Official Declaration i

On select occasions the First Presidency has published official declarations—often, if not always, with the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—although they were rarely called “official declarations.” I am referring to things like The Family: a proclamation to the world, and The Living Christ which I consider as official and doctrinally sound as the 2 official declarations published in the Doctrine and Covenants. I am cognizant of the time and effort that the leaders of the church take to ensure that every word is deliberate in those statements (which are distinguished from revelations because they are pieced together by those church leaders while seeking inspiration rather than given to them as visions or other comparable strokes of pure knowledge) before they are published. What might take us a minute or a few minutes to read might take days, weeks, or months for them to compose. I have been thinking how the Testimony of the Three Witnesses must have also gone then a comparable process—although coming before the formation of the church and from a group who held no collective, official power within the church after it was formed it would be on a separate numbering system from the others if they were all numbered together as Official Declarations.

I assume that after the revelatory experience of being shown the plates and other artifacts and hearing the heavenly declaration regarding their authenticity and the correctness of the translation the three witnesses spent a good deal of time collaborating together signing off on a collective statement to the world to be published with the work about which they were testifying.