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By Kaitlyn Bancroft, Church News
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are familiar with the story of how a young Joseph Smith was inspired to pray after reading James 1:5, an experience that led to the First Vision.
Perhaps less well-known is the Bible edition that Joseph Smith read from that day — the King James Version — and the many layers of its translation into English.
“People today like to refer to the ‘original Hebrew’ when we’re looking at the Old Testament, and they don’t realize there’s layers even before that,” said Josh Sears, an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. “Because even translation probably had to exist as far back as that to record these things in Hebrew in the Old Testament.”
That’s why he sees the Church’s recent General Handbook update allowing for more flexibility in using different Bible translations as a positive thing. The reality is that language is always changing, Sears said, and that’s “nothing to be afraid of.”
“We see that throughout history, that as language of the scriptures gets too far removed from what people are speaking, there’s always a need to update and modernize,” he said.
The Church announced its handbook update on December 16, 2025. Section 38.8.40.1 states that while Church members should generally use a preferred or Church-published edition of the Bible in Church classes and meetings, “other Bible translations may also be used. Some individuals may benefit from translations that are doctrinally clear and also easier to understand.”
Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who chairs the Church’s Scriptures Committee, said at the time of the announcement that “clearly, God’s children are more inclined to accept and follow His teachings when they can understand them.”
He continued: “As Latter-day Saints, we can confidently gain insights from multiple translations, in part because ‘we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God’ (Articles of Faith 1:8). Latter-day scripture, including the teachings of living prophets, is a good standard for evaluating any doctrinal discrepancies that might come up in different Bible translations.”
A ‘Long History’ of Translation
In a conversation with Church News, Sears said that while most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the Hebrew language itself didn’t develop until about the 12th century B.C. — meaning that when the Israelites wrote the Hebrew-language Old Testament, they were translating from the Canaanite dialect.
Later, the Babylonians took Jewish prisoners, who learned Aramaic and lost the Hebrew language. They eventually would’ve learned Old Testament stories translated from Hebrew into Aramaic.
These shifting language patterns continued in New Testament times, Sears continued, noting that early Christians wrote the New Testament in Greek. Latin later became the predominant language of Christianity, followed by translations into English, French, German, Spanish and any other number of languages around the world.
“So by Joseph Smith’s day — to circle back to where we started — the Prophet Joseph Smith has the King James Version, and the language is several hundred years old by the time he gets to it,” Sears said.
He continued that Joseph Smith himself went on to compile the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, “part of a long history where God has given revelation to His children, and those revelations have had to be written and recorded and preserved and translated in order to communicate what God wanted His children to know.”
A Tool to Understand God’s Word
Young-woman-reading-scriptures
A young woman in Brazil reads and marks her scriptures. © 2022 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.Sears said that, ultimately, translation is a tool to understand God’s word. The point isn’t just to understand what someone said anciently — it’s to connect with Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ through the Holy Ghost.
Sears said people sometimes get frustrated with minor differences between translations, and while it can be worthwhile to explore those differences, “the bigger purposes the scriptures are serving might be well served by either rendition. …
“As long as the scriptures are pointing us to Jesus and helping us to come unto Him and be able to take on us His nature, they’re doing what they should do, regardless of which variant reading is the exact right one.”
Sears added that there’s no right way to do scripture study; each person should experiment with different approaches and figure out what works best for them.
He said various translations can help people spend less time trying to understand the words themselves and more time figuring out how those words can help them draw closer to the Savior.
“I’ve been grateful for additions and versions and translations, whatever it is I can get to [have] every additional insight about Jesus Christ,” Sears said. “And to gather this all together and to compare them and just soak in all the truth that they have has just been a wonderful blessing.”
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