The First Visions

 

I broke my own code in a lot of my analysis of Section 1. Because most of the other sections are chronological, we'll get a chance to get back up to speed, but I consider an understanding of context one of the most cardinal hermeneutic principles, and I didn't give enough. The words means things themselves, but unless you have a decent sense of who is writing, to whom, under what circumstances, as framed by which general discursive fields (the conjuncture of historical forces, current debates, broader intellectual movements relevant to the text, etc.), you're very likely to misinterpret something, and maybe even something pivotal.

So let's do a little work establishing things here. Joseph Smith is writing his own account of a heavenly visitation he claims to have received in 1820. The version we're reading, penned in 1838 by dictation to a scribe for publication purposes, is canon as of 1880. But it is not the first recording, and is not considered canonical at the date of its publication. While there are times a prophet speaks authoritatively and the Lord's words must be carried out immediately, this record is of a more testimonial nature, and is more rich in implications than instructions or doctrinal explanation. And while Smith told oral versions of this story to many over the years, even his first written version was 12 years after the fact, in 1832.  Why then?  Why wait 12 years before publishing a first account of something so important?

In the summer of 1832, Joseph's wife of 5 years was pregnant with their 4th child, but the first three had died, as well as one of the twins they had adopted when their own survived only hours after birth. This was also a time of the early spread of the Church. Just 2 years prior, the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon was complete and the Church was restored, and even more recently revelations had been received calling on the Saints to relocate from wherever they originally converted through first missionary efforts to Kirtland, Ohio.

And while growth in the church was robust, so was pushback. Competing churches decried the doctrine and local newspapers were happy to publish inaccuracies mingled with facts so long as it sold copies, which it seemed to in direct proportion to the growth of the church. This is especially important in a protestant world of remunerated pastors whose livelihoods, not just doctrines, would be under threat by a popular Christian denomination preaching that authority didn't come from votes or degrees, and that local priests should provide their own material support and not be compensated for preaching and ministry. Worse, if the Joseph's story were taken seriously, it implies no need for them as intermediaries--either dispensers of authority or dispenser's of Biblical interpretation. 

Joseph's main prophetic priority at this time was split between revelatory work on a revision of the Bible and meeting the various and frequent administrative needs, which included caring for the training and spiritual needs of growing numbers of converts, group and doctrinal discipline (there was at least one competing "prophet" who had deceived some from the inside) and the codification and editing of the "Book of Commandments" for first publication. But public affairs was also a concern and discipline was sometimes thorny, and more than one disaffected recent convert turned sour enough to publish biased and distorted testimony, or worse. A few short months before the first written First Vision was penned, Joseph was tarred and feathered by a mob led by just one such disgruntled ex-member.

It is in this environment--a young, inexperienced father, acquainted with grief and 3rd degree burns, in a barely civilized land of nominal freedom, but in which mob rule was often more likely to settle a dispute than a constitutionally conforming judiciary, under the intense pressures of leadership--that Smith relays the details he deems salient for others to read on his personal story of conviction for sin and answers to prayers, mustering his entire 2nd grade education to write it himself. This is a departure. His norm since obtaining the gold plates seems to have been prioritizing the publishing of translation, and revelation, and the administration of church and community affairs. His concentration, in other words, was on recording God's words and work to the world, not his own faith journey. 

What are those details? While there are significant shifts of focus and detail between the various accounts he gave and others shared that he gave, the canonical version lays out the same basic framework of a youth stymied by competing interpretations of scripture, noting the mismatch between doctrine and behavior and between Biblical and extra-biblical elements of extant churches, and faithful prayer, with intent to act upon it, that led to a theophany. The visit from the Lord spoke of forgiveness from sin, testified that Christ was He who atones, and then warned of an impending anger against unrighteousness, and about lips near Him, but hearts far from Him--all of which confirmed Joseph's tentative conclusions previously drawn from scripture and observation. This early manuscript version clearly establishes the pattern, accessible to all, of personal experience with God, of aloofness from already established Christian denominations, and of the Savior actively and personally directing the preparations for the judgment at His second coming. But it doesn't as clearly do three things: 1. claim God the Father was there and spoke first; 2. claim Smith was interested in joining one of the churches, but was told not to; 3. claim Smith was told he would be a prophet to restore the church.

Tackling those back to front, the 3rd thing isn't in the 1838 canonized version either. That's a misconception critics and uncareful readers assume. The other two, however, are real and are addressed in the following paragraphs.

I have a hard time reconciling point #2. The more polished 1838 version contains the parenthetical comment in verse 18 "(for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)." The 1832 version reads: "my mind become excedingly distressed for I become convicted of my sins and by searching the scriptures I found that mand <​mankind​> did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatised from the true and liveing faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament." In other words, The 1832 version makes the sacred grove theophany sound like it was about mercy for the inability for himself or anyone to be saved from sin because there were no Biblically accurate organizations available to administer the Gospel, whereas the 1838 version makes the primary question about wanting to join one, but not knowing which and not knowing "none" would be the answer.

What strikes me is how the earlier record seems to draw a different picture of Smith's confidence level in his own calling as prophet. By 1832 he has already had massive and extended experiences with angelic visitations, translations, and other revelations. The content of some of the revelations prior to this date include a Book of Mormon passage all but naming him outright as a prophet so pivotal that his namesake, the original Joseph of Egypt, had prophesied about his role three and a half millenia beforehand. And the preface to the Doctrine and Covenants itself made explicit the principle that the Lord speaks by servants. So he should be as confident in himself as the Lord is calling him prophet. Why not start with the start and show the progression from First Vision to Moroni's revelation of the gold plates, and on to the other revelations of the Restored Church?

My best hypothesis, for now, is that as authorized as he was, as exemplary as his story could be for others, he wanted to make conversion to the Restored Gospel about Christ, not himself. The pathway to covenantal belonging in the Lord's true church was through accepting Joseph Smith as a prophet, yes, just as accepting the Father--as Pharisees claimed to want--had to come through that same Jesus they rejected. But accepting Smith as a prophet came through discovering the Book of Mormon was true, not through an analysis of Smith's own testimony of his direct dealings with heaven. At least, that was the pattern from 1829 on.

And if that's the case, then it might make a little sense that he was less concerned with crafting a polished response to extant criticisms in the biased press (which seems to be the main motivation in 1838, meaning he had multiple false testimonies to address in a single source then) and more concerned with creating solidarity with new converts, many of whom had drawn similar conclusions--they were convinced of Christ, but knew that none of the denominations claiming to represent Him and His church were Biblically sound.

In other words, it was about structure, not personality for Smith. The main un-named, but unmistakable contrasts from this account that investigators to the church would not fail to note in their day and context is that to gain access to the Lord's forgiveness, one could not rely on intermediaries: neither traditional authorities nor Protestant interpreters. There is a Church, and there is scripture, but God's desire was for a direct mantic connection, not a sophic one that bound Christ up in mediated limits under which God doesn't speak anymore, and miracles are no longer in His toolkit. Joseph's story was of personal salvation, and offered an experiment that all could reproduce. But it was not a doctrinal analysis designed to compel reform through argumentation--instead it was the testimony of a demonstration of the need for an entirely restored paradigm of direct revelation.

In this way, Smith's study and experience noting that New Testament patterns are not present among the various churches led him to a hypothesis and an existential angst that He knew only God could resolve, so he asked for that wisdom under the intention to join a church anyway. And this thought is what reconciles the two versions, finally: the anyway. He sincerely thought they were all in apostasy, but it hadn't yet entered into his heart that this meant he should still NOT join one. At least, to me, this nuance helps me hold the two as possibly consistent on, even with a surface detail that seems contradictory.

Smith was likely more self-effacing when the membership was around a more manageable 2000 than when six more years of growth, a population of over 17 thousand, and the experience of struggle against bad press, mob activity, and bad-faith legal challenges to his leadership. In the summer of 1832, by my very schematic extrapolation, Smith is in the early New Testament phase of his "translation" of the King James Bible. We know he worked on it from June 1830 to July 1833, and if one assumes a fairly consistent pace that speeds up when verses require no changes, this reasonably puts the 600,000 words of the Old Testament upon which only 1300 of the verses required alteration most likely in the rear view mirror by spring 1832 as the 2100 verses he altered among the 180,000 words of the New Testament slowed him down and likely took up the last year of the project. Adding this context help remind us of how fresh on his memory the New Testament passages would have been when feeling inspired to alternate writing duties with Frederick G. Williams in a notebook to make that first record of the First Vision for compilation among other Church history records from its infancy. It must have been striking to Smith how structures, principles, and procedures that had been revealed to him directly in the previous 2-3 years were lining up with the passages he was freshly translating. The pattern was not sola scriptura, it was sola revelatio. And those revelations were both consistent and corrective without the need to address 1800 years of argument and commentary in a precise analog to how Jesus' ministry corrected and restored the Spirit of the Law of Moses to Jews whose commentary and creedal additions had contravened it in the most important of ways in His day.

And therein is why the 1838 version became necessary and remains canonical: with the more explicit detail that the Father was also present with the Son in that pillar of fire, those who believe have no need for Niceae, or for a works-cited list dozens of references long to rebut the false doctrine of the trinity, of the closed canon, of the changeable God who is incapable of miracles and direct revelation today, and of a Christ who is one with His Father in an inexplicable and "mysterious" way. Instead Joseph learned before the first word from either deity was uttered, by sight alone, that they were unified, not conflated; that there was a more tightly analogous way to how we need to become one with Christ--not literally, but symbolically; not in person, but in purpose.

And despite all of this, we should remember that while the authenticity of the 1832 account as a draft document is not contested, there was not a choice to publish it until it was lost and recovered from historical vaults in 1965. What was published was the 1838 canonical account.

This vision, and what it implies, fills me with wonder and hope, and because I've received a witness from the Lord through His Spirit that the Book of Mormon is true, and that Joseph Smith was truly a prophet, I am in pursuit of the Lord's pattern of revelation as Smith was--through study and prayer, faith to act and in expectation of direct direction. The heavens are not closed, His authority remains among His servants, and we can become like Him and His Father, as He taught, through unity of purpose with Them. May we all seek His refinements to our purpose and direction as we approach His Son with our weakness, sin, and lack of wisdom.