Mormon Says Jesus Believed in Multiple Gods

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But there has been a major change because I started going out to the temple before you were born.

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And the young men who were 13 or 14 years of age would come up to me and want to discuss

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Bible passages on the plurality of gods. That doesn't happen today. And there were 3 .7

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million members back then. A whole lot more now. I've seen a huge development and change in that time period that you couldn't possibly have seen.

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But I've seen it. And if it makes you feel any better being in the lion's den,

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I've been on KTKK radio, in studio, in Salt Lake City with a

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Mormon attorney as the host, two BYU professors across the table from me, and every caller was a

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Mormon. So I've done the same thing up in Salt Lake that you're doing.

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Well, you know, I think it just comes down to two things. Well, one, generations are just different than each other. It's not like, it's just people emphasize different things.

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But I don't know if I fully agree because I'll talk to people I know at BYU, and I know most of my friends are young Latter -day

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Saints, and we talk about plurality of gods. We talk about eternal progression, you know, God being exalted, things like that.

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I don't think it's gone away. We talk about it on our show, and it comes up probably every single day. So I, at least in my experience in 2018, being a young Latter -day

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Saint and doing a show for young Latter -day Saints, it comes up quite a bit.

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I don't think it's gone. Not at all. I'm not saying that the doctrine isn't gone. What I'm saying is... Or the discussion. I don't think it's gone.

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The discussion of it. We used to literally have a line of people waiting to talk to us outside the general conference.

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You almost have to trip people to get them to talk with you anymore. Well, that's the thing. That's changed. I bet if you went up next general conference, and you weren't grouped in with the crazy people with the signs...

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That's sort of impossible to avoid. Because they are there... Oh, believe me, I know. I go, oh, you're one of them.

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I'm not going to listen to this. I was there the first year they showed up. So we had done it for 18 years. You've been made weird bedfellows with them, even though you've got nothing to do with them.

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Even though they hate us, actually, more than they hate you guys. Yeah, we've had run -ins with them. But anyways, that's neither here nor there,

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Jeff. You're in charge. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So what we wanted to do was do something...

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We talked just a bit yesterday that would be beneficial for our hearers. So we thought it'd be good to leave aside the peripheral things, the non -essential things, and just focus in upon the core.

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So Dr. White and I chatted a bit about what might that look like? What might we touch? And then when we spoke yesterday, you talked about all the same things.

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Those are the main issues. So the issues of authority, Scripture, the authority of Scripture. Who is

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God? How does someone come to know God? But all that obviously comes down to authority.

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What's your foundation? And so I think that we can probably try to circle around those as the main issues.

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Questions about God. Is God an exalted man? Who is a resurrected man?

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Who has a God before him? Who had a God before him? Is there potential for human beings to go through the process of exaltation and become gods and goddesses themselves?

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Is that what the Bible teaches? Is that anywhere close to the biblical definition of God and description of God?

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Is that how God's disclosed himself to us? And the other thing, of course, is the gospel itself. So I think we should probably start there at the question of authority.

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So I'll let whoever wants to start maybe bring in the start of the discussion. Yeah, well, let me just put this on the table and go from there.

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I'm looking at Isaiah chapter 44 verse 6. And there's two directions we can go from this.

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So let me just put it out there. Thus says Yahweh.

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Now, I know that you have a quad over there. And so you've got a King James Version of Bible. I have the Hebrew in front of me at the moment.

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And the name Jehovah, of course, is L -O -R -D in all caps in the King James Version of Bible.

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I'm sure you're aware of that. Thus says Jehovah, the King of Israel and his

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Redeemer, Yahweh, Jehovah of hosts, I am the first and I am the last.

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And besides me, there is no Elohim. Now, we can go two directions with this.

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First is the consistent testimony of scripture to the fact that there is only one

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God, Yahweh Elohim. That both those terms are used of one deity 535 times as a joint name in the

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Old Testament. Or we can go, depending on what your personal perspective is, as to why after the 2700 years, these words would be authoritative to us.

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In other words, a fundamental question of the preservation of these words in the original language, translation into the

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English language. Do these words remain normative for the

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Christian in this age? Or is there an authority above these words?

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And I think we can go either direction. I think they're both fruitful and are both relevant to the issue.

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Well, one, I want to say you have a voice like a nice cup of warm milk. It is very soothing. In other words, you fell asleep halfway through what

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I said. Okay, I get it. I grew up doing radio. Okay, you've got from the time

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I was 16. Very impressive. I think the issue isn't translation.

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It isn't the transmission of it. I think that you're approaching it from a perspective of Middle Ages European revisionist history of an ancient

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Semitic culture. And that's an issue I see. And I see that issue from our evangelical brothers and sisters all the time.

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It's very common to take passages in Isaiah and really all throughout the Old Testament and even some of the

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New Testament where, you know, no God's beside me. Hero is real. The Lord, our God is one

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Lord. I'm sorry. I ordered that the other day at the cafeteria.

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There you go. But even like to see what you got when you ordered it. But even so, even, you know, in Latter -day

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Scriptures here. Oh, you heavens and give ear. Oh, you earth and rejoice the inhabitants thereof. For the Lord is God beside him.

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There is no savior. I think, though, the issue I see is that these scriptures are taken out of their ancient context.

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The reality is, and in the same time period and in the surrounding cultures,

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I can find, I keep hitting this mic. I can find quotes from other religions that use this exact same language.

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And I'm sure you're both familiar with a lot of Jewish scholarship. That's very, very clear, especially in 2018, that the

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Godhead or the nature of God and the idea of plurality of gods, the way we see it with monotheism, polytheism, the mainline

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Christian view of that topic is not the view they had in the biblical era. It just isn't.

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I think a good example is that, you know, the tale of Sunni from the Middle Kingdom. This is about the

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Pharaoh Senwoset. I hope I'm saying that right. The first. He is a God without equal with none in existence preceding him.

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The great Cairo hymn to Amun -Ra. Unique one like whom among the gods. Literally like whom of the gods? You were the sole one who made all that exists.

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One alone who made that which is singly unique without his second. I mean, you can go on and on and on. You can find that the exact same language shown in the

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Bible of no gods beside me, before me or after me is the exact same language. These very clearly polytheistic societies from the same time period use.

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That isn't a coincidence. They use the same language. And we know that the Jews of the Old Testament were not monotheists in the way that we see it today.

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Really? They just weren't. That's a very common mythology in scholarship. But it's a mythology.

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It's based upon a fundamental rejection of what you believe is Latter -day Saint. And that's what I find strange that people at BYU and things like that embrace our forms of liberalism without recognizing that it's absolute poison to your fundamental belief.

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How so? In the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Prophecy, and the Price. Because certainly Joseph Smith and the early leaders of the church did not embrace the kind of documentary hypothesis -based idea that allows you to atomize the text of the

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Old Testament and say, well, sure, there are some texts that sound monotheistic, but then you've got these over here and you don't have to take them as a whole.

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That would end up destroying the reason, for example, why 17 chapters of the

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Book of Isaiah end up quoted almost verbatim from the King James Version of the Bible in the Book of Mormon. That was not the argument of the early

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LDS church. They were not utilizing our German liberals as BYU is now.

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So what has changed? And I would just simply respond that believing

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Christian scholarship has answered that unbelieving skeptical scholarship and points out that, for example, quotations from Egyptian lore where the gods are derived from the created order has to be a completely different context than if you take seriously the

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Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim as a whole, that what separates

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Yahweh from all the gods of the peoples is that he created all things.

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In fact, he says in Jeremiah chapter 10, if your God did not create the worlds and the heavens, then he will pass away from the worlds and the heavens.

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So there is a huge chasm between having a God who is the source and origin of all things and having a

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God that you're saying is highly exalted but came out of these things.

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No, no. So I'm not saying he came out of those things. I'm not saying the Egyptians did. Okay, great.

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Well, I think there's a bit of a misrepresentation. So I'm not saying, nor do

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I think early Latter -day Saint leaders were saying that these other gods, you know, are even real or that they were actual gods.

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I'm just saying that. We know that. Yeah. I wasn't saying what you were. I was simply saying, I don't understand why you would make reference to the

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Egyptians. It's so important to do that because the quotes of the Bible, when you look at them in their ancient context, you see the exact languages used with surrounding cultures.

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So it is not a coincidence. You have to look at that and say, okay, well, if they're saying it this way, no gods before me, and we're saying these are monotheists, but then these polytheists are saying the exact same thing.

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What's the issue here? Why are they all employing this language? What is the issue? And there's nothing wrong with using that argument at all.

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What is the issue? The issue is that the biblical teaching is that Yahweh creates all things whereas these other religions teach that their gods were derived from the creation itself.

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I think that's a little, I think that's off road though. That's off road of the context of the quotes itself. If you, because I'm saying you're the idea, okay, there are no other gods, only

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God alone. That's it. There's the only God that exists in the universes of universes. Yeah, Psalm 965. Yeah. But we're saying, okay, if this is true in the, if the ancient context of that matches exactly the later

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European, what I call revisionist history of it, then why on earth are other societies quoting and using that same language if they are polytheists?

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We should see a big separation. We do. And we know from history, no, no, I mean with those quotes, they would not employ that same language.

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And we know from history, again, I say we know from history that the Jews of the

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Old Testament were not the monotheists in the American European sense of the word. They just weren't. We happen to know that they believe that there is only one true

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God. They covenanted with one God, but they believed in multiple. No, I believe that's completely wrong. I don't.

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I guess that's where we have to disagree. I think. Well, but one of us can allow all of the

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Old Testament scripture to speak as a harmony. I can, yeah. The people that you are relying upon for this idea of inserting polytheism into a monotheistic text do not believe that the

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Old Testament scriptures are consistent. Do you know what the Graf Wilhelsen theory is? I'm assuming you're going to tell me, so.

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I'm just asking because it's fundamental basic. It's fundamentally basic to understanding

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Old Testament scholarship that you are relying upon right now. And see, long ago,

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I went to Fuller Theological Seminary, which was way off to my left. I was much more conservative. In California, yeah.

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Well, not just left as in over there, the left coast. Theologically. Theologically to the left. And so all of my

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Old Testament instruction was in this, what you're quoting. So I know what the arguments are.

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And that's why I said from the beginning, I find it odd that Latter -day

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Saints would utilize this kind of stuff. And in fact, I will even make the assertion that I think it is the entrance of this worldview through BYU into the mainstream of Mormonism that is resulting in the major changes that we're seeing right now.