Monday, October 21, 2019

Steven C. Harper on Evidence of Early Retellings of the First Vision by Joseph Smith


Commenting on early retellings of the First Vision by Joseph Smith, Steven Harper wrote:

Joseph Smith’s reluctance to tell of his first vision apparently ended in the early to mid-1830s . . . recent research related to The Joseph Smith Papers shows that as early as 1833, Smith remembered the vision with believers, who then communicated it to others. These tellings and retellings formed a transactive memory, “a set of individual memory systems in combination with the communication that takes place between [the] individuals” (Daniel M. Wegner, “Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind,” in Theories of Group Behavior, ed. Brian Mullen and George R. Goethals [New York: Springer-Verlage, 1987], 186) . . . .By telling memories of his vision, Smith shared it in several ways, making those who heard co-owners in a sense, and giving them some power over how the story was told, remembered, and communicated . . . Historians have long wondered why Smith “withheld the vision from the public until 1840,” but the newly discovered evidence shows that he shared it, at least with some believers. He may have delayed publication, but he told the vision story repeatedly, perhaps often, in private settings, earlier and more frequently than has been previously thought. (Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins [New York: Oxford University Press, 2019], 53, 54, 56)

Harper then provides examples of the evidence of Joseph sharing the vision very early on, such as:

While preaching in Salt Lake City in 1853, Milo Andrus remembered that, at age nineteen, about 1833, he listened to “the testimony of that man Joseph Smith”—how Smith envisioned a glorious angel in the woods “and trees seemed to be consumed in blaze” as he learned that “darkness covered the earth” and the Christian creeds were “universally wrong” (Milo Andrus, July 17, 1853, papers of George D. Watts, MS 4534, box 2, disk 1. May 1853-July 1853 images 231-256. Partial transcript in CR 100 317, box 2, folder 15. Transcribed by LaJean Purcell Carruth, October 3, 2012, corrected October 2013).

In late 1839 Joseph Curtis wrote, “In the spring of 1835 Joseph Smith . . . came to Michigan & paid us a visit.” While there, Smith explained to believers “the reason why he preached the doctrine he did.” Curtis remembered Smith telling the story of sectarian revival, how members of his family joined in the excitement, and how he felt anxious and found guidance in James 1:5. “Believing it,” Curtis wrote, “he went with a determination to obtain to enquire of the lord himself after some struggle the Lord manifested to him that the different sects were rong” (Joseph Curtis, “History of Joseph Curtis,” MS 1654, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, 5) . . . Mary Horne, one of those converts, heard the story, perhaps repeatedly from Joseph Smith himself in Toronto in the summer of 1837. She was among the few who accompanied her prophet as he visited each congregation. “I heard him relate his first vision when the Father and Son appeared to him,” she remembered. And, like others who are on record, she noted the emotional power of the telling, an element that helped the memory endure and increased her desire and ability to communicate it later (M. Isabella Horne, “The Prophet Joseph Smith, Testimony of Sister M. Isabella Horne,” Relief Society Magazine, March 1951, 158-60) . . . a boy named John Alger heard Smith saying that God “touched his eyes with his finger and said, ‘Joseph, this is my Beloved Son, hear Him.’ As soon as the Lord had touched his eyes with his finger he immediately saw the Savior.” This experience endured in Alger’s memory, and he passed it onto others (A. Karl Larson and Katherine Miles Larson, eds., The Diary of Charles Lowell Walker [Logan: Utah State University Press, 1980], 1:755-56). (Ibid., 53-55)

With respect to John Alger’s account and belief in God as corporeal, Harper notes:

According to Walker, Alger “told us at the bottom of the meeting house steps that he was in the House of Father Smith in Kirtland when Joseph made this declaration, and that Joseph while speaking of it put his finger to his right eye, suiting the action with the words so as to illustrate and at the same time impress the occurrence on the minds of those unto whom He was speaking.” Wilford Woodruff preached in 1837 that God was embodied. See Thomas G. Alexander, Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993], 58). (Ibid., 57 n. 15)