver it. One of his clerks Robert. B. Thompson was the person who actually gave that sermon at the October 1840 conference.) So, this classification of C includes notes kept by Martha Jane Knowlton Coray, for example, that are just so significant, and we would be much the lesser without notes that she and others, such as William McIntire and Levi Richards, who took notes of Joseph Smith's teachings.

I can't imagine what we would be in the absence of note takers, none of whom took shorthand. These are all notes written in longhand, so we have just short excerpts. They are incomplete.

For example, of Thomas Bullock's account, and his is the longest of the four principle scribes who were in the audience who listened to Joseph deliver what we call the "King Follett Discourse," I can read a typed copy of Thomas Bullock's notes in seventeen minutes and the sermon lasted, several documents suggest, for over two hours. Well, what would happen if Bullock had not have kept minutes, or kept notes (because they're not minutes and certainly not verbatim reports).

Then there are capital letter D folks who reported Joseph's words that we called non-supportive Church members. These were people who left later on. David Whitmer, for example, some of the things that David Whitmer said are very important but we know that there was a certain edge to what he said. We just wanted the writing committee to know that.

Even Joseph's own brother, William Smith, in the autobiographical piece that he did later in life fell into this category. We wanted the writers and compilers to know that the events of which David Whitmer wrote were not written contemporaneously, and that William Smith had had kind of a rocky experience with the Church (including a rocky experience or two while he was with Joseph Smith).

There were a number of people who were not Latter-day Saints, who wrote what we thought were quite neutral accounts that we think are fairly reliable, such as a number of newspaper reporters who went to town to Nauvoo and what they created we think is quite credible. And so, we wanted the curriculum people to know about that. So, we gave that a capital letter E.

We would give capital letter Fs to non-Latter-day Saint antagonists. We know that some of these people came to town with a chip on their shoulder. One of them is Daniel P. Kidder, his diary is at Rutgers University. I went there and read his diary before I read the book that he produced on Joseph Smith in 1842, and clearly he came to town to get fodder for this decidedly anti-Mormon piece.

Two other features affected how we graded a document. One was time. Was this a contemporary report? Was it a year old? Five years old? Ten years old? Twenty years old? Much later than twenty years old?

We found that there was a great deal that had been traditional among Latter-day saints about Joseph Smith that was really old, over a generation from the time that he is alleged to have said it.

Some of those things we do not dismiss out of hand but they must be qualified, and we wanted to ensure that the committee had that kind of information. And as important, was this an eyewitness report or was it secondhand or third hand? It has a real bearing on the weight that we apply to the credibility of that particular source.

So, what would the documents look like? We created a template that we then populated with the various fields of information about the text.

This particular example from our database is as good as it gets: capital A, lowercase a, a 1 (because it's a contemporary document), and a plus sign (because Joseph wrote it, which we consider an eyewitness account). This letter from Joseph to his wife Emma from Chester County, Pennsylvania, January 20, 1840, is one you can take to the bank. And we would include all of the information about the original source for this so that the writing folks would have all of that…

Interestingly, it took seventeen 3-inch binders of material to compile, after which people, who are a lot smarter than I am, created an electronic database of the material and we passed that electronic database on to the Curriculum Department. They produced this what I think is a manual that has great power, something that is of consequence, something that it would be foolish to ignore if one wants to get to the morsels of Joseph Smith's teachings.

…In closing, I think we need to look at not only what the Church produces but what others produce about Joseph Smith or any other aspect of Latter-day Saint history in light of the quality and reliability of the product. We owe it to ourselves to go to that kind of trouble to consider how our history and heritage is packaged…. We can't be lazy about this. This religion is too important and it is very defendable.

I have a stronger belief in Joseph Smith and his divine appointment today than ever before. And there's not much that surprises me anymore. I've worked for the Church for 32 years. I've been in the belly of the beast that long and I tell you, I feel more strongly about Joseph's divine appointment and the truthfulness of this religion today than I ever have in my life. We do not have to cut corners. This really is the kingdom, and there are men who really do have keys that were really handed over to them by the Prophet Joseph Smith, and they really were handed down to his successors. I'm banking the rest of my eternal future on it, and I'm very comfortable in doing it. Joseph Smith has won me over in every way. I didn't mean for this to be a testimonial but I've got one, I want to tell you…
For those of us who are advocates of the legitimacy of Joseph Smith's claims, we do no favors to anyone if we knowingly misarrange information to make the Prophet more attractive or even seemingly more understandable. There are many alternatives regarding the way that scholarship may be applied to this religion. However, it just may be that, if we are brave enough and careful enough, that we may have a chance to make great headway into our understanding of the irretrievable past.