The Journal of Discourses — Is It a Valid Source?

A great many attacks on the Church consist of a single sentence lifted from the Journal of Discourses and presented as though a prophet had signed it. Almost none of them mention what the publication is, who wrote down the words, or that the man’s original shorthand survives and does not always match what was printed. This page sets out what the source is and what it can honestly be asked to prove — in both directions.

What It Actually Is

The Journal of Discourses began as a private business. George D. Watt, an English convert and a skilled Pitman shorthand reporter who served as clerk to Brigham Young, started it in 1854, had it printed in Liverpool, and sold it by subscription — the proceeds supporting his family. The First Presidency gave the first volume a written endorsement and encouraged Saints to buy it, but they did not edit it, review it, or control what went into it. The Church took over the publication in 1860 and paid Watt a salary. Twenty-six volumes appeared before it ended in 1886.

At no point in that history did it become an official publication of the Church, and the Church says so plainly in its own Gospel Topics entry:

Gospel Topics, “Journal of Discourses”

“The Journal of Discourses is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

“It included some doctrinal instruction but also practical teaching, some of which is speculative in nature and some of which is only of historical interest.”

“Questions have been raised about the accuracy of some transcriptions. Modern technology and processes were not available for verifying the accuracy of transcriptions, and some significant mistakes have been documented.”

“By itself it is not an authoritative source of Church doctrine.”

That is not a modern retreat under pressure. It is a description of what the publication was from the beginning: a commercial subscription series of sermon reports, produced by reporters working for their own account, never submitted to the speakers for approval.

How a Sermon Got Onto the Page

The chain between a spoken sermon and a printed paragraph matters more than most readers assume, because there is no point along it where anyone checked the result against what was said.

From Pulpit to Print

• Spoken without a text. These sermons were extemporaneous. There was no manuscript to compare against and no recording of any kind — the technology did not exist.
• Taken in Pitman shorthand. A reporter wrote the sermon down in a personal shorthand hand, at speed, in a crowded bowery or tabernacle.
• Transcribed by the same man, later. The reporter converted his own notes into longhand, editing as he went — and he was the only person alive who could read them.
• Typeset an ocean away. The transcript was sent to Liverpool for printing.
• Never reviewed by the speaker. There was no approval step. A man could read his own words in print months later and be the first to learn what he had supposedly said.

Watt was the principal reporter and editor from 1853 until 1868, but he was not the only one. David W. Evans, George Gibbs, John V. Long and others also reported sermons, each transcribing and editing his own shorthand. The Journal of Discourses is therefore not one text with one set of habits; it is several reporters’ work bound under one cover.

The Shorthand Survives — and It Does Not Always Match

This is the part that changes the argument, and it is recent. Watt’s original shorthand notes survive in the Church History Library, and for most of the last century nobody could read them. LaJean Purcell Carruth spent decades learning not merely Pitman shorthand but Watt’s particular hand, and has now transcribed hundreds of sermons directly from the notes — making it possible, for the first time, to lay the original beside the printed version.

Her finding, stated plainly, is that the published texts “often differ significantly from what speakers actually said according to the original shorthand record.” The scholarly treatment is Gerrit J. Dirkmaat and LaJean Purcell Carruth, “The Prophets Have Spoken, but What Did They Say?: Examining the Differences between George D. Watt’s Original Shorthand Notes and the Sermons Published in the Journal of Discourses,” BYU Studies Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2015) — which received the Mormon History Association’s Article of Excellence Award the following year. This is not a fringe apologetic claim; it is award-winning work by a Church History Library transcriber and a BYU historian.

Documented Categories of Change

• Material added. Words, phrases and whole passages appear in print with nothing behind them in the shorthand — including a large share of the scripture quotations, which were supplied by the transcriber rather than the speaker.
• Material dropped. Passages present in the notes were left out of the published sermon entirely, in some cases at considerable length.
• Questions turned into statements. Where a speaker asked his hearers something, the printed text can render it as a flat declaration — which makes the speaker sound more categorical than he was.
• Pronouns shifted. Inclusive first person (“we”) becomes third person, moving the speaker outside the group he had placed himself in.
• Word choice altered. Small substitutions change the sense — “heart” for “mind” is one documented instance.
• Scale. Individual sermons diverge from their shorthand by hundreds of words.

A single example shows how large the gap can be. Heber C. Kimball preached in the Bowery on 6 October 1865. The printed sermon carries this sentence:

Heber C. Kimball, “Others’ Sins No Justification of Ours,” Journal of Discourses 11:143 (6 October 1865)

“Every person should learn to govern himself and live in this world so as to secure life everlasting…”

Carruth’s transcription of the underlying shorthand runs to well over a hundred words at that point. The printed version is not a misquotation of a sentence; it is a paragraph compressed into a sentence by a man deciding, alone and after the fact, what was worth keeping. Nothing on the printed page tells a reader that happened.

Who Was Watt?

George D. Watt was the first person baptized into the Church in the British Isles, in 1837, and a genuinely gifted reporter — the Church had no comparable stenographer, which is why he became indispensable. He served as Brigham Young’s clerk from 1853 to 1868. He also had a difficult relationship with the men whose words he was recording. In May 1868 he asked Young for a raise, Young refused angrily and denounced him in the School of the Prophets, and Watt left. He drifted toward the Godbeite movement, was disfellowshipped in 1869, and was excommunicated on 3 May 1874 for adhering to William S. Godbe against the leadership of the Church.

That history is worth knowing, but it should be used carefully, and this page will not overstate it. Watt transcribed the great bulk of these sermons while in full fellowship, years before his break — the 1856–57 sermons that draw the most fire were taken down almost two decades before his excommunication. The problem with the Journal of Discourses is not that an apostate wrote it. The problem is structural: one man, working alone, from notes only he could read, with no editor, no second reporter, and no review by the speaker. That would produce documented divergence in the hands of the most faithful transcriber alive, and it did.

What This Does Not Prove

An argument that proves too much is worth nothing, and it would be easy to turn everything above into a blanket excuse. It is not one, and using it that way would be dishonest in exactly the way this page objects to.

The Limits of This Argument

• It does not mean the sermons never happened. These men preached, at these times, on these subjects. The record of the event is not in doubt.
• It does not mean the substance is invented. Divergence in wording is not fabrication of content. Where a theme runs through many sermons, the theme is real.
• Unverified is not disproved. Most sermons have no published shorthand comparison yet. That leaves their wording unconfirmed — not refuted. Treating “unchecked” as “false” is the same error in the opposite direction.
• It cannot be applied selectively. A defender who dismisses an uncomfortable quotation as a transcription error, and then cites the next page approvingly, has no argument — only a preference.
• It is still the only record we have. For hundreds of sermons the Journal of Discourses is the sole surviving account. Discarding it would not leave a better source; it would leave silence.

There is also a point that cuts against the comfortable reading. If a transcriber’s documented habit was to convert questions into declarations and to tighten loose speech into crisp assertions, then the systematic error runs toward harshness. The printed Journal of Discourses is, if anything, likelier to read as more absolute than the pulpit actually was. That is not a licence to assume every hard sentence was softer in the original — but it does mean the direction of doubt is not the one a critic needs.

A Usable Standard

The practical question is what weight a given quotation can bear. These four tests answer it, and they apply the same way to anyone using the source, friendly or hostile.

Before Resting Anything on a JD Quotation

• Is it one sentence or a pattern? A theme repeated across many sermons by several speakers is solid. A single striking sentence, quoted alone, is the weakest thing the source produces — and it is the form nearly every attack takes.
• Read the whole discourse. Sermons wander, qualify themselves, and answer objections three pages later. A quotation that survives its own context is worth something; most do not.
• Was it taught, or was it said? A sermon is not a canonized text. The standard works, official declarations, and the united voice of the First Presidency are how this Church states doctrine — a point the Church itself makes about this very publication.
• Did anything come of it? This is the decisive test and the one most often skipped. Was it made an ordinance, a policy, a practice? Was it repeated, adopted, acted upon? A sentence that produced nothing is a sentence, not a doctrine.

That last test is why the most inflammatory quotations tend to collapse under examination. The blood atonement sermons of 1856–57 are the clearest instance: the language is genuinely severe, and it produced no committee, no ordinance, no procedure, and no case ever established against the Church. The quotation is the whole of the case, and a quotation from this source, standing alone, is not enough to carry one.

The Verdict

Yes, the Journal of Discourses is a valid historical source — and it is indispensable, because for hundreds of sermons nothing else survives. Anyone who waves it away entirely is discarding the record of a generation.

But it is a source of a particular kind, and it has to be used as what it is: a private, commercial, unofficial series of sermon reports, taken down in shorthand by individual reporters, transcribed and rewritten by those same men without oversight, printed overseas, and never approved by the men who spoke. The Church has said as much in its own words. The shorthand now confirms it in detail.

So the honest position is neither of the two on offer. It is not a book of scripture, and it is not a forgery. It is a valuable, uneven, secondhand record — and a single sentence pulled out of twenty-six volumes of it, stripped of its discourse, attributed to a whole church, and treated as binding doctrine, is not an argument. It is a quotation in search of one.