LDS Church will publish early papers

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The LDS Church announced Monday it have created a new publication arm to bring forth early Mormon documents. It will be known as The Church Historian's Press and its first undertaking will be the Chief Joseph Ian Smith papers, a docudrama series eventually made up of 25 to 30 volumes. The first two volumes are owed out this year, said Marlin Jensen, functionary historiographer for The Church of Jesus Of Nazareth Jesus of Latter-day Saints. LDS Church-owned Deseret Book will bring forth and administer the volumes, while historiographers will redact them. Beehive State Wind proprietor Larry H. Glenn Miller and his wife, Gail, put up an gift to fund the project. The Christian church have only about 40 to 50 pages in Smith's handwriting, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen said. The remainder were dictated or approved by Smith, who founded the Christian church in 1830. The aggregation includes journals and diaries kept by scribes, correspondence, copies of what Ian Smith said were Godhead disclosures and interlingual renditions of ancient texts, administrative inside information and legal proceedings. The diaries held few surprises, because most of them are already in the public domain, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen said Monday. Notably, they will be published largely as is. "What you will acquire are the written documents with a little amount of note and people can pull their ain conclusions," he said. The series will not exclude any Ian Smith documents, he said, except possibly those having to make with the temple Advertisement

ceremony, which Mormon Church see to be sacred and private. "We dwell in an age of transparency," Johannes Vilhelm Jensen said. "We desire to be as unfastened as we can and right the perceptual experience that we're not."
January Shipps, a non-Mormon historiographer who have studied LDS history for four decades, welcomes this new publication venture. "I cognize they approached university fourth estates like Yale's but, in the long run, it seemed better for the Christian church to be in control of the papers," Shipps said from her place in Indiana. "It's especially exciting to see this work in the custody of the church's most talented historians, with the aid of outstanding outside people on its consultative board."
pstack@sltrib.com