First Vision
In the spring of 1820, by his own account, a teenage Joseph Smith walked into a grove of trees to pray about which church to join, and God appeared to him. Joseph told that story more than once across the rest of his life, and the versions do not all line up: one mentions an angel, another two beings, another the Father and the Son. Almost the whole CES Letter case for this section rests on those differences. A story that keeps shifting as it is retold, the CES Letter argues, is a story somebody invented.
The accounts do vary. What kind of variation it is turns out to be the whole question, because a real memory and a made-up one age in opposite directions, and you can tell which is which.
A fabricated story usually freezes. Its teller is repeating a script, so the safe move is to keep every detail fixed and never get caught changing it. A true memory drifts instead. The middle stays put while the outer details wander, because a person remembering is reaching for an experience, not rehearsing lines. That drift is exactly what researchers see when people recall vivid, life-changing moments, and Steven Harper, a former managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, finds the same pattern running through Joseph's tellings.[1]
The detail an inventor would never give up
Take the one piece of the record that troubles the invention theory most. In 1835 Joseph told a scribe about "many angels" in the grove. The 1838 telling, the one the Church later canonized, leaves them out entirely.[2]
Now ask which theory predicts that. A fake vision, given three more years and a bigger following, should pile on the wonder: brighter light, more glory, more heavenly visitors, not fewer. Here the wonder shrinks while the audience grows. Dropping a vivid detail you have already written down is the sort of loose end someone trims out of a story they are inventing and keeps in a story they actually lived.
The center, meanwhile, never budges. A boy worn down by competing churches prays by himself; light comes down; a heavenly being, or two, appears and tells him every church of his day has it wrong. That same core repeats from account to account while the small stuff moves around it, which is how a true memory behaves and how a memorized script never does.
Multiple Accounts lays all nine side by side, down to the small things five separate listeners remembered that Joseph himself never recorded. One heard the light was so bright he braced for the trees to catch fire. A non-Mormon editor recorded that Joseph had walked first to the stump where he had left his axe the day before. A convert who heard him a month before he was killed noted the color of his eyes.
None of those particulars teaches a doctrine or wins a convert. They are the kind of stray detail a real memory hangs onto and a forgery would have no reason to put there.
The claim that does not survive a date
The CES Letter also pins a second big claim to the calendar. It insists there is "absolutely no record of any claimed 'first vision' prior to this 1832 account," and that for the twelve to twenty-two years after the vision supposedly happened, nobody had so much as heard of it.[3] This one is checkable against a date, and the date sinks it.
On February 14, 1831, a year before Joseph put a single word of his account on paper, a Palmyra newspaper that had been needling the Mormons for months, the Reflector, sneered that Joseph
"had seen God frequently and personally."[4]
The wording is garbled, and the Late Appearance article grants up front that the paper trail before 1832 runs thinner here than it does for the Book of Mormon. Even so, a hostile editor in Joseph's own town mocking him by name over a vision is an odd thing to turn up inside a stretch of years the CES Letter calls blank. Enemies do not dream up miracle stories to credit their targets with; they needle the claims those targets are already making out loud. Somebody was telling, and hearing, a story about Joseph seeing God well before the year the section treats as the start.
The head count is wrong in the same direction. The CES Letter counts four accounts; nine survive, four in Joseph's hand and five written by people who listened to him. That beats what we have for Moses at the burning bush, who left a single account, or for Paul on the Damascus road, whose conversion comes down to us three different ways in the book of Acts.
No one figures Paul invented Damascus because those three versions cannot agree on who dropped to the ground or who caught the voice. John Tvedtnes, lining the cases up one by one, actually counted fewer clashes among Joseph's tellings than among Paul's.[5] Harper rates the First Vision as perhaps the best-documented event of its kind on record.[1:1] Whatever the differences mean, a shortage of evidence is not the trouble.
Sorting the rest of the bullets
What is left of the CES Letter's case comes as four pages of fast bullets, so the pile looks overwhelming before you have weighed even one item.[6] Slow it down and the bullets separate into a handful of plain questions, each taken up by itself in Contradictions: the age gap that turns out to be a scribe's note jammed in above the line, one being or two, when the revival happened, the idea that Joseph's view of God evolved over time. The thread running through them is simple: leaving something out one time is not the same as denying it another, and the bullet format hides that difference.
The version that should make you nervous is the one polished smooth, identical every single time, never picking up a small detail or letting a dramatic one go, because that is the mark of a rehearsed script. The First Vision wears the other signature, the one a lived memory leaves. Go through the section watching for those seams, and the very differences the CES Letter offers as proof begin to argue for the vision instead of against it. The grove holds the marks a remembered morning leaves behind, not the polish of an invented one, and that is the strongest thing the record has to say.
Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Harper, a former managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, applies cognitive memory research to the accounts and characterizes the surviving record as arguably the best-documented theophany of its kind. See also Steven C. Harper, "Four Accounts and Three Critiques of Joseph Smith's First Vision," FAIR Conference, August 2011, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/august-2011/four-accounts-and-three-critiques-of-joseph-smiths-first-vision. ↩︎ ↩︎
Harper, "Four Accounts and Three Critiques," observes that "even later accounts do not continue to become longer, more detailed, or [more] elaborate": the 1835 account includes "many angels" in the grove, a detail the later 1838 and 1842 accounts drop, the reverse of what an embellishing fabricator would do. The omission is documented in the firsthand sources; see also Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (2019). ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," no. 3, p. 34. The CES Letter asserts that no one, including Joseph's family and the Saints, "had ever heard about the first vision from twelve to twenty-two years after it supposedly occurred," and that "there is absolutely no record of any claimed 'first vision' prior to this 1832 account." ↩︎
"Gold Bible, No. 4," The Reflector (Palmyra, NY), vol. 2, no. 13 (February 14, 1831), p. 102, reporting that Joseph "had seen God frequently and personally." ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, "Variants in the Stories of the First Vision of Joseph Smith and the Apostle Paul," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 2, no. 1 (2012): 73–86, https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/variants-in-the-stories-of-the-first-vision-of-joseph-smith-and-the-apostle-paul. Tvedtnes concludes there are fewer differences among Joseph's First Vision accounts than among the New Testament accounts of Paul's Damascus Road experience (Acts 9, 22, 26, with epistolary references in Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 9 and 15). ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," nos. across pp. 34–35. ↩︎