85: The First Vision Happened in 1825?!

So while the 1832 account is void of any mention of James 1.5, it is present in the 1835 account.

I retired to the silent grove and bowed down before the Lord under a realizing sense that he had said, if the Bible be true, ask and you shall receive, knock and it shall be opened, seek and you shall find.

And again, if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not.

Information was what I most desired at this time and with a fixed determination to obtain it, I called upon the Lord for the first time in the place above stated, or in other words, I made a fruitless attempt to pray.

And then he launches into the story.

James 1.5, again, is another one of those very seminal Mormon things.

It's a scripture that most Mormons will know by heart, if not be incredibly aware of the reference and the content of.

And it's one of, we'll say it later, but it's one of the most consistent things that he is talked about amongst the First Vision accounts.

The idea that James 1.5 was the scripture that caused Joseph Smith to go and seek information from God and then receive a heavenly visitation.

Right.

And this is an important part that we're going to talk about throughout this episode.

And so the big thing we want people to recognize in this slide, because as we talked about kind of leading into our introduction today, there are multiple different accounts of the first vision directly attributed to Joseph Smith.

Then there are other accounts that are secondhand, also traceable back to Joseph Smith.

Mm-hmm.

We're not going to reiterate every single deviation from one account to the next, but I think it's important to take away from this slide that this scripture that Nemo's just correctly talked about how it's so foundational to this story in the 1835 and then the 1838, which is really the version of the story that most people know.

That's the version that's in the Pearl of Great Price and that missionaries share with people.

that story or that scripture doesn't feature in the story in the earliest handwritten by Joseph Smith account in 1832.

Right.

Yeah.

Another thing that I wanted that I was noticing, we've done episodes on Joseph Smith's ability to write well-worded letters.

And then he was able to remember passages of the scriptures.

It doesn't seem like in this one that he's got the scriptures open.

I'm wondering if he's just pulling this from memory, just because I recognize that some of the words are different.

I don't know because it isn't if any of you lack wisdom,

but it's