The “First Vision” [FV] is a very important and even central claim of modern LDS Mormonism. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s referring to JS’s claim that, as a teenager, God appeared to him in a vision. Most people (especially including most Mormons) know only about the 1838 account, which ended up being canonized by the LDS Church, but there are other versions of this FV, including one handwritten by JS, as well as several others.
The fact that this is even the subject of a GTE means that there are problems with the official accounts. Most LDSs who are even aware of multiple FV accounts dismiss the problems as inconsequential, but some of the discrepancies include age (most of the accounts have JS as 14 years old, but some say 15 or “in my 16th year”), who was seen in the vision (only angels; only “the Lord”, singular; both Heavenly Father and Jesus; or all of the above), what JS was told (some have a primary message that JS’s sins were forgiven, while the message of some of the others is that all the churches were corrupt), and finally, whether there was a revival going on at the time of the FV or not.
I will grant that some of these differences can be more easily overlooked, since when you tell a story, sometimes you include some facts but not others, so just because JS didn’t mention a revival is not the same as him saying, “there was no revival”. [However, based on local church records from the time, there was no revival in 1820, but there was a few years later, with many new members joining the local churches, so that’s another timing issue. Later on, the essay will claim that there actually was a great deal of religious excitement in 1820, but the annual “revival meeting” of 1820 produced no major change (indeed, some churches seemed to post losses in membership) which doesn’t fit with what JS seemed to be saying, whereas in 1824, many local churches posted great increases in membership, which does fit the description of “great spiritual excitement”.]
Outright differences and contradictions, though, are harder to overlook, particularly his age (how can you forget how old you are, when you have a vision of God?!??! — heck, most people clearly remember how old they were when they realized Santa Claus isn’t real [my mom was 6, and an older cousin spilled the beans, and she was devastated; she’s now in her 70s and she still tells exactly the same story, including her age]). Another major issue, in my opinion, is the discrepancy between the 1832 account (written by JS himself) and the 1838 “official” account, with one saying that JS went to pray which church was right “for it never entered into my mind that they were all wrong“, with the other saying that he had already determined that all the churches were wrong before he went to pray, and the FV was in response to his wondering what to do in light of that. These two things are diametrically opposed.
Finally, when it comes to the issue of who and what JS saw in the FV, it doesn’t bother me that in some accounts angels are mentioned and in other accounts they’re not. What bothers me is that in some accounts only the angels are mentioned, and there is no mention of Heavenly Father or Jesus. Pretend we’re not talking about the FV, and instead pretend you’re talking about seeing LDS leaders. Let’s say that you were invited to an event with all 3 members of the First Presidency, plus the whole Q12, as well as some other people (their wives and children, or their secretaries, or whoever), and you actually get to have a conversation with LDS Pres. Nelson as well as some other members of the Q12, then later on you’re telling people about that event. I’m having trouble conceiving of a situation in which you would tell someone about the event, but only tell the person that you had a conversation with Dallin Oaks’s secretary, and never mention that you actually conversed with Pres. Nelson as well. Even if there was some reason to focus on the conversation with the secretary, wouldn’t you still always mention that you spoke to Nelson? The lack of angels in some accounts is, again, not troubling; but the lack of a mention of either Heavenly Father or Jesus in some of the accounts is troubling. Even worse, the earliest accounts written by people other than JS (Mormon or non-Mormon — including Mormon/LDS leaders) only mention that he saw “an angel”, so it seems like adding in Jesus and the Father was a later development. [Edited to add this link to “A Documented History of Joseph Smith’s First Vision“.]
Further, many people are unaware of the fact that the 1832 FV account was actually cut out of the original notebook and hidden away in the private safe of the LDS President for decades, then finally was taped back into the notebook. I give this GTE full marks for posting links to the different accounts, so that you can read the 1832 account here and the 1838 account here. Though I’ve read them, I haven’t studied them, but I think that these two accounts are the most contradictory, with differences that I have already mentioned above (including age 14 vs. 15, whether JS believed the churches were wrong or not, and whether JS saw only “the Lord” or whether he saw Heavenly Father and Jesus). While many LDSs say they have no problem with reconciling these irreconcilable differences, one question I have is, if it presents no problem, why was the account hidden away for so long, as if it were problematic?
This GTE reads very much like what we’ve come to expect from all the GTEs: a smoothing over and minimizing of all the problems, and making the LDS Church look better, and more honest and upright than it actually is. For instance, it says:
“The two unpublished accounts, recorded in Joseph Smith’s earliest autobiography and a later journal, were generally forgotten until historians working for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rediscovered and published them in the 1960s. Since that time, these documents have been discussed repeatedly in Church magazines, in works printed by Church-owned and Church-affiliated presses, and by Latter-day Saint scholars in other venues.“
Why didn’t they say that at least the 1832 account was unknown to historians because it was hidden away in a safe? It also makes it sound like the historians just happened to find the account while going through old boxes somewhere, and rushed to publish the important find, but the reality is much different. You can read full details here (it is a fascinating story!). Finally, the last sentence of the quote makes it sound like once the account was “rediscovered”, it was regularly discussed and promoted by the LDS Church, but, again, that’s not exactly true. There was a write-up in 1970 in an LDS magazine (probably because people had found out about the strange 1832 account, so they needed to explain away as much as they could), but other than a few books (which most members wouldn’t have even heard of, much less read), I doubt they discussed it more than a handful of times between 1970 and 2010 in such venues as General Conference, in LDS Church manuals, and/or in LDS magazines like “The Ensign”. And even when they did mention it in the past, I strongly suspect that most of the times were footnotes or passing mentions, or, like this GTE itself, that they ignored all the problems, difficulties, and differences, and made it sound like it was basically the same as the official FV account. So, even if it was mentioned, that doesn’t mean that the average LDS in the pew actually read or understood it.
Most of the essay is devoted to smoothing over and ignoring and minimizing the differences between the accounts. The other main thing the essay does is to claim that JS’s embellishment of the FV as time went on (much like fishermen’s stories of “the one that got away” tends to grow over time, or Dr. Seuss’s “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street“), is not actual embellishment, but just “evidence of increasing insight, accumulating over time, based on experience.” Um, yeah.
[Edited to add: this website has a list of five claims made by people other than JS, of them having had a vision of God very much like JS’s FV claims. While some of the similarities are to be expected, the sheer number of some of them along with the unusual nature of others, strengthens the case that he was borrowing from them.]
[Mormonism Research Ministry also has responded to the GTEs, either as articles or podcasts on their website here.]
TOYBOM: The One Year Book of Mormon 
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