In 1842, as Nauvoo, Illinois was growing rapidly and Joseph Smith was gaining more notoriety on a national level, a Chicago newspaperman named John Wentworth solicited “a summary of the doctrines and history of the Latter-day Saints” from Joseph on behalf of his friend George Barstow, who was writing a history of the state of New Hampshire.¹ Joseph obliged, and provided Wentworth with a short “sketch of the rise, progress, persecution, and faith of the Latter-Day Saints.”² Joseph took the request from Wentworth seriously, since “opportunities for favorable treatment of the church in non-Mormon publications were rare, and some previous attempts had not been entirely successful.”³ In this history, which was ultimately not published by Barstow but was published by the Prophet in the Times and Seasons as “Church History,” and which is known widely today as the Wentworth Letter, “[Joseph] recounted his first vision of Deity and the production of the Book of Mormon. He also included a thirteen-point summary of Latter-day Saint beliefs, known today as the Articles of Faith.”⁴

The account of the First Vision provided by the Prophet in this history is somewhat brief, but hits upon the major points that are also present in his previous narratives. He begins this part of the history with, “When about fourteen years of age I began to reflect upon the importance of being prepared for a future state, and upon enquiring the plan of salvation I found that there was a great clash in religious sentiment.” “[C]onsidering that all could not be right,” Joseph reasoned, “and that God could not be the author of so much confusion I determined to investigate the subject more fully.” This Joseph did by turning to the Bible, where he encountered passages such as James 1:5. “I retired to a secret place in a grove and began to call upon the Lord,” he continued, and “while fervently engaged in supplication my mind was taken away from the objects with which I was surrounded, and I was enwrapped in a heavenly vision and saw two glorious personages who exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness, surrounded with a brilliant light which eclipsed the sun at noon-day.” The personages told Joseph “that all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines, and that none of them was acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom.” Joseph was “expressly commanded to ‘go not after them,’” and instead received “a promise that the fulness of the gospel should at some future time be made known unto [him].”⁵

This account of the First Vision is marked by a “concise, straightforward, unadorned, informative, and matter-of-fact” tone. This makes perfect sense since “this account was meant for publication by the non-Mormon press” and thus has “the characteristics one would expect to find in a public relations statement.”⁶ Unlike Joseph’s 1838–39 account which was written during a time of severe persecution for Joseph and the Saints, the 1842 account was written during a time of relative peace and calm. It was also solicited in good faith by an influential and sincerely inquisitive non-Latter-day Saint journalist. Joseph’s voice in the 1842 account is therefore not as defensive or polemical as in his previous account. For example, the 1842 account lacks any mention of the local opposition to Joseph’s vision (a theme that is prominent in the 1838–39 account), and instead of quoting the Lord as harshly saying the Christian creeds were an “abomination” (Joseph Smith–History 1:19), instead he is paraphrased as simply saying that “all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines.”

The 1842 account of the First Vision also bears the marks of Joseph Smith’s evolving literary style and his reliance on clerks and ghostwriters (such as William W. Phelps, John Taylor, and others) to assist him in telling his history.⁷ Unlike Joseph’s 1832 account of the First Vision, the language of this account is highly polished and sophisticated and peppered with Latin phrases such as summum bonum (“the highest good”), all of which rhetorically serves to give readers an impression of the Prophet’s learnedness. Joseph likewise drew from the language of previously published works such as Orson Pratt’s influential 1840 missionary tract A[n] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions in this retelling of his early visions.⁸ The cumulative effect of all of this is a tone running throughout this account that is erudite while also “confident and self-assured.”⁹

The influence of this account of the First Vision can be seen in its republication on multiple occasions throughout the succeeding decade after its initial appearance in 1842. Both Latter-day Saints and non-Latter-day Saints republished both extracts and verbatim copies of “Church History” in newspapers, books, and tracts throughout the 1840s and early 50s.¹⁰ In 1843, at the direction of Joseph Smith, William Phelps prepared a slightly revised and updated version of “Church History” for the publisher Clyde, Williams & Co., which was preparing a volume surveying contemporary religious movements in the United States. A year later Phelps’ revised version of Joseph’s 1842 history appeared as an article titled “Latter Day Saints” in the book He Pasa Ekklesia edited by Israel Daniel Rupp.¹¹

Although the 1842 “Church History” editorial would later be eclipsed by Joseph’s 1838–39 history, it still contributes important and unique details to fully understanding what Joseph saw and experienced in the grove. For example, it is in this account that Joseph described the two personages he saw as “exactly resembl[ing] each other in features, and likeness,”¹² thus affirming the inseparability and corporeal nature of both the Father and the Son (cf. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22–23). For these and other reasons, Latter-day Saints are greatly benefited by Joseph’s 1842 account of his First Vision.

Further Reading

Karen Lynn Davidson et al., eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844 (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church Historian’s Press, 2012), 489–501.

James B. Allen and John W. Welch, “Analysis of Joseph Smith’s Accounts of His First Vision,” in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestation, 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch, 2nd ed (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2017), 37–77.

Dean C. Jessee, “The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” BYU Studies 9, no. 3 (1969): 275–294.

¹ Karen Lynn Davidson et al., eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844 (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church Historian’s Press, 2012), 489.

² “Church History,” Times and Seasons 3, no. 9 (March 1, 1842): 706; cf. Davidson et al., eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1, 492.

³ Davidson et al., eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1, 489.

⁴ Davidson et al., eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1, 491.

⁵ “Church History,” 706–707.

⁶ James B. Allen and John W. Welch, “Analysis of Joseph Smith’s Accounts of His First Vision,” in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestation, 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch, 2nd ed (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2017), 53.

⁷ Alex D. Smith, Christian K. Heimburger, and Christopher James Blythe, eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 9: December 1841–April 1842 (Salt Lake City, UT: Salt Lake City, UT: The Church Historian’s Press, 2019), 177; Bruce A. Van Orden, We’ll Sing and We’ll Shout: The Life and Times of W. W. Phelps (Provo and Salt Lake City, UT: Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University and Deseret Book. 2018), 317–318.

⁸ Davidson et al., eds. The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1, 491–492, 519–520; Smith, Heimburger, and Blythe, eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 9, 177.

⁹ Allen and Welch, “Analysis of Joseph Smith’s Accounts of His First Vision,” 53.

¹⁰ Smith, Heimburger, and Blythe, eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 9, 177–178. A generation later, Latter-day Saint historian B. H. Roberts blended the 1842 account with the canonical 1838 account in his retelling of the early visions of Joseph Smith. See the discussion in Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 152–153, citing B. H. Roberts, “History of the Mormon Church: Chapter 5, The Early Visions of Joseph Smith,” Americana 4, no. 6 (September 1909): 610–627, esp. 616n8.

¹¹ “Latter Day Saints,” 1844; cf. Davidson et al., eds. The Joseph Smith Papers, Histories, Volume 1, 503–516.

¹² “Church History,” 707.