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The Olivet Discourse — Joseph Smith—Matthew and Matthew 24

Standing disclosure — KJV-overlap material. This page reports verbal correspondence with the King James text as textual fact, including where the correspondence follows the KJV’s English translation. What that correspondence implies about the origin of the text — in any direction — is an external question outside this wiki’s scope. Both Joseph Smith—Matthew 1 and Matthew 24 are hosted corpus books and legal reference points; the wiki maps their internal world, states the divergences exactly, and leaves the origin of the parallel to the reader (per the wiki’s standing editorial position on Book-of-Mormon ↔ KJV overlap).

What the frozen text does and does not say. The frozen Joseph Smith—Matthew 1 is verse text only — it carries no title, superscription, or attributing note naming Matthew, Joseph Smith, or a translation. So this page does not import the extra-textual framing that the passage is a revision of Matthew’s chapter; it reports only what the two frozen texts show: they narrate the same discourse — one speaker (Jesus), one occasion (the Mount of Olives), one audience (the disciples, privately) — and diverge in the ways catalogued below. Because the text gives no account of the relationship between the two renderings, the origin question is out of scope in both directions, and all records here are asserted_by: wiki (the text names Daniel, Noah, and Moses, but never names Matthew as a source).

The corpus hosts the Mount-of-Olives prophecy twice: as Matthew 24, and — in a fuller, re-sequenced rendering — as Joseph Smith—Matthew 1. Both open with Jesus leaving the temple and predicting not one stone left upon another; both move to the Mount of Olives and the disciples’ private question; both answer with the same catalogue of signs — deceivers, wars and rumors of wars, tribulation, the abomination of desolation, the darkened sun, the sign of the Son of Man, the fig tree, the days of Noah, the faithful servant. Where they part is instructive and exact: the Joseph Smith—Matthew rendering begins one verse earlier (at what Matthew sets as 23:39), splits the discourse into a stated two-fold application — first “concerning the Jews”, and “again” upon the last days — re-orders several sayings to fit that division, names the abomination of desolation twice rather than once, and qualifies “the elect” with “according to the covenant” (1:20, 22) in material where Matthew writes only “the elect”. This page lays those divergences down as textual facts and links the discourse to the corpus’s own last-days material.

Account

The two renderings, side by side

Both texts open on the same scene. Jesus departs the temple, the disciples come to him about its buildings, and he predicts its ruin. Matthew gives the prediction once: “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2). Joseph Smith—Matthew gives it with one added phrase — “there shall not be left here, upon this temple, one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:3; [Textual] ) — and prefaces the whole with a saying Matthew places at the close of the previous chapter (see the boundary note below).

Both then move to the mountain and record the disciples’ private question. Matthew: “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” (Matthew 24:3). Joseph Smith—Matthew widens the same question and glosses its final term: “what is the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world, or the destruction of the wicked, which is the end of the world?” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:4; [Textual] ) — “the end of the world” is defined, inside the question, as “the destruction of the wicked,” a gloss that recurs at 1:31 and 1:55.

From there the two run the same signs. The opening command is word-for-word — “Take heed that no man deceive you” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:5 / Matthew 24:4) — and so nearly is the first sign, the deceivers who come saying “I am Christ” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:6 / Matthew 24:5; [Textual] ) — as is much of the catalogue that follows. Long stretches track the KJV closely: the fig-tree parable (1:38–39 / 24:32–33), the days of Noah (1:41–43 / 24:37–39), the one taken and the other left (1:44–45 / 24:40–41), and the faithful-and-evil-servant close (1:47–54 / 24:43–51) are near-verbatim.

The boundary — where the rendering begins

The two renderings do not begin at the same verse. Matthew opens chapter 24 at the temple departure (Matthew 24:1); the saying “Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord” is the last verse of the previous chapter, Matthew 23:39, spoken in the temple. Joseph Smith—Matthew opens with that saying instead — “ye shall not see me henceforth and know that I am he of whom it is written by the prophets, until ye shall say: Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:1; [Textual] ) — extends it (“in the clouds of heaven, and all the holy angels with him”), and adds the disciples’ reaction: “Then understood his disciples that he should come again on the earth, after that he was glorified and crowned on the right hand of God” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:1). So the Joseph Smith—Matthew rendering starts one verse earlier than Matthew’s chapter division, carrying the 23:39 saying into the discourse. This is a textual fact of where each rendering sets its boundary, not a claim about how the two came to differ.

The two-fold application — the re-ordering

The clearest structural divergence is that Joseph Smith—Matthew states, in the middle of the discourse, that the signs apply twice — once to the destruction of Jerusalem, and “again” to the last days: “Behold, these things I have spoken unto you concerning the Jews; and again, after the tribulation of those days which shall come upon Jerusalem, if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe him not” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:21). Matthew’s single sequence carries no such stated pivot; the clause “if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not” stands at Matthew 24:23 without the “concerning the Jews … and again” framing ([Textual] ).

That stated two-fold division reorganizes the material around it. Two consequences are visible as textual facts:

The added material — “the elect according to the covenant” and the coda

Where Matthew writes “the elect”, Joseph Smith—Matthew repeatedly qualifies it. The bare “for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened” (Matthew 24:22) becomes “for the elect’s sake, according to the covenant, those days shall be shortened” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:20); “they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24) becomes “they shall deceive the very elect, who are the elect according to the covenant” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:22; [Textual] ). The exact phrase “according to the covenant” stands twice in the chapter (1:20, 1:22, verified by search), and the possessive “mine elect” — with no Matthew counterpart — recurs at 1:27, in the form “mine elect’s sake” at 1:29, and 1:39.

Two further additions have no Matthew counterpart at all and so are reported here without a paired reference (they cannot be registered as connections):

The corpus’s own last-days material

The Book of Mormon carries its own second-coming and destruction-of-the-wicked material, and it overlaps the Olivet signs in idiom rather than in extended wording. The clearest verbal contact is the signs catalogue: Moroni’s prophecy of the day the record comes forth reads “there shall also be heard of wars, rumors of wars, and earthquakes in divers places” (Mormon 8:30) — the same “wars … rumors of wars … earthquakes in divers places” cluster the discourse gives at Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:28–29 (Matthew 24:6–7 carries the same catalogue, with “rumours” in the u-spelling and “earthquakes, in divers places” pointed with a comma). This pairing is registered below as ⚖️ interpretive, because the shared run is a common apocalyptic idiom (see the distribution note on that record), not a distinctive phrase.

The corpus’s other last-days language runs thematically parallel without a registrable shared phrase, and is cross-referenced here rather than registered: the “destruction of the wicked” the discourse names (1:4, 1:31; in fused form at 1:55, “the end of the wicked”) meets the corpus’s burning-of-the-wicked material — “the day cometh that shall burn as an oven … and the day that cometh shall burn them up” (3 Nephi 25:1), “the world shall be burned with fire” (Jacob 6:3); and the discourse’s “heaven and earth shall pass away; yet my words shall not pass away” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:35; Matthew 24:35 reads “but my words”) meets the risen Christ’s expounding “even until the elements should melt with fervent heat, and the earth should be wrapt together as a scroll, and the heavens and the earth should pass away” (3 Nephi 26:3). These are thematic contacts; the “heaven and earth shall pass away” idiom in particular stands in the hosted Matthew text (24:35), so it is noted, not scored.

Significance

Read as two renderings of one discourse, the pair is most useful for what its divergences are consistent about. Every substantive difference in Joseph Smith—Matthew pulls in the same direction: toward an explicit two-fold reading of the Mount-of-Olives signs. The stated pivot at 1:21 (“concerning the Jews; and again … upon Jerusalem”) is not an isolated addition — it is matched by the doubled abomination of desolation (1:12, 1:32), the relocation of the gospel-preached-then-end saying into the second application (1:31), the repeated “destruction of the wicked” gloss on “the end of the world” (1:4, 1:31; fused at 1:55 as “the end of the wicked”), and the covenant-qualified “elect” (1:20, 1:22). That internal consistency is a describable fact about the rendering; whether the reordering represents an interpretation of Matthew, a fuller original, or something else is exactly the origin question the wiki leaves to the reader.

The discourse also gives the corpus its through-line on the last days. The signs it lists — deceivers, wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes, tribulation, the darkened sun, the sign of the Son of Man in the clouds, the gathering of the elect — find their nearest corpus neighbors (the wars/rumors/earthquakes catalogue, with fires, tempests, and vapors added) in Moroni’s account of the day the record comes forth (Mormon 8:29–31) and in the burning-of-the-wicked material of 3 Nephi 25–26 and Jacob 6. The one contact firm enough to register is the wars/earthquakes catalogue; the rest are thematic and cross-linked, not padded onto the page.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. The Olivet signs-catalogue and Moroni’s last-days catalogue can be read as the same list applied to the corpus’s own coming-forth. The textual facts: the discourse gives “wars, and rumors of wars … famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:28–29; cf. Matthew 24:6–7), and Moroni prophesies that the record will come in a day when “there shall also be heard of wars, rumors of wars, and earthquakes in divers places” (Mormon 8:30). The shared run “earthquakes in divers places” is the anchor. What keeps this interpretive, not textual, is distribution: that exact run (comma-variant included) stands at four corpus verses — Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:29, Matthew 24:7, Mark 13:8, and Mormon 8:30 (verified by search of the frozen corpus) — so it is a shared apocalyptic idiom, not a distinctive pairing. The reading that Moroni deliberately echoes the Olivet catalogue is offered for the reader to weigh; the co-occurring signs are the evidence, and the origin of the shared idiom is out of scope.

Key references

Messiah · The Coming Forth of Scripture / the Sealed Book · Index · Connections

Sources

Joseph Smith—Matthew 1 (all 55 verses) and Matthew 24, both hosted corpus books; Matthew 23:39 and Matthew 25:1 for boundary facts; Mark 13:8 and 13:14 for the “earthquakes in divers places” and “abomination of desolation” distribution checks; Mormon 8:29–31, 3 Nephi 25:1, 3 Nephi 26:3, and Jacob 6:3 for the corpus’s own last-days material.

Every quote on this page is taken verbatim from the frozen source text, cited to its verse and checked against the source this session (Joseph Smith—Matthew 1; Matthew 23–25; Mark 13; Mormon 8; 3 Nephi 25–26; Jacob 6). The em-dash in “Joseph Smith—Matthew” is copied from the frozen verse markers. Class determination (per the wiki’s standing editorial position on Book-of-Mormon ↔ KJV overlap): the frozen text carries no title or note naming Matthew, Joseph Smith, or a translation, so the wiki does not import the extra-textual revision-of-Matthew-24 framing; from the frozen text alone the two texts render the same discourse (one speaker, one occasion), and the text gives no account of their relationship — this fits neither the named-source class (a) nor the two-occasions same-speaker class (b), and is treated with the class-(c)-equivalent discipline: correspondence and variants reported as textual fact, origin out of scope in both directions, asserted_by: wiki on every record (the text names Daniel, Noah, and Moses, never Matthew). The standing KJV-overlap disclosure is placed once, at the head of the page. Distribution claims — “abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet” at four corpus verses (JS—M 1:12, 1:32; Matthew 24:15; Mark 13:14); “earthquakes in divers places” at four corpus verses (JS—M 1:29; Matthew 24:7; Mark 13:8; Mormon 8:30); “according to the covenant” at two verses in the chapter (JS—M 1:20, 1:22) — were each verified by search of the frozen corpus this session. Real-world historicity of the events, and the origin of the KJV correspondence, are out of scope.