First Vision

According to the canonical account Joseph Smith wrote in 1838 and later published as Joseph Smith-History in the Pearl of Great Price, religious revivalism in the Palmyra, New York, area in the early 1820s left the fourteen-year-old Smith troubled by competing claims among the Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches active in his family's circle. Reading a verse from the Epistle of James urging anyone who lacked wisdom to ask God, he went alone into a wooded grove near his family's farm in the spring of 1820 to pray about which church, if any, he should join. He reported that a pillar of light descended, and that within it he saw two personages, one of whom, pointing to the other, said, 'This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him.' Asked which church was true, Smith recounted being told to join none of them, since their creeds were an abomination and their professors were corrupt.

Smith did not publish an account of the vision until 1832, and the canonical 1838 narrative differs in emphasis and detail from that earlier, less circulated version and from other retellings recorded by associates, a pattern of variation Latter-day Saint scholarship and outside historians have both examined at length. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints treats the 1838 account as authoritative and canonical scripture; other Latter Day Saint movement denominations, and secular historians, weigh the multiple accounts differently, but within the tradition the event as narrated in the Pearl of Great Price is treated as settled and foundational regardless of the textual history behind it.

Within Latter-day Saint theology, the First Vision functions as the founding event of what the tradition calls the Restoration, the recovery of Christian authority and doctrine the movement holds was lost through a general apostasy after the apostolic age. The vision's content, that existing churches held a form of godliness without its authority, supplied the movement's founding claim: not reform of existing Christianity but restoration of something Latter-day Saints believe had been withdrawn from the earth and needed to be given again directly by God. Everything that followed for Joseph Smith, translating the Book of Mormon, receiving what adherents hold was priesthood authority through angelic ordination, and organizing the church in 1830, is presented in Latter-day Saint teaching as continuous with the commission implied in the grove.

The vision also supplies the tradition's most distinctive claim about God's nature: that the Father and the Son are two separate, embodied personages rather than a single incorporeal being, a claim later developed doctrinally that put the movement at odds with the Trinitarian formulations of mainstream Nicene Christianity. The First Vision is retold and reenacted throughout Latter-day Saint devotional life, from missionary discussions to the Church History sites the church maintains at the reconstructed grove in Palmyra, and it functions less as one event among the tradition's scriptural narratives than as the interpretive key the rest of Latter-day Saint history is read through.