Part Two: The Books

The LDS church operates with a four-part canon it calls the "Standard Works." Understanding what each book is, what it claims, and where it fails is essential to engaging the LDS interlocutor on the ground they have built their faith on.

Section 11: The Bible — "As Far as It Is Correctly Translated"

The LDS church officially accepts the King James Version of the Bible as Scripture — "as far as it is correctly translated." This qualifying clause is the Third Excision in a single phrase. It sounds like appropriate scholarly humility about the challenges of ancient text transmission. It is not. It functions as an escape hatch: any biblical passage that creates difficulty for the LDS system can be dismissed as a translation error without reference to any manuscript evidence, without consulting any textual scholar, and without specifying what the correct translation would say.

The LDS church has no official position on which passages have been incorrectly translated. The authority to determine this lies with the living prophet. The Joseph Smith Translation (see Section 15 below) represents the most extensive exercise of this authority. But the broader clause — "as far as it is correctly translated" — applies to the entire Bible and gives the institutional prophetic voice permanent interpretive dominance over the written text.

ERROR IDENTIFIED: The biblical text has been transmitted through thousands of manuscripts across multiple language traditions. The work of textual criticism — comparing manuscripts, identifying variants, establishing the most accurate readings — is among the most rigorous disciplines in historical scholarship. LDS teaching does not engage this scholarship. It does not identify specific mistranslated passages with reference to better manuscripts. It simply asserts the right to discount any inconvenient biblical teaching as potentially corrupt — a right exercised not by textual scholars but by institutional authority. This is not caution about translation accuracy. It is a mechanism for controlling which biblical teaching counts.