I am listening to episode 5 of "The First Vision: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast. Eight minutes in, a professor Steven C. Harper of BYU talks about the nature of memory and why there were different accounts of Joseph Smith's first vision.
8:23 - 12:45 question "Why are there different accounts?"
Following is a selection of the transcription of “It Caused Me Serious Reflection” (The First Vision Podcast, Episode 5) from 8:25 - 12:45 in the audio that answers the question "Why are there different accounts?"
The four gospels of the new testament.
The way memory works. A present production of the shards of the past.
We view the past through the lens of the present.
From the transcription:
Spencer: All this talk of record keeping
brings us to a question that many Latter-day Saints have asked about Joseph
Smith’s first vision. Why are there different accounts?
The answer: there are different accounts of the First
Vision because Joseph Smith described the event to different audiences at
different times. Naturally, the different accounts vary in emphasis and detail
because each was told in a different context. Nevertheless, the various
accounts tell a consistent story.
Now, historians expect differences in the accounts of
historical events if they were created at different times and under different
circumstances. In fact, such differences in detail and emphasis often help
historians and other scholars piece together a fuller story.
For instance, think of the accounts of Jesus’s life and His
resurrection in the Bible—the four gospels. There are four different accounts
told in different contexts that emphasize different details. Scholars of the
Bible and early Christianity do not reject the accounts because of the
differences but instead understand the different accounts as a benefit to their
scholarship.
So, the different accounts of the First Vision can be
studied in a similar way. And they not only help us better understand the
vision itself. The different accounts help us better understand Joseph Smith’s
life and the early history of the church he led. As Steven Harper explains,
this has a lot to do with the way that memory works, that in addition to Joseph
relating the vision at different times to different audiences, the various
accounts are also formed by the nature of memory itself.
Steve: So, the answer to why these
different accounts to me lies in the science and the psychology of memory.
Memory is not what we often assume it is. Memory is not a recording of our past
that’s like this podcast recording. We could replay it ten years from now, and
it’ll sound the same. It’ll be the exact same recording, no matter how many
times you play it or how distant in time we play it. That is not how memories
work, not at all.
A memory is a present production that is made from a
combination of cues that are stored somewhere in our minds somehow. Nobody
knows for sure how, but “traces” of the past, as Daniel Schacter at Harvard
calls them. “Traces” is his word.
So, it’s the past or pieces of the past—you might think
about it as shards of the past—and present. The present environment in which we
are remembering has a lot to do with the shape that memory will take.
Spencer: What Steve is describing is really
interesting to me. As I understand it, what is happening in the present
influences the way we remember events in the past. Our circumstances in a given
moment also influence what aspects of those events we choose to emphasize. When
we are talking about memory, context matters. And it matters a lot.
In other words, we view the past through the lens of the
present. That’s how our memories work.
So, how does this influence the way that Joseph Smith
remembered and retold the First Vision at different times?
Steve: So, what is happening in Joseph’s
present to cue the memory in the first place, and then help him recover some of
the shards or traces he has at his disposal, and put them together in the
particular way he does at the time—that’s the way to get at the differences in
the accounts.
Spencer: If we want to understand the
differences in the accounts of the First Vision and uncover new and deeper
meaning from Joseph Smith’s experiences, then we need to ask what was happening
in Joseph Smith’s life at the moments in which he recounted the First Vision.
In short, to move beyond the question of why there are different accounts of
the First Vision to the question of what insights can we gain from studying the
different accounts, we need to look at what cues informed the way Joseph
remembered and told audiences about the event.
A link to the other episodes of "The First Vision: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast"
