The Shape of God: Corporeal vs. Triune
Latter-day Saint doctrine today holds that God the Father and Jesus Christ are two distinct, separately embodied beings, the Father possessing "a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's." The earliest LDS textual and testimonial record describes something else. Read in the order it was produced, the primary record shows a real shift, over roughly fourteen years, from language closer to traditional trinitarian or modalist Christianity toward the fully separate, corporeal Godhead doctrine known today.
This entry traces that shift through three bodies of primary evidence: Smith's own multiple, non-identical accounts of his First Vision; the actual textual revisions made to the Book of Mormon between its 1830 and 1837 editions; and the 1844 King Follett discourse, delivered less than three months before Smith's death.
The record does not settle only what Joseph Smith believed. It also raises which version of what he said counts as the origin, and which counts as the drift, a question the record itself does not answer for the reader.
The First Vision accounts
Smith produced or dictated at least four distinct written accounts of his foundational 1820 vision, composed over more than a decade beginning in 1832, none contemporaneous with the event itself. The accounts differ on a specific, theologically significant point: how many divine beings appeared.
"the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord": a single figure, referred to once, as "the Lord."
"I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air." One introduces the other: "This is My Beloved Son."
The 1835 account, dictated to a visitor named Robert Matthews and recorded by scribe Warren Parrish, describes one personage appearing first, "followed shortly by another," and additionally mentions "many angels" present, a detail absent from the 1838 account. Three of the four accounts describe two personages; the earliest, 1832 account is the outlier.
LDS-affiliated scholarship (FAIR, the church's own Gospel Topics essay, BYU Studies) holds that the 1832 account does not deny a second personage, and instead reads as an abbreviated, personally-focused account emphasizing Christ as the deliverer of the vision's message. They characterize discrepancies of this kind as ordinary in any individual's recollection of a personal experience recorded years apart, for different audiences and purposes.
Independent and critical accounts (Mormon Stories, CES Letter, LDS Discussions) argue that the identity of who appeared in a foundational theophany is not a minor biographical detail subject to ordinary memory drift, and that the 1832 account's grammar, "I saw the Lord," singular and unqualified, most naturally describes one being rather than an unstated second. They further argue that if the 1838 account's specific claim of two separate, embodied personages had been true and consistently understood from 1820 onward, the later doctrinal need to clarify it by revelation (see Stage 3, below) becomes harder to explain.
The Book of Mormon, 1830 to 1837
The first, 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon contains language that, read plainly, identifies Jesus Christ directly with the Father, a modalist or trinitarian construction rather than the doctrine of two wholly separate divine beings taught later. Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery revised this language for the second, 1837 edition.
"the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father": describing Jesus Christ. And of Mary: "the mother of God."
"the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father": now describing Jesus as the Father's son, not the Father himself. Mary becomes "the mother of the Son of God."
A parallel change occurs on page 26 (1830) / 1 Nephi 13:40: "the Everlasting God, was judged of the world" becomes, in 1837, "the Son of the everlasting God, was judged of the world." Church history sources attribute the edits to Smith and Cowdery working from a corrected printer's manuscript, alongside more than two thousand other, mostly grammatical changes.
The church's own history department describes these specific edits as "clarifications" comparable to ordinary period publishing practice, correcting production-era ambiguity rather than reversing doctrine, and groups them alongside purely typographical corrections made in the same 1837 pass.
Independent scholarship (CESNUR, Mormonism 101) notes these are not typographical errors of the kind also corrected in 1837. They are substantive changes to specific christological titles, "Eternal Father" to "Son of the Eternal Father," made at precisely the passages most directly asserting an identity between Christ and the Father. They further note that even after the 1837 revision, other passages retaining trinitarian-sounding language were left unedited, meaning the correction was selective rather than systematic, a pattern consistent with an evolving doctrinal position being patched into an existing text rather than a single consistent original meaning being restored.
The King Follett discourse
Speaking at a general conference in Nauvoo before a congregation of roughly twenty thousand, less than three months before his death, Smith delivered his fullest statement on the nature of God: that God the Father was "once as one of us," a mortal man who lived, died, was resurrected, and progressed to become God, and that human beings could likewise progress to godhood. No complete verbatim transcript survives; the sermon is reconstructed from several attendees' notes.
This teaching was formalized the following year in what became Doctrine and Covenants 130:22: "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit." This is the doctrinal statement underlying the modern LDS teaching that God is a corporeal, exalted, once-mortal being, a position with no equivalent in the 1830 Book of Mormon text or in mainstream Christian trinitarianism.
The wording of D&C 130:22 was itself revised again in 1854–55, under Brigham Young's direction, seventeen months before the revised text was published in the Deseret News, meaning the canonical proof-text for God's corporeal nature was edited a second time, a decade after Smith's death, by a different Speaker holding the same office. The Lectures on Faith, present in the Doctrine and Covenants since 1835 and removed from the LDS canon in 1921 (see Two Canons), taught a two-personage rather than corporeal-and-separate Godhead, a doctrinal position the King Follett discourse and D&C 130 had by then superseded, making the Lectures' later removal a consequence of this same theological shift rather than an unrelated editorial event.
The arc, read together
| Date | Source | Position on God's nature |
|---|---|---|
| 1830 | Book of Mormon, 1st ed. | Christ directly identified as "the Eternal Father": modalist/trinitarian language |
| 1832 | First Vision, earliest account | One divine figure described, called "the Lord" |
| 1835 | First Vision, Matthews account | Two personages, appearing in sequence; also angels |
| 1837 | Book of Mormon, 2nd ed. | Revised to "Son of the Eternal Father": separates Christ from the Father textually |
| 1838 | First Vision, canonized account | Two distinct personages, Father introduces the Son |
| 1844 | King Follett discourse | God the Father is a once-mortal, exalted, corporeal being |
| 1843/1855 | D&C 130:22, then revised | Father and Son each embodied; wording itself edited again under Brigham Young |
| 1921 | Lectures on Faith removed | Earlier two-personage Godhead teaching decanonized as incompatible with the above |
Read start to finish, the record shows a doctrine that moves, in documented stages, from language compatible with a single, undivided God toward a fully separate, embodied, formerly-mortal Godhead, with the textual evidence for the earlier position edited, in each case, by the same authority who was simultaneously teaching the later one.
Sources
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gospel Topics Essay, "First Vision Accounts," churchofjesuschrist.org.
- FAIR, "Alleged Contradictions in the Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision" and "Differences in First Vision accounts."
- BYU Studies, "Analysis of Joseph Smith's Accounts of His First Vision," in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844.
- Pearl of Great Price Central, "Did Both the Father and the Son Appear to Joseph Smith in the First Vision?"
- LDS Discussions, "Overview of First Vision Accounts" and "Why are there multiple accounts of the First Vision and what can we learn?"
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Changes to the Book of Mormon," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics.
- Bible.ca, "The original 1830 Edition, Book of Mormon had 1000's of errors," side-by-side 1830/modern text comparison.
- CESNUR 2004, James K. Walker, "Re-imagining Elohim: Rethinking the Mormon Doctrine of God for the 21st Century."
- Mormonism101, "The Trinity in the Book of Mormon."
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "King Follett Discourse," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics.
- ATRI Research, "Joseph Smith's Role as 'Prophet' in View of the King Follett Discourse," citing Sandra Tanner.
- BYU Studies, "The Textual Development of D&C 130:22 and the Embodiment of the Holy Ghost," on the 1854–55 revision under Brigham Young.
- "King Follett discourse," Wikipedia.