Review of The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts, eds. Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018), 381 pages.

Abstract: Volume 4 of the Revelations and Translations series of the Joseph Smith Papers does not live up to the standards set in previous volumes. While the production values are still top notch, the actual content is substandard. Problems fill the volume, including misplaced photographs and numerous questionable transcriptions beyond the more than two hundred places where the editors admitted they could not read the documents. For this particular volume, producing it incorrectly is arguably worse than not producing it at all.

The Joseph Smith Papers Project has developed a well-deserved reputation for excellence in every aspect of publication. Fantastic photographs, faithful transcriptions, helpful notes, and top-quality paper and bindings have all been standard issue. This is a tremendous heritage to live up to, and each new volume comes out with eager anticipation.

The volume under review, Volume 4 of the Revelations and Translations series, contains a number of documents that have been known to historians for at least fifty years, but many of them have never been properly published and have never before been officially published. The volume begins with a lengthy introduction that attempts to set the documents into historical context. This is followed by the individual documents with accompanying short introductions. The documents are organized into groups: Egyptian papyri (pp. 3–24), Notebooks of Copied Egyptian Characters (pp. 25–41), Copies of Egyptian Characters (pp. 43–52), Egyptian Alphabet Documents (pp. 53–109), [Page 176]Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (pp. 111–90), Book of Abraham Manuscripts, circa July–circa November 1835 (pp. 191–242), Book of Abraham Manuscripts, circa February–circa 15 March 1842 (pp. 243– 93), and Facsimile Printing Plates and Published Book of Abraham (pp. 295–335). Reference material at the end of the volume includes Book of Abraham Chronology for the Years 1835 and 1842 (pp. 338–40), Works Cited (pp. 341–49), and Comparison of Characters (pp. 350–80). References for the Introduction are given as footnotes, but references in the other sections are gathered as endnotes at the end of each section. This makes references difficult to locate, although that may not be a bad thing. Readers should carefully note that the list of works cited is not a comprehensive bibliography on the volume’s subject matter and is thus missing several major works.

On the surface, this volume appears to conform to the standards of the previous volumes, but in the details that is not the case. There is much in the volume with which one could and perhaps should quibble. I will not be able to spend much time on the numerous questionable editorial decisions or scholarship evident in the volume. I will, however, note that the editors chose to completely relabel the documents from their historical names, which will sow much confusion in discussions, but they provided no concordance of other major labels for the documents, as is standard in scholarly editions. Instead, I will simply list a sample of known problems in the volume.

I have previously done a letter-by-letter transcription of the documents based on high-resolution photographs and personal examination of the original documents utilizing the transcription standards used by ancient historians1 rather than those of the modern American hi...