Where we are
This is the most personal book in the Pearl of Great Price — and in some ways the most personal book in all of scripture, because it is a prophet telling, in his own plain words, exactly how God first spoke to him. It is the account of a fourteen-year-old farm boy who read a verse in the Bible, walked into the woods to pray about it, and came out having seen the Father and the Son. Everything the Restoration is rests on what happened in that grove.
Joseph Smith—History is an extract from the history Joseph dictated in 1838, and it carries four scenes: the confusion of the competing churches that drove him to his knees; the First Vision in the spring of 1820; the visits of the angel Moroni beginning in September 1823; and the restoration of priesthood authority in 1829. I want to do something with this chapter that we've been building toward through every essay in this overhaul — to set Joseph's experience next to the oldest prophetic-call narratives in scripture, because the shape of his story is the shape of theirs, and that turns out to matter.
The confusion, and the question (verses 5–13)
Joseph grows up in a region torn by revival — "an unusual excitement on the subject of religion" (v. 5), with Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians competing fiercely for converts and contradicting one another flatly. A thoughtful boy is left genuinely stuck: "so great were the confusion and strife among the different denominations, that it was impossible for a person young as I was… to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong" (v. 8). He wants to be right with God and cannot tell which door leads there. And then, reading in the family Bible, he hits a verse that lands like a hand on the shoulder:
If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. — James 1:5 (quoted at Joseph Smith—History 1:11)
He says no passage of scripture ever came to a human heart with more power than that one did to his. "It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again" (v. 12). And he reaches the obvious, terrifying, simple conclusion: he must either stay forever in the dark, "or else I must do as James directs, that is, ask of God" (v. 13).
The grove (verses 14–20)
On a clear spring morning in 1820 he goes into the woods near his home, finds a quiet place, and kneels to pray aloud for the first time in his life. And almost at once he is seized by a power of darkness so thick it binds his tongue and nearly overwhelms him — "thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction" (v. 15). (Note that, by the way: the adversary's resistance comes right at the threshold of the theophany, exactly as it did to Moses on the mount — Moses 1:12-22 — the pattern holds.) He calls to God with all his strength at the very moment he feels he is sinking, and the deliverance comes:
I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me… When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other — This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him! — Joseph Smith—History 1:16-17
There it is — the foundation stone of the Restoration in two sentences. The Father and the Son, two distinct embodied Persons, the Father introducing the Son and directing the boy to listen to him. Joseph asks the question he came with — which church should he join? — and is told to join none of them, that the fulness was not then on the earth. He came out of that grove a different kind of person than anyone in his world: a boy who had seen.
The angel, and the plates (verses 27–54)
Three years later, on the night of September 21, 1823, Joseph prays again — and his bedroom fills with light, and a personage stands in the air by his bed: the angel Moroni, the last writer of the Book of Mormon, returned as a resurrected being to point Joseph toward the record his own people had buried fourteen centuries before. Moroni tells him of the plates, quotes him a cluster of prophecies about the last days (Malachi, Isaiah, Joel, Acts), and the cycle repeats three times that night and again the next day. It's a vision of staggering scope handed to a poor, untutored farm boy — and Moroni warns him, pointedly, that Satan will try to tempt him to get the plates for the money the family badly needs (v. 46). The record is sacred; it must not be sought for gain.
Joseph obtains the plates four years later, on September 22, 1827, and the work of translation begins — the work that produces the Book of Mormon. And as he and Oliver Cowdery translate, they come upon the subject of baptism, pray about it, and receive a heavenly messenger:
We still continued the work of translation, when, in the ensuing month (May, 1829), we on a certain day went into the woods to pray and inquire of the Lord respecting baptism… While we were thus employed, praying and calling upon the Lord, a messenger from heaven descended in a cloud of light, and having laid his hands upon us, he ordained us, saying: Upon you my fellow servants, in the name of Messiah, I confer the Priesthood of Aaron. — Joseph Smith—History 1:68-69
The messenger is John the Baptist — the same John who baptized Jesus, now a resurrected being conferring the authority to baptize. The pattern that began in the grove holds to the end: every step forward comes by asking — the boy asked about which church, the young men asked about baptism — and every answer comes by heavenly visitation. The Restoration is built, scene by scene, out of honest questions and the God who answers them.
The oldest pattern of all
Now the thing this whole overhaul has been moving toward. Set Joseph's story beside the call narratives of the ancient prophets, and the shape is unmistakable.
Here is why the pattern matters, and I want to put it carefully. The most natural objection to the First Vision is that a nineteenth-century farm boy made it up. But a made-up theophany tends to look like its inventor's expectations. Joseph's doesn't look like the revivalist religion around him — it looks like Isaiah's call, and Ezekiel's, and the heavenly-ascent visions of Jewish texts that wouldn't be translated into English until decades after he died. The darkness before the light, the divine Persons, the commission, the sending: these are the load-bearing features of the most ancient prophetic-call form in scripture, and Joseph's account carries them with a naturalness that's hard to fake. And it sits at the center of everything else this overhaul has shown — a young man producing, again and again, restored texts that match buried ancient writings. The simplest account that fits all the evidence is the one he gave: he was called the way the old prophets were called, by the God who has always called that way.
How this chapter changes the reader
Joseph Smith—History hands the ordinary believer two gifts. The first is the doctrine of asking. The whole Restoration began because a boy took James 1:5 literally — "if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God" — and discovered that God really does give, liberally, without scolding the asker for needing to ask. That is not a special privilege reserved for prophets. It's the standing invitation. Every honest question brought to God in faith stands in the same posture Joseph took in the grove, and the same God waits on the other side of it. The closing promise of the Book of Mormon (Moroni 10:4) is just the First Vision's method offered to everyone: ask, with real intent, and you will know.
And the second gift is the Father's word over the Son. Whatever else the First Vision restored — the true nature of God, the apostasy, the coming Restoration — its center is the simplest thing in it: the Father pointing to Christ and saying "hear him." That sentence is the oldest in scripture, spoken at the council, at Sinai, at the Jordan, at Bountiful, and now in a grove in New York. It's still the whole assignment. Everything the Restoration built rests on a boy who asked an honest question and was handed, in reply, the one instruction God has been giving since before the world: here is my Beloved Son — hear him.