🙈 Concealment¶
Estimated time to read: 8 minutes
Assuming you've read through the page of notes on the First Vision, and read about the conflicting recollections of the event and why they're problematic, you might wonder if anyone has taken steps to conceal some of the inconvenient documents. Let's find out, shall we?
Joseph Smith published two accounts of the First Vision during his lifetime. The first of these, known today as Joseph Smith—History, was canonized in the Pearl of Great Price and thus became the most well-known account. While the 1832 account emphasizes the more personal story of Joseph as a young man seeking forgiveness, the Pearl of Great Price account focuses on the vision as the beginning of “the rise and progress of [t]he Church” (Joseph Smith—History 1:1). Like the 1835 account, the central question of the narrative is “Which church is right?”
— Pearl of Great Price First Edition (1851), Church History, churchofjesuschrist.org
This is the kind of wording that the church uses for plausible deniability. "We never hid this from you! Says right there that Smith's handwritten account is different from the canonized one. You must be a lazy learner if you didn't know that."
For illustrative purposes, should a teacher blame a student for not knowing something? Whose job is it to teach, and ensure understanding? I never found out about this until I was in my late 20's. And after all the church meetings I had faithfully attended for all of those years, it's somehow my fault for taking what authoritative voices said at face value. And I find it upsetting when they tell me it had always been taught. No, it was not.
To me, this is incredibly problematic. For two years, at the MTC and in the mission field, we were drilled on reciting the 1838 version verbatim, because all of the church’s claims relied on this event happening. That’s how it was framed. For the church to exist for some span of time ranging between two and eight years, and no one has heard of the first vision.... it's enough to make me think it didn’t happen.
Historian Joseph Fielding Smith¶
Just to level-set before delving in—we're talking about the church historian named Joseph Fielding Smith Junior (1876 - 1972) who would later become the tenth president of the LDS church; not to be confused with Joseph Fielding Smith Senior, the sixth president of the church, and nephew to Joseph Smith Junior, the first president of the LDS church who founded it based on the premise of having a physical visitation of God and Jesus. Maybe.
Hope that clears things up.
Under the stewardship of Joseph Fielding Smith serving as Church Historian, the journal that the founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr. had personally hand-written his accounting of the First Vision in 1832 had its pages cut out and removed. This account, as described above, is an outlier to the established theology, and calls into question the legitimacy of the broadly accepted, canonized and standardized version. Probably just a coincidence that those pages were removed and concealed until Jerald & Sandra Tanner called him out on it.
1943¶
Fawn Brodie, author of an incisive biography of Joseph Smith, was able to access lots of early church documentation—something about being being the niece of president David O. McKay gave her preferential treatment. When she asked the acting church historian, Joseph Fielding Smith for access to Joseph's first-hand account of the First Vision, "he personally refused Fawn . . . remarking at the time that 'there are things in this library we don't let anyone see.'" (Source: UTLM)
His response was not "I don't know what you're talking about," nor "that document doesn't exist," but (paraphrased) "no, you can't see the document that you're asking for." Fawn doesn't get access, but the next time someone does get access to the book, lo and behold, six pages have been sliced out but taped back in. Very un-suspicious.
This six-page history was at some point excised from the letterbook. Fortuitously, one can actually date the time period when these leaves were removed, because the tearing of the last of the three leaves was done with such little care that a small triangular fragment (containing four words of the text) was initially left in the gutter of the letterbook and then removed and taped back onto the last leaf. The clear cellophane tape that was used for this repair was not invented until 1930... Furthermore, “the cut and tear marks, as well as the inscriptions in the gutters of the three excised leaves, match those of the remaining leaf stubs, confirming their original location” in the Joseph Smith letterbook. By 1965 these three leaves of the 1832 account were again “archived together with the letterbook.” Thus, the period when these three leaves were separated was approximately 1930 to 1965—or allowing a five-year period for the cellophane tape to come into common usage in America, the three decades from 1935 to 1965.
— Another Look at Joseph Smith’s First Vision, Stan Larson, Dialogue Journal
🤷♂️ Can't ask tough questions about source material when it's literally being cut out of the books and hidden away.
Maybe you can read subtext better than I can, but I'm not sure I follow from this excerpt how we can "date the time period when these leaves were removed." I definitely see how we can find a minimum date for them to be put back in, though. We can also compare that date to who was serving as the Church Historian and Recorder between years 1921 and 1970. To me, the best and most charitable interpretation of this fragmented event is gross negligence. If not that, I'm left to assume deliberate, contemptuous disregard for historical documents by the one man appointed to be responsible for preserving historical documents.
If JFS was so defensive of it to not let Fawn Brodie access it, then I can assume that JFS was very selective of who can access it. JFS had access, no doubt. Perhaps he's protective of the document because he had discovered it to be vandalized by the previous borrower? That's pure conjecture, of course, but I can confidently say that JFS himself had access, and perhaps had a motivation to remove the pages. Does that prove that he's the one who did it? I don't think it proves that, no. Someone cut out the pages. Someone taped them back in using 1930's technology. Must have been the illuminati.
Scanned Papers¶
The cellophane tape is visible in the Joseph Smith Papers Project scans of these documents:
Under the "Source Note" for the 1832 document:
Also, the initial three leaves containing the history were excised from the volume. The eight inscribed leaves in the back of the volume may have been cut out at the same time.
In the footnote of that source note:
These eight leaves have not been located.
Manuscript evidence suggests that these excisions took place in the mid-twentieth century. A tear on the third leaf, which evidently occurred during its excision, was probably mended at the time. This tear was mended with clear cellophane tape, which was invented in 1930.
Does the LDS church have anything to say about why the pages were cut out?
There is nothing about the 1832 account that would merit cutting it out and hiding it. Understood in its context, it is a valuable addition to our understanding of the First Vision.
— Was the 1832 account of the First Vision cut out of a letter book and restricted from public access?
No, not really.
1960 General Conference¶
Now, if the Prophet was telling a falsehood when he went into the woods to pray, he never would have come out and said that he had seen a vision of the Father and the Son and that they were separate Personages, and that the Father introduced the son and then told the Prophet to address his question to the Son, who would give him the answer. The Prophet never would have thought of such a thing as that, had it been a fraud.
If he had come out of the woods saying he had seen a vision, had it been untrue never would he have thought of separating Father and Son, nor would he have ever thought of having the Father introduce the Son and for him to put his question to the Son to receive his answer. He never could have thought of it; for that was the farthest thing from the ideas existing in the world in the year 1820.
— Joseph Smith's First Prayer, Joseph Fielding Smith, General Conference 1960 April
(The full quote I'd like to present here is very lengthy; go on and read that talk.)
"If the prophet Joseph was lying, he would have said something like he prayed and say only one figure appeared to him. But he definitely said there were two figures. ... Wait, what? The account he wrote by hand says only one?"
"Nu-uh. No it doesn't. That didn't happen. There are things in the library we don't show people."
Find related reading material on the main page for the first vision.