Posted by:
Seer? Sucker!
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Date: January 28, 2018 03:43PM
MormonThink probably has this well covered already, but…
The earliest of which I'm aware is Smith's earliest (1832) "First Vision" story, where he claims to have been visited by angels sometime in the indefinite past.
http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-circa-summer-1832/1[As an aside, there's also Oliver Cowdery's letter in the Feb. 1835 Messenger & Advocate that ignored the FV entirely, explaining that the 1823 bedroom visit was First Contact.]
I don't know of any contemporaneous claims of angels while the BOM was being written. I think the BOM was concocted simply as bible fanfic, sort of a me-too version of Ethan Smith and Solomon Spaulding, and called a "translation of ancient records" simply as a marketing hook. But when the book and its copyright wouldn't sell, Smith & friends decided to start up a church. Only then did they need to come up with a theological justification (i.e., angels) for its existence.