1820–2020
Four accounts in Joseph Smith's own voice, and they do not match
11 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.
Every firsthand account is his. He wrote the 1832 history partly in his own hand, dictated the 1835 journal retellings to a scribe, directed the 1838 history that became scripture, and published the 1842 Wentworth letter. He never publicly reconciled the differences among them, and never published the 1832 version.
Williams and Joseph Smith wrote the circa-summer-1832 history in alternating hands, sometimes switching mid-sentence. The Joseph Smith Papers editors date the document to between 20 July 1832, when Williams recorded that he began writing for Smith, and 22 September 1832. Without Williams's hand there would be no manuscript at all.
Parrish recorded both November 1835 journal entries — the long 9 November account given to a visitor calling himself Joshua the Jewish minister, and the one-line 14 November summary given to Erastus Holmes. That the same scribe wrote both, five days apart, is the hinge of the apologetic argument that they describe one event. Parrish later left the church and denounced Smith.
Matthews arrived in Kirtland in November 1835 under an assumed name. Joseph Smith described his beard, his sea-green frock coat and his habit of shutting his eyes while speaking, then told him the story of the vision. The resulting journal entry is the earliest surviving account to describe two personages.
Pratt's 1840 Edinburgh pamphlet, An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, was the first published account of the vision anywhere. Joseph Smith's own 1842 Wentworth letter appears to follow Pratt's wording closely enough that editors have suggested Smith used the pamphlet as a model.
Brodie's 1945 biography argued that the vision passed unnoticed in Palmyra and may have been 'an evolutionary fantasy beginning in a half-remembered dream stimulated by the early revival excitement,' or else invention. Her hypothesis set the terms of the twentieth-century argument; both defenders and critics have been answering it ever since.
Allen's 1966 Dialogue article established, from inside the faith, that the story of the vision was not in general circulation in the 1830s — not in the Book of Commandments, not in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, not in early missionary literature. It remains the single most-cited finding on the topic, quoted approvingly by apologists and critics alike.
Walters searched Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist records for the 1820 revival Joseph Smith described and could not find it, then found the Reverend George Lane's own account of a Palmyra revival that began in 1824. His 1967 study forced a generation of Latter-day Saint scholarship into the archives after him.
Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (2002) laid the accounts side by side in parallel columns and argued that a forgiveness epiphany was later rewritten into a divine commission. He was disciplined by the Church over the book; BYU Studies answered it in print.
Harper has written the fullest history of how the vision was remembered, and argues that its status as the all-or-nothing test of Mormon truth claims is itself a historical development — the product of canonization in 1880 and of choices made since, not of the 1820s or 1830s.
Hinckley repeatedly staked the entire truth claim of the Church on the vision's literal historicity, most famously in October 2002: if it did not occur, 'then this work is a fraud.' That formulation is quoted by defenders as testimony and by critics as the reason the documentary differences matter.
