Friday, November 30, 2018

Questions about buying scriptures - Are they current?

From an email today:

I have...questions, I am hoping you can help me find the answers to. I would like to buy the Old & New Covenants, as well as the T&C that are currently for sale on Amazon.com. However, I would like to know if the needed corrections of errors that people have been sending in, are updated/corrected in these, if I buy them now? (*If not, do you happen to know when they will be? I really like these paper editions (GREAT for note taking), but want to make sure I the errors found, up to date, corrected in them.) Another question... Is there anywhere, or any possible place that can be made accessible, where we can see what corrections have been made/are needing to be made to the New Covenants? (The T&C & The Old Covenants too, if possible!!!) My thought is, if I know all of the errors & what the corrections are suppose to be, I can go through my paper copies I have/am purchasing & make the necessary correction with a pen. That would be so helpful IF the ones we can order today on Amazon.com are not updated.

RESPONSE:
The scriptures aren't finished yet. We have completed the Book of Mormon and don't plan any future changes. We are in the middle of the New Testament and hope to finish by around Christmas. That will mean that Vol.2 will be ready around New Year's. We will announce that. The T&C won't need as much time to complete and will be done sometime in Jan., hopefully. Then the OT will get a workover by late April (next Gen Conf) we hope.

As we reach major milestones we update the text on Amazon. For example, the 4 Gospels are done and we have updated Vol.2 with that portion.

The vast majority of changes are punctuation, though we keep finding archaic phrases and grammar that we have to tackle.

We kept a running list of typos on the scriptures blog, but it took so much time to keep updating it that it hurt the progress of the work and we stopped making note of those changes.
 
There may be a way to post our copies of the final run-throughs for each work, showing what was changed and why. We'll look into that.

REPOST: If you think you've found a typo, do some research first.

Several emails have come in recently to point out typos. The good news is that every one of them has not been a typo, but has been text that has been restored to Joseph's original. The bad news is that these folks haven't bothered to research the issue on their own and are simply handing us some busy work that takes us away from getting this project done. and when you add up the time it takes to go and look and verify, those small pauses become significant. So we're reposting this from last April when we first invited you to look before you leap:


We get emails for potential typos almost daily. Yet the majority of them are not typos or errors, but are simply unusual text. Remember that the Lord rescinded permission to update the archaic language in the Book of Mormon. Also remember that Middle English was in use during Joseph Smith's day. And realize that the LDS scriptures are not a valid source of reference. The scripture project was undertaken to correct the errors introduced not only by scholars, but also by the LDS church.

If you discover something that you think is an error, please research it on your own first to confirm that it is an error. Yes, it might be faster for us to look into it since we've been doing this for a couple of years, but if it takes perhaps 5 minutes to resolve one submission, and you multiply that to include all of the emails we get, it puts an unfair burden on our time. We're still working on cleaning up the damage that software inflicts on text. And we've already sacrificed many thousands of hours on this project. We need to get to know our families again.

Here are the resources you might need to verify that you've found a problem. Obviously some typos are self-evident and don't need research, but most are not. Many are unusual, but not blatant. Anyway, here's where you can go to do your research:

VOLUME 1 - THE OLD COVENANTS
Joseph Smith's personal bible
Old Testament Manuscript 1
Old Testament Manuscript 2

VOLUME 2 - THE NEW COVENANTS (New Testament, Book of Mormon)
New Testament Manuscript 1
New Testament Manuscript 2

Printer's Manuscript
Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, 1st Edition
(We used the 2nd Edition, but it is not available online)

VOLUME 3 - TEACHINGS AND COMMANDMENTS
Revelation Book 1
Revelation Book 2
Book of Abraham
1835 Doctrine and Covenants
D&C correlation to earliest documents