Scott Woodward:
The more carefully one studies Joseph Smith’s First Vision in the context of his world at that time, the more interesting the questions become. For example, if Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in a vision, does that mean he didn’t actually see them in reality? And what are we to make of the fact that other people around the time of Joseph Smith’s vision also claimed to have had visions of God, many of whom were Methodists? And how might the form of these Methodist conversion narratives at the time have impacted how Joseph Smith recorded his vision? Furthermore, what is the interplay between Joseph Smith’s memory of his First Vision and the various contexts in which he recalled it and recorded it? Today on Church History Matters, we sit down with Dr. Stephen C. Harper, one of the world’s foremost scholars on Joseph Smith’s First Vision, to discuss these and other great questions. And by the way, we apologize in advance for recording Dr. Harper’s high quality responses in such poor quality audio. In case you wonder, no, he did not record his responses underwater, though sometimes it sounds like he did. We assure you, we will repent and do better the next time we have a guest on our show. I’m Scott Woodward, a Managing Director at Scripture Central, and my co host is Casey Griffiths, also a Managing Director at Scripture Central. This is our fifth and final episode in this series dealing with Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Now let’s get into it. Hello, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
How you doing, Scott?

Scott Woodward:
Good, man. How are you?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Very good.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So we’ve been talking a lot about the First Vision. This is our final episode. There’s so much more to talk about with the First Vision, so we want to give it one more shot today, and that’s the purpose of today’s episode. We actually want to respond to our listeners’ questions that have been sent in about the First Vision, and we are honored to have with us today a special guest. Casey, want to tell us who’s with us today?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yes. We are thrilled to have with us Steve Harper. Let me give you a little bit of background here. Steve is a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of BYU Studies, he’s the executive editor of the Wilford Woodruff Papers, and from 2012 to 2018, he was the Managing Editor for a little publication you might have heard of called Saints. And Steve has a strong academic background. He’s got a bachelor’s from BYU, a master’s in American history from Utah State. Ph. D. in American History from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And we invited Steve because he is the world’s expert on the First Vision. In fact, I want to talk about one of Steve’s publications. He just had a book come out from Oxford a couple years ago called The First Vision Memory and Mormon Origins, which kind of traces the history of the First Vision the way it’s been used in the church. Fascinating book, a great read, and I’m glad to have Steve here because he’s a good colleague. We worked together in the Department of Church History at BYU, and so we’re just really, really happy to have him with us. Steve, did I miss anything in your bio there?

Steven C. Harper:
That was great, Casey. Thanks. My favorite part is I’m married to Jennifer Sebring, and we have five kids, so that’s the best thing about me.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I didn’t know if you wanted that information out on the internet or anything, so I self-edited. Yeah, Jennifer is another great part of the Steve Harper package altogether. Love her, and I’m grateful for your good family and all they’re doing.

Steven C. Harper:
Thank you.

Scott Woodward:
So, okay, so Steve, let me start with a question. It’s kind of also a autobiographical question. So I’ve noticed in listening to you over the years that one of your favorite words to use to describe yourself is a seeker. And I love that. Tell us a little bit about where and when your seeking began, and then specifically where and when your intensive interest in and then research on Joseph Smith’s First Vision began.

Steven C. Harper:
Oh, great question. I did not realize it as a teenager, but I had a seeker’s spirit. I didn’t yet have tools and skills for seeking, but my dad and mother helped me to be a seeker, helped me to want to know the truth and be willing to quest for it, work hard for it, seek after it. So it’s sort of a heritage. It’s a blessing belonging to the family that I *inaudible* to, but I was on my mission when I really gained a desire to study the scriptures intensively. I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing that, and then as I got interested in teaching the scriptures and the history of the Church as a career, became aware of a really important talk that you both know by President J. Reuben Clark, who gave it in the late 1930s to Church religious educators, and one of the things he emphasized in that talk is that there are two things that if you’re going to be a church, a religious educator, you’ve got to really know and believe as literal reality, and one of those is the atonement of Jesus Christ, and the other one is the First Vision of Joseph Smith. And so I don’t love one of those more than the other, right? For me there are two things that are inseparably connected, but my training and background is better suited to studying the revelations of Joseph Smith in the early American context. So I thought there’s nothing better I could research and write about than those revelations, and preeminent among them is Joseph Smith’s First Vision. It really kicked off for me, though, the going beyond my own intense research of the First Vision accounts, and the visionary accounts of other people in this time and place, that didn’t start for me until about 2008 when I was part of a summer seminar with Richard Bushman. It was called “Joseph Smith and His Critics,” and the goal was to study the criticisms of Joseph Smith and his revelations and to respond to them in different ways than we had. We kind of realized that, you know, we’ve responded quite a bit, and maybe we need to think of some new responses and address these important questions with fresh eyes, and my assignment in that seminar was First Vision, and that led to just an intense and long-standing, continuing academic interest to go along with my spiritual interest in it.

Scott Woodward:
Hmm. So a lot of this traces back to that 2008 seminar with Richard Bushman.

Steven C. Harper:
Indeed.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Well, can we just tap your brain about the First Vision for the next, I don’t know, 45 minutes and just…

Steven C. Harper:
Nothing I’d rather do.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. This is our idea of a good time, everybody. This is what we do. Okay. So we’ve got a list here from our listeners, and Casey, do you want to take the first shot? You want to throw a question out at Steve here? And we’ll just, we’ll just go through some of these. See how much we can get through.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re just going to run down the list, and the first one is actually a question I’ve been asked by students in my classes, which is was the First Vision a vision or a physical visitation, and did Joseph Smith really see God the Father and Jesus Christ if it was a vision? So Steve, was it a vision or was it a visitation? Were they physically there? Was he seeing something? What’s your take on that from the sources?

Steven C. Harper:
This is a terrific question, and I can answer it in one sense, but not in some kind of final, ultimate sense, because I frankly don’t know the physics or the metaphysics of it. If I had been with Joseph in the grove, I’m not sure I would have seen what he saw, but that is not me saying that he didn’t actually see them in person. So he was emphatic that he did see them in person: “I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light, I saw two personages, and they did, in reality, speak to me.” He’s emphatic that he saw God and Christ, and so I think you’re noticing that I’m avoiding the words it was either a vision or a visitation. Those are words that we put on it today. We want to know, right? That’s sort of a characteristic of our time and place. How real was it? The answer to that was, it was real. It was real. One way we can see this is that in the late 1890s there was a fireside, what we would today call a fireside, in St. George, and an old timer spoke, and he told about when he was a little boy, way back in the earliest days of the church, and he heard Joseph Smith tell the story of his First Vision, and he said that Joseph said that the Father touched him on the eye, and that Joseph held up his hand and touched himself on the eye to demonstrate, and he said that when the Father touched his eye, Jesus appeared, and he could see the Savior. So that’s a singular account. It’s a thirdhand one. We don’t have a way to triangulate it. I’m not trying to contend that that detail is an absolute fact. What I’m trying to say about this is that there’s evidence in the historical record, besides Joseph’s emphatic testimony, that other Latter-day Saints thought of it as a physical visit from God and Christ, and I have no reason to think otherwise than that.

Scott Woodward:
Love it. Now, you mentioned that you’ve not only studied Joseph Smith’s vision, but also contemporaries of Joseph Smith, and that leads to another question. Actually, there’s multiple ways that different listeners have asked the question, so I’ll read a few varieties of this, and then you can respond to this. Some of our listeners have said this: “I heard that other people had similar visions in the 1800s in upstate New York about God and Jesus Christ. Is there anything true about that?” Another listener said, “I’ve heard that stories about people having visions weren’t really that uncommon during Joseph Smith’s day. What makes his account different from others?” Another listener actually, like, loaded up a bunch of specific names, like, “I’ve heard that Norris Stearns had a vision in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1815 which is very similar to Joseph’s.” Elias Smith in 1816, Charles Finney in 1821, and the list goes on.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So, how similar was Joseph’s experience to the common sort of evangelical and particularly Methodist conversion narratives of that day, Steve? And what do you make of those similarities, and what do you not make of those similarities?

Steven C. Harper:
These are very cool questions. I’m excited that people are asking these questions. These are the kinds of questions I ask in my research and writing, and I learned to do so from Professor Richard Bushman. He published a really, really, really important article, prize-winning article, about this in the late 1990s, “The Visionary World of Joseph Smith.” It’s in BYU Studies. If you Googled “Bushman” and “visionary world,” it would turn it up. And so Richard Bushman, a Latter-day Saint scholar and historian and a highly acclaimed scholar, is the one who turned us on to the facts of the matter. And the facts of the matter are there are people not just in upstate New York, but throughout the North American continent, at least the eastern parts, that are settled by descendants of Europeans—so, there are people there in the late 1700s, early 1800s, who testify that they’ve had some variation on a vision. Some say they saw angels or spirits. One fellow used the word a genie. It was like a genie. Others say the Father, the Son. Some say the Father and the Son. And these are similar to Joseph’s in some ways, and then they’re quite different in some ways. I—what do I make of them? I do not doubt them or dispute them. I try to help people understand that there’s no reason why we shouldn’t expect that to have been happening. If you lack wisdom, ask God. If you knock, it’ll be opened.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
There’s no reason to assume that only Joseph Smith is asking these questions or longing to know his relationship with and standing to God, and there’s no reason to assume that God wouldn’t answer others. Now, I don’t know. I can’t validate or verify whether these are actual experiences or not, but I don’t doubt that they could be. And what I do notice, though, is that the idea of writing off Joseph’s—the reality of his experience because there are other similar ones, it’s bad logic. It’s bad reasoning. It’s a non sequitur, it does not follow. So if your first premise is there were lots of people—and there weren’t lots. It was not terribly uncommon, but it also wasn’t common, it’s not 9 out of 10 people who are seeing the Father and the Son in the woods. It’s one out of a who knows how many, but it’s a small number, but probably enough that most people have heard of somebody, somewhere, in their recent past or lifetime that had an experience in their bedroom or in their law office or in the woods with a vision of some kind or other. So Joseph Smith’s gets more concrete and more—he gets more emphatic over time as he describes it about the theological content of what happened. In other words, Joseph’s vision leads, by his 1838-39 narration of it, to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, and he—the more he’s opposed by it and the more it goes counter to his culture, the more adamantly Joseph Smith affirms it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, he kind of leans into it.

Steven C. Harper:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
That is exactly the opposite of Charles Finney. Charles Finney is the most famous other person who experienced a vision of the Savior in the woods of Western New York or actually in his lofts. He prayed in the woods of western New York in Adams County, about the same time Joseph Smith did, and then later, in his law office, envisioned the Savior. Over the years, as Finney became a leading figure in Presbyterian revivalism, a lot of listeners will know the burned over district. That—we sometimes use that a bit anachronistically. Western New York didn’t become known as the burned over district until after Joseph Smith had moved away from it, and it became the burned over district largely because of the preaching, the revival preaching of Charles Finney. He becomes a deeply committed convert to Presbyterianism as a result of his vision. As the years go by and Joseph Smith is getting more and more emphatic about his vision and the Father and the Son telling him that their church was not on the earth and so forth, Finney actually backs away from his vision. And by the his mature years, it’s sort of a spiritual experience, it’s more fuzzy around the edges, and he doesn’t use it nearly so much to establish the theological content of his teaching as we see Joseph Smith doing. The farther we go in time, the more Joseph Smith relies on his vision in some ways, which is different from the others.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, doesn’t Charles Finney say over time, like, well, it happened in my mind?

Steven C. Harper:
Yes.

Scott Woodward:
You know, over time he does back away from the reality, like, the physical reality of it.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah. So contrast that, right? Whereas Finney says, well, yeah, it kind of was just a vision sort of thing, maybe metaphysical, not physical, you have Joseph Smith saying, “I saw two personages, and they did in reality speak to me,” right? He gets more emphatic about it, and that’s against—both of them are talking against the tide of unpopularity, right? It’s not mainstream to say you had that kind of experience. It’s not unheard of, but it’s not mainstream. And so as Finney moves and becomes the epitome of that mainstream, Joseph Smith is further and further from it. So that leads us to your question about how much Joseph Smith’s experience is like Methodist conversion narratives or evangelical Christian conversion narratives: It is quite like them in some ways and then very different from them in other ways. You might think of Methodism as the language. If you’re going to have a vision in the woods or wherever else, what language are you going to use to speak it? I know it’s English, but you might think of the vocabulary and the script for this sort of thing as a Methodist dialect. What else does Joseph Smith have, right?

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Steven C. Harper:
So he follows a cultural script, an Evangelical conversion narrative script that he knows. He’s heard it lots of times before, and he compares his experience to it and uses it as best he can to narrate it. I don’t think he feels terribly satisfied with that, right? He—in the beginning of his 1832 autobiography and his later one he starts by telling us he’s very poorly educated and he can’t do a very good job of describing what defied all description. But Christopher Jones is the scholar who has shown us how closely Joseph’s accounts follow some tropes and some themes of Methodist conversion. But there’s some interesting dynamics there to be sure, and that is that in Joseph’s earliest autobiography, his 1832 account, he follows that script pretty closely, and in some ways it therefore doesn’t sound very distinctively Latter-day Saint. It’s the most generic, we might say. Well, by 1838-39, he is peeved at the Evangelical clergy. You can tell by the way he starts his account. And then, by the way, he calls them priests. That’s a way of associating them with Catholic clergy, who are almost as—

Scott Woodward:
About as hated as Latter-day Saints.

Steven C. Harper:
Exactly. So in this version of the story, Joseph uses the Methodist form, but he turns it on its head. He uses it to indict the Methodists. The Methodists had used it to indict others. So, for example, the founder of Methodism, or at least the pioneer, John Wesley, had told his followers a generation before Joseph Smith, or two, he had said, guys, we will become very numerous because we have what everybody’s looking for, but the danger of that is that we will become like them. We will get to the point where we have a form of godliness, but we deny the power thereof.

Scott Woodward:
That sounds familiar.

Steven C. Harper:
Does that sound familiar?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
So imagine, now, Joseph Smith coming along and saying, you guys know what? In the context of remembering the vision, and thinking back to the beginning of persecution, so as Joseph remembers 17 years earlier, what was the beginning of this life of persecution I’ve had? Oh, it started a few days after my vision when the Methodist minister, of all people, of all people, the Methodist minister told me it was all in my head.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Okay, so Joseph Smith—History, we’re in verse 21, right, where he says, like, he wanted to go instinctively to a Methodist preacher. He says, “I took occasion to give him an account of the vision which I had had. I was greatly surprised at his behavior.” Sounds like Joseph expected him to affirm this as this Methodist conversion narrative that was kind of common.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
No, this preacher doesn’t seem to buy into that.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Tell us why not, or what do you think about that?

Steven C. Harper:
Well, it’s hard to know for absolute certain, but the preacher is probably a lot more attuned to this history, this way religious movements tend to work, and to the debate among his own clergy, maybe inside his own self, and the history of his own tradition. So another way of saying that is that Methodism, as one analyst put it, Orthodoxy, Orthodox Evangelical Christianity, became Methodized, meaning the Methodists sort of took it over because they treated personal spiritual experiences like Joseph’s seriously. That wasn’t a crazy thing. It was something God would really do, just like the New Testament said, He would put His Spirit into the people and they would have the gifts. Well so Methodists take that seriously. Joseph Smith wants, he tells us—in one account of his vision, he tells us that he attended the Methodist meetings, and he wanted to feel what they felt and shout like they shouted, but he couldn’t. He didn’t get it. So then the vision occurs, and he thinks, I did, it worked, it finally worked, and he’s eager to report that to the Methodist minister, and then the minister treats him with contempt instead of validation. And this is a very difficult disconnect for Joseph. He has to, therefore, figure out what the vision meant. Now, people might object. They might say, well, huh-uh, because he understands from the beginning everything about it and how it’s going to lead to him being the president of the church. That’s not true.

Scott Woodward:
No.

Steven C. Harper:
That’s not in the historical record, and that’s not the way we function.

Scott Woodward:
No.

Steven C. Harper:
We often look back on our past and give meaning to it. We can see from the way it worked out what the pattern was.

Scott Woodward:
Mm.

Steven C. Harper:
This is called interpretive memory, and you can see interpretive memory in verse 22 and 23 and 24 there. Contrast that with verse 21—21 is a factual memory. A few days after the vision, I was in company with a specific minister, I said this, he said this, and then the next three verses are Joseph Smith saying, this is what it felt like then and since. This is what it’s like when I’ve reflected on it, and I felt like Paul before Agrippa. So this is hundreds of words here of memory that Joseph didn’t have at the time. He only has had it over time as he’s reflected on it and sees, oh yeah, it wasn’t necessarily so much a Methodist experience as I originally thought it was.

Scott Woodward:
Man, I feel so sad for him. I wonder if this Methodist preacher had, like, had other people explain such things, or maybe he had felt that things were getting out of control. I know during this time there was kind of a movement of, like, old Methodism and new Methodism, right?

Steven C. Harper:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
The old Methodism was this more spiritual, enthusiastic type of personal experience with God, and the new Methodism at this time is starting to shift toward a more respectable, middle-class, more non-enthusiastic expression of it.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And this minister seems to be caught in the middle and starting to lean toward that new Methodism. Do you feel like that’s a fair handling of the facts?

Steven C. Harper:
I do. I like the way you distinguish between what the facts are and what they might mean.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
We don’t have enough historical facts recorded to know for sure what that minister was thinking, but we do know that context, that larger pattern that you just described, we know that very well, and it may very well be that that minister fit in that pattern, was feeling the tensions that were convulsing Methodism at the time, and last thing he wanted was to be responsible for inspiring some kid to go off the rails—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
—you know, into enthusiasm, which, which meant—was not a popular, it’s not a positive term in those days to be enthusiastic.

Scott Woodward:
Because it meant what? It meant that you were…

Steven C. Harper:
It literally means that you’re full of God and theos, but it was used as a pejorative to mean you are sort of unreasonably and not very right in your enthusiasm for the gifts of the Spirit, being full of the Holy Ghost, full of the love of God. It was a way of curbing what they regarded as the excesses of emotional religion, and ecstatic religion, it’s sometimes called.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, one scholar, Jeremy Talmage, he’s published at BYU Studies, he called it, I think a phrase from that time was, “effusions of an enthusiastic brain.”

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And I feel that a little bit today. I think if people talk overly about how they’re always guided by the Spirit, or they talk too much about spiritual experiences, I start to feel a little uncomfortable. I start to feel like maybe there’s some excess here, and maybe they’re not as Spirit-guided as they’re saying. Is that fair? I mean, I feel sometimes, like, there’s a line that socially, if you cross it, it starts to feel weird for the people around you.

Steven C. Harper:
Well said. That’s a phenomenon that scholars of religion observe throughout history.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting. Okay. Anything else about those conversion experiences at that time or should we go on to another question? Casey, do you have any follow-up or Steve, anything else you want to say about that? It’s a big question. I think it’s an important one.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh, I would just add the interaction with the Methodist makes me think of that old statement that radical ideas discouraged by institutions, become institutions that discourage radical ideas.

Scott Woodward:
Whoa.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That Joseph Smith was very much plugged into the Methodist ethos. It’s kind of strange that they discouraged him, but I guess you’re right: They’re on their way to becoming institutionalized, basically.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so maybe it makes sense that Joseph Smith was a threat to them.

Steven C. Harper:
The second half of that saying—that was cool, Casey, what you just said. That’s a very good saying. The other version of it that I quoted half of was, “Orthodoxy became Methodized, and then Methodism became Orthodox.” And, Scott, what you just said about how a Latter-day Saint might feel today about somebody who stands up at testimony meetings and says, “An angel came and stood in my bedroom in mid-air and told me some cool stuff,” we might think, “Uh…” And that’s—whatever reasons that might explain that, one of them could be this same phenomenon that we’ve seen elsewhere. Sometimes called the routinization of charisma, as well.

Scott Woodward:
Mm. Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Well, let me ask the next question here. And this is probably a pretty common one that comes up often, which is, what’s your take on why Joseph Smith appears to have at first been hesitant to share the vision, and why it doesn’t seem to have been very common knowledge among the early saints?

Steven C. Harper:
Great questions. Let’s set forth the facts, the historical facts. So these are things that are the same no matter what perspective you choose, what interpretation you choose. Interpretations vary, but the facts that don’t vary are that the historical records say only two things about who he told and when he told, and one of them is what we’ve been reading. The most specific one is verse 21 of Joseph Smith’s history in the Pearl of Great Price, which is a selection from his manuscript history. “Some few days after I had this vision, I happened to be in company with one of the Methodist preachers who was active in the aforementioned religious excitement. I took the occasion to give him an account of the vision,” and he was—he reacted with contempt. Joseph Smith was surprised, as Scott said. This is not an expected answer. It caught him by surprise. It was psychologically painful. It was, I think—and now I’m interpreting, right? So the fact of the matter is he says he reported the vision, and it was—he was surprised, and he was rejected. So what might that fact mean? I have made a lot of that fact following on the pioneering work of James B. Allen. He thought we ought to make a lot of that fact and that there was probably a key in it. And I think there was, too, the key meaning that Joseph Smith probably decides to clam up about the vision after that rejection. It’s not fun to be rejected. None of us like being rejected, and if we go and tell our, our happiest thing that’s ever happened to us, the greatest thing we’ve ever seen, and an authority figure who we trusted and who we thought would validate us rejects us just as soundly as possible, then the likeliest thing to do is to clam up.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Sure.

Steven C. Harper:
Now a lot of people assume that—we often do this: We assume. We don’t go with the facts; we go with our assumptions. And a common assumption is, well, if you see God and Christ, you go tell everybody. You do this, that, you record it in your journal right that day. Well, those are things that we might think of of our time and place, but that’s not universal reality. There’s no reason to believe that those assumptions are correct, and it’s terrible history. You can’t do history that way. In history, you have to go with what the historical facts say and the evidence. The other fact is that in his 1832 autobiography, the earliest one, Joseph simply says, “I could find no one who would believe the heavenly vision. Nevertheless, I pondered these things in my heart,” echoing there the gospel of Luke about Mary. And doing that, by doing that, telling us that he had some sacred stuff that he wasn’t going to throw out there because it wasn’t appreciated.

Scott Woodward:
So he doesn’t tell us how many people he told. All he tells us is, I could get nobody to believe me.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah, so we should not assume that he tells everyone, and we should not assume that anyone he told believed him. I think it’s common to assume, well, he must have told his parents, and they obviously believed him. Well, the historical record doesn’t specify that he did tell his parents. And if he did, then it does specify that they didn’t believe him, at least in the beginning.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
One way to see that enacted is to read Lucy Mack Smith’s memoir, which has no personal memory of the vision. She does not seem to remember Joseph coming home or meeting her in the barnyard and telling about the vision.

Scott Woodward:
You’d think that would make her record if he had told her. You’d think that would have made it in there.

Steven C. Harper:
Oh, you would think so, and you can compare to other events, right, where, when Joseph talks about the angel Moroni or gets the plates, she does have her own version of those stories from her point of view. Why not, then, a First Vision memory point of view? And neither do the other family members.

Scott Woodward:
Hm. Interesting.

Steven C. Harper:
Why wasn’t it common knowledge among the early Saints? Well, if this interpretation that we’re entertaining here is accurate, then Joseph Smith doesn’t tell anybody after he’s rejected by the minister. And today, from our perspective, we know that the First Vision is, in our narrative, it’s the inciting incident.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
It is the event that kicks off the entire story. But that’s not necessarily the way Joseph Smith thought of it, and it’s definitely not the way he presented it to the early Saints. He didn’t. He presented to them being called of God when the angel Moroni came and called him to the work, right? God has a work for you to do, Moroni said. And Joseph being called to the work in his narrative starts with that. And that’s how Mother Smith tells the story as well. So early saints didn’t necessarily even know there was a First Vision. We might think that’s impossible, or if there was a First Vision, he certainly would have told them, if there was a First Vision, they would have all known about it. Those are nothing but hypothetical assumptions. Zero historical evidence behind them. You can’t use them to disprove the vision. All you’re disproving is what you think should have happened if history happened the way you imagine it happened.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So when does he start feeling more confident to tell the story? We know we don’t have a record of all the details, but we do have people mentioning that he had told it, and he seems to have, you know—people want him to tell the story again. Doesn’t W. W. Phelps say, like, we asked him to tell that story again about the Beloved Son?

Steven C. Harper:
Exactly.

Scott Woodward:
When does it start picking up speed?

Steven C. Harper:
We used to think that it was not until the late 1830s, but discoveries of more and more evidence over the years have moved that date earlier in time, so, I’m inclined now to think that much earlier, 1832, that’s when he first records his autobiography, I believe he’s not very happy with that autobiography. I believe he doesn’t think it’s very good, but I believe that he starts telling it orally around that time, and I believe that he’s way more comfortable telling it orally than he is writing it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
Both times he writes it, 1832 and ’38, he starts with a disclaimer about his lack of education, his poor abilities. But in his 1835 journal entry, which is simply his scribe capturing a spontaneous oral telling, Joseph Smith is so much more free. The pace is faster. He doesn’t feel like he has to stop and apologize for his lack of learning, his ability to—inability to write sentences. He just tells a story, and I think that that’s the way he starts to do it by—certainly by 1835, but I believe there are reasons to think that it’s earlier than that.

Scott Woodward:
Fascinating. It reminds me, I just was reading yesterday Ether 12, where it says, like, I wish I was as good at writing as I was at speaking. It’s awkward when I write, but when I speak, I feel like I can speak freely. I can have the Spirit of God, but writing is awkward, and I’m not good at it, and people are going to mock at these things, Lord.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
I sense that same kind of spirit with Joseph, just this, I’d rather speak 100 times than write twice.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah. Understanding that is a real key to understanding why Joseph Smith was reluctant to record the vision and then why he recorded it the ways that he did when he did. So let’s map that out a little bit. He had a terrible dilemma. There are two dilemmas at the heart of the First Vision. The one we’re talking about here is the dilemma that has to do with recording it. So by 1830, by the time the church is founded, he has two manuscripts of the Book of Mormon, an original and a printer’s. He’s got a couple of dozen written revelation manuscripts, and those just continue to multiply. He’s not at all reluctant to write the revelations the Lord gives him. He’s confident in those. But notice that he does not yet have a written record of his first revelation, and he’s very reluctant to write it. The Lord tells him the day the church is organized to let there be a record kept and document your apostolic work, right? And Joseph delays that. He doesn’t do it. He doesn’t start a journal, etc. until two and a half years later when the Lord tells him again, emphatically now, in section 85 of the Doctrine and Covenants, you’ve got to get this written down. If you don’t, there’s no record of your earliest revelation. So Joseph, that same day that revelation comes, gets a journal. He starts a journal. About that same time he starts his earliest autobiography and tells the earliest account of his vision, but the first thing he does out of the gate after he says, I’m going to document the marvelous experiences that the Lord has given me, then he says, I’m not a very good writer. I didn’t get to go to school. So he’s got this conflict. I’ve got to record it, and I’m inadequate to record it.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm. Well, great answer.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And I want to add to that, basically, by just saying it seems like it increases in theological significance to him, too. The earliest accounts of the First Vision are, my sins were forgiven me. That’s the main outcome. By the 1838 it seems like he’s tapped into this idea of, this is a big deal for everybody, not just for me, and so he’s talking about the theological consequences for all people, including, you know, the big bombshell that there’s no church on the earth today that belongs to Jesus Christ, which is still the probably the most controversial claim you can tie back to Joseph Smith.

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah, I think you’re right about that, Casey, that the 1832 account, the focus of it is Joseph’s individual salvation. It’s his personal sinfulness that is the driver of his quest. And that means that he needs a church. He needs The Church of Jesus Christ, and his observations tell him that none of the ones he’s observing is matching the New Testament version. This becomes grief to his soul, and he finally discovers that he can go to God directly in the woods and receive the forgiveness that he so desperately needed. It’s not that the question about a church isn’t there, but it’s background. It’s not the foreground questions: can I be forgiven, and how? By 1838-39, right, it’s a competition of churches, and Joseph is in battle. So our present circumstances make a huge difference in the way we remember things. And some people might not think so. They might think that they’re perfect at remembering things the same way every time. They just haven’t observed their own memories enough, if that’s the case. All of us reshape our memories in real time based on what actually happened in our past and our present circumstances. All of us have experienced memory distortion. Memories are not accurate or inaccurate. They’re both accurate and inaccurate. Joseph Smith, in 1838-39, when he writes the account, or has someone else write it for him in the manuscript history, he has just come off the worst year of his life, and he has been incarcerated. He’s been—he’s watched his people be brutally treated. He’s been driven from two different states. And he is upset. Really upset. And you can hear that as it begins. “Owing to the many reports put in circulation by evil disposed and designing people.” And in this account, he uses the word persecute or persecution over and over. And he often has an adjective, “hot persecution,” “the bitterest persecution.” So his present circumstance is giving this one a very defensive tone and an embattled tone, right? And when he searches his memory for the beginning of his persecuted life, he remembers, yeah, it started a few days after the vision when I came in company with that minister, who I thought should be my friend and my ally, who I really needed, and ever since then, people who should have befriended me have been my enemies and have persecuted me. It’s important to understand his present so we can see how it’s shaping his memory of his past.

Scott Woodward:
Can I ask a follow-up on this, too, Steve? Here’s another question from our listeners I think would fit right here. They asked, “How do we engage in constructive interfaith discussions about the tough language that’s used to describe other faiths in the 1838 and 1842 accounts?”

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
For instance, Joseph Smith—History 1:19, he said, “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong. And the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight, and that those professors were all corrupt.” In the 1842 account, he’s a little more concise, but he says, “They told me,” they meaning the Father and the Son, “that all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines. None of them was acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom, and I was expressly commanded to go not after them.” Casey and I have taken our swing in previous episodes to try to address this. What would you say? How do we engage in constructive interfaith discussion when you have this kind of tough language?

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah. That’s a terrific question. One way to approach it is to think of what you’re doing as an act of love, right? So it’s not a good idea to think of yourself as superior to some other Christian or person of any other kind of faith or no faith, but it is fine to think of some things as true and some things as not true and some things as less true. So if you had the truth, if you had the fact of the matter, if you knew it, or thought you did, that God had appeared to a young man in western New York and had ushered in a new gospel dispensation of fullness, then you would not be a true Christian if you didn’t offer that to every other person on this earth. You would not be a true follower of Jesus if you didn’t take that Pearl of Great Price and share it with every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. So we live in a hypersensitive time where we’re so worried about hurting feelings, and I’m not advocating being a jerk to other people, okay? And I would have people be aware here that Joseph Smith is hurting. He’s traumatized. And some of this language is the fruit of trauma, of a lifetime of being beaten, imprisoned, having his family subjected to terrible circumstances and his people be driven. A governor has issued an order saying, your people should be exterminated from my state. When that happens, you get defensive. So let’s give Joseph some slack. Notice that his other accounts are not as hostile in their language, but it’s still the case that he says, the Lord told me they were believing in incorrect doctrines. Well, that’s another way of saying that creeds are an abomination. The creeds are wrong about the nature of God and Christ. If you believe in the Restoration, that’s a fact. And if Latter-day Saints don’t offer that truth to our brothers and sisters everywhere else, we’re not acting very lovingly toward them. Now, we claim the privilege of worshiping God according to the dictates of our conscience, and we allow them the same privilege. And I should be at least as interested in what they have to offer me as I would like them to be in what I have to offer them. So I can’t—if I’m hypocritical, if I’m condescending, if I’m self-righteous or superior, I’m not following Jesus in my interfaith efforts or my ministry. But if I am trying to, sincerely as I possibly can, give to all of God’s children the things that are the most precious to me, then I can’t hold back from saying this is what I think is absolutely the truth, and I want to give it to you. I want you to have the opportunity to see if it’s what you have been looking for. And of course, for many, many people, it is. So I think we can’t hedge on the truths that have been restored through Joseph Smith, but we can be Christian in the way we engage our brothers and sisters in our interfaith dialogue. Casey’s actually really fantastic at this. I’m not so good at it myself. I’m more of a controversial person, but Casey’s really good at treating people the way he would like to be treated and offering all the truths that he knows and not expecting that he’s better than someone else or unwilling to listen to what they have to offer to us.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’ll just offer an aw, shucks. That is a major compliment. Thanks, Steve. We’ve only got you for a few more moments, so I want to jump to a question. You wrote a wonderful article, and it’s tied to your Oxford book on the First Vision called Raising the Stakes. Talks about how over time the First Vision has increased in significance to Latter-day Saints, and I guess the question is—well, let me let me phrase it the way one of our listeners did: “Was it inevitable that members and leaders of the church would raise the stakes about the significance of the vision over the decades, and was that a helpful development? Do you think the First Vision should be the centerpiece, or should we have a broader perspective? What are the pros and cons?”

Steven C. Harper:
Oh, yeah. Great. Cool questions. So that article argues that the First Vision’s place in our memory, our collective Latter–day Saint memory, is not inevitable, and it traces how that came to be. It might surprise some listeners to know that the First Vision was not first and foremost the fact of our story to the earliest Latter-day Saints, not for a couple of generations, and that it began to become so around 1880 when it became canonized in the Pearl of Great Price. But even then it took a couple of generations or more. So it was not inevitable. It was the result of several really important contingencies, decisions, choices, and I’ll just refer people to that article if they want to learn more about that. It’s free. I’m not trying to sell anything. It’s at byustudies.byu.edu. If you just Googled “raising the stakes BYU First Vision,” it would turn it up. So I think of history as way more interesting when I think of it as full of human agency. The interplay between God’s guarantees and human agency is fascinating to me: probably the most fascinating historical dynamic that there is. And so I don’t think of very many things as inevitable. I think of the ultimate outcomes of God’s promises as inevitable, but how we get there and the rollercoaster ride between here and there is full of human choices and contingencies that could go all kinds of ways, depending on what we decide to do.

Scott Woodward:
Love that. All right, here’s an impossible question to answer, but I want to know your thoughts on this, Steve. One of our listeners asked, “If we had an 1820 record of Joseph’s experience, would we be impressed by it? Would it be better than the later memories?”

Steven C. Harper:
I can’t answer the subjective parts of that because I just don’t know, but there are really interesting ways to think about that whole question. If we had an 1820 record of his experience, what we would notice is that it would be—overwhelmingly it would be factual memory. Like verse 21 of the Joseph Smith—History and the Pearl of Great Price, factual meaning it would record the things that Joseph experienced, or some of them. Not all of them, certainly. It would say things like, I read this verse, I went to the woods, I knelt where I—the place I stuck my axe. Who knows what else it would say, but it would have the facts, but it would have very little of the interpretive memory that you get in verses 22, 23, 24, because you can’t form that memory until you have space to look back on the experience and think about what it means, how to best interpret it. You don’t say things like, “I have often thought then and since,” right? You don’t have this 15-plus years of persecution to tie back to that original event. So if we had a journal entry, it would give us factual memory and maybe some initial reactions. Maybe it would say, yeah, I finally had my Methodist conversion experience just like the minister told me I would. Can’t wait to talk to him a few days from now, and I’m going to see him and tell him all about it. It would have that kind of short-term understanding of what just happened, but it wouldn’t have the longer interpretive framework. It wouldn’t tell us what it meant to Joseph over time. It would tell us what it meant to him at the time.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, so good. Well, Steve, thank you so much for being with us today. I want to let you have the last word here. You have studied the First Vision more than anyone that I know, probably more than anybody currently living, and we’re so thankful for your scholarship. How would you like to end? I mean, you’re a believer, Steve. Still, after having studied everything about the First Vision that there is to study, you’re still a believer. What do you want to say about that, about Steve Harper, the believer in the First Vision?

Steven C. Harper:
Yeah, you’re right about that. I am a believer. I believe President J. Reuben Clark was right that the First Vision is a historical reality. I think that that is one of the most wonderful truths in the world. Jesus Christ is the sinless Son of God. He was resurrected from the dead. And not just that, they came again in this dispensation and restored their gospel, and it’s for everyone. It’s not for people who are currently Latter-day Saints and no one else. And that’s why we do this kind of stuff where we tell everyone the good news that we know, right? We’re not trying to tear anyone else down. We’re trying to do what Doctrine and Covenants 10 says, which is to “build up my church.” And when Jesus says that in that verse, he means Christianity. The restored gospel is the leaven of the Lord’s church across the whole earth. So I am grateful that we have the accounts of the vision. There’s so much rich evidence, and it all testifies that God is good. God is loving, right? There’s a deep question in Joseph’s mind about whether God is the Presbyterian version of the 1820s and before or the Methodist version. And another way of saying that is, is God damning me to hell, or is God offering me a chance at His grace if I reach out to Him? And the answer is God is offering me all of His grace if I reach out to Him. That’s what Joseph learned in the grove. That is the truth. God is good. God is full of love for all of us.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Steven C. Harper:
A Presbyterian minister in a very famous sermon in 1741 said, “God abhors you.” And Joseph Smith learned that that wasn’t the case, that—he learned, as the beautiful hymn puts it, “Joseph sought the God of love,” and he found him in the woods in Western New York. And because of that, I know that there’s a God of love so that when I need to go and get forgiveness for my sins, I know where to turn. I know that I have a Savior and a Redeemer in Jesus Christ, who’s just as interested in us here now as He was ever in them there then. I’m thankful for the chance to bear that witness to anybody who is interested in it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Amen.

Scott Woodward:
Awesome. And thanks so much, Steve.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We appreciate your time.

Steven C. Harper:
Thanks, fellas.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. For more of Dr. Steven C. Harper’s scholarship on the First Vision and many other church history topics, We recommend you start by going to his website at stevencraigharper.com. That’s Steven with a V. Today’s episode was produced by Zander Sturgill and Scott Woodward, edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.