nutshell said:
Why are there so many varying accounts of the First Vision? You can see a summary here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7182438254515590608&q=LDS+Mormon+History
Here are some other questions from the video:
First of all, let me say that if you are looking through history hoping to find a perfect man in Joseph Smith, you might as well stop. He wasn't. He could be fooled, he could mess up, he could even sin. My testimony isn't in Joseph Smith the man, but in Joseph Smith the Prophet - and that testimony doesn't come by history books, but through the Holy Ghost. The history books are interesting though, and I enjoy reading them - so here are some answers.
From the FARMS website:
Why do Joseph Smith's various accounts of the first vision differ so much?There are fewer differences between the various accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision than between the five different accounts of the apostle Paul's first vision and his trip to Damascus (Acts 9:1-30; 22:5-21; 26:12-20; Galatians 1:11-24; and 2 Corinthians 11:32-33) or in the various accounts of Christ's resurrection found in the four gospels. (For example, did the men with Paul hear the voice but see no man, as in Acts 9:7, or did they see the light but not hear the voice, as in Acts 22:9?) Indeed, there are no blatant contradictions between Joseph Smith's accounts--only different emphasis--as would be expected when someone recounts an event from his life at different times and in different circumstances.
Thus, for example, the fact that Joseph says in one account that he saw "the Lord" and in another that he saw "two personages" is not contradictory, only a matter of emphasis. And there is no real contradiction between Joseph Smith believing, when he went to pray in the grove, that he should join none of the churches, and the Lord confirming that thought by revelation. After all, he went into the woods to get an answer. If his mind was already made up and he merely needed confirmation, then it fits the pattern in D&C 9:8, where the Lord told Oliver Cowdery, "you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right." The point of the "official" version of Joseph Smith's story is that he received a revelation on the issue. But even that version does not preclude the idea that he had already determined the answer and needed confirmation.
Also, if the first Vision was real...why did JS try to join a Methodist Church a few years later?
From Richard Bushman's "Rough Stone Rolling", Pgs 69-70:
Sometime in this dark period [the time after Martin Harris had lost the manuscript], Joseph attended Methodist meeings with Emma, probably to placate her family. One of Emma's uncles preached as a Methodist lay minister, and a brother-in-law was class leader in Harmony. Joseph was later said to have asked to be enrolled in the class. Joseph Lewis objected to the inclusion of a "practicing necromancer" on the Methodist roll. He confronted Joseph and demanded repentance or removal. For some reason Joseph's name remained on the roll for another six months, although there is no evidence of attendance.
Why did JS not include the First Vision when he wrote the first Church History in 1835?
One possibility is that he very well may have viewed this as a personal experience and not necessarily as a part of Church History.
Here's a bit more from Bushman's book (pg 39 - 40):
At first, Joseph was reluctant to talk about his vision. Most early converts probably never heard about the 1820 vision. "The angel of the Lord says that we must be careful not to proclaim these things or to mention them abroad," he told his parents after on early vision. A subsequent vision of the angel who led him to the gold plates was not mentioned in the first edition of the Book of Mormon. Accounts of John the Baptist and Peter, James and John, other early visions, did not appear in the early editions of the revelations. When he described the First Vision in 1832, he abbreviated the experience.
As Joseph became more confident, more details came out. ...
In the 1835 account and again in 1838, the balance of the two parts of the story - personal forgiveness as contrasted to the apostacy of the churches - shifted. Joseph's own salvation gave way to the opening of a new era of history...
When Joseph came to, he found himself lying on his back. Returning to the house, he spoke to his mother but said almost nothing about the vision. When she asked about his apparent weakness, Joseph said, "Never mind all is well. - I am well enough off." All he would report was that he had learned for himself that Presbyterianism was not true. His refusal to say more may have been the natural reticence of a teenage boy keeping his own counsel, or he may have held back for fear of ridicule. Two or three years later when the angel appeared to him, he again said nothing until explicitly commanded to speak to his father. As late as 1831, he was slow to say much about Moroni. He was not interested in notoriety.
Why does the Book of Abraham not match the translation of the papyra done by academics in 1966?
More from Bushman (pg 291 292)
What was going on as he translated? For many years, Mormons assumed that he sat down with the scrolls, looked at each Egyptian word, and by inspiration understood its meaning in English. He must have been reading from a text, so Mormons thought, much as a conventional translator would do, except the words came by revelation rather than out of his own learning. In 1967, that view of translation suffered a blow when eleven scraps of the Abraham papyri, long since lost and believed to have been burned, were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and given to Latter-day Saint leaders in Salt Lake City. Color pictures were soon printed and scholars went to work. The texts were thought to be the Abraham papyri because Joseph had published facsimiles from the papyri with his translation, and the same pictures appeared on the museum fragments. The translation of these texts by expert Egyptologists would finally prove or disprove Josephs claims to miraculous translating powers. Would any of the language correspond to the text in his Book of Abraham? Some Mormons were crushed when the fragments turned out to be rather conventional funerary texts placed with mummified bodies, in this case Hor, to assure continuing life as an immortal god. According to the Egyptologists, nothing on the fragments resembled Josephs account of Abraham.
Some Mormon scholars, notably Hugh Nibley, doubt that the actual texts for Abraham and Joseph have been found. The scraps from the Metropolitan Museum do not fit the description Joseph Smith gave of long, beautiful scrolls. At best the remnants are a small fraction of the originals, with no indication of what appears on the lost portions. Nonetheless, the discovery prompted a reassessment of the Book of Abraham. What was going on while Joseph translated the papyri and dictated text to a scribe? Obviously, he was not interpreting the hieroglyphics like an ordinary scholar. As Joseph saw it, he was working by inspiration that had been clear from the beginning. When he translated the Book of Mormon, he did not read from the gold plates; he looked into the crystals of the Urim and Thummim or gazed at the seerstone. The words came by inspiration, not by reading the characters on the plates. By analogy, it seemed likely that the papyri had been an occasion for receiving a revelation rather than a word-for-word interpretation of the hieroglyphics as in ordinary translations. Joseph translated Abraham as he had the characters on the gold plates, by knowing the meaning without actually knowing the plates language. Warren Parish, his clerk, said, I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Heiroglyphicks as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of heaven. When Chandler arrived with the scrolls, Joseph saw the papyri and inspiration struck. Not one to deny Gods promptings, the Prophet said what he felt: the papyri were the writings of Abraham and Joseph. The whole thing was miraculous, and to reduce Josephs translation to some quasi-natural process, come concluded, was folly.
He goes on to describe that the peculiar thing is that Josephs story about Abraham is not entirely out of line with the huge apocryphal literature on Abraham much of which was not published in English until 1829 and in America until 1840. Im not going to type all of that though.
