Recovery to Mormonism

The First Vision

The First Vision is a favorite target of Recovery to Mormonism type sites—of ex-Mormons and anti-Mormons.  It’s not hard to understand why.  If you discredit the First Vision, you discredit the source of the Church.

So it’s rather in their interest to prove that the First Vision didn’t happen—that Joseph Smith made it up.  They’re less concerned with whether Joseph Smith was mad or dreaming, here—more that he was lying.  Here are some of the main attacks and our responses.

There were several versions of the First Vision.  Yes, if you mean that Joseph Smith Jr. did not copy his account of the First Vision word-for-word across the four versions.  You will find mild inconsistencies between Paul’s two accounts of his conversion (whether those in his party saw the light or heard the voice).  Joseph Smith’s accounts, likewise, do not share every detail, but the core story is always there.

There’s something that those who are critical of Christianity like to bring up—that one of the gospels mentions people rising from the dead after Christ and none of the others do.  Does this mean that the other writers didn’t know about this, or that Christianity is false because of this omission?  No.  The gospels were written to different purposes.  They were also written by different people.  Even things that appear to be outright errors (a different number of angels reported at Christ’s tombs) do not disprove the gospels.  And, again, Paul is proof that even the same people can tell a different story in different tellings.  When you tell a story multiple times, do you repeat every detail?

The most “scathing” criticism is that Joseph didn’t mention, in an unpublished 1832 account, that there were two personages.  The account read thus: “and I saw the Lord and he Spake unto me Saying Joseph my Son they Sins are forgiven thee.”  At this point, Joseph had already published an account in which two personages were strictly mentioned.  It seems improbable that Joseph Smith would have forgotten, even if he’d made the story up.  Nor does this fragment discount that there were two personages—it focuses on the Lord speaking.  1

Accounts of the First Vision were written years after it happened.  And it happened when Joseph Smith was fourteen years old.  As his education was fairly slight, why would his first impulse be to write it down?

That aside, if we impose that on Joseph, we have to impose it on the writers of the New Testament.  Why is our first written account of Paul’s conversion twenty years after the fact?  Why were the gospels written decades after Christ?  Paul’s letters are actually the oldest part of the New Testament and rather reveal that people understood Christianity before the gospels were written.  We can’t discount the oral elements of faith.  We can’t decide that if something wasn’t immediately written down, it wasn’t true.  (Heaven knows I’m the worst journal keeper in the world.  This doesn’t mean that what happened to me ten years ago didn’t happen.) 2

Major members of the Church were unfamiliar with the First Vision.  In a way, this is related to the complaints about Joseph Smith’s multiple versions of the same vision.  Really.  This and that major Church member (namely Orson Pratt, John Taylor, and Brigham Young) apparently believed that an angel, not the Father and the Son, appeared to Joseph Smith.  Therefore, the Father and the Son were added later to the account.

Here they are: "The Lord did not come… But he did send his angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith jun.,…" (Brigham Young)

"…just as it was when the prophet Joseph asked the angel which of the sects was right that he might join it. The answer was that none of them are right. What, none of them? No. we will not stop to argue that question; the angel merely told him to join none of them that none of them were right." (John Taylor)

"By and by an obscure individual, a young man, rose up, and, in the midst of all Christendom, proclaimed the startling news that God had sent an angel to him;… This young man, some four years afterwards, was visited again by a holy angel." (Orson Pratt)

First, let’s look at the dates on the latter two of these “confused” quotes.  One is in 1879, another in 1869.  Brigham Young’s quote is certainly after he’d become Prophet and Joseph had died.  Joseph Smith had, at that point, published his account four times and had also been dead a number of years.  We have published and even unpublished accounts of the First Vision, the latter written in Joseph’s hand.  The latest of these was published in 1842. Then whether these Church leaders “misunderstood” the event or not, we can’t decide that the official story was that an angel visited Joseph Smith, not the Father and the Son, and that only later, say, in 1890 or some such, the Church decided to go back and change the story to sound more impressive.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  This does not coincide with historical reality.  At no time, in any of these accounts, does Joseph say he was visited by “only an angel.”

But let’s say, then, that these Mormon Church leaders, all of whom had been members for years and would have read these accounts, somehow did not “get” the First Vision.  Is this supported by historical reality?

That Orson Pratt and John Taylor “didn’t know” about the First Vision is actually easily debunked.  Orson Pratt’s quote, which would seem to indicate that Joseph had been visited by an angel and not God, has been taken wildly out of context.  This “quote” is, in fact, the first and the last sentence of a long paragraph describing the visitation of the Father and the Son and what came after.  (We don’t have the room to reproduce it here, but please check out our source at the bottom of the page for a treatment of all of these in full.)

John Taylor edited the publication that Joseph Smith’s First Vision accounts appeared in.  And, additionally, in a sermon given the same day, he spoke of the visitation of the Father and the Son.

Brigham Young’s quote is also out of context.  The phrase is “The Lord did not come with the armies of heaven,” and another long paragraph.  This one is somewhat trickier to parse than the other two (as you’ll see in the full paragraph linked below), but have you noticed a consistency?  All three, although quite apparently understanding the First Vision, use the word “angel” interchangeably with “God.”  This seems to be a linguistic choice, which is, in fact, also used in the Bible (see Genesis 48:15-16).  While odd to our ears, this makes more sense than a strange amnesia on the part of old, established members. 3

1. The First Vision (Michael R. Ash)

2. Same.

3. Did Earlier Church Leaders Understand the First Vision? (D. Charles Pyle and Cooper Johnson)