This youthful experience became known among the Latter-day Saints as Joseph’s “First Vision.” In recent decades, scholars and others have pored over the several accounts of the vision, often with the motive of either buttressing Joseph’s reliability or casting doubt on his credibility. For instance, in Joseph’s earliest, handwritten account, he cries out to God first and foremost because he wants forgiveness for his sins. He sees one divine being (Jesus Christ) rather than two. Observing such inconsistencies, Fawn Brodie dismissed Joseph’s vision as either a half-remembered dream stimulated by the early revival excitement” or “sheer invention.” Richard Bushman, by contrast, suggests that as Joseph grew more confident, he shared more detail and emphasized different aspects of the experience.

Whether or not heavenly beings appeared to Joseph is a matter of faith, not historical inquiry. It is impossible for scholars to penetrate the marrow of anyone’s religious experience. At the same time, regardless of its particular content or exact date, there seems little reason to doubt the story’s core: that a spiritually distraught young man sought, saw, and heard the Lord.