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To the Seeker of Truth,
In the CES Letter, Jeremy Runnels described a dozen major concerns including the first vision. He listed facts and interpretations by historians, none of which were new but all of which were new to him. “I did not know there are multiple first vision accounts,” Jeremy wrote. “I did not know of their contradictions or that the Church members did not know about a first vision until 12-22 years after it supposedly happened. I was unaware of these omissions in the mission field.”
The purpose of this post is to help Jeremy and anyone else who thinks and feels similarly to start their quest for answers by asking open questions. Not all questions are equally useful to seekers. Biased questions lead to biased answers. David Hackett Fischer is an outstanding historian who has won a Pulitzer Prize and other awards for his work. In his book Historians’ Fallacies, Fischer says that the best questions “have an open end, which will allow a free and honest choice, with minimal bias and maximal flexibility.”[1] Declarative questions violate this rule. They think too fast. They reveal bias.
Dan Vogel knows all the facts about Joseph's vision accounts but he approached them with this declarative question: “When Smith fails to mention foundational visions until years after the event and gives conflicting and anachronistic accounts of them, how certain can one be that he relates events as he experienced them at the time?”[2]
That question is based on the heuristic–or mental shortcut–that the psychologist Daniel Kahaneman described as "what you see is all there is." The question does not prove that Joseph Smith failed to mention his vision for years, it assumes that he did not. No one knows for sure what Joseph said about his vision and when. All we know is that the historical records available to us say that he told a minister of the vision a few days after it, and that he could not find anyone who believed him. To say Joseph failed to mention the vision for years assumes knowledge that does not exist. Knowing that we have an account of the vision, written in Joseph’s hand, dating to 1832, is not the same as knowing that Joseph did not say or write or dictate anything about the vision prior to that. And the word fails reveals bias.
The claim that Joseph’s vision accounts are conflicting and anachronistic (out of historical order) is not a fact. It is an interpretation of verifiable facts. All scholars of Joseph’s First Vision know the same verifiable facts and they disagree about whether the accounts are conflicting and anachronistic.[3] The determinant of this difference is not simply faith in the Restoration or lack thereof, because Stephen Prothero, a highly-regarded, non-LDS religion scholar, answered the question this way: “Critics of Mormonism have delighted in the discrepancies between this canonical account and earlier renditions, especially one written in Smith’s own hand in 1832. . . . Such complaints, however, are much ado about relatively nothing. Any good lawyer (or historian) would expect to find contradictions in competing narratives written down years apart and decades after the event. And despite the contradictions, key elements abide.”[4]
So think about the questions you and others ask. Seeking questions are open-ended, free, and honest. They have minimal bias and maximum flexibility. Discern the difference between what you know–really, actually know–and what you've simply heard or assumed.
We can know everything the First Vision accounts say and still not know whether Joseph saw a vision in the woods of western New York. Knowing Joseph Smith’s testimony comes from historical research. Knowing that his testimony is true requires revelation, for which, thankfully, we can ask of God in faith (see James 1:5–6). We can only come to know for sure whether Joseph testified truly by following his successful way of seeking knowledge. It may not work if we are less tenacious than he was. Asking declarative questions is intellectually dishonest and lazy. And any intellectual or spiritual laziness will hedge the way to knowledge. So will any motivation other than sincere desire to know the truth. The restored way to know is not to “just pray about it.” It is to read, remember, ponder, and repent, all with a sincere heart, faith in Jesus Christ, and real intent. Those who do that work come to know by the power of the Holy Ghost. They know what they know. They know how they know. Like Joseph, they can say, “I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it” (Joseph Smith—History 1:25).
Sincerely,
Steven C. Harper
[1] David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Perennial, 1970), 24.
[2] Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature, 2004), xv.
[3] Ann Taves and Steven C. Harper, “Joseph Smith’s First Vision: New Methods for the Analysis of Experience-Related Texts,” Mormon Studies Review 3 (2016): 53–84. See also Ann Taves, “First Vision Controversies,” BYU Studies Quarterly 59 no. 2 (2020).
[4] Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 171.
Biography:
Dr. Steven C. Harper is a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University and the editor-in-chief of BYU Studies Quarterly. He holds a PhD in early American history from Lehigh University, where he was a Lawrence Henry Gipson Fellow. Dr. Harper's academic journey includes teaching at BYU campuses in Hawaii and Utah, and serving as a volume editor for The Joseph Smith Papers and managing historian and a general editor of Saints: The Story of The Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter-days. He has authored several significant works including Promised Land (2006), a study of colonial Pennsylvania’s dispossession of the Lenape, and First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (2019), which received the Smith-Petit Best Book Award. He has published dozens of articles and is currently working on a study of The Doctrine and Covenants to be published in the Guides to Sacred Texts series by Oxford University Press.
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