PAPER

The Editor as Author: A Forensic Critique of Stephen Smoot’s “Latter-day Targumist” Thesis


The most fundamental defect in Smoot’s comparative model is one he acknowledges but refuses to treat as fatal: Joseph Smith did not work from an ancient-language source text. Every Targum in the Aramaic corpus[1] — Onkelos,[2] Pseudo-Jonathan,[3] Neofiti[4] — exists as a linguistic bridge between Hebrew and Aramaic. The Targumist’s creative latitude, including expansion, paraphrase, and harmonization, operates within the constraints of that bridge. The Hebrew text is always present, always governing sequence, always setting the outer boundaries of what the translator can do. Even the most expansive Targum — Pseudo-Jonathan, which at points reads more like midrash than translation — never abandons the Hebrew sequence as its spine.


Smith worked from the 1828 H. & E. Phinney King James Bible, acquired by Oliver Cowdery from the Grandin Press in Palmyra in October 1829.[5] This is not a Vorlage in any meaningful sense of the term.[6] It is a finished English product, three translation layers removed from the Hebrew and Greek originals. Smith was not bridging languages; he was revising a printed text in the same language he spoke, dictating changes to Sidney Rigdon as he read through the KJV verse by verse.[7] Applying Felsher and Chilton’s seven rules to this activity is a category error.[8] Those rules were formulated to describe a specific kind of linguistic and exegetical behavior — the behavior of learned Jewish scholars rendering sacred Hebrew into an Aramaic vernacular for communities that could no longer access the original. Smith’s JST is, physically and procedurally, something else: an editorial revision of an existing English translation, conducted without access to, or apparent consultation of, the underlying Hebrew or Greek manuscripts.[9]
The analogy Smoot draws is formally similar to calling a film adaptation of a novel “translation” because both tell the same story with interpretive choices. The label borrows the prestige of the ancient category without meeting its basic material conditions. And this is not merely a pedantic objection about terminology.


The absence of a primary-language Vorlage removes the structural constraint that gives the Targumic rules their descriptive force. Rules 2 and 3 — smooth integration, substitution without disturbing surrounding form — are meaningful precisely because the Targumist is working around a fixed Hebrew sequence that cannot be altered. Remove that constraint, and those rules describe almost any act of engaged literary revision. They describe Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Morals of Jesus, which also cut and rearranged biblical material according to the editor’s theological priorities.[10] Jefferson was not a Targumist either.


The LDS Church’s own institutional framing is instructive here. The Bible Dictionary in the Church’s current edition calls the JST “a revision or translation of the King James Version.”[11] The Joseph Smith Papers Project, in its introductory series framing, describes it as “an inspired revision (and in some cases expansion) of biblical passages.”[12] When Smith’s own institutional heirs reach for “revision” first, the burden falls on Smoot to explain why “Targumist” is the more precise and illuminating frame — rather than a frame that imports an ancient pedigree the text’s material conditions do not support.


II. The Matthew 24 Anomaly: A Falsifying Case
The most decisive single piece of evidence against Smoot’s model is Joseph Smith—Matthew, the JST’s treatment of Matthew 24.[13] This is not a marginal case. It is the most structurally radical intervention in the entire JST corpus, and Smoot’s framework has no mechanism to accommodate it.


Smoot’s use of Rule 2 states that a Targum “integrates any addition smoothly so as not to interrupt its flow.” Rule 3 states that substitutions occur “without disturbing the form of the surrounding translation.” Both rules rest on a premise Smoot never states explicitly but which every example in the Targumic corpus confirms: the translator follows the source text’s sequence.[14] The Targumist of Onqelos does not reorganize the sequence of Genesis.[15] The Targumist of Pseudo-Jonathan does not move a verse from the middle of Exodus to its opening to create a cleaner theological narrative.[16] Structural re-sequencing is simply not a behavior that appears in the Targumim, because it would violate the institutional function of the text. The Targumim were designed to be read alongside or in place of the Hebrew in synagogue settings.[17] A Targumist who re-sequenced Genesis 1 would have produced a liturgically useless text.
Smith’s treatment of Matthew 24 does exactly what no Targumist did. The KJV chapter presents a running interweave of prophecies about the 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem and eschatological end-times events, two threads of discourse that Jesus, in Matthew’s account, does not cleanly separate[18] Smith’s revision physically re-orders those verses to impose a chronological division between first-century events (verses 5–21 in the JST rendering) and latter-day events (verses 21–55). Phrases are extracted from the chapter’s middle and relocated to its opening. What the KJV presents as a conclusion to one line of thought is buried mid-text in the JST to smooth Smith’s resequenced timeline. The chapter is not expanded — it is architecturally reconstructed.[19]


This is chronological redaction, not translation. It is the behavior of an editor who has looked at the source’s “order of evidence,” decided it is wrong or insufficiently clear, and corrected it according to a predetermined interpretive framework — in this case, an eschatological chart that separates the fall of Jerusalem from the Second Coming in a way Matthew’s Greek text does not. The behavior is closer to what a modern study Bible editor does when reorganizing commentary around a thematic argument than to anything a Targumist does. Smoot’s Rules 2 and 3 are not merely strained by this case; they are flatly contradicted by it. A comparative model that cannot account for the most structurally significant intervention in the corpus it is describing has a serious explanatory problem.


III. The First-Person Usurpation: Changing the Deponent
Smoot offers JST Genesis 1 as his primary positive parallel with Targum Neofiti, and the comparison is genuinely interesting on the surface.[20] Both texts expand the role of divine agency in the creation account. Neofiti introduces the Memra — the Word of the Lord — as the active agent of creation in place of the more direct divine action described in the Hebrew. Smith introduces “I, God” as the first-person narrator, transforming the entire creation account into a direct divine speech delivered to Moses.[21] Smoot reads Smith’s shift as a species of “substitution” within the meaning of Rule 3.


The comparison fails at precisely the point where it appears most convincing. Targum Neofiti’s Memra is a theological intermediary — a buffer between the transcendent God and the anthropomorphic language of the Hebrew text.[22] It is third-person throughout: “The Memra of the Lord said,” “the Memra of the Lord created,” “it was manifest before the Lord.”[23] The narrator remains external to the action. God’s Word acts in the story; God himself, as a speaking subject, remains at a remove. This is consistent with the broader Targumic strategy of downplaying anthropomorphism — the same strategy Smoot notes when Neofiti renders God’s act of seeing (Hebrew ra’ah) as the earth’s goodness being “manifest before the Lord,” rather than God actively beholding it with eyes.


Smith moves in the precisely opposite direction. He does not distance God from the text — he installs God inside it as the first-person speaker of every sentence. “I, God, said: Let there be light.” “I, God, divided the light from the darkness.” “I, God, called the light Day.”[24] This is not a theological intermediary softening anthropomorphism. It is the wholesale elimination of the narrator’s position and its replacement by direct divine deposition. The text no longer reports what God did; God reports what God did, speaking through the prophet in the present tense of revelation.


The functional consequence is significant and has no Targumic parallel. A historical narrative in the third person carries the implicit authority of a human witness — someone reporting what happened. A first-person divine speech act carries a categorically different claim: that God is speaking now, through this prophet, and that the content of what is said carries immediate revelatory authority. By shifting to first person, Smith does not merely interpret the Genesis account — he forecloses the possibility that the revision is merely interpretation.


The grammatical structure of the text itself becomes the authorization mechanism. What Smoot frames as a translation technique is, in functional terms, a prophetic authority claim embedded in the syntax. Indeed, the shift represents a total reversal of the Targumic impulse. Where the Targumist employed the third-person Memra as a protective buffer to preserve divine transcendence and shield the reader from anthropomorphism, Smith’s revision collapses that distance entirely.[25] By installing God as the first-person deponent, Smith replaces the ‘Word of the Lord’ with the voice of the Prophet, effectively merging the two.


No Targumist required that mechanism, because no Targumist was arguing that the received Hebrew text was corrupted and required correction. The Targumim’s authority rested on their fidelity to the Hebrew, however expansively rendered. Smith’s authority rested on the claim that the Hebrew — and every translation from it — was already compromised.


IV. Harmonization vs. Retrofitting: The Anachronism Problem
Smoot invokes Rule 4 — that targumic additions “may be drawn from, imitate, or relate to material elsewhere in the work” — to account for Smith’s insertion of “mine Only Begotten” into JST Genesis 1:26–27.[26] God’s address to “mine Only Begotten, which was with me from the beginning” in the JST creation account is read by Smoot as harmonization with other biblical material, consistent with how Targumists resolved internal textual tensions by drawing on resources elsewhere in the canon.[27]


The comparison requires closer examination than Smoot gives it. Targumic harmonization characteristically resolves tensions within the Hebrew Bible, drawing on the conceptual resources of the tradition the Targum serves. When Pseudo-Jonathan addresses the grammatical puzzle of Genesis 1:26 — “Let us make man in our image,” with its anomalous plural — it has God address his divine council (Sôd), a conceptual move supported by Psalms 82, Job 1–2, and the broader ancient Israelite tradition of the divine assembly. The explanation is internal to the Hebrew canon. The Targumist reaches into the same textual tradition and produces a reading that the Hebrew itself, read carefully, already supports.


Smith’s “Only Begotten” does something structurally different. The phrase imports a Christological category developed explicitly within New Testament theology and formalized the nature of God at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.[28] The “Only Begotten Son” of John 3:16 and 1:14 is a specifically Christian theological construct, one developed through centuries of Christological debate in a tradition that did not exist when Genesis was written. Smith’s harmonization is not between Genesis and another Hebrew Bible text — it is between his 19th-century revision of Genesis and the theological framework of Restoration Christianity, a tradition claiming to recover a primitive Christianity that predates the very biblical canon the Targumists were working within.[29] The anachronism runs approximately 1,800 years in the wrong direction for the comparison to hold.


This distinction matters because it reveals something important about the JST’s actual function. The Targumim contemporize ancient texts for the audiences of their time — they bring the Hebrew forward into the translator’s present. Smith’s JST moves in a more complex direction: it retrojects the theological conclusions of his restoration project backward into the biblical text, so that the text appears to have always contained those conclusions. Genesis 1, in the JST version, already knows about Jesus Christ. That is not contemporization; it is the textual construction of theological priority. The Targumim never claimed the Hebrew was anticipating their interpretations. The JST’s revisions systematically claim that the original text, before corruption, contained Smith’s theology.


V. Parallelomania and the Limits of Functional Comparison
Smoot is careful throughout to note that his comparison is offered without pejorative intent, and he approvingly cites Shannon’s concern that “midrash” and “targum” have been deployed as soft pejoratives against the JST by scholars who treat historical-critical readings as normative.[30] This framing does real work in the paper: it positions substantive methodological objections as potentially ideologically motivated, the product of a bias toward literal translation and against interpretive expansion.[31]


The actual problem with Smoot’s comparison is not evaluative. It is methodological, and Samuel Sandmel named it precisely in his 1962 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature: parallelomania.[32] The error is declaring two texts analogous on the basis of shared surface behaviors — expansion, paraphrase, interpretive addition — without establishing that they share a mechanism, an institutional context, or a functional goal. Smoot’s comparison is functional, not genealogical. He is not arguing that Smith knew the Targumim, drew on them, or was working within a tradition that did. He is arguing that the JST looks like a Targum from certain angles.[33] That is a weaker claim than it appears, because the behaviors Smoot identifies as Targumic are not distinctive to the Targumim.


Expansion, paraphrase, harmonization, and interpretive addition appear across nearly every tradition of sustained engagement with sacred texts: medieval Christian glosses, the Quranic tradition of tafsir,[34] the pesher commentaries at Qumran,[35] 19th-century American biblical commentary including Adam Clarke’s commentary,[36] which Thomas Wayment has shown Smith likely consulted directly during the JST project.[37] If those behaviors are sufficient to warrant the Targumic label, then Clarke is a Targumist too.


Forensically, the comparison is further strained by the specific tools of production. While the Targumist was bound to the Hebrew scroll, recent scholarship has shown that Smith’s primary ‘Vorlage’ for hundreds of changes was a contemporary, printed English resource: Adam Clarke’s The Holy Bible… with a Commentary and Critical Notes.[38] The comparison has been extended to the point where it no longer distinguishes anything.


The most significant disqualifier remains the one already established: a Targumist never claimed the Hebrew text was wrong. The entire institutional logic of the Targumim rests on the assumption that the Hebrew is authoritative and that the translator’s job is to make it accessible, not to correct it. Smith’s stated purpose was the opposite. He was repairing what he described as damage done by “ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests” — a claim that positions the received biblical text as a corrupted artifact requiring prophetic restoration.[39] That is not a translator’s posture. It is a competing authority claim. The Targumist stands beside the Hebrew text as its servant. Smith stood over the KJV text as its corrector.


The similarities Smoot identifies between the JST and the Targumim are real. They are also present between the JST and dozens of other traditions of interpretive revision that no one would call Targumic. Functional resemblance across texts that share no institutional context, no methodological self-conception, and no common goal is exactly what Sandmel warned against treating as meaningful comparison.[40] Smoot’s paper demonstrates that Smith did things the Targumists also did. It does not demonstrate that the Targumic framework explains why Smith did them, what he understood himself to be doing, or what is distinctive about the JST as a textual phenomenon.


VI. What the Comparison Conceals
There is one further problem with the Targumic framing that Smoot does not address, and it is perhaps the most consequential. Calling the JST “Targumic” imports an assumption of secondary status that the JST explicitly rejects. As noted earlier, the Targum is, by definition, a secondary accompaniment to the authoritative Hebrew. Its expansions and interpretations derive whatever authority they have from their proximity to, and fidelity toward, the primary text. The Targumist’s creativity is licensed by the Hebrew, bounded by it, and always subordinate to it.
The JST claims the inverse relationship. It does not present itself as an accompaniment to the KJV. It presents itself as a correction of the KJV — and by extension, of the transmission history behind it. Where the KJV and the JST diverge, Smith’s position is that the KJV is wrong and the JST is right. That claim is structurally incompatible with the Targumic model, in which the source text’s authority is axiomatic. By framing the JST as Targumic, Smoot’s model assigns it a secondary, interpretive status that the text itself, and the prophetic framework that produced it, explicitly refuses.


Summary Position
Smoot’s paper makes a genuinely useful negative argument: that “midrash” and “targum” deployed as dismissals of the JST’s legitimacy as a form of scriptural engagement are imprecise and carry an unexamined bias. That point stands. The positive argument — that the JST is meaningfully illuminated by the Targumic comparative framework — does not. The Targumic comparison requires a primary-language source text, a translation process bound to that source’s sequence, harmonization internal to the tradition being served, and an institutional posture of secondary accompaniment to a text whose authority the translator does not contest. The JST meets none of these conditions. It proceeds from an English printed Bible, re-sequences that Bible’s contents in at least one structurally significant case, installs God as its first-person narrator to authorize the prophet’s revisions, imports post-biblical Christology into the Hebrew creation account, and rests on an explicit claim that the received text is corrupted.


Calling any of that “Targumic” requires stretching the term until it covers almost any form of engaged biblical revision — at which point it has ceased to explain anything about the JST in particular. The comparison is cosmetic where it needs to be structural, and it conceals the most theologically distinctive feature of Smith’s project: not that he expanded the biblical text, but that he claimed the authority to correct it.

[1] Targum: an ancient Aramaic translation or paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh).
[2] Targum Onkelos: the primary Targum on the Torah recognized as authoritative in the Talmud.
[3] Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: a Western (Palestinian) Aramaic translation and expansion of the Torah.
[4] Targum Neofiti: a Western (Palestinian) Aramaic Targum of the Torah preserving an early tradition of translation and interpretation distinct from Onkelos.
[5] Bible Used for Bible Revision,” Joseph Smith Papers Project, www.josephsmithpapers.org
[6] A Vorlage (German: “prototype” or “template”) is a prior version or textual form underlying a later work.
[7] “Visions of Moses, June 1830 [Moses 1],” Joseph Smith Papers Project, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org
[8] Paul V. M. Flesher and Bruce Chilton, The Targums: A Critical Introduction (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 39–54.
[9] “Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org
[10] Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, ed. Forrest Church (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
[11] “Joseph Smith Translation (JST)” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org
[12]  “Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org
[13] Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, Matt. 24 (JST).
[14] Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith as Latter-day Targumist: A Few Preliminary Observations,” paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Latter-day Saints and the Bible session, The Catholic University of America.
[15] Martin McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited: Aramaic Paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 43–45.
[16]  Martin McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited: Aramaic Paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 43–45.
[17] Wilhelm Bacher, “Targum,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), https://jewishencyclopedia.com
[18] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 339–368.
[19] Compare Matthew 24:4–31 (KJV) with Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:5–55 (Pearl of Great Price). Note especially the relocation of KJV v. 34 (“This generation shall not pass”) from its original position as a conclusion to the 70 CE discourse to its new position in JST v. 34, now separated from the preceding context by the insertion of JST vv. 21–33.
[20] Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith as Latter-day Targumist: A Few Preliminary Observations,” paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Latter-day Saints and the Bible session, The Catholic University of America.
[21] Book of Moses 2:1–3.
[22] Martin McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), esp. 99–120.
[23] Geza Vermes, “The Memra of the Lord,” in Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1961).
[24] Book of Moses 2:3–5.
[25] Martin McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited (2010), 99–120. McNamara explains that the Memra is a linguistic device used to avoid attributing human-like actions (anthropomorphisms) directly to God, thereby maintaining a respectful distance between the Creator and the created world.
[26]  Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith as Latter-day Targumist: A Few Preliminary Observations,” paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Latter-day Saints and the Bible session, The Catholic University of America.
[27] Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith as Latter-day Targumist: A Few Preliminary Observations,” paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Latter-day Saints and the Bible session, The Catholic University of America.
[28] Bart D. Ehrman, “The Council of Nicaea and the Resulting View of Christ,” The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History & Literature of Early Christianity, May 2, 2021, www.ehrmanblog.org
[29] Thomas G. Cooper, Early History of the Churches of Christ: Restoration of the New Testament Church (Primitive Christianity) and Unity of Believers (Place of publication: Publisher, Year), https://www.academia.edu/124728397/Early_history_of_the_Churches_of_Christ_Restoration_of_the_New_Testament_Church_Primitive_Christianity_and_Unity_of_Believers
[30] Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith as Latter-day Targumist: A Few Preliminary Observations,” paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Latter-day Saints and the Bible session, The Catholic University of America.
[31] Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), page
[32] Patrick Gray, “Presidential Addresses of the Society of Biblical Literature: A Quasquicentennial Review,” Journal Name volume, no. issue (Year): www.jstor.org
[33] Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith as Latter-day Targumist: A Few Preliminary Observations,” paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Latter-day Saints and the Bible session, The Catholic University of America.
[34] “The History of Tafsir in Quran,” DarulQuran Academy, October 10, 2023, www.darulquran.co.uk
[35] David K. Geilman, “1QpHab: Habakkuk Pesher”, www.scholarsarchive.byu.edu/
[36] Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Holy Bible (1810–1826) is a multi-volume Methodist exegetical work that expands upon biblical passages through paraphrase, harmonization, and interpretive addition, reflecting early nineteenth-century Protestant engagement with the text.
[37] Thomas A. Wayment and Haley Wilson-Lemmon, “A Comparison of the Joseph Smith Translation and Adam Clarke’s Biblical Commentary,” in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, eds. Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020), 437–460.
[38] Kent P. Jackson, “Joseph Smith’s Translation of the New Testament,” in New Testament History, Culture, and Society: A Background to the Texts of the New Testament, ed. Lincoln H. Blumell (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), 707-718.
[39] Robert L. Millet, “Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: A Historical Overview,” in The Joseph Smith Translation: The Restoration of Plain and Precious Truths, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Robert L. Millet (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1985), 23–47.
[40] Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81, no. 1 (1962)