PREFACE

Background

In a 2017 revelation regarding the scriptures, the Lord declared the following referring to the following books: Old Testament, New Testament, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Book of Mormon:

The records you have gathered as scriptures yet lack many of my words, have errors throughout, and contain things that are not of me, because the records you used in your labors have not been maintained nor guarded against the cunning plans of false brethren who have been deceived by Satan.

...the records you have received have not transmitted that which was first written in holiness,

...many parts were discarded and other parts were altered. False brethren who did not fear me intended to corrupt and to pervert the right way, to blind the eyes and harden the hearts of others, in order to obtain power and authority over them.

Conspiracies have corrupted the records, beginning among the Jews, and again following the time of my apostles, and yet again following the time of Joseph and Hyrum. As you have labored with the records you have witnessed the alterations and insertions, and your effort to recover them pleases me and is of great worth. You may remove the brackets from your record, as I accept your clarifications, and you are permitted to proceed to the end with your plan to update language to select a current vocabulary, but take care not to change meaning — and if you cannot resolve the meaning, either petition me again or retain the former words. Nevertheless, you labor with an incomplete text.

The work of recovering the scriptures took a group of volunteers years of work before its completion in 2017. The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible had not been correctly recovered and published. A version provided by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (subsequently renamed the Community of Christ) did not include all of Joseph Smith’s corrections to the text, and contained multiple inaccuracies. Removing errors and correcting the text required extensive research before the Bible was finished in 2017.

The Book of Mormon was published before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized. It belongs to the entire Christian world and not a single denomination. When the text was recovered for the scripture project in 2017, the earliest surviving portion of the translation and the printer’s copy were used. The printer’s copy was a hand-copied version of the translation given to E. B. Grandin’s print shop in 1829 to use for typesetting. That copying resulted in numerous copy errors, which Joseph Smith was attempting to correct in 1842 for a later edition. Not all those errors were corrected, and the 2017 project attempted to finish recovering the most correct text.

Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from an unknown language based on Egyptian characters to record Hebrew ideas. The Egyptian script was selected because it was more efficient and required fewer characters. However, the translation of the resulting text into English by Joseph Smith used an older version of English, often referred to as Elizabethan or Shakespearian English, named Early Modern English, and was used between A.D. 1485 and 1714. Many of the words were in common usage before the creation of the King James Bible in 1611. Accordingly, when the book first appeared in 1830, its formal language was already outdated. The initial translation, instead of using early 19th-century American English, was presented in an awkward yet occasionally poetic form of English from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Relying on Noah Webster’s 1828 first edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language as a reference to understand the text proves inadequate and leads to a misunderstanding of the meaning of many words.

Seven years ago, a new edition of the scriptures was approved by a conference that accepted the corrected, updated, recovered, and more complete texts at a conference in Boise, Idaho, and adopted as scriptures. The Old Covenants (Joseph Smith’s corrected Old Testament), the New Covenants (Joseph Smith’s corrected New Testament with the Book of Mormon), and the Teachings and Commandments (containing numerous missing or discarded revelations and historical writings) comprised the finalized canon. Since 2017, work has continued on the Book of Mormon following the approved process and confining the work to the Lord’s direction: “you are permitted to proceed to the end with your plan to update language to select a current vocabulary, but take care not to change meaning[.]” That instruction motivated this modern English version of the Book of Mormon.

When the recovered scriptures were presented to and accepted by the Lord in 2017, He offered a covenant to believers and asked of us to: “receive the scriptures approved by the Lord as a standard to govern you in your daily walk in life, to accept the obligations established by the Book of Mormon as a covenant, and to use the scriptures to correct yourselves and to guide your words, thoughts, and deeds[.]” For this reason, as the project to restate the Book of Mormon in modern English neared completion, the Lord gave it a new title: Covenant of Christ. That new title is the direct result of the Lord’s 2017 Covenant.

The updated language is essential for those who accept the 2017 Covenant. During the final stage of the project, the Lord declared: “The original Book of Mormon translation was to get that generation to be willing to accept it as scripture. They needed it to mimic the King James Version language. But this has a different purpose. This is to help a new generation understand the content to help with the Lord’s return. There is as much Divine attention and assistance in getting this new version completed as before.” Inspiration from the Lord has assisted throughout the process of finalizing this updated volume of scripture.

This volume is not intended solely for those who accepted the 2017 Covenant but will have value for anyone who wants to read and understand the Book of Mormon.