Pyreaux

One pro-Christian view is to accept the historical reality of the Deuteronomic scribes did scribal editing for political consolidation and retrospective justification. The Deuteronomic histories, like Deuteronomy, Judges, Kings, the Deuteronomists emphasized a highly legalistic deity who demanded the absolute, violent eradication of the "other" people in the land, whom God did not send to Babylon. Deuteronomy could be propaganda by xenophobic Levitical scribes, using segments by Moses, but compiled during the reign of King Manasseh and planted in the temple to dupe young King Josiah to bring about a xenophobic reform, an anti-Melchizedek, anti-temple, anti-prophesy, anti-theophany, anti-proto-Christian reform that ultimately led to Jerusalem to be razed three times. 75 years later, Deuteronomic scribe Ezra and Nehemiah, return from Babylon to find an occupied Jerusalem, they needed to establish an exclusive identity to prevent assimilation. A command to utterly destroy groups could likely be a post-exilic retrojection. Ezra's regime was forcing Jewish men to divorce their foreign wives and abandon their mixed children (Ezra 10). He and his scribes rewrote all the books from memory. If God supposedly commanded the complete slaughter of ancient neighbors to prevent "contamination," then Ezra’s demand to exile foreign wives seemed mild by comparison. Weaponized against the Samaritans, depicting the northern tribes and their neighbors as historically corrupt, compromised, and marked for divine rejection. Malachi, a book not in chronological order, seems to disapprove of Ezra. Makes perfect sense to LDS, the Book of Mormon's opening chapters, Lehi left Jerusalem just a few decades after Josiah’s reforms. The Brass Plates would be scriptures unaltered by the final post-exilic scribal revisions of Ezra. Lehi and Nephi are classic "First Temple" prophets, building temples after the temple of Solomon. I was saying it's a very pro-Christian stance, Genesis and the New Testament breaks many Deuteronomic laws, yet many churches can't survive the implications of that line of study as many require the scriptures to be pure so it can be used as an authority to trump all other authorities. You can't have it all.

I intended to reply to this, answering it is not as simple as the questions look, then I forgot. I was born in the church. My mom converted at 14, and my dad is a 7th generation. I like it's always made sense and been enlightening to me, and seems more true the more I study, I am introverted and I don't like the social demands, but that's really just my problem, not the church's.

Um, no, I was saying the Christians were the populist, grassroots movement of the common people. Qumran were indeed educated, isolated, closed-circled group of Zadokite priests. Both groups intensely disliked the corruption of the Jerusalem/Temple establishment, they had the same anti-establishment, apocalyptic ideas. John the Baptist seems very associated with Qumran but clearly didn't stay in the monastery, baptizing mass crowds of common people.

I still think the oversimplification is to paint Second Temple Jerusalem as place where the High Priests were sitting around reading Plato or trying to be philosophers. That strips them of their organic, native development. The high priests were politicians dealing with Greek overlords, living in Jerusalem, Tiberias and Sepphoris. Jesus’s disciples were from the rural fishing villages and agricultural pockets of Galilee, places like Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Nazareth. Jesus never sets foot inside Sepphoris or Tiberias, and they were only a few miles away. Like the other working class, he actively avoided these urban hubs of foreign compromise. But even "Hellenized elites", who may have liked Greek styles and luxury still were not sophisticated intellectuals. The disciples were entirely insulated from Greek education, philosophy, and rhetoric, their worldview was shaped exclusively by the text of the Hebrew Scriptures and the oral traditions of their local communities. Jesus preached entirely around local themes of seeds, soil, nets, fish, and vineyards. His hated Jewish corruptions to the Law, the injustice for the poor and the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Christianity wasn't a brand-new invention, nor was it a product of Greek thought. Jesus the Christ, John the Baptist, James the Righteous, and Jude seem to have more than a little Qumran in them. The movement was populist and from grassroots. But Qumran itself saw every single compromise made by the Jerusalem establishment, whether it was a political treaty with a Greek king, or how the upper-class dressed, was through a magnifying glass of religious panic.

They weren't offended by the Greek language. Philosophy was incompatible the Raz Nihyeh, secrets of the way things are, as revealed to their leader. Truth was static, divine, and unlocked only through inspired interpretation of Hebrew scripture, the "pesher". Debate, logic, and speculative metaphysics of schools like Stoicism or Platonism were viewed as part of the "dominion of Belial" because it was seeking wisdom outside of God. The Community Rule lays out that they were leaving society and going to the wilderness to escape the corrupt of mainstream Israel, "They shall separate themselves from the session of the men of deceit in order to depart into the wilderness to prepare there the Way of the Lord; as it is written: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make level in the desert a highway for our God.'" (1QS 8:12–15) The "men of deceit" were the religious rulers in Jerusalem who had done such things as adapt the Torah to find comfortable common ground with Hellenistic laws. The War Scroll's entire text is about an apocalyptic global war "against the Kittim of Asshur [the Seleucid Greeks]." (1QM). Kittim to refer to the invading Greek Seleucids and Ptolemies, and later the Romans. It and Pesher to Habakkuk (1QpHab) condemn the Greeks for idolatry. But the scrolls biggest ax is for the Hellenized Jews, those were the high priests and elites in Jerusalem who adopted Greek philosophy, Greek sports, and Greek religious syncretism. The Pesher on Nahum (4Q169), the community explicitly rails against the ruling class in Jerusalem for introducing Greek customs and cooperating with Greek kings, like Antiochus Epiphanes. Halakhic Letter, Miqsat Ma'aseh ha-Torah (4QMMT) outlining, "We have separated ourselves from the multitude of the people and from all their impurity, and from intermingling in these matters, and from participating with them in these things... because we have seen that they have no understanding of the Law." (4QMMT C:7–8). The "intermingling" refers to the sweeping changes made to Temple sacrifices, marriage laws, and festival schedules under Hellenistic influence. The Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) the community is talking about the high-priestly aristocracy for looting funds, taxing the population, and adopting Greco-Roman economic and political patterns to solidify their own power. "The explanation of this concerns the Wicked Priest, who was called by the name of truth at the beginning of his course... but when he ruled in Israel his heart became proud, and he abandoned God and betrayed the precepts for the sake of riches. And he robbed and hoarded the wealth of the men of violence who had rebelled against God, and he took the wealth of the peoples to add to himself a load of guilt." (1QpHab 8:8–12). The Damascus Document (CD) details the "three nets of Belial (Satan)" that have trapped the mainstream Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. One of those nets was the total desecration of the sanctuary through pagan-influenced laxity, "They defile the Sanctuary, for they do not separate according to the Law, but lie with a woman who sees the blood of her discharge... and each man marries the daughter of his brother, whereas Moses said... 'You shall not approach your mother's sister.'" (CD 5:6–11) Concern for moral, marital, and ritual standards that looked dangerously similar to the practices of the surrounding Hellenistic world, where close marriages was common practice to keep wealth and power concentrated. Even Jews who deeply resented the Greek political rule or religion spoke, wrote, and read Greek as a matter of daily survival and commerce. Some scrolls were brought by converts joining the community from Greek-speaking areas, while others may have been brought later from the Jerusalem libraries for safekeeping when the Roman army marched on Judea. They were heavily exposed to the Greek language, yet they fiercely resisted Greek theology, despite centuries of exposure to the Greek language, their theological core remained un-Platonic. Spirits as the heavenly blueprints before made on earth Their sectarian scrolls contain a highly developed concept of human spirits existing before mortality, but it is framed through a belief around divine pre-planning of Creation, but not Platonic philosophy. The most famous text on this is the Treatise on the Two Spirits, found within the Community Rule (1QS 3:15) "From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and shall be. Before they existed, He established all their design; and when they come into being... they fulfill their work according to His glorious design." Before the world was made, God created the Spirit of Light and the Spirit of Darkness. Every human soul is assigned to one of these two spirits before they are ever born. "Sons of Light" and the "Sons of Darkness". Your spirit exists pre-mortally as either a divine blueprint or an engineered spirit within God's design. God sits down at a metaphorical drafting table before the creation of matter. He designs individual human "spirits" and assigns them a definitive set of tasks, moral capabilities, and historical roles. The Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot / 1QH) "You have formed every spirit and established its work before creation... You determined the destiny of every human being according to the spirit given to him." (1QH 17:11–12) The Barkhi Nafshi (Bless, O My Soul / 4Q434–438) The text explicitly praises God for knowing a person "before they were ever formed in the womb," echoing Jeremiah but expanding it to general human populations. Spirits in storehouses of the winds 1 Enoch references heavenly storehouses. Enoch sees the "storehouses of all the winds" and these winds are alive. Often treated as identical to being the storehouses of human spirits in the Guf, where pre-existent or post-mortem spirits are kept under lock and key until their appointed time. References to these storehouses are seen in 4 Ezra (4 Esdras), 2 Baruch 30:2, Psalm 135:7, Jeremiah 10:13, Job 38:22, Ecclesiastes 12:7. Spirits in the Assembly / Council Enoch is granted a vision that purposefully blurs the line between the souls of the righteous and the angels: "And I saw another vision... the dwelling-places of the holy and the resting-places of the righteous. Here my eyes saw their dwellings with His holy angels, and their resting-places with the holy ones." (1 Enoch 39:4-5) There is the Zedekim, the "Assembly of the Righteous," is framed as part of the exact same celestial architecture as the "Assembly of the Holy Ones." The Zedekim, the righteous ones, in the heavenly court and divine council, are lead by a heavenly Melchizedek. Later there are clearer references to a pre-mortal council where Adam, Noah, Abraham, Enoch, and Moses sit with God before the physical world is constructed, a classic midrashic concept that was compiled and popularized by Eliyahu Kitov in Sefer HaParshiyot (The Book of Torah Portions) from texts like Bereshit Rabbah 8:7 and the Talmud.

The missionary who was attacked, he has a photo. I know we aren't fans of watching every hour long LDS video people post, so I have the video cued to the part with the photo, if you want to watch just a few seconds.

Its confirmed now.

Pick up any standard university textbook on the history of biblical scholarship, such as Bart Ehrman, and they will categorize Wright and Crossan, despite many disagreements on other things, as key leaders of a specific academic movement called Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. In fact, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Wright and Crossan traveled the world together doing public debates, co-authoring books like The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue, precisely because they were the two most famous faces of the Third Quest. And Third Quest refutes the Hellenistic model using new archaeological data, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I didn't claim Galilean fishermen penned the Greek texts, rather they are the dialogue of characters, it's all everyday vernacular of Jews, including asking if a man sinned before he was born in John, and they were non-Platonic, fiercely anti-Hellenistic Palestinian Jews in Judea. The Qumran community records starting around 250 BC, they literally fled into the desert to escape Greek cultural contamination. They despised everything Hellenistic. Yet, their writings are packed with highly complex worldviews regarding eternal spirits. They didn't need to get that from reading Plato, they had their own traditions of the First Temple and Enoch. The Anchor Bible Commentary on John, Raymond Brown systematically evaluates four potential backgrounds for the Logos. Greek philosophy (Stoicism/Platonism), Philo of Alexandria, Gnosticism, and Old Testament/Rabbinic Judaism. His conclusion is definitive. The primary, foundational background for the Johannine Logos is the Old Testament concept of the "Word" of God (Davar), combined with the personification of Wisdom (Hokmah) found in Israel's Wisdom literature like Proverbs 8, Sirach 24, and Wisdom of Solomon 9. In Stoicism, the Logos was an impersonal, material cosmic force. John’s Logos is a deeply personal, divine being. Brown argues the two concepts are completely different. Philo was a Hellenistic Jew trying to bridge Moses and Plato. For Philo, the Logos was still an abstract metaphysical concept or a buffer zone between God and matter. John’s "And the Word became flesh" would have been utterly abhorrent to Platonists and Philo, who believed the divine could never mix with corrupt physical matter. The Logos in John 1 isn't a Greek philosophical import at all. John took a Greek word and completely bent it to fit a Semitic, biblical worldview. Poisoning the well claiming Givens isn't qualified, Oxford University Press does not publish kooky apologist material. Every single book they release must pass a brutal, anonymous peer-review process conducted by independent, non-LDS, mainstream secular historians.

You're leaning on the Hellenization model, and the evolutionary model of religion, that attributes every concept of an eternal soul to Greece, but modern comparative religion shows that's an oversimplification. It is heavily discarded and widely recognized as obsolete, it was pioneered in the 19th-century. Over the last few decades, mainstream New Testament scholars like E.P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, N.T. Wright, and John Dominic Crossan, have completely re-evaluated the world of Jesus, Paul and John, leaning heavily on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, not Plato. The disciples weren't educated Middle Platonists. They were everyday, working-class Galileans. Margaret Barker is a polarizing figure on some of her more radical theories. Though she was awarded a Lambeth Doctor of Divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2008. She's spoken well of by many mainstream historical-critical scholars view her work as brilliant but over-speculative. She's been warmly received by Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican and LDS theologians, because the claims that vestments, rites and liturgies are very ancient are very appealing. Terryl Givens' Oxford University Press study When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought shows that the "Greek-only" narrative is an oversimplification. Givens traces how this doctrine continuously resurfaced across three millennia, despite being repeatedly and aggressively suppressed by mainstream religious orthodoxy. Givens argues that philosophers and theologians did not arbitrarily invent pre-existence, they kept turning to it because it solves many intellectual dilemmas that standard Christian theology struggles to answer. Suffering, genuine free will, deja vu and soulmates and kindred spirits. Givens maps the journey of the pre-mortal soul across history. Originating in ancient Mesopotamian myths where humans are imbued with a spark of divine blood, an idea formalized by Pythagoras and Plato, establishing the soul's native home in the stars. Mesopotamian and early Semitic frameworks featured the concept of a heavenly assembly where the destinies and "essences" of individuals were determined and formed before their earthly births. 700–300 BC, the Upanishads in ancient India established a highly sophisticated doctrine of the eternal soul (Atman) that pre-existed its current physical birth, independent of any Mediterranean contact. Anti-Mormon critics in the 19th centuries often accused Joseph Smith of "stealing" the doctrine of pre-mortal existence from Plato. But Joseph Smith didn't need to copy Plato, there was already a vibrant, brilliant underground stream of Western thought that mainstream scholastic theology had spent 1,500 years trying to suffocate. You don't need Margaret Barker to see the timeline flaws.

Your argument is the outdated, cynical evolutionary model. Dr. Margaret Barker's entire life's work is dedicated to proving that Jewish apocalypticism was not a late Greek invention. Instead, it was a preservation of the First Temple Israelite religion that existed but had been forced underground by the Deuteronomist reformers. Barker argues the exact opposite, Apocalypticism is the survival of the oldest, original Israelite worldview. Existing at least to the 7th century BC, well before the Greeks. A marginalized group burst back onto the scene as Apocalyptic Literature with Enoch. While it's true that the Old Testament uses nephesh in a holistic way (soul = the whole living being), the concept of an individual spiritual entity that survives death or exists before birth is found in ancient Near Eastern cultures centuries before Plato was born. The ancient Egyptians had a deeply complex, highly developed multi-part theology of the Ka and the Ba that lived before and after mortality, completely independent of Greek philosophy. Israel spent 400 years in Egypt. To claim they had to wait for Plato in 300 BC to conceptualize the ideas of a spirit is absurd. In ancient Ugaritic (Canaanite) texts similarities are remnants of a common Semite origin. The ancient Semites believed the spirit survived death as a distinct, conscious entity. Such as the Rephaim, in the Ugaritic texts, the spirits of the departed kings and righteous ancestors are invoked in liturgical rituals, invited to feasts, and expected to protect the living king. Isaiah 14:9 and Psalm 88:10, the dead in the underworld are called the Rephaim. When Abraham arrived in Canaan, he didn't find a spiritual vacuum either. He met Melchizedek, who was already the priest of El Elyon (The Most High God), a king living in Canaan.

Like more crowd participation opportunities? What should a person with a short attention span do when things get dull? You can't engage by shouting amen or clap. I'd would say meditate, but meditation beyond thinking or remembering is not a taught skill in the church. Meditation does activate the God Center of the brain, like prolong prayer does, except you push thoughts out instead of concentrating hard.

Jews believed in a preexistence completely independent of Plato with zero Platonic flavor. It was native to ancient Jewish apocalyptic thought. God actively "made" or "prepared" the souls before the foundation of the world. They are meant to come to earth as part of a grand design, "like the angels" (1 Enoch 69:11) "For all souls are prepared for eternity, before the composition of the earth." (2 Enoch 23:5) "And it shall come to pass at that time that the treasuries will be opened in which is preserved the number of the souls of the righteous, and they shall come forth, and a multitude of souls shall be seen together in one assemblage..." (2 Baruch 30:2) "Bring to an end the poverty of Zion, and remember the multitude of souls that have been numbered, and hasten the time of their birth." (2 Baruch 21:23) Church Fathers initially leaned toward it, but the Catholic Church ultimately condemned strict pre-existence at the Council of Constantinople 553 AD because it sounded too much like Plato’s reincarnation dualism. Instead, Catholicism sort of invented Creationism, the belief that God creates a fresh soul at the moment of conception, to justify Original Sin. John's 'Logos' subverted Platonism. The Logos is a translation of an established, personified Davar (Word) or the Aramaic Memra (Voice) that created the world, "And God said, Let there be light." And to a Middle Platonist "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us..." is a grotesque impossibility. John didn't adapt Platonism, he just used their vocabulary.

Firstly, it's present-tense in the New Testament. Revelation 1:5-6: "Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father..." The Greek verb epoiesen "he made/has made" is telling the living members of the early seven churches that Christ already made them kings and priests on earth. D&C 84:33-34 states that those who received the Melchizedek priesthood on earth become "the seed of Abraham, and the church and kingdom, and the elect of God." You cannot inherit a kingdom as a king unless you have already been legally entered into the royal line. The Melchizedek priesthood is the vehicle that binds them to that royal order now and the afterlife. Someone receives true kingly "dominion" in the afterlife, but I'm arguing about what authority the New Testament church was operating under.

Are all High Places bad? Sunday School started 1 Kings. My thoughts on Kings has evolved over time to the point that they are no longer appropriate for Sunday School. It's simply not the time to dig into an overly long counter narrative. So, I heard the Sunday School throw the classic tropes around that condemn the construction of other shrines, high places and groves, as if they only exist to worship foreign deities. 1 Samuel 9 explicitly shows the prophet Samuel blessing a sacrifice at the high place in Ramah. Saul is told he will meet a group of prophets coming down from a high place playing harps, tambourines, and flutes (1 Samuel 10:5). 1 Kings 3:3–4 says Solomon loved the Lord, but "he sacrificed and burned incense at the high places." But Gibeon was "the chief high place," and it was precisely there that Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream and granted him his wisdom. The scribes explain why this was okay at the time. 1 Kings 3:2 "The people, however, were still sacrificing at the high places, because a temple had not yet been built for the Name of the Lord." The condemnation of the high places in the later monarchy was about protecting the divine boundaries. Because high places were so deeply contaminated by the rebellious elohim, keeping them open was a constant invitation for infiltration and footholds into Israel. Margaret Barker takes a sharp, historical-critical view here. She argues that the "high places" actually preserved elements of the ancient, original First Temple theology, including the veneration of Yahweh’s heavenly host and the divine mother figure (represented by the Asherah). For Barker, when later reforming kings like Hezekiah and Josiah violently tore down the high places, wasn't just a cleanup of paganism, it was an aggressive political purge by a specific Jerusalem faction determined to centralize all power, money, and theology into their capital city, effectively rewriting Israel's older, decentralized religious history. Did Elijah defeat Ba'al or disprove Ba'al? The perspectives of scholars like Michael Heiser and Margaret Barker, Elijah’s showdown at Mount Carmel is understood as a defeat of a real territorial deity, rather than the modern "disproof" of an imaginary being. Look at the Old Testament through the lens of ancient Near Eastern context, rather than modern Western categories of monotheism. Elijah did not go to Mount Carmel to argue that Baal was a psychological fiction. He staged a geographical turf war near the Israel border. Baal was a real demonic and/or rebel entity. When Elijah mocks Baal in 1 Kings 18:27, "Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling... or sleeping", modern readers assume Elijah is saying, "He's fake." Elijah is actually mocking actual beliefs about Baal, who routinely went to the underworld, traveled, or slept. Elijah is essentially saying, "Your god is a limited entity who can't hear you right now" Barker places a heavy emphasis on 1 Kings 18:30, where Elijah "repaired the altar of the Lord that had been torn down." For her, this isn't an abstract debate about whether the gods exist, it is a physical and spiritual reclamation of the First Temple cultus against a real, rival priesthood that had successfully hijacked the nation. The notion of disproving a god's existence is a modern, post-Enlightenment way of thinking. Elijah might say rather, he defeated Baal. He proved Baal had no authority over the land of Israel, Yahweh alone is King over the council of the gods.

My sister says my proportions might be off. No need for onion powder. There is supposed to be just salt, pepper and some brown sugar.

I would, but I don't think it's in the original recipe. I'm trying to think if there is supposed to be any brown sugar, but I don't think so.

Dad’s Chili *Not an actual photo, but very similar. No peppers in this. I'm sorry Texans but my Kentuckian father cooked this Chili abomination from wayback, contain everything you are not supposed to put in "real" chili. This is like a chili-powder spaghetti with pinto beans you put cracker crumbles on. Ingredients: 1/2 diced onion 1 lb ground beef 2 cans of Luck’s pinto beans (undrained) Several cans of tomato sauce (varies, like 4, enough to make it soupy) Chili powder - a lot, to taste. Or some with a little paprika and adjust. Dash of Onion Powder, Salt and Pepper. Ketchup - enough to give a noticeable sweetness, maybe around ½ to 1 cup, add gradually and according to taste, the more you cook the ketchup, the more it changes, less tart, more sweet. Cooked spaghetti (maybe a half box, enough noodles to soak up the soupiness) Saltine crackers (for serving, crushed on top to soak up remaining soupiness) Instructions: Boil the noodles in a large pot (gallon-sized). Cook diced onion and ground beef together until browned. Drain grease and return the meat and onion to the pot. Add 'undrained' pinto beans, tomato sauce, chili powder blend, and ketchup. Simmer until flavors meld and the mixture looks good and soupy. Stir the pot bottom often. Let it sit and cool for a while - it’ll thicken as it cools as the spaghetti soaks up the liquid. Serve with crushed saltines on top. Texture Note: This dish starts off soup-like but becomes chunkier as it sits. Beware tall pots, you if it boils without any stirring, noodles will sink to the bottom and burn at the bottom before it boils at the top. It should balance spaghetti, beans, and beef in roughly every spoon bite. The crackers help thicken it right in the bowl. For thicker texture sooner: Add uncooked broken spaghetti right into the simmering chili (but stir often so it doesn’t stick or burn). Add extra water or sauce if needed. If you can, use Luck’s Pinto Beans - Luck’s beans are already seasoned and have a distinct flavor and texture that made the chili what it is. I hope I'm not forgetting anything.

RIP Joseph Smith Jr, all is well.

I'm not saying to not contact the Righteous Branch, in fact, I'd be very curious to know what they would teach you, how they live, whether they're happy, if you'd keep us up to date. My cynical instincts are they'll gaslight you about what are authentic original doctrines with the Journal of Discourses. So, you know, it's not scripture, it's full of sermons by leaders, penned second hand by clerks. 10,000 talks by Brigham Young across 12 huge volumes, past the first volume, they were not reviewed or edited for correctness. And so they contain a few... anomalies I believe they'll home in on.

I have a lot of respect for his research, and honestly, I think he’s "orbiting" around the truth on a lot of this. For instance, I completely agree with his point that angels, demons, and even the human dead are all referred to as "elohim" in the Old Testament. Where I object, though, is his conclusion that elohim is just a term denoting the "other realm" they occupy. Take the Spirit of Samuel, for example. The Bible explicitly calls this human dead an elohim, but I don’t think it’s simply because he was residing in the spirit world. It’s because he was distinctly set apart from ordinary familiar spirits (obs). For anti-witch doubters, the text says, “it was Samuel” (1 Samuel 28:14), described by a witch to King Saul as no ordinary looking "ob" or ghost, she said she saw an elohim or a "god", and describes his features as an old man in a “coat", identified as a sacred robe in Jewish sources. I'm saying other dead spirits of non-priests may not be wearing those robes and therefore wouldn't look or called a "god". When he appears, he is specifically noted as wearing a robe, that's bearing the image of God. Prophets and priests wear the white temple robes and sash because they are dressing the way the angels dress and as God dresses, imitating a god. So, I don't think all dead humans are gods, as per Dr Heiser, rather just some are.

Semantics. The royal cult believed in royal king-priests who were called after Melchizedek (Psalm 110). Christians when not saying the 'Elderhood", sometimes said "royal priesthood" and "kings and priests" is referencing Melchizedek. The early Christians were stepping directly into the ancient Royal Cult. Aaron is usurped, and we LDS are just labeling what is really the lesser offices of the Melchizedek priesthood after Aaron. You are factually incorrect to say this was not a thing in the early Church or into Catholicism. The early Church Fathers explicitly and repeatedly stated that the Christian priesthood was from Christ, the priesthood of Christ and their ordinances like the Eucharists were from Melchizedek. "In the priest Melchizedek we see prefigured the sacrament of the sacrifice of the Lord... For who is more a priest of the most high God than our Lord Jesus Christ, who offered a sacrifice to God the Father, and offered that very same thing which Melchizedek had offered, that is, bread and wine, to wit, His body and blood" (Cyprian of Carthage (250 AD) Epistle 62) Augustine repeatedly turns to Genesis 14 to explain Melchizedek is manifested in the Catholic Church’s sacrifice of the Eucharist. "The sacrifice appeared for the first time there [with Melchizedek] which is now offered to God by Christians throughout the whole world." Commenting on Psalm 110, "Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek" "To change the priesthood was necessary... Aaron was cast aside, and the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek was established... Our Lord Jesus Christ is the High Priest of this order, who offered a sacrifice to God... not of animals, but of bread and wine, which is His own body and blood." (Augustine, The City of God (Book 16, Chapter 22)) For Augustine, Christ did not just keep this priesthood to Himself in heaven. He left a functioning, structural earthly, ordained bishops and priests of the Catholic Church to act in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) to offer these very same Melchizedek sacrifices. The bishops and priests are partakers of Christ's Melchizedek Priesthood, the bishops and priests act as His literal ministers on earth to perform the Melchizedek rites. The Melchizedek priesthood is not a purely abstract, heavenly concept unique to Jesus, but the daily Mass offered by Christian priests is the literal expression of the Melchizedek priesthood on earth. Arguing this is semantics. If both Augustine and Jerome explicitly argue that the Aaronic priesthood was obsolete and had been replaced by another priesthood offering Melchizedek's bread and wine, how are they not Melchizedek priests too? Jesus introducing bread and wine as a sacrificial offering was a deliberate, formal re-institution of Melchizedek's ancient offering to Abraham. The Book of Mormon objection is a weak argument for two reasons, Alma 13 contains one of the most extensive discourses on the Melchizedek Priesthood in all of scripture (Alma 13), establishing its eternal nature, its ordinances, and how men are ordained to it. "Lord God ordained priests, after his holy order, which was after the order of his Son,... of Melchizedek, who was also a high priest after this same order which I have spoken... the holy order of God," Second, like the New Testament they simply called them the "Disciples" or "Elders" whom Jesus gave authority to baptize and administer the bread and wine, the Melchizedek offering. One more time, to argue that they didn't hold the Melchizedek priesthood just because they didn't used the title is pure semantics. When New Testament Christians used terms like 'Royal Priesthood' and 'Kings and Priests,' they were directly invoking the King-Priests of ancient times.

Nope, but I had to look into it. With 300 members they believe themselves as the true, unadulterated continuation of the restoration started by Joseph Smith. They practice polygamy as a fundamental requirement for the highest level of glory. Unlike some other "Fundamentalist" groups, they prohibit sealing women under the age of 18 into plural marriages and wear modern clothing. Attempting to live a communal economic lifestyle where resources are shared to care for the poor. They reject any modern modifications made by the LDS, practicing only the version they believe was originally revealed. My main problem is not even with their claims that those were originally thought or taught (more or less), rather it's the concept of trying to argue the Restoration was at any point complete or final. The Restoration was not a one-time event, but an ongoing dynamic process. New revelations are by nature new changes to the original. We're restoring old priestly offices but not the exact structure of the past, restoring old texts but also adding entirely new texts. Even having restored ancient scripture does not necessarily mean we must obey all ancient mandates. For example, polygamy violates the Book of Mormon's prophet Jacob's prohibition of polygamy for his people, that does not stop the modern prophet from commanding otherwise. We believe apostasy is caused by the cessation of prophetic authority to receive new direct revelations from God. These groups have entered a state of apostasy for the same reason everyone else has, they place a closed canon or a fixed tradition above the possibility of a new, contrary revelation. Read a few pages of Magaret Barker and she's constantly explaining how King Josiah’s Deuteronomic reform in the 600 BC was from discovering an old law book (Deuteronomy) Reforming the kingdom by its laws, purging the kingdom of disruptive prophet's Revelations. The law was the answer to all questions asked, forever, they locked the canon, and decided that God had finished speaking. From that moment on, if a prophet showed up with a new vision that contradicted the written text, the text won, and the prophet was stoned. An Apostacy began then because Deuteronomic editors and reformers placed the old covenant law above the living voice of a prophet. They'd kill any prophet that contradicted the law of Moses. They prioritized adherence to a written tradition over receiving an unwritten, fresh word from God, effectively setting a trajectory that would eventually resist and kill new prophets. The later Jews built a dense body of tradition that became a barrier to accepting the new revelation of Jesus Christ that was contradicting the old law. They tried to kill Jesus multiple times over it. Whether it's RLDS, FLDS, Righteous Branch, these breakaway groups commit the exact same error that necessitated the Restoration in the first place. Their modus operandi is to reject all changes as practiced by the main LDS Church in order to maintain a specific, frozen past doctrine. The early RLDS Church formed specifically to "purify" the Restoration by returning to what they saw as the original, uncorrupted doctrines of the 1830s and early 1840s, right before Joseph Smith's death. The FLDS and other groups are a mirror images of the RLDS in this way, they are just freezing at a later point in the main Church's history. You can't lock the Church into stasis. Riddle me this: How does a religious movement claiming to maintain the continuity with its founder's teachings also remain truly open to a God who reserves the right to change those teachings in the future like he has in the past?

There are a few rude commenters here. Dealing with a blatantly rude comment can trigger your stress response. So protecting your mental health is a worthy priority. Immediately pause, try not to reply hastily. Before you say anything, buy yourself a few moments. A rude comment is often intentional, so try not to let them force an aggressive counter-attack, or get trapped in the other person's negative energy. Let the provoking spike of adrenaline settle. Meanwhile, assess the intent. Was this cluelessness, or was it a deliberate attempt to hurt or diminish you? You don't need to yell (or use ALL CAPS) to be firm. If you can speak calmly and directly, you can shift your discomfort back onto the person who made the comment. Ask for clarification to neutralize passive-aggression. Forcing someone to explain their own sharp remarks usually exposes how inappropriate it was. Makes them say the quiet part out loud, which most rude people want to avoid. Strategically disengage to protect yourself. You do not owe every rube person a response. If someone wants to get a reaction, denying them that reaction is incredibly powerful. Give a calm, silent, expressionless look, completely changing the subject or leaving the room. Rudeness can reflect their lack of emotional regulation or their poor communication skills. It is almost never actually about you. After the interaction is over, do a quick check-in with yourself. If you are still ruminating on it hours later, try writing it down to get it out of your head, or talk it through with a friend to validate your feelings and let it go. But knowing more context can help us tailor more specific advice.

Well, maybe then pair this Christian scholarship with Latter-day Saint scholarship. Hugh Nibley The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment or Temple and Cosmos Hugh Nibley was top LDS scholarship long before Margaret Barker published The Great Angel, Nibley could read Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek and was scouring ancient Egyptian, Jewish, and early Christian texts to prove the existence of an ancient temple liturgy. He made an exhaustive book about early Christian and Egyptian initiation rites. Focusing on washing, anointing, being clothed in sacred garments, and passing through a veil and shows that early Christians actually practiced these specific physical rituals. David J. Larsen From Dust to Exalted Crown: Royal and Temple Themes Common to the Psalms and the Dead Sea Scrolls David Larsen is an LDS biblical scholar who explicitly specializes in the Royal Psalms and the Royal Temple Cult. He has written extensively on how the enthronement rituals of the Davidic kings tie directly into ancient temple theology. Larsen directly bridges the academic world of Raphael Patai with LDS theology. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw Temple Themes in the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood or God's Image and Likeness Bradshaw is hyper-focused on the literal structure of ancient cosmic journeys, the Divine Council, and how humanity is invited into that council. This pairs well with Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm. While Heiser shows that the Old Testament is saturated with a "Divine Council" of Elohim, Bradshaw takes the next step and uses LDS scripture to show how the Temple endowment is the ritual path for humans to enter that Council, be clothed in royal vestments, and inherit seats as divine sons and daughters of God.

Those are free links, so you can start looking at pages right now. Whichever subject piques your interest the most, they are all their own "rabbit hole", though people who say "rabbit hole" use it to deter people. If you don't yet know the questions to ask yourself, there are overarching questions, like is Christianity new? Or something very specific, like how does the Masoretic Texts differ from the Dead Sea Scrolls? Does the Masoretic Jews delete Christian prooftexts concerning the Sons of God, Elyon and the Messiah? Is the Book of Enoch ancient? Who is "Wisdom" in Psalms 8, or "Elyon" in Genesis 14 and Deuteronomy 32? Who are "the gods" of Psalm 82? Why does Exodus say Israel "saw God" while Deuteronomy says they "only heard a voice"? Why didn't King Josiah ever know about Deuteronomy? Why did no king ever obey Deuteronomy before? How come when Josiah reforms the temple based on Deuteronomy promising prosperity, Josiah is killed, Jerusalem falls and the Temple razed? What is magic? Who are the sons of God? What is a Son of Man? Was Ezra a good dude, or is Malachi and Jesus critical about mass divorce and (genetically) pure priests in the temple? You'll get a different answer from these scholars than you'd ever hear from a theologian from a Bible diploma mill, I tell ya. Margaret Barker spent her entire career answering many of these. The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God by Margaret Barker addresses questions about Genesis 14, Deuteronomy 32, and Psalm 82 head-on. Barker meticulously proves that the oldest layers of the Bible didn't teach strict, monolithic monotheism. They taught that El Elyon (God the Most High) was the Father, and Yahweh was His chief Son, the "Second God" who was the God of Israel. It proves that when early Christians said Jesus was "the Lord", the "Son of the Most High God", they weren't inventing a new unique person, they were identifying Jesus as Yahweh, the Second God of the First Temple. But as female Bible fan she'll introduce you to a concept that will may blow your mind. Like the divine Lady Wisdom / Asherah of the First Temple in the Bible.