LDS Discussions — A Faithful Response

The First Vision: A Scholarly Response to LDS Discussions

Examining the historical record, the multiple accounts, and the logical structure of a critique that looks formidable on the surface but dissolves under careful scrutiny.

Introduction

In November 2019, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a short animated video on the First Vision as part of its “Now You Know” series. LDS Discussions responded with a critique blog post, and later expanded those arguments in a detailed overview page and a response to a 2020 Church News article on the multiple First Vision accounts. The cumulative LDS Discussions case against the First Vision rests on four main pillars: (1) the Church’s video is evasive and cartoonishly simplistic; (2) there was no 1820 revival in Palmyra; (3) the First Vision was never mentioned publicly for over a decade, proving Joseph Smith invented it later; and (4) the accounts are irreconcilably contradictory—most critically, Joseph Smith changed from seeing one divine personage in 1832 to two in 1838, which LDS Discussions ties to his broader theological evolution away from Trinitarianism.

Each of these arguments has genuine historical weight. Each also has a specific, documentable answer. This page examines the claims systematically, marshaling primary sources, peer-reviewed scholarship, and careful logical analysis to demonstrate that the LDS Discussions critique, while rhetorically effective, ultimately fails to establish what it claims.

Claim 1: The “Now You Know” Video Is Evasive and Misleading

LDS Discussions criticizes the Church’s animated video for using “fluffy language and imagery” and for failing to address difficult historical issues. This critique applies a standard no three-minute video could meet. The series is explicitly introductory—its stated purpose is to answer the question “What is the First Vision and why does it matter to Latter-day Saints?” for a general audience, not to serve as a comprehensive academic treatment. Criticizing it for omitting the 1832 account’s Trinitarian language is like criticizing a short documentary introduction to the American Civil War for not discussing historiographical debates among academic historians.

Importantly, the Church has not hidden these complexities. The Gospel Topics Essay on First Vision Accounts, freely available on ChurchofJesusChrist.org, acknowledges all four accounts, discusses their differences openly, and addresses the most common critical objections. The Joseph Smith Papers project has published the 1832 account in full with scholarly apparatus. The “Now You Know” video exists on a spectrum of Church-produced materials; dismissing the entire picture because a three-minute animated video does not include graduate-level historiography is not fair criticism—it is a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Claim 2: There Was No Revival Near Palmyra in 1820

LDS Discussions devotes substantial space to arguing that religious excitement in the Palmyra area is dateable to 1824, not 1820, and that no evidence of an 1820 revival exists in denominational records, newspapers, or missionary reports. This is one of the oldest critical claims against the First Vision, originating with Wesley Walters in 1967, and it is one of the most thoroughly rebutted.

Historian Milton Backman documented that “church records, newspapers, religious journals, and other contemporary sources clearly reveal that great awakenings occurred in more than fifty western New York towns or villages during the revival of 1819–1820” (Joseph Smith’s First Vision, 2nd ed., 1980). The Genesee Conference of the Methodist Church, which encompassed the Palmyra area, grew by 24% in 1819 alone. Richard Lloyd Anderson identified a Methodist camp meeting held near Palmyra in June 1818, documented in Aurora Seager’s journal, where approximately forty joined the church and Bishop Robert Roberts presided. Orsamus Turner, a contemporary Palmyra printer’s apprentice, recalled that young Joseph Smith had “caught a spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road”—a recollection entirely consistent with the pattern of religious activity Joseph described.

Don Bradley’s detailed contextual analysis (“The Original Context of the First Vision Narrative: 1820s or 1830s,” FAIR Conference, 2013) demonstrated that the narrative fits what we independently know of the Smith family’s economic situation after the Panic of 1819, their documented pattern of praying in groves, and family members’ documented visionary religiosity—details that would be essentially impossible to fabricate accurately a decade or more later. The family’s circumstances, in Bradley’s phrase, fit “the reported 1820s context hand in glove.”

LDS Discussions’ key citation is Wesley Walters’ 1969 Dialogue article, but Walters committed what historian Steve Harper has identified as two logical fallacies: negative proof (the absence of specific records does not prove no revival occurred) and irrelevant proof (Joseph described religious excitement across a broad “district,” not only within the township of Palmyra). The argument from silence about denominational records is especially weak given that the Burned-Over District of western New York was famously saturated with intermittent revivals; absence of a specific record of a specific meeting is not absence of the meeting itself.

The argument also creates a problem for LDS Discussions internally: Joseph Smith’s 1832 account, which LDS Discussions treats as more historically reliable than the 1838 account, describes the religious excitement as the backdrop to his vision just as the 1838 version does. If the revival setting is fabricated, both accounts are equally problematic—but LDS Discussions uses the 1832 account as a weapon against the 1838 one, which requires treating the 1832 account as largely reliable.

Claim 3: The First Vision Was Not Mentioned for Over a Decade—Proving It Was Invented

This is perhaps the most rhetorically powerful of LDS Discussions’ arguments: if Joseph Smith truly witnessed God and Jesus Christ personally in 1820, how could this foundational event have gone unmentioned for over a decade? LDS Discussions cites former Assistant Church Historian James B. Allen’s 1966 Dialogue statement that “the fact that none of the available contemporary writings about Joseph Smith in the 1830s… mentions the story of the first vision is convincing evidence that at best it received only limited circulation in those early days.”

Several critical distinctions must be made here. First, Allen’s statement concedes the event itself—he says it “received only limited circulation,” not that it was invented. He is describing a sociological fact about how information moved in the early Church, not making a claim about the vision’s historicity. Second, and decisively, the 1832 account refutes the claim of a twelve-year silence: Joseph wrote an account of the vision in that year, in his own handwriting, approximately twelve years before the 1842 Wentworth Letter made it public. The 1832 account was not for public circulation—it was written as a private autobiography, which explains why no one was discussing it publicly.

Third, the cultural context of early nineteenth-century American religious life is essential. As historian Richard Bushman documented, there were over thirty published pamphlets describing visionary experiences in the United States between 1783 and 1815—claims of divine visions, angelic visitations, and direct revelations were genuinely common. A fourteen-year-old’s private religious experience, in an era saturated with such claims, would not automatically become a public teaching point. The early Church’s founding narrative centered on the Book of Mormon and the restoration of priesthood authority. The First Vision became a central public teaching as the Church matured and needed to articulate its theological foundations clearly—particularly regarding the distinct personhood of the Father and the Son.

Fourth, Dean Jessee’s scholarship on the Joseph Smith Papers demonstrates that Joseph “worked hard to document his experience” across multiple contexts from 1832 onward. The 1835 account told to Robert Matthews was a personal sharing in a private meeting, not a public sermon. Joseph’s 1838 account was written specifically to set the historical record straight—as Joseph himself wrote, he wanted to “disabuse the publick mind” about the origins of the Church. This is the behavior of someone who did have the experience and wanted the record to reflect it accurately, not the behavior of someone fabricating a story.

Finally, the argument from silence proves too much. The Book of Commandments (1833) does not mention the First Vision—but it also does not mention the death of Joseph’s brother Alvin, the loss of the 116 manuscript pages, or Joseph’s marriage. The absence of an event from a specific document type does not establish that the event did not occur.

Claim 4: The Accounts Are Irreconcilably Contradictory

LDS Discussions identifies two major contradictions between the 1832 and 1838 accounts: (a) in 1832 Joseph already knew the churches were wrong, whereas in 1838 he went to pray to find out which was true; and (b) in 1832 only one personage (“the Lord”) appears, while in 1838 two personages appear as the Father and the Son. These are real textual differences. The question is whether they constitute irreconcilable contradiction or natural variation in emphasis across multiple accounts written for different purposes.

The Purpose of Prayer

In the 1832 account, Joseph says he “pondered many things in my heart concerning the situation of the world of mankind the contentions and divisions the wickedness and abominations and the darkness which pervaded the minds of mankind.” He sought “mercy” and “forgiveness of my sins.” The 1838 account emphasizes his quest to know “which of all the sects was right.” These are not contradictory motivations—they are complementary. A young man deeply troubled by sin and uncertain about which church to join could simultaneously carry both concerns into prayer. The 1832 account does not say he was unconcerned about which church to join; it emphasizes his spiritual anguish. The 1838 account does not say he was unconcerned about forgiveness; it emphasizes his doctrinal question. Different accounts naturally foreground different aspects of a complex, multi-layered experience.

One Personage or Two?

LDS Discussions’ strongest textual argument is that the 1832 account mentions “the Lord” as a single personage, which it ties to Joseph’s alleged Trinitarian theology before 1835, whereas the 1838 account clearly distinguishes God the Father from Jesus Christ. The Church’s official Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges this openly: “Three of the four accounts clearly state that two personages appeared to Joseph Smith in the First Vision. The outlier is Joseph Smith’s 1832 account, which can be read to refer to one or two personages.”

The most careful reading of the 1832 text supports the two-personage interpretation. The account states: “the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee.” The phrase “the Lord opened the heavens” describes an initiating divine act, after which “I saw the Lord.” In later accounts, Joseph consistently describes the Father as the one who introduced the Son—“This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”—while the Son then delivered the primary message. The 1832 account’s focus on the personage who forgave Joseph’s sins (Jesus Christ) is precisely what one would expect if the 1832 account is emphasizing Joseph’s personal spiritual need: the Father opened the vision, the Son delivered the message of forgiveness, and it is the Son whom the 1832 account identifies as the speaker. Scholars John W. Welch and James Allen conclude in Opening the Heavens that “there is wide and credible agreement in detail among them all.”

Furthermore, the 1835 account—which LDS Discussions acknowledges as a transitional account—describes “a personage appeared… Another personage soon appeared, like unto the first. He said unto me, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee.’ He testified unto me that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” Two personages appear here, one testifying about the other—a structure that matches the Father-Son pattern of the 1838 account. This 1835 account is not consistent with a purely Trinitarian single-being account; it describes sequential appearances of two distinct beings.

The Theological Evolution Argument

LDS Discussions’ most sophisticated structural argument is this: Joseph Smith’s early writings (Book of Mormon, JST, Evening and Morning Star, Lectures on Faith) reflect a Trinitarian or modalist theology, and only after 1835 do we see a clear distinction between the Father and the Son. Therefore, the 1838 First Vision account retroactively projects the later theology back onto 1820.

This argument is intellectually serious, but it rests on a foundational assumption that does not survive scrutiny: that early LDS theology was straightforwardly Trinitarian or modalist. The Book of Mormon is actually theologically complex. While passages like “Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God” can be read in a modalist direction, the Book of Mormon also contains passages that clearly differentiate between the Father and the Son—including Nephi’s vision of Mary as “the mother of God” in the 1830 edition (which refers to Mary’s son as God, consistent with the very high Christology of a theophanic encounter, not a claim that the Father and Son are identical). More telling still, the Lectures on Faith’s description of the Father as “a personage of spirit” and the Son as “a personage of tabernacle” is itself a non-Trinitarian formulation. Classical Trinitarianism does not describe the Father and Son as ontologically different kinds of being. The Lectures are a binitarian formulation that presupposes numerical distinction between Father and Son—the very distinction LDS Discussions claims was not articulated until 1838.

Additionally, LDS Discussions’ own evidence partially undermines its conclusion. The Evening and Morning Star quote teaching “the doctrine of the Trinity” is from a single 1832 publication using conventional Protestant vocabulary—it is not Joseph Smith’s personal statement about his own visionary experience. Newspaper editors and early contributors used familiar theological language because the deeper formulations were still being worked out. The presence of Trinitarian-adjacent language in early Church publications is consistent with both genuine theological development and a prophet who had a vision of two distinct divine persons and was still working out the full implications of what he had seen.

Genuine theological development is entirely consistent with an authentic visionary experience. The New Testament itself shows development: Paul’s letters, written before the Gospels, contain sophisticated Christological statements not expressed in the same vocabulary as later creeds. The Nicene formulation of the Trinity (AD 325) was not present in the earliest Christian documents. Scholars of early Christianity do not conclude from this developmental trajectory that the disciples fabricated their experiences; they conclude that people worked out the theological meaning of genuine events over time. The same hermeneutic applies here.

Claim 5: Contemporary Visionary Accounts Undermine Joseph’s Credibility

LDS Discussions cites the vision of Norris Stearns (1815), the October 1823 account of Asa Wild, and Solomon Chamberlin’s 1816 vision as evidence that Joseph Smith’s account drew on a pool of culturally available visionary narratives. Stearns saw “two spirits,” one “almost in bodily shape like a man” identified as God, the other as Jesus Christ. Wild heard God tell him “every denomination of professing Christians had become extremely corrupt.” Chamberlin was told by an angel that “the churches were corrupt.”

LDS Discussions acknowledges it is not claiming Joseph plagiarized these accounts—only that his account is not uniquely credible. But this argument proves far less than it appears to. The existence of similar claims in a culture does not reduce any particular claim’s credibility. Many people throughout history have reported visionary experiences of divine figures and been told existing churches were corrupt; this was a common template in the Burned-Over District’s religious culture. But the fact that other people made similar claims neither establishes that their claims were false nor that Joseph’s claim was derived from theirs rather than reflecting a genuine experience that fit recognizable cultural categories of religious expression.

To make this argument do the work LDS Discussions wants, one would need to establish that Joseph actually read or heard these specific accounts and incorporated their specific details. LDS Discussions explicitly declines to make this claim. Without a demonstrated mechanism of borrowing, the argument amounts to “other people had similar experiences, therefore Joseph’s is suspect”—which is not a logical inference. The Stearns parallel is structurally striking but has no documented connection to Joseph Smith. Solomon Chamberlin’s account, which is documented as reaching the Smiths in 1829, involved an angel (not God and Jesus personally) and described God raising up a future apostolic church—a detail that does not appear in any of Joseph’s accounts. The surface similarities dissolve on close comparison.

The Question of the 1832 Account’s Suppression

LDS Discussions charges that pages containing the 1832 account were “carefully cut out of Joseph’s letterbook and stored in the church’s vault” and only restored after their existence leaked. This charge deserves a direct answer.

The pages were indeed removed from the letterbook at some point in the nineteenth century, before modern archival practices existed. However, the historical record does not support deliberate suppression to conceal embarrassing material. Paul Cheesman’s 1965 master’s thesis, based on his own research in Church archives, revealed the account to the broader scholarly world—meaning Church archivists had not hidden it from a believing scholar. The account was subsequently published by Dean Jessee in BYU Studies in 1969, a Church-affiliated publication, and has been openly discussed in Church magazines, the Gospel Topics Essays, and the Joseph Smith Papers ever since. The story of the 1832 account becoming known is a story of standard archival research, not of secrets forcibly leaked. It is fair to note that correlation-era curriculum emphasized only the 1838 account for decades, creating a reasonable perception of concealment—and the Church’s current transparency is the appropriate corrective. But the claim that Church historians deliberately hid the 1832 account because they knew it was damaging attributes intent beyond what the evidence establishes.

The Methodological Problem at the Heart of the Critique

Running through every section of LDS Discussions’ First Vision critique is a consistent methodological move: treat the most critical interpretation of every ambiguous piece of evidence as established fact, and treat any faithful interpretation as mere apologist spin. This is advocacy, not historical method. When LDS Discussions declares that Church historians “are intentionally deceiving members,” “flat out lying,” and “know exactly what they are doing,” the critique has left historical argument entirely and entered the territory of unfalsifiable psychological accusation. No amount of new historical evidence could disprove the claim that Church historians are lying, because the claim is about intent rather than evidence.

Historian Steve Harper, in his FAIR Conference paper “Four Accounts and Three Critiques of Joseph Smith’s First Vision” (2011), identified this dynamic as “subjectivity squared”: critics replace the witnesses’ testimony with their own subjective interpretation, then treat that interpretation as fact. The proper historical approach—employed by scholars including Richard Bushman, John W. Welch, and Dean Jessee—is to approach the accounts with what Harper calls a “hermeneutic of trust”: not credulous acceptance, but the same methodological fairness one would extend to any historical source of comparable documentary quality. By that standard, the First Vision accounts are remarkably well-documented for early nineteenth-century personal religious experiences: four accounts by the principal witness, five secondhand accounts by contemporaries, and extensive contextual corroboration for the historical setting.

Conclusion: What the Evidence Actually Supports

The LDS Discussions First Vision critique is carefully constructed, marshals genuine historical complexity, and raises questions every serious Latter-day Saint should be able to engage. It is not, however, the irrefutable demolition of the First Vision’s historicity it presents itself as. Its charges of outright Church dishonesty exceed what the evidence supports. Its argument from silence treats absence of records as equivalent to absence of events—a logical fallacy. Its theological evolution argument ignores the complexity of early LDS theology and the parallel of early Christian theological development. Its most powerful textual argument—the 1832 account’s apparent single-personage language—dissolves on close reading and is already contradicted by the 1835 account.

What the historical record actually supports is this: a young man in western New York in the late 1810s and early 1820s, surrounded by a culture of religious seeking and visionary experience, had a personal religious experience he described as an encounter with divine persons. He wrote about it privately in 1832, shared it informally in 1835, and formalized it publicly in 1838 when the organizational needs of a growing church required a clear founding narrative. The accounts differ in emphasis, purpose, and some details—as any four accounts of the same experience recorded across twenty years would differ. They agree on the essentials. The documentary, contextual, and circumstantial evidence does not establish fabrication; it is consistent with authenticity.

As Gordon B. Hinckley stated: “Our whole strength rests on the validity of that vision. It either occurred or it did not occur.” The historical evidence, fairly evaluated, does not resolve that fundamental question—no historical method ever could. What it does establish is that the critique of the First Vision accounts is not as one-sided as LDS Discussions presents it, and that the faithful interpretation of the evidence is historically defensible, intellectually serious, and consistent with the documentary record.

Joseph Smith — History 1:17

“I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”

Primary Sources and Further Reading

Scholarly and Primary Sources