Robert J. Matthews, key to LDS edition of Bible, dies
Robert J. Matthews died at the age of 82 Sunday of complications following open-heart surgery. (Provided by BYU)
Robert J. Matthews was a teenager during World War II when he first heard that LDS Church founder Joseph Smith had made what he said were inspired changes to the Bible.
The 17-year-old was listening July 9, 1944, when Elder Joseph Fielding Smith of the Quorum of the Twelve said during a KSL Radio broadcast that Joseph Smith had corrected a verse in the Bible by revelation.
Matthews had a spiritual experience. “The word revelation meant something,” Matthews said in an interview in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. “I hadn’t known that Joseph Smith had made some corrections in the Bible. Joseph Fielding Smith’s statement penetrated me.”
That day in 1944 began Matthew’s quest to learn about what is called the Joseph Smith Translation. Before he died Sunday, Aug. 30, 2009, at age 82 of complications following open-heart surgery Matthews became known as the world’s expert on the translation.
Matthews probably would have preferred that people forget his role in bringing the Joseph Smith Translation into popular acceptance among members of the LDS Church. However, his work on the JST was his most lauded achievement by those who spoke with the Deseret News on Monday.
Oscar W. McConkie, author and chairman of the law firm Kirton & McConkie, was a regional representative for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he called Matthews to be a stake president. “In my judgment, Robert J. Matthews is one of the great men of this dispensation. He did yeoman work on the Joseph Smith Translation,” McConkie said. “My brother, (the late Elder Bruce R. McConkie of the Quorum of the Twelve), was insisting that we get the Joseph Smith Translation in our scriptures, but he couldn’t have done it without the scholarship backing him up of Robert J. Matthews.”
That scholarship had as much to do with Matthews’ personality and tenacity as it did with his academic work. When he first became interested in Joseph Smith’s work on the Bible, the LDS Church did not trust the printed copies of the JST that had been printed by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now called the Community of Christ.
According to an essay by BYU professor Robert L. Millet in the book “The Joseph Smith Translation: The Restoration of Plain and Precious Things,” Matthews was sometimes chided by fellow Mormons for even quoting the JST
