Narrative Theology in Truman G. Madsen’s “The First Vision and Its Aftermath” (1978)

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On Tuesday, August 22, 1978, Truman G. Madsen (1926–2009) was working to get a family cabin enclosed before winter arrived in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. He looked at his watch, said “Whoa—gotta go!,” and climbed into the passenger side of the family truck. He traded his overalls for a shirt, tie, and jacket as his son Barney drove him down the canyon to the curb outside the massive new Marriott Center on the campus of Brigham Young University.¹ The basketball arena had been adapted for Education Week, the university’s late-summer continuing education program held since 1922. Thousands of Latter-day Saints had gathered inside, hungry for a series of lectures about their founding prophet, Joseph Smith, by one of the university’s most popular professors and its Richard L. Evans Chair of Christian Understanding. The first of Madsen’s two speeches that day (and eight that week) is “The First Vision and Its Aftermath.”²

These speeches culminate a decade of Madsen-led efforts to solidify Latter-day Saint faith in the founding prophet’s first theophany, which had become the Saints’ origin story. “The first vision has come under severe historical attack,” Madsen wrote to the Church’s First Presidency in 1968, referring to the work of Reverend Wesley Walters, a Presbyterian minister in Marissa, Illinois, whose recent article had impeached Smith’s canonized vision narrative as anachronistic.³ When Madsen eyed Walters’s nametag at a Southern Illinois University symposium later that year, he erupted pleasantly, “Wesley Walters! So you’re the one who dropped the bomb on BYU.” Madsen then said, speaking of BYU and its sponsoring church, “They’re giving us all the money we want to try and find answers to you.”⁴

Madsen’s speech delivers answers to thousands of self-selecting Saints who had come “to give eight hours of undivided—or even divided attention.”⁵ The audience was well known to Madsen, and he to them. Now in his early fifties, he had long been a popular speaker and a student favorite. Years earlier, BYU student Jeffrey R. Holland (who would become the president of BYU two years after Madsen’s 1978 speech) had sat “spellbound like all the rest” of his peers at one of Madsen’s fireside talks.⁶ So Madsen knew, as he reflected later, that “I could begin with presumptions and assurances which to others would have appeared startling.”⁷

When he stepped to the podium, Madsen spoke to the thousands he could see but also to those he later called his “invisible” audience, composed of concerned Saints, whose “penetrating queries about Joseph Smith” were directed to him for answers. “At certain points it is apparent that I was addressing them,” Madsen recalled, “in a kind of underground conversation, more than those present.” In “The First Vision and Its Aftermath,” Madsen performs a strategic counter maneuver against the attack on the Saints’ origin story. Years in the making and tactically skillful, the speech does what a BYU colleague would later describe as arming the children.⁸

A decade after the speech, Madsen noted: “More than all else I have written or recorded, these cassettes have engendered a return wave, international in scope, of responsive letters and comments.” I first heard this speech while serving as a missionary in Saskatchewan soon after Madsen observed how far it had reached. Some missionary apartments were stocked with the cassettes, and I was one of many missionaries who could not listen to them often or long enough. Madsen’s resonant voice has a distinctive cadence and varied pacing that is entirely lost in transcription. The text reads: “In the earliest account, Joseph speaks of his days in Vermont. There and later in New York Joseph would look up at night and marvel at the symmetry and the beauty and the order of the heavens.” But orally, Madsen actually says,

Let me then dwell for a few moments on the background. In the earliest account Joseph says that even in the days that he was in Vermont—Vermont, where even today there is little pollution and where the sky, at night, is clear. And the Milky Way [pause] is [emphatic] milky. He would look up, at night, and marvel [pause] at the symmetry, and the beauty, and the order [pause] of the heavens.

Here was the inverse of monotone.

It helps that Madsen picked a perfect story. Whatever literary wisdom Joseph Smith lacked, he had instinctively cast himself as a likeable protagonist embattled against the forces of evil, including an actual if unseen devil and his corrupt clergy. Madsen taps that arc to give his listeners a Joseph Smith who raises the stakes on his young self to eternal life and death, reads a Bible verse that launches his quest by going to the woods to ask God for knowledge, and escalates the tension until he is overcome by “thick darkness” and “doomed to sudden destruction.” Just then, as Madsen shows, Smith exerts all his power to call on God, “and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction,” a pillar of light fills the woods where he was praying, vanquishes the evil, and reveals God and Christ, who deliver the knowledge Joseph had desperately lacked.⁹

Madsen embellishes this story in the positive sense of the word. He further characterizes Joseph and his antagonist, whom he gives a name, Reverend George Lane, and a voice, creating a scene that beats back and forth. It features young Joseph, full of glory and excitement, being robbed of joy by Lane’s rejection, then ending the scene as a martyr. “Shucks, boy, it’s all of the devil” was Madsen’s paraphrase of Lane’s dismissal. “The boy’s smile slowly disappeared.” Joseph “learned early that to testify of divine manifestations was to stir up darkness and to call down wrath. That wrath finally evolved into bullets.” Madsen laces the story with other delights, too, including data points that I had never heard before, delivered so matter-of-factly that they integrated seamlessly into my prior knowledge of Smith’s First Vision. I had known nothing about the four accounts of the First Vision. After hearing the speech, I felt as if I had known them all along, that the Wentworth letter was indeed “well known” to informed people like me. Madsen takes for granted the existence and positive value of multiple vision narratives. Sprinkled throughout are lines like, “In an earlier account he adds that for a time he could not speak, as if his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.”

The selection of data is a purposeful and powerful act of reshaping Latterday Saint memory, which is constructed of consolidated and unconsolidated components. When people choose how to attend to these components, however subtle or unconscious, they select and relate data components to one another. Relating apparently happens in the brain’s hippocampus. By analogy, groups consolidate collective memories via a social hippocampus, with a person or group selecting, relating, and repeating the memory until it is common knowledge. Madsen selects and relates information strategically, leading to new knowledge in me and many others and forming a novel and improved past that would prove especially usable and resilient.

Even so, I changed my mind about Madsen’s speech. It happened gradually and perhaps ironically. Inspired in part by Madsen’s work, I pursued Joseph Smith’s revelations academically. In that process, I became a different kind of hearer of Madsen’s interpretation. As I gained the will and skill to be source critical, I dissected the text of Madsen’s speeches and found that they had lost much of the power they once offered me. As I learned the academic jargon, the speeches seemed reductive and lacking nuance. They were historically sloppy. Then, in 2003, I heard Madsen speak in person for the first time. It was at the symposium God, Humanity, and Revelation: Perspectives from Mormon Philosophy and History, hosted by Yale Divinity School.

He told about his conversation with some Jesuits. They were trying to understand each other’s theism with mutual respect and rigor. The Jesuits, he said, explained that they could not imagine theism other than classical and could not fathom a God whose purpose could be to raise children quite literally to be equals in his exalted image. Madsen said he explained to his learned Catholic friends that Latter-day Saints could not imagine God’s work to be other than that. Listening to Madsen and then reflecting restored my initial judgment. His lecture on Joseph Smith’s First Vision deserves a place in the pantheon of landmark Latter-day Saint speeches. Truman Madsen is a philosopher. In August 1978, he was doing theology, not history. As he acknowledges from the outset and in his notes, he had relied on the best informed historians but did not presume to be one of them. I had become frustrated at what I perceived to be his historical shortcomings, but all the while he was not trying to do historical work. Rather, he was on a mission to do theological work for the masses, telling historical stories as a means to rhetorical and epistemological ends. Madsen could—as he elsewhere did—speak the language of his Harvard education and engage in erudite exchanges. But if he had done that in the Marriott Center, he would not have reached the masses with the message that God knew the (extra)ordinary boy Joseph Smith, and that that boy came to know God, and that I could know the same thing in the same way. Though Madsen opened my eyes, I had been blind to the work he did. Others saw clearly. Hundreds of people in Madsen’s “invisible” audience wrote to him “expressing what the Joseph Smith tapes had meant to them.” One letter he loved came from an Australian man in his early thirties, saying that he had first heard the talks when he was fifteen. “I spent the next three months listening to them every day,” he said, and credited Madsen with solidifying his faith in Joseph Smith as God’s prophet.

The First Vision and Its Aftermath (1978)

Truman G. Madsen¹⁰

Years ago I prepared a paper that went as a kind of tract in New England. We used it at the Joseph Smith Memorial—titled “Joseph Smith Among the Prophets.” It was written, I thought, to a non-Mormon. It attempted to present ten characterizations of prophets that are typical in Judeo-Christian literature. For instance, a prophet is a foreteller; he has prophetic access to the future. Also, prophets have been called “forth-tellers,” meaning that they speak forth boldly in judgment and in recommendation as to their own time. A prophet too is categorized as a man who has authority, who speaks with more than human sanction. He is a recoverer or discoverer of truth. He is an advocate of social righteousness. He is a charismatic, one whose personality manifests something that attracts in a spiritual sense. He is one who endures suffering, and does so radiantly. He is an embodiment of love. He is a seer, meaning that he has the capacity to clearly understand and reveal truth. Finally, among the great prophets of the past, many have been martyrs. In that presentation I simply showed that, under each of those heads, Joseph Smith qualifies as a prophet. If we can use any one of them to characterize a prophet, what can we say of a man who radiates them all?

Today, more intimately than in the Judeo-Christian captions above, we come to a subjective approach to Joseph’s glorious first vision. (I would prefer to call it, for reasons that will soon appear, his first visitation.) Let me begin with a little book work. Nearly nine years ago, in 1969, BYU Studies¹¹ published a collection of the four known written accounts of the First Vision. One was first recorded in 1832; another in 1835, after a visit Joseph had with a Jewish visitor named Joshua;¹² there is the 1838 statement, which has been published to the world in the Pearl of Great Price; and finally, the well-known Wentworth letter written in 1842 to the Chicago Democrat,¹³ in which the Prophet briefly recapitulated his first vision. What was intended by the BYU Studies¹⁴ publication was not only to give, as was done, the actual holographs—the handwritten accounts from his different scribes—as he dictated them, but also to provide articles on the context by some of the best LDS scholars.

Let me now dwell for a few moments on the background. In the earliest account, Joseph speaks of his days in Vermont. Vermont where even today the sky is clear, the pollution is little, and the Milky Way is milky. There, and later in New York, Joseph would look up at night and marvel at the symmetry and the beauty and the order of the heavens. Something in him said, as has happened to sensitive souls from the beginning, “Behind that there must be a majestic creator of the heavens.” The contrast between his boyhood awareness and the confusion he saw on this planet was not just difficult; it seared his soul. The divisions he laments in Palmyra were not just among and between others, neighbors and friends; they were in his own family. He had at least one relative in every church in Palmyra, so that his family was utterly spread. Order in heaven, disorder on earth. How could God be responsible for both?

The record makes it transparently obvious¹⁵ that before the sacred experience in the Grove it had never occurred to Joseph that all the then influential churches were in error. Notice, the question he put to Jesus Christ when he recovered himself was not, “Is there a true church in the world?” The question was, “Which church is true?” He assumed that at least one had to be true. The answer therefore was all the more striking and startling: “Join none of them.”

Another interesting point about the background is that by reading in the Bible, Joseph had been “struck”—in fact, he says, “Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine.” We think we know that Reverend George Lane may have been the man who first recommended in Joseph Smith’s hearing, “Let him ask of God.” That specific passage in James 1:5 was mentioned in some of the minister’s sermons. A Methodist, he was associated with revivals in western New York. We can’t prove that he was this person, but Joseph later talks of a Methodist preacher he was with soon after the vision, a person who was, he says, “active in the before mentioned religious excitement.” Imagine (and this to me is poignant) Joseph at age fourteen—full as he was of the glory, the remarkable experience, and the excitement of it—recounting his experience to this man (he does not say George Lane, he says he went to this man). And the man’s response was, “Oh no, that could not be of God. Those things don’t happen anymore.”

So to recommend that one lacking wisdom ought to go and pray about it, by all means let him ask of God. But to this man the answer seemed . . . well, too much. Heaven had come too close. We can almost visualize the boy—pureminded, spontaneous, even a little unrestrained, as teenagers are—being struck by the wonder of this marvelous answer to prayer. “Wow! It worked! You told me to do it. I did it.” And the response was, “Shucks, boy, it’s all of the devil.” The boy’s smile slowly disappeared. And he learned early that to testify even to hints of divine manifestations was to stir up darkness and to call down wrath. That wrath finally evolved into bullets.

I have not done justice to the family and their support for him. We have a document from a woman who herself was a Presbyterian, who speaks of Joseph’s early life, when she as a girl, much younger apparently, came and watched him with others of the boys working at her father’s farm. The enemies of Joseph Smith have made out over and over that he was shiftless, lazy, indolent, that he never did a day’s work in his life. The truth, exactly the contrary. The stories radically contradict each other. On the one hand, we hear of this shiftless person, who’s always telling stories aimlessly and never doing a hard day’s work, and in the next breath the anti-Mormons point out that every night at midnight he’s out with his crew digging for silver or buried treasure or something and never finding it, which is hardly indolent; it’s overactive.¹⁶ The truth is that, according to this account, a non-Mormon account, her father hired Joseph because he was such a good worker.

Not only that, but because he was able to get the other boys to work. The suspicion is that he did that by the fairly deft use of his fists. I noted that as a suspicion, I don’t say that that is the truth. It is my belief that one of the feelings he had of unworthiness, one of the things for which he asked forgiveness (and his account shows that he did pray for forgiveness prior to the visitations of Moroni), was this physical propensity. He was so strong, so muscular, so physically able, that that was one way he had of solving problems. This troubled him. He did not feel it was consonant with the divine commission he had received.

Mrs. Palmer’s account speaks of “the excitement stirred up among some of the people over [Joseph’s] first vision.” A churchman, she recalls, came to her father “to remonstrate against his allowing such close friendship between his family” and the boy Joseph. But the father, pleased with Joseph’s work on his farm, was determined to keep him on. Of the vision, he said that it was “the sweet dream of a pure-minded boy.” That is before. But then, the daughter reports, Joseph claimed to have had another vision; and this time it led to the production of a book. The churchman came again, and at this point the girl’s father turned against Joseph. But, she adds significantly, by then it was too late. Joseph Smith had a following.

The first members of that following were his family, who supported and loved him with great constancy. In fact, there is no greater example of total familial endurance in history than that of the Smith family. It is true that they had their ups and downs and that William Smith was almost as insecure and unsteady as Hyrum Smith was loyal and unyielding in his faith. But from an overall perspective, one of the strengths of the history of the Church is that the first family held true to each other. Even in the early days of Joseph’s revelations, the father would say to his son, “Do not be disobedient to this heavenly vision.”¹⁷

Notice that all four of the accounts of the First Vision describe the struggle Joseph had with the adversary.¹⁸ At crucial turning points in the Restoration, Beelzebub, the enemy of righteousness, the prince of darkness, has made his power felt. The First Vision was a natural point of attack. The devil has not, like the rest of us, lost his memory of premortal life. He has not been placed in a physical body and had the veil drawn. He therefore knew Joseph Smith. Later in his life Joseph would say, “Every man [and that would include himself] who has a calling to minister to the inhabitants of the world was ordained to that very purpose in the Grand Council of heaven before this world was.”¹⁹ It is no surprise, then, that the adversary would wish to thwart the earnest supplications of the boy Joseph in the Sacred Grove. I believe it is important to observe that it was not the first time someone had prayed for the Lord to answer the hard question, “Where is the truth?” In effect, the response that came to Joseph, this mere boy, was the answer, I believe, to millions of prayers offered down through the centuries on both sides of the veil.

[. . .]

It is significant, I take it, that when the Lord speaks, coming in His glory is he who shall abide the day that the very same reality, namely, His glory should be a blessing, a creative, enhancing, sanctifying thing. And for the wicked, anything but. Corruption cannot endure the presence of God. The same fire that will confirm the worthiness of the faithful will condemn the wickedness of the rest. They, in effect, will lose by purging, and in some cases by death, the very elements of their system that have been corrupted.

The Prophet was not harmed by the experience; he was hallowed by it. Having seen the light, he now saw in it two personages, one of whom said to him, indicating the other, “This is my Beloved Son.” In the Wentworth letter the Prophet adds, speaking of the two, that they “exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness.”²⁰ Notice they not just resembled—they exactly²¹ resembled each other in features and likeness. My own guess as to his meaning is what we speak of on earth as a family resemblance: “Like father, like son.” The Master looked like his Father.²² Hancock records a discourse in which Joseph Smith said that the Holy Ghost, only the gift of the Holy Ghost, in its special province of revelation, can really enable you to know the Father from the Son in so much that they are alike. Philip asked, “Show us the Father.” The Master replied, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”²³ This is not because they are identical but because they are, in appearance as well as in nature, exactly similar.

[. . .]

Next I turn to the emerging point that I have hinted at. Though we do not know how long the Prophet Joseph was in the Grove that day receiving instructions, it probably was longer than is suggested by the outline we have. We know, for example, that he wrote, “Many other things did he say unto me, which I cannot write at this time.”²⁴ So far as I know, he never did commit them to paper. Some critics have pointed out that the Prophet spoke of the visit of angels in connection with his first vision. Some have theorized that he began by asserting that he saw an angel and ended by embellishing it with the claim that he saw the Father and the Son. The truth is that, having described all that we are familiar with about the visitation of the Father and the Son, he says in the closing words of the 1835 account, “I saw many angels in this vision.”²⁵ It is an enforced either-or to say that he either saw the Father and the Son or saw angels. What he saw was both.

It is a fascinating and unanswerable question: Who would have been permitted to be with him in that theophany—what angels were present? We have Joseph Smith’s teaching that angels are either (1) resurrected personages who have lived upon this earth, or (2) the spirits of the just who have lived here and will yet be resurrected, or (3) as in the rare cases in the Old Testament, not-yet-embodied persons who come in anticipation. “There are no angels who minister to this earth but those who do belong or have belonged to it.”²⁶ That narrows it down to this earth, but we do not know much more than that.

Joseph was wearied with his experience in the Grove. The encounter, however long or short, demanded much from him. He says, “I came to myself.”²⁷ I think it inappropriate to say that he had been in a trance or a mystic state. The clearest parallels come from the ancient records of Moses and Abraham and Enoch. Like those prophets of old, Joseph was filled with a spirit which enabled him to endure the presence of God. Is that spirit enervating or is it energizing? My considered answer is, “Yes.” It is both. It demands from us a concentration and a surrender comparable to nothing else possible in this life. But it also confers great capacities that transcend our finite mental, spiritual, and physical powers. In 1832, emerging from the vision on the three degrees of glory²⁸ with his companion in the vision, Sidney Rigdon, the Prophet looked strong, while Sidney looked like he had been through the war.²⁹ To this the Prophet, with a certain humility as also perhaps with a little condescension, said, “Sidney is not as used to it as I am.” But after the First Vision, he was feeble. It was difficult for him to go home. Similarly, in his 1823 encounter with Moroni, the repetitive encounter, he was left weak, and his father sent him home. He couldn’t even climb the fence, though he was usually a strong and vigorous boy. Neibaur reports him saying of his condition immediately following the First Vision, “I . . . felt uncommon feeble.”³⁰

We now turn to some of the theological extensions of this initial insight of the First Vision as the Prophet later taught them. “It is the first principle of the gospel,” he said, “to know for a certainty the character of God.” That is more than saying it is the first principle to know that³¹ God exists. He doesn’t use the word existence³² at all in this context. You can’t find one argument in Joseph Smith for the existence of God. Why not? I’ll give you the most unkind answer.³³ Because one does not begin to argue about a thing’s existence until serious doubts have arisen. The arguments for God are a kind of whistling in the dark. In the absence of experience with God, men have invented arguments to justify the experience of the absence of God. They have built a rational Tower of Babel, from which they comfort themselves with, “We haven’t heard from God, but he must still be there.”

But Joseph wasn’t speculating. He was reporting his firsthand experience. Prophets always have. On the other hand, the philosophers have expended some of the greatest ingenuity of the western world in inventing what turn out to be specious and invalid arguments for the existence of God. No. “It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character [the personality, the attributes] of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another.”³⁴ That is the testimony of Joseph Smith from beginning to end. He is talking about all of us, now. A man, a woman—it is the first principle for any of us. That is where you begin.

[. . .]

That leads to my final point. So often, so often, we are haunted not only with the question of whether we have gone far enough in our own religious experience but also whether we can rely on some things we have previously trusted. Acids eat away at us. Sometimes it is the taunting of other voices; but sometimes it is nothing more profound than our own sins and weaknesses, and the betrayals of the best in ourselves. Doubt naturally follows.

The Master made a strange statement to Thomas. Thomas is categorized as a doubter because he said what the others had said earlier: “I will believe when, and only when, I see.”³⁵ According to Luke, the others virtually rubbed their eyes in disbelief when they did see. It is a beautiful phrase: “They yet believed not for joy.”³⁶ Meaning what? Meaning it was too good to be true. Within days they had seen their Lord crucified, and now he stood before them! They rubbed their eyes. So they too had impending doubts, as did Thomas. The strange words of Jesus are reported by John: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”³⁷

I call that strange because on the surface this statement seems to put a premium on secondhand or distant awareness, almost as if unsupportable faith is more commendable than faith resting on the knowledge of sight. That, I think, is a mistake. What is involved in the statement is the recognition by the Lord and by his prophets that the most penetrating of assurances—the one power, even beyond sight, that can burn doubt out of us and make it, as it were, impossible for us to disbelieve—is the Holy Ghost.

[. . .]

In closing may I offer a word of testimony. Often we are confronted in the world by those who want to believe in God without believing in God. They are willing to affirm that there is something—and that’s about the strongest word they are willing to use—that there is something out there that accounts for things: a principle, a harmonic force, or an ultimate cosmic mystery. How rarely is the testimony welcomed that the Father is in the likeness of the Christ! One reason—and Latter-day Saints can testify of this—is that such personal beings can get involved in your life, changing it, giving specific commandments and counsels, rebuking, approving, or disapproving. A God who is utterly distant stays out of your hair.

Whether or not the Prophet fully anticipated the consequences of his prayer in the Grove, and I’m sure he did not, but he nevertheless fully measured up to those consequences. He never wavered. On one occasion he said, “If I had not actually got into this work and been called of God, I would back out.” But he added—and this shows his integrity—“I cannot back out: I have no doubt of the truth.”³⁸ (Some men having no doubt of the truth have nevertheless backed out, but he did not.) From the Grove experience on throughout his life he knew and welcomed into his life the Father and the Son, “even,” as he was commanded in 1829, “if [he] should be slain.”³⁹ He was true unto life and unto death. To use the word that he re-revealed in our generation, that seals the power of his first and subsequent visitations. Anyone who has enough of the Spirit of God to know that God lives and that Jesus is the Christ, by that same spirit will be brought to recognize that one of the prophets called by the Father and the Son was the prophet Joseph Smith.

Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Steven Harper is a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University and was previously editor in chief of BYU Studies, managing historian, and a general editor of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, and a volume editor of The Joseph Smith Papers. His books include First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (2019).

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

1. Barnard N. Madsen, The Truman G. Madsen Story: A Life of Study and Faith (Deseret Book, 2016), 375.

2. B. N. Madsen, Truman G. Madsen, 375–78; Steven David Grover, “Building Bridges: The Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding,” Religious Educator 9, no. 2 (2008): 45–56.

3. Truman G. Madsen to First Presidency, April 17, 1968, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT. One version of Walters’s argument is in Wesley P. Walters, “New Light on Mormon Origins from Palmyra (N.Y.) Revival,” Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 10, no. 4 (1967): 227–44. Another printing is in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 59–81.

4. Helen Walters, “Wesley Walters, Sleuth for the Truth,” 1, unpublished manuscript in Presbyterian Church of America Historical Archives, St. Louis, MO.

5. Truman G. Madsen, Joseph Smith: The Prophet (Bookcraft, 1989), 1.

6. B. N. Madsen, Truman G. Madsen Story, 295.

7. T. G. Madsen, Joseph Smith: The Prophet, 1–2.

8. Arthur Henry King, Arm the Children: Faith’s Response to a Violent World (BYU Studies, 1998).

9. Joseph Smith–History 1:1–17.

10. Truman G. Madsen, “Joseph Smith Lecture 1: The First Vision and Its Aftermath,” BYU Speeches, Brigham Young University, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/trumang-madsen/joseph-smith-first-vision-its-aftermath/; T. G. Madsen, Joseph Smith: The Prophet, 7–18. The speech was published under this title as a pamphlet in 1966 by Deseret Book Company. The transcript included in this chapter has been modified by the editors to include many of Madsen’s extemporized comments. These comments are represented in italics. Other variations from the official pamphlet are acknowledged in endnotes.

11. Italics in the original; formatting treatment for title of an academic journal.

12. Official transcript reads “Matthias.” Archival scans of Joseph Smith’s journal from September 11, 1935, confirm the name to be Joshua: “A man came in, and introduced himself to me, calling himself by the name of Joshua the Jewish minister.” 13. Italics in the original (formatting treatment for newspaper title).

13. Italics in the original (formatting treatment for newspaper title).

14. Italics in the original (formatting treatment for journal title).

15. Official transcript reads “clear” instead of “transparently obvious.”

16. Official transcript reads: “But a document exists that contains reported recollections about Joseph Smith as recorded by Martha Cox. One of these comes from a woman, identified as Mrs. Palmer, who knew him in his early life when she was a child. As a girl—years younger than him, apparently—she watched him with others of the boys working on her father’s farm. Far from his being indolent, . . .”

17. Official transcript reads that the father would “counsel him not to . . .”

18. Official transcript references only the 1838 account.

19. The transcript refers to “TPJS, p. 365,” which we presume is Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, comp. Joseph Fielding Smith (Deseret News Press, 1938).

20. See Milton V. Backman Jr., Joseph Smith’s First Vision: The First Vision in Its Historical Context (Bookcraft, 1971), 169.

21. Italics in the original.

22. Official transcript reads “Son” instead of “Master.”

23. John 14:8–9.

24. Joseph Smith–History 1:20.

25. Backman, First Vision, 159.

26. Doctrine and Covenants 130:5.

27. Joseph Smith–History 1:20.

28. D&C 76.

29. Official transcript reads “. . . was limp and pale.”

30. Backman, First Vision, 177.

31. Italics in the original.

32. Italics in the original.

33. Official transcript reads: “One answer . . . ”

34. TPJS, 345.

35. Luke 24:11.

36. Luke 24:41.

37. John 20:29.

38. TPJS, 286.

39. D&C 5:22.