Joseph Smith’s Sermons and the Early Mormon Documentary Record

In “Joseph Smith’s Sermons and the Early Mormon Documentary Record,” William V. Smith treats Joseph Smith’s preaching record in chronological fashion. This treatment provides, in part, an explanation of documentary trends in that record and its subsequent place in the Mormon textual value system. The documentary record of Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s preaching expanded with the growing importance attached to that preaching. That growth followed from Smith’s practice of increasingly offering new doctrinal teachings that he often claimed were based on revelation. The record of Smith’s sermons—longhand reports by official clerks and the work of a growing regiment of pew auditors—reached its productive acme in 1844, the final year of his life. Examples show that the complex character of that record and its subsequent evolution as a published authority bar the historian from a simplistic use of Smith’s documented preaching corpus.