120: One Heart First

In this episode, Denver discusses the process that groups of people have followed in the past, and need to follow today, to achieve unity when working together on a project. Transcript Several years ago there were a number of people who were independently interested in trying to do something to reclaim the Scriptures in a more accurate and authentic way. I heard rumors about the existence of this project—people had talked about it—and the existence of the project came to my attention by rumors, for some time. But it was late in December of that year (and I right now don't recollect what year it was… No, it was—this was when the very thing began)... It was late in December, and it was almost within a two-week time period that one group finished what they believed to be a completed project on the Scriptures, getting them back into shape. And they turned that product over to me. When they turned it over to me, I was surprised to learn the identity of the people that I had heard the rumors about, and I was interested in looking at what they had completed and what they turned over. But within a two-week time period, a second group stepped up who had likewise completed a Scripture project and turned that project over to me for me to look at. And neither of these groups who’d been working on it had been working together or were even aware that they had independently started on and were working toward the same end. So, I wind up now in possession of two different sets of the same objective, which is to get a better set of Scriptures put together. And it… The thing that occurred to me was that it really should not be something that I go through and read and compare the two with one another, but it made a whole lot more sense to get the two groups together. And so, the projects that were now done resulted in a meeting (in the same room that we're in right now) of representatives from both groups. Some of the people that were involved in it chose to be anonymous and remain behind the scenes. But both groups were well represented by getting together to talk about “the projects.” They were identical in the objective, and they were very different in the content. Because as you go through and you have to reconcile problems that you find with the version of the Scriptures that are in existence, what you find is that one group discovered some set of problems and resolved those, while another group found a different set of problems and resolved those—but neither group had identical problem-recognition or problem-solving. There were many places where they were identical, but there were also many places in which there was a dissimilarity between the two. And in the meeting that began (in the early discussions), what we learned was that sometimes the same problem had been identified and grappled with by both groups, but for different reasons they had reached a different method to resolve the scriptural problem. And so, the discussion became detailed and lively and interesting. And both sides were willing to take a look at the whys and wherefores of the manner in which the dilemmas had been reconciled. And both sides were very interested in seeing what they had not had come to their attention that the other group had done. And so, a project these two groups had worked on (literally for more than a year, a couple of years)—and both of whom thought their project was now done—in coming together realized that nothing had yet been accomplished, and it all had to start over again. And so, the work of both groups (that was originally envisioned as having been 100% completed) now turns into the starting point for a combined effort to try and work this problem through. So, the Scripture project had now three beginnings, and it started over again. There were numerous issues that came up. Both groups had strong personalities. Some of those strong personalities were also eccentric people whose strong feelings and eccentricities lent themselves to not merely lively debate, but also conflict and disagreement. One of the things that we confronted, time and time again, were strongly held opinions in conflict with one another that required people to come together and reason with one another. Now, not everyone was involved in every single part of problem identification. Instead, someone would be trusted to go do and resolve something. (I say “someone”… It was usually a group—two, three, four people working on something.) And then, what was not agreed to with unanimity, the problem was then presented to everyone. And we get together with everyone in the same room (or in the same room with a number of people joining by Zoom or online), and we’d hash it through. The way in which a problem was resolved was by unanimous agreement. If there was not unanimous agreement, then the issue was discussed, the opinions were laid on the table, the disagreement was exposed, and then it was tabled. And we would come back at a later point, and we would approach it again—but it required unanimity in coming to a resolution for the problem in order for that issue to be put to bed and things to move on. Well, the project advanced far enough and the attention to the project had been spoken about widely enough that we began to talk about it publicly and openly and inviting other people to participate. Any number of volunteers… I think at one point we had as many as 200 people that were trying to help out on the project, but any number of volunteers looked, worked, cross-checked, double-checked, worked with manuscripts. We learned a hard lesson in that process—because the entire objective of the Scripture project was not to innovate. It was to do the hard research work in order to identify (as accurately and completely as it is possible to do so) what it was that Joseph Smith did with the translation of the Book of Mormon/with the revelations as they tumbled out when they were originally given and originally recorded and what Joseph Smith had done with his revision to the Bible (the Old and the New Testament). So, it was a research project; it was not a drafting, or it wasn't an “innovating” project. It was a reclamation project that was trying to strictly get back what it was that Joseph had originally given to us. Joseph referred to his effort to recover the Bible in its original form as “the fullness of the Scriptures.” So, the Bible—the Old and the New Testament—was what was referred to as the fullness of the Scriptures. The Book of Mormon was the “Book of Mormon,” and the revelations given to Joseph was referred to generically (very often) as just the “commandments.” And so, when the term “the fullness of the Scriptures” got used by Joseph, he was referring to the work that he was doing in recovering the Joseph Smith translation. So, we move along happily to the point that we think we've got this project in a robust enough state of completion that it went into print, and it was circulated (as a result of the conference that was held down in St George), and hard copies of these things became available (print-on-demand through Amazon), and people bought them. One of the folks in whose hands a copy of those Scriptures wound up is in here in the room today. (I'm not naming names today because I don't wanna embarrass anyone.) But one of the people that’s sitting in the room happened to have spent years of work on the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible, in which he learned things about the JST version that no one on the committee had had brought to their attention. And so, after they were in print and available in print-on-demand and the JST (that everyone on the committee was so proud of) came to the attention of someone that knew more, he (fortunately) was willing to volunteer; he joined the committee. And so, the project that was complete enough to call it done and “Now we can put it out in print,” we find out is not only not complete enough, but it needed to start all over again from scratch. And so, the project—which had been done now another time in its fourth state of completion—began anew because attention had been paid to details that had not yet come to the attention of the committee. Then we find out that not only was the JST version incomplete and the version we were working with had been modified before its publication by the RLDS Church (who felt at liberty to eliminate some of the changes that Joseph Smith made and also to add some additions to it that the publication's committee at Herald House—the RLDS Church—felt at liberty to make), and so the text had become something other than the Joseph Smith translation. Fortunately, there was resources available and someone who had spent the time invested in those resources to guide through that. But we also found that the original publication of the Book of Commandments, which was done in Missouri by Oliver Cowdery and W.W. Phelps… That's the version that got destroyed by the mob, and copies (unbound copies) of those got smuggled out by women in their skirts. The Book of Commandments (that was assembled from that printing) later was bound—at a later time, in another place—and the do-over of the Book of Commandments was accomplished in 1835 back in Kirtland where they had a press. And so, the original expectation was that the Book of Commandments had a better version than did the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. (They changed the name from Book of Commandments to Doctrine and Covenants for the first time in 1835.) However, what we learned upon further research (‘cause this is a research project) is that Oliver Cowdery—who had been given permission in a revelation to write (but not by way of commandment) for the Church—felt at liberty to take the revelations of Joseph when he put it into the Book of Commandments and make changes there. That Book of Commandments version was what the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants teed off of. So,...