Was Joseph Smith Persecuted For Sharing The First Vision

[Ariarates]

I wonder how many Junior High schoolers there are that are bullied(persecuted), and 250+ years later, proof of it can be found. Many kids simply suffer it in silence while going about their life. I wonder why this is so readily tossed aside, and proof is demanded to verify his claims?

It seems we only have Joseph's word on the matter. That's just fine, nobody is tossing that aside. However, if independent, corroborating evidence were available, that would only bolster the case.

[Jaybear]

I wonder why this is so readily tossed aside, and proof is demanded to verify his claims?

I think it has something to do with the fact that the First Vision is the foundation of the LDS Church.

GBHinkley: "Upon that unique and wonderful experience stands the validity of this Church."

[Ariarates]

I think it has something to do with the fact that the First Vision is the foundation of the LDS Church.

For my part, it has nothing to do with that. As I explained in the OP, persecution has always been a given for me and I was surprised to learn that it left no traces. I somehow thought that as soon as Joseph shared his story in 1820, all hell broke loose.

That said, I also wonder why some posters imply that it is somehow inappropriate to look for corroborating evidence.

[Deborah]

I really am amazed that one expects to find newspaper clippings or some other formally recorded event of persecution of an individual, particularly at a time when that individual was a boy of no particular import. The only documentation would be in personal journals or in the memories of those involved. It is a very unrealistic view of that time.

[Nevo]

I really am amazed that one expects to find newspaper clippings or some other formally recorded event of persecution of an individual, particularly at a time when that individual was a boy of no particular import. The only documentation would be in personal journals or in the memories of those involved. It is a very unrealistic view of that time.

It is true that Joseph Smith was of no particular import in 1820. Only after 1823 did he begin to attain notoriety. In 1826, we have tangible evidence of persecution. He was hauled before a judge on a charge of being a disorderly person. We know he had enemies by then. By the late 1820s, Joseph and his "gold bible" were widely discussed in the local press (you can read these accounts here).

Those who were acquainted with Joseph Smith as a youth in Palmyra and Manchester and elsewhere were interviewed repeatedly over the years (the main collections are by Hurlbut, Deming, and Kelley). These interviews fill several volumes of Dan Vogel's Early Mormon Documents series. Yet, with the exception of Mrs. Palmer's late reminiscence, which may not be wholly reliable, nobody mentioned any uproar over Joseph's first vision. In fact, nobody else seems to have been aware of his 1820 theophany. There are scattered references to him claiming revelations but that's about it.

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

I really am amazed that one expects to find newspaper clippings or some other formally recorded event of persecution of an individual, particularly at a time when that individual was a boy of no particular import. The only documentation would be in personal journals or in the memories of those involved. It is a very unrealistic view of that time.

I was persecuted once because I wore girls pants and did not know it in middle school. I have never written about this event until now. There is no other evidence than my say so. Is that good enough for you guys to know that it really did happen? Or can we safely dismiss the story because no news papers reported this unimportant event.

I wonder, why people think that a news paper should even be aware of who JS is or was in the 1820's let alone that some people may have persecuted him.

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

It is true that Joseph Smith was of no particular import in 1820. Only after 1823 did he begin to attain notoriety. In 1826, we have tangible evidence of persecution. He was hauled before a judge on a charge of being a disorderly person. We know he had enemies by then. By the late 1820s, Joseph and his "gold bible" were widely discussed in the local press (you can read these accounts here).

Those who were acquainted with Joseph Smith as a youth in Palmyra and Manchester and elsewhere were interviewed repeatedly over the years (the main collections are by Hurlbut, Deming, and Kelley). These interviews fill several volumes of Dan Vogel's Early Mormon Documents series. Yet, with the exception of Mrs. Palmer's late reminiscence, which may not be wholly reliable, nobody mentioned any uproar over Joseph's first vision. In fact, nobody else seems to have been aware of his 1820 theophany. There are scattered references to him claiming revelations but that's about it.

Maybe I am ignorant or uninformed or don't remember but did any one claim that JS was persecuted heavily because of the first vision?

It seems all I can recall is that JS just claimed he was persecuted for the BoM and and for some of his visions.

[Nevo]

I wonder, why people think that a news paper should even be aware of who JS is or was in the 1820's let alone that some people may have persecuted him.

Newspapers were aware of Joseph Smith in the 1820s, so it doesn't really matter what people think about it.

If Joseph Smith had been widely ridiculed for claiming to see God (JS-H 1:22), how come his neighbors seem to have had collective amnesia about this?

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

Newspapers were aware of Joseph Smith in the 1820s, so it doesn't really matter what people think about it.

If Joseph Smith had been widely ridiculed for claiming to see God (JS-H 1:22), how come his neighbors seem to have had collective amnesia about this?

It seems, to me, that what he is stating is that his telling of the first vision was the starting point. Of course he is telling this from memory several years in the future from this event and he would be looking back at everything trying to make sense of it. I guess I can see why people think JS was heavily persecuted solely for his telling of the First Vision. I don't think that is what he means here but.....

[ERayR]

Newspapers were aware of Joseph Smith in the 1820s, so it doesn't really matter what people think about it.

If Joseph Smith had been widely ridiculed for claiming to see God (JS-H 1:22), how come his neighbors seem to have had collective amnesia about this?

Your assumptions are not valid. as a 15 year old kid I was ridiculed by my peers at times for various reasons. None of it made the local newspaper nor was it remembered by my neighbors after I grew up.

Edited June 7, 2011 by ERayR

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

Your assumptions are not valid. as a 15 year old kid I was ridiculed by my peers at times for various reasons. None of it made the local newspaper nor was it remembered by my neighbors after I grew up.

This has been my experience.

I hear what people are saying is that if he had other evidence that would help JS case, but we don't so what do we do, dismiss it? It really did not happen?

I am not going to say that everything JS claimed happen is 100% accurate. People tend to exaggerate things esp, when you are young and trying to remember them years after that fact. I have no doubt that JS story about the Methodist minister did happen. I theorize that this minister probably told one of his friends about it and they made fun of JS and he thought everyone was out to get him. Esp in light of some of the other persecutions that happened to JS latter in his life that were much more serious.

Edited June 7, 2011 by Mola Ram Suda Ram

[David Waltz]

Hello Nevo,

In your last post, you wrote:

>>If Joseph Smith had been widely ridiculed for claiming to see God (JS-H 1:22), how come his neighbors seem to have had collective amnesia about this?>>

Me: After the publication of the BoM, I think it goes without saying that the focus of non-Mormons was on undermining the text that was now before everyone; why emphasize recollections of supposed epiphanies when one could attack the actual text that claimed to be new revelation from God.

But, with that said, there were some early snipes at Joseph's claims to have seen God. In a Feb. 14, 1831 The Reflector article, it was reported that "Cowdery and his friends" were preaching Joseph Smith Jr., "had seen God frequently and personally."

Some interesting "circumstantial" evidences concerning the "first vision" are provided by Richard Lloyd Anderson in his essay, "Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision Through Reminiscences" (BYU Studies, vol. IX.3 [spring 1969], pp. 373-404 - online version at: LINK).

Grace and peace,

David

[Nevo]

Your assumptions are not valid. as a 15 year old kid I was ridiculed by my peers at times for various reasons. None of it made the local newspaper nor was it remembered by my neighbors after I grew up.

How are my assumptions not valid? I am assuming that people who had bitterly persecuted Joseph for claiming to have seen God would remember, some 12 years later, that Joseph had claimed to have seen God. Is that such an unreasonable expectation?

Of course not all instances of mockery or bullying are recorded by history. Sometimes they may even be forgotten by the parties involved. But Joseph Smith wasn't a nonentity. When Hurlbut visited the Palmyra-Manchester area in 1833, Joseph Smith and his family had been the subject of neighborhood gossip for years. Nowhere did anyone mention his vision of God as the reason for his notoriety. Instead, people remembered his claims to find lost objects with a seer stone, and his claims to have seen an angel and to have discovered a "gold bible." Those were the things about Joseph Smith that they considered noteworthy.

[LeSellers]

When Hurlbut visited the Palmyra-Manchester area in 1833, Joseph Smith and his family had been the subject of neighborhood gossip for years. Nowhere did anyone mention his vision of God as the reason for his notoriety. Instead, people remembered his claims to find lost objects with a seer stone, and his claims to have seen an angel and to have discovered a "gold bible." Those were the things about Joseph Smith that they considered noteworthy.

No, they were the things Hurlebut "remembered" for them. Hurlebut wasn't there in 1820~23, so he didn't remember reports of the events of Easter morning, 1820. By the time he got involved in the movement, Joseph had learned not to share it with too many people.

He wrote the affidavits, you will recall. All they did was sign them.

Lehi

[Nevo]

After the publication of the BoM, I think it goes without saying that the focus of non-Mormons was on undermining the text that was now before everyone; why emphasize recollections of supposed epiphanies when one could attack the actual text that claimed to be new revelation from God.

Hi David, it's nice to see you posting here.

You make an interesting argument. Perhaps they knew about Joseph's claimed 1820 theophany but by 1833 thought it more important to attack the Book of Mormon, hence, the heavy emphasis on Joseph's money-digging activities. That's certainly a possibility.

To be clear, I'm not expressing skepticism that Joseph experienced a vision of God in 1820. I think the evidence for that is quite good. I simply question the accuracy of certain aspects of his 1838/39 narrative. I think there is a certain amount of exaggeration and conflation going on.

[Rob Bowman]

Robert,

You wrote:

Given the vagaries of real historiography (historywriting: the way in which people actually recall and record events), none of these above observations carry much weight -- except as they are used as debaters points to satisfy preconceived positions.

And your appeal to the apparent discrepancies in the Acts accounts of Paul's conversion is not a mere debating point to defend a preconceived position?

I have already addressed this argument more than once, but I don't mind hammering on the nail repeatedly to make sure it sinks in. You wrote:

For example, those who reject the testimony of St Paul often rest their case on the very clear differences among the various accounts of his First Vision:

1. Acts 9:3-9

2. Acts 22:6-11

3. Acts 26:12-18

4. Galatians 1:15-17

According to them, not only are certain crucial details left out of some accounts, but important, canonical details are in conflict, e.g., in Acts 9:7 those with him heard the voice versus 22:9 in which they didn't hear the voice.

This is the only alleged discrepancy in the accounts, and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. I won't bore you with the exegetical nuances that the criticism overlooks unless you tell me you would personally find such information helpful. The bottom line is that there is no valid or legitimate comparison between this apparent discrepancy and the discrepancies in Joseph Smith's accounts of his alleged First Vision. Here's why:

1. The apparent discrepancy in the Acts accounts of Paul's conversion experience is of miniscule importance. It has nothing to do with the who, what, where, when, or why of the event. By contrast, Joseph's accounts of his first visionary experience conflict as to the who, what, where, when, and why of that first experience:

• who (an angel; the Lord Jesus; the Father and the Son)
• what (a revelation of the Book of Mormon vs. a revelation of the apostasy and restoration)
• when (1820 or 1823)
• where (his room or the woods)
• why (because God simply chose to send an angel to Joseph; because Joseph thought true Christianity was not on the earth and needed forgiveness; because Joseph wanted to know which church to join)

2. The Book of Acts records all three accounts of Paul's conversion for all to see; none of these accounts was ever suppressed or buried. By contrast, Joseph's 1832 account of the First Vision was shelved and a conflicting account produced years later, with the 1832 account suppressed for many years.

3. The accounts of Paul's conversion experience do not grow larger with each telling (fish-story fashion). By contrast, the stories of Joseph's first visionary experience grew ever more impressive as the years went by, from an appearance of an angel (1820s) to an appearance of the Lord Jesus (1832) to a completely unprecedented appearance of the Father and the Son (1838).

4. Skeptics naturally deny that Paul saw the risen Christ, but they rarely deny that he thought he saw the risen Christ, and they all agree that something happened that led Paul to change from a Pharisee who despised Christianity to a Christian apostle bent on converting Gentiles to Christianity. For example, skeptics often claim that Paul had a hallucination precipitated by his suppressed guilt over persecuting Christians. Paul's conversion requires some sort of personal crisis experience to make any sense of the facts. By contrast, the origins of Mormonism make perfectly good sense without the First Vision, and most non-Mormons (skeptics or not) see no reason to acknowledge that Joseph even thought he saw the Father and the Son.

5. In the case of Paul, we have no paper trail of documentation prior to our earliest references to his encounter with the risen Christ in which a different story is found. Paul's earliest writings tell the basic story that he was a Pharisee who persecuted the church until the risen Jesus appeared to him and made him an apostle (Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, and 1 Corinthians, all written AD 49-54). No earlier accounts from any source contradict this story (and for that matter nor do any later accounts from the first century contradict it). Paul's culture was literate but at a level far below that of the early nineteenth century. By contrast, we have a significant paper trail of statements from Joseph Smith, other Mormons, and non-Mormons throughout the 1820s and 1830s in which the appearance of the angel to Joseph regarding the Book of Mormon was Joseph's first religious or visionary experience.

You wrote:

As a matter of Formgeschichte (form criticism), one places such phenomena under the heading of "Apparition Dialogue form" and looks to see whether the common elements are present (see for example Gen 18:1 - 19:1, 46:1-3, Dan 10:7, II Cor 12:1-4, etc.). Other diagnostic tools can also be brought to bear. See the standard treatment by Norbert Lohfink, The Conversion of Paul; or Blake Shipp, Paul the Reluctant Witness for examples of how scholars dispassionately deal with such questions. It is not fair or credible to approach such matters without a certain amount of sincere gravitas, something which has been notably lacking in discussion elsewhere on this board.

Your citation of Norbert Lohfink's "standard treatment" entitled The Conversion of Paul is problematic in more than one sense. A search of Lohfink's exhaustive bibliography of his works reveals no such publication (see here). Lohfink, an Old Testament scholar, did write one rather obscure article on the OT background of Paul's conversion in a 1965 issue of Biblische Zeitschrift, but the article did not have that title (not even translated into English). A search on Google and on the ATLA database found no such book by Norbert Lohfink. Gerhard Lohfink did write a book entitled in English The Conversion of St. Paul (a translation of his book Paulus vor Damaskus). This book at least exists, but it is not a "standard treatment." Shipp did write the book you mentioned (Paul the Reluctant Witness) but it is neither a standard nor a particularly cogent analysis of the Acts accounts (see the review by Ruben Dupertuis, or the one by C. Clifton Black in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 70 [2008]: 393-94). Shipp's position assumes that the author of Acts did not know Paul (contrary to the author's explicit claim) and assumes that the Book of Acts portrays Paul as resisting the leading of the Spirit throughout the second half of Acts! Before you can have any gravitas, you have to have some basic facts straight.

If we're going to drop names, let's mention some whose works are standard on the subject of Paul's conversion: Martin Hengel (two books on the subject); the book The Road from Damascus edited by Richard Longenecker; Seyoon Kim (two books on the subject); at least a couple of essays by James Dunn; and (for a decidedly non-Christian perspective) Alan Segal's Paul the Convert.

[Nevo]

He wrote the affidavits, you will recall. All they did was sign them.

You keep asserting this but I don't agree with it. Several of Hurlbut's witnesses were subsequently interviewed by RLDS apostle William H. Kelley and they essentially confirmed their earlier statements. Hurlbut didn't just make it all up.

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

I think there is a certain amount of exaggeration and conflation going on.

For the record, I think you are correct. The evidence seems to point to this and it is very plausible as well.

[Rob Bowman]

Rivers had written, with regard to evidence for Joseph being persecuted because of the First Vision:

There is the story that Lucy tells in which someone attempted to shoot Joseph.

I had replied:

"I looked in Lucy's history but didn't find this in the same section that deals with the First Vision. Can you tell me where Lucy said this? Thanks."

Four days later, I have not seen an answer. There have been a lot of posts, so perhaps I missed it. Can anyone provide documentation for this story from Lucy? I am aware of Lucy mentioning at least one attempted shooting of Joseph in the late 1830s, but I am aware of none from the 1820s.

How about you, BOMT? You endorsed this "evidence"; can you provide documentation for it?

[Nevo]

Can anyone provide documentation for this story from Lucy? I am aware of Lucy mentioning at least one attempted shooting of Joseph in the late 1830s, but I am aware of none from the 1820s.

"At the age of fourteen, an incident occurred which alarmed us much, as we knew not the cause of it. Joseph being a remarkably quiet, well disposed child, we did not suspect that any one had aught against him. He was out one evening on an errand, and, on returning home, as he was passing through the door yard a gun was fired across his pathway, with the evident intention of shooting him. He sprang to the door much frightened. We immediately went in search of the assassin, but could find no trace of him that evening."

— Lavina Fielding Anderson, ed., Lucy's Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith's Family Memoir (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), 329.

[bookofmormontruth]

The problem with this evidence is that it probably doesn't originate with Lucy Smith. The phrase—"From this time until the twenty-first of September, 1823, Joseph continued, as usual, to labour with his father, and nothing during this interval occurred of very great importance—though he suffered, as one would naturally suppose, every kind of opposition and persecution from the different orders of religionists"—appears to have been added by editor Howard Coray in his 1853 revision of Lucy's preliminary manuscript. It isn't in the original manuscript (source).

Jan Shipps has noted that Coray often "simply substituted a part of [the] official history, at times placing in Mother Smith's mouth a remark such as 'Here I extract from my son's history'" (Jan Shipps, Mormonism: Story of a New Religious Tradition [urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985], 104). I suspect that is the case here (you will note that the remark comes at the end of a long excerpt from Joseph Smith's official history.) In short, this source is problematic.

Actually your source shows that it did originate with Lucy. There is no "Coray" modification of the quote.

[bookofmormontruth]

If it were self-evident, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Fact is, we only have Joseph's words for it as related in JS-H v. 22. While a lot of interesting and creative theories have been proposed in this thread, contemporary corroborating evidence is still severely lacking.

Whether or not Joseph Smith was persecuted for sharing his first vision in the 1820s and early 1830s cannot be determined from this thread with any degree of certainty. However, there appears to be no independent evidence that he was.

If you completely ignore post # 11, 23, 87, 115 and 145 then you are correct, we only have Joseph Smith's words (sufficient enough, but not enough for the faithless) that he was persecuted after the 1st Vision.

Edited June 8, 2011 by bookofmormontruth

[Nevo]

Actually your source shows that it did originate with Lucy. There is no "Coray" modification of the quote.

The section comes from "Coray/Pratt: 1853" (p. 330)—in other words, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations, published in Liverpool in 1853. It is not in Lucy's 1844/45 preliminary manuscript (which leaves out the First Vision altogether).

[bookofmormontruth]

The section comes from "Coray/Pratt: 1853" (p. 330)—in other words, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations, published in Liverpool in 1853. It is not in Lucy's 1844/45 preliminary manuscript (which leaves out the First Vision altogether).

See Lucy 1844/45 (p. 478)

[bookofmormontruth]

Here is more evidence to ignore.

for I know that which she has had to endure—she has been tossed upon the ocean of uncertainty—she has breasted the storms of persecution, and buffeted the rage of men and devils, which would have borne down almost any other woman. Chapter. 38 My link

Lucy talking about Emma before (years before 1831) their official move to Kirtland.

The way this thread has headed, it will be decided that Emma suffered from persecution, but not Joseph Smith.

Edited June 7, 2011 by bookofmormontruth