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Abstract: Authors of two recent articles believe they have found evidence that Joseph Smith, in preparing his revision of the Bible, drew ideas from a contemporary Bible commentary by British scholar Adam Clarke. The evidence, however, does not bear out this claim. I believe that none of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke’s commentary, and almost all of them can be explained easily by other means. The authors do not look at their examples within the broader context of the revisions Joseph Smith made to the Bible, and thus they misinterpret them. Some of the revisions they attribute to Clarke are ones that Joseph Smith had made repeatedly before he arrived at the passages where they believe he got ideas from Clarke. In addition, there is a mountain of material in Clarke that is not reflected in the Joseph Smith Translation, and there is a mountain of material in the Joseph Smith Translation that cannot be explained by reference to Clarke. The few overlaps that do exist are vague, superficial, and coincidental.


Recently Thomas A. Wayment, professor of classics at Brigham Young University, published an article, “A Recovered Resource: The Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary in Joseph Smith’s Bible Translation,” co-authored with his former research assistant, Haley Wilson-Lemmon.1 That article was followed by Wayment’s “Joseph Smith, Adam Clarke, [Page 16]and the Making of a Bible Revision.”2 In the articles the authors present their view that Joseph Smith drew some of the ideas and language for his Bible revision — the Joseph Smith Translation (JST) — from a commentary written by British scholar Adam Clarke. The online posting of the research conclusions, as part of the student grant Wilson-Lemmon received, was the first publication of their proposed Adam Clarke-Joseph Smith connection.3 Wayment subsequently discussed the research in online interviews in 2017 and 2019,4 and Wilson-Lemmon did as well in 2018 and 2020.5 Likely the first reference to the matter in an academic publication wa...