Informal Canonization and the Revelations of John Taylor

John Taylor (1808-1887) was the third president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Taylor is best-remembered today for leading the Church during a tumultuous period in its history, the beginning of the federal government’s attempt to prosecute the practice of plural marriage. This paper will explore a little-known aspect of Taylor's time as prophet: his use of direct revelation in governing the Church.  

Joseph Smith, the founding Mormon prophet-president, had organized and directed the Church using revelation. “Revelation” can mean a range of things in Mormon thought, from felt impressions that are posited to have a divine source to specific words and phrases attributed to the divine, lines given in the first person where the speaker is God. Smith attested to forms of revelation on either end of this continuum, but he is most associated with the latter. Particularly in the early period of his career, Smith frequently issued pronouncements that he said were the direct words of God. Sometimes these were about lofty theological questions or urgent matters of Church business; often, they can seem bureaucratic, even mundane. Notionally, according to the logic of Mormon leadership, every inheritor of Smith’s prophetic mantle has inhabited his same relationship to God. Each President of the Church, that is, could issue verbal dictations from God. However, in practice they do not. Doctrine and Covenants, the LDS Church’s canonized collection of direct revelations, contains over 130 revelations dictated by Smith, and just two by subsequent prophets, along with a handful of other texts scripted as general statements or “Official Declarations” rather than as “revelations.”

Brigham Young, Smith’s immediate successor as President of the Church, did not issue verbal revelations, at least not in the way that Smith had. As Young’s successor, though, John Taylor revitalized Smith’s approach to revelation. Sources attest to nine distinct Taylor revelations. Each of these, in content and form, are modeled on Smith’s style of dictated revelation. The most widely-circulated of these pronouncements, for example, opens with Smith’s standard “Thus saith the Lord…” and makes appointments to the Church leadership, the sort of business that Smith often conducted through revelation. Of all of Smith’s sixteen successors as President of the Church to date, John Taylor’s use of revelation has been the closest to his original model. 

None of Taylor's revelations are canonized by the LDS Church; they are largely forgotten. However, they survive in several material forms. Eight are written out in a notebook kept by George Francis Gibbs, one of Taylor’s secretaries. Two of those revelations were printed, and a handful of those ephemeral publications survive. Those two were briefly contained in foreign language editions of the official canon: they show up in late-nineteenth-century printed editions of the Doctrine and Covenants in Danish and German. One of those revelations, moreover, was subject to what material-text scholars call manuscript publication: it was copied out, kept, and circulated by many individual Saints. The LDS Church History Library holds at least ten examples of this revelation being enclosed with personal letters, written out on business stationery, and copied into private journals.

This paper will mostly set aside the very obvious and alluring questions of official canonization. Why are these revelations, widely recognized as such during Taylor’s day, not in the Doctrine and Covenants? Why did neither Taylor nor his followers pursue canonization of his revelations during his lifetime? Why has there been no move to canonize them subsequently? This paper will note a few possible answers to these questions, but they can be distracting. With attention to the material terms of these texts’ use in Taylor’s lifetime and in the decades after his passing, I want to focus on what we might call informal canonization. What we can see from the example of Taylor’s revelations is that official canonization matters with respect to the longevity of a scriptural text’s status, but not necessarily to any given, if potentially truncated, attainment of that status. This to say: by virtue of their absence from printed editions of the Doctrine and Covenants, Taylor’s revelations have fallen into disuse. This does not mean, however, that they have never had the status of scripture. The material record shows that Taylor’s flock was deeply invested in these texts during and immediately after his lifetime. Readers treated these texts as revealed scripture, regardless of their presence in the Doctrine and Covenants. They sought out and obtained copies of these texts, studied over them, shared them with others, connected them to other scriptures through citation and cross-reference, and acted on their commands. The material evidence of the popular use of these texts as scriptures, I'll argue here, recommends against too strong a focus on the terms of official canonization in the study of scripture, even within a Christian tradition with a strong focus on those official terms. Rather, the archive of John Taylor's revelations suggests that scholars should attend more to the contingencies of scriptural usage while acknowledging the power of canonization to boost and sustain that usage.