Methodology

How this site dates a manuscript when its own account differs from a later one.

Most dates on this site are not in question. Where they are, this page states the rule this site follows and why, rather than arguing the point separately on every page that needs it.

The Rule

This site dates a manuscript from what the manuscript itself says about its own place in a sequence of events, not from a heading added when the document was later copied, compiled, or filed. Where a manuscript’s internal content — what it assumes has already happened, what it defers to a future document, what it responds to — fixes it more precisely in time than a transcription heading does, this site follows the manuscript’s own internal evidence.

This is not a claim that later headings are unreliable as a rule, or that this site’s dating should be preferred generally over the Joseph Smith Papers’ own. In the great majority of cases the two agree, and this site follows the Joseph Smith Papers’ dating without comment. This page governs only the specific, identified cases where the two diverge — currently one, detailed below — and states the standard this site would apply if another such case were found.

Why Internal Evidence Governs

A manuscript can carry two different kinds of date. One is the date something was first dictated or drawn. The other is the date it was copied into a letterbook, a revelation book, or a packet sent to someone else — an act that often happened weeks or months after the fact, by a scribe recording when the copying occurred rather than when the content originated. Where only the second date survives as a heading, and the content itself contains internal evidence of the first, this site treats the content as the more reliable witness to when the material was actually received.

Applied: The May–August 1833 Case

Revelation Book 2 carries a heading of “2d August 1833” over the text giving dimensions for the house described on The House. This site dates that text instead to May 6, 1833.

The reasoning: the text looks backward to a city pattern it treats as “already given,” and forward to a court pattern it defers, saying that pattern “shall be given unto you hereafter.” A separate revelation dated June 1, 1833 supplies exactly that deferred pattern. Read on the August heading, this sequence runs backward — the promised pattern would already have existed for nine weeks before the May text promised it. Read on May 6, the promise and its June 1 fulfillment fall into their natural order.

Supporting this reading, an earlier manuscript — History, 1838–1856, Volume A-1 — places the same text at May 6 rather than August, preserving what this site takes to be the original placement before the August letterbook copy was made.

Sources: Revelation Book 2, p. 64 (Joseph Smith Papers); Letter to Church Leaders in Jackson County, Missouri, 6 August 1833 (Joseph Smith Papers); History, 1838–1856, Volume A-1, p. 295 (Joseph Smith Papers).

Citation Standard

Alongside how this site dates a manuscript, this section states how it cites one.

This site cites primary sources by their manuscript date and scribe, and links directly to that manuscript’s own page on the Joseph Smith Papers. It does not cite by the section number later assigned when these texts were compiled into a printed volume — that numbering describes a later editorial compilation, not the manuscript itself, and using it here would describe the wrong artifact.

Where two manuscripts share the same date, this site distinguishes them the way the Joseph Smith Papers itself does — by the letter the Papers assigns to each (“Revelation A,” “Revelation B,” and so on) — rather than by section number.

This standard governs this site’s own narrative pages. It does not apply retroactively to the separate papers linked from Papers, which are attributed to their own authors and presented as they were written.