Multiple Accounts of the First Vision

The claim:

"There are at least 4 different first vision accounts by Joseph Smith, which the Church admits in its November 2013 First Vision Accounts essay: 1832 HANDWRITTEN ACCOUNT • TWO 1835 ACCOUNTS • 1838 ACCOUNT (OFFICIAL VERSION) • 1842 ACCOUNT… 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]

Behind the catalog of dates, the CES Letter is pressing a single point. Joseph Smith told the story of his First Vision more than once over his life, and the tellings are not identical. One is long, one is a quick note to a stranger, one was written for a newspaper. They stress different things and include different details. If the same man keeps telling the most important story of his life a little differently each time, the argument goes, then he is making it up as he goes.

Part of that is true. Joseph really did tell the story in different ways to different people across twelve years. The question the CES Letter skips is what that variation actually means, and here the evidence cuts back against the people raising it. Retell any genuine memory enough times over a lifetime and it behaves precisely this way. A rehearsed story does not.

Start with something the CES Letter never mentions. Five different people who had heard Joseph tell the story each wrote down a small detail he never recorded himself. Orson Pratt, in 1840, said the light was so intense Joseph expected to see the leaves of the trees catch fire. A non-Mormon newspaperman who interviewed Joseph in 1843 wrote that Joseph went first to the stump where he had left his axe when he quit work. Alexander Neibaur, a German convert who talked with Joseph a month before he was killed, wrote down the color of the eyes he was shown: blue, with a white cloth over the shoulders. None of those details proves any doctrine. None helps a missionary. They are exactly the kind of incidental thing real memory hangs onto and invention never thinks to add, and they survive in five separate hands. Keep that picture in view; everything below grows out of it.

For the specific contradictions the CES Letter alleges (his age, why he prayed, whether he saw one being or two, the timing of the revival), see Contradictions. For the question of why no one seems to have written the vision down for years, see Late Appearance. This page is about something those two pages assume: why there are multiple accounts in the first place, and what the pattern across them shows.

Nine tellings, not four

The CES Letter's count is wrong in a way that matters. It counts one telling twice ("TWO 1835 ACCOUNTS" is really one detailed retelling plus a one-line mention of it five days later). But it also leaves out five more accounts entirely.

Joseph wrote or dictated four versions himself, in 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842. On top of those, five other people who heard him tell it wrote down what they heard: Orson Pratt in 1840, Orson Hyde in 1842, Levi Richards in 1843, the newspaper editor David Nye White in 1843, and Alexander Neibaur in 1844.^[2] That is nine in total, not four. The CES Letter discusses only the four Joseph wrote and says nothing about the other five.

That missing number changes how the argument comes across. The complaint is built on the 1832 account, the one that reads a little differently from the rest. Standing it next to three other accounts, it looks like a quarter of the record. Standing it next to eight others, it is one telling out of nine, and as you will see, even that one is less of an outlier than it first appears.

The five extra witnesses also pull the record outward in a way that is hard to explain as a sales pitch. Pratt's was a missionary pamphlet printed in Edinburgh in 1840, before Joseph's official 1838 history ever appeared in print. Hyde's was in German. White was not a member at all; he was a non-Mormon newspaper editor with no reason to flatter Joseph. These are not friendly voices reciting a script. They are five different people in five different settings, and they still tell the same basic story.

Title page of Orson Pratt's 1840 Edinburgh missionary pamphlet, A[n] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, the earliest published full account of the First Vision. It circulated to readers in Britain from 1840, before Joseph's 1838 history saw print in 1842, one of five secondhand accounts the CES Letter never mentions. Via Joseph Smith Papers.

The details nobody would bother to invent

Go back to those five secondhand witnesses, and look closely at the specific things each of them wrote down.

Pratt kept the burning leaves. White kept the axe in the stump. Neibaur kept the blue eyes and the white cloth over the shoulders. Hyde added that, as Joseph knelt to pray, his mind filled with doubts and distracting images, the ordinary experience of anyone who has ever tried to pray and could not focus. Levi Richards wrote down Joseph saying, on that occasion, that "the Everlasting covena[n]t was broken," wording that fits the sermon on apostasy Joseph had just been listening to.

Now ask what these have in common. Not one of them carries a doctrine. Not one props up the Church's claims. Not one has the kind of drama a missionary could use. They are small, specific, almost pointless little facts: where an axe was, what the light looked like, the color of someone's eyes. Their very pointlessness is what makes them matter, because pointless particulars are the residue real memory leaves behind. When you remember a genuinely important morning from your own life, you remember odd, useless details right alongside the big ones, the song on the radio, where you were standing, what the weather did. Inventions do not come with that texture. A forger repeating an invented story to five different listeners would give each of them the same clean version.

There is one more turn here that makes the point stronger, not weaker. Suppose a skeptic says the five recorders made up their own details. That would require five different people, in five different places, with no contact and no shared motive, to each independently invent a pointless, theologically useless particular and attach it to Joseph's story. The more recorders you add, the less believable that gets. The scatter of uninventable little details across five separate hands is positive evidence that real memory, retold out loud over years, is what produced these accounts. (The in-depth version lays all five side by side; see the five secondhand accounts.)

What every account keeps

If the small details drift, you might expect the big ones to drift too. They do not. Run all nine accounts together and the same backbone shows up in every one. Steven Harper, the leading Latter-day Saint scholar of the First Vision, has spent a whole book tracing that pattern, and the line he keeps coming back to is one Richard Bushman wrote in 1969: "One would expect variations in the simplest and truest story."^[3][4] Laid side by side, the accounts carry the same seven elements:

1. Joseph was young.
2. He was troubled by religious confusion.
3. He went off to pray alone.
4. A divine light appeared.
5. A heavenly being, or beings, appeared.
6. He was told the existing churches were wrong.
7. He was treated badly when he told people.

Every account hits those seven, or clearly implies them. What moves around is the periphery. The 1835 telling mentions many angels; the 1838 telling has the Methodist minister who mocked him; Neibaur's has the blue eyes. The edges shift with the audience and the occasion, and underneath them sits a stable core that every telling keeps. The Church's own essay on these accounts says the same thing plainly, that the accounts "tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail."^[5] That combination, a fixed center with details shedding and reattaching at the rim, is the signature of something remembered many times over.

This is how real memory works

The CES Letter's whole argument rests on a quiet assumption about memory: that if Joseph really lived through this, he would tell it the same way every time. That sounds reasonable, and it is exactly backwards. Psychologists have spent fifty years documenting how real memories of real events actually behave, and they do not behave like that at all.

The research goes back to a famous idea called "flashbulb memory," the feeling that a huge emotional event burns itself into your mind like a photograph. It turns out the photograph is not reliable. After the Challenger explosion in 1986, researchers wrote down people's fresh memories of hearing the news, then asked them again two and a half years later. A quarter of them were dead wrong the second time, and the striking part is that they were completely confident in the wrong version.^[6] The same thing showed up after 9/11: people's memories drifted with the years, but their confidence did not.^[7]

You can see it in public figures whose stories were checked against the record. President George W. Bush described watching the first plane hit the World Trade Center on television before he went into a classroom, which is impossible, because no footage of the first plane had been broadcast yet. Ronald Reagan spoke of being present at the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp; he spent the war in the United States and never went. Hillary Clinton remembered landing in Bosnia under sniper fire; she did not.^[8] These were not lies. They were ordinary, confident, sincere memories that happened to be wrong in the details while the core feeling stayed intact.

Joseph's accounts follow that pattern down to the letter. The core stays put; the details shift with each retelling. The variation the CES Letter treats as a confession is, by everything modern psychology knows about memory, the signature of someone remembering something that actually happened.

Scripture does the same thing

Anyone raised on the Bible already knows a case like this, even if they have never noticed it. If varying accounts of a vision proves the vision was invented, then the same rule wrecks the New Testament, because the conversion of the Apostle Paul is told three separate times in the book of Acts, and the three do not match on the details.

In one telling, the men with Paul heard the voice; in another, they did not. In one, only Paul falls to the ground; in another, the whole group falls. In one, a man named Ananias plays a central role and baptizes Paul; in another, Ananias is not mentioned at all. These are real differences in the actual scripture, written about one of the most important events in Christian history. The scholar John Tvedtnes, who lined them up against Joseph's accounts, concluded that "there are fewer differences between the various accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision than between the five different accounts of Paul's first vision and his trip to Damascus."^[9] His five are the three in Acts plus two passages from Paul's own letters. No Christian reads those Acts differences and decides Paul made up the road to Damascus. They read them as one true experience retold for different audiences, and that same fairness, handed to Joseph, takes the force out of the objection. Joseph saw the parallel himself, and wrote in his 1838 account that he felt much like Paul defending his own vision before King Agrippa.

The Book of Mormon does this too. Alma the Younger's conversion is told three times inside it, each version shaped for a different listener, and no two of them use quite the same words. "Born of God" is the one phrase all three repeat exactly. The thunder image appears in all three as well, but the shortest telling, the one Alma gives his second son, puts it differently, and that same telling drops the "gall of bitterness" phrase the other two share, reaching instead for different language to describe the same three days. John Welch's explanation is simple enough: Alma had told the story so many times that a certain set of words and phrases had become second nature to him.^[10] The pattern critics call a problem in Joseph's life is the same pattern scripture itself treats as normal.

When the memory argument cuts both ways

This question has a hard part. Two of them, actually.

The same memory science that helps the faithful case also limits it. If memory naturally reshapes itself over years, then we cannot turn around and treat every specific detail of the 1838 account, the exact words spoken, the precise way the Father introduced the Son, as a perfect transcript of what happened in 1820. What the research supports is real but modest: something extraordinary happened to Joseph, and the way he retold it across his life matches genuine memory. It does not certify the fine print of any single telling. The limit is real, and claiming the variation pattern proves more than that would be overreaching.

The second hard spot is the 1832 account, the earliest one. Read by itself, it speaks of "the Lord" and does not clearly count two beings the way the later accounts do. The CES Letter is right that this is the strongest single piece of its case, and the Church's own essay grants that the 1832 telling "may have concentrated on Jesus Christ, the bearer of forgiveness." There are solid reasons it still fits two beings, and the trail of evidence actually runs against the "he grew the story over time" theory, but that argument takes real work and belongs to its own page. The in-depth version walks through it, and the Contradictions page handles the related question of why he prayed, which is the single tensest line in the whole record. Neither gets waved away here.

Liars recite, witnesses drift

Stop weighing the accounts one at a time and ask what the whole record looks like from a distance. Think about what a man guarding an invented story has reason to do. He has every reason to recite it word for word, year after year, and none at all to let an axe or a pair of blue eyes wander into it. Every stray particular is one more thing a listener could check against the last telling. Joseph's record does none of that. Some critics do allow that something real happened to him and say only that he enlarged it as the years went on. That reading still has to concede the part of the story that never budged, and argue only about what grew around it. Spread across nine accounts and twelve years, the record shows a steady seven-part core, peripheral details that wander the way real recollection wanders, and a scatter of pointless little particulars (an axe, some blue eyes, leaves about to burn) that no forger would ever think to plant, preserved in the hands of five different people, the last of them writing a month before Joseph died.

It does not all come out tidy, and this answer has not pretended it does. The 1832 account still reads differently from the rest, and the same memory research that explains the variation also limits how much any single telling can be asked to settle. Neither limit touches the shape of the nine accounts taken together, and weighed fairly, that shape reads like memory rather than manufacture. And none of it was ever meant to rest on one journal page. The Book of Mormon is the one you can check for yourself, and it is waiting whenever the documents get harder than you want them to be.

Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.

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1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "First Vision," p. 33. The bullet-list catalog of who appeared is from p. 34, item 4. ↩︎

2. Pearl of Great Price Central, "Secondhand Accounts of the First Vision." https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/secondhand-accounts-of-the-first-vision/ ↩︎

3. Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Winner of the Harvey B. and Susan Easton Black Award (Mormon History Association) and the Smith-Petit Best Book Award (John Whitmer Historical Association). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/first-vision-9780199329472 ↩︎

4. Richard L. Bushman, "The First Vision Story Revived," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 82–93. Reprinted in Exploring the First Vision (BYU Religious Studies Center, 2012). https://rsc.byu.edu/exploring-first-vision/first-vision-story-revived ↩︎

5. "First Vision Accounts," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2013; the page as currently served carries a 2016 citation line and 2016 publication metadata). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/first-vision-accounts?lang=eng ↩︎

6. Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, "Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger," in Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of 'Flashbulb' Memories, ed. Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–31. ↩︎

7. Jennifer M. Talarico and David C. Rubin, "Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories," Psychological Science 14, no. 5 (2003): 455–461. ↩︎

8. George W. Bush's false 9/11 memory is discussed in Daniel L. Greenberg, "President Bush's false [flashbulb] memory of 9/11/01," Applied Cognitive Psychology 18, no. 3 (2004): 363–370, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1016. Robert A. Rees, "Looking Deeper into Joseph Smith's First Vision," Interpreter 25 (2017): 67–80, collects the same set: Bush's misremembered account of hearing the 9/11 news, Hillary Clinton's assertion that she came under sniper fire at Tuzla, Bosnia in 1996, Ronald Reagan's false remembrance that he was present at the liberation of a concentration camp, and Brian Williams's misremembrance of the Iraq helicopter incident. (Sources differ on which camp Reagan named, so none is given here.) ↩︎

9. 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 ↩︎

10. John W. Welch, "Three Accounts of Alma's Conversion," in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book / FARMS, 1992), 150–153. Welch's argument is summarized here rather than quoted; the chapter was not available for byte-level verification. ↩︎