Eyewitnesses tell the same event differently all the time, and the Gospels do too. Why hold Joseph Smith to a standard the Bible would fail?

Variation in detail is normal, and the comparison to the Gospels is the church’s own. The difference critics press is not detail but substance: whether the founding event involved one divine person or two is not a minor angle, and the accounts moved from the first to the second over six years as the theology developed. A fair observer can accept ordinary memory variation and still find that growth, in the single most important vision of the movement, worth weighing.