[Page 321]Review of Samuel Morris Brown, Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 314 pages. $34.95 (hardback).

Abstract: Samuel M. Brown opens up a new and expansive view of Joseph Smith as a religious thinker. Written for an academic audience, Brown is intentionally dealing with what can be seen and understood about Joseph Smith’s various translations, a term that Brown uses not only for texts, but for concepts of bringing the world of the divine into contact with the human domain. This is a history of the interaction of a person and the world of his thought, from the first text (the Book of Mormon) to the last, which Brown considers to be the temple rites.

Some will read the main title of Samuel Brown’s book without continuing to the subtitle. That will lead to an unfortunate misunderstanding of Brown’s sympathetic investigation into early Latter-day Saint thought. This book never intends to venture into the questions of how or whether Joseph Smith translated a text from one human language to another. His use of the word translation is a more expansive concept; thus, the subtitle: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism.

Easily overlooked also would be the last two words: early Mormonism. Those are essential because an important distinction in Brown’s work transcends the common notion that early Mormonism simply means its historical beginnings. In Brown’s description of the Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism, it is a qualitative rather than a temporal difference.

In 1994, Armand L. Mauss published The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation. Mauss selected two symbols [Page 322]to represent the tensions he felt the young Church developed. For the maturing Latter-day Saint church, the beehive symbolized “all aspects of Mormon involvement with the world, cultural as well as economic.”1 The angel (specifically the angel Moroni on the temple) signified “the charismatic element in Mormonism.”2 That tension between early charisma and later assimilation is part of the developmental process that moves an early sect into a recognized church.3

That division between charismatic beginnings and eventual assimilation is important when approaching Brown’s book because it was written in the assimilation phase, and it will be read either by an audience that has no Latter-day Saint history or by those whose Church history consists of perceptions developed as part of the assimilation phase. Samuel Brown is pushing his description into the past and discussing the early charisma with reverence, understanding, and a view to present the impact of that charisma to an audience increasingly distant from the intellectual world in which the early Latter-day Saint converts lived. Brown is as close to an insider’s view as we can get while still presenting the overarching perspective of a longer history that allows a vision of how the puzzle pieces finally fit together.

Brown is painting a picture of the development of ideas and therefore begins not with a typical history of Latter-day Saint origins but with one of swirling concepts that will eventually coalesce into an impression of Joseph’s mental world that so enthralled his early converts. It is a verbal painting more akin to Van Gogh’s Starry Night than to the more photorealistic paintings of, say,