Sometimes it seems like it takes decades for historical research to go from academic papers to the mainstream consciousness on a subject. Other times it seems like it happens overnight. Such is the case with the work of Dr. Thomas A. Wayment, Professor of Classics at Brigham Young University, and his then research assistant and now librarian Haley Wilson-Lemmon. Their 2020 paper, A Recovered Resource: The Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary in Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation, set the Latter-day Saint academic setting on fire as it presented what appears to be definitive proof that the Joseph Smith Translation (JST) of the King James Version of the Holy Bible copied Adam Clarke’s commentary of the Bible, incorporating much of it into the JST. They discovered 200 to 300 places (pg. 6) in the JST where they are certain that Joseph Smith copied Adam Clarke directly without attribution.
Their stance seems to have quickly become the norm with people online accepting as fact in a very short amount of time. The reactions of Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon themselves are representative of the reactions people had to their conclusions. Wayment, concluded that this meant that some of the JST was revelatory meant to restore lost scripture while other parts were simply Joseph trying to correct translation errors. (pgs. 8-9) Wilson-Lemmon had already become inactive in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2017 and left it in 2019 by the time the article came out, but she has given interviews where she has said that she believes Joseph plagiarized Clarke. These stances mirror quite closely those that I have seen online where faithful members, such as myself, have largely independently of Wayment come to a conclusion similar to his while former church members and anti-Mormons have largely taken stances similar to Wilson-Lemmon.
But in all of this, there has been a distinct lack of addressing the validity of the Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s actual claims. We have all just taken their claims at face value. Too few of us have actually critically evaluated their work to see if it holds up to scrutiny. We have just assumed they were right and went directly to arguing over what it should mean.
So, thank Heavens for Dr. Kent P. Jackson, Professor emeritus of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University who has done extensive work studying and publishing on the Joseph Smith Translation (JST). He is, in other words, a one of the foremost experts on the text of the JST. And he was not impressed by Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s work. In fact, as he studied their conclusions and compared their arguments to what he knew, he realized they were dead wrong.
I have examined the same material [as Wayment and Wislon-Lemmon], and I don’t believe that there is any evidence at all that Joseph Smith drew ideas from Clarke’s Bible commentary.
…[Clarke’s] commentary is full of paraphrases, restatements, and wordy discussions, some of which include words that bear resemblances to revisions Joseph Smith made to the biblical text.
Wayment has interpreted those as examples of Joseph Smith borrowing ideas or words from Clarke, but that’s not what they are, in my opinion. They’re random and coincidental resemblances, mostly of unimportant words.
…Even if their theory were true, this wouldn’t be “plagiarism,” because the convergences they propose amount mostly to isolated words and vague resemblances. At best they could say that Joseph Smith was occasionally influenced by things Clarke wrote, though I don’t believe it.
The Joseph Smith Translation: An Inspired Version of the Bible
It isn’t that Dr. Jackson finds the theory religiously offensive, he doesn’t. It is simply that he doesn’t find any evidence for it:
There is nothing wrong with the idea of Joseph Smith getting some ideas from an external source when revising the Bible, and I will propose some possible examples below. When I first became aware of the proposed Adam Clarke-Joseph Smith connection, I had no reason not to welcome the discovery. …In between [the large additions to the Bible such as the Book of Moses and JST Matthew 24] are a few thousand small changes that are simply rewordings of the language of the King James Version text (KJV) — word changes that correct, modernize, simplify, clarify, or amplify. …There is no reason to think that in those revisions the Prophet could not have simply used his own common sense where needed, or that he could not have been influenced by printed sources available to him to improve the text. …The only question is whether proof exists for that taking place in his revision of the Bible.
Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke
Dr. Jackson also pointed out that this was a purely academic work and only appears apologetic in nature when compared to Wilson-Lemmon’s use of her work with Dr. Wayment as a way to attack Joseph Smith and through him the veracity of the church. But her criticisms were never a concern of his when writing the article. His only concern was evaluating the evidence put forth to argue that Joseph Smith copied the Adam Clarke biblical commentaries:
In the article I discuss each of the JST revisions that they attribute to Clarke. Discussing each one separately makes the article unfortunately longer than I had wanted. Interpreter is a responsible journal that publishes excellent articles. Their editors and reviewers were terrific to work with, and they did an excellent job. …because I don’t view the Adam Clarke thesis to be necessarily an attack on the Church, I don’t view my article as apologetic. It’s simply an article that examines some ideas.
The Joseph Smith Translation: An Inspired Version of the Bible
Doing Actual History
So, what did Dr. Jackson discover in his evaluation?
I have studied closely the Wayment article and the Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon article and their proposed connections between Clarke’s commentary and Joseph Smith. I have examined in detail every one of the JST passages they set forth as having been influenced by Clarke, and I have examined what Clarke wrote about those passages. I now believe that the conclusions they reached regarding those connections cannot be sustained. I do not believe that there is Adam Clarke-JST connection at all, and I have seen no evidence that Joseph Smith ever used Clarke’s commentary in his revision of the Bible. None of the passages that Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon have set forward as examples, in my opinion, can withstand careful scrutiny
Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke
While I cannot quote herein every evidence that Dr. Jackson cites, there are some fascinating insights that are worth looking at specifically.
He starts by dismantling Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s understanding of how the JST was recorded. First, Dr. Jackson notes that despite Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s claim that Joseph’s scribes repeatedly copied from the Bible and made interlinear notes that added the JST as additions/edits. What actually happened was that the majority of the JST text was a dictation by Joseph Smith to his scribes who wrote everything he said in a single stream of text without punctuation or verses, but including all the major changes introduced by Joseph Smith to the biblical text. Jackson admits that some edits were made later, but explains that these came during a second pass over the text and represent only a minority of changes of minor importance. You can see an example of this in the picture below. Similarly, Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon claim that Joseph used the Urim and Thummim for part of the JST and switched to using the Adam Clarke Commentary in the New Testament. But, Jackson points out that no source contemporary to Joseph says he used the Urim and Thummim but they do support the idea that he continued to use the revelatory dictation process described above.
Further problems for Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s Adam Clarke hypothesis is that there are times where Joseph decides the very opposite of Clarke. Dr. Jackson provides the example of conflicting lists of families in Ezra and Nehemiah. Joseph edited Nehemiah to be consistent with Ezra whereas Clarke argues that both lists are correct, even though they disagree, and doesn’t see a need to choose one as being more correct than the other. If Joseph was so beholden to Clarke, then why would Joseph come to the exact opposite conclusion? Likewise, Jackson points out that Joseph’s changes are similar to other commentaries than Clarke’s as well, but no one suggests that Joseph was copying those commentaries in addition to Clarke or other than Clarke. Dr. Jackson argues that the similarities between Joseph and other commentaries are convergences, areas where the shared desire to simplify the King James Version and make it easier for contemporary English readers to understand led those making commentaries to making similar changes utilizing the similar phraseology because they shared a common language.
Towards the end of the paper, Dr. Jackson even destroys their evidence that Joseph Smith had a copy of Adam Clarke’s commentaries. Their single source for this is a thirdhand story about Nathaniel Lewis, Emma’s uncle, that has Lewis asking Joseph to use the Urim and Thummim to translate some of the Hebrew characters from Clarke’s commentaries. The problem with this story is that it first appears in the January 1843 edition of the anti-Mormon Methodist Quarterly Review in an anti-Mormon story that cites no sources for events that are supposed to have happened in 1828 or 1829, when Joseph Smith was translating the Book of Mormon. A thirdhand account from a hateful source telling a story from approximately 15 years before without a source for the story is not historically reliable. Given the source, it is most likely made up entirely.
No historian would take that seriously, which is probably why Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon never actually tell you where their source that Joseph supposedly had a copy of Clarke’s commentaries even comes from. All of which means that there is no evidence at all that Joseph Smith even owned a copy of Adam Clarke’s commentaries, much less used them in the JST.
Making these points – demonstrating the failures of Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon to understand the historical process and context of the JST, and therefore calling into question their understanding of the JST itself – Dr. Jackson then goes on to demonstrate how they are wrong about every single example they provided which they claim proves Joseph Smith copied Adam Clarke. Dr. Jackson argues that convergences between Clarke and Joseph are not proof that Joseph copied Clarke, that Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon frequently misunderstand Clarke and therefore get wrong what he was trying to say (and therefore how that might apply to the JST), and their complete lack of understanding the relationship of the JST verses they claim were copied to the rest of the JST blinds them to the obvious historical facts that in many cases the changes they claim Joseph made copying from Clarke where changes that Joseph had made elsewhere before ever encountering the portion of Clarke that Joseph is supposed to have copied.
A Look At The Evidence
I do not have the space to provide all the examples Dr. Jackson does demonstrating how Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s ignorance led them into coming to significantly erroneous conclusions. He refutes their every example. I will provide only two of Dr. Jackson’s examples, one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament.
Psalms 33:2
KJV: Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery, and an instrument of ten strings.
JST: Praise the Lord with thy voice, sing unto him with the psaltery and harp, an instrument with ten strings.
Adam Clarke’s commentary expresses displeasure with the KJV of this verse and argues that the words represented as “psaltery” and “an instrument of ten strings” are a single instrument. His reconstruction of the Hebrew removes the “and” between them.
Joseph Smith’s revision is not at all what Clarke had in mind, but Wayment misreads Clarke here and wants to attribute it to Clarke. The Prophet reinvented the verse. He retained the “and” and relocated “harp” following it, equating the harp, not the “psaltery,” with the ten-stringed instrument. He inserted “thy voice” in the place of the harp in the first clause of the sentence. There is much evidence in the JST to show that when the Prophet removed or replaced words, he had a tendency to save the deleted words and place them elsewhere, and this is a good example. All of these revisions are the opposite of what Clarke wanted.
Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke
Notice in the citation above how Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon fundamentally misunderstand both the JST and Adam Clarke. Such a significant misreading of both texts should immediately call into question the understanding of anyone claiming to be expert in them. And this kind of error is not isolated to this single citation. Here is another, this one from the New Testament:
Matthew 5:22
KJV: whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause
JST: whosoever is angry with his brother
[Page 34]Adam Clarke’s commentary points out that the Greek word translated “without a cause” is not found in Vaticanus nor in some other manuscripts, and “it was probably a marginal gloss originally, which in process of time crept into the text.” This was not a revolutionary discovery, because even the translations of Martin Luther and William Tyndale did not include the clause.
Wilson-Lemmon states that the absence of this clause was the first discovery she made that linked Joseph Smith’s translation with the commentary of Adam Clarke. But Clarke is not the source for the Prophet’s rendering of this verse, the Book of Mormon is. The evidence is clear that when he revised Matthew 5, Joseph Smith edited the KJV text against 3 Nephi in the 1830 Book of Mormon, pages 479–81. He did not copy the Book of Mormon text exactly, but he inserted into Matthew 5 about thirty wordings of it that differ from the KJV. The Book of Mormon is the source for the absence of “without a cause” in the JST, not Adam Clarke. In addition to those revisions, Joseph Smith’s translation of Matthew 5 also contains over ten other changes that cannot be accounted for with reference to Adam Clarke.
Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke
In case you’re curious what Dr. Jackson means by referring to the Book of Mormon, he is talking about the Sermon at the Temple, a recapitulation of the Sermon on the Mount that is given by the Resurrected Lord in 3 Nephi 12-14. In the Sermon at the Temple, the Risen Christ says:
21 Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, and it is also written before you, that thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment of God;
22 But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of his judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
3 Nephi 11:12, emphasis my own.
Notice here, years before Joseph Smith is supposed to have used Adam Clarke to have edited Matthew 5:22, we find the same edit in the Book of Mormon. It is clear from this alone that Joseph had a source other than Clarke, which he didn’t access until years later, that told him to drop the phrase, “without a cause,” something that Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon totally ignore. Why? Perhaps because they were too busy reading the JST for proof of their preconceived conclusions as opposed to studying the historical and theological context in detail to see if their theory was supported at all. As Dr. Jackson concludes:
The Adam Clarke-JST theory starts with the given that Joseph Smith borrowed ideas from Adam Clarke, and then it searches through Clarke for words that can be invoked as evidence for it. The real explanations are almost always much easier and much more intuitive than the explanations that involve Adam Clarke.
Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke
Final Thoughts
There is so much more here dismantling Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s hypothesis. See, for example, Kevin Barney’s detailed evaluation of Exodus 11:9 where he evaluates Dr. Jackson’s evidence given in the Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke articl, by digging down deeper into the text. Barney proves that Dr. Jackson’s argument that the change made to Exodus 11:9 in the JST is definitely not related to the Clarke commentaries even though the JST and Clarke end up using the same language. What appears to Wayment and WIlson-Lemmon as Joseph copying Clarke is in fact proof of a convergence, proof that two separate people ended up at the same conclusions separately and independently.
Barney also points out that only about 5% of the JST relates to Adam Clarke according to Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s own work, which means that 95% of the JST is not influenced or copied from Clarke in any manner whatsoever. Ultimately, Barney therefore concludes that if there is a Clarke influence on the JST then it is “negligible” at best. Despite what the critics would have you believe, even if Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon were right, which the evidence shows they were not, then it still wouldn’t mean that Joseph Smith plagiarized Adam Clarke or that Clarke was a major influence at all.
Finally, I would suggest this 2023 presentation from Dr. Jackson where he presents in detail on Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s theory and why it is wrong. While the presentation can’t get into the textual detail that the Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke article does, the presentation does do an excellent job of exploring historical context that couldn’t be included in the article. Taken together, Jackson’s article and presentation do more than just seriously challenge Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon’s theory, they dismantle it entirely.
Epilogue
As a side note, if you’re wondering how Wilson-Lemmon stopped going to church in 2017 and left it entirely in 2019 but still managed to get published by BYU in 2020 as a student, I figured out the answer while doing research for this article, near the very end of writing it in fact. The answer of how she managed to keep the necessary ecclesiastical endorsement while completely rejecting the church’s teachings is simple. She is a liar. Wilson-Lemmon herself tells the story in one of the anti-Mormon subreddits where they were all shocked that BYU tried to pull her Letters of Recommendation to Notre Dame University when it came out that she had been lying to all of her religious leaders, school officials, professors, and even Wayment himself about her religious beliefs for years. Since I hate to link to these sites and give these people traffic of any sort, here is a screen capture of Wilson-Lemmon telling the story in her own words:
Though she never says who “this individual” is, the fact that she worked with him for years makes me wonder if it was Wayment himself. After all, she lied to Wayment for years as they did research on this paper. It would make sense that when he found out that he tried to pull his Letter of Recommendation for her to Notre Dame University. Because he didn’t want to recommend liars. After all, if she would lie, manipulate, and deceive everyone around her in her private life, taking advantage of the trust of the most important relationships in her life for her own gain, then it seems likely she would not hesitate to do it to her own benefit in her professional life either. History is a discipline built on trust and she proved that she was absolutely untrustworthy.
Ultimately, Notre Dame University didn’t care about the issue, something the anti-Mormons find hilarious. But I find it admirable that BYU and its employees would rather support honesty and truthfulness over having a student in a prestigious university. BYU’s first dedication was to promoting integrity and honest scholars over institutional prominence. If Wilson-Lemmon had been rejected from Notre Dame University it wouldn’t be BYU’s fault, it would have been her own for lying about her faith for years by that point in order to manipulate and take advantage of everyone around her in order to dishonestly take advantage of the church education system and the relative inexpensiveness of BYU thanks to the church subsidizing BYU with tithing funds. It seems like Wilson-Lemmon couldn’t stand the church but she had no problem lying to it in order to get its monies for her own benefit. But in her eyes she is the victim that was punished for her beliefs, not a liar taking advantage of the trust of others for her own gain.
That is what gaslighting looks like, folks. And yes, when you’re the one lying to dozens of people in order to take advantage of their kindness and the wealth of any organization for your own advantage and then act like you’re the victim when those people find out about your lies and try and correct the errors you manipulated them into then you’re gaslighting everyone.
Honestly, the whole thing sours me on her personally. I didn’t put any of this information above because I didn’t want to commit a poisoning the well fallacy. I want Dr. Jackson’s arguments to stand on their own. But finding out that Wilson-Lemmon is a proud liar who deceived and manipulated dozens of people around her, including religious leaders, friends, and colleagues, including Dr. Wayment himself (whether he was “this individual” or not), all for her material benefit even as she was essentially swearing to all of them that she was being as honest as possible – the whole thing disgusts me. And it throws any works she does and any other claims she makes into a negative light. After all, who can take a proven and proud liar seriously in history where your honesty and integrity are foundational to your work?
Only the equally dishonest.
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great.