Across the library

The First Vision accounts

Joseph Smith wrote or dictated four accounts of the First Vision between 1832 and 1842. They are not the same. The earliest, in his own handwriting, describes one personage and says nothing about the churches — every version quoted here, from the primary sources.

Most Latter-day Saints know one version of the First Vision, the one in the Pearl of Great Price. Fewer know it is the third of four, written eighteen years after the event. The earliest was written by Joseph Smith himself in 1832 and sat unpublished in a letterbook until the twentieth century. This page puts all four side by side and quotes each from the primary document. The church acknowledges all of them, and its own framing is worth having in front of you first:

The various accounts of the First Vision tell a consistent story, though naturally they differ in emphasis and detail.

First Vision Accounts, Gospel Topics Essays

Read the four and decide for yourself whether emphasis and detail covers the distance. That is the whole argument, and it is one you can only have honestly with the texts in hand.

1832: in his own handwriting

The earliest account is part of an unfinished history begun in the summer of 1832. Several pages are in Joseph Smith's own hand — one of the very few extended texts he wrote himself rather than dictating. Here is the vision:

and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph <​my son​> thy sins are forgiven thee

Joseph Smith, History, circa Summer 1832, Joseph Smith Papers (original spelling)

Three things in that line are worth noticing. One personage, not two — the Lord, singular. Forgiveness of sins is the message, not a rejection of the churches. And the same document places the event in the 16th year of my age, where the canonical account puts him at fourteen.

The church's essay describes this account's emphasis without dispute:

He emphasized Jesus Christ's Atonement and the personal redemption it offered.

First Vision Accounts, Gospel Topics Essays

1835: two personages, and many angels

On November 9, 1835, Joseph Smith told the story in Kirtland to a visitor calling himself Joshua the Jewish minister — in fact Robert Matthews, an itinerant preacher. His scribe recorded it in the journal that day:

a personage appeard in the midst, of this pillar of flame which was spread all around, and yet nothing consumed, another personage soon appeard like unto the first, he said unto me thy sins are forgiven thee, he testifyed unto me that Jesus Christ is the son of God

Joseph Smith, Journal, 9 November 1835, Joseph Smith Papers (original spelling)

Now there are two personages. The forgiveness of sins is still there, carried over from 1832. And this account contains a detail found in no other version, inserted between the lines of the manuscript:

and I saw many angels in this vision

Joseph Smith, Journal, 9 November 1835, Joseph Smith Papers

1838: the account that became scripture

The version Latter-day Saints memorize was written in 1838 and later canonized as Joseph Smith—History. The church says so directly: The narration of the First Vision best known to Latter-day Saints today is the 1838 account.

When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air.

Joseph Smith—History 1:17, Pearl of Great Price

And here the purpose of the vision is something the 1832 account never mentions — a verdict on the churches:

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.

Joseph Smith—History 1:19, Pearl of Great Price

1842: the Wentworth letter

The fourth account was written for a newspaper editor, John Wentworth, and published in the Times and Seasons on March 1, 1842 — indexed here in full. It is the shortest, and it is the version most nineteenth-century readers outside Utah actually encountered:

I had a heavenly vision and saw two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness, surrounded with a brilliant light which eclipsed the sun at noon-day.

Joseph Smith, Church History (the Wentworth letter), Times and Seasons, March 1, 1842

What actually differs

The pattern is not random. The number of personages goes from one to two and stays there. The angels appear once and never again. And the point of the vision shifts: in 1832 it is a boy forgiven of his sins, and by 1838 it is a commission that founds a church by disqualifying every other one.

How this is argued

Critics read the sequence as a story that grew — a private conversion experience later rebuilt into a founding event. The church reads it as one man telling a true story to different audiences for different purposes across a decade, the way anyone does. Its essay meets the objection head on:

Some have mistakenly argued that any variation in the retelling of the story is evidence of fabrication.

First Vision Accounts, Gospel Topics Essays

Both readings are available to an honest person, and this page is not going to pick one for you. What is not in dispute is the documents themselves — every one of them is published by the church, and every quote above links to the manuscript it came from. The one thing worth refusing is a version of this conversation conducted by people who have not read all four.