PROVO, Utah — A comprehensive effort to compile every identifiable historic document pertaining directly to the Prophet Joseph Smith has received an official nod from a prestigious commission affiliated with the National Archives.

Joseph Smith Collection, LDS Church Archives

Page 4 of Joseph Smith's earliest journal, written entirely in his hand, covers Dec. 4-6, 1832. It is included in Joseph Smith Papers project.

Historic portrait by Suttcliffe Maudsley depicts Joseph Smith in his uniform as Nauvoo Legion lieutenant general.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission announced in May that it would formally endorse the Joseph Smith Papers Project sponsored by the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at BYU in cooperation with the Church Archives.

It's the first time a project of this magnitude has been undertaken with Joseph Smith as the subject, said Ronald Esplin, its executive director.

"This will be comprehensive in the sense of every letter written to or from Joseph that has survived that we can locate, every journal entry, every legal case in which he was a defendant or plaintiff, all the revelations, that sort of thing," he said.

Endorsement by the commission assures scholars that the project has high credibility, comparable to that of similar collections covering such historic figures as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

Brother Esplin said one context for viewing this project's importance is that "we've never before had anything like a comprehensive edition of the papers of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young" or other early leaders of the Church. By contrast, scholarly and comprehensive editions of the papers of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and John Adams have been available for as long as 50 years now.

"Our 'founding fathers' within a Church context are as important to us as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are to the nation," he noted.

Further, "scholars who want to write about Joseph Smith or early Mormonism and don't live in the West heretofore haven't had access to many of the papers," he said. A DVD collection released about 18 months ago has been of "tremendous help," he acknowledged, but it covers only part of the collection and is not accompanied by a historic contextual setting for the material. The Joseph Smith Papers will provide "scholars anywhere in the world with a deep corpus of Joseph Smith documents from which they can write their own conclusions of Joseph and early Church history," he said.

Moreover, with the publication of the collection, Joseph Smith in a sense "gets to tell his own story," Brother Esplin said.

"It is a chance for his own pen and that of his clerks to be among the sources that everyone can use and will have to use to be credible," he said. "Once it is on the shelf, everyone will recognize it as a body of material that will have to be dealt with" in writing about Joseph Smith.

The genesis of the project goes back to the 1970s with the work of historian Dean C. Jessee, who serves as general editor on the current project. "In the 1980s, he published two volumes called The Papers of Joseph Smith," Brother Esplin said. "That was a valiant and successful one-man effort." But the work of a comprehensive compilation became large enough that a team was assembled and funding procured for a new project, not just to update Brother Jessee's work but "to construct a new model and expand the project thoroughly."

What will result is a number of series, the first covering three volumes of journals. A subsequent series will be called "the Documents" and will be a master chronological set of items such as revelations and letters written by the Prophet or his clerks. A future series will publish administrative records, such as the Far West Record and the Kirtland Council Minute Book, Brother Esplin said.

Accessibility by the general public will be one characteristic that sets this project apart from other scholarly compilations. "A typical documentary editing project would have a limited audience," Brother Esplin said. "Some of them publish only 800 to 1,000 copies, and a few scholars might get them and a few hundred libraries." This project will have a potential readership many times greater than that.

The Joseph Smith Papers project will have two audiences, Brother Esplin noted. "We will have the scholars and libraries, which will include many non-LDS who know the historical context but do not know Joseph Smith or Mormon history, and we will have the LDS audience who may know a good deal of Mormon history but don't know the scholarly literature or context of American religious history. We have the double challenge of trying to prepare annotations of documents that meet the needs" of these two groups.

Brother Esplin observed that, in a sense, this project continues a work that began in pioneer days, when Joseph Smith and his clerks began publishing documents in chronological order, some of the first being in the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo. The effort was continued in the early Utah period, with important documents being published in the Deseret News.

E-mail to: rscott@desnews.com