by Wayment & Wilson-Lemmon
Here the authors properly call it the “new translation” which for all intents and purposes has achieved near canonical status except for whole sections that were adopted into the Book of Moses of the Pearl of Great Price -- those translations are 100% canonical in their entirety.
Church scholars have tried to answer “the fundamental question of what Joseph Smith meant by the term “translation” and this chapter comes to terms that it was an effort to rework the biblical text through the instrumentality of Smith’s “academic interest in improving the English text of the Bible.” The very word translation has different meaning and connotation to various applications but the authors admit that Smith melded his “own prophetic inspiration into the resulting text.” Thus, revelation is the key.
The authors enquire about how the Adam Clarke Commentary played a role in assisting Smith with his translations. They agree that Smith did not have certain aids that scholars generally depend on such as dictionaries, Lexica, and training in Hebrew and Greek. Smith depended on revelation more than anything to produce his biblical revision. The authors describe how Smith’s translation effort entailed “rewording, rearranging, and otherwise altering the KJV text.” I find the following statement to be rather startling because it showcases the translation process as being entirely revelatory in nature and not just changing words or rearranging subject matter to add clarity as some may suppose but is the introduction of all NEW material:
Smith began the revision by dictating a substantially altered version of Genesis that generally followed the text of the Bible but expanded the story in dramatic ways.
Notice the big “but” and the introduction to something far broader and wider than just altering text for clarification or meaning. It is wholesale production of new material on the same level and scope of new material provided by the Book of Mormon. Raw textual material could be produced out of whole cloth by the arm of flesh but in this case it had to be through prophetic means: REVELATION THROUGH THE HOLY SPIRIT! Hence, whole sections or chapters were produced in the new translation and were subsequently published as extracts in the Evening and Morning Star in 1832 and later in the Times and Seasons in 1843. Those works of the new translation were later arranged into the Book of Moses and canonized in 1880.
Revelation was involved in order to effect a new translation whether he was simply altering a word or phrase or when he expanded the story in dramatic ways by adding pages of new content never conceived before by the arm of flesh. Thus the new translation was conceived by revelation -- lock, stock, and barrel, every single word.