In 1820, at the age of 14, Joseph Smith was wracked with religious confusion. Spurred by a religious revival in his area, he wanted to know which church he should join. Smith took up the counsel of James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God…” and went off into a nearby grove to pray for an answer.

While in prayer, Smith was overtaken by a dark demonic power—so much so that he was rendered paralyzed and mute. He was delivered from this power by “two personages” (God the Father & the Son), who descended above him in a bright beam of light.

God told him that the “professors” of the different denominations were “corrupt” and that “all their creeds were an abomination in [my] sight;” he was commanded to join none of them. This story subjected Smith to “bitter persecution” from all religious sects in the area.

Above is the official version of the First Vision that was written in 1838, nearly twenty years after the event supposedly happened, and which today appears in LDS scriptures. The story is fundamental to the founding of Mormonism and most members accept this account uncritically. But its veracity has been the matter of much debate.

There were 14 published accounts of the First Vision during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, of which Smith wrote or dictated 4. And among the various accounts, there are glaring omissions and discrepancies. Here, I will discuss (albeit cursorily) a few of them. But before I do that, it’s important to understand Joseph Smith’s environment.

Early 19th century upstate New York was a breeding ground for many religious movements—the Shakers, the Oneida Society, Millerism, Mormonism, et al. And in so hyperreligious a climate, spiritual experiences like Smith’s were almost commonplace.

In 1815, Norris Stearns published an account of God and Jesus Christ appearing to him in a “bodily shape like a man.” Evangelist Charles G. Finney, in 1821, went to a grove to pray, but when he began, he was arrested by a feeling of despair and was unable to speak. In 1823, Asa Wild reported a vision of Christ in Amsterdam, New York, telling him that all the churches were false. And three years later, a preacher at the Palmyra Academy said he saw Christ descend “in a glare of brightness, exceeding ten-fold the brilliancy of the meridian Sun.”

Some of these stories were printed in the local press and widely known. Yet there is little evidence that Smith’s experience—despite his claimed persecution—received any such attention. Virtually nothing was written about the First Vision in the several years following its occurrence. In fact, as LDS historian James B. Allen wrote in a 1966 Dialogue article, “the general [early] membership of the Church knew little, if anything, about it.” Not until the church abandoned polygamy did the First Vision receive significant emphasis.

The earliest accounts we have of anything resembling the First Vision date to 1827 and read as frontier tall tales. Willard Chase and Joseph Knight Jr. knew the Smith family from their involvement in “money-digging,” a practice where hidden treasure was sought using divining rods or seer stones. Chase employed Smith for this service, and Knight occasionally worked alongside Smith in the money-digging ventures. Both men heard from the Smith family that Joseph Smith had seen a spirit who informed him of a buried ancient record written upon gold plates.

Mormons will recognize this as the Moroni encounter, not the First Vision story. It seems that Joseph Smith did not readily share the more overtly religious story of the First Vision until 1832, many years after the event’s supposed occurrence, and a time when Smith was trying to establish himself as the leader of a new church.

In the 1832 account, Smith writes that he felt convicted of his sins after studying the Bible. He then went into the woods to “cry unto the Lord for mercy.” The Lord heard his prayer and descended from the heavens in “pillar of light.” The Lord forgave Smith of all his transgressions, admonished him to keep the commandments, and warned that the judgment of the world was nigh. Then, a few years later, Smith was visited by an angel who also forgave Smith of his sins and told him about the plates.

This story will sound more familiar to Mormons, but it is still markedly different from the official 1838 account. According to the 1832 account, Smith didn’t wonder which church was true—he had already determined that no church was “built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” This prayer was also not concerned with his salvation, as it is in the 1832 account. He doesn’t say that both God and Jesus Christ were present, only the latter. And Smith puts his age at 15, not 14, in this account.

In 1834-35, Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith published the first history of Mormonism in The Messenger and Advocate, an LDS periodical. This account credits a local religious revival for instilling in Smith a desire to receive a remission of his sins and to “know for himself of the certainty and reality of pure and holy religion.” More than that, he wanted to know if a Supreme Being existed at all. An angel appeared in his bedroom—as opposed to in a grove—and told Smith his sins were forgiven and informed him of the existence and location of the gold plates. Here, Cowdery recalls that Smith was 17.

The Messenger and Advocate’s account is interesting because it combines Smith’s concerns over salvation with the revelation about the gold plates. Some previous accounts and all subsequent ones split these elements into two distinct events separated by three years (the First Vision and Moroni’s bedside visitation), as Mormons understand it to be the case today. Cowdery, though, wasn’t alone in conflating the First Vision and Moroni’s visitation. Lucy Mack Smith does the same in her biography of her son, as does William Smith, Joseph’s brother.

Also in 1835, Joseph Smith shared a version of the First Vision with Joshua the Jewish minister. This time, Smith is 14. He sees two unidentified personages and many angels. He also reports that at 17, he saw “another vision of angels,” which would suggest he was visited by more than just Moroni. That same year, he gave a similar account to Erastus Holmes, in which he only mentions being visited by angels in 1820.

These are the accounts that precede the canonized 1838 account, from which they differ considerably. To review:

How old was Joseph Smith at the time of the First Vision? 14? 15? Cowdery says he was 17. Age may be a minor difference, but it is a difference all the same.

Who exactly did Smith see? Two unnamed angels? A multitude of angels? Just the angel Moroni? Jesus Christ? Both God the Father and the Son? These discrepancies are sometimes explained as part of Smith’s evolving understanding of God. It’s argued that when Smith held a vaguely trinitarian (or more accurately, modalist) view of God, as is evident in several verses of the Book of Mormon, he reported seeing one personage.  But once he taught that God the Father and the Son were distinct beings, he reported seeing two personages. So the doctrine informed the First Vision, and not vice versa.

Mormon apologists deny that this is the case. They claim that Smith long understood God the Father and the Son to be distinct. In an 1831 vision, for example, John Whitmer and Joseph Smith “saw the heavens opened, and the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the Father…” In other words, Smith saw two personages in this vision. But curiously, just a year later in his 1832 account, Smith wrote that he saw one personage at the First Vision—the Lord. So I’m not totally convinced that Smith’s evolving understanding of God accounts for the disparate reports of what Smith saw at the First Vision.

Another difference among the accounts concern Smith’s motivation. Was it to receive a remission of sin? To find out which church to join? To find out if God even exists? A couple of accounts credit a local religious revival as the impetus for Smith’s taking to the grove in prayer. There seems to have been no such revival in the Palmyra area around 1820. But revival or no, there certainly would have been plenty of religious excitement to inspire Smith’s prayerful questions.

These differences are important because they belie any one account’s credibility. It gives us reason to doubt that the official 1838 account is a reliable recollection of the First Vision. Marvin S. Hill, an American history professor at Brigham Young University, suggested that if any one account should be trusted, it is the 1832 account written by Smith himself.

So what best explains the evolution of the First Vision? “When Joseph began his autobiography in 1838,” Fawn Brodie writes in No Man Knows My History, “he was writing not of his own life but of one who had already become the most celebrated prophet of the nineteenth century. And he was writing for his own people” (25).

Grant H. Palmer, a former LDS educator, makes a similar point in his book An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins:

A leadership crisis began in Kirtland on 7 November 1837. Frederick G. Williams, a counselor in the First Presidency, left the church…On 10 March 1838, John Whitmer, one of the eight witnesses to the Book of Mormon, was excommunicated. On 25 March, Martin Harris told a public meeting that none of the witnesses had physically seen or handled the plates, that they had not seen the plates with their “natural eyes.” As a result, Apostles John F. Boynton, Luke Johnson, and other church members renounced the Book of Mormon (246).

Palmer’s argument is basically that Smith wrote the 1838 account with the above crisis in mind in order to shore up his support. There’s an obvious logic to this explanation, but I find it ultimately unsatisfying. If the 1838 account was primarily a response to an immediate crisis, why would Smith wait until 1842 to have it published?

I think that people generally just have a tendency to embellish their experiences over time. Joseph Smith was probably no exception. Daniel Hendrix, who helped set the type for the Book of Mormon, said that Smith “could never tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination…” What’s more, Smith’s embellishments needn’t have been calculated. Not only do people misremember things (especially about ethereal experiences), they often unknowingly manufacture memories.

But unlike some Joseph Smith’s detractors, I actually believe that he had some seminal religious experience in his youth. I don’t believe, however, that it was an actual encounter with the divine. I think it was instead a case of sleep paralysis. When I was Mormon, I mistook my episodes of sleep paralysis to be profound religious experiences. Smith could have easily made the same mistake.

Dr. Robert Bushman, a linguist and instructional psychologist, persuasively argues that the First Vision was an out-of-body experience (closely related to sleep paralysis). He notes that paralytic seizure and seeing a being or beings within a light are common characteristics of out-of-body experiences; these phenomena are often present in alleged alien abductions, for instance.

Much more can be said (and has been) about the First Vision. I just wanted to briefly address a few of the disparities among the accounts (a full comparison chart of the different accounts can be found here and offer a naturalistic explanation of the First Vision—one that does not necessarily dismiss Joseph Smith as insincere or dishonest.

I hope that my LDS readers will wrestle with the different accounts and their implications. And for my fellow atheists and ex-Mormons, I hope that you’ll be careful not to overstate the contradictions among the accounts. You may remember that I attempted a First Vision post last month, but took it down after a friend of mine identified a serious factual error. My mistake was that I relied on a source (lds-mormon.com) that omitted a critical part of the 1832 First Vision account—a part that effectively rebutted a popular claim that the 1834-35 account by Smith and Cowdery was the first to distinguish Moroni’s visitation from the First Vision. I have tried to be more responsible with my research this time around. But this article is still a work in progress, so don’t take this (or anything I write) as foolproof.

As always, your criticisms and suggestions are welcome.