Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Was Joseph Smith lying or forgetting the first vision? There are differences in the various first vision accounts where Joseph Smith first encountered God in 1820. A lot of people know this. Critics have pointed to these differences in the accounts to show that Joseph Smith's being dishonest.
But no one is talking about the role that memory might be playing in shaping these accounts and what that means about how reliable they are. But new research has just been done that tackles this head on. Welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine Rapley and I'm joined in studio by researchers Neal Rapley and Steven Smoot, both of whom are pretty well published on church history topics. So let's dive in.
I thought it would be fun to start with a TikTok I saw a while ago about a creator who talked about her biggest shelf breaker in the entire church.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Do I wish I could push the rewind button and share this one piece of information with my family and friends about why I lost my faith? Yes. Yes, I do. Because actually, this is really just the one piece of information people would need. Are you ready? The first vision. The first one, not the fifth one or the one that we know now. The first recorded vision of Joseph Smith talked about one God, and it was the same as Jesus Christ. And in the first version of the Book of Mormon, the Trinity was referenced.
God the Father and Jesus Christ were one person. They were later changed to reflect the first vision story that was selected to be part of the church's narrative.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: Oh, man.
How is Royal Skousen or, you know, James Allen or Richard Bushman ever going to recover from this? I tell you so.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: I really thought that was a fascinating clip for multiple reasons, not just because of what the clip said. So in there, she's talking about how, like, the biggest shelf breaker for me was Joseph Smith's different accounts. And in this one specifically, she's talking about the Book of Mormon and how their perception of God is different than Joseph Smith's first vision. But lots of people know that Joseph Smith himself told the account of the first vision various times, and there are differences, and that is hard for people.
So then I was very interested in this creator once I saw that clip. And so I went on her page and I started scrolling her TikTok profile just to learn more about her. And. And I, through that process, discovered no less than four different versions of her own faith deconstruction. Like, not even just like, different details, but very different catalysts. Like, oh, no, no. This is what really started my faith crisis. Oh, no, no. But this time it Was this thing started my faith crisis. And that is not to disparage this creator or say that that's not true or she was lying. Because, honestly, I believe that, you know, the process of deconstruction probably was complex. There were probably multiple factors. Maybe it was her experience teaching seminary.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: Maybe.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: Maybe it was the first vision. Maybe it was also this. Like, people, just people are complex, and they have lots of experiences. But I also suspect that as she's telling these narratives about herself and her own journey, like, memory is playing a role. Like, she's remembering things differently the more she revisits that account. And I think that that is an aspect that is very underplayed when we talk about the first vision.
[00:03:07] Speaker D: Oh, absolutely. And it's actually really normal for people to have those kinds of experiences and remember them differently at different times, because different things will trigger the memory. Right.
How many times has someone said, like, man, the thing that pisses me off the most, and it's a different thing every time, right? It's whatever is most current at the moment is on their mind. Like, oh, that's the thing that makes me angriest out of everything in the world.
[00:03:34] Speaker C: My father and I have a lively disagreement in our family because we. When our family went to Israel for the first time, I was, like, 15, right. This is back in 2005.
So, you know, good. Good time ago, 20 years now, @ this point, there was this funny little incident. I won't go into the whole story that that happened. And if you put my dad and I in a room together, he will insist emphatically that he was there for it and that he remembers being there at this funny little thing that happened to us. And my memory is that it was. I was there myself, and then I told my dad after it happened. Right. And so. But you get us. And we both, like, are sincerely having these conflicting memories over what really happened at this event now, like, the event happened. Right. I will go to my grave insisting on this funny thing that happened to me in Israel.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. My dad's just this bad guy. Lying. No, like, exactly. Human memory works this way. And it's. I don't want to say it's entirely socially constructed, but social and external factors impact memory and how it's constructed and how it's reconstructed.
[00:04:37] Speaker D: Right, right, absolutely. Circling back to specifically the first vision, I.
I'm gonna be honest, and I don't want to be rude to people who struggle with this, but this is something that, like, all the way back when I was a missionary and I'd never heard of the different accounts. I hadn't, like, studied and, like, gotten any training as a historian or whatever at the time. Like, it just. People were like, oh, there's different accounts of the first vision. My honest to goodness reaction to that was always so, like, there's differences in the accounts.
So, like, it just never bothered me. And so I have always kind of struggled to understand this. And I've. You know, there's a quote from an American religion scholar, not a Latter Day Saint, not an apologist or whatever, Stephen Prothero, where he basically says. He talks about how critics of Mormonism have delighted in the discrepancies between the canonical account and earlier renditions, especially one written in Smith's own hand in 1832. That's the one she was just talking about. Right.
But here's what he says. Such complaints, however, are much ado about relatively nothing.
[00:05:41] Speaker C: Boom. Ooh.
[00:05:42] Speaker D: Okay, again, this is not a Latter Day Saint. This is not an apologist saying this. This is a scholar of American religion. And he explains why. He says, any good lawyer or historian would expect to find contradictions in competing narratives written down years apart and decades after the event. And so this is. This is normal. And anyone who actually goes on to, like, get serious about studying history, whether you're doing it as an amateur or a professional, is going to discover this really quickly. Once you actually get into the primary source documents, once you stop reading other people's kind of interpretation of history, that's. That's been packaged for you and start getting into the primary source material, it's like, whoa, there is. This is a mess. And that's. That's true of Latter Day Saint history. That's true of pretty much any history. So.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: So you mentioned that you don't really get when people struggle with the first vision. Stephen, could you maybe articulate a little bit, like, what is the challenge people have with these First Vision accounts and what are the accounts and maybe some of the differences?
[00:06:39] Speaker C: Sure.
I'll try to be very brief.
There's a mountain of literature on the First Vision out there. The church has published the accounts of the first vision. It's on the Gospel Library app or whatever. Right.
Okay. So when we talk about the First Vision accounts, mostly what people mean are, like, the four or five that Joseph Smith created in his lifetime.
So one from 1832, one from 1835, which was then shortly after copied. Right. One in 1838, that's the one from our Pearl of Gray Price. That's the canonical account. And one from 1842, that's the wet north letter, right? Which again was sort of recopied in other places. So those are like the four main ones people kind of wonder about when they're, you know, there are second hand accounts from Morrison, Pratt and things like that, right? But Joseph Smith's accounts, it's these four, four main ones. The reason why it's bothersome for some people or why it causes trouble for them is because there are differences in the accounts, right? So this creator, she mentions how in the first account I would push back on saying there's only one God mentioned, right? Like rather, there's not two explicitly mentioned, right? So I would dispute that only one personage is exclusive mentioned. But regardless, there are not explicitly two personages mentioned as coming to Joseph Smith, right?
In the 1835 account, for instance, there's like this parenthetical comment, almost like an afterthought saying, and there were many angels in the vision. Which is kind of interesting and weird, right? Because there is no mention of that in any of the other accounts.
So those are kind of the big differences, some of the minor ones, right? Like in 1832, Joseph Smith describes it as a pillar of flame or a pillar of fire and then crosses out and says pillar of light and that becomes the language. Those are, those are minor discrepancies. He's just describing a glorious bright pillar, right? So the reason. So those are sort of the main accounts.
The reason why people didn't have a problem with it is because of the differences which they immediately jumped to the conclusion that, okay, either he's just making it up as he goes along.
So in the case of this TikTok creator, right, she's saying that, well, early on he just believed in one trinitarian God, and then later he believed in multiple gods.
And so he just made up the accounts to reflect that evolving theology. That's super duper common, that talking point out there.
I find that talking point really funny considering the fact that like three months before he wrote the 1832 account, Joseph Smith recorded Section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which describes two personages with Jesus on the right hand of God. So that evolutionary thesis doesn't really work in that regard, I suppose. But.
[00:09:13] Speaker D: And honestly, that like to. To suggest that he was like a strict trinitarian monotheist at that point is silly because DNC 76 is also where it starts to talk about how we become gods.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Anyways, but. But this is the narrative. This is the way people read this Is, okay, so his, his view of God is evolving in the first vision change with that. So that's one explanation.
Others sort of say that, well, he may have had some kind of an actual religious experience in 1820, but he elaborated it and it kind of became exaggerated over time to like shore up his. His prophetic authority right in the face of challengers or crises in the church. Like this was Fombrodian down Vogel. This is what they say about the first vision, that it evolved to reflect Joseph Smith's need to consolidate his power, whatever.
So that's, that's a line you could take of it, bottom line, to reflect.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: His understanding of the theology or something.
[00:10:07] Speaker C: Yeah, something like that. So, so basically that's the bottom line. So we have these accounts, but are some differences in them, right? They're not carbon copies of each other. And two of the ways you could explain them, I don't think they're very good explanations, but you could explain them as he's just making it up, like purposely just making it up as he's going along, or he's exaggerating it or embellishing it for whatever purposes that are suiting his needs at the time. Right. To consolidate his power, to answer his critics, you know, things like that. So, and clearly this creator, she seems to be saying, right, the first, that he's just kind of making it up. And as his made up ideas about God change, then his made up ideas about the first vision changed.
So that seems to be the approach he's taking.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Some, from what I understand, from like a faithful perspective, you can look at those differences and maybe try to harmonize them and say, well, you know, it wasn't explicitly mentioning two personages, but that doesn't mean they weren't there. And maybe these other elements in these other accounts were actually all there, but he was only highlighting certain things at different times. But something that hasn't been explored a lot is the function of memory. How he's like shaping this because of just recalling it over time and retelling these narratives over and over.
So new research has come out, actually two various pieces of research. So before we dive into the specifics about like how memory ties into the first vision, I'm wondering, Neil, if you can kind of like give us a picture on like, how does memory really work? Is this just like a video recording that you play back to yourself, or is there something more complicated going on?
[00:11:41] Speaker C: We know how memory works. We saw it in Harry Potter. It's a little. It's a little white goofy. That you pull out your head and put in a bowl or.
[00:11:48] Speaker D: You know, I'm a big fan of Psych, the TV show, right. And Psych is always portraying, you know, Sean having, you know, flashback memories. And they're just like these. Photographic, photographic, picture perfect. It's like he's watching a video of his past and, and reconstructing it. That's not how memory actually works, though. And I'm, you know, I'm really not, I'm not a neuroscientist or a cognitive scientist or a psychologist or whatever other discipline a person might have to explain the complexity of memory.
But there have been people with those backgrounds who have, who have obviously studied the science of memory. And it's actually a really, really complex process. And actually about a decade ago, back in 2012, so 13 years ago, I guess, Steve Harper first started to try and apply memory science to the accounts of the first vision. And he did it in this book right here that was published with Deseret book.
It's in his seventh chapter, I think he titled it Listening to Joseph Remember.
And he developed that further.
If you think, oh, that's a Deseret book, that's a Latter Day Saint, so that's apologetics. Well, he developed it further in a book he published with Oxford.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: Okay, that bastion of Latter Day Saint apologies, Oxford University Press.
[00:13:10] Speaker D: The first he goes into, he uses the whole first five chapters are about analyzing Joseph Smith's first vision accounts in the context of memory science. And so most of what I know about memory science I learned from Steve Harper.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Well, let's talk about exactly what he's trying to argue here, what he's exploring when it comes to memory in the first vision.
[00:13:30] Speaker D: Yeah. So the basic summary here in these two books is that he argues that memory is in fact a complex dynamic process that isn't static over time. Right. It's something that, and it's not really this binary. This is a reliable or unreliable detail or whatever. That's just not how it really works. Memory can contain, you know, distortions, you, you misremember things that happens, but they also retain core truths.
And the varying accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision, he argues, reflects the complexity of memory as it develops over time. And it reflects the complexity that you would expect to see in a person genuinely remembering and therefore reconstructing their genuine lived experience on specific occasions and in specific contexts. And that's kind of the gist of what he argues. He argues that, you know, he goes into some of the science that shows that memory can especially like when you have a really powerful experience, that memory can make an impression on you. And there are certain details that will kind of get pushed to the side the periphery of your memory as your memory focuses in on the key details of that experience. And those key details will become consolidated and stabilized in your memory really early.
And then other details will be kind of fuzzy. And you see this in Joseph Smith's first vision. So there are. There are core details like we talked about in that quote from Steven.
Like we talked about in that quote. There are key details that are consistent across the accounts. Then there are other things that he kind of struggles to remember, like his exact age, the date, the time of year. Yeah, the time of year.
Those things are kind of fuzzy. And that's actually really normal for human memory.
Even with powerful, important experiences in our lives, we often don't remember exactly what day it happened unless we happen to, like, make a journal entry or something for that.
[00:15:31] Speaker C: Or it's like a notable date or something.
[00:15:33] Speaker D: Or, yeah, it's like a Christmas or something, an anniversary. Right. Those are dates that we might remember specifically. But other than that, it's really normal to be. And like, just think, like, when you were a teenager, like, could you think about a particular memory from when you were a teenager? Could you even nail down whether you were 14, 15, or 16?
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Like, I mean, there's definitely things where, like, I felt like 16 was a pretty landmark age for me. And so I tend to measure all of my memories if it was before or after that, but I couldn't narrow down that. And pretty much anything that happened to me between the ages of like, 7 and 11 is just like. It's a lump. I have no idea if I was 10 or 8 or 9. Like, it's like, oh, yeah, my. My childhood, my later childhood.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: And so, I mean, I. I get that, but at the same time, like, when you say that. No, I mean, it's preserving real truth. But there are distortions. That still sounds like, well, does that mean that the first vision is unreliable because there's distortions there.
[00:16:32] Speaker D: Well, so that is.
So that is where the discipline of history comes in. Right. Historians understanding the limits and complications of. Of memory and eyewitness accounts and things like that.
Their job is to critically analyze documents and compare them against each other when you have multiple accounts of the same event, but also compare them against just broader contextual details that we have about the time period from other, you know, a mass of other documents and data to evaluate and say, hey, how reliable do these accounts appear? To be. And that's the kind of thing, lots of historians have already done that kind.
[00:17:13] Speaker C: Of work with the first vision.
[00:17:14] Speaker D: With the first vision. And the evidence at least is very persuasive to me that as Joseph Smith is recounting and accounting, is recounting these events and the surrounding details that we can actually check with other outside sources and stuff, he's actually pretty consistent and pretty reliable on those things.
I actually thought that a presentation Don Bradley gave a few years ago, actually probably close to 10 years ago now at fair where he talked about, does, do the first vision accounts reflect an 1830s setting, like when Joseph Smith is writing them, or does it reflect an 1820s setting? The setting when he says he experienced these things. And he argues that the accounts really do reflect genuine memory of an 1820s setting.
[00:18:01] Speaker C: I can give an example actually where Neil's talking about this. I don't remember if Don mentions it in his paper, but I know this has been a big discussion with others.
It's the question of revivals happening in Palmyra.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:18:11] Speaker C: So famously in the 1838 account, the Pearl Gate Price account, Joseph Smith says there was a great unusual excitement on religion. Right. He says it started with the Methodists, but then it went to all the other sects in the area. You know, low here, low there, religious excitement. Right. Okay. So historians say, okay, yeah, broadly this is the second Great Awakening. This is the burned over district in western New York.
But do we have evidence, historical evidence, for specifically in the vicinity of Palmyra, specifically in 1820.
And famously back in the 1960s, Wesley Walters published this article saying there's no evidence of religious revivals happening in Palmyra in 1820. Therefore Joseph Smith was either making it up or misremembering. And therefore it's not credible, it's not reliable.
Historians, however, got to work and first of all, they mentioned that Joseph smith in the 1832 account and the 1838 account, he doesn't actually say it was in Palmyra in 1820.
Right. He says beginning in our second year from our removal to Manchester, which would be 1818.
Right. And then in the 1832 account, he says, you know, when, when I was about 14 years old or so. Right. About 13.
[00:19:19] Speaker D: About 12.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: About 12, yeah, he says about 12. And he says in the whole district of area was being affected by it. So it's not just like the little township of Palmyra. It's, you know, what, Wayne county or whatever, the rest of this round deal. So historians got to work and what do we find? Indisputable evidence of revivals happening. Camp Methodist, camp meetings and things. So all we had to do was be careful to read the accounts and not impose on them something that, again, and we kind of set ourselves up for failure. As we retold the first vision, we said in 1820, in Palmyra, there was a revival happening. Well, that's not actually what Joseph Smith says, Right. So that's an example where Joseph's memory, he can't nail down the precise date or the name of the minister or things like that. But he remembers when I was starting, when I was about 12, there was a lot of religious excitement happening in the area of Palmyra, Manchester.
[00:20:07] Speaker D: And he does. He does. Actually, his recollection specifically that it starts with the Methodist actually tracks really well with what we can document, what we can show with. With history. And that's stuff that like Milton Backman and. And others.
[00:20:21] Speaker C: Mark Staker more recently.
[00:20:22] Speaker D: Mark Staker more recently. And Mark Stecker's actually done a good job showing that, like, while it was this broader area, it was impacting directly people in Palmyra, people in Palmyra in ways that are consistent with Joseph Smith's account.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: So if we can rely on memory to preserve core truths, but some details get distorted, what are the kinds of things that are most likely to get lost to memory versus the things that are, like, cemented in your mind?
[00:20:49] Speaker D: Well, like I said earlier, like, specific dates, your exact age, precise things that people said. Precise things that people said are the kinds of things that might be hard to remember. And there are things in Joseph Smith's accounts that kind of reflect this. I think the 1832 account, he says, like, I mean, I don't have the accounts right in front of me. You know, he says something about, like, I was about the age of 16 or in my 16th year or something like that, which is, as we know, famously inconsistent with his more later retellings that say, you know, more consistently, say, 14.
But those are the kinds of things that are usually harder to remember and are kind of vaguer in your memory.
[00:21:35] Speaker C: The thing that tends to be solidified, that Steve Harper shows are feelings at the time. And that's really interesting because in the 1838 account, it's a very emotive and expressive account, right? My soul was caught up to deep reflection. There was great anxiety, right? Like, he remembers how he felt at that time, which the neuroscience shows tends to be fairly common in terms of memory retrieval.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: So, like emotional events, things that you feel. I mean, that tends to track with my own experience. Like My youngest memories of early, early, early childhood are usually ones where I got hurt. Like I stubbed my toe really bad or I got my finger jammed in a door. And like, I remember that moment, nothing else about that day, but, like, that was, like, so seared in my memory because it was really painful or really happy or whatever that memory was I had.
[00:22:24] Speaker C: When again. Here we go. Ready? I'm going to do what we're talking about. When I was about six years old, I had a traumatic leg injury when I fell off my bike.
[00:22:33] Speaker D: Oh, my gosh, you're Joseph Smith.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: I am, yes, absolutely.
Yeah, that's right. Had my dad hold me. No, I had a brand new bike I'd gotten for my birthday. I was riding it down our gravel road at our. I was living up in Woodland, Utah, right past Park City.
Brand new bike. I was so excited.
The little plastic cup holder on the, you know, the middle rack or whatever had broken off and there was this jagged plastic piece that was sticking out. I fell off the bike and it jammed in my leg and I had to get my. Literally, my sister came. My sister ran, she picked me up. I was bleeding, I was screaming. We ran into the ER to get stitches. It was a. It was a deep gash. Right. I still have a scar on my leg for it. I remember that. That memory that is here, that feeling of trauma and pain, it's there. I couldn't tell you the exact date. I can't even tell you the exact year. All I know is I was about six. It was before we moved to Salt Lake, which was when I was about 8 or 9, because we were still living in Woodlawn. So you get.
People do this all the time in real time.
The way that memory affects real events that happen to us, it's playing out in living people today. And it played out with Joseph Smith.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Clearly you remember your sister was there. Do you remember other people who were there, the environment you were in, the other kinds of details?
[00:23:42] Speaker C: I remember it was at our family ranch up in Woodland, right where I grew up as a very little kid. I remember screaming when I fell off and had all the blood going around me and the feeling of the pain. I remember my sister coming out. My sister Emily, shout out to Emily for helping me out here. My sister Emily came, picked me up in her arms, ran me into the house. And then that's about where the memory fades. And I just now know I have a scar on my leg, right? A giant, nasty scar.
[00:24:07] Speaker D: So actually, what's really interesting about what Stephen just said is one of the things that actually does show up in the, in the science on, on memory is that oftentimes when people can triangulate or, or narrow down a specific date or time or year, they do it through like a triangulation process like Stephen just did with like. Well, I know it was before we moved to Salt Lake and it was, you know, and that triangulation process where they know certain concrete dates, probably because other people told them. Like, I know when my family moved to. When I moved with my family to Utah is in June of 1992, but I don't know that because I distinctly remember that date when we were moving. I was only five. I remember that because my parents have told me as I got older, that's when we made that move. Right? And so then I have certain memories that I can pin to about that time because I've been told by others who were there when that happened. And I can triangulate those memories in that way. But I wouldn't, without that external piece of data, I wouldn't remember when, when certain things happened. And I. Well, I was, you know, I was maybe about five or six, but now I have like this distinct break in my life where before five I lived in Colorado. After five I lived in Utah. So I can say, well, if I remember something from Colorado, it was before I was five.
[00:25:31] Speaker C: So let me throw out something and then maybe we can go on to the piece that we're here to highlight. This is really interesting.
Okay, so let me play devil's advocate here for a second and say, all right, sure. This all makes sense for like, Normie, mundane day to day things with people's lived experience. Right? But Joseph saw God. He would remember that and he would never forget any of the details of him seeing God.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: You say it sounds like a caricature, but I really can't tell you how many comments in DMs I get about like, I would not have forgotten if I saw God. I would not have forgotten how many people were in that vision. And there's sincere concerns that how on earth could someone conflate or distort or mess up that important of a detail? It's not just what date it was, it was that he saw God or did you see God and Jesus? Like those are two big things.
[00:26:18] Speaker D: Okay, so that actually is a nice setup here. So the whole reason we wanted to talk about this topic is there's a new article that came out in the. Sure, I get the title of the.
[00:26:31] Speaker C: American Academy of Religion.
[00:26:33] Speaker D: That's right. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion Apologist Venue.
[00:26:36] Speaker C: So this is, it might as well be the Journal of Mormon Apologetics. Yeah, that might as well be.
[00:26:40] Speaker D: This is like one of the highest tier top journals for like the study of religion and religious experience and stuff like that in the field. This is, this is a very high tier journal. It's co authored by a. Celine Dafoe and Carter Charles.
And I think it's worth pausing for a moment to talk about who Celine Dafoe is for a moment because Steve Harper we talked about earlier, he's a historian, he's engaging neuroscience and the studies of memory. But this is a person whose career has been to study neuroscience. Neuroscience Answers.
[00:27:16] Speaker C: Pulled up her CV here.
[00:27:17] Speaker D: So we've got her cv.
She is a Latter Day Saint. But I do think it's kind of interesting.
She's an adult convert to the church who was, I think, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I think she was actually studying neuroscience at university when she encountered the church and joined the church. So this is someone who is highly intelligent, was very cognizant of how memory and the brain works and stuff like that as an adult and joined the church as an adult as a result of that. But her professional career, you know, and the things she teaches, she does teach at byu, Hawaii, so maybe some people will use that. Oh, Mormon apologist.
But her specialties and the things she teaches, you just look over at cognitive psychology, the brain and behavior, the biological bases of memory processes, things like that. This is someone, you could say this is a memory scientist.
[00:28:19] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:20] Speaker D: For all intents and purposes. Right.
And she actually analyzed the different accounts of the first vision in light of memory and she got it published here, like we said, in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. And no one's been talking about this, but the title of the article, Religious Experience and Memory Retrieval, A Memory Studies Reading of Joseph Smith's first vision accounts and she goes over some of the different details of memory studies and how they work and a lot of the kind of stuff we've already hit and some of the points we've made, you can find in this, in this study that she, she does.
It's a little densely written because it's a, it's a real honest to goodness, you know, cognitive scientist writing in a real academic journal. It's not.
And it's, it's, it's pretty serious stuff. But one, but, but germane to the question Jasmine asked. She talks about this concept of flashbulb image memories. Okay.
These are Memories. And I'm trying to find where I.
Yeah, okay, so flashbulb memories are things where. Of something of great consequence in a person's life that happened and caused this person to have this like, very vivid, very impactful experience that kind of like a flashbulb makes an imprint on their.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Memory, like a traumatic leg injury. On a.
[00:29:44] Speaker D: Like a traumatic leg injury or a.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Very spiritual experience, like in the temple.
[00:29:47] Speaker D: Or a strong spiritual experience. One of the things she compares it to is people's memory of 911 in 2001. You know, if we. If a Gen Z is listening, we need to understand this happened before you were born.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: There's a thing called 9 11. It's really bad.
[00:30:03] Speaker D: Yeah, but, but there have been memory studies on.
On people's recollection of 911 that are considered a flashbulb memory where this really, like, shocking thing happened.
And the criteria for a flashbulb memory are consequentiality in your life experience. It's an experience that affects the person's future.
There's an intensity of emotions associated with the experience.
There's kind of a documented trail of the rehearsal of that memory. It's being retrieved and rehearsed frequently because of its impact.
The surprising nature of the event is part of it. And, you know, she says that Joseph Smith's visionary experience combines all of these criteria. And so when people say things like, well, if I had an experience like that, I would not forget. I would not forget how many people were there, or I would not forget anything like, you know, any of the details. I would remember all of it.
The problem is that's not what the science shows.
[00:31:00] Speaker C: That's literally not how human brains work.
[00:31:02] Speaker D: That's literally not how human brains work. And that's not what the science actually shows, even for flashbacks, because of the vividness and the intensity of it. Yes, there are certain details that become imprinted on your memory and stabilize pretty quickly.
But the studies with 911 memories, for instance, have actually shown that over time, those memories do change and evolve still. And people do actually forget certain details or misremember things because they've done, like, longitudinal studies on people's memories of.
Of 9 11. And so they can track that kind of thing. And it's actually interesting. There's something she says in the article where she actually says that these, the memories, Joseph Smith's accounts of the first vision, show a similar trajectory or curve as seen in the memories people have of 9 11.
And so it's just kind of a little indication that, like, these are not accounts that Joseph Smith's making up. It actually has the authentic trajectory that you would expect for flashable memories. So, yeah, again, that's just like. That's how memory is.
And even. Even these. Like, to me, what that tells us is, yes, there are.
There are certain details that are consistent throughout the accounts. And that's because as a flashbulb memory, there were things that were seared and impacted on Joseph Smith, like, from that moment of memory. But it's still not gonna be. You're not gonna have perfect exact recall of the event every single time. And it's not gonna be this perfectly re.
And honestly, like Stephen even said, like, I would contend or I would dispute the idea that he wasn't remembering that there were two people in the first place.
And that's something that historians who critically analyze the different accounts in, like, a professional way, not a TikTok way. TikTok way who professionally and critically analyze the accounts. Historians like Steve Harper and others have, I think, persuasively argued that there are hints that there were two people in the 1832 account. It's just not quite as explicit.
But the point is, if people think, oh, the accounts shouldn't have any major differences because of how prominent. Like, my. I wouldn't forget that. Well, you probably would. You probably would actually forget some details if you had an experience.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: I mean, you talk about how, like, there are flashbulb memories and you're going to remember certain things, but then other things distort. And that almost makes it sound like when you have a memory, it's something that is solid and then fades over time. But I was really interested to learn more about, when going through this research, that it actually is almost like the opposite. Like, a memory occurs and then it will consolidate and solidify and kind of take a final evolutionary form over time, as, like, you tell narratives about yourself. Like, that impacts how you interpret that memory. She even talked about, like, memory as a pyramid, how first you experience the memory, but then you are going to subjectively process that memory. Then you're going to have your psychological and personal experiences be informing how you interpret that memory. And then, you know, over time and your other private experiences informs how you interpret that memory and how it, like, forms your life. Especially if it's a memory that you are rehearsing over and over and over again, because it's like a corner, a core. It's a core memory, as they would say in Inside out, or it's just like a narrative. And I. I have noticed that there are certain as like a public figure people, I've. I found myself, like, having to rehearse a lot. Like, well, how did you become an influencer? Like, what inspired you to start talking about the gospel online? And like, I've had to kind of solidify that narrative. And as different people have asked me, I've kind of told it in different ways. But the more and more people ask me that question, like, well, how did you become an influencer? Why did you want to start doing this? Like, it started to solidify. And that means that some details are getting like massaged over and others are being highlighted as I've kind of reflected. Like, well, was it really that thing that got me going or was it really more this thing that got me going? Yeah, I think it really did start all the way back with my mom in seminary. And okay, I really can't. And like, that just becomes part of my narrative and it starts to solidify. And it's not that, like, my memory changed, it's that my entire life is now I'm reflecting back my entire life to say, okay, how did I get from here to there? And I think we probably could say something similar about Joseph Smith in the first vision.
[00:35:22] Speaker C: Let's imagine an alternate universe where Joseph Smith's earliest account of the first vision is that Peter, James and John appeared to me in a vision right, in 1820. And they told me. And then later it's, oh, it's actually Jesus and God the Father. Like, those would be the kinds of discrepancies that I could see. Okay, what's going on here? But as you were saying, as we consolidate our experiences into a narrative, some of the details are going to be marginalized. Others will, you know, sort of come to central prominence. But with the. And that happens with the first vision. And if you read the long arc of the first vision narratives, that's what we kind of see. But as Neil was saying, people are exaggerating the actual differences and divergences in these accounts. I really don't think it rises to the level of he's just willfully making things up willy nilly. I think this great research from Steve Harper and now Celine Dufault and Carter Charles, great stuff. To help us understand this inexplicable way, I just wanted to read my favorite sentence in the entire article, and it might be the greatest sentence that's ever been written in an article on Mormon studies. Joseph Smith's neurons are not available for present day research. I just think something about that. So great, like just the Understatement of it. All, right? Like that's. And, but, you know, we laugh, but it's true. He's not alive. We can't put a little head scanner on his brain, do a CT scan or whatever and find out what's going on. We only have these written accounts. And there's ways that we can, we can approach these written accounts where we don't have to jump on the TikTok bandwagon we saw there with this influencer.
[00:36:47] Speaker D: Well, and within, within, like the intra discourse that historians have with each other, there's a lot of talk about how, you know, the past isn't actually available for examination. And that's kind of a similar point. Like we don't have Joseph Smith's brain. We don't actually have the past. We can't get in a time machine and just go back to it and study it and analyze it. Right? We just have written accounts about the past and figuring out exactly what happened. It's hard. It's challenging, especially when it's an event like this where there is literally only one human person that was involved. We believe there was more people because we believe God and Jesus were involved too. But.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: Yeah, but there were no human witnesses.
[00:37:26] Speaker D: There are literally no other human witnesses other than Joseph himself to what happened there. And there is actually a line at the end of the article where they say, like, from a scientific standpoint because we can't, like, hook up to Joseph's brain and study his neurons, and we certainly couldn't do it like in the moment to see what's happening in his brain and stuff. From a scientific standpoint, we'll never know what happened precisely in that, like, grove of trees in upstate New York in 1820. And frankly, from a historical standpoint, we'll never really know for sure either. It takes faith to accept that this happened. But when we study it from these different disciplines of history and neuroscience, what we do find is that Joseph seems to be authentically remembering a real experience he had. This isn't. He's not lying or making this up. I wanted to share this. This story from Arthur Henry King, who's. Who was actually a literary scholar in, in Britain.
He was an adult convert to the church, already had a PhD and a professional career as a literary critic.
And he encounters Joseph Smith's official account, the 1830 account, 1838 account. Excuse me, and he talks about how he says, when I was first brought to read Joseph's story, I was deeply impressed.
I wasn't inclined to be impressed as a Styletician. I've spent my life being disinclined to be impressed.
So when I read his story, I thought to myself, this is an extraordinary thing.
This is an astonishingly matter of fact and cool account. This man is not trying to persuade me of anything. He doesn't feel the need to. He's stating what happened to him and he's stating it not enthusiastically, but in quite matter of fact way. And he goes on, there's actually, it's on the FAIR website, it has this excerpt from his book that talks about this. He goes on to like analyze the whole account from this perspective. But what really struck me, what really stood out to me is he culminates by saying something that this is a piece of literature that he considers, you know, he says, Joseph Smith in this account of his first vision produced a piece of literature or a piece of prose better than anything that Coleridge ever wrote. Okay? Now if you're familiar, if you're familiar with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he is like the founder of the Romantic movement, a poet and literary critic. And for a British literary scholar in particular, because this is a British, you know, Romantic.
For a British literary scholar to say that Joseph Smith wrote something better than anything Coleridge ever wrote. Coleridge, if you're not familiar, he's most famous for the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, right.
Which is excellent. You can actually, there's a, there's a, there's a clip of, of, there's, there's a video of Ian McClellan actually reading it on, on YouTube if you want to check it out. Really excellent poetry. My first exposure to it was actually the Iron Maiden version, the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner on the Powerslave album, which has some great Egyptian themed artwork, by the way. But, but this is, this is like the highest praise a British literary scholar could give a piece of literature. Right? And so you have so many people with, who are really learned and experienced, they're telling us, hey, when we analyze these accounts critically, Joseph Smith appears to be genuinely telling about his experience.
And you can never really know that except by faith. Except and having a spiritual experience with it yourself. But several kind of different fields or disciplines of analysis do support that Joseph was trying to tell the truth based on the best he could remember.
[00:40:59] Speaker C: Yeah, but did Arthur Henry King know about TikTok?
Come on, man.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: Well said. If you want to learn more about Joseph Smith's first vision and memory. Stephen C. Harper, first Vision, Memory and Mormon Origins. And then also Defoe and Charles, I forgot the name of the title of the article, but you can look it up in our show notes.
[00:41:19] Speaker C: We'll have a link to the show notes below.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Yeah, and Church is true.
