Contradictions
The claim:
"There are at least 4 different first vision accounts by Joseph Smith... This is in direct contradiction to his 1832 first vision account... The dates/his ages: The 1832 account states Joseph was 15-years-old while the other accounts state he was 14... Who appears to him? Depending upon the account, a spirit, an angel, two angels, Jesus, many angels or the Father and the Son appear to him — are all over the place."[1]
The CES Letter's argument here is about consistency. Joseph Smith told the story of his First Vision more than once over his lifetime, and the versions are not identical. He gives his age differently. He describes who he saw differently. He says different things about why he was praying. To the CES Letter, that means he kept changing his story, and a man who changes his story is making it up.
The accounts really do differ. Joseph really did say more in some tellings than in others. But once you slow down and look at the differences one at a time, instead of as a fast list, most of them stop looking like a man caught in a lie, and a couple that stay genuinely hard turn out to be hard for reasons the CES Letter never mentions.
Nine accounts that don't match
Joseph wrote or dictated four accounts of the vision in his lifetime (1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842), and other people who heard him tell it wrote down five more. Nine in all. They do not read word for word the same, and no one on either side disputes that.
Before the list, one distinction settles more than half of it. There is a difference between a contradiction and an omission. A contradiction is when one account says a thing happened and another says it did not. An omission is just one account saying less, leaving a detail out. The shorter 1832 account leaves out a lot that the later ones include, and the CES Letter treats every one of those gaps as if Joseph had denied the detail, when he had only not mentioned it yet.[2] If you forgive me using a plain comparison: if I tell a long story to my journal and a short version to a stranger, the short version is not a different story, it is a shorter one. Hold onto that, because it does most of the work below.
The age "contradiction" was written by someone else
The CES Letter leads with Joseph's age, so start there, because it is the cleanest. The 1832 account contains the phrase "in the 16th year of my age." Every other account says he was fourteen. A man who cannot keep his own age straight, the argument runs, cannot be trusted on anything bigger.
Here is what the argument leaves out. That phrase was not written by Joseph Smith. Dean Jessee's careful study of the original manuscript, published in BYU Studies in 1969 and still the foundational work on these documents, showed that the words were squeezed in above the line, in a different hand, by Joseph's scribe Frederick G. Williams.[3] Joseph wrote the running text; someone else inserted the age. The one "wrong" age in the whole record is not even in Joseph's handwriting.
And it gets better, because even the inserted phrase does not say sixteen. "In the 16th year of my age" means age fifteen, not sixteen, the same way a baby is in her first year of life before her first birthday. Your sixteenth year begins the day you turn fifteen. The historian D. Michael Quinn, no apologist, pointed this out plainly.[4] Joseph turned fourteen in December 1819 and the vision came the next spring, so even at face value the gap is between "about fourteen" and "fifteen," roughly a year. That is the whole "discrepancy": a one-year difference, introduced by another man's pen, against a record that everywhere else in Joseph's own words says fourteen.
Key Point
The one "wrong" age is a note his scribe squeezed in, in his scribe's handwriting, and every account in Joseph's own words says fourteen. This was never Joseph contradicting himself. Remove the insertion and the firsthand record is consistent.
One being or two, and "all over the place"
The CES Letter's strongest-sounding line is that the descriptions of who appeared are "all over the place": a spirit, an angel, two angels, Jesus, many angels, the Father and the Son. Read fast, that sounds like chaos. Read slowly, it falls apart, because the list quietly mixes together things that are not the same kind of evidence.
Sort the accounts and the picture steadies. Of the nine accounts, eight describe two divine beings. The lone outlier is the 1832 account, which speaks of "the Lord" without clearly counting two, and even that is an omission, not a denial: it does not say only one being came.[5] The "a spirit, an angel" wording the CES Letter quotes does not come from any of Joseph's own four accounts at all. Some of it is a casual one-line mention (a week after his detailed 1835 telling, Joseph offhandedly referred to "my first visitation of Angels," using "angels" loosely the way the Bible often does for heavenly messengers), and some of it describes other people's experiences entirely, not Joseph's.[6] Lined up by what they actually are, the accounts are strikingly consistent, not scattered.
| Account | Year | Who appears |
|---|---|---|
| 1832 history (Joseph's own) | 1832 | "the Lord" (does not count, but does not deny two) |
| 1835 journal (Joseph's own) | 1835 | Two personages, plus "many angels" |
| 1838 history (Joseph's own) | 1838 | "Two Personages": the Father introduces the Son |
| 1842 Wentworth Letter (Joseph's own) | 1842 | "Two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other" |
| Five secondhand accounts (1840–1844) | 1840–44 | Two personages, every one |
Now the harder version of the question, because there is one. The 1832 account, read by itself, naturally reads as a vision of Christ alone. It mentions "the Lord" forgiving Joseph's sins and never explicitly names a separate Father. Critics argue this is the smoking gun: that Joseph started with one being and only later grew the story into two. That is a fair point and the strongest piece of their case, so it deserves a real answer rather than a dodge.
The answer is that the evidence around the 1832 account runs the wrong way for the "he grew the story" theory. If Joseph were inflating the tale over time, the accounts should get bigger with each telling. They do not. The 1835 account, written three years before the canonical 1838 version, actually contains more than 1838 does: it mentions "many angels" that the 1838 account drops entirely.[7] A man padding a legend does not quietly delete the angels when he writes the official version. On top of that, just six months before the 1832 account, Joseph had already recorded a separate revelation (now Doctrine and Covenants section 76) describing the Son standing "on the right hand" of the Father, two distinct beings, side by side.[8] His belief in a separated Father and Son was on paper before the "one being" account the critics say proves he had not gotten there yet. The simplest reading is that the 1832 account is a private, personal note focused on the one thing that mattered to a guilt-stricken teenager, hearing that his sins were forgiven, and not a complete account of everyone who was present.
The 1820 revival really happened
The CES Letter also claims Joseph invented the religious revival that set the whole thing in motion: "the historical record shows that there was no revival in Palmyra, New York in 1820. There was one in 1817 and there was another in 1824."[9]
This one comes from a single 1967 article that searched church membership records for the village of Palmyra and found no big spike in 1820.[10] The problem is that Joseph never claimed a revival inside Palmyra village. His 1838 account describes excitement "in that region of country," in "the whole district."[11] In 1820 a Methodist "district" was a regional area covering many towns, so the 1967 search looked in the wrong place and then concluded the thing it could not find did not exist. Steven Harper, the leading scholar on the First Vision, calls that a basic logical error: declaring "there is no evidence" of a thing and then treating the lack of evidence as proof it never happened.[12]
And there is plenty of evidence once you look at the region instead of the village. A Methodist camp meeting drew roughly a thousand people to the edge of Palmyra in June 1818; regional Methodist membership jumped by thousands in 1819–1820; the Palmyra Register newspaper itself reported a camp meeting "held in this vicinity" in the summer of 1820; and several preachers' diaries record revival activity all around the area in those years.[4:1] Two non-Mormon neighbors even remembered the young Joseph "catching a spark" at one of those camp meetings.[13] Apostle D. Todd Christofferson summed up the modern picture: "there is ample evidence of religious revivals in the area during 1820."[14]
What most likely happened is that Joseph folded together memories from a multi-year stretch of religious excitement (roughly 1818 to 1824) into one compressed telling, which is the sort of thing ordinary memory does. As Quinn put it, Joseph "merged the two revivals... While this is partially inaccurate, I see it as streamlining his narrative, not as an example of fraudulent invention."[4:2] A man inventing a story from scratch picks one dramatic revival and dates it cleanly. Joseph described years of seeking, which is what actually happened.
Why Joseph prayed
Some of the differences are genuinely hard, and the strongest of them is not even in the CES Letter's loud bullet list. It is buried in the details.
It is the question of why Joseph prayed. In the 1832 account, Joseph writes that by searching the scriptures he had already concluded that all the churches had fallen away, "that there was no society or denomination that was built upon the gospel," and that he went to pray mainly to seek forgiveness of his sins. But in the 1838 account he says his purpose was "to know which of all the sects was right," and then adds a line that points the other direction: "for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong."[15][11:1] One account says he had already decided the churches were wrong. The other says that idea had not yet entered his heart. Those are not just different emphases. They are two positive statements that pull against each other, and the CES Letter is not wrong to flag it.[16]
There are reasonable things to say around it. In the revival culture Joseph grew up in, "which church is true" and "how do I find forgiveness" were not really two separate questions; converts experienced them as one tangled crisis.[17] The 1832 account actually contains both motives, forgiveness and the apostasy of the churches, so they were never truly exclusive in his mind.[18] And a multi-year search for truth, retold years apart for different audiences, can naturally get compressed in ways that flatten the exact order things happened. But it would be dishonest to claim those points dissolve the tension completely. They explain how both concerns could live in the same person; they do not perfectly square the one line that says the thought had "never entered" his heart. This is a real seam in the record, and the right response is to weigh it squarely against everything else, not to pretend it is not there.
Two other questions stay genuinely open and deserve the same candor. The exact year Joseph's mother and siblings became involved with the Presbyterians cannot be pinned down, because the Palmyra church records that would settle it are simply lost.[19] And an early Church teaching document called the Lectures on Faith (published in 1835, under Joseph's authority) described God the Father as "a personage of spirit," wording that sits awkwardly beside a vision of an embodied Father standing in a grove.[20] There are real answers to that last one (the language was largely written by Sidney Rigdon, the phrase is older and broader than our modern reading of it, and the Church refined and eventually removed those Lectures), but the answers are partial, and the believing reader is better served sitting with that than waving it away.[21] The deeper, scholarly version of this whole criticism, the argument that Joseph's theology grew over time and that the accounts grew with it, is real, and the in-depth version engages it at length.
He never took it back
Step back from the individual seams and look at the shape of the thing. The way the accounts vary is not the way a lie behaves. A liar working from a script tends to lock the story down and repeat it the same way every time. Genuine memory of a powerful moment does the opposite: the core stays fixed while the details shift with the telling, the audience, and the years. That is exactly the pattern memory researchers have documented in real, verified events, and it is exactly the pattern Joseph's accounts show.[22] His private journal dwells on his guilt and forgiveness; his formal history dwells on the founding of a church; the throwaway details (an axe left in a stump, the color of eyes, light so bright he expected the leaves to burn) are the texture of someone remembering, not the polish of someone inventing.[23]
And the people who knew him best, including the scribe Frederick G. Williams who inserted that "16th year" phrase and later left the Church embittered, never once claimed the vision was fabricated, even when they had every reason and every opportunity to say so.[24]
None of this requires every hard question to vanish. The motive question, the Presbyterian timing, the Lectures on Faith, those stay partly unresolved, and this answer has not pretended otherwise. What it does show is a record that, examined slowly, looks far more like a young man truly remembering the most important morning of his life than like a fraud refining his pitch. When the hard questions pile up, that is the kind of foundation worth standing on: not a story too clean to be human, but four testimonies from a man who said, at fourteen, that he saw God, and who never took it back.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," pp. 32–35. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," pp. 32–35. The CES Letter's First Vision section uses an accumulation strategy across these four pages. ↩︎
Dean C. Jessee, "The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision," BYU Studies 9, no. 3 (1969): 275–294, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol9/iss3/4/. Jessee's manuscript analysis confirmed the "16th year of my age" phrase was inserted interlineally by scribe Frederick G. Williams, not in Joseph Smith's own handwriting. ↩︎
D. Michael Quinn, "Joseph Smith's Experience of a Methodist 'Camp-Meeting' in 1820," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Dialogue Paperless E-Paper #3 (2006), https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/joseph-smiths-experience-of-a-methodist-camp-meeting-in-1820/. Quinn observed that "in the 16th year of my age" means age 15, not 16, since one's sixteenth year of life begins on one's fifteenth birthday. He also documented a June 28, 1820 Palmyra Register report of a death at "a camp-meeting which was held in this vicinity" and dismissed Walters's "Methodists did not own property until 1821" objection as irrelevant since Methodists "rarely (if ever) owned the forested land" used for camp meetings. Quinn proposed memory conflation as the most parsimonious explanation: Joseph "merged the two revivals … While this is partially inaccurate, I see it as streamlining his narrative, not as an example of fraudulent invention." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Pearl of Great Price Central, "Secondhand Accounts of the First Vision," https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/secondhand-accounts-of-the-first-vision/. The five contemporary secondhand accounts are Pratt 1840, Hyde 1842, Richards 1843, White 1843, and Neibaur 1844. All derive ultimately from Joseph Smith and are not independent witnesses to the 1820 event. ↩︎
Joseph Smith, Journal entry for November 14, 1835, Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/35. Joseph mentioned "my first visitation of Angels" to Erastus Holmes one week after his detailed November 9 account to Robert Matthews. ↩︎
Joseph Smith, Journal, 9–11 November 1835, pp. 23–24, Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/23. Recorded by Warren Parrish from Joseph's narration to Robert Matthews ("Joshua the Jewish Minister"). The First Vision narrative begins on page 23. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 76:20 (February 16, 1832): "And we beheld the glory of the Son, on the right hand of the Father, and received of his fulness." ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," p. 34. ↩︎
Wesley P. Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins from the Palmyra (N.Y.) Revival," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 10, no. 4 (1967): 227–244, https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/files_JETS-PDFs_10_10-4_BETS_10_4_227-244_Walters.pdf ↩︎
Joseph Smith, History, 1838–1856, vol. A-1, pp. 2–3, Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/3. Later canonized in Joseph Smith—History 1:1–26, Pearl of Great Price. ↩︎ ↩︎
Steven C. Harper, "Evaluating Three Arguments Against Joseph Smith's First Vision," in Exploring the First Vision, ed. Samuel Alonzo Dodge and Steven C. Harper (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2012), https://rsc.byu.edu/exploring-first-vision/evaluating-three-arguments-against-joseph-smiths-first-vision. Harper cites David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies for the definition of the fallacy of negative proof. ↩︎
Orsamus Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's Purchase (Rochester, NY: William Alling, 1851), 214. ↩︎
D. Todd Christofferson, "The Prophet Joseph Smith" (BYU–Idaho devotional, September 24, 2013). The "ample evidence of religious revivals in the area during 1820" formulation is widely cited in apologetic literature; transcript verification recommended for downstream fact-checker. ↩︎
Joseph Smith, History, circa Summer 1832, pp. 1–3, Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/1. The JSP source description identifies the 1832 history as "the only narrative of the foundational spiritual events of JS's early life that includes his own handwriting." ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," p. 33. ↩︎
Christopher C. Jones, "The Power and Form of Godliness: Methodist Conversion Narratives and Joseph Smith's First Vision," Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 88–114, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/mormonhistory/vol37/iss2/1/. Jones argues that in Methodist conversion culture, seeking forgiveness of sins and identifying the true church were intertwined dimensions of the same spiritual crisis; the JSTOR-paywalled article is summarized in FAIR's secondary citation at https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Joseph_Smith's_First_Vision/Contradiction_about_knowing_all_churches_were_wrong ↩︎
Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 39. This characterization of Joseph's both-motives pattern is widely cited in the apologetic literature as the standard formulation of the both-motives view. ↩︎
FAIR, "Lucy Mack Smith / Religious Affiliations," https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Lucy_Mack_Smith/Religious_affiliations. The page quotes Bushman: "Unfortunately, the Presbyterian records that could confirm this date are lost." FAIR addresses the broader gap in surviving Palmyra Presbyterian records that could resolve the timing of Smith family affiliation. ↩︎
Lectures on Faith, Lecture 5, in Doctrine and Covenants (1835 edition). Primary text via BYU Religious Studies Center, https://rsc.byu.edu/lectures-faith-historical-perspective/lecture-5 ↩︎
Larry E. Dahl, "Authorship and History of the Lectures on Faith," in The Lectures on Faith in Historical Perspective, ed. Larry E. Dahl and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 1990), https://rsc.byu.edu/lectures-faith-historical-perspective/authorship-history-lectures-faith. Dahl summarizes Phipps 1977 ("Sidney Rigdon's use of function words corresponded very closely with that in Lectures One and Seven") and Larsen-Rencher 1982 ("Our conclusions largely support [Phipps's] results") and concludes: "the theological ideas which they contain came from Joseph Smith" despite collaborative authorship; the materials were "published with the sanction and approval of the Prophet." ↩︎
Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). The definitive scholarly monograph applying memory science to the First Vision accounts. ↩︎
David Nye White interview with Joseph Smith, August 29, 1843, published in Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, September 15, 1843; Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/interview-29-august-1843-extract/1 ↩︎
Jerry Winder, "What Did Joseph Smith's Family Know About the First Vision?" interview with Kyle R. Walker, FromTheDesk (June 15, 2022), https://www.fromthedesk.org/first-vision-smith-family-accounts-kyle-walker/. The general absence of public denial of the First Vision from Joseph's inner circle — including Frederick G. Williams, who was the very scribe who interlinearly inserted "in the 16th year of my age" into the 1832 account — is noted in the standard apologetic literature; argument from silence weighed accordingly given the FV's relatively limited public role until the 1840s. ↩︎