The PBS special gave much ado to revisions and changes to the story of the First Vision so as to challenge the LDS belief in the official version of the foundational narrative of their faith. The basic charge: Why revise the truth? Only guilty parties need change their stories, right? Under this framework, hostile witness testimony can be completely honest about the facts of the successive revisions with this framework, and therefore no personal bias need be evident since the framework itself does the work of charging that Joseph Smith was a megalomaniac successively deluding himself in his desires to delude others by ever more grandiose and detailed accounts which served to consolidate his power and others' belief in him. And neutral observers are aimed to conclude that from their position the JS official version is vastly less credible than ignorant Mormons believe, and that the explanation of the scholars is much more compelling than that of the believers.
So let me ask you: have you ever told the same story twice? How about even the same sentence? Linguists such as myself have known for millennia the simple principle that the memory does not transcribe speech. Language gets processed in the brain such that synonyms and lexically equivalent variants of syntactic choices are often substituted in the memory for an actual and/or accurate transcription. The general meaning of elements is rarely lost, but the re-construction of meaning elements required to reproduce the utterance from memory almost always results in different wording as a by-product. It seems to me that even without formal training in linguistics or literary theory any reflecting human being who can focus their attention for a few moments on a re-telling they themselves have done will admit quite readily that they did not use exactly the same words, and quite probably didn't even tell the events in the same order. Furthermore, storytellers (all of us, I'd assume, to one degree or another) are quite well aware of changes in the composition of their audience, and rarely choose to retell the same story the same way when they become aware of the differing audiences they're called upon to recount to. My 3-year-old son is familiar with many stories of Jesus' ministry, for example, but I tell those same stories quite differently to the adults I'm sometimes called upon to teach in church. Teaching is another grand framework from which to understand the differential ways one might tell a story: I can tell the same story highlighting different details as they pertain to the larger pedagogical point I'm trying to make as I teach. These points shouldn't require any examples, so I'll leave those to commenters.
So without even getting into the intricacies of the changes made, you can at least now make a place in your mind for a position beyond the PBS framework that it is quite reasonable, and in fact expected for changes to occur in the telling of a story. Did you note that even despite their framework none of the hostile witnesses went so far as to say that the retellings were contradictory? There were things added to some retellings, and details left out of some others, as can be expected, but the basic facts of the story never changed and subsequent retellings were not found to be in contradiction with previous ones. This fact of analysis leads the opposite direction of the PBS framework, suggesting, instead of ever increasing fraud, that the story itself is at least diegetically consistent. Of course you might still believe that JS was just all the more clever a liar to have retold the story with hundreds of different variants one never contradicting any of the others. But now we're a long way beyond the PBS framework (which was presented as carefully neutral), to the point where a truly neutral observer, is now aimed to conclude that it's the scholarly explanations that seem less compelling.
Now imagine that you are a believer in the idea that Joseph Smith was a true prophet. You have arrived at such a belief without recourse to this particular narrative, so when you encounter it and the facts of its revisions, you approach it from an apologetics point of view. Does it not make perfect sense to you that the story would evolve orally before being published? Does it not make sense to you that its overall truth as a foundational narrative for the need for Joseph Smith as a prophet would remain intact through all retellings, but that as the church grew and more and different ideas about the nature of God (which this narrative tends to fix), about the need for and role of a prophet (which this narrative establishes), and about the need for and role of a church (which this narrative also answers)--in short all of the salient points of the content of this narrative--there might be ever increasing need for the details of the original event to surface, thereby fixing all the more definitively the doctrinal underpinnings of the Church? There's no need to suspect megalomania when you understand the history of the progressive need for doctrinal detail. And when you already believe JS to be a prophet, such suspicions retreat even further into the realm of improbability.
Pretty unimpressive and ridiculous megalomaniac, in the end, who can't profit comfortably from misleading such a vast number of people enough to guarantee either their safety or his own, let alone financial success (of which he personally had almost none). No, it's much more logical, considering his end results, to believe him or at least believe in his sincerity as a benefactor and not a dictator, than his detractors who would at the same time have him power hungry, and effective enough to motivate vast threatening hordes of the weak minded yet so ineffective as not to be able to create personal wealth from his power.
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