How should the differing First Vision accounts be understood?
Common ground
Four firsthand accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision survive, conventionally dated 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842, along with several accounts by people who heard him relate it. They differ in details, including his age, the beings described, his reasons for praying, and the messages he received. The 1832 account emphasizes forgiveness and describes seeing the Lord; the later accounts describe two personages. The earliest surviving narrative was written more than a decade after the traditional 1820 date. The 1832 account became widely known when historians published it in the 1960s. Oliver Cowdery’s 1834–35 history in the Messenger and Advocate describes a revival and then the angel’s 1823 visit without recounting a vision of God; the first printed account of the vision appeared in Orson Pratt’s 1840 pamphlet. The Church’s First Vision Accounts essay introduces the documents and links to their texts.
The dispute
Scholars disagree over whether these differences are complementary memories of a real 1820 encounter, later developments in Smith’s understanding and founding narrative, or experiences best studied within contemporary visionary religion. A related dispute concerns the revival setting: Walters locates the revival described in the later history in 1824–25, while Backman, Anderson, and Bushman point to broader religious activity around 1820.
Start here
accessibleThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “First Vision Accounts,” Gospel Topics Essays (2016).
A short institutional introduction to each account, its context, and the Church’s reading, with links to the primary texts.
Allen argues that the accounts’ variations reflect different emphases in retelling and recording the experience. He also concludes that the First Vision circulated only narrowly in the 1830s and acquired its central place in Church teaching gradually, especially after Smith’s death.
Backman argues that the four accounts describe the same divine encounter from different perspectives, for different audiences and purposes. He reads their varying descriptions of the personages and messages together rather than as stages in a changing theology, and holds that revival activity across the wider region fits Smith’s 1820 setting.
history · Professor emeritus of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University
Anderson argues that reminiscences of Smith’s early involvement with Methodism and regional camp meetings support the setting of an experience around 1820. He distinguishes sources with direct knowledge from later recollections that combine separate events, and holds that the surviving evidence supports the basic accuracy of Smith’s memory.
history · religious studies · Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
Bushman argues that religious activity in 1819–20 across nearby communities was sufficient to have impressed Smith even without a large revival in Palmyra village. He regards variation in retellings as compatible with changing emphases and ordinary slips, and cautions against treating incomplete records or net membership totals as a full measure of religious excitement.
history · religious studies · Professor of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University
Harper interprets the accounts as successive acts of remembering a real experience, shaped by present concerns, retrieval cues, audiences, and growing understanding. Differences therefore need not indicate invention, and later accounts need not be less accurate simply because they are later; his book also traces how the vision became a shared founding memory.
Rather, they are products of Joseph Smith’s subjective, constructive process of remembering.
Development of the founding narrative
Earlier religious experiences or conversion material were retrospectively reshaped into a founding theophany as Smith’s theology and circumstances changed.
religious studies · Distinguished Professor Emerita and Research Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Taves compares Smith’s accounts with contemporary ways of identifying supernatural presences, treating the reported experiences and interpretations as historical evidence without deciding their supernatural source. In her 2020 reconstruction, the evidence for the 1824–25 revival and Lucy Smith’s history suggests that direct speech from the Lord emerged in 1829 and was later placed at the beginning of the founding narrative.
Vogel argues that Smith’s First Vision retellings changed alongside his teachings about God. He reads the single Lord in the 1832 account as consistent with early Mormon modalism, in which Father and Son were one person, and the later two-personage accounts as reflecting a subsequent distinction between Father and Son.
Marquardt argues that the accounts developed from personal forgiveness and an angelic calling into a narrative of two divine personages and the rejection of existing churches. He treats the later account as a theological explanation of Church origins rather than a reliable chronology of the Palmyra revival, while allowing that Smith may have had a religious experience.
Walters argues that church membership records, ministerial appointments, and contemporary reports place the multi-denominational Palmyra revival described in Smith’s later history in 1824–25 rather than 1820. He proposes that the later founding narrative combined and redated earlier material, and argues that because the 1838 account ties the vision to this revival, the misdating undermines that account’s reliability as history.
We also show that in 1820 there was no revival in any of the churches in Palmyra and its vicinity.
Conversion narratives and visionary experience
The accounts are read within early American visionary religion, distinguishing reported experience from its interpretation without settling its supernatural source.
Jones situates Smith’s First Vision narratives within the Methodist conversion narratives of his era. He argues that this context helps make sense of differences between the early and later accounts while allowing each version to retain its distinctive emphasis.
Flake reads the 1832 and 1838 accounts as narratives explaining why a church capable of mediating salvation was necessary. She argues that the later narrative shifts from personal forgiveness toward institutional authority, with Smith’s Kirtland experience informing its meaning; her concern is the story’s religious function rather than deciding whether the vision occurred.