This year members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the First Vision. Such community awareness surrounding the date and religious meaning of that founding visionary event has been historicized by the recent publication of Steven C. Harper: First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins. Oxford University Press (2019).

Harper explores the long history of the First Vision’s formation, reception, and contestation within the church and scholarly circles. When individuals—whether they are members of the church or those outside the church simply interested in the church’s past or current teachings—write of Smith’s theophany, they come to the topic from various frameworks only sometimes explicitly stated. A member might speak of the literal presence of God the Father and Jesus Christ appearing to the boy in 1820, a non-Mormon might speak to the inconsistent story of Smith in his telling of the story, or the scholar might speak to the effort in the 1960s of writers supporting or attacking Smith’s story.

Like all events in history, the First Vision has been interpreted and remembered in a variety of ways. There is nuance and complexity in the initial memory creation by Joseph Smith and the later shared memory formation of the community of believers. Or as Harper makes clear, “both individuals and groups store stable memories and new information in a buffer, select items from this buffer and relate those items to each other, and, lastly, make these memories enduring in a process that turns the information into general knowledge with specialized elements.” (3) Though Harper draws similarities between individual memory and collective memory, he is also quick to point out the differences. An individual remembering a personal event is, in fact, different than a community commemorating the place of that event in their collective consciousness.

As Harper lays out in the book, even in the telling and retelling done by Smith, there was a context Smith told of this visionary event. Divorcing the telling of the event from the context of the need to tell the event does damage to the historical source. For instance, Harper reminds his readers that the earliest detailed account written in 1832 was prompted by revelation and very deliberate in what Smith wanted that narrative to perform: the history “was shaped by his late 1832 preoccupation to record history, his sense of inadequacy as a writer, and rivalry with [Sidney] Rigdon.” The 1835 account, on the other hand, was a spontaneous capture of a conversation between the two prophets in Kirtland, Ohio: JS and Robert Matthews (who called himself Joshua, the Jewish minister). I’m not completely convinced at the stark dichotomy of spontaneous and strategic memory, but the contextualizing of the First Vision accounts is a welcome and thoughtful exercise.

Studying when and under what circumstances Smith told each of his accounts illustrates the importance of contextualizing sources. Treating the four first-hand sources as interchangeable or somehow creating a “harmonized” account of the First Vision is, at best, a result of the contemporary Church processing the First Vision’s place in their collective consciousness. But “smoothing out” such differences between accounts does little good for an attempt at making sense of Smith’s own life.

Harper introduces the common thread of persecution playing a factor in the retelling of each event. This common thread found through historicizing the sources, ironically, minimalizes some of the important differences of the accounts. While it is true that the 1832 account and the 1838 account (nowhere in the volume does Harper convince me of his claim that the First Vision account is actually dated 1838-39) should be read in their proper context—some of which can be seen as persecution for Smith, the different content of each of those account still matters. Whether it be internal challenges to his authority (1832) or external forces seeking to reign in the growing power of the church in Missouri (1838), there are other forces at play and Smith chose to emphasize certain events over others. Why, for instance, does the 1832 account mention one personage and the 1838 account mentions two? It is a glaring difference that Harper has discussed in other venues. To not delve into the content differences is perhaps justified given the volumes approach of memory formation. But the details of remembered memory affect how that memory is shared over time and offers important context to retellings.

Harper’s biggest contribution is his application of memory theory to Smith’s individual retellings and the collective memory of the Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Harper’s second and third part of the book offer important research and insight into the way church members formed and shared that collective memory. Such a survey of memory formation presents a clear picture of how each generation made this event their own. Just as Smith had specific needs met by each of his retellings, so too did the Mormon community seek out specific needs for its acceptance of the story and its meaning, whether that was post-manifesto Mormonism, Progressive-era Mormonism seeking out more systematic theology, or a generation defending its history from attacks from without.

Throughout the book, I kept coming to one realization. Scholars have long since known that the First Vision is an unprovable event. No matter the care with which scholars search the archives, analyze the sources, or adopt scholarly models, they are left discussing and analyzing an unknowable event. Scholars get around this by studying the effects of that event on individuals and groups of people. Harper’s work highlights the fundamental problem while failing to fully avoid it. The precise memory formation within the brain of Joseph Smith is also ultimately an unknowable event. And yet we can get around that by studying when, why, and how Smith retells that event. And we can look to those who surrounded or believed in him and how that event affected their lives.

The study of the First Vision—and more specifically its retelling—had and has an effect on individuals throughout the world. Though the study of that memory formation isn’t quite left to the realm of faith like it is for the actual event of the First Vision, there are aspects of that telling and retelling of the memory that force scholars to trust in the words of others. What can past generations tell us about how they thought, felt, and believed about the First Vision? The study of the First Vision—and the memory it created—is a question of trust and faith more than we perhaps realized.