Prayer of Joseph

The past year has been a time of discovery for me. I could have never guessed what it would hold in terms of opening my eyes to new vistas concerning Restoration teachings and theology. Much of this happened by fortunate accident, or, I guess you could say, revelation. Digging deeper into the teachings and revelations of Joseph Smith helped me see beyond the layers of later teachings and assumptions superimposed on these "mysteries." Now I am seeing the whole with new eyes, and that is very exciting.

During my time at BYU, among the high points of the experience was taking classes from Hugh Nibley. One of the things I learned from Nibley was to see Restoration teachings in ancient texts. Of course, this reading strategy can be problematic. If you want to read a text as the author understood what she or he was up to, it is best to read it from the perspective of the time, as best as one can approximate it with the available evidence. Nibley did not always do that, and he is often criticized for providing a very Restoration-friendly slant to his interpretations of texts. Some cases really do little justice to the ancient source. His readers need to be aware of that, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, he did inspire many LDS people to dig into the ancient texts and learn the ancient languages. These days, I detect a kind of Nibley 2.0 effort in the work of people such as Stephen J. Fleming, who is able to trace Platonic Christianity through time into the doctrines of the Restoration. He blogged about this pretty extensively at By Common Consent, if you happen to be interested. His dissertation on the topic is also worth digging into. Some people are turned off by such efforts because they view them as attempts to "explain away" Joseph Smith's revelations. Personally, I don't find them threatening, but they may not be your cup of tea, so to speak.

In the spirit of Nibley and Nibley 2.0, I present to you a fragment of the text "The Prayer of Joseph" as transmitted by the Ante-Nicene Church Father Origen (Commentary on the Gospel of John 2.25). The text Origen is quoting probably dates to the first century AD, or, in other words, the same century as Jesus and the so-called "Early Church," as well as those Jewish rebels who fought against the Romans in the First Jewish War. He quotes this text in support of his own argument that John the Baptist was in fact an angel who was born to human parents.

"I, Jacob, who speak to you, and Israel, I am an angel of God, a ruling spirit, and Abraham and Isaac were created before every work of God; and I am Jacob, called Jacob by men, but my name is Israel, called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am the first-born of every creature which God caused to live." *** "When I was coming from Mesopotamia of Syria, Uriel, the angel of God, came forth, and said, I have come down to the earth and made my dwelling among men, and I am called Jacob by name. He was angry with me and fought with me and wrestled against me, saying that his name and the name of Him who is before every angel should be before my name. And I told him his name and how great he was among the sons of God; Are you not Uriel my eighth, and I am Israel and archangel of the power of the Lord and a chief captain among the sons of God? Am not I Israel, the first minister in the sight of God, and I invoked my God by the inextinguishable name?"

As I have discussed in prior entries, Joseph Smith identified Michael as Adam and Gabriel as Noah. This first-century Jewish text identifies Jacob as Israel, as the Bible always have, but with a further twist. Here Israel is identified as an angel. Jacob says, "I am an angel of God." He also notes that "Abraham and Isaac were created before every work of God," a phrase that suggests Abraham and Isaac are also angels. Indeed, Jacob is claiming that he is "the first born of every creature which God caused to live, which would make him older than Abraham and Isaac, according to the chronological schema of this text. Uriel comes down to wrestle with Jacob because he believes he should have precedence over Jacob, but Jacob observes that Uriel is 8th in rank, whereas he is the "first minister in the sight of God."

In other words, it seems that in this text, as in Joseph Smith's revelations, angels are coming down and taking on human form. When God calls Jacob Israel, He is not necessarily giving him a new name; He may be recognizing him by his prior angelic name before he was born as Jacob. The angelic names of Abraham and Isaac are not given, but they, although given chronological priority over Jacob on earth, were younger than Jacob among God's angelic creatures. When Uriel to challenge Jacob/Israel, he comes forward with the name Jacob, having already taken up his abode among humankind under that name, claiming that he should have precedence over Jacob/Israel, but, as noted before, Jacob corrects him, and, as we know from the Bible, prevails over him in the wrestling contest.

In short, this text provides excellent ancient evidence for the doctrine of angels taking up a mortal probation. Many LDS people who are into deep doctrine would admit that Michael became Adam, but they hold him to be an exception because he was conceived as an immortal, not born to mortal parents. This text may be read as addressing that issue by throwing the full mortality of Abraham and Isaac into question. They, too, may have been first created as angels. The key question would then be whether it matters that the earth body was immortal or mortal. If Jacob was born into a mortal body, could he have been an angel first? Or are other examples of angel-humans, such as Gabriel and, in this text, Israel, on a path of progression that only moves one way--from spirit, to human, and then to angel?

The most basic Christian doctrine is that Jesus was the Word in the beginning, and that the Word was God. Why then could not angels be born as humans just as the Word was born a human?