First Vision

The First Vision of Joseph Smith is recognized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) as the starting event of their religious movement. According to the standard narrative of this event, Joseph Smith, while a young boy of 14, became concerned about his salvation and religious truth. While seeking God in the woods in the spring of 1820, a heavenly being (or beings) appeared to him and declared that God was going to inaugurate the “restitution of all things.” This vision, on April 6, 1820, is considered the foundation of the LDS church, so that LDS President Gordon Hinckley declared at the October 1998 Church Conference, “Our entire case as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rests on the validity of this glorious First Vision . . . Nothing on which we base our doctrine, nothing we teach, we live by is of greater importance than this initial declaration.”

The first published account of Smith’s vision was composed in 1838 or 1839 and then printed in the Mormon newspaper Times and Seasons in 1842. It was canonized in The Pearl of Great Price in 1880. In the canonical version Smith relates that when he was 15, there was a revival of religion in his neighborhood that resulted in his mother, sister, and two brothers joining the Presbyterian denomination. Smith was undecided about which church to join, and so he went into the words to pray. He was then overcome by “thick darkness,” after which a pillar of light appeared and “two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description” appeared above him. “One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is my Beloved Son, Hear Him!” After composing himself, Smith asked the personages which sect was right so that he could join it, to which the Personage replied that “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight” and Smith was forbidden to join any of them. Smith claimed that he returned home and began to share what he learned in this vision, which resulted in his experiencing “great persecution.”

Historical Problems

Historians have pointed out some problems that historical records of the time present to this account, in addition to the wrong age the account gives for Smith.

1. The official account speaks of a revival in the area in 1820, while historical records indicated a revival in the area occurring between 1824 and 1825. Examination of the church role records for the year 1820 showed that the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches showed either losses or only modest gains of a handful of people that year, not the massive numbers expected from a revival. In the 1824 revival, approximately 300 people joined the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches.
2. There are no records from the period of 1820 to 1838 of Smith sharing this record with anyone, despite his stating that his relating the vision brought him “great persecution.” This lack of any attestation of any attestation from contemporary sources is pointed out not only by Fawn Brodie, an apostate who wrote an extensive history of early Mormonism, but also by LDS scholar James Allen. Similarly, LDS scholar Steven C. Harper wrote, “There is no evidence in the historical record that Joseph Smith told anyone but the minister of his vision for at least a decade.”
3. Smith was still involved in the occult practice of looking into a peep-stone in order to find hidden treasure in 1825; there had been no reformation in his life at this point.
4. In March 1826, Smith was arrested in Bainbridge, New York and charged with being “a disorderly person and an impostor” because of his occult practices in looking for buried treasure. There are official court records of his conviction.
5. In 1828, Smith applied for membership in the Methodist Church. His wife Emma was already a member of the church; both circumstances cannot be reconciled with the warning he supposedly received from divine beings in 1820 that the creeds of all denominations were “an abomination” and he was not to join any of them. In response to Smith’s request for church membership, Emma’s cousin Joseph Lewis raised an objection to allowing Smith’s name to be added to the church rolls on the grounds of Smith’s dealing in magic, the occult, and money-digging:

   I [Joseph Lewis], with Joshua McKune, a local preacher at that time, I think in June, 1828, heard on Saturday, that Joe Smith had joined the church on Wednesday afternoon, (as it was customary in those days to have circuit preaching at my father’s house on week-day). We thought it was a disgrace to the church to have a practicing necromancer, a dealer in enchantments and bleeding ghosts, in it. So on Sunday we went to father’s, the place of meeting that day, and got there in season to see Smith and talked with him some time in father’s shop before the meeting. Told him that his occupation, habits, and moral character were at variance with the discipline, that his name would be a disgrace to the church, that there should have been recantation, confession and at least promised reformation—that he could that day publicly ask that his name be stricken from the class book, or stand an investigation. He chose the former, and did that very day make the request that his name be taken off the class book.

Various Versions of the First Vision

In 1965, Mormon scholar Paul Cheesman finished his Master’s thesis at Brigham Young University entitled An Analysis of the Accounts Relating Joseph Smith’s Early Visions. This contained an account, written in 1832 in Joseph Smith’s handwriting, of the First Vision. The 1832 account had been suppressed for over 130 years because of its divergences from the official or canonical version, which was written six years later. The handwritten account contradicts the “canonical” account found in the Pearl of Great Price in giving the correct age of Joseph as 15. More seriously, in the 1832 account only Jesus was said to have appeared, but in later versions it was either angels or the Father and Son who appeared to Smith. Also disagreeing with the canonical narration of the vision, “Most of the accounts of the First Vision prior to 1875 described the appearance of either one or more angels, but rarely God and Jesus.”

Resources

• Account of First Vision in Pearl of Great Price.
• “The First Vision 200 Years Later” in Salt Lake City Messenger 134 (June 2020): 1–16.