As I progress in laying out the evidence for my twin genome Godhead position, my research will show that Joseph Smith's version of the Godhead is actually very closely aligned with the modern scholarship of the late Michael Heiser and his Two Yahwehs' position. Also see Heiser discussing the Two Powers here. For a summary of Heiser's scholarship, see digitalseminary.com' summary titled The Second Yahweh. Heiser also discusses the Two Powers in Psalm 2 here.
In his book The Jewish Gospels, Daniel Boyarin also covers the Jewish concept of Two Powers in Heaven, which led to the idea of Jesus as a member of the Godhead. See the video Daniel Boyarin reading Hagiga (1) on YouTube here.
For one of the best video presentations I've seen on this topic by Michael Heiser, see the video Did Ancient Jews Believe in Two God's? In case the link doesn't work the actual presentation is titled Godhead in the Old Testament: Israelite Monotheism, High Christology, and Judaism's Two Powers in Heaven by Michael Heiser.
I think Joseph Smith actually discovered and revealed, in his scriptures, the Godhead that is most often presented in the New Testament (especially in the writings of Paul and the Gospel of John). Here is one of Heiser's visuals from one of his presentations:
The reason that Jesus and the Father often sound like the same being in LDS Scripture is because Jesus is the Monogene of Father Jehovah: meaning Jesus is the only exact reproduction, the only unique gene/genome of Jehovah's noomatic body. Note that Jehovah's personage of spirit often appeared as the "angel of the Lord" in the Old Testament, see:
Who is The Angel of the Lord? (Animation) by Bible Animations
Who is the angel of the Lord? By Got Questions
In the Introduction to the Two Powers in Heaven, the intro states:
Most people are not aware that ancient Judaism taught the idea of a Godhead – though it was restricted to a Two-Person Godhead.
To further understand the "angel of the Lord" as Jehovah in the form of a Man (seen before Jesus' birth), see Michael Heiser's lecture Two Powers of the Godhead (May 4, 2013).
Then there is the book Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity by Peter Schäfer (Author), Allison Brown (Translator). The Amazon.com page explains the book:
Contrary to popular belief, Judaism was not always strictly monotheistic. Two Gods in Heaven reveals the long and little-known history of a second, junior god in Judaism, showing how this idea was embraced by rabbis and Jewish mystics in the early centuries of the common era and casting Judaism's relationship with Christianity in an entirely different light.
Drawing on an in-depth analysis of ancient sources that have received little attention until now, Peter Schäfer demonstrates how the Jews of the pre-Christian Second Temple period had various names for a second heavenly power―such as Son of Man, Son of the Most High, and Firstborn before All Creation. He traces the development of the concept from the Son of Man vision in the biblical book of Daniel to the Qumran literature, the Ethiopic book of Enoch, and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the picture changes drastically. While the early Christians of the New Testament took up the idea and developed it further, their Jewish contemporaries were divided.
Then a review from biblical scholar Paula Fredriksen, author of When Christians Were Jews, reads:
"God was never the only god, not even in his own book. As Peter Schäfer deftly demonstrates, our idea of monotheism―'one god only'―is modern, not ancient. Two Gods in Heaven not only repatriates New Testament ideas to their originary Second Temple Jewish matrix; it also offers an enriching and intriguing view of the theological dynamics that formed the West."
So Heiser is not the only one who discusses the concept of Two Powers in Heaven. In the article Two Powers in Heaven… Manifested, author Andrei A. Orlov writes on page 352:
In the Hebrew Bible the deity often appears in an anthropomorphic shape. Such anthropomorphic symbolism comes to its most forceful expression in the Israelite priestly ideology, known to us as the Priestly source, wherein God is depicted in “the most tangible corporeal similitudes.”[2] Elliot Wolfson remarks that “a critical factor in determining the biblical (and, by extension, subsequent Jewish) attitude toward the visualization of God concerns the question of the morphological resemblance between the human body and the divine.”[3] Indeed, in the biblical priestly traditions the deity is understood to have created humanity in his own image (Gen 1:27) and is therefore frequently described as possessing a humanlike form.
The article discusses how this visual imagery of the Deity in bodily form is later contested by the Deuteronomic group that sought to replace the bodily imagery of Jehovah by replacing such imagery with only hearing the Voice of the Deity (or the Words of Jehovah), and God’s body being interpreted as not a physical body but the brick and mortar body of the sanctuary (temple), and the temple being God’s bodily abode.
After watching Michael Heiser's presentation Two Powers of the Godhead (May 4, 2013), at around 33 minutes into the video he gives a reason for why you would hear the voice of the Father in 3 Nephi and then you see the Son. At 39 minutes he explains things in a way which mirrors the vision of the brother of Jared. In the same lecture he references Jude 5 where he says that basically Jesus is presented as the Angle of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible. Heiser recommends, Did Jesus Save the People out of Egypt? A Re-examination of a Textual Problem in Jude 5 by Philip F. Bartholoma. Then at 49 minutes, Heiser explains that Jesus being called the "only begotten" means he is the unique gene of Jehovah.
In his video What Makes Jesus UNIQUE Amongst The Sons of God?, Heiser further explains that Jesus being called the "only begotten Son" really means that Jesus is a "Son" in the sense of being of the same kind/genus of God, as God's "unique gene" or monogene. He provides this visual slide explaining how "Only Begotten" means Only Kind/Gene or Monogene:
Heiser goes on n the video to explain that Isaac is the only begotten because he is the only son that is born through supernatural intervention. He quotes Hebrews 11: 17 and 1 John 4:9 about how Isaac is Abraham's only son because he was born miraculously and Jesus is the only son because he was born miraculously too. Hebrews 11: 17 (EXB) reads, "God made the promises to Abraham, but Abraham [L The one who received the promises] was ready to offer his ·own [unique; one of a kind; John 3:16] son as a sacrifice." We then go to John 3:16 in the EXB which reads:
- The “Two Yahweh Figures” served as a conceptual precursor to the “Tow Powers in Heaven” theology of ancient Judaism (Segal).
- The New Testament identified the second (anthropomorphic) Yahweh figure with/as Jesus
In the video titled How the New Testament Writers Communicated OT Theology with a Focus on Jesus Part 4, Michael Heiser presents these slides:
Click to Enlarge
Heiser then provides these slides in the same presentation:
What this demonstrates for me is further evidence of the coherence of original Mormon scripture on the Godhead. For you have a consistent understanding of the Godhead as two identical Yahweh figures or Twin Powers being expressed all throughout the Jewish religion which is echoed in the 5th Lecture on Faith.
In the slide below, Heiser points out that texts written around the time of the New Testament where they clearly understand that Yahweh appeared in a human-like form in the Old Testament:
The passage above from an extra biblical source helps us provides further support for the understanding among ancient Jews that the Twin Powers were two identical figures that look exactly like the same Jesus.
Heiser's research makes sense of LDS Scripture, wherein two Yahwehs/Jehovahs is I think what Joseph Smith was thinking when composing his scriptural language. Heiser First Power, the Supreme Being would be the Deity of Lecture on Faith 2:2 manifesting himself first in the form of the Angel of the Lord figure that Heiser discusses above, which is the Father as a personage of spirit in Lecture 5 in the Old Testament. In other words, the Bible's "angel of the Lord" (in the form of a Man), is equivalent to Father Jehovah's personage of spirit described in Lecture 5.
The Fifth Lecture explains that the Father's "personage of spirit" (the noomatic form in which he appears in the Old Testament) is basically the express/exact image and likeness of the future (not yet born) earthborn Jesus. What this means is that the Deity of Lecture 2:2, foresaw within his omniscient mind, the genetic human formation of Jesus of Nazareth (born of Mary), and that earthly form (Jesus) was chosen by the Deity of Lecture 2 to be the bodily image (personage) of the Deity. In other words, the Deity formed for himself a noomatic genome, i.e. a personage composed of nooma or spirit-matter, which was an exact twin duplicate (in the form of nooma) of the future earth-born Jesus. This understanding is made clear in the following excerpt from the Fifth Lecture quoted below (click on the links below that I added to the text, to learn more about the meaning of the words and phrases used by Joseph Smith):
[The omnipresent Deity's] Godhead ... [is] the two personages [Heiser's Two Powers, of the Father-Jehovah and Son/Jesus] who constitute [i.e. form or compose] the great, matchless, governing and supreme power [see Lecture 2:2] ... The Father being a personage of spirit, glory and power ... The Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, a personage of tabernacle, made, or fashioned like unto man, or being in the form and likeness of man, or, rather, man was formed after his likeness, and in his image;—he is also the express image and likeness of the personage of the Father: possessing all the fulness of the Father, or, the same fulness with the Father; being begotten of him ... and is called the Son because of the flesh ... The Father and the Son possessing the same mind, the same wisdom, glory, power and fulness: Filling all in all—the Son being filled with the fulness of the Mind, glory and power, or, in other words, the Spirit, glory and power of the Father—possessing all knowledge and glory, and the same kingdom: sitting at the right hand of power, in the express image and likeness of the Father—a Mediator for man—being filled with the fulness of the Mind of the Father, or, in other words, the Spirit of the Father: which Spirit is shed forth upon all who believe on his name and keep his commandments: and all those [Christians] who keep his commandments shall grow up from grace to grace, and become heirs of the heavenly kingdom, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ; possessing the same mind, being transformed into the same image or likeness, even the express image of him who fills all in all: being filled with the fulness of his glory, and become one in him, even as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one.
In other words, the bodily form of the Old Testament Jehovah, as a personage of spirit-matter, as a noomatic genome, a personage of glorious spirit-matter, is an exact copy of Jesus and Jesus is an exact copy of Jehovah (His Genome) formed in the heavenly realm before Jesus was born on earth; so that we read above that Jesus is Father-Jehovah's express image and likeness; but the formation of Jesus as a duplicate seal or twin of Jehovah molded in the flesh, was to be a combination of noomatic material and human flesh. In this way, Jesus was both the Father and the Son (Flesh), that is Jesus was Father-Jehovah incarnate (as Jehovah's duplicated genome, His express image): a mirror image and a copy, formed/molded into flesh. In other words, Jesus is an exact duplicate of Jehovah's personage of spirit but imprinted onto flesh as an exact twin duplicate seal of Jehovah's divine genome as the Unique Monogene (Only Begotten). Thus Jesus is part divine, part flesh, and basically an "identical twin" of Jehovah. Jesus is thus called the only begotten, which actually means basically the only same genome copy of Jehovah's noomatic personage; as in Jesus is an exact copy, i.e. a cast image molded into human flesh, and is called the Son due to his formation in flesh as Jesus of Nazareth. This is explained in much more detail in my blog post titled, Jesus as a Duplicate Seal (Facsimile) of Jehovah: the Only Monogene of the Father ...
As a twin duplicate, Jesus is also a separate and distinct personage and unique person (separate from the Father-Jehovah) with his own separate life lived on earth. Jesus as a man on earth is separate from the Father, who is a personage of spirit (a noomatic personage) in heaven. Thus Jesus prays to his Father (Jehovah) while Jesus is on earth. Meanwhile, Jesus says plainly in John 14: 8-10 that he who has seen him has seen the Father-Jehovah, and this is because they are one genome, an identical twin duplicate of each other.
So to summarize and recap, the Deity of Lecture 2:2, as the Head God of D&C 121:32, formed a noomatic body to dwell in as the "angel of the Lord" in the Old Testament, who was Jehovah (the Father as a "personage of spirit" in Lecture 5). Jehovah, as a spirit body then duplicated himself: essentially copying his divine genome as a noomatic body and molded himself, his genome, into a duplicate body composed of earthly human flesh which was Jesus of Nazareth (who was called the Son because of the flesh). Jesus was literally both the Father and the Son as an exact duplicate genome of the Father. In other words, Jesus is the Father "because he was conceived by the power of God" (Mosiah 15:3). Note that the 1828 Dictionary defines conceived as "Formed in the womb; framed in the mind; devised; imagined; understood." In other words, Jesus' flesh-body was formed in Mary's womb by the creative power of God. As in Jesus was formed by God's power and molded into the "express image and likeness of the personage of the Father" (Lecture 5). This is why in Luke 10:22/23 in Joseph Smith’s translation (or revision) of the Bible he changed the original verse in the KJV to read:
“All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth that the Son is the Father, and the Father is the Son, but him to whom the Son will reveal it.”
This revision/translation was done I think to emphasize that to see the Son's body was to simultaneously see the Father's body, because the Son is the exact duplicate genome of the Father, i.e. Jesus is basically an "identical twin" of the Father. This is because again, Jesus was conceived (formed) in Mary's womb by God's molding power, wherein Jesus was molded into an exact twin duplicate of God's genome (as the Unique Monogene, i.e. Only Begotten).
Yet being born of Mary and growing up as a human, Jesus developed his own separate identity and personality as the Word (Logos) made flesh, yet they (Jehovah and His Logos) remain identical as One Genome.
Evidence that God created or manufactured a duplicate of his noomatic personage and divine nature (DNA) can be found all throughout the New Testament. For example, see Rev. 3:14 (EXB). The Fifth Lecture on Faith in turn quotes other New Testament passages of this sort.
So the Father-Jehovah is a personage of spirit as the identical twin image of the earth-born Jesus; Jehovah as a personage of spirit-glory (nooma), the "angel of the Lord" discussed above, a blueprint noomatic duplicate of the flesh body Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. the identical twin image (in the form of spirit-matter) of the earth born Jesus of Nazareth. But Jehovah is a "father" in that his genome conceived/formed Jesus, who is only called the Son due to his flesh body (see Mosiah 15: 1-5).
So Jesus and Jehovah are identical twins basically, and again the phrase "only begotten" literally means "only unique gene/kind." So that only Jesus is the unique gene, or only genome, of Jehovah. Christians in turn are not the only unique gene of Jehovah, but are only adopted into the divine family and partake of the divine genetic nature of Jehovah through Christ's seed implanted in them, as we read in Peter that Christians are to "partake of the divine nature (DNA)."
The understanding of Heiser's two Jehovahs, makes sense of the Lectures on Faith which are about the Deity and what constitutes His godhead: as the Deity is a Divine Genome ("species unique" as Michael Heiser puts it), composed of his personage of spirit (the form of Jehovah the Father) as His body of spirit composed of noomatic material, energy and power; and the Only Begotten Son, meaning the Only Unique Gene (i.e. Jehovah's duplicated Genome). Put another way, Jesus of Nazareth is the identical twin of Father Jehovah: who is the first fruits (genus) of God's genome being replicated; as Christians are adopted into this Divine Species by receiving God's DNA (sperma) through the nooma.
I put together the following illustration to summarize all this information so far:
