I previous posts I presented the following illustration to summarize the original LDS Trinity:
Ronald Huggins noticed that the original LDS Godhead is not a strict modalism but what he calls Swedenborgian. While I disagree with Huggins and side with Clyde Ford that the early Mormon Trinity was more like an Alternative Trinitarian doctrine, I did benefit from Huggins’ analysis below on how much is emphasized that the Father and Son look exactly like. Here is what Huggins writes (emphasis added, words in brackets are my own):
The Wentworth Letter (Times and Seasons [1 March 1842] 3:706-8, 710).[33]
The Wentworth Letter first appeared in the 1 March 1842 Times and Seasons. … It was in the same issue of this paper that the first installment of the Book of Abraham appeared. It was in the Book of Abraham that Joseph Smith set forth the basis of his radical new doctrine of the plurality of Gods, which he had begun teaching at the beginning of the previous year.
The Wentworth Letter contains a version of Joseph Smith’s first-vision story that is of special significance here. He writes that on that occasion he “saw two glorious personages, who exactly resembled each other in features and likeness.” This statement is virtually identical to one in an earlier account of the first vision written and published by Orson Pratt in 1840.[34] Smith also sent a statement that was essentially a copy of the Wentworth Letter to I. Daniel Rupp in 1843, which also contained this statement about the identical appearance of the Father and the Son.[35] Although the Wentworth Letter does not identify the two “personages,” there is little doubt that Joseph understood them to be the Father and the Son. In the currently official first-vision account, written in the Spring of 1838, but not published until 1 April 1842, i.e., one month after the publication of the Wentworth Letter, the identity of both personages is revealed when one of them pointed to the other “and said…`This is my beloved Son, hear him’” (JS-H 1:17).[36]
The Wentworth Letter states explicitly what is only implied in earlier statements. In Joseph’s 9 Nov 1835 recital of the first vision…, he says only that when the second personage appeared he was “like unto the first.”[37]
What is the basis for Joseph’s conceiving of the Father and the Son as identical in appearance? Perhaps the answer lies in a train of thought going goes all the way back to the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price Moses, where Joseph was viewing the incarnate Son as the image of the spirit-body of God [Father-Jehovah], which was itself the image of the spirit and personality of God.
If Joseph decided that after the incarnation [of Jesus on earth] he would reserve the spirit body of God for the Father and the physical body of God for the Son, it would only make sense that they would be identical in appearance, since one was the image of the other. The 1835 Fifth Lecture on Faith might well speak from the same perspective when it calls the Father a “personage of spirit” and the Son 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.” (D&C 1835, p. 53). …
… Conclusion
Thus, to sum up the matter, throughout the 1830s, Joseph Smith continued to develop the expansionistic modalism [or a modified Trinity as John Tvedtenes puts it in his response to Dick Baer] of the Book of Mormon. … God the Father [Jehovah] and Jesus as God the Son looked identical because the physical body of Jesus in his role as Son was made in the image of the spirit body of Jesus [that is, Jesus as the Son (flesh) was formed in the express image of Jehovah's spirit body, or as the Wentworth letter puts it, Father Jehovah and Jesus are “two glorious personages, who exactly [[resemble]] each other in features and likeness.”]. …
In the Book of Mormon, in 3 Nephi 19: 18-20, we read (my words in brackets), “…they [the Nephites] did pray unto Jesus [the express image of the Father as His genetic twin], calling him their Lord and their God. And … Jesus departed out of the midst of them, and went a little way off from them and bowed himself to the earth, and he said: Father, I thank thee that thou hast given the Holy Ghost unto these whom I have chosen …” Hence they pray to Jesus and worship him as the Only Begotten (the only genetic twin gene/kind of Jehovah). Yet Jesus prays to the Father (who is a personage of spirit) while he is a separate human body as the Logos/Intelligence of Abraham chapter 3, as such:
One of the most Trinitarian sounding passages in the Bible is in 1 John 5: 6-8, and the Book of Mormon and Lecture 5 keep this idea intact because Jesus as Jehovah’s twin is his identical image. Thus we read in in 3 Nephi 11: 32-36 the following (words in brackets are my own):
And this is my [the resurrected Jesus’] doctrine, and it is the doctrine which the Father[/Jehovah] hath given unto me; and I [the flesh-body of God as His identical twin genes and Image] bear record of the Father, and the Father beareth record of me, …; and I bear record that the Father commandeth all men, everywhere, to repent and believe in me [the Son/fleshly Image of Jehovah].
35 … and I bear record of it from the Father; and whoso believeth in me believeth in the Father also [as His genetic twin]; and unto him will the Father bear record of me …
36 And thus will the Father bear record of me, and the Holy Ghost will bear record unto him of the Father and me; for the Father, and I … are one [divine species].
In his article The Earliest Mormon Concept of God, Dan Vogel points out:
Some of the revelations which Joseph Smith dictated between 1829 and 1831 similarly blur the distinction between the Father and the Son (D&C 11:2, 10,28; 29:1, 42, 46; 49:5, 28)[31] Also in the early 1830s Smith revised the Bible, changing a number of passages to more explicitly identify the Son with the Father. For example, he changed Luke 10:22, in which Jesus declares that "no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him." In the revised version Jesus says that "no man knoweth that the Son is the Father, and the Father is the Son, but him to whom the Son will reveal it."[32]
Non-Mormon, Clyde Ford, critiques Vogel’s essay and offers a history of Trinitarian debates in Joseph Smith’s day showing that some form of monotheist Trinitarianism is more likely than strict sequential modalism (see Jesus and the Father: The Book of Mormon and the Early Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Trinity by Clyde Ford).
So why does LDS Scripture often have the Father Jehovah begin speaking in a section of Scripture like D&C 42 and then it switches to the resurrected Jesus talking as if they are the same person? The reason is they are the same God in divine substance (Mind/Spirit) and form as a duplicate genome, yet two distinct persons in the Godhead while being the same identical twin personage. So because they are basically identical twins they often speak simultaneously and finish each other's sentences like human identical twins.
Before the Book of Mormon was published, Joseph Smith dictated this revelation where Father-Jehovah is talking but then it switches to Jesus talking, just like identical twins would talk as if the same identical genetic “personage” (a mirror image of each other) in D&C 11:
2 Behold, I am God [Jehovah, compare Mosiah 15: 1-5]; give heed to my word [the Logos/Christ and Christ’s words], …
10 Behold, thou hast a gift, or thou shalt have a gift if thou wilt desire of me in faith, with an honest heart, believing in the power of Jesus Christ [compare Moses 1: 32 where Jesus is the “word of God’s power”], or in my power [Christ] which speaketh unto thee;
11 For, behold, it is I [Jehovah speaking simultaneously alongside the resurrected Jesus as his genetic twin] that speak; behold, I am the light [see D&C 88 and Lecture 2] which shineth in darkness, and by my power I give these words unto thee.
28 Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I am the life and the light of the world.
In the same year the Book of Mormon was published in 1830, Smith produced D&C 29 where Father-Jehovah, the resurrected Jesus, and Holy Spirit are all speaking through the personage of the resurrected Christ. Here we see the Triune Godhead in Jesus speaking through Jesus and speaking of sending Jesus in the flesh even as Jesus is the narrator:
D&C 29:
1) Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ, your Redeemer, the Great I Am, whose arm of mercy hath atoned for your sins; …
Then the twin Yawheh, as Heiser puts it, talks as the same personage like watching one twin talk and then the other one talks without skipping a beat a completing each other’s sentences as if the same person:
42 But, behold, I say unto you that I, the Lord God [Jehovah], gave unto Adam and unto his seed, that they should not die as to the temporal death, until I, the Lord God [Jehovah], should send forth angels to declare unto them repentance and redemption, through faith on the name of mine Only Begotten Son [Unique Monogene].
Verse (1) very clearly states this is the “voice” of Jesus (the resurrected personage of Jesus) on the right hand of Father-Jehovah, and then because they are the same image or twin Jehovahs', as twin copies, the Father (to the left hand of the Son) then speaks of His “Only Begotten Son.” Again, this is why the Wentworth letter describes the First Vision as the Father and Son being identical. We see this in several of the revelations. For example, in 1831 Smith produced D&C 49 where in verse 5 we read and hear Father-Jehovah talking who says:
5 Thus saith the Lord [Father-Jehovah]; for I am God, and have sent mine Only Begotten Son [the Word/Logos who became Jesus of Nazareth] into the world for the redemption of the world, and have decreed that he that receiveth him shall be saved, and he that receiveth him not shall be damned— …
In the years 1832-1833, Joseph produced his own translation of Luke 10: 22 (verse 23 in the JST) which reads, “All things are delivered to me [Jesus] 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.” As I see it, what Joseph Smith likely meant was, Jesus is the Father and the Father is Jesus when it is revealed to the person, because when one sees the two personages of the Father and Son they realize they are identical as twin Yahwehs (again, as Heiser puts it: the Two Powers as the same image of Yahweh).
We see this as well with the Sample of Pure Language in March 1832:
Source: The Joseph Smith Papers
God as "Awmen" in the explanation above, which "made all things in all its parts" mirrors the Deity in Lecture 2 who is the supreme governing power. Jesus is the "Son Awmen" because Jesus is the Son (flesh) copy of Jehovah. The Son is the "greatest of all parts of Ahwmen" because Jesus is the flesh formed part of the Supreme Being (the Deity of Lecture 2) who again is "the being which made all things in all its parts." Jesus is the "the greatest of all the parts of Awmen [God] which [image] is the Godhead the first born" because the resurrected Jesus as the firstborn is the prototype image of holy being (see Lecture 7). Jesus is a part of God as the stamped seal of the Father's image molded into a body of flesh. Jesus is the image part of Jehovah, the representative image of Jehovah, the twin identical image, whose bodily form as a template image is the Godhead in that the two personages of the Godhead per Lecture 5 are the exact same image of Jesus born of Mary, but the Father is a personage of spirit as a noomatic form that is the same exact image of Jesus as the form the Deity of Lecture 2 took on as his noomatic form, while the personage of Jesus (flesh) is the copy of the Father's divine personage of spirit.
Jesus is known as “Son Ahman” in D&C 78:20 and 95:17. Thus the Son (as part of God) is God’s tabernacle (see Lecture 5). Compare Lecture 5 that quotes Colossians 2:9. I would argue that the Logos?Son is part of God in that God’s omnipresent Spirit/Fullness fills all in all and Jehovah’s identical genes formed Jesus as part of Jehovah, an extension or expansion of God. A year after Smith wrote section 76, in 1833 Joseph reiterated his two twin personages understanding of God by writing the following in D&C 93: 3-5, 17, and 19 (words in brackets are my own, emphasis added):
I [the resurrected Jesus] am in the Father [God/Jehovah], and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one—The Father because he gave me [Jesus] of his fulness [identical Nooma/Spirit and Gene/Kind], and the Son because I [Jesus] was in the world and made flesh my tabernacle [compare Mosiah 15:3], and dwelt among the sons of men. I was in the world and received of my Father [i.e. received His Gene/DNA], and the works of him [as we are twins] were plainly manifest.
[At this point in section 93, the narrator switches and it is now the Father-Jehovah who appears to be speaking but then soon switches back to Jesus speaking …]
And he [Jesus] received all power, both in heaven and on earth, and the glory of the Father was with him, for he [the Father] dwelt in him [Jesus was filled with the noomatic fulness of the Deity per Lecture 2 and 5 and Jehovah’s identical DNA]. [Compare this with Lecture 5:2]. I give unto you these sayings that you may understand and know how to worship, and know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father [Jehovah] in my name [Jesus’s name], and in due time receive of his [the Father’s] fulness.[Christians receiving the same fulness as Christ is covered in Lectures 5 and 7].
Notice how the Father-Jehovah and Jesus speak as the same person in D&C 93 just like twins will speak and complete each other’s sentences. The Lectures on Faith began to be formulated just a couple years after D&C 76, which means the nature of the Father and Son would have been discussed among church leaders perhaps as early as 1833 or 1834; and the Fifth Lecture that was published in 1835 clearly teaches that the Father as a personage of spirit as the express image of the Son (a personage of tabernacle or flesh and bone), and they are one God, that is one divine image, the same divine bodily image; which is what we just read above in D&C 93: 3-5.
The Intelligences in Abraham 3 are parts of the Deity of Lecture 2, expanded spirits of the one God; but the most intelligent Intelligence (the Logos/Word) who is “the greatest of all the parts of Awmen [Jehovah] which is the [first copy of the] Godhead, the first born [i.e. the firstborn prototype of the future holy ones, Image-bearers]. This corresponds with Colossians 2:9 (that Jesus is the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form as Jehovah’s genetic twin) which verse is quoted in the Fifth Lecture.
The LDS Scriptures are clear that the Son is not a second God but is God as basically a twin Yahweh. As we see in Alma 11: 23-39, where it says very clearly there is only one God and Jesus is an exact duplicate of this one God. For in Alma chapter 11, the character Zeezrom in these passages tries to get Amulek to deny the doctrine of one God, but Amulek is clear that there is not more than one God and the Son of God is the very Eternal Father, which I interpret as the Son is the exact identical twin of the Father (Heiser's second Yahweh). Again, we have to combine Alma 11 with Mosiah 15: 1-5 and the teachings of Paul in the New Testament where God through Christ (the firstborn prototype) is propagating a crop of divine beings that have His same divine DNA and attributes as they share the divine nature. In other words, Jehovah's genetic twin Jesus, is the firstfruits of the divine species of holy ones (saints).
Traditional Brighamite Mormon apologists say that the saying that Jesus is the Eternal Father in Alma 11 is not to be taken literally, that the word Father just means Jesus is the Creator, etc. But their apologetic interpretations did not exist as official doctrine prior to 1900. In the 1800s, the official LDS doctrine was the Lectures on Faith that teach that Jesus was the express/exact image of the Father and that is why he is called the Father and Son in the Book of Mormon, because as an identical twin genome as Luke 10: 23 in the JST explains, “... no man knoweth that the Son is the Father, and the Father is the Son, but him to whom the Son will reveal it.” Those who see the Father and Son together, it is revealed to them that they are two identical personages in exact features and likeness. So Jesus is the Father as his exact same image. In fact, in Alma 11: 44 we read that people will be brought before “… the bar of Christ the Son, and God the Father [Jehovah], which is one Eternal God, to be judged according to their works ...” They are one Eternal God as twin Yahwehs.
This is further corroborated in the Joseph Smith Translation of 1 Timothy 2: 3-5 quoted below (words in italics in original JST):
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
4 Who is willing to have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth which is in Christ Jesus, who is the Only Begotten Son of God, and ordained to be a Mediator between God and man; who is one God, and hath power over all men.
5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
Note, the wording “who is one God” and “who is the Only Begotten Son/Flesh of God,” which to clearly means that the one Deity is one personage (the form of Jesus) as one divine genome, and Jesus is the Monogene, (i.e. the Only Begotten), meaning the only one identical genetic twin/kind of Jehovah, a twin Yahweh, that is God our Savior.
Early LDS scriptures in the 1830s are very clear that the prototype image of Jesus Christ represents the Godhead in bodily form but that there is only one God: one Deity dwelling one model form of Jesus, as Jehovah as the Angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible and then the earthborn Jesus in the New Testament. The Book of Mormon people thus worship and pray to Christ as the embodied form of God, the Only Begotten (Only Unique Gene or Species) of Jehovah:
“…I beheld the Son of God going forth among the children of men; and I saw many fall down at his feet and worship him.” (1 Nephi 11:24)
“And now behold, I say unto you that the right way is to believe in Christ… wherefore ye must bow down before him, and worship him with all your might, mind, and strength, and your whole soul; and if ye do this ye shall in nowise be cast out.” (2 Nephi 25:29)
“Hosanna! Blessed be the name of the Most High God! And they did fall down at the feet of Jesus, and did worship him.”(3 Nephi 11:17)
“…Jesus came and stood in the midst…he spake unto the multitude, and commanded them that they should kneel down again upon the earth, and also that his disciples should kneel down upon the earth. And it came to pass that when they had all knelt down upon the earth, he commanded his disciples that they should pray. And behold, they began to pray; and they did pray unto Jesus, calling him their Lord and their God.” (3 Nephi 19:15-18).