Joseph Smith's First Vision: The 1832 Account They Kept in a Safe

There's an earlier First Vision account — written in Joseph's own hand, kept in a church official's personal safe for decades. It describes a different age, a different reason, and one being, not two.

Joseph Smith wrote the earliest account of the First Vision in 1832 — in his own hand, without a scribe. In it, he's in his sixteenth year, not his fourteenth. He doesn't go to pray because he's confused about which church to join. He goes because he already knows the churches have gone wrong. And one being appears: "I saw the Lord." No God the Father. No two Personages.

That account sat in the Church Historian's Office for 133 years. The pages were cut from Joseph's letterbook. The repair tape is cellophane — invented in 1930. The pages were held in Joseph Fielding Smith's personal office safe until a BYU graduate student's 1965 master's thesis made them available to scholars. The church got to call it a discovery.

Jess and Hannah work through all four Joseph-authored accounts, the Gospel Topics Essay's memory-variation argument and its specific limit, the rhetorical moves the essay makes around the phrase "I saw the Lord," and what it means to have borne testimony of one account of one event your entire life — without ever being given the earliest version of that event.

The memory argument applies to accounts people can access. It doesn't reach a document that was in a safe.

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