The founding claims
The First Vision
Four accounts. The earliest, in his own handwriting, describes one being.
The point in one sentence
Joseph Smith told the First Vision story at least four different ways, and the earliest version, written in his own hand, describes one divine being rather than two.
Start with the stakes, in a prophet’s words
Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Church, general conference, October 2002
Our whole strength rests on the validity of that vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud. If it did, then it is the most important and wonderful work under the heavens.
This page applies his standard, not an outside one. Everything below is about the only evidence that has ever existed for what occurred in the grove: Joseph’s own tellings of it.
The talk, on churchofjesuschrist.orgWhere the story comes from
Palmyra, New York, sat in country so repeatedly swept by revival fire that historians call the region the burned-over district. The canonized account remembers it exactly that way: “an unusual excitement on the subject of religion,” competing preachers, a fourteen year old farm boy asking “Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together?” In that world, visions were not rare. What made this one different is what was later built on it: an entire restoration, and the doctrine that the Father and the Son are two separate, embodied beings, standing in the air above a boy in the woods.
No one can check what happened in the grove in 1820. What can be checked, on the Church’s own websites, is what happened to the story between 1832 and 1842. That is this page.
The four accounts, side by side
Most members are taught only the 1838 version, which is the one canonized in the Pearl of Great Price.
| 1832 (his own hand) | 1835 | 1838 (canonical) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beings seen | One. "I saw the Lord" | A personage, then another, plus "many angels" | Two Personages |
| Why he prayed | For forgiveness of his sins | Concern about which church | Which church is right |
| Churches | Already concluded they had apostatized before praying | Not emphasized | Learning they are wrong is the message of the vision |
| Opposition | None mentioned | Not emphasized | Seized by a dark power before the vision |
Sources: Joseph Smith Papers; Church Gospel Topics Essay, "First Vision Accounts"
The exhibits
History, circa summer 1832, in Joseph Smith’s own handwriting
1832, the earliest account
What it establishes: The earliest account, in Joseph’s own hand, describes one divine being, "the Lord," not two personages.
The manuscript, Joseph Smith PapersThe same 1832 manuscript, on his age
1832
What it establishes: The earliest account places the vision in his sixteenth year. The canonical account places it in his fifteenth. Both cannot be right.
Same manuscriptHistory, circa June 1839, Draft 2, canonized today as Joseph Smith—History
1838–1839, the canonical account
What it establishes: The version taught to members and printed in the Pearl of Great Price. It is also the first account to state plainly that two Personages appeared.
The canonical draft, Joseph Smith PapersThe Church of Jesus Christ, Gospel Topics essay, "First Vision Accounts"
Published 2013
What it establishes: The Church concedes there are multiple accounts and that they differ. The essay grants that three of the four clearly describe two personages, which quietly concedes the fourth, the earliest, does not.
The essayThe Church’s own First Vision Accounts FAQ, on the 1832 manuscript
Church-published
What it establishes: The earliest, one-personage account was physically removed from its volume and was not made available to researchers until the early 1960s. State only what the Church documents: removed, then restored. It does not say hidden.
The FAQOrson Pratt, "An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions" (Edinburgh)
1840
What it establishes: For its first decade the Church was founded, preached, and gathered converts with no published First Vision story at all.
The pamphlet, Joseph Smith PapersThe common rebuttals
“The accounts differ in emphasis, the way the four Gospels differ. Different audiences, different details.”
For tone and scenery, the analogy is fair, and the essay is right that multiple tellings of a real event will vary. But look at what varies here. Whether one divine being appeared or two is not an emphasis; it is a fact about what happened, and it is the fact the Church’s doctrine of the Godhead stands on. The analogy also has a quieter problem: the Gospels are four authors working from second-hand tradition decades later. These are four tellings by the same man of his own experience. And an emphasis cannot move his conclusion about the churches from before the prayer, where the 1832 account puts it, into the answer to the prayer, where the canonized account puts it. That is not a shift of tone. It is a different sequence of the founding event.
“Of course the later tellings are fuller. Anyone retelling the most important moment of their life adds detail.”
Memory does add detail, so state precisely what the earliest account lacks. Not color. The Father. The honest version of this point is narrow: the 1832 history never says “only one being appeared,” it simply describes the Lord, forgiving Joseph’s sins, and nothing else. But it is his own history, in his own handwriting, written closest to the event, and the being it does not mention is the one whose separate, embodied appearance became the signature doctrine resting on this vision. A detail that load-bearing, present in the memory, does not usually go unmentioned by the man writing his own conversion story by hand.
“Nothing was hidden. All four accounts are on the Church’s website right now.”
True, and to the Church’s credit: the essay has been up since 2013, and the Joseph Smith Papers publishes every manuscript. Two things remain. First, the Church’s own FAQ records that the pages holding the earliest account were removed from the bound history volume sometime between 1930 and 1965 and that the account was unavailable to researchers until the early 1960s. Removed, then restored, is all the Church documents, and it is enough: for a generation, the one account in Joseph’s own hand could not be read by anyone. Second, publishing is not teaching. The account in the canon, the manuals, the films, and the paintings is the 1838 telling, alone. The question the punch above asks is the operative one: not whether the accounts are available, but whether you were ever told they exist.
"There was no revival in Palmyra in 1820." BYU's Milton Backman found a Palmyra newspaper reference to an 1820 camp meeting, and Joseph's phrase "the whole district of country" does not require the revival to be in Palmyra village. The honest version is narrower: the specific revival Joseph describes is not independently corroborated.
Ask whether you were ever taught there were four accounts.
And if not, ask who decided you did not need to know that, and when.
What this means
Go back to President Hinckley’s standard, because it is the right one: it either occurred or it did not, and everything rests on which. Then face what the record is. The only evidence that has ever existed for what occurred is Joseph’s word, and the documented history of Joseph’s word is a story growing. In 1832, in his own hand: the Lord, forgiving his sins, in his sixteenth year. By 1838, the account that would be canonized: two Personages, a dark power, his fifteenth year, and the corruption of every church delivered as the vision’s message rather than the conclusion he says he had already reached. Between those tellings, the doctrine that the Father and the Son are two separate embodied beings became the theology the vision now anchors.
The vision cannot be checked. The story can, and the story grew in exactly the places the theology needed it to.
If the founding event were as fixed as the certainty built on it, the first telling would contain the fact the whole restoration stands on. It does not. That does not prove nothing happened to a boy in the woods in 1820. It means the strongest thing the Church itself says about this event, all or nothing, is being carried entirely by the version of the story that came last.