When did the First Vision take place? Dr John Lefgren and Dr John Pratt worked together to come up with a date: March 26, 1820. Dr Lefgren discusses how he used weather records and understanding of maple syrup making to confirm Dr Pratt’s proposed date. We’ll talk more with John Lefgren to discover how he came up with those weather records. Check out our conversation…
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Who is John Lefgren?
Interview
GT 00:40 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have an amazing mathematician on the show. We don’t get very many of those. Can you go ahead and tell us who you are?
John 00:48 I’m Dr. John Lefgren, and I’m excited to be here with Gospel Tangents.
GT 00:54 Awesome. Okay. So, you’re an economist, I believe.
John 00:57 Yes.
GT 00:58 Can you give us a little bit about your academic background?
John 01:00 I grew up in Ogden, Utah. I went to Weber State.
GT 01:05 Weber College back then.
John 01:07 Well, in those days it was Weber State.
GT 01:09 Oh, it was? Okay.
John 01:10 Yeah, in those days it was. I, then, went on a mission to Finland and I was in Finland for two and a half years. Then, I came home, continued at Weber State and then went to the University of Utah.
GT 01:23 Nice! A Utah man you are.
John 01:25 I’m a Utah man. I was married at the time I was at Utah. My time was occupied with studies and family, not much else on my schedule.
GT 01:35 You know, I grew up in Ogden. What part of Ogden did you grow up in?
John 01:38 I grew up on Fifth Street on the hill. I went to Ben Lomond High School.
GT 01:42 I was going to say, I was an Ogden Tiger, so we were rivals.
John 01:45 We were. We were.
GT 01:47 Ben Lomond High School was a great school. It was a good place for me. I had the best friends. [I have] nothing but good things to say about my growing up years. [I had a] wonderful family, a lot of excitement, a lot of give and take in conversation and it was fun. I had wonderful teenage years. I was very active in the Boy Scouts.
GT 02:11 So, you got your Bachelor’s in…
John 02:14 Economics.
GT 02:14 Economics. Was out from Weber or Utah?
John 02:16 From Weber. Then I went to the University of Utah on a National Science Foundation Fellowship for three years. That was adequate to feed me and my family. And after that, I got a Fulbright stipend to the University of Helsinki.
GT 02:38 Oh, wow.
John 02:39 I was at the University of Helsinki, wrote a dissertation on banking in the early industrialization of Finland.
GT 02:46 Oh, interesting.
John 02:47 It was very interesting, very fun.
GT 02:49 Wow. So, you got a master’s at Utah?
John 02:51 No, I got a doctorate at Utah.
GT 02:56 Oh, okay.
John 02:57 But my dissertation work was at the University of Helsinki.
GT 03:00 Okay.
John 03:01 I went to Helsinki on a Fulbright for one year, took my family. I took the foreign service entrance exam when I was in Helsinki at the American Embassy. And when I came back, I got a position as a as a diplomat, as a Foreign Service Officer in the State Department.
GT 03:24 Oh really? Wow.
John 03:26 From there, after some work in Washington, I was assigned to the American Embassy in Helsinki. It was a very exciting time.
GT 03:40 Now I don’t know much about Finland, but they speak English pretty well there, I guess. You didn’t have to learn…
John 03:46 I learned Finnish on my mission.
GT 03:48 Okay.
John 03:48 All my research was done in the Finnish language. My wife is Finnish, and I speak excellent Finnish. I have lived in Finland six years. I’ve traveled probably half a million miles.
GT 04:00 Do they call it Vinland? Isn’t that the land of the Vikings?
John 04:03 No, you sound like a Viking. The Finns are, they call themselves Suomi, the Land of the swamp, Suomi. They’re not Germanic and they’re not Slavic. They are in their own language group, their own identity as a race, for sure. They’re in a border land between two big forces, the Western civilization and the Eastern civilization of Russia. That’s where they are.
GT 04:43 Okay.
John 04:43 They still are today. In those days, not many people spoke much English. Nowadays is quite different.
GT 04:50 Okay. Very cool. So you’re an economic historian. Is that right?
John 04:57 I wrote on economic history. I wrote mainly on Scandinavian economic history. Yes, that’s right. I published a few articles, and I did my dissertation.
Discussing Birth/Death of Christ
Interview
GT 05:07 Very good. Well, I know the reason why we’re having you here, you and John Pratt got together to triangulate when the First Vision was.
John 05:18 It was never our intent to do that. You know how things happen in life? You make a plan, and then something else happens.
GT 05:26 Yeah. So how did you get involved with John and all that sort of stuff?
John 05:32 Well, I wrote a book called April Sixth, dealing with the date of the organization of the Church, and the birth of Christ. That book was published by Deseret Book. And it was pretty well received. It came out in 1980. BYU Studies reviewed the book and didn’t have much good to say about it. It was very annoying for me. They didn’t understand the argument. And they were using what scholars have used for the last 100 years concerning the date, the likely date of Christ’s birth. It goes around Herod. The arguments are pretty interesting. It’s now shifting more in favor of a 1 BC birth year. But most scholars for a long time, have thought maybe it was a 4 BC birth year. Well, that wasn’t my idea. And I took the Book of Romans…
GT 06:39 Isn’t Talmage a 1 BC guy?
John 06:40 He’s a 1 BC, man, for sure. And to this date, BYU is not yet there where they need to be. But I was young. I didn’t know who they were. And they tore into my book in their review. And John Pratt had done work. I didn’t know him. He was my age. He was living in Layton, working for the Hill Air Force Base. He was on the Minuteman missile.
GT 07:15 Okay. My dad used to work on the Minuteman.
John 07:19 Yeah, John Pratt is a brilliant mathematician.
GT 07:21 I wonder if he knew my dad.
John 07:22 He probably did. So, he wrote a rebuttal to the review of my book. And he sent it to me out of the blue. And he and I became fast friends. We were friends for 40 years. I came out, visited him a couple of times at his house, became acquainted with his wife and family. I can’t say enough good about John Pratt. He died a year ago.
GT 07:51 Yeah.
John 07:52 You interviewed him.
GT 07:53 I interviewed him. And unfortunately, he passed away after the interview, but before I released it, so it was terrible.
John 08:00 Yeah, his [is an] unusual mind, unusual mind. He was gifted in number theory. He was doing prime numbers before he went to kindergarten and had this appreciation for astronomy, and for ancient calendars. I don’t think the Church has ever had anything to compare to what he was doing.
GT 08:25 Yeah, definitely.
John 08:26 He did his Ph.D. in astronomy at University of Arizona, you know.
GT 08:30 Right.
John 08:31 And he grew up at a time when the computers were very expensive, and it was cheaper to pay a computer programmer to work the code, than to get somebody just hacking away and trying to see if something could work out. So, his style was quite different from today. He would have supporting documentation on how the program was to work. It was expensive to test to see if it does work.
GT 09:11 Yeah.
John 09:12 And so, the mind was, I think, more involved in what he was doing, than, maybe, what happens today. It’s so easy to calculate, to throw things up and see what sticks. But John Pratt came from a different time. He was very disciplined. And he was he was gifted, gifted. He knew his Bible, and he knew his Bible well. He was completely in my camp, and I became very much a friend of his and in his camp. The two of us did not match in math. He was he was a genius, a genius. It was always fun to talk with him, though. And I knew that whatever he said, it was serious. And you had to go back and study it. And then he was always ahead of me in terms of the math and in terms of the astronomy.
GT 10:14 Okay, so that’s interesting. So, you had written an article…
John 10:18 A book.
GT 10:19 A book, that Jesus was born on April 6, 1 BC. Is that right?
John 10:23 That’s right.
GT 10:24 Okay, and then John Pratt agreed with you, essentially.
John 10:27 The big insight that I was hoping to bring to the world, was how that was perfectly in alignment with the account given in the Book of Mormon concerning the death of Christ.
GT 10:41 Now, are you aware of Dr. Chadwick. I’m trying to remember what his first name is. Jeffrey Chadwick.
John 10:46 I’ve talked to him on the phone. He knows me, we’ve never met. He is at BYU. He’s a nice enough guy. I don’t know that I have anything other to say than he’s not yet where John Pratt was.
GT 11:01 He’s pretty convinced Jesus was born in December.
John 11:05 That’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. The simple argument is real simple. Christ was born in the spring, because he died in the spring. We know Easter is in the spring. We know the crucifixion is in the spring. He was born in the same season of the year as his death. We have this 34th year, first month, fourth day. I mean, there’s a very exact date [in the Book of Mormon.]
GT 11:30 Because he uses the Book of Mormon and the Bible for his calculations,
John 11:35 He’ll never get himself into December. If you’re going to give any value to the chronology, the exact chronology that the Book of Mormon has, for the death of Christ, the birth and the death, are in the spring. And, as it turns out, they are both, the birth and the death, are on the Jewish Passover. That’s the way it is and if you don’t believe me, ask John Pratt. (Chuckling)
GT 12:08 I can’t ask him anymore. Except for I will, obviously, provide a link to that interview, because we talked a lot about the birth of Christ in that interview. I talked to Thomas Wayment, also. He’s a BYU professor. His conclusion is, we can’t really date to any precision when Jesus was born. He disagrees with Jeffrey Chadwick, for sure.
John 12:33 So this goes back to 1980. If numbers mean anything, if you can count 1, 2,3, you have a number line, and you put a number on days, then I don’t know how you cannot say that the birth of Christ and the death of Christ are, first, in the same season of the year. And upon close examination, from his birth to his death, we have exactly 33 Hebrew calendar years. He was born on a day, it’s very exact. He was born on Wednesday. He fulfilled every prophecy that related to his birth. And he was killed. He was martyred, and he was crucified on the day of Passover. That, for me is, as it was for John Pratt, that…
GT 13:32 I think the death is a lot easier to pin down and the birth, right?
John 13:36 Well, okay, yes, the death is easier. It was something that Newton spent a lot of time on. He spent more time on biblical chronology than he ever did on physics, or on gravity. This was a very serious man, doing very serious work. And he gave us the first indication of how to calculate the date of Christ’s crucifixion, with the sun and the moon, and the spring. So, certainly, the crucifixion, we have 1/3 of the New Testament deals with the week of passion. We have more detail concerning that last week of Christ’s life in the first century, than we have on any other event. It’s rich in its detail, and the crucifixion of Christ is a big thing. And it centers around Passover, just as we have our Easter calculated primarily on the basis of how you might calculate Passover. So, the death becomes a very important point. But the Book of Mormon comes at it from the birth. The birthday is a day of great tension, great conflict. The believers are going to be killed when the sun goes down.
GT 14:59 In the Book of Mormon.
John 15:00 In the Book of Mormon. This was Samuel the Lamanite’s prophecy. It was real clear. And they were expecting it. The non-believers were going to kill the believers. Well, the sun went down and the light filled the sky, and they begin a new calendar count. They began a new calendar count on that very day. And so, on the day of his death, we have an exact year, month and day in their calendar. That’s the marvel at all. That fixes it on both ends, the death end and the birth.
Dating First Vision
Interview
John 15:49 Now, John Pratt had done a lot of work on that. He didn’t know I was doing it. We both came at it a little bit differently. He said I scooped him on the story. But it didn’t take very long before I understood that he was [a genius.]
GT 16:06 So, you guys, were both working on the same thing, basically.
John 16:09 Yes, on the same approach, and it was so comforting to me to have somebody who actually understood what I was doing. My critics didn’t. They still don’t. I’m sorry.
GT 16:31 So, that was how you got to meet John. And then how did you guys get into the First Vision?
John 16:36 Well, John, and I have a friendship that lasted 43 years. We would talk on the phone. He wrote for Meridian Magazine. I met with him and his wife for about four days in Vermont in a place I had there. And we reviewed some of the work that he was doing. We were talking all the time about different things. He was writing. I had written April Sixth. And I heard that some Church leaders suggested that April 6th, would have been a good day for the First Vision. So, the April 6th date, really, is where I started. That’s 1830, when the Church is organized. But it’s 1820, when we have the First Vision. I want to tell us a little bit about this, because I think it’s interesting. The weather news, the news report and weather go together. The U.S. Bureau of Weather is one of the oldest federal agencies. There was this young doctor from Harvard in 1818, James Lovell, who was like 29 years old. I don’t know how he became the Surgeon General of the United States Army. But he came down with some ideas. This had never been done before. He had 14 military posts that were reporting to him. These are medical doctors, who are reporting to Washington on the condition of the troops and how they might be able to improve their health. These are from different posts from around the country, a million square miles.
GT 18:54 Now, the country in 1820 was a lot smaller than the country today.
John 18:57 Indeed, it was all east of the Mississippi. And most of the military posts were pretty close to the oceans. And these were doctors and they all had thermometers. Thermometer was, like, a big instrument. Up until that time, it probably would not have been possible to collect weather temperatures. So, Lovell instructs his–this is the Surgeon General, a young guy, he puts together a system for them to report to him every day on the weather, three times a day. They have to fill out a report and they have to give him temperature and general weather conditions, just a short statement. These reports are collected in Washington. They cover nearly a million square miles of territory. This is the first national weather reporting system in the history of man. Now, up until that time, [you] probably could not have done what would have–you needed an instrument to measure. So, the thermometer, the Fahrenheit scale had already been developed. Mercury thermometers were common for the doctors, and they could, in the morning, see what the temperature was and write it down and then in the afternoon, and then in the evening. These are tens of thousands of observations, handwritten with a quill pen, sent into Washington. Now some doctors are better than other doctors. In the area of New York–New York had, at one time, a third or fourth of all the military assets of the United States, because of the War of 1812 and the British up there. So, Sackets Harbor was a big port.
GT 18:58 Because the British were coming from Canada?
John 21:09 Oh, they had already had those fights up there.
GT 21:11 Yeah.
John 21:11 So, the Sackets Harbor position, that’s where we took a stand. And it’s now in America. It’s the United States. But Sackets Harbor had some pretty important people, military officers, like, Ulysses Grant was up there for a while as a young officer.
GT 21:31 And that’s why West Point is in New York, I guess.
John 21:33 No, West Point was probably before them by 10 years. But New York was an important command post. And they had a very good doctor there, Doctor Wheaton. His penmanship is good. And his records are incredible. And he’s making an observation three times a day. And he’s reporting on that to the Surgeon General. Each month, he sends a report. That report ends up in the National Archives, and it’s microfilmed, and it’s there for anybody to look for. So, the Surgeon General has 14 surgeons around the country, giving him lots and lots of data. And nobody’s ever done this before. And he doesn’t know. What do I do? So, in July 1820, the newspaper, in the Washington Inquirer, prints the first weather report in history.
GT 22:42 Tell us when that is, again.
John 22:43 Well, it had been collected. So, they started in 1820, that’s January 1820.
GT 22:49 That’s interesting an year, 1820.
John 22:51 And we have, then, this flood of data. I mean, we have, before that, you might get one or two temperatures. Thomas Jefferson, he liked his thermometer, and he kept his temperature in his diary or in his journal often. But until that time, you had no systematic effort to collect weather information.
GT 23:16 And so if this [First Vision] had been 1819, we’d be out of luck, right?
John 23:19 Absolutely out of luck. Absolutely out of luck. It’s never been done before. The Germans won’t do it for another 10 years, the English will try to follow us. But this young doctor and that Surgeon General, he developed a system for data collection. And then he prints up a report in the local newspaper, National Intelligencer, and printed it in Washington. It’s a neat sheet. It has all these numbers on it with data for America, just tables of temperatures. And he says, “I don’t know why I’ve done this, but maybe somebody would like to look at it later on.” And so, in this printing of the first ever National Weather Report, we have the First Vision. Can you believe that?
GT 24:20 So how did you know about this?
John 24:22 I didn’t.
GT 24:22 Okay, because John…
John 24:26 I read and it’s in the Church history, that on April 6, 1830, it was a beautiful day. So in Lake Seneca, Joseph Smith, Sr. is baptized. The weather was unusually warm, and it was clear. That was in the Church record. And I said, “Well, is there a weather record that I can find that might confirm that?”
GT 24:55 In 1830?
John 24:56 In 1830, and I found it. It was there, April 6, 1830, clear day, beautiful day. Lake Seneca [was] not a bad place to be baptized. Now…
GT 25:12 There’s another controversy. Was it in Manchester or Fayette when the Church was organized?
John 25:18 It was in Peter Whitmer’s house.
GT 25:20 Was that in Manchester of Fayette?
John 25:23 Manchester is off. To this day, it’s still in Fayette.
GT 25:28 Okay.
John 25:28 I don’t think there’s any controversy there.
GT 25:30 Well, there is actually. Michael Marquardt has said it was actually in Manchester.
John 25:37 Manchester is, like, 20 miles away.
GT 25:39 That’s what he said, yeah.
John 25:40 And I really think that–and so some of the Book of Mormon was translated in Fayette, at the Whitmer farm. The Whitmer farm is a beautiful place. I think that’s…
GT 25:53 Some of the original records, say Manchester and then…
John 25:55 It might have been some planning records. Joseph Smith wanted Tuesday, April 6. He was told, by revelation, Tuesday, April 6, 1830, is the day on which this Church will be organized. Why?
GT 26:12 It’s weird that it wasn’t a Sunday.
John 26:15 It’s really weird. It’s a workday. It’s a sunny day. The farmers should be out working. But they gathered together. That day was by revelation. And the reason that Joseph Smith says we’re going to organize the Church on this day is, it’s the birth of Christ, 1830 years since the birth of Christ. He was told on that day to organize. So, the weather’s great in the Church records. The weather record in Sackets Harbor is the same kind of weather. It’s beautiful weather. I said, “Well, that fits, April 6, 1830, a clear day, nice temperatures. They’re pushing up over 70.” The spring in New York, the spring in New England is powerful. It can come in just a few days. The weather is incredibly convenient, incredibly beautiful. So, that fits. And I said, “Well, let me see if I can find a weather report for 1820.” The same guy, Dr. Wheaton keeping it 10 years before. And guess what? It was cold. It was miserable. There was sleet, 1820 was not a beautiful morning.
GT 27:42 April 6th.
John 27:43 [Yes,] April 6, 1820, it was not nice. And so, I said, “The weather is not there. [There was] no, How Lovely Was the Morning, singing [about it] on that day. And I told John Pratt, and he didn’t quite catch it. He didn’t understand these weather records. And so, years later, he comes up with a view on the First Vision, which was Sunday, March 26, 1820. And that he gets from the Calendar of Enoch. And, I said, “I don’t know how you got there. I know you’re really careful in what you do.” I mean, when John Pratt counts days, he’s counting days. He goes down to the hour. He’s got a head for it, too. He knows a number line. And he’s obsessed with these numbers. It’s not some kind of, I mean, if he can’t get the numbers to line up, he won’t have much opinion. That’s how he comes to it.
GT 29:00 And so according the Enoch calendar, March 26th was a special day. It’s right after [the first day of Spring.] Because I know March 20th is the first day of Spring.
John 29:09 Well, it’s sort of like, when was Easter in 1820? We have this really complicated formula. Because we’re trying to mesh two cycles.
GT 29:23 Yeah.
John 29:24 We’ve got the spring. We’ve got to have spring for Easter, and we need the moon.
GT 29:27 Right.
John 29:28 And the moon is really a trick. If I asked you, “What was Easter Sunday?” It’s always on the Sunday, too–Easter is always on a Sunday for the Christians. And it’s in the spring. And we have Easter Sunday because we have a formula that was developed and the calendar was reformed, mainly because of that. The calendar we use today, the Gregorian calendar, is mainly a reformed calendar that Pope Gregory had. So, I mean, alight, so you’ve got spring, Easter is in the spring and Easter is always on a Sunday. And that’s the way it is. So, the Enoch calendar, always, the first day of the year is always on a Sunday. The first day of the week, always on a Sunday. So, this is the first day of a very important point in the Enoch Calendar. When I say important point, John Pratt has an Enoch Calendar that stretches out over 7000 years. And in his calendar, it’s amazing what he did. And I said, “Well, you think it was the 26th of March 1820?” It’s a Sunday.
GT 30:47 Because he’d already published this, right?
John 30:50 He had. So, this all happened in a matter of a few short weeks. He had suggested that as a First Vision date. And it was just in a footnote in a sentence. I called him up and I said, “John, I don’t know how you did this. I know you’re careful. And I know that you don’t do these things lightly. I don’t know how to even appreciate what you’re trying to tell me about the calendar of Enoch.” I since learned a lot more. But, at that time, I said, “I don’t know.” But I told John, “I can test it. I know the weather.”
John 31:35 And he says, “How do you know that?”
John 30:39 I said, “I’ve got the weather report. I’ve got the first National Weather Report in history. And it has weather for March 26, 1820.” So, I ordered from the National Archives, the microfilm. I’d already seen April. It wasn’t that hard to understand April 6th was not going to work.
GT 32:03 Yeah, sleet, you said.
John 32:05 But, I hadn’t seen March. And March 26th is early spring, not bad. It’s still early spring. So, I took the first six weeks, from March 15 to maybe April 15, and maybe a few more. I’m looking in this narrow range. But I didn’t have the microfilm. You can order it from the National Archives. They send you the whole film.
GT 32:11 Oh, really?
John 32:14 So, I put it up on the microfilm reader in the Flemington, New Jersey Library.
GT 32:39 Is that where you taught or something?
John 32:41 I had a business in New Jersey and they had a microfilm reader in the library. I went there, I said, “This is going to be so easy. It’s either a beautiful spring morning,” the likelihood in spring in that part of the country is it’s miserably cold. Because we’re in this period of transition. I couldn’t believe it. There were three days–it was snow on–we’re talking about a Sunday. So, there’s snow on Thursday. There are temperatures that are freezing, and then it breaks. And you can see it right in that sequence. And you come, and March 26th is written out in a quill pen, a brilliant, beautiful day.
GT 33:35 What was the temperature? Do you remember?
John 33:37 It was 72.
GT 33:37 Oh, 72, nice.
John 33:39 It is so incredible when you get a 72 degree temperature in New England in the spring. It’s like the sweetest thing you can imagine. It is really amazing. So, I called John and I said, “Hey, I don’t know how you did it. But I got the weather, and the weather is completely in alignment with what you’re suggesting. I went to the back. I went to the front of that spring period of six weeks. So, there’s no other place. And that’s where we sort of landed, two different, strange ways of going, but I’m absolutely confident in what he did and what I did. I have, as a matter of fact, I was able to buy the 1820 newspaper, the original, I have that.
GT 34:36 Oh really, for March 26th?
GT 34:40 I do. I mean, the original paper, everything. It’s really wonderful. So, I thought, “Well, this is interesting. This is very interesting.” I then spent some time trying to understand Enoch. There is a part of the story that’s important, and that’s the maple sugar production. Lucy was a big producer. She was a producer of maple sugar, 1000 pounds. It was a lot of work. So, Joseph, when he was 14, and the family, in that year made 1000 pounds of sugar, [which is] very weather dependent. The sap flows, according to the fluctuations in the temperature. The pattern by which that works is well known to scientists today. This dissolution rate of carbon dioxide in the sap is affected, greatly, by the outside temperature. If you don’t have a freezing night, and then a thaw in the day, the sap doesn’t run. If the sap doesn’t run, you don’t make sugar. But if you get two days with temperatures above freezing into the night, the sap stops. And when the sap stops, the sugar production stops. So, you get this unusual day when the temperature is over 70. It’s a bright, clear day, and there’s no sugar production. Everybody’s exhausted because they’ve been working 14–15-hour days, keeping those fires and boiling that sap. The whole house would have been just completely quiet. And it was Sunday.
Book of Enoch
Interview
John 36:45 There’s no doubt about that my mind, that Joseph Smith went into the woods to pray on Sunday, March 26th, 1820. Now what does that mean? Enoch is an interesting Prophet. We have our scriptures and we’re grateful for them. Most of what is written in the first five books of the Bible was written by Moses. Job, in our current Bible, is probably the oldest of all of the books. We have no book in our Bible that predates the flood. The Book of Enoch predates the flood. So, I write this article about the First Vision and about the calendar of Enoch. And I get these people from Ethiopia, contacting me. They have the Coptic Church there. The Ethiopian Christians are among the oldest continuous practicing Christians. And they have the Book of Enoch.
GT 37:56 In their Bible.
John 37:57 In their Bible. We didn’t see that in English until 120-140 years ago. But they’ve been keeping that record.
GT 38:08 And that’s where the calendar of Enoch is?
John 38:10 Well, there are seven chapters on the calendar of Enoch in the Book of Enoch, seven chapters, very complicated. You have these 364-day years. You have this Angel Uriel telling exactly how it’s supposed to work. John Pratt figured it out. The neat thing about the calendar of Enoch is it makes prophecy concerning these divisions of time. It’s common for Jews and Christians to believe that the Earth temporal existence is 7000 years. Well, the Book of Enoch lays it right out. And in that pattern of time, that Enoch lays out with his calendar, he identifies in these epic periods that are about 1000 years. And so, in his prophecy, there is a great thing that will happen on the 26th of March, 1820. John Pratt put that together.
GT 39:21 Should we all become Coptic Christians?
John 39:23 I don’t know. I think that we should become aware of the faith that has endured for so long. Let’s not forget. Joseph Smith had a lot to say about Enoch, in our Pearl of Great Price in other places. Enoch is Before Noah. He’s the seventh from Adam, right? Enoch has an important role to play in the restoration of all things. This is his book, and it’s got some strange stories in it. Maybe we’ve lost some of it, but this calendar is amazing. And John Pratt has an answer for it. That’s to his credit.
GT 40:06 Well, as I recall, I’ll have to go back and watch that interview. But instead of having a leap day like we do, every four years, he has a leap week, every five years?
GT 40:16 So, the secret to the Calendar of Enoch is the week, not the day. Time moves as it does in our own place. We often, most often identify time, in terms of what day of the week, is it? You know, is it Tuesday, is it Wednesday, Thursday? The seven-day week period is common to us. So, in making his Calendar of Enoch, you have to keep the week together. Now in our calendar, we intercalate. We adjust in full days. In the calendar of Enoch, you adjust in full weeks. And you have to put this week in every once in a while. And that’s the way–I mean, otherwise, it’ll get out of sync with the seasons.
GT 41:09 Right, with 364, versus 365, it gets out of sync quick.
John 41:12 Well, it gets out of sync pretty quick. But with this intercalation, the John Pratt intercalation, we have a brilliant calendar.
GT 41:25 Yeah, it sounds awesome.
John 41:27 Well, it’s not just awesome. If you stretch it out over 7000 years, it’s more accurate than our Gregorian calendar. And I’ve got to thank the Lord that John Pratt was able to do this before he died. Because nobody else would have a mind for it. That’s clear to me. The people in Ethiopia knew something was going on. Another thing that happened, we had this little video on the First Vision.
GT 42:00 Yeah.
John 42:01 I was getting some emails from Nigeria. I couldn’t believe it. They were having meetings in Nigeria, like firesides showing this video.
GT 42:14 Oh, really? These weren’t LDS firesides, or were they?
John 42:20 I think it might have been a mixed mixture of things. The guy in Ethiopia that contacted me, we’re still friends on Facebook, he works for the for the Agricultural Ministry. He’s a Coptic Christian. And for him, this was really, really meaningful.
Questions about First Vision
Interview
GT 42:38 All right, welcome back to Gospel Tangents. We were talking to John Lefgren, and we get interrupted, so I didn’t get to ask him all the questions I wanted to ask. So, we came back here a few days later, and we’re here to finish up on the First Vision, and then we can talk about a few other things. So, we’ve got gone through the First Vision pretty well, your work with John Pratt.
John 43:05 Yes.
GT 43:06 And, that sort of a thing, I kind of wanted to ask you–there are some people like Dan Vogel and others that question some of the things in the First Vision. One of the things that Joseph said is, “There was a great excitement about religion.” But Dan Vogel says that didn’t happen in 1820, that wasn’t until 1823-24. So, I was wondering, because you and John Pratt, have dated it to March 26th, 1820.
John 43:46 Yes.
GT 43:46 You were instrumental in finding those weather records.
John 43:49 Yes.
GT 43:50 And so, what do you think about those issues with, like, Dan Vogel in saying, “Well, either we need to move the First Vision later, or Joseph talked about something that didn’t happen in 1820.” How do you reconcile that?
John 44:08 I don’t know that I can reconcile it. It seems to me that the best account we have of the First Vision is the original account, as given to us by Joseph Smith.
GT 44:20 The 18–, because there’s also four different versions.
John 44:23 Well, this is true, but we know what he said. He gave us the most complete account.
GT 44:32 This is the 1838 account in the Pearl of Great Price?
John 44:34 The 1838 account, 18 years after the First Vision. And I don’t know that he–it wasn’t published broadly in its final and best version until 1838.
GT 44:51 Yes. Most people are familiar with the 1838 account.
John 44:55 I think that’s the best place to start, I think we don’t go too far away from that. I’d like to, at least, mention that Wentworth is known to the Smith family. The Wentworth family had huge tracts of land in Vermont, and in New Hampshire, and would have been known very well to Lucy Mack Smith. So, when one of the sons of the Wentworth family from New England, went to Chicago to start his newspaper, the letter or the inquiry from Wentworth would have been very meaningful for Joseph Smith, very meaningful. He was at the top of the social ladder in New England. He was coming from a family that was well known to his mother. The letter is written to Wentworth to be published in his new newspaper. And I think that Joseph Smith was very careful as he recounted the First Vision to Wentworth. I think everything else may be a little bit early. It wasn’t intended to be sort of a complete story. But there’s nothing better than the 1838 Wentworth letter, nothing.
GT 46:33 Because I know Steven Harper has said, and he’s a BYU professor…
John 46:36 I know him. I know of him. He has views.
GT 46:38 Well, one of the things that he said, and I’m trying to remember what year it was. There’s a later account, 1840, 41, 42. I don’t remember, somewhere around there. And in the 1838 account, one of the things that Joseph talks about is the severe persecution, which was happening in 1838. There was severe persecution, but it wasn’t happening in 1842. And he kind of leaves that out.
John 47:01 So I don’t pretend to be an expert in all of these matters. I know that there have been scholars that have spent years looking at them. I would, just coming at it from the weather point of view, I looked at those other years, some of those other years. I can say, I think with some confidence that there was never a spring morning like that spring morning in 1820. It was glorious. It was not to be found in later years. The weather account is clear. And that’s what I was looking at.
GT 47:34 Did you look at any other years?
John 47:35 Of course.
GT 47:36 Like 1823 or 24?
John 47:38 I did, I looked at them all. And I tried to plot out some of those weather charts. My conclusion was, and I didn’t finish that. But it was that this is an unusual day. March 26th, 1820 is unusual with respect to the weather, very unusual. And weather has a powerful impact on memory. We don’t always remember dates, but we can remember sometimes weather. I did some research on Oliver Cowdery, the first time that he appeared to the Smith house to teach and become an instructor of the Smith children. He lived there. And there was a night when he showed up there that it was really rainy, a terrific storm, and it was in Lucy Mack Smith account. He’ll go from there down to Harmony to help translate the Book of Mormon, to be the scribe for the translation of the Book of Mormon. It was interesting for me because of the weather that Lucy Mack Smith talked about when Oliver Cowdery came to visit the house. It was right there in the record. I liked that. So, I had another point of reference, in terms of weather. If I have anything to say, I have something to say about weather. I couldn’t say it without the weather reports. The weather reports are unusual in their detail. And 1820 is the year that Joseph Smith gives. I think he got it right. I think he was really careful in 1838, when he was preparing what became canonized, for the Wentworth letter. I went to Wentworth’s grave site in Chicago.
GT 49:52 Oh?
John 49:53 Yeah. I tried to follow him. [He was a] very interesting fellow. I think that Wentworth connection, the fact that we are getting some of the clearest and most detailed accounts of early church history, prepared by Joseph Smith, himself, that’s fine. That’s fine. I mean, how can you improve on that?
GT 50:18 Yeah. So, do you think that Joseph might have had a bad memory and combined some events together?
John 50:23 Of course! He didn’t have a perfect memory.
GT 50:26 Yeah.
John 50:26 Who does?
GT 50:27 Right.
John 50:27 But there are times when you remember things. And when God the Father and His Son appeared unto him, he knew it was a beautiful morning in the spring. I mean, you can’t experience that without remembering the actual surrounding. I was in the grove, and I’m looking for this glorious spring morning. Well, when we went there, on the very day of the First Vision, it was really cold, really not nice.
GT 50:59 On March 26th?
John 51:00 Yeah, March 26th, believe it or not. Most people…
GT 51:04 Well, that’s normal weather, right?
John 51:06 Indeed. The early spring is going to be a time of great change in weather.
GT 51:14 Right.
John 51:14 So temperatures can move 20 degrees in 24 hours. That’s the way New England works. When the spring comes, it comes with a great force and everything comes alive in a very short time. And it’s magical. The weather, the warm weather in the early spring, in a grove of trees, can take your breath away. I’ve been there. [It’s] very magical. It’s something that if anyone goes and experiences that, [they] will not forget that. And the fact that on that day, God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ appeared unto him, I think, is remarkable. So, if you’ve got 100 points in terms of weight, where are you going to concentrate as to what is a good account? Boy, the Wentworth letter is the best we’ve got.
GT 52:21 I’m glad you pointed that out. I want to ask you a couple other questions about that. The 1832 account, which is the earliest account, but it was the one that was found latest, it wasn’t until the 1960s, it was found. Joseph said [that] he spoke to the Lord, as in singular.
John 52:38 I hear what you’re saying. And I’m not going to try to interpret any of that. All I know is this, that the most complete and accurate account that we of with the First Vision, was given to Mr. Wentworth, by Joseph Smith, himself. And that is a complete account. I mean, that is canonized. I like that. I like the idea that we have the First Vision in the Pearl of Great Price in Joseph Smith’s History, without much comment about these other things. The historians can look at that. I don’t know that it’s, for me. If you want a good record, and a good account, you go to Wentworth’s letter. It was a serious, serious production on the part of Joseph Smith. He knew the Wentworth family. These were among the most important people in New England. And his mother would have known Wentworth’s parents.
GT 53:40 Okay. And then the other question I want to ask, a lot of times missionaries will use the First Vision account, the 1838 account, and we call it a vision. Do you think it was a vision of God and Jesus, or was it a visitation where they were physically present? Do you have an opinion on that?
John 54:00 I just go to the account. I mean, I don’t know that my opinion matters much anyway. He saw God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, and they spake unto him. And he had that experience with a dark and evil force before that occurred. He thought he nearly died and was going to die. I liked that. I mean, okay, fine. What does he say? I’m not going to try to…
GT 54:33 So, you’re not going to distinguish whether it was just a vision of two…
John 54:38 I think the way the story is found in the 1838 account, in our Pearl of Great Price is as good as we can hope to get. And for me to try to bring in something else, I’m not. I don’t have any authority to speak in any way. I mean, I’m looking for the weather. I’m looking for the circumstances of the family. I think he got the year right.
GT 55:05 You think 1820 was the correct year?
John 55:08 Absolutely. Absolutely.
GT 55:09 And then he might have conflated some events in 1823 and put it in 1820.
GT 55:15 Perhaps, but the event we’re looking for is the First Vision. And it was profound for him. I’m sure of that. It was very profound. And the detail that he gave us is pretty sufficient, I think, to–why try to twist or change it? I mean, it’s…
GT 55:41 Well, there are just some people that say there are some conflicts in, like the revivals. There were no revivals until 1823.
John 55:48 Well, I know the revival question could have been part of–I don’t have any insight on any of that. I mean, I read the account. I think it’s a truthful account, I think it’s one of the most truthful accounts ever given by anyone who is remembering something. It’s very detailed. And it’s a mistake for us to try to tear it apart and not let him tell it in his own way. I think it’s a very truthful account, very truthful. And so you remember things. We all may remember things in a different way, particularly 18 years later, it was before. Maybe he didn’t know what had happened to him. He was grateful. He felt very lifted by the fact that his sins had been forgiven, and he was reconciled to God. Now, that’s a big thing, a big thing. I mean, anyone who has had some kind of spiritual experience, and then tries to recount it, years later, may have some mixing of things. Now, this is a big story. It’s a big story, and it deserves–this is a personal story of salvation that Joseph Smith experienced. And the best account he gave us was in 1838 to Mr. Wentworth, John Wentworth. And I think he was really, really trying to give us it as honestly as he could.
GT 57:38 All right, very good.
{End of Part 1}
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