First Vision Accounts: A Response to LDS Discussions' Critique of the Church News Article

Examining the scholarly record on Joseph Smith's First Vision and where the critical narrative fails under scrutiny.

In April 2020, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published a Church News article titled "Why Are There Multiple Accounts of the First Vision and What Can We Learn from Them?" featuring commentary by Elder Kyle S. McKay, a General Authority Seventy and assistant executive director of the Church History Department. A follow-up article in September 2020 featured Elder McKay discussing how the four First Vision accounts "reveal the doctrine and dealings of God." The LDS Discussions website published a detailed critique of this Church News coverage, charging the Church with dishonesty, deliberate inoculation, and flatly lying to its members.

This response examines each of LDS Discussions' core charges against the Church News articles and the broader First Vision narrative, drawing on the full scholarly record. The critical case turns out to be weaker than its rhetoric suggests. In claim after claim, LDS Discussions suppresses or dismisses evidence it finds inconvenient while demanding a standard of proof from Latter-day Saint sources it never applies to its own preferred sources. What follows is a point-by-point examination.

Claim 1: The Church Is “Flat-Out Lying” When It Says the First Vision Accounts Are Consistent

LDS Discussions writes: “The accounts do not tell a ‘consistent story’ because they literally evolve from Jesus and God being one being to Jesus and God being separate beings. There is just nothing consistent about that.” The site goes further, calling Elder McKay’s and BYU professor Steven Harper’s statements “flat out, 100% untrue” and accusing Church leaders of deliberate deception.

This is a significant overstatement of the evidence. The question of what the 1832 account actually describes is genuinely contested among serious historians, and calling it a settled matter of lying is simply not honest.

What the 1832 Account Actually Says

The 1832 account reads: “the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” LDS Discussions treats this as an unambiguous description of a single personage. Steven C. Harper, the lead editor of the Joseph Smith Papers and author of the Oxford University Press volume First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (2019), has argued otherwise in peer-reviewed scholarship. Harper points out that the two uses of “Lord” in the account are separated in time: first the Lord opens the heavens, then Joseph sees the Lord. This reading — two sequential appearances of divine beings — is entirely compatible with the 1835 and 1838 accounts.

Harper further argues, drawing on contemporary memory science, that the 1832 account is best understood as a conversion-narrative genre document — a personal testimony focused on sin, forgiveness, and the speaker’s relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. The 1838 account, written under different circumstances with different purposes, emphasizes the founding events of the Restoration. Both documents describe the same event from different rhetorical vantages. This is not an apologetic invention. It is a standard historical-critical method applied to a text. The interpretation may be disputed, but it cannot responsibly be called a lie.

Consistency Across All Four Accounts

Every one of the four primary accounts shares the following core elements: Joseph Smith was distressed by religious confusion and personal sin; he prayed in a private setting; he received a divine manifestation; he was told to join no existing church; he received assurance of forgiveness. FAIR Latter-day Saints scholars, Stephen Prothero, and Milton V. Backman have all noted this structural consistency. These are not trivial overlaps. They constitute the doctrinal substance of the event. The differences in peripheral detail — the number of angels, the precise description of the pillar of light, the foregrounding of one purpose over another — fall within the range scholars routinely describe as normal variation in eyewitness retelling.

The claim that calling these accounts “consistent” is a lie applies a standard no historical document can meet. Every set of multiple eyewitness or autobiographical accounts of a single event contains discrepancies in peripheral details. If peripheral discrepancy equals fabrication, the Gospels, every court transcript, and every autobiography must be dismissed as lies. LDS Discussions does not apply this standard to other historical documents it treats as credible.

Claim 2: The One-Personage vs. Two-Personage Discrepancy Proves Fabrication

LDS Discussions frames the shift from one to two personages as the single decisive blow against the First Vision’s historicity: “You simply would not forget that.” This is an emotional argument, not a scholarly one, and it ignores several complicating factors.

The Ambiguity Is Real and Acknowledged

The Gospel Topics essay on First Vision Accounts, which LDS Discussions quotes selectively, explicitly acknowledges that the 1832 account “can be read to refer to one or two personages.” This is not spin. It is a textually accurate observation. The word “Lord” in early 19th-century Christian discourse was commonly used interchangeably for both the Father and the Son. Joseph’s 1832 account does not say “I saw one being.” It says “I saw the Lord.” Whether that constitutes one or two personages depends on how one reads “Lord” — a linguistic question, not a self-evident answer.

Memory Science Does Not Support the “You Would Not Forget” Argument

Steven Harper’s 2019 Oxford volume draws on decades of cognitive and memory research to argue that autobiographical memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive. Contrary to popular intuition, emotionally intense experiences do not produce more accurate or more consistent recall — they often produce the opposite. Memory researchers including Elizabeth Loftus, Daniel Schacter, and others have documented that even central features of witnessed events can be misremembered, reordered, or restructured over time. Elder McKay’s analogy of recording his own conversion experience four times over forty years — with documented factual errors in intermediate versions — is not a strawman. It is an empirical demonstration of exactly what memory researchers predict. LDS Discussions dismisses it as “confirmation bias” without engaging the underlying memory science.

The New Testament Parallel Is Not a “Nonstarter”

LDS Discussions argues that comparing Joseph’s accounts to Paul’s Damascus Road vision is invalid because the New Testament was written by anonymous authors decades after the fact, whereas Joseph wrote his own accounts. But this actually strengthens rather than undermines the parallel. If documents about Paul — written 30–80 years after the event, by people who were not present — contain variations (Acts 9 has Paul’s companions hearing a voice but seeing no one; Acts 22 has them seeing the light but not hearing the voice), why would we expect a single witness writing about his own experience to achieve perfect verbal consistency across four documents spanning a decade? The standards LDS Discussions imposes on Joseph Smith are stricter than those it acknowledges for any other ancient or modern source.

Gordon B. Hinckley expressed this point plainly in 1984: “I am not worried that the Prophet Joseph Smith gave a number of versions of the first vision anymore than I am worried that there are four different writers of the gospels in the New Testament, each with his own perceptions, each telling the events to meet his own purpose.” This is not deflection. It is the standard historians apply to all ancient and early modern religious documents.

Claim 3: Joseph Smith’s Evolving Theology Proves the Accounts Were Retrofitted

LDS Discussions argues that the shift in Joseph Smith’s theology from trinitarian/modalist (1830–1834) to binitarian (1835) to a clear distinction of Father and Son (1838) proves that the First Vision accounts were revised to match an evolving theology — rather than reflecting a genuine original experience. This is the most substantive historical argument LDS Discussions makes, and it deserves a careful response.

The Trinitarian Evidence Is Overstated

LDS Discussions cites the 1832 Evening and Morning Star’s reference to “the doctrine of the Trinity,” Joseph’s JST revision of Luke 10:22 (strengthening a trinitarian reading), the 1830 Book of Mormon’s language (“Eternal God,” “I am the Father and the Son”), and the removal of the Lectures on Faith from the D&C in 1921. These are legitimate historical data points. But they do not prove what LDS Discussions claims they prove.

Richard Bushman’s magisterial biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005) and other historians have noted that early Latter-day Saint theological vocabulary was drawn from the surrounding evangelical Protestant culture. Terms like “trinity” appeared in early church publications partly because they were the available cultural vocabulary, not because Joseph Smith had a fully systematized trinitarian doctrine. Joseph’s 1832 First Vision account itself states that he saw “the Lord” — not “the triune God.” The 1832 account is consistent with a binitarian or proto–Latter-day Saint view if read carefully, and it is not inconsistent with Joseph already believing in two distinct personages but lacking the language to express it precisely.

The Book of Mormon Revisions Do Not Require a Trinitarian Reading

LDS Discussions documents the 1830–1837 changes to 1 Nephi (adding “Son of” in several places) as evidence of retrofitting. But these textual changes can be explained differently. The original 1830 phrasing was ambiguous or susceptible to misreading. The 1837 revisions clarified the text’s meaning in light of growing doctrinal precision — a process that is standard in religious textual traditions. The New Testament itself contains manuscripts with later theological glosses that clarified earlier ambiguities. This is what all religious traditions do as their theological vocabulary matures. The fact that early Latter-day Saint language sometimes echoed broader Protestant norms does not establish that Joseph Smith privately held trinitarian beliefs he later abandoned — it establishes that early church publications used the vocabulary available to them.

The Lectures on Faith Are Not Evidence of Joseph’s Personal Theology

LDS Discussions treats the Lectures on Faith (1835) as definitive evidence of Joseph’s theology at that moment. But the Lectures were a set of catechetical documents prepared for the School of the Prophets, likely written primarily by Sidney Rigdon with Joseph’s oversight. Their binitarian description of the Godhead (Father as personage of spirit, Son as personage of tabernacle) actually matches the 1835 First Vision account — where two personages appear — and does not match a purported “trinitarian” 1832 account. If anything, the Lectures on Faith support the claim that by 1835 Joseph already distinguished Father from Son, consistent with having seen both in 1820.

The argument that theological evolution proves fabrication assumes that authentic revelatory experience would produce a fully formed, perfectly consistent theology from the first moment. This assumption is not historically supportable. Even the New Testament canon reflects centuries of theological development around a core of experiences its authors believed to be real.

Claim 4: No Revival Occurred in Palmyra in 1820, So the First Vision Timeline Is Impossible

LDS Discussions relies heavily on Wesley P. Walters’ 1967 argument that no religious revival occurred in Palmyra in 1820, concluding that the First Vision timeline must be moved to 1824 — after Moroni’s 1823 visitation — making the entire narrative structurally impossible. This is one of the oldest critiques of the First Vision and one of the most thoroughly answered in the scholarly literature.

Milton Backman’s Documentary Response

BYU professor Milton V. Backman Jr. systematically challenged Walters’ argument using primary sources in his 1980 book Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Backman produced documentary evidence of Methodist camp-meeting activity in the Palmyra area as early as June 1818, with Methodist membership in the broader Genesee District increasing by 1,187 members in 1819 alone. A Palmyra newspaper documented a camp meeting in June 1820. Benajah Williams’ diaries record Methodist itinerant activity throughout the Ontario Circuit during 1819–1820, with documented visits from Reverend George Lane, the Methodist preacher whose sermons tradition suggests Joseph may have heard.

The Geographic Scope of Joseph’s Description

Joseph Smith’s 1838 account describes “an unusual excitement on the subject of religion” in “the place where we lived” and “the whole district of country.” Walters searched for a concentrated, localized, single-denomination revival in Palmyra village itself and found none. Backman and subsequent scholars — including Richard L. Anderson in his BYU Religious Studies Center essay “Joseph Smith’s Accuracy on the First Vision Setting: The Pivotal 1818 Palmyra Camp Meeting” — have argued that Joseph’s language describes a broader, multi-year wave of religious activity rather than a single event. This is also what Orsamus Turner’s contemporary memoir records: Joseph “caught a spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road.” D. Michael Quinn’s 2006 Dialogue article “Joseph Smith’s Experience of a Methodist Camp-Meeting in 1820” further documents specific evidence of the Vienna/Palmyra area meeting in 1820.

The Lucy Mack Smith Presbyterian Membership

LDS Discussions cites Lucy Mack Smith’s Presbyterian membership as evidence the revival occurred in 1823–24, after Alvin Smith’s death in November 1823. But Lucy’s joining the Presbyterians after the First Vision is entirely consistent with the 1820 date. The First Vision itself does not prevent family members from later affiliating with denominations. In fact, the 1838 account explicitly states that Joseph’s family members “were proselyted to the Presbyterian faith” and describes this as motivation for Joseph’s own seeking. A mother joining the Presbyterians after 1823 does not move the revival; it merely shows the family’s continued engagement with the religious ferment Joseph describes as ongoing throughout the early 1820s.

Walters’ argument is not worthless, but treating it as definitive — as LDS Discussions does — requires ignoring a substantial body of contrary evidence produced by credentialed historians in peer-reviewed venues. LDS Discussions does not engage Backman, Quinn, or Anderson’s documentary responses in any depth; it simply restates Walters as though the scholarly conversation ended in 1967.

Claim 5: The First Vision Was Never Mentioned Until the 1840s and Was Deliberately Hidden

LDS Discussions relies extensively on James B. Allen’s famous 1966 Dialogue article to argue that no contemporary evidence exists of Joseph teaching the First Vision before the late 1830s, and that the 1832 account was deliberately suppressed when discovered in the 20th century. Both claims deserve careful examination.

Allen’s Argument Is More Nuanced Than LDS Discussions Represents

LDS Discussions quotes Allen’s conclusion that the First Vision “received only limited circulation in those early days.” But Allen — a believing Latter-day Saint scholar — also argued in his 1970 follow-up article in the Improvement Era that this limited early circulation is explicable without impugning the event’s historicity. Eight contemporary accounts of the First Vision by people who heard Joseph tell the story during his lifetime exist in the historical record. Allen himself identified these accounts and published them. The 1832 account exists in Joseph’s own handwriting. Warren Parrish recorded the 1835 telling in his journal. These are not suppressed documents; they are documents that were archived and later discovered, as happens routinely with historical materials.

The Claim of Deliberate Suppression of the 1832 Account

LDS Discussions states the Church “cut the pages out of the book” and describes this as evidence that the Church “knows what a problem it causes.” FAIR Latter-day Saints’ analysis of this question is more cautious. The three leaves containing the 1832 account were excised from the letterbook at some point in the mid-20th century. The pages were kept in the office safe of Joseph Fielding Smith, then Church Historian. They were transferred back to the regular Church Historian’s collection and authorized for a BYU graduate student (Paul Cheesman) to study in 1965. Dean C. Jessee published a scholarly transcript in BYU Studies in 1969. The 1832 account has been publicly available and discussed in LDS scholarly publications since 1969 — and prominently featured in the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

Was the restriction of access problematic? Yes — FAIR acknowledges this forthrightly. Is it evidence of a knowing institutional conspiracy to deceive members about the First Vision’s content? No — that conclusion requires certainty about the motives of individuals who left no written record of their reasoning. The most that can honestly be said is that access was restricted for a period, then restored, and the document has been publicly available and widely discussed for over fifty years. The Church News article and the Gospel Topics essay both reference the 1832 account openly. LDS Discussions frames decades of open scholarly discussion as if it were ongoing institutional suppression. That is not an accurate characterization.

Why Limited Early Circulation Is Not Historically Damning

LDS Discussions asks: if the First Vision was real, why didn’t Joseph mention it publicly for twenty years? Elder McKay’s answer — that Joseph’s practice was not to document personal history until commanded to do so — is supplemented by a deeper historical consideration. The First Vision’s theological significance grew over time as Latter-day Saint doctrine developed. In the early 1830s the event was primarily a personal testimony of divine call and forgiveness. As the theology of the Godhead developed and as Joseph’s authority was increasingly challenged by dissenters, the First Vision’s institutional importance increased. This pattern of gradual public emphasis on a foundational personal experience is not unique to Mormonism.

Paul’s conversion account in Acts appears in three different versions, with increasing theological elaboration, in documents written decades after the event. Martin Luther’s “tower experience” of theological breakthrough was not publicly narrated in detail until decades after it occurred. Gradual public articulation of a foundational personal experience is a normal feature of religious biography, not evidence of fabrication.

Furthermore, LDS Discussions’ assertion that “no one close to him ever spoke of it” is directly contradicted by the eight contemporary accounts Allen himself documented. People who heard Joseph describe the vision during his lifetime recorded those descriptions. The claim of total silence is factually false.

Claim 6: Contemporary Visionary Accounts Undermine the First Vision’s Uniqueness

LDS Discussions cites Norris Stearns (1815), Asa Wild (1823), and Solomon Chamberlin (1816/1829) as evidence that Joseph’s First Vision was merely one of many similar contemporary visions and may have been culturally derived rather than historically real.

Cultural Parallel Does Not Equal Fabrication

Richard Bushman’s research, which LDS Discussions itself cites approvingly, documents thirty-two pamphlets of visionary experiences published in America between 1783 and 1815. Bushman uses this data not to undermine Joseph Smith but to contextualize him: visionary experience was a recognized and widely reported genre in early 19th-century American evangelical culture. The existence of cultural parallels to a religious experience does not disprove the experience. Every genuine religious experience occurs within a cultural context that provides its language and form. The vision of Paul on the Damascus road parallels other Greco-Roman divine appearance narratives. Medieval mystics’ accounts of divine union parallel each other extensively. Comparative context is suggestive; it is not debunking evidence.

The Norris Stearns Account Does Not Prove Borrowing

Stearns’ 1815 account describes two divine figures — one in the form of a man and one as fire — structurally similar to Joseph’s later accounts. But structural similarity in religious vision narratives drawn from the same biblical tradition (Daniel, Isaiah, Revelation) is expected, not suspicious. Both accounts draw on the same textual sources. Whether Joseph ever read or heard of Stearns’ pamphlet is entirely unanswered by LDS Discussions. The argument is: visions with similar elements existed; therefore Joseph borrowed from them. This is not a logical inference from the evidence; it is an assumption presented as conclusion.

Solomon Chamberlin’s Visit

LDS Discussions notes that Chamberlin visited the Smith family in 1829 — three years before Joseph first wrote down his own First Vision account. But the First Vision is claimed to have occurred in 1820. If the event happened in 1820, the 1829 visit cannot be its source. The argument implicitly requires that Joseph invented the 1820 vision account sometime after 1829 — but LDS Discussions has not demonstrated this, only asserted it. It acknowledges “that is not to say that Joseph Smith plagiarized Chamberlin’s experience,” then proceeds to imply precisely that without evidence.

The existence of a rich tradition of visionary experience in early American Christianity is a historical fact. It is also a fact fully compatible with Joseph Smith having had a genuine experience within that tradition. LDS Discussions never explains why a genuine divine vision could not occur in a culture already familiar with claims of divine vision. The cultural context argument is suggestive at most; as evidence of fabrication it fails.

Claim 7: The Church News Articles Are Deliberately Deceptive “Inoculation”

LDS Discussions repeatedly characterizes the Church News articles as “inoculation” — a strategy to keep members from studying church history honestly by pre-framing the evidence in reassuring ways. This charge assumes that the Church News authors know the critical case is decisive and are deliberately concealing that knowledge. No evidence supports this assumption.

What the Church News articles actually do is present the evidence through a believing interpretive framework, drawing on real scholarship by real historians — Steven Harper (Oxford University Press), Richard Bushman (Knopf), Milton Backman, and James Allen — who have studied these questions in peer-reviewed contexts. One can disagree with that interpretive framework. But disagreement is not the same as deliberate deception. The Gospel Topics essays cite primary sources, acknowledge genuine difficulties, and reference the full range of documentary evidence. These are not the characteristics of deliberate institutional dishonesty; they are the characteristics of committed believers interpreting contested evidence in ways consistent with their faith — which is exactly what LDS Discussions does, in the opposite direction.

LDS Discussions is itself engaged in framing: presenting the most critical possible reading of every piece of evidence, dismissing alternative scholarly interpretations as lies, and inviting readers to conclude that the critical case is not just stronger but definitively proven. That is not neutral historical scholarship. Both the Church and its critics interpret the same contested evidence through different frameworks. Honest engagement requires acknowledging this.

James E. Talmage — an LDS apostle LDS Discussions itself approvingly quotes — wrote: “The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it.” The same standard applies to those who can only listen to arguments confirming their departure from faith.

Summary: What the Scholarly Record Actually Shows

After examining each of LDS Discussions’ core charges against the Church News articles and the First Vision narrative, a clear picture emerges:

Summary of Findings

• The 1832 one-personage claim — Genuinely ambiguous. Harper and others have offered credible two-personage readings of the text. Calling it settled proof of fabrication misrepresents the scholarly conversation.
• Theological evolution as proof of retrofitting — The evidence shows Joseph’s theological vocabulary developed over time; it does not prove he invented the First Vision to match later theology.
• The Palmyra revival — Documented evidence of camp-meeting activity in the broader Palmyra region in 1818–1820 has been in peer-reviewed scholarship since 1980. Walters’ argument is not the final word.
• Lack of early mention — Eight contemporary accounts exist. Limited early public circulation is a normal feature of religious biography and does not constitute evidence of fabrication.
• Suppression of the 1832 account — The account has been in public scholarly literature since 1969, prominently featured in the Joseph Smith Papers, and openly discussed in the Gospel Topics essays. Calling this ongoing suppression is inaccurate.
• Contemporary visions as evidence of borrowing — Cultural parallels exist; proof of borrowing does not.

None of this means the First Vision is without historical difficulty. Serious scholars — both believing and non-believing — have grappled with these questions for decades. What it means is that LDS Discussions’ confident conclusion that the Church is “flat-out lying” and that the critical case is definitively proven is not supported by the scholarly record. The record shows contested evidence, multiple interpretive frameworks, genuine historical ambiguity, and a Latter-day Saint scholarly community that has engaged these questions openly and rigorously for over fifty years.

The Church News articles accurately represent the scholarly consensus among believing historians. They draw on real scholarship — Harper’s Oxford volume, Bushman’s biography, Backman’s documentary research, Allen’s archival work — and present genuine evidence for a genuine position. Elder McKay’s personal analogy reflects real memory science. The Gospel Topics essays openly discuss all four accounts, including the 1832. The Joseph Smith Papers Project publishes all the documentary evidence in full. This is not the behavior of an institution engaged in deliberate deception.

Those who wish to evaluate the First Vision honestly owe it to themselves to engage the full scholarly record — not only Walters, Brodie, and Vogel, but also Backman, Allen, Bushman, Harper, Quinn, and the Joseph Smith Papers. The evidence is genuinely complex. Anyone who tells you it is simple — in either direction — is not giving you the full picture.

Key Scholarly Sources

Primary Scholarly Works

• Steven C. Harper — First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (Oxford University Press, 2019). The definitive peer-reviewed scholarly treatment of the First Vision accounts, applying contemporary memory science.
• Richard L. Bushman — Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005). The most comprehensive modern biography of Joseph Smith, engaging all major historical questions.
• Milton V. Backman Jr. — Joseph Smith’s First Vision (Bookcraft, 1980). Documentary response to the Walters revival argument, with primary source evidence of 1818–1820 Methodist activity in the Palmyra region.
• James B. Allen — “Eight Contemporary Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” Improvement Era (April 1970). Documents contemporary witnesses who heard Joseph describe the vision during his lifetime.
• Dean C. Jessee — First scholarly publication of the 1832 account transcript, BYU Studies (1969). The document has been continuously available in published scholarship for over fifty years.
• D. Michael Quinn — “Joseph Smith’s Experience of a Methodist Camp-Meeting in 1820,” Dialogue (2006). Primary-source evidence of documented revival activity in the Palmyra area in 1820.
• John W. Welch, ed. — Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844 (BYU Studies/Deseret Book, 2nd ed. 2017). Comprehensive compilation and analysis of all First Vision accounts with full scholarly apparatus.
• Joseph Smith Papers Project — josephsmithpapers.org. Publishes all primary source documents, including the 1832 account, with full scholarly annotation.