From the book ‘The Crucible of Doubt’—Reflections on the Quest for Faith by Terryl and Fiona Givens wrote:
Translating God’s will into specific programs, policies, and practices. . . requires ongoing effort. One of the greatest Jewish scholars writes “An analysis of prophetic utterances shows that the fundamental of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God. . . . The prophet hears God’s voice and feels His heart. He tries to impart the pathos of the message.”35
Joseph Smith’s manuscript revelations similarly reveal a man ever struggling to find the right language to convey the truths that he sensed in his communion with the Divine. In recent years, the historical department of the Church has produced documentary editions of those revelations. Most of the manuscript versions show more editorial changes, before the revelation made its way into print, than many an author’s literary manuscript. It is clear that Joseph did not wish to promote the idea of himself as an infallible oracle, transmitting with pristine perfection the word of God. For there is the Facsimile Edition of the Joseph Smith Papers, published by the Church for all the world to see in half a dozen vivid colors, are the additions, strike-outs, and rewordings to Joseph’s original words made by half a dozen different hands, his own included.36
Whatever spiritual intimations he received of God’s mind and will, however powerful the fonts of inspiration at which he drank, Joseph had to transmit eternal things into the idiom of common English. And that, he found, was no easy task. He complained to a friend, “Oh Lord God, deliver us from this prison, . . . of a crocked, broken, scattered and imperfect language.”37 And so he related both the epiphanies of celestial brilliance and the merest glimmers of heavenly truth to ready scribes. And then he reworked the language—and enlisted other respected associates to the task of refining and remolding the wording—in an effort to depict more accurately the Divine mind and the truths the Spirit communicated as “pure intelligence flowing unto” him.38
Outside Joseph’s scriptural production, his words ranged from wise and inspired to opinion—with his audience, then as now, seldom attuned to the differences. Joseph himself complained that “he did not enjoy the right vouchsafed to every American citizen—that of free speech. He said that when he ventured to give his private opinion” about various subjects they ended up being given as the word of the Lord because they came from him.”39 When not speaking with prophetic authority in other words, he claimed no authority at all—which is why his pronouncements on subjects from Lehi’s New World landfall to the prospects of the Kirtland Bank were as liable to error as other men’s. Mormon leaders—like the great souls of other religious traditions—are never assured an unvarying inspiration when they speak or write. ~Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014),68-69
