Late Appearance

VIDEO: CES Letter pages 22 to 23 The First Vision

CES Letter Core Question

The first written account of the First Vision is 1832, twelve years after the event. Is this a sign of fabrication?

Click to Read the Original CES Letter Claim

Late Appearance

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.

Despite the emphasis placed on it now, the first vision does not appear to have been widely taught to members of the Church until the 1840s, more than a decade after the Church was founded, and 20 years after it allegedly occurred.

James B. Allen, former BYU Professor and Assistant Church Historian explains:

There is little if any evidence, however, that by the early 1830’s Joseph Smith was telling the story in public. At least if he were telling it, no one seemed to consider it important enough to have recorded it at the time, and no one was criticizing him for it. Not even in his own history did Joseph Smith mention being criticized in this period for telling the story of the first vision...The fact that none of the available contemporary writings about Joseph Smith in the 1830’s, none of the publications of the Church in that decade, and no contemporary journal or correspondence yet discovered mentions the story of the first vision is convincing evidence that at best it received only limited circulation in those early days.

Multiple sources support Joseph was sharing his vision with selected audiences prior to 1832.

Joseph recounted that after telling a preacher, his account was rejected, which may have greatly diminished his willingness to tell his story thereafter.

Joseph’s account acknowledges that he did not even tell his mother when she asked him about it. It is consistent with the position that he didn’t often speak about it.

As early as 1827, antagonists recall Joseph claiming to have conversed with God. Click here

D&C 20:5 (part of the Articles and Covenants of the Church presented by Joseph Smith for approval at a Church conference held in Fayette, New York on 9 June 1830) declares that Joseph had previously been forgiven of his sins as described in the earliest published reference of the First Vision story.

In 1879 Emma Smith recalled that Joseph was not particularly given to writing or even dictation in 1829: "Joseph Smith could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter; let alone dictating a book like the Book of Mormon." (The Saints' Herald, vol. 26, pp. 289, 290 [1 Oct 1879].) That he did not write or declare formal statements about the First Vision is not surprising.

Newspapers would not have considered a visionary claim from a 14-year-old boy to have been newsworthy.

We have very few records dealing directly with Joseph Smith between 1820 and 1830. That the few in existence do not mention the First Vision is not surprising.