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SALT LAKE CITY — Matt Godfrey said the journals of Joseph Smith are always fascinating to read, providing insight into what his daily life was like.
Volume 15 of "The Joseph Smith Papers" is scheduled to be published next week, and Godfrey said it covers the last six weeks of the life of the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"If you ... want to see how chaotic and hectic things were in those last six weeks, it's a great volume to look at," Godfrey said.
Those journal entries are in the last of 27 volumes of "The Joseph Smith Papers," and it is scheduled to be published on Tuesday, June 27.
Godfrey said his biggest takeaway from working on the project with the Church History Department is really learning who Joseph Smith was as a person.
"He comes across as someone who is very concerned about the well-being of church members, very concerned for the well-being of his family," he said.
Godfrey said there were a lot of trials that Joseph Smith worked through, and he is dealing with those trials as he is working to run a church and be a good father, husband and friend while he is in his 20s and 30s.
"It just gave me the sense that God really does work through ordinary people. ... I think (Joseph Smith) really was kind of a special person. But it helped me to see that God can do a great work through anyone," he said.
A 22-year effort
The project began in 2001, and is a complete compilation of all of Joseph Smith's surviving papers, including letters, documents he signed, journal entries, and revelations. Godfrey said in terms of resources and time, this is the biggest project ever pulled together by the Church History Department, and hundreds of people contributed.
Godfrey began working on the project in 2010. He previously worked for the federal government using his American history degree for legal research but saw a job listing for work on "The Joseph Smith Papers" and applied, because he had always wanted to work for the church.
Since 2013, he managed the 15 historians working on the project.
He said the historians would start by verifying transcriptions of sources, and then they would do research to write an introduction to the document explaining what was going on at the time and why the document was created. Godfrey said he was also a general editor, so he was responsible to read everything and make sure the style was followed and every introduction had a similar tone.
Although the official project began in 2001, Godfrey said the effort to gather documents associated with Joseph Smith began in the 1960s when an archivist with the Church History Department named Dean Jessee began compiling and publishing editions of the prophet's personal writings. After about 30 years, the department decided to consider a more comprehensive work.
Godfrey said some universities had spent decades compiling papers from specific founding fathers, and the church's history department came up with a proposal for this edition which was approved by church leadership in 2001.
The main audience for the volumes is researchers, both inside and outside of the church.
"We wanted people, scholars, to be able to access Joseph Smith's papers so that when they were writing about Joseph Smith, or about that era of church history, they would have a ready resource to turn to," Godfrey said.
He said they wanted to have a comprehensive edition to provide transparency, and address claims from critics that the church is hiding its history. Godfrey said the scholarly world now has the benefit of being able to really examine the church founder's life.
"We wanted this to be completely transparent. And so (it includes) any Joseph Smith document — which we define as anything that he created himself, or that he directed to be created, or anything that he owned, so like a letter that somebody wrote to him," Godfrey said.
Most of the documents have not been published previously and would have only been accessible by going to the Church History Department.
Now that researchers have completed this project, Godfrey said they have begun working on other compilations — although he said there aren't currently plans to do comprehensive editions of documents for any other presidents of the church. He said they are compiling and publishing discourses of Eliza R. Snow, journals of George Q. Cannon and journals from Emmeline B. Wells.
Advice for church members
Godfrey said a strong secondary audience for "The Joseph Smith Papers" is church members who are interested in church history, but he reminds members the publications are reference volumes and are not meant to be read cover to cover.
He said there was an effort to make the volumes credible to scholars, but also accessible to members who are looking for a historical source to read. One example of this is in scholarly works Joseph Smith would typically be referred to as "Smith" after the first reference, but Godfrey said that format "seemed kind of jarring" and did not express the respect and familiarity with the prophet church members are used to. To address this, the project ended up settling on using initials "J.S." — which is sometimes done in scholarly projects but is not as jarring for members.
Godfrey said there are some things in the papers from the early church that seem odd and strange, but "The Joseph Smith Papers" are able to provide context to those and help members understand them better. One example is plural marriage.
"I think when you look at the records behind (plural marriage), you can see that Joseph is very sincere and very much believes God has commanded him to do this. That he's not just drumming this up in his own mind, but he's trying to do what God commanded him to do," he said.
He said members can access the papers in a more accessible way than diving into one of the 27 volumes, including a podcast, reading historical books that cite them like the first volume of "Saints," and a church publication called Revelations in Context that focuses on the Doctrine & Covenants.
Copies of the Doctrine & Covenants printed since 2013, include heading information found by researchers involved with "The Joseph Smith Papers" project that corrected some errors in the previous version of the scriptures.
Most of the documents from the project are available online on "The Joseph Smith Papers" website, including some that are not available in the printed edition. Everything will be on the website, but due to contracts with Deseret Book, some of the volumes are still waiting to be added until 18 months after they are published, Godfrey said.
