CES Letter Answers

Appearance

Late Appearance ​

The claim:

"Late appearance of claims: No one — including Joseph Smith's family members and the Saints — had ever heard about the first vision from twelve to twenty-two years after it supposedly occurred. The first and earliest written account of the first vision in Joseph Smith's journal was 12 years after the spring of 1820. There is absolutely no record of any claimed 'first vision' prior to this 1832 account."[1]

The CES Letter deploys a quote from BYU historian James B. Allen to seal the case: "There is little if any evidence, however, that by the early 1830's Joseph Smith was telling the story in public."[2]

If no one knew about the First Vision for 12 years, why were hostile newspapers reporting it in 1831?

The evidence trail the CES Letter ignores ​

The claim rests on a simple assertion: nothing exists before 1832. The documentary record says otherwise.

DateSourceWhat it reports
1820Joseph Smith--History 1:20-22Joseph told his mother and a Methodist minister about the experience; the minister responded "with great contempt"[3]
1827Joseph Capron affidavitThe Smith family made "the highest pretensions to piety and holy intercourse with Almighty God"[4]
Apr 1830D&C 20:5"It was truly manifested unto this first elder that he had received a remission of his sins"[5]
Nov 1830Painesville TelegraphReports Joseph claiming divine visions and heavenly revelations[6]
Feb 14, 1831The Reflector (Palmyra, NY)Joseph "had seen God frequently and personally"[7]
Mar 7, 1832Fredonia CensorMissionaries teaching Joseph "had recourse to prayer" after not joining any church due to "numerous divisions"[8]
Summer 1832Joseph Smith's handwritten historyFirst written account of the vision[9]
Mar 2, 1833Rev. Richmond Taggart letter"Joe Smith... told them he had seen Jesus Christ and the Apostles and conversed with them"[10]

The Capron affidavit is the earliest hostile reference. It dates to 1827 -- before the Church existed. A neighbor mocking the Smiths for claiming "holy intercourse with Almighty God" is not the profile of a family hiding a visionary experience.

A hostile newspaper confirms it before Joseph wrote it down ​

On February 14, 1831, the Palmyra Reflector -- a paper that had been ridiculing the Mormons for months -- reported that Joseph "had seen God frequently and personally."[7:1]

The editors weren't doing Joseph any favors. They were mocking what his followers were teaching. The information passed through several hands (Joseph to Cowdery to a correspondent to Abner Cole), and "frequently and personally" is broader than a single 1820 event.[11]

But the core point holds: claims that Joseph had seen God were circulating publicly a full year before he wrote anything down. The CES Letter says "absolutely no record" before 1832. The Reflector is a record. It's hostile. And it's from 1831.

D&C 20: an official document in 1830 ​

Doctrine and Covenants 20:5-7 -- the "Articles and Covenants" received April 1830 -- describes a specific sequence:

  1. Joseph "received a remission of his sins"
  2. He "was entangled again in the vanities of the world"
  3. God "ministered unto him by an holy angel"[5:1]

That sequence -- forgiveness, then worldly entanglement, then angelic ministry -- maps precisely to the narrative arc of the 1832 First Vision account: the vision and forgiveness (1820), the intervening years, and Moroni's visit (1823).

A skeptic can argue "manifested" means inner spiritual conviction rather than a vision.[12] But the match isn't a single word. It's a three-part narrative structure published in a Church founding document, read aloud at conferences, and printed in the non-Mormon Painesville Telegraph by April 1831 -- all before Joseph's first written account.

The family remembered it ​

Joseph wasn't the only witness to what happened after the grove.

Lucy Mack Smith told Wandle Mace in 1839 about "the time the Angels first visited him" -- describing Joseph as "about fourteen years old" and identifying the personages as God and Jesus.[13]

William Smith named George Lane as the influential Methodist preacher, recalled Joseph attending camp meetings, and remembered the influence of James 1:5.[13:1]

Katharine Smith Salisbury told her children and grandchildren that Joseph saw "two bright lights coming down from above; when they were close to him he saw that they were heavenly messengers." She told her son Frederick that Joseph "would teach the family" about "heavenly messages which he had received from God and his Son."[13:2]

The family also remembered persecution beginning shortly after the First Vision in 1820-1821, with Katharine noting her sister Sophronia became sick during this period.[13:3]

Three siblings. Distinct personal details. Consistent core story. The CES Letter's claim that "no one -- including Joseph Smith's family members" had heard about the vision collapses under the weight of the family's own testimony.

What the James B. Allen quote actually says ​

The CES Letter treats Allen's 1966 Dialogue article as a fatal admission from inside the Church. Three things it doesn't mention.

Allen wrote in 1966. The 1832 account wasn't widely available to scholars. The documentary evidence above hadn't been catalogued. He was working with incomplete records.[2:1]

Allen was a faithful Latter-day Saint. He found the vision's growing prominence historically interesting -- not suspicious. His article traced how the First Vision went from a personal experience to a foundational narrative. He never concluded it was fabricated.

Allen updated his position. By 1970, he acknowledged that Joseph "described his experience to friends and acquaintances at least as early as 1831-32" and that the vision "was known, probably on a limited basis, during the formative decade."[14]

1966 article (CES Letter cites this)1970 update (CES Letter ignores this)
Assessment"Little if any evidence" of public telling by early 1830sJoseph described the experience "at least as early as 1831-32"
Conclusion"Only limited circulation in those early days"Vision "was known, probably on a limited basis, during the formative decade"
Allen's faithFaithful LDS historianSame faithful LDS historian, with more evidence

The CES Letter freezes Allen in 1966 and ignores six decades of subsequent scholarship.

Why Joseph waited to write it down ​

The CES Letter implies the silence was strategic -- that Joseph didn't write about the vision because it hadn't happened yet. The evidence supports a different explanation.

He was barely literate. Joseph described himself as "mearly instructid in reading writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic." He later called writing a "little narrow prison... of paper pen and ink" because of his "crooked broken scattered and imperfect language."[15]

There was no record-keeping apparatus. An April 1830 revelation commanded records be kept (D&C 21:1). Development was agonizingly slow. By October 1839, only 59 pages of history had been completed after nine years. Scribes kept dying: James Mulholland (June 1841), Robert B. Thompson (August 1841). Joseph lamented: "Long imprisonments, vexatious and long continued Law Suits -- The treachery of some of my Clerks; the death of others" had prevented adequate record-keeping.[15:1]

Joseph's focus shifted in 1832. "During the first four years of Mormon record keeping (1828-1831), [Joseph] focused primarily on preserving his revelatory texts. This focus changed in 1832, when [Joseph] began documenting his personal life in detail for the first time."[16] The 1832 First Vision account appeared exactly when Joseph first turned to personal history. The timing fits the infrastructure, not a fabrication schedule.

Telling people went badly. The Methodist minister treated it "with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil" (JSH 1:21). Joseph compared himself to Paul: "some said he was dishonest, others said he was mad" (JSH 1:24-25). A 14-year-old facing that reaction doesn't organize a press conference.

A 12-year gap isn't unusual -- it's normal ​

The CES Letter treats the 12-year delay as inherently suspicious. By that standard, most of history's foundational religious experiences are suspect.

EventGap to first written recordNotes
Paul's Damascus road vision (~AD 33)~14-24 years (Galatians, ~AD 48-55); Acts accounts 30+ years laterThree accounts in Acts vary on key details. No scholar concludes the vision was fabricated.[17]
Moses at the burning bushWritten centuries after the event by traditional datingJoseph had better documentation in a fraction of the time
Martin Luther's 95 Theses (1517)29 years -- first recorded by Philip Melanchthon in 1546Melanchthon wasn't even in Wittenberg in 1517. Modern historians debate whether the door-nailing actually happened.[18]
Joseph Smith's First Vision (1820)12 years to first written account; oral and hostile-witness references by 1830-319 documented accounts during Joseph's lifetime[19]

Paul's conversion was more important to Christianity than any other event except the Resurrection. He didn't write it down for at least 14 years. The three accounts in Acts were written decades later -- and they disagree on whether his companions heard the voice (Acts 9:7 vs. 22:9).[20]

No serious biblical scholar treats the gap as evidence Paul invented his experience.

The Brodie fabrication thesis and its collapse ​

The strongest scholarly case for fabrication came from Fawn Brodie, who argued in No Man Knows My History (1945) that Joseph concocted the vision "when the need arose for a magnificent tradition" -- placing the invention around 1838.[21]

Brodie wrote before the 1832 and 1835 accounts were widely available. When those documents surfaced, her timeline collapsed. She adjusted by "substituting 1830 for 1838" but never reconsidered the thesis itself. Harper: she "simply pushed her proposed date of fabrication back rather than rethinking her argument."[22]

The 1832 account is the fatal problem. It's a private, unfinished, unpublished journal entry partly in Joseph's own handwriting. Its content -- personal anguish over sin, the Lord granting forgiveness -- doesn't serve the institutional purpose the fabrication thesis requires. A man inventing a divine endorsement for his church would lead with "God told me to start a new church." Joseph led with "I was convicted of my sins and the Lord forgave me."[9:1]

Harper called this the "most raw of all Joseph's accounts." Here he "literally with his own pen for much of the document, poured his experience onto the pages."[22:1]

The 1835 account undermines embellishment ​

If Joseph were building an increasingly impressive origin story over time, you'd expect details to grow with each telling. The 1835 account wrecks that theory.

AccountBeings described
1832"The Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord"
1835"One personage" then "another personage"; also "many angels"
1838"Two Personages," one introducing the other as "My Beloved Son"

The 1835 account -- written three years before the "official" version -- includes "many angels."[23] The 1838 account drops them. A fabricated narrative adds spectacle over time. This one removes it.

The 1835 entry was also a private journal entry prompted by a conversation with a visitor named Robert Matthews. Joseph wasn't crafting a public document. He was telling a stranger about his experience, and his scribe Warren Parrish wrote it down.[23:1]

The best-documented theophany in history ​

Steven C. Harper -- BYU professor, Joseph Smith Papers volume editor, and the leading scholarly authority on the First Vision -- has called it "the best-documented theophany in history."[24]

The evidence:

  • 4 firsthand accounts by Joseph (1832, 1835, 1838, 1842)
  • 5 contemporary secondhand accounts (Orson Pratt 1840, Orson Hyde 1842, Levi Richards 1843, David Nye White 1843, Alexander Neibaur 1844)
  • Multiple hostile-witness references before the first written account
  • Family testimony corroborating the event and its aftermath[19:1]

Scholars studying Moses's burning bush or Paul's Damascus road experience would be thrilled to have this kind of documentation. The First Vision's record isn't unusually thin. It's unusually rich.

For how the accounts compare and what the differences mean, see Multiple Accounts and Contradictions.

Further Reading

Bottom line: The CES Letter says "absolutely no record" before 1832. A hostile newspaper reported Joseph's claim to have "seen God" in February 1831. D&C 20 referenced the experience in 1830. A neighbor mocked the Smiths' "holy intercourse with Almighty God" as early as 1827. Joseph's family independently corroborated the vision with distinct personal details. The 12-year gap to the first written account is shorter than Paul's -- and the documentary trail is exactly what genuine experience looks like: oral before written, personal before institutional, hostile witnesses before friendly accounts.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," no. 3, p. 34. ↩︎

  2. James B. Allen, "The Significance of Joseph Smith's 'First Vision' in Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1966): 29-45. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-significance-of-joseph-smiths/ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Joseph Smith--History 1:20-22, Pearl of Great Price. Joseph describes telling his mother and receiving contempt from a Methodist minister. ↩︎

  4. Joseph Capron affidavit, collected by D.P. Hurlbut (1833), in Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, OH, 1834), 259. Capron was a neighbor of the Smiths; his affidavit references the family's "highest pretensions to piety and holy intercourse with Almighty God." Compiled in FAIR, "Events after the First Vision." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Events_after_the_First_Vision ↩︎

  5. Doctrine and Covenants 20:5-7. Received April 1830; presented at conferences and published in the non-Mormon Painesville Telegraph, April 19, 1831. Richard Lloyd Anderson contended this passage contains "the earliest LDS reference to the First Vision." ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. Painesville Telegraph (Ohio), November 16 and December 7, 1830. Reports referenced Joseph Smith claiming divine visions and heavenly revelations. ↩︎

  7. "Gold Bible, No. 6," The Reflector (Palmyra, NY), February 14, 1831. The article reported that Joseph "had seen God frequently and personally." Full text at http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/ny/wayn1830.htm ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. Fredonia Censor (Fredonia, NY), March 7, 1832. Missionaries teaching that Joseph "had recourse to prayer" after not attaching to any church due to "numerous divisions." Compiled in FAIR, "Events after the First Vision." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Events_after_the_First_Vision ↩︎

  9. Joseph Smith, History, circa Summer 1832, pp. 1-3, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/1 ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. Rev. Richmond Taggart, letter to Rev. Jonathan Goings, March 2, 1833. "Joe Smith... told them he had seen Jesus Christ and the Apostles and conversed with them." Compiled in FAIR, "Events after the First Vision." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Events_after_the_First_Vision ↩︎

  11. Robert M. Bowman Jr., "The First Rumor: The 1831 Palmyra Reflector and the First Vision," Institute for Religious Research. Bowman argues the report is "so far removed from the source, and so flawed factually, that it is unreliable" -- the strongest counterargument. https://mit.irr.org/first-rumor-1831-palmyra-reflector-and-first-vision ↩︎

  12. Robert M. Bowman Jr., "Truly Manifested: Does D&C 20:5 Refer to the First Vision?" Institute for Religious Research. Bowman argues "manifested" typically means inner spiritual confirmation in D&C usage. https://mit.irr.org/truly-manifested-does-dc-205-refer-first-vision ↩︎

  13. "How Did Joseph Smith's Family Testify of the First Vision?" Scripture Central KnoWhy. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/how-did-joseph-smith-s-family-testify-of-the-first-vision ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. James B. Allen, "Eight Contemporary Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision -- What Do We Learn from Them?" Improvement Era 73 (April 1970): 4-13. Allen updated his earlier conclusions, acknowledging evidence that Joseph shared the vision "at least as early as 1831-32." https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/allen/2020-02-05/ie_73.4._james_b._allen_eight_contemporary_accounts_of_joseph_smiths_first_vision_april_1970.pdf ↩︎

  15. Dean C. Jessee, "The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision," in Exploring the First Vision, ed. Samuel Alonzo Dodge and Steven C. Harper (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2012). https://rsc.byu.edu/exploring-first-vision/earliest-documented-accounts-joseph-smiths-first-vision ↩︎ ↩︎

  16. Joseph Smith Papers, Introduction to Documents Volume 2, Part 5. "During the first four years of Mormon record keeping (1828-1831), [Joseph] focused primarily on preserving his revelatory texts." ↩︎

  17. Paul's Damascus road experience (~AD 33) is first referenced in Galatians 1:15-16 (~AD 48-55), a gap of approximately 14-24 years. The three accounts in Acts were written even later. ↩︎

  18. Philip Melanchthon, Historia de vita et actis Lutheri (1548) -- the sole source for the door-nailing claim, written 29 years after the event. See Erwin Iserloh, The Theses Were Not Posted: Luther Between Reform and Reformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). ↩︎

  19. "Accounts of the First Vision," Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/site/accounts-of-the-first-vision ↩︎ ↩︎

  20. "Why Are There Different Accounts of Paul's Conversion?" Scripture Central KnoWhy. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-are-there-different-accounts-of-pauls-conversion ↩︎

  21. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 24-25. ↩︎

  22. Steven C. Harper, "Four Accounts and Three Critiques of Joseph Smith's First Vision," FAIR Conference, August 4, 2011. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/august-2011/four-accounts-and-three-critiques-of-joseph-smiths-first-vision ↩︎ ↩︎

  23. Joseph Smith, Journal, 9-11 November 1835, pp. 23-24, Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-1835-1836/24 ↩︎ ↩︎

  24. Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Harper calls the First Vision "the best-documented theophany in history." ↩︎

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