The following is taken from the monumental work titled The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense, authored by Robert M. Bowman Jr. & J. Ed Komoszewski, published by Kregel Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2024, Part 2: Like Father, Like Son: Jesus’ Divine Attributes, Chapter 9: Monotheism and the Divine Attributes, pp. 177-184.
In my estimation this is THE best and most comprehensive exposition and defense of the biblical basis for the Deity of Christ. Every serious Trinitarian Christian student of the Holy Bible, apologist, and/or theologian must have this book in the library.
LATTER-DAY SAINTS: MANY PERSONAGES WHO ARE GODS
The LDS Church teaches a doctrine of God that is at the other extreme from the position of progressive Christianity. Whereas progressive Christians deny that God is a personal being, Latter-day Saints believe in a plurality of divine beings who are “personages,” that is, anthropomorphic individuals. We gave a brief account earlier (pp. 56–57) of the development of LDS theology from Joseph Smith’s beginnings to the present. Joseph’s earliest revelations were in most respects monotheistic, but by the end of his life he was teaching explicitly that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were three Gods, that they progressed to become Gods, and that we are the Father’s literal spirit offspring with the potential to become divine beings like him. Although there are in the LDS doctrine of God many theological issues of interest and even relevance we could address, here we will focus on the LDS belief in a plurality of Gods and its distinction between “Elohim” the Father and “Jehovah” the Son as two different Gods in the Old Testament.
Plurality of Gods
In 1842, Joseph Smith published initial installments of the Book of Abraham, a supposedly inspired translation of a text that the Genesis patriarch Abraham had written on one of the Egyptian papyri that the LDS Church purchased in 1835. The papyri were authentically ancient Egyptian papyri (though two thousand, not four thousand, years old), but the Book of Abraham was not an authentic translation of the papyrus on which it was supposedly based. This fact became clear when fragments of the papyri resurfaced in the 1960s and were translated by both LDS and non-LDS scholars.34 What interests us here is that Abraham 4–5 is a revision of Genesis 1–2. The base text of the revision is clearly the KJV, but the passage has been extensively edited to teach a polytheistic account of creation, as the following excerpts illustrate (emphases added):
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Gen. 1:1–3 KJV)
And then the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth. And the earth, after it was formed, was empty and desolate, because they had not formed anything but the earth; and darkness reigned upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of the Gods was brooding upon the face of the waters. And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light; and there was light. (Abr. 4:1–3)
The Book of Abraham changes “God” to “the Gods” not just in these verses but throughout Abraham 4–5. Notably, Genesis 1:26–27 is rewritten so that human beings are made in the image of the Gods: “So the Gods went down to organize man in their own image, in the image of the Gods to form they him, male and female to form they them” (Abr. 4:27). In his final sermon, known as the Sermon in the Grove, Joseph attempted to prove this translation from the plural form of the Hebrew word ʾĕlōhîm.
I once asked a learned Jew, “If the Hebrew language compels us to render all words ending in heim in the plural, why not render the first Eloheim plural?” He replied, “That is the rule with few exceptions; but in this case it would ruin the Bible.” He acknowledged I was right. . . . The word Eloheim ought to be in the plural all the way through—Gods.35
The LDS Church has had for a long time a contingent of scholars who know this is nonsense. More than a century ago, LDS apostle James Talmage, one of the LDS Church’s most influential intellectuals, commented regarding the word ʾĕlōhîm: “In form the word is a Hebrew plural noun; but it connotes the plurality of excellence or intensity, rather than distinctively of number.”36 Yet the LDS Church stands by Joseph’s interpretation of the word ʾĕlōhîm, at least in some of its literature. In its Old Testament curriculum manual, for instance, they assert that contrary to the view of “modern scholars,” Joseph “indicated the significance of the plural form,” quoting the Sermon in the Grove.37 There are many reasons why we know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that ʾĕlōhîm in Genesis 1 functions as a singular noun and should be translated “God.” For the sake of space, we will mention just three reasons.
1. Hebrew uses plural nouns for a variety of reasons other than to express a numerical plural. It does this, for example, with ʾādôn, the Hebrew word for “lord,” which often occurs in plural forms in reference to a king, such as David (1 Kings 1:43, 47), or in reference to Yahweh (e.g., Ps. 8:1, 9). Biblical scholars generally agree that the plural ʾĕlōhîm in reference to God is another example of this usage.
2. In virtually all cases where ʾĕlōhîm in context means “God,” the verbs, other nouns, pronouns, and adjectives used with it are singular in form, not plural.38 The point here is easy to understand. If you read a sentence saying “Elohim is good,” you know that Elohim in this sentence must be singular because the verb is singular (“is”). The same thing applies to expressions like “Elohim our Father” or “Elohimsits on his throne.” We see this use of singular words in relation to ʾĕlōhîm right in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God [ʾĕlōhîm] created the heavens and the earth.” The verb “created” in this verse (bārāʾ) is singular, not plural. This pattern continues throughout Genesis 1–2 in the Hebrew text wherever the word ʾĕlōhîm occurs.
3. The Hebrew Bible refers to Yahweh numerous times as ʾĕlōhîm. Whenever it does so, the word ʾĕlōhîm must mean “God,” not “gods.” But this leads to the second problem in LDS theology we need to address.
Jehovah and Elohim as Two Gods
There was a reason why James Talmage over a century ago pointed out that the Hebrew word ʾĕlōhîm was singular in meaning. By that time, the LDS Church had settled on the convention of using “Elohim” as a name for God the Father, while using “Jehovah” as a name for the Son Jesus Christ. Thus, Talmage immediately explained, “Elohim, as understood and used in the restored Church of Jesus Christ, is the name-title of God the Eternal Father, whose firstborn Son in the spirit is Jehovah—the Only Begotten in the flesh, Jesus Christ.”39 This was not merely a naming convention, however; in LDS theology, Elohim and Jehovah are two different Gods. Again, Joseph Smith explicitly taught that the Father and the Son are two different Gods (and that the Holy Ghost is a third God). His statement on the matter in his very last sermon continues to be quoted in LDS Church publications:
I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods.40
As we saw was the case with Joseph’s interpretation of the word ʾĕlōhîm, the LDS distinction between Elohim and Jehovah as two different Gods (which, as just mentioned, developed decades after Joseph’s death) has proved difficult for LDS scholars to correlate with the Bible. If Jehovah had a God over him who was his father, where in the Old Testament is this God who was superior to Yahweh? Joseph Fielding Smith, an influential apostle who led the LDS Church briefly toward the end of his life (1970–72), offered the following explanation that Latter-day Saints commonly accept to this day:
The trouble with this explanation is that if Jehovah really were a God lesser in rank and glory than his father Elohim, one would expect that in Jehovah’s revelations to the patriarchs and the prophets throughout the Old Testament he would have spoken frequently about that greater deity. Not only are there no such statements in the Old Testament, what we find instead is an astonishing wealth of statements to the contrary. In what follows, we will use “Jehovah” to represent the Hebrew YHWH (Yahweh, commonly translated “the Lord” in English Bibles) and “Elohim” to represent the Hebrew ʾĕlōhîm (commonly translated “God”).
First of all, the Hebrew Bible pervasively identifies Jehovah as Elohim. It does this in many ways. Most commonly, it does so by referring to “Jehovah your Elohim” well over four hundred times, as well as in related references with other pronouns (“our Elohim,” “my Elohim,” and so on). We also find the compound name “Jehovah Elohim” or “Jehovah the Elohim,” references to “Jehovah, Elohim of Israel,” “Jehovah, the Elohim of ” various human figures (Shem, the patriarchs, David, Elijah, etc.), “Jehovah, Elohim of hosts,” and “Jehovah, Elohim of heaven” (or “of heaven and earth”). Besides these references, there are at least ten statements explicitly stating that Jehovah is Elohim (Deut. 4:35, 39; Josh. 22:34; 1 Kings 8:60; 18:21, 37, 39 [bis]; 2 Kings 19:19, cf. 19:15; Ps. 100:3). Some of these texts even state that Jehovah alone is Elohim. Here we will quote from the ASV, which uses “Jehovah” for the divine name YHWH:
Unto thee it was showed, that thou mightest know that Jehovah he is God [ʾĕlōhîm]; there is none else besides him…. Know therefore this day, and lay it to thy heart, that Jehovah he is God [ʾĕlōhîm] in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else. (Deut. 4:35, 39)…
that all the peoples of the earth may know that Jehovah, he is God; there is none else. (1 Kings 8:60)
O Jehovah, the God of Israel, that sittest above the cherubim, thou art the God [ʾĕlōhîm], even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; thou hast made heaven and earth. . . . Now therefore, O Jehovah our God, save thou us, I beseech thee, out of his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou Jehovah art God [ʾĕlōhîm] alone. (2 Kings 19:15, 19; cf. Isa. 37:16, 20)
We find additional statements to the same effect elsewhere (again, quoting the ASV):
Wherefore thou art great, O Jehovah God: for there is none like thee, neither is there any God [ʾĕlōhîm] besides thee. (2 Sam. 7:22; also 1 Chron. 17:20). I am Jehovah, and there is none else; besides me there is no God. (Isa. 45:5, cf. 45:14)
. . . who hath declared it of old? have not I, Jehovah? and there is no God [ʾĕlōhîm] else besides me, a just God and a Saviour; there is none besides me. (Isa. 45:21).
Conservatively, there are well over 850 statements in the Old Testament identifying Jehovah as Elohim in the various ways we have just catalogued, averaging almost one per chapter. Not only are there many such statements in the Hebrew Bible, but they are spread throughout it in thirty-four of its thirty-nine books. It would not at all be an overstatement to assert that the primary message of the Old Testament is that Jehovah is Elohim.
In the light of this evidence, the only recourse would seem to be to question the integrity of the Old Testament. Indeed, that is what some Latter-day Saints do. Here LDS apologists have found some help from a maverick Methodist scholar named Margaret Barker. According to Barker, in ancient Israelite religion during the period of the first Jerusalem temple (Solomon’s), “there was a High God and several Sons of God, one of whom was Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel. Yahweh, the Lord, could be manifested on earth in human form, as an angel or in the Davidic king.”42 The “High God” might be called El or Elohim (“God”) or El Elyon (“God Most High”), but he was a God superior to Yahweh. “The original temple tradition was that Yahweh, the Lord, was the Son of God Most High, and present on earth as the Messiah.”43 Here we have a scholarly construction of the origins of Christology that apparently lines up with LDS theology: Elohim as the Most High God and as the father of a group of “sons” (whom Latter-day Saints claim were the preexistent spirits of human beings), one of whom was Jehovah, later known as Jesus Christ.
The early Christians, Barker argues, drew on the First Temple traditions of the ancient Israelites in their view of Jesus, rather than on the monotheistic tradition that came to dominate Judaism in the Second Temple period. That monotheistic tradition was primarily the work of the “Deuteronomists,” Jewish scribes around the time of the Babylonian exile and thereafter who produced the passages in Deuteronomy and Isaiah that Christians commonly cite in support of monotheism.44 Kevin Christensen, the main LDS apologist who has used Barker’s work to defend LDS theology, comments: “The same passages in Isaiah and Deuteronomy that are often used as proof texts for the strict monotheism of the Old Testament turn out to be for Barker evidence for a shift in Israelite theology during the exile.”45
A full critique of Barker’s theory is beyond the scope of this book, but we can explain rather simply why it does not work as a support for LDS theology. First, the problems for the view cannot be limited to a few passages in Isaiah and Deuteronomy. Over 850 statements in thirty-four of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament explicitly identify Jehovah as Elohim, and several books assert that Jehovah is the only Elohim (recall the texts we quoted above from Kings and Chronicles as well as Deuteronomy and Isaiah). Genesis and the Psalms also explicitly identify Jehovah as God Most High (El Elyon), the deity that Barker claims was the father of Jehovah and the other spirit sons: “Thou alone, whose name is Jehovah, art the Most High [ʿelyôn] over all the earth” (Ps. 83:18 ASV; see also Gen. 14:22; Pss. 7:17; 47:2; 97:9). All thirty-two occurrences of ʿelyôn in the Hebrew Bible as a title of deity are consistent with this identification of Jehovah as the God Most High. The one text that supposedly distinguishes Jehovah from Elohim or El Elyon is embedded, ironically, in Deuteronomy—in one of the most explicitly monotheistic passages in the Old Testament: When the Most High [ʿelyôn] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s [YHWH] portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage. (Deut. 32:8–9)
When the Most High [ʿelyôn] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s [YHWH] portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage. (Deut. 32:8–9)
This passage does not clearly distinguish Jehovah from Elyon; it makes perfect sense as saying, in Hebrew parallelism, that Jehovah the Most High allowed other nations to be dominated by “the gods” but reserved Israel (Jacob) for himself. In this same passage (the Song of Moses), Jehovah states:
“See now that I, even I, am he; And there is no god [ʾĕlōhîm] beside me.” (Deut. 32:39)
The theory that Elyon was a different deity than Jehovah entails that the “Deuteronomist” scribes skillfully edited out this idea from the entire Hebrew Bible, yet it somehow shows up in one statement in their signature book of Deuteronomy.46 Barker herself admits, “How such a ‘polytheistic’ piece came to be included in Deuteronomy, with its emphasis on monotheism, is a question we cannot answer.”47
In effect, the LDS use of Barker’s theory turns the Old Testament upside down. The Old Testament consistently presents the monotheists as the good guys and the polytheists as the bad guys, the ones who corrupted Israel and who brought divine judgment on Israel. The LDS apologists claim that the polytheists were the good guys while the monotheists were the bad guys. Notice how different this theory is from Joseph Fielding Smith’s explanation for why it is so difficult to find a God above Yahweh in the Old Testament. Smith, assuming the general integrity of the Old Testament text, argued that after the fall Elohim the Father withdrew from contact with humanity and had his son Yahweh speak and act for him. Christensen claims that the Father was almost entirely erased from the Old Testament by apostate scribes. Neither theory holds up.
Finally, we should acknowledge the superficial appeal of the theory that Elohim and Jehovah are two different Gods for the LDS reading of the New Testament. As is well known, the New Testament authors most commonly use the title “God” (theos) for the Father and the title “Lord” (kyrios) for Jesus Christ. Since the Greek word theos is a common translation of the Hebrew ʾĕlōhîm while the Greek word kyrios is a common translation of YHWH, anyone who views the Father and the Son as two different deities will quite naturally infer that the Father is the deity called Elohim/God while Jesus Christ is the deity called Yahweh/Lord.
However, as we have seen, such an interpretation is at odds with the most fundamental teaching of the Old Testament, which is that Yahweh is Elohim. It is also at odds with the New Testament, which clearly accepts the identification of Yahweh as Elohim, at least in equivalent language in Greek. For example, Matthew, Mark, Luke–Acts, and Revelation all use the compound name “the Lord God” (Greek, kyrios ho theos) and related forms (“the Lord our God,” “the Lord your God”) as a designation of God (Matt. 4:7, 10; 22:37; Mark 12:29, 30; Luke 1:16, 32, 68; 4:8, 12; 10:27; 20:37; Acts 2:39; 3:22; Rev. 1:8; 4:8; 11:17; 15:3; 16:7; 18:8; 19:6; 21:22; 22:5, 6). This is a stock designation for God in the Septuagint, appearing over nine hundred times (translating both YHWH ʾĕlōhîm and ʾădōnāy YHWH). The New Testament also quotes Old Testament texts in which the titles kyrios (representing YHWH) and theos (representing ʾĕlōhîm) are used for the same referent. These include the famous Shema, the Old Testament affirmation of Jehovah as Elohim (Deut. 6:4) that became the Jewish “creed” (Matt. 22:37; Mark 12:29, 30; Luke 10:27).
We conclude that the New Testament is just as “monotheistic” as the Old Testament. The distinction between God the Father and Jesus Christ the Lord cannot be explained biblically as a distinction between two of several or many different gods. The traditional Christian doctrine that there is one God who made the world and who is unique in his divine attributes (affirmed also in Judaism and Islam) is therefore securely grounded in the teachings of Scripture. There is no one like God—a point made over and over in the Old Testament (Exod. 8:10; 9:14; 15:11; 1 Kings 8:23; 1 Chron. 17:20; Ps. 86:8; Isa. 40:18, 25; 44:7; 46:5, 9; Jer. 10:6–7; Mic. 7:18). And yet, as we will see, the New Testament claims that Christ possesses the fullness of that unique divine nature (Col. 2:9; Heb. 1:3; see also John 14:7–10; 2 Cor. 4:4).
34. The LDS Church made no official statement on the translation problem until almost fifty years later, in a 2014 article on its website entitled “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham,” at ChurchofJesusChrist.org (where one can also find the text of the Book of Abraham). The literature on the Book of Abraham, especially from LDS authors, is enormous. A representative introduction by a Latter-day Saint scholar is John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU; Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2017). The best critical study is Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. P. JS 1–4 and the Hypocephalus of Sheshonq, with contributions by Marc Coenen, H. Michael Marquardt, and Christopher Woods (Salt Lake City: SmithPettit Foundation, 2011). Ritner, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, also wrote “‘Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham’—A Response,” The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 2014, answering the LDS Church’s website article. Ritner’s article is conveniently available along with other resources on the subject at https://mit.irr.org/category/book-of-abraham.
35. Smith, History of the Church, 6:475, 476.
36. James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, 6th ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1922 [orig. 1915]), 38. The book is currently on the LDS Church’s official website.
37. “Enrichment Section: Who Is the God of the Old Testament?” in Old Testament Student Manual: Genesis—2 Samuel: Religion 301, 3rd ed. (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2003), accessed online at ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
38. Genesis 20:13 (“And when God caused me to wander [hithʿû, plural verb]”) may be a rare exception (see also Gen. 35:7, “revealed”; 2 Sam. 7:23, “went”). The fact that these occurrences are rare and in theologically inauspicious contexts means one cannot use them to read a doctrine of plurality of Gods into the Bible.
39. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, 38; see also Joseph F. Smith et al., “The Father and the Son: A Doctrinal Exposition by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,” Ensign, April 2002, reprinted from Improvement Era, August 1916, 934–42.
40. Smith, History of the Church, 6:474; quoted, e.g., in Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2007), 41–42; Chapter 47, “Doctrine and Covenants 121:11–46,” in Doctrine and Covenants: Student Manual: Religion 324 and 325 (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2017).
41. Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, comp. Bruce R. McConkie (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954–56), 1:27. LDS Church publications frequently quote this statement, e.g., “Moses 1:1–11,” in The Pearl of Great Price: Student Manual: Religion 327 (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2017). It is also quoted in Robert L. Millet, “The Ministry of the Father and the Son,” in The Book of Mormon: The Keystone Scripture, ed. Paul R. Cheesman (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 1988), 44–72, accessed online at rsc.byu.edu.
42. Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 3, emphasis in original.
43. Margaret Barker, “Joseph Smith and Preexilic Israelite Religion,” BYU Studies Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2005): 79.
44. E.g., Barker, Great Angel, 28.
45. Kevin Christensen, “The Deuteronomist De-Christianizing of the Old Testament,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 16, no. 2 (June 2004): 69.
46. On Deuteronomy 32:8–9, see Michael S. Heiser, “Are Yahweh and El Distinct Deities in Deut. 32:8–9 and Psalm 82?” Hiphil 3 (2006); “You’ve Seen One Elohim, You’ve Seen Them All? A Critique of Mormonism’s Use of Psalm 82,” FARMS Review 19, no. 1 (2007): 233–37.
47. Barker, Great Angel, 6.
FURTHER READING
MORMON GOD VERSUS THE TRUE GOD
15 Eerie Similarities Between Islam & Mormonism
WHO IS THE ELOHIM OF MORMONISM?, PT. 2
THE MORMON SATAN & PREMORTALITY
THE BIBLICAL GOD VERSUS THE MORMON GODS, PT. 2, PT. 2B
Answering Islam Blog 