History Of The Church By Joseph Smith

Working With the History of the Church Source Material

The History of the Church is a massive six-volume compilation of documents, letters, and proceedings from Joseph Smith's lifetime. It is not a book Joseph Smith wrote himself. It is a collection assembled later, primarily by B.H. Roberts in the early twentieth century. If you are looking to use it for research, genealogy, or theological study, you need to understand how it works before you dive in. The volumes are arranged chronologically. Volume 1 covers 1830 to 1832. Volume 6 covers up to Joseph Smith's death in 1844. Each volume contains hundreds of pages of reproduced primary sources with sparse editorial commentary. The most common question I get is where to access it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has digitized the entire set and made it available online through their official website. You can find it at churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/history-of-the-church?lang=eng. It is free to use. The LDS Church also maintains a separate companion site called josephsmithpapers.org, which is the more rigorous academic edition. I use both depending on what I am working on. Here is the practical problem most people run into: the online versions have OCR errors and inconsistent footnote numbering. The print edition from Deseret Book is much cleaner, but it is out of print and runs about $150 for a full set on the used market. I found that scanning specific pages you need from the internet archive version, then cross-referencing with josephsmithpapers.org for the primary documents, saves a lot of time. The cross-referencing is the key step people skip. Joseph Smith Papers gives you the original source text with full annotation. The History of the Church gives you the B.H. Roberts editorial framing. They complement each other but they are not interchangeable.

A lot of beginners assume the History of the Church is a secondary source you can cite lightly. It is actually a primary source collection, but the editorial voice of B.H. Roberts is layered on top. When you read a chapter introduction or an editorial note, that is Roberts speaking, not Joseph Smith. I have seen people cite Roberts' commentary as if it were Joseph Smith's own words. That is a mistake that shows up frequently in forums and even in some student papers. The fix is straightforward: check the endnotes. Each document in the History of the Church lists its original source. The source is usually something like "Times and Seasons, Vol. 3, p. 706" or "Letter in author's possession." Follow that reference to the original publication if you need to verify context. The footnotes in the History of the Church are also incomplete by modern standards. B.H. Roberts did not have access to every archive that scholars have now. Documents that were lost or destroyed between 1902 and today are simply not in the set. The Book of Commandments, for example, appears only briefly. The original manuscript of the Lectures on Faith is referenced but not fully reproduced. If your research depends on those materials, you will need to go to the Joseph Smith Papers project or the Community of Christ archives for the complete versions. One thing the History of the Church does exceptionally well is preserve documents that no longer exist in any other form. The 1832 history, the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants edition notes, early church minutes, and various revelations printed in their original context are all here. The timeline of events from 1830 to 1844 is as complete as any single collection gets. That is why it remains the first stop for most serious students of early LDS history, even though we now have better critical editions available.

If you want to download a physical copy, the Church has released a limited print run through Deseret Book. Academic editions from BYU Studies and the Smith Papers project are also available separately. The free digital version is sufficient for most purposes unless you need the critical apparatus that comes with the newer scholarly editions.

How to Actually Use It Efficiently

Start with the document index at the front of each volume. It lists every entry by date and type. If you are researching a specific event, find the date range, then jump to the corresponding pages. Do not read linearly. The chronological arrangement means related documents are scattered across hundreds of pages. The index is your shortcut. When you find a document, read the surrounding entries too. Context matters. A revelation printed in Volume 2 does not exist in isolation. The letters and newspaper articles before and after it show how the community received it, modified it, or reacted to it. The gaps between documents are often as informative as the documents themselves. A three-month gap with no entries usually means records were lost or the community was displaced. That happened several times during the Nauvoo period. The big limitation of the History of the Church is editorial selection bias. B.H. Roberts chose what to include and what to leave out. He was writing in 1902, and his priorities were different from ours. He emphasized institutional history, doctrinal development, and apologetic narratives. Documents that complicate or contradict the mainstream LDS story were sometimes minimized or omitted entirely. Later scholars have filled many of these gaps, but the six-volume set itself has blind spots. The plural marriage documents, for instance, are present but handled with the editorial restraint typical of the era. You will find references to them, but not the full documentary record that later critical editions provide.

For anyone doing serious work with this material, the workflow I recommend is: locate the document in the History of the Church, verify it against josephsmithpapers.org for the full annotated version, and check the original publication source if the citation seems unclear. That process takes longer than just copying from one volume, but it prevents the kind of citation errors that come from trusting a single secondary editorial frame. The History of the Church is not perfect. It has gaps, editorial slant, and incomplete footnotes. But it remains the most accessible comprehensive collection of early LDS documents available, and for anyone working in this field, it is still the foundation most research builds on. Just be clear about what you are reading and where each document actually came from.