The Doctrine and Covenants collects revelations, visions and other statements that Joseph Smith Jr. said he received as direct communications from God, recorded chiefly during the earliest years of the church in Ohio, Missouri and New York. An earlier compilation, titled "A Book of Commandments for the Government of the Church of Christ," was being printed at the church's press in Independence, Missouri, when a mob destroyed the press in July 1833 and scattered the unfinished sheets before the book could be completed; it was never officially issued, though a small number of the salvaged, unbound sheets survive.
An expanded and retitled "Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints" followed in 1835, published in Kirtland, Ohio, and compiled and approved by a committee of four: Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon and Frederick G. Williams. That first edition paired two kinds of material under one cover — a series of theological lectures given at the Kirtland School, presented as its "Doctrine," alongside the recorded revelations themselves, presented as its "Covenants." The lectures, known since as the Lectures on Faith, were later dropped from the book, widely dated to the 1921 edition, leaving the revelations as the whole of the work.
The book is organized into numbered sections rather than the books, chapters and verses of a Bible, reflecting what it is: a gathered set of separate texts rather than one continuous narrative. Both the content and the numbering changed across nineteenth-century editions, including an 1876 edition under Orson Pratt that reorganized earlier material and added further revelations. The modern edition reached its current shape in 1981, when two more items, a vision of the degrees of glory and a vision of the redemption of the dead, were added as sections 137 and 138, along with two "Official Declarations": an 1890 manifesto ending the church's sanction of new plural marriages, and a 1978 declaration extending priesthood ordination to all worthy male members regardless of race. A 2013 printing updated further reference material. The standard edition now in use holds 138 sections and the two Official Declarations.
It is one of the four volumes the Latter Day Saint movement calls its standard works, alongside the Bible, the [[BOM|Book of Mormon]] and the [[PGP|Pearl of Great Price]]. The Community of Christ, a separate denomination descended from the same movement, keeps its own Doctrine and Covenants, numbered and updated independently of this one. The text in this corpus comes from the Mormon Documentation Project's JSON export, the same public-domain source used for the [[BOM|Book of Mormon]] and the [[PGP|Pearl of Great Price]], and is modeled here as a single book, "Doctrine and Covenants," with each section standing as a chapter; it carries the wording of the current standard edition and leaves out the copyrighted footnotes and chapter headings that remain under copyright, which is why no single printing year is given here.