The Four First Vision Accounts — What They Actually Show

Jeremy Runnells argues that four differing accounts of the First Vision expose it as a fabrication that grew in the telling. But at every turn he chooses the reading that requires the least historical work — and the record rewards the reader who does more.

The CES Letter points to four accounts of the First Vision — 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842 — and argues they contradict one another:

The CES Letter’s Argument

In the 1832 account there is no mention of two beings, no reference to asking which church to join, and no attack by Satan; Joseph’s stated age differs between tellings; in 1832 he had already found “there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel,” yet the 1838 account has him say “it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong” — a direct contradiction; and no one heard of the vision until twelve to twenty-two years after it supposedly occurred.

Each of these is a real feature of the record (the last line is Joseph Smith—History 1:18). The question is what an honest reader concludes from them — and that is exactly where Jeremy makes his choice.

Confronted with four texts written across two decades for four different purposes, a reader faces a genuine fork.

The path Jeremy took: treat the four documents as sworn depositions about the same three minutes, line them up, and rule that any difference is a contradiction and any contradiction proves invention. On this reading the accounts don’t remember an event — they build one, detail by detail, until a private prayer becomes a two-personage theophany. It is a tidy argument. It also requires ignoring what kind of documents these are, when and why each was written, and everything historians know about how real people narrate a life-altering experience more than once.

The path he passed over: ask what each document actually is — a private sketch, a diary retelling, an institutional history, a newspaper summary, each written for a different listener (see the table below). Read that way, the accounts show the fingerprint of authentic memory: a rock-solid core with peripheral detail that shifts by audience and purpose. This is not the “apologetic” reading; it is the one basic historical method demands — the same we apply without controversy to Paul’s three conversion accounts and the four Gospel resurrection narratives. And it is better supported for a reason Jeremy never engages: his own thesis predicts the wrong data. A fabricator polishing a story over twenty-two years produces accounts that converge. Joseph’s do the opposite — the earliest is the roughest, the later ones foreground different concerns, and the details never harmonize into a clean marketing document. That is the signature of remembering, not manufacturing.

The Four Accounts at a Glance

Watch what stays fixed and what shifts — and notice that the audience column does most of the explaining.

A careful critic would not lead with the trivia. He would concede that age and motive are the kind of thing memory blurs, and press the one difference that matters theologically: the 1838 canonical account describes two personages — the Father and the Son — while the 1832 account seems to describe only the Lord. If the defining doctrine of the vision is absent from the earliest telling, isn’t that exactly the “grew in the telling” pattern a fabrication would show?

This is the version worth answering, and it has a strong answer. First, absence of mention is not denial. The 1832 account is a compressed personal sketch about Joseph’s standing before God — a document about forgiveness — so its emotional center is naturally the divine figure who pronounces it: the Son, who says “thy sins are forgiven thee.” A first-person note that foregrounds the Redeemer is what one expects from a penitent, not a theologian mapping the Godhead. And the 1832 text is not even obviously single-personage: “the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord” — two distinct actions, two references to “the Lord,” one who opens the heavens and one who is then seen. That the Father and Son are already implied here is not certain and should not be oversold, but it is enough to dismantle Jeremy’s claim, which needs the 1832 account to affirmatively teach a one-personage vision. It does no such thing. It simply says less.

Further, the 1835 account — recorded three years after 1832 and three years before the canonical history — explicitly describes “a personage” in a pillar of flame, and then “another personage” who appeared like the first and testified of Jesus Christ. Two beings are firmly in the record long before 1838. (The 1835 wording identifies them by role rather than by the later Father-and-Son formula, so it establishes the plurality of divine persons, not yet the full doctrinal statement of 1838.) The doctrine did not appear at the end of a twenty-two-year drift; it sits in the middle, in an offhand retelling Joseph had no reason to stage. For a fuller walkthrough of all four texts see The Four First Vision Accounts, and the doctrinal treatment at The First Vision.

There is a sharper version still. Joseph’s language about the Godhead developed across his ministry: the fully explicit teaching that the Father and Son are two separate, embodied beings belongs to his later Nauvoo preaching. So a critic can argue the two-personage reading is a back-formation — Joseph reading matured theology into a vaguer early memory. Two things answer it. The argument reaches only Joseph’s vocabulary for God, not the event: a prophet articulating a revelation more fully years after receiving it is the ordinary shape of spiritual learning, not evidence the experience was invented. And the timeline refuses to cooperate — the 1835 account reports two personages years before the Nauvoo sermons that spell out embodiment. The plurality of divine persons is in the record well before the doctrine reached its mature form, exactly backward from what a theology-driven fabrication would produce.

The Age and the Motive: Real Differences, Ordinary Ones

The age difference is real and entirely ordinary: the 1832 account places the event “in the 16th year of my age” (fifteen), the 1838 account in his fifteenth year (fourteen), spring 1820. A man dating a boyhood spring from memory a decade later, without a diary, misremembers by a year — and an inventor with an eye to a clean story would have fixed the number. That it stays fuzzy is what real recollection looks like, not fraud.

The motive is the contradiction the CES Letter presses hardest, and it deserves full strength. In 1832 Joseph writes he had already found “there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel” — he seems to know before praying that no church is true. Yet Joseph Smith—History 1:18 says that when he prayed “it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong.” Read as answers to one question they collide — but they are not one question. The 1832 line is a retrospective judgment reached by searching the scriptures: a settled conviction that Christianity as an institution had drifted from the New Testament faith. The 1838 line describes his frame of mind in the moment of prayer about a narrower matter — which of the competing sects he should join. A boy can hold both at once: a general unease that something is wrong, and a live, open question about what to do about it. The 1832 boy prays chiefly to “obtain mercy”; the 1838 boy is pushed by a revival and moved by James 1:5 to ask God directly. Two facets of one restless search — whose revival setting is treated at The 1820 Revival and Historical Context, and whose documented drift toward Methodism is discussed in Did Joseph Smith Join the Methodist Church?

The One Standard Test: Paul and the Gospels

The quickest way to expose the weaker path is to apply Jeremy’s own rule to accounts he would never call fraudulent. Paul’s Damascus Road conversion is told three times in Acts, and the accounts openly diverge: in Acts 9:7 his companions “heard a voice, but saw no man”; in Acts 22:9 they “saw the light” but did not hear the voice. Yet no credible scholar treats this as proof Paul invented his conversion. The four Gospels likewise disagree on how many angels stood at the empty tomb, who arrived first, and in what order the risen Lord appeared — and believers and historians alike read this as different authors writing for different audiences, not as hoax. Jeremy asks the reader to adopt one standard for Joseph Smith and a gentler one for everyone else. Named plainly, that is not a historical argument; it is a double standard.

What Memory Research Actually Predicts

Steven C. Harper’s First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (Oxford University Press, 2019) applies modern memory science directly to these accounts. The field’s consistent finding is that retellings of even dramatic, deeply meaningful events preserve a stable gist while peripheral details shift or drop out — variation that grows with time. A narrative that stayed word-for-word identical across twenty-two years would be the suspicious one. The First Vision accounts behave exactly like memory: the gist never moves, and the variation lands where memory research says it should — on numbers, sequence, and emphasis, never on the core.

Jeremy’s final claim — that no one heard of the vision for twelve to twenty-two years, implying late invention — again chooses the weaker inference over the record, on two counts.

Sacred experiences were guarded. The biblical pattern is private first, public later: Paul waited “fourteen years” to write of being caught up to the third heaven, still unsure “whether in the body… or out of the body” (2 Corinthians 12:1–4). Joseph reports that when he shared the vision with a local minister he was met with contempt and told it was “of the devil” (Joseph Smith—History 1:21–22). Discretion after that reception is rational, not incriminating.

The early critics prove the point in reverse. Joseph’s opponents attacked him ferociously from the 1820s on — his treasure-seeking, the Book of Mormon, his character. If the First Vision had been freshly minted in the late 1830s, they would have pounced on the sudden appearance of a story no one had heard. They didn’t, because it was not a new story but a privately-held one becoming public — and public earlier than Jeremy implies: Orson Pratt printed a First Vision account in 1840, within the lifetime of anyone who could have contradicted it.

A common follow-on worry is that the multiple accounts were somehow concealed. They were not. Historian Dean Jessee published the 1832 account in BYU Studies in 1969, and James B. Allen had surveyed the accounts and their differences in Dialogue in 1966 — roughly half a century before the CES Letter appeared. Anyone with a library card could read the whole record decades ago. The Church has since gathered all four texts, differences and all, into a public Gospel Topics essay and the Joseph Smith Papers. These primary sources are laid out for inspection — the posture of an institution confident the full record supports it, not one managing a secret.

What is resolved. The charge that four accounts equal a fabrication collapses under its own method. The core of the vision is unwavering, and the variation falls precisely where genuine memory varies. The 1832 account does not teach a one-personage vision; it simply says less, and two personages are explicit by 1835 — three years before the canonical account — dissolving the “grew in the telling” thesis. The vision was guarded, not unknown, in print by 1840 and in scholarly circulation by the 1960s. On every count the accusatory reading is the one that requires the least historical work, while the better-supported reading sat in the same sources the CES Letter cites.

What remains genuinely open. Only the small and the honest. The year Joseph assigned the vision wobbles by one, as boyhood dates do. How much of the two-personage doctrine the terse 1832 wording intends is a fair question the text is too brief to settle. And why Joseph left the fullest telling until 1838 will always admit more than one motive. None of this touches whether the vision happened; these are the ordinary loose threads that trail every real event — a world away from the fabrication Jeremy needs them to prove.

Further Study

• The Four First Vision Accounts — a text-by-text walkthrough of all four narratives and their differences.
• The First Vision — the doctrinal meaning of the vision and its place in the Restoration.
• Did Joseph Smith Join the Methodist Church? — Joseph’s documented religious seeking and how it fits the 1838 account.
• The 1820 Revival and Historical Context — the revival environment that framed the boy’s question.