Joseph Smith

The man the revelations of the translation era address by name — entrusted with a record he is told he can lose, rebuked for having lost part of it, restored to the work, and told that the work itself cannot be lost with him.

What this page maps. This page reports the Doctrine and Covenants as modern revelation — a first-person divine voice addressing named recipients. Every sentence states what the revelations themselves say. Because the current edition’s section headnotes are excluded from this wiki’s source text, a revelation’s date, place, and historical occasion are not available here and are not asserted; that material is external, real-world, and out of scope exactly as archaeology is for Nahom. This page is drafted from sections 2–19 only and will be extended by later work as the rest of the corpus is drained.

Account

Named in the text

The revelations of these sections name the addressee outright. “Behold, thou art Joseph, and thou wast chosen to do the work of the Lord, but because of transgression, if thou art not aware thou wilt fall” (D&C 3:9). Elsewhere the voice uses the full form: “my servant Joseph Smith, Jun.” (D&C 5:1, 5:2, 17:4, 17:5, 18:7, 19:13); at D&C 18:8 the identification is made as a closing clause — “and his name is Joseph.”

Entrusted, and told the trust is conditional

The central fact these sections state about him is a stewardship that can be withdrawn. “Behold, you have been entrusted with these things, but how strict were your commandments” (D&C 3:5). “And you have a gift to translate the plates; and this is the first gift that I bestowed upon you; and I have commanded that you should pretend to no other gift until my purpose is fulfilled in this” (D&C 5:4). The withdrawal clause is stated twice: “Except thou do this, thou shalt be delivered up and become as other men, and have no more gift” (D&C 3:11); “And except thou do this, behold, thou shalt have no more gift, and I will take away the things which I have entrusted with thee” (D&C 5:31).

The rebuke of D&C 3 is unusually specific about the failure: “you should not have feared man more than God” (D&C 3:7); “thou deliveredst up that which was sacred into the hands of a wicked man” (D&C 3:12); “thou hast suffered the counsel of thy director to be trampled upon from the beginning” (D&C 3:15). The restoration is equally explicit: “But remember, God is merciful; therefore, repent of that which thou hast done which is contrary to the commandment which I gave you, and thou art still chosen, and art again called to the work” (D&C 3:10); and, in the later section, “it is now restored unto you again” (D&C 10:3).

The revelations also record danger to his person as a stated reason for particular commands: “because I foresee the lying in wait to destroy thee” (D&C 5:32); “there are many that lie in wait to destroy thee from off the face of the earth; and for this cause, that thy days may be prolonged, I have given unto thee these commandments” (D&C 5:33). The witnesses’ commission at D&C 17:4 is given the same purpose — “that my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., may not be destroyed.”

The work is not the man

Against the conditional stewardship the revelations set an unconditional work. The opening of D&C 3 states the principle before naming the failure: “The works, and the designs, and the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught” (D&C 3:1); “Remember, remember that it is not the work of God that is frustrated, but the work of men” (D&C 3:3). And after the rebuke: “Nevertheless, my work shall go forth” (D&C 3:16).

That opening carries wording the Book of Mormon uses of God’s constancy.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () Three clauses of the revelation’s opening stand in Alma’s teaching, in the same order: - D&C 3:2: “For God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said, therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round.” - Alma 7:20: “…that he cannot walk in crooked paths; neither doth he vary from that which he hath said; neither hath he a shadow of turning from the right to the left, or from that which is right to that which is wrong; therefore, his course is one eternal round.”

Divergences reported: “doth not walk” for “cannot walk”; the right-and-left clause stands second in the revelation and third in Alma, and reads “turn to the right hand nor to the left” (D&C 3:2) against Alma’s “a shadow of turning from the right to the left” (Alma 7:20); the revelation adds “therefore his paths are straight” (D&C 3:2) before the eternal-round clause, which Alma lacks. The run “one eternal round” stands at five corpus verses (counting rule: distinct frozen verses in the corpus, case-insensitive, punctuation-normalized) — these two, Alma 37:12, 1 Nephi 10:19, and D&C 35:1.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () The revelation’s closing clause pair stands whole in a second Alma verse: - D&C 3:2: “…therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round.” - Alma 37:12: “…for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his works, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round.”

The eight-word run is identical. That the revelation braids into one sentence the crooked-paths / vary clauses of Alma 7:20 and the straight-paths / eternal-round clause of Alma 37:12 is a fact of the two texts’ wording; the wiki does not assert how or why.

Significance

Across these eighteen sections the revelations hold two claims together without resolving them into one: the named recipient can lose his gift, and the work cannot be lost. The rebuke chapter states both in eleven verses — “thou art still chosen” (D&C 3:10) and “Nevertheless, my work shall go forth” (D&C 3:16) — and the wiki reports the pairing as the text’s own, not as a lesson drawn from it.

Two further disciplines govern this page. First, several sections in this range are addressed to a “thee” or “you” the verse text never names; the wiki does not supply a name the text withholds, and it does not import one from the excluded headnotes. Second, cross-section identification is likewise withheld: D&C 3 names Joseph and rebukes the loss of “that which was sacred” (3:12); D&C 10 addresses an unnamed “you” who “delivered up those writings which you had power given unto you to translate by the means of the Urim and Thummim” (10:1). The two descriptions match; the equation of the two addressees is left to the reader rather than asserted here.

Key references

D&C 3:1–20 — the works of God cannot be frustrated; the rebuke; “thou art still chosen”; the record’s purpose to the Lamanites
D&C 5:1–35 — the gift to translate; the withdrawal clause; the three witnesses promised
D&C 6:18, 9:1–14 — the scribe charged to stand by him and to write for him
D&C 10:1–3 — the gift lost and restored
D&C 17:4–6 — the witnesses’ commission, and “he has translated the book”
D&C 18:7–8, 19:13 — baptism by his hands; commandments received “by the hand of my servant Joseph Smith, Jun.”

The First Vision and the Coming Forth of the Plates · The Lost Writings · The Three Witnesses · Oliver Cowdery · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants sections 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19 (verse text only — the current edition’s section headnotes are excluded from this wiki’s source text per the project’s source-admission rules, so no date, place, or historical occasion appears here). Cross-references quoted from Alma 7 and Alma 37; 1 Nephi 10 and D&C 35 cited, not quoted, in the phrase-distribution disclosure.

Every quote on this page is taken verbatim from the frozen source text and checked character-for-character against it; no quote crosses a verse boundary. This page registers two connection records, both [textual] and both asserted_by: wiki — the revelations name no source for either clause. The “one eternal round” distribution is a count of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing. External, real-world questions about the person named — biography, dating, competing accounts — are outside this wiki’s scope.