This post is the second of a two-part interview with Robin
Jensen, editor with the Joseph Smith Papers Project (Part 1
available here). Robin continues to discuss his research in
early Mormon record keeping. In describing your thesis, you
noted that you hope to “show where historians could look past
this tradition to the texts themselves.” However, you draw some
important distinctions in your research about texts and the
commandments as oral creations. Could you introduce that history
of orality? I felt a study on the introduction and early
development of the written commandments of Mormonism should
begin at a point where no such commandments were being written
down. Accepting Smith’s narrative would have him receiving
religious visitations and divine instruction about eight years
before his first known written text.  The birth of the written
commandment is understood when we look at the different
circumstances around which oral texts were created. (By “oral
texts” I mean anything of an oral nature that accom