Hey Podcast Friends, Professor Anthony Sweat from the Department of Church History and Doctrine here.

In the spring of 1820, a young boy named Joseph Smith went to a grove of trees to pray.

You and I know this story like the back of our hand. I mean this story

has become foundational and essential to the Church of Jesus Christ to Latter-day Saints.

In fact the first vision of Joseph Smith has become so essential that the April 2020

General Conference was designated by President Russell M. Nelson as a bicentennial year to celebrate the first vision.

In the springtime of the year 2020,

it will be exactly 200 years since Joseph Smith experienced the Theophony that we know as the first vision.

God, the Father and his beloved son Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph, a 14 year old youth.

That event marked the onset of the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ

in its fullness.

But something you may not know is this, If you and I were members of the church in the

1830s or 1840s or 1850s, it's highly likely that we wouldn't know about

Joseph Smith's first vision.

Listen to what Stephen Harper said about this.

The first vision didn't necessarily have to become the founding story of the church. It went for 50 years where the early

Saints did not think of the first vision as sort of the founding of their faith and

it was not taught by the missionaries

widely. So what happened? How did the first vision become the first story that

we tell in the narrative of the restoration.

Well, BOU church history and doctrine professor Stephen Harper has dedicated most of his professional life to understanding how the first vision became remembered and recorded and understood by Joseph

Smith and the church. He has recently published a seminal book and you guys I

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