1820–2020
Four accounts in Joseph Smith's own voice, and they do not match
26 events, 7 of them flagged as hinges. Filter below, or open the master timeline across every topic.
Joseph Smith's 1832 history says that at about age ten his father moved the family from Vermont to Palmyra, Ontario County, New York, and that being 'in indigent circumstances' they were 'obliged to labour hard for the support of a large Family.' The move places the family in the burned-over district during the years the vision is later said to have occurred.
Latter-day Saint researchers have pointed to a documented Methodist camp meeting near Palmyra in 1818, and to Genesee Conference activity in 1819, as the 'unusual excitement on the subject of religion' Joseph Smith later described. Richard Lloyd Anderson argued that the 1818 camp meeting satisfies the requirements of the 1838 narrative without any conflation of later events.
The 1838–39 history places the event 'on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty,' with Joseph in his fifteenth year. No contemporaneous record of any kind survives from 1820. Every account of the event was written twelve or more years later.
Joseph Smith's accounts of a nighttime angelic visitation revealing the gold plates are earlier, more consistently told, and far more widely circulated in the 1830s than any account of the 1820 vision. The 1832 history dates this visitation to when he was seventeen and says the angel told him 'the Lord had forgiven me my sins.'
Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist records all show a large multi-denominational awakening in Palmyra beginning in the fall of 1824. The Reverend George Lane published his own account of it in the March 1825 Methodist Magazine. Palmer counts 103 people joining the Palmyra Presbyterian church in 1824–25 against fourteen in 1820–21; Baptist records show membership rising from 132 to 219 in the same conference year.
The foundational revelation printed as chapter 24 of the 1833 Book of Commandments and as section 2 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants reads: 'After it was truly manifested unto this first elder that he had received a remission of his sins he was entangled again in the vanities of the world: but after repenting and humbling himself, sincerely, through faith in God ministered unto him by an holy angel.' There is no vision of Deity in it.
In a record book, in alternating hands with Frederick G. Williams, Smith wrote a six-page history that opens with a prospectus of four foundational events and then narrates his religious anxiety from age twelve to fifteen. It is the only narrative of these events that includes his own handwriting. It was never published, never quoted, and never mentioned in any Church publication for 133 years.
In letters printed in the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate — written with Joseph Smith's approval and constituting the first published history of the church's origins — Oliver Cowdery placed the religious excitement in 1823, when Smith was seventeen, and connected it with the Reverend George Lane. Cowdery's letters describe the angel and the plates but no earlier theophany.
A visitor calling himself 'Joshua the Jewish minister' came to Smith's house in Kirtland. Warren Parrish recorded Smith's account: a fruitless first attempt to pray, a tongue that would not move, footsteps behind him, then a pillar of fire, one personage, and 'another personage soon appeard like unto the first.' The second says 'thy sins are forgiven thee' and testifies that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. An interlineation adds 'and I saw many angels in this vision.'
Five days later, and to the same scribe, Smith summarized the same span of his life for a Methodist convert named Erastus Holmes: an account of his experience 'say from 6, years old up to the time I received the first visitation of Angels which was when I was about 14, years old.' Holmes stayed several days, dined with Smith, viewed the Egyptian mummies, and asked for a revelation about his baptism.
The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, whose preface declared it contained 'the leading items of religion which we have professed to believe,' included the Lectures on Faith. As Allen observed, the Lectures teach that the Godhead consists of two personages without any reference to Joseph Smith having seen them, and the vision appears nowhere in the volume.
Smith began the multivolume manuscript history in 1838 amid mass excommunications in Kirtland and Missouri. It opens with the revival, the reading of James 1:5, the attack by an unseen power, the pillar of light, two personages, and the instruction to join none of the churches because 'all their Creeds were an abomination.' Volume A-1 and the surviving Draft 2 both preserve the text.
Pratt's pamphlet An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions was the first appearance of the story in print anywhere — twenty years after the event and two years after Smith began writing the manuscript history. Editors have noted similarities between Pratt's text and Smith's own 1842 Wentworth letter close enough to suggest Smith used the pamphlet as a model.
Written at the request of Chicago Democrat editor John Wentworth for a friend writing a history of New Hampshire, Smith's sketch says he began to reflect on salvation 'when about fourteen years of age,' describes 'two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness,' and reports being commanded to 'go not after them,' with a promise that the fulness of the gospel would later be made known.
The Times and Seasons carried the manuscript history in installments; the 1 April 1842 issue printed the pillar of light, the two personages, 'This is my beloved Son, hear him,' and the answer that he must join none of them. Twenty-two years after the date it assigns to the event, and nearly twelve years after the church was organized, the full story was finally in print in the church's own paper.
Two 1843 records preserve Smith telling the story to others. Richards noted a sermon in which Smith repeated the Lord's message that no church was His. A non-Mormon editor quoted Smith saying he prayed 'O Lord, what church shall I join?' and saw first a light, then 'a glorious personage in the light, and then another personage,' the first saying 'Behold my Beloved Son, hear Him.'
Neibaur, a Jewish convert who was teaching Smith German and Hebrew, wrote in his journal that Smith told him that day of his early religious quest and of going into the woods to pray. It is the last known contemporary record of Smith telling the story; he was killed five weeks later.
George Q. Cannon held up the volume before general conference and proposed that it be accepted as scripture, which the conference did. Only after this did references to the vision in general conference begin to multiply. Harper dates the vision's rise to doctrinal centrality from this moment, not from Joseph Smith's lifetime.
No Man Knows My History argued that nothing happened in Palmyra in 1820 that anyone noticed, that Smith's own family confused the vision with the visit of the angel, and that the story may have been 'the elaboration of some half-remembered dream stimulated by the early revival excitement' or 'sheer invention.' Brodie was excommunicated the following year.
A graduate student found the 1832 history in a journal ledger in the Church Historian's Office and printed a transcript in his master's thesis. Before this, the document had been seen by a handful of people; Levi Edgar Young told LaMar Petersen in 1953 that he had been permitted to read a 'strange' account of the First Vision but instructed not to copy it or say what it contained.
Allen, later assistant church historian, traced the vision's absence from 1830s publications and concluded that 'an understanding of the story of Joseph Smith's vision dawned only gradually upon the membership of the Church during his lifetime, and that new and important uses were made of the story after his death.' The article is quoted approvingly by apologists and critics to this day.
Working through Methodist Magazine year by year, Walters found abundant revival reports but nothing in Palmyra for 1819, 1820 or 1821 — then found the Reverend George Lane's account of a Palmyra revival in the March 1825 issue. His study appeared in 1967 and was argued out in a 1969 Dialogue roundtable with Latter-day Saint historians replying.
In general conference, President Gordon B. Hinckley said: 'Our whole strength rests on the validity of that [First] vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud. If it did, then it is the most important and wonderful work under the heavens.' He had made the same argument in 1998 and, more starkly, in 1961.
The Gospel Topics essay names four firsthand accounts and five contemporary secondhand ones, links each, describes what each emphasizes, and states that they 'tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail.' Within weeks the CES Letter was circulating a bulleted list of the same differences read the opposite way.
The Church's official narrative history opens chapter 2 with Joseph rising early on a spring morning in 1820 and praying 'O Lord, what church shall I join?' It weaves the forgiveness of the 1832 account together with the church question and two personages of the 1838 account into one continuous story, with the sources given in the chapter notes.
Around the two-hundredth anniversary, BYU Studies Quarterly published both Harper's account of how the vision became 'all or nothing' and Ann Taves's essay conceding how much better attested the 1824 revival is than the 1820 one. Both appeared in the Church university's own journal.
