SANDY, UTAH

Joseph Smith's First Vision in which he saw the Father and the Son during the spring of 1820 may be the best-documented theophany in history, said Steven C. Harper in his Aug. 4 FAIR Conference address.

"In the 1830s and '40s, Joseph wrote or enabled scribes to write eight known documents declaring that the Lord opened the heavens upon him," said Brother Harper, associate chair of the Department of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. Five of the documents are unique, with the other three being copies of previous ones, and five other writers documented the event during Joseph's lifetime, said Brother Harper, who is an editor in the Joseph Smith Papers Project of the Church History Department.

"Scholars would be thrilled to have that much direct and indirect documentation of Moses' encounter at the burning bush, Isaiah's vision of the heavenly temple or Paul's experience on the road to Damascus," remarked Brother Harper. He noted that Joseph worked hard to document his experience in the Sacred Grove and that scholars have worked hard to raise awareness of his several accounts, with images of the Prophet's own direct statements being available in the Church's archives.

"Even so, they are little known by most Latter-day Saints and others," he said. "Strangely, some believers do not want to know the plentiful historical record. They can hardly be troubled with Joseph's efforts to capture his sublime experience.

"Some critics, meanwhile, assume that the documentary richness shows Joseph to be a fraud."

Brother Harper commented that as seekers thirst for all the evidence and examine it for themselves, "they read, remember and ponder Joseph's descriptions, they seek understanding and verification. My presentation is for them."

He outlined a few of the more prominent accounts of the vision, then spoke of three criticisms of it separated widely in time:

Photo by R. Scott Lloyd

Closeup of Joseph Smith handwritten account of First Vision

The Methodist minister to whom Joseph confided a few days after his experience and who treated it contemptuously, saying there was no such thing as visions in modern times.

Fawn Brodie's biography of No Man Knows My History, written more than a century later.

A generation thereafter, the Rev. Wesley Walters' charge — later discredited — that Joseph invented the revivalism the Prophet said prompted his seeking of the Lord and preceded his encounter with the Father and the Son in the grove.

"Each of these three arguments begins with the premise that it could not have happened as Joseph described it," Brother Harper observed. He characterized such reasoning by the Latin term a priori, or that which is essentially assumed and does not rely on experience or verification, but rather is based on definitions and widely held beliefs.

"The critics' a priori preconceived certainty that the vision never happened as Joseph Smith said it did prevents them from exploring the variety of possibilities that the historical accounts offer," he said. "All of the unbelieving accounts share a common hermeneutic, or interpretive method, sometimes called the hermeneutic of suspicion, which in this case simply means interpreting Joseph Smith's statements skeptically, unwilling to trust that he might be telling the truth.

"One historian who doesn't believe Joseph Smith said that he couldn't trust the accounts of the vision because they were subjective, and it was his job to figure out what really happened. By what method, I wonder, is this scholar going to discover what actually happened when he is unwilling to trust the only eyewitness.

"Such historians assume God-like abilities to know. They don't seem to grasp the profound irony that they're replacing the subjectivity of historical witnesses, granted, with their own. I call their methods 'subjectivity squared.' They dismiss the historical documents, and they severely limit possible interpretations by predetermining that Joseph Smith's accounts cannot be possible."

Brother Harper said he worries that the danger of closed-mindedness is as real for believers as it is for skeptics, that some believers are "just as likely to begin with preconceived notions rather than a willingness to go where Joseph's accounts lead them."

"Many assume, for instance, that Joseph told his family of the vision immediately, or that he wrote it immediately, or that he understood all of its implications perfectly or consistently through the years, or that he would always remember or tell the exact same story, that it would always be recorded and transmitted the same. But none of those assumptions is supported by the evidence."