Pearl of Great Price

Franklin D. Richards assembled the first Pearl of Great Price as a mission pamphlet, gathering items British converts had little access to, and the 1851 collection's title, drawn from the parable of the merchant, described its purpose: precious things in small compass. The Book of Moses restores, in the movement's understanding, material lost from Genesis, unfolding the visions of Moses, the preaching of Enoch and the city of Zion taken to heaven, texts that ground distinctive doctrines including the premortal existence and God's weeping over human wickedness.

The Book of Abraham, published by Joseph Smith in 1842, presents the patriarch's first-person account of his near-sacrifice in Ur, his astronomy learned through the Urim and Thummim, with the governing star Kolob nearest the throne of God, and a creation narrative in which the Gods organise rather than create from nothing, foundations for Latter-day Saint teaching on the plurality of gods and eternal progression.

Joseph Smith Matthew reworks the Olivet discourse; Joseph Smith History gives the canonical account of the First Vision of 1820 and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon; and the Articles of Faith, from Smith's 1842 Wentworth letter, remain the church's most quoted summary of belief, memorised by generations of children. Canonisation came in Salt Lake City in October 1880, by the sustaining vote of a general conference, alongside the sustaining of Wilford Woodruff's revelations; later editions adjusted contents, moving two visions into the Doctrine and Covenants in 1976 to 1979.

In 1835 the church purchased four mummies and accompanying papyri from a travelling exhibitor, and Joseph Smith announced that one roll contained writings of Abraham in his own hand. His translation appeared in 1842 with three woodcut facsimiles. The papyri were thought destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871, but in 1967 eleven fragments surfaced at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and were returned to the church, allowing Egyptologists to read them directly.

The verdict of Egyptology, from the first examinations of the facsimiles in 1912 through study of the recovered fragments, has been consistent: the fragments are portions of common Egyptian funerary documents, a Book of Breathing prepared for a priest named Hor and pieces of a Book of the Dead, dating from centuries after any plausible Abraham, and the facsimile interpretations do not match their Egyptian content.

The church's own Gospel Topics essay acknowledges these findings. Responses within the tradition divide: some scholars argue the Abraham text came from portions of papyrus now lost, others that the papyri served as a catalyst for revelation rather than a source translated in the ordinary sense, and Community of Christ never canonised the book at all. The dispute is genuinely unresolved as a matter of faith commitments rather than of Egyptology, and it has become the standard case study in how the movement negotiates scholarship and scripture.