Typically, this topic tends to amount to running through a list of Joseph Smith’s accomplishments and how great of a prophet he was. (That’s how it went down in the Relief Society class today.) When I was preparing my lesson, I knew I wanted to approach it in a unique way because I knew it would garner better discussion, which ultimately results in better introspection.

When I came across this quote, I had a good idea how I wanted to approach the lesson:

When Joseph announced that he had seen a vision and had seen the Father and the Son, the query came to the minds and lips of the neighbors, the ministers, and the townspeople: “Is not this the farmer’s son?”

The following quote just a few paragraphs later closed the deal for me:

within God’s hands and under the direction of the Savior of the world, weak and simple things should come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones.

As a communist, I was intrigued by the idea that Joseph Smith—despite his flaws and regardless of how authentic he was in his actions—was a revolutionary in his day. That was something I hadn’t consider in much depth before.

The bulk of our conversation on the topic revolved around 2 ideas found in another quote in that chapter:

the claim that God had spoken, that Christ’s Church was again organized and its doctrines reaffirmed by divine revelation, was the most outstanding declaration made to the world since the days of the Savior himself when he walked the paths of Judea and the hills of Galilee.

There were 2 main ideas that Joseph Smith’s First Vision changed: God was a nebulous, formless entity distant from us and revelation had been closed off with the death of the 12 apostles. These principles solidified the position of religious leaders of the day to be the gatekeepers of biblical interpretation and gospel explication.

The First Vision shows us that God looks like us: he’s a glorified, perfect human who is intimately familiar with the mortal experience, which makes him highly approachable, the opposite of how he was treated by Christian sects of the time.

In addition, the First Vision showed us that God can speak to us. We don’t need religious leaders to counsel us on our individual beliefs and aspirations; we can skip the intermediaries and petition God directly.

This revolutionized religious worship. It empowered the people with autonomy over their own religious beliefs. In fact, this idea is encapsulated in one our Articles of Faith:

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

This leaves me with one question, however: if God could use Joseph Smith as a weak and simple thing to come forth and break down the control the religious establishment had over the people, how might we, too, be weak and simple things and what mighty and strong things might God have us break down?

I have personally found several of the articles encouraging because they cover things I never learned growing up: things I learned only as an adult and only through blogs, podcasts, and anti-Mormon websites.

I don’t know why I never learned these things. What I do know is that I never learned them in Primary, Sunday School, Aaronic Priesthood classes, Seminary, or Institute, or even on my mission. I never read them in a church magazine (although recently a handful of them have appeared in Ensign issues) or lesson manuals.

I present below several recent articles and direct quote from each showing facts and ideas I had to learn through non-official channels.

Book of Mormon Translation

• “The other instrument, which Joseph Smith discovered in the ground years before he retrieved the gold plates, was a small oval stone, or ‘seer stone.’”
• “As a young man during the 1820s, Joseph Smith, like others in his day, used a seer stone to look for lost objects and buried treasure.”
• “Apparently for convenience, Joseph often translated with the single seer stone rather than the two stones bound together to form the interpreters.”
• “According to these accounts, Joseph placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument.”

First Vision Accounts

• “he wrote or assigned scribes to write four different accounts of the vision.”
• “In addition to the firsthand accounts, there are also five descriptions of Joseph Smith’s vision recorded by his contemporaries.”
• “1832 account . . . He wrote that ‘the Lord’ appeared and forgave him of his sins.”
• “1835 account . . . the appearance of one divine personage who was followed shortly by another. This account also notes the appearance of angels in the vision.”

Race and the Priesthood

• “During the first two decades of the Church’s existence, a few black men were ordained to the priesthood.”
• “There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.”
• “In 1852, President Brigham Young publicly announced that men of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood”
• “Even after 1852, at least two black Mormons continued to hold the priesthood.”

Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham

• “Other times, his translations were not based on any known physical records.”
• “Neither the rules nor the translations in the grammar book correspond to those recognized by Egyptologists today.”
• “some Egyptologists had said that Joseph Smith’s explanations of the various elements of these facsimiles did not match their own interpretations of these drawings. ”
• “None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham’s name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham. ”
• “Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham”

Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints

• Everything in the section about the Danites
• Everything in the section about the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo

• “Joseph married many additional wives”
• “The oldest [of Joseph’s wives], Fanny Young, was 56 years old. The youngest was Helen Mar Kimball, daughter of Joseph’s close friends Heber C. and Vilate Murray Kimball, who was sealed to Joseph [at 14 years old].”
• “Joseph Smith was sealed to a number of women who were already married.”
• “Emma approved, at least for a time, of four of Joseph Smith’s plural marriages in Nauvoo, and she accepted all four of those wives into her household.”
• “[Emma’s] decision to ‘receive not this law’ permitted him to marry additional wives without her consent.”

The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage

• “Under exceptional circumstances, a smaller number of new plural marriages were performed in the United States between 1890 and 1904”
• “Of the 315 marriages recorded in the ledger, research indicates that 25 (7.9%) were plural marriages . . . . Of the 25 plural marriages, 18 took place in Mexico, 3 in Arizona, 2 in Utah, and 1 each in Colorado and on a boat on the Pacific Ocean.”
• The entire section on The Second Manifesto.

I see these new articles as a step in a positive direction, where the Church has begun accepting the fact researchers have known for decades. I’m happy to see the Church moving towards openness and transparency on topics for which historians were excommunicated just a few short years ago.

I am happy my children can potentially grow up in a Church where these things are taught readily.

A common explanation for this difference in details is that Joseph smith was speaking to different audiences, so he needed to explain the story differently. While I have heard this explanation on several occasions, I have never thought about it much until now.

What purpose would be served by telling one person he saw Jesus, another he saw Moroni, and another he saw God and Jesus? In what ways would these three audiences be different enough to warrant these differences?