I can’t resist taking a moment and looking at this same issue from a Book of Mormon perspective as well because once I began to look at the Book of Mormon from the ancient Hebrew and early Christian view described in the previous posts, it became quite revelatory, and some passages that seemed obscure or even contradictory to current LDS theology became suddenly understandable.
Let’s quickly review the four elements relating to the two Gods of John 1:1 that were prevalent in writings of the early Christians and related to how they read the Old Testament. These elements are:
- A Father god, 'El who is also called el elyon or "God Most High."
- Yahweh as the son of God (El).
- Yahweh as preeminent God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
- Yahweh as Messiah, the Saviour or Jesus Christ.
I’m not going to address every reference in the Book of Mormon that touches upon this topic, since there are far too many. As an anti-Mormom once said to me, “One thing I don’t like about the Book of Mormon is that it talks about Jesus and the Messiah far too much.” Not quite sure what he meant by this, but it is true that the primary theme of the Book of Mormon is that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah, and the book exists for the express purpose of bearing testimony that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and the Saviour of them who believe on Him and follow Him.
But anyway, let’s begin our discussion with a passage from Nephi 11:6. “And when I had spoken these words, the Spirit cried with a loud voice, saying: Hosanna to the Lord, the most high God; for he is God over all the earth, yea, even above all. And blessed art thou, Nephi, because thou believest in the Son of the most high God. . .”
While we don’t have the original text to examine, we can perhaps understand it a little better if we "retranslate" the text to highlight the parallels.
Hosanna to El Elyon; for he is God over all the earth, yea, even above all. And blessed art thou, Nephi, because thou believest in [Yahweh] the Son of El Elyon...
Here we can see the same distinctness between God the Father and God the Son that was taught by the early Christians.
Continuing this, let’s take a look at 1 Nephi 11:18. This is a verse that has changed since the original 1830 edition. The verse originally read as follows: “And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh.”
In 1837, Joseph Smith made editorial corrections to the Book of Mormon, primarily to correct the numerous punctuation and type-setting errors that had crept in, but he did make a few other changes to the text. 1 Nephi 11:18 was one of them. It was changed so that it currently reads as follows: “And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh.”
Why was this change made? Many have tried to ascribe motives to Joseph for making this change, some of them nefarious. However, in my opinion, it was simply a change made to bring the language in line with 19th century vernacular. Was the original translation incorrect? I believe not. Was the original translation potentially confusing? Absolutely, primarily because Biblical and historical scholarship hadn’t advanced to the point where this verse would have been understood fully as originally penned by Nephi.
To see this, let’s play the ‘retranslation’ game again with the 1830 version of the verse: "And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of [Yahweh], after the manner of the flesh."
This ‘retranslation’ makes sense of the verse and returns the text more clearly to its appropriate 600 B.C. cultural context. It is absolutely essential to understanding the theology of the Messiah in the Book of Mormon. From the perspective of Book of Mormon theology, the 1837 change in this text might have helped the Latter-day Saints with their understanding of God, but it did violence to an essential part of the Nephite understanding of God. For the Nephites, it is absolutely essential that they understand that Yahweh was the Messiah who would come. Nephi himself notes:
For the things which some men esteem to be of great worth, both to the body and soul, others set at naught and trample under their feet. Yea, even the very God of Israel [Yahweh]do men trample under their feet; I say, trample under their feet but I would speak in other words--they set him at naught, and hearken not to the voice of his counsels.
And behold he cometh, according to the words of the angel, in six hundred years from the time my father left Jerusalem.
And the world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he suffereth it; and they smite him, and he suffereth it. Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his loving kindness and his long-suffering towards the children of men.
There can be no doubt nor confusion that the person referred to here is Jesus Christ, and this Christ is the person that Nephi declares to be "the very God of Israel." This meaning is also essential to Abinadi's argument in Mosiah 15:1:
And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God [Yahweh] himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people.
For the entire Book of Mormon, Yahweh is the God of Israel, and Yahweh is the Messiah. Those equivalencies are absolute and important to Nephite theology. However, there is still an understanding that Yahweh was the Son of God, in the context of El Elyon, or the Most High God. As with the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon depicts the two numerically distinct Gods of John 1:1 in the same manner as the early Christian authors.
While I’m on this topic, there is one more issue to address in relation to how Elyon and Yahweh are described in the Book of Mormon, and that relates to the fact that God [Yahweh] within the Book of Mormon is often titled, The Father, as is Elyon. If the Book of Mormon authors understood the separate nature of El Elyon and Yahweh, why is it also true that the text frequently equates the Messiah and the Father? While this is the stuff that led to the Christian arguments about trinitarianism and modalism, there is a much different process at work in the Book of Mormon, and it can’t be fully understood outside of the ancient Hebrew historical context. The problem begins in Nephi, who seems to personally present us with every possible confusing statement about God:
And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father!16
The Lamb of God is a title that is symbolic of the atoning function of the Messiah, so here we have the Messiah declared to be the Eternal Father. This is not the only place where this happens. In other texts, the Messiah is not only Father, he is also Son. Mormon writes a thousand years after Nephi:
...And because of the fall of man came Jesus Christ, even the Father and the Son; and because of Jesus Christ came the redemption of man.17
The explanation for is not to be found in modern, post-Christian theology, because that perspective cannot explain all of the various references to God in the Book of Mormon. Using our historical perspective we can explain the cultural contexts that allowed Nephi to hold what appear to be contradictory beliefs about God.
Margaret Barker described the nature of the heavenly council, and in her explanation she gives us the key that helps us understand Book of Mormon theology. She said:
"There are those called sons of El Elyon, sons of El or Elohim, all clearly heavenly beings, and there are those called sons of Yahweh or the Holy One who are human."
As there were two numerically distinct Gods, they are also viewed as two numerically distinct Fathers, depending upon the context. The sons of one father (Elyon) are heavenly, and the sons of the other (Yahweh) are human, or earthly. This creates a distinction in the realm of operation of the two fathers, one being heavenly and the other earthly. When humans are involved, their sonship is a relation to the father-God of Israel, Yahweh. When heavenly beings are the reference, the relationship is to the Most High God, or El, the father of the gods.
The Book of Mormon parallels this usage precisely. As in the Old Testament, the heavenly or earthly context provides the reader with the key to understanding the meanings of father and son. I can’t recall a section of the Book of Mormon where this frame of reference doesn’t work.
Let’s see how this works with one of the more confusing examples from 3 Nephi 1:14:
Behold, I come unto my own, to fulfil all things which I have made known unto the children of men from the foundation of the world, and to do the will, both of the Father and of the Son--of the Father because of me, and of the Son because of my flesh.
The phrase "the Father because of me" is the declaration of Yahweh's relationship to humanity from the heavenly perspective. He is Yahweh, and is the father over all of the natural and adopted branches of Israel. He is our father in the same way that he is the Father of heaven and earth, a term exclusively applied to Yahweh in the Book of Mormon. Because the context is now very clearly crossing the bounds between heaven and earth, Christ explains that he is also the Son, "because of my flesh." This phrase is a very apt definition of this contextual shift in meaning. The Book of Mormon depiction of the Messiah was that he was Yahweh, and that "God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people" (Mosiah 15:1). When Jesus declares that he is Father and Son in 3 Nephi, he is not only on earth, he is in a physical body that he allows to be touched. He declares that he has made that vertical transition from heaven to earth. Thus he is Father to us while he is in heaven, and in the essence of his being. However, when he came down, he became as we are, and therefore a son, as we are sons. The change in place creates a change in symbolic relationship. It is his flesh that makes him the son. Jesus Christ is Father and Son because he is the God who came down among the children of men. Alone of sons of God, he was also a son of man.
When we examine the Book of Mormon text within this historical context, which, by the way, is what it declares to be its origin, we find an absolutely consistent theology of God that mirrors that of the early Christian authors. The Nephites knew of and believed in a Most High God, known as El or Elyon in Biblical and semetic literature. That God Most High is father to Yahweh, and the relationship between Yahweh and the Most High God is indicated by the title Son of God.
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