Hello, this is Scott Woodward with Scripture Central. I am delighted and excited to announce

our new podcast about church history topics called Church History Matters. In this

podcast, my good friend Casey Griffith and I pick a rich and

important and sometimes controversial church history topic and explore it in

depth together. Casey and I have both been studying and teaching Latter-day Saint Church history topics in one way or another for over 20 years.

So if you're like us and can't seem to get enough of Church history, or if you've got questions on any of these topics we're discussing and want to do a deep dive with us,

then you're in the right place. We're excited and happy to have you along for the ride.

For our first series we chose to discuss Joseph Smith's first vision, because that seemed like a great place to start.

So, here we go. Enjoy our first episode. Joseph Smith's first vision is foundational to our narrative of the restoration today,

but it was not always so from the church's beginning. of the have rarely shared this experience publicly.

So how did the first vision go from what began as a very personal experience of Joseph's

to growing an institutional significance for the whole church, as it has today?

Joseph also wrote or dictated essentially four separate accounts of

his first vision over a 10-year period from 1832 to 1842 and each account

contains unique differences from the others, sometimes significant ones.

Some details like Joseph's age at the time and the number of beings he saw in the vision

can also be perceived as possibly contradictory or at least ambiguous. So how are we to make sense of these

differences, possible contradictions, and ambiguities? And what role does our personal

hermonutic play in how we do so?

Also, did you know that Joseph Smith's first recorded account of his vision,

written in 1832, was also his last account to come to light.

It wasn't rediscovered and made publicly available

...