Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?

Lehi's Jerusalem vision

After his first vision of the pillar of fire -- of which we have no other details, only that "he saw and heard much" -- Lehi returned home to Jerusalem, "cast himself upon his bed," and proceeded to have a second vision:

And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God.

And it came to pass that he saw One descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his luster was above that of the sun at noon-day.

And he also saw twelve others following him, and their brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament. And they came down and went forth upon the face of the earth.

And the first came and stood before my father, and gave unto him a book, and bade him that he should read. And it came to pass that as he read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord. And he read, saying:

Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations!

Yea, and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem—that it should be destroyed, and the inhabitants thereof; many should perish by the sword, and many should be carried away captive into Babylon (1 Ne. 1:8-13).

Much more followed -- "many great and marvelous things" both "read and seen," but again we have no details. Apparently it wasn't all bad news about the destruction of Jerusalem, based on Lehi's reaction: "his soul did rejoice, and his whole heart was filled, because of the things which he had seen, yea, which the Lord had shown unto him” (v. 15). Specifically,

He testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also the redemption of the world (v. 19).

The traditional interpretation, and problems with it

The "One" descending out of heaven is capitalized in modern editions (though not in the 1830 edition or the printer's manuscript), implying that this being is understood to be Christ, with the "twelve others following him" presumably being the twelve biblical apostles.

This interpretation is reinforced by the very similar language used in the account of Nephi's vision: "And the Lamb of God went forth . . . . And I also beheld twelve others following him" (1 Ne. 11:27, 29). These twelve are later explicitly identified as "the apostles of the Lamb; for thus were the twelve called by the angel of the Lord" (v. 34). Given that we know Lehi's vision included content about the Messiah, and that he used the same expression ("twelve others following him") with which Nephi would later refer to the apostles, it seems obvious that the One Descending must be Christ and that the Twelve Others must be the apostles. Who else could they be?

Here are my reasons for questioning this traditional and seemingly obvious interpretation.

First, Lehi's vision also includes "God sitting upon his throne," clearly a separate being from the One Descending -- but Nephite prophets always taught that the Messiah was the same being as God: "God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people" (Mosiah 15:1). We know that that later Nephites knew Lehi's vision (it is directly quoted by Alma the Younger in Alma 36:22). If they had understood the One Descending to be the Messiah, they would not have conflated the Messiah with God.

Second, Nephi's vision is consistent with the twelve followers being ordinary mortals, but Lehi's is not. Like the One Descending, they come down from heaven: "they came down and went forth upon the face of the earth" (1 Ne. 1:11). Christ came down from heaven, but did the apostles? Only in the same sense that we all do, I suppose, "trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home." Lehi's Twelve are not earth-dwellers who meet and follow the One after he descends; the Twelve and the One descend together. They "follow him" not in the sense of being his disciples, but in literally following him from heaven down to earth.

Third, Nephi is seeing a vision of things that will happen in the distant future. He sees Christ being born and baptized, acquiring twelve followers, being crucified, and so on. None of these figures he sees talk to him or interact with him, because they're not actually present; he's essentially watching a movie.

Although Lehi also apparently saw visions of the future Messiah, the vision of the Twelve and the One is not a movie-like vision of the future. These beings come down and interact with Lehi. One of them -- either the One Descending or the first of the Twelve Others -- gives him a book in which he reads the fate of Jerusalem. Their coming down is not a future event Lehi is precognitively witnessing; it is a present event, involving beings who were in heaven at the time of Lehi and came down to reveal things to him. His experience is fundamentally different from Nephi's.

Of course, if we accept the preexistence of human spirits (and we do), it is possible that the Twelve Others were the same beings that would later incarnate as the apostles of Jesus, and that they came down to Lehi in their pre-incarnate state, both to inform him of the fate of Jerusalem and to dramatically pre-enact for his benefit certain elements of their future mission -- as if their going "forth upon the face of the earth" was a sort of pantomime of their anticipated work as traveling preachers some six centuries later.

So the Twelve Others could be the apostles, but if so that has important ramifications. Assuming these twelve apostles are more or less the same characters we meet in the New Testament, in that latter book they come across as being ordinary men who were transformed through their association with Christ and became extraordinary. (At least this is true of Simon Peter, the most fleshed-out of the lot.) If they are Lehi's Twelve Others, though, they seem already to have been angelic beings of sorts all those centuries before, brighter than the stars in the firmament, their incarnation as much a "condescension" as that of Christ. And among these godlike beings was the future Judas Iscariot? It's not impossible, but it would require some major reevaluation of the way we normally think of the apostles -- who seem almost to be cast as "bumbling sidekicks" in much of the Bible.

Who else could they be?

If the thirteen luminous beings are not already-godlike beings who will, centuries in the future, condescend to incarnate as mortals, the other possibility is that they are people who already incarnated centuries in the past and have since "gone to heaven" and become like angels. If not the twelve apostles, could they be the twelve patriarchs?

Think of the two dreams of Joseph. In the first,

we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf (Gen. 37:7).

Joseph's brothers immediately understand the dream's import and say, "Shalt thou indeed reign over us?" (v. 8). The upright sheaf represents Joseph himself, and the bowed sheaves represent his 11 brothers.

The second dream is more directly relevant to Lehi's Jerusalem vision because it uses the imagery of the sun and stars:

Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me (v. 9).

Joseph's father, Jacob, understands the dream thus: "Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?" (v. 10). The sun is Jacob, the moon is Rachel, and the 11 stars are Joseph's brothers. Joseph does not mention how he himself was represented in this latter dream, but if the sheaves bowed to a sheaf, it stands to reason that the stars bowed to a star. Could Lehi's sun-like being be Jacob; and the 12 star-like beings, his sons?

After the One and the Twelve descend, 

the first came and stood before my father, and gave unto him a book, and bade him that he should read. And it came to pass that as he read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord (1 Ne. 1:11-12).

Does "the first" mean the One, or the first among the Twelve? If the latter, then this should be Joseph, clearly primus inter pares in the dream on whose imagery Lehi's vision seems to draw.

Now isn't that curious? Later, in his "real," non-visionary life, Lehi is given another book and reads it. After seeing what is in the book, "he was filled with the Spirit, and began to prophesy concerning his seed" (1 Ne. 5:17). What book was this? The plates of brass, a record kept by the descendants of Joseph, and identifying Lehi as one of their number (something he had apparently not known before). What did he prophesy? "That these plates of brass should go forth unto all nations" (v. 18), just as the 12 star-like beings in his vision "went forth upon the face of the earth."

If Joseph -- in the form of the book kept by his tribe, the plates of brass -- will go forth unto all nations, what of the other 11 starry beings who also go forth? Well, according to Nephi's later prophecies, each of the other tribes will also produce a holy book, and these, too, will go forth to the world.

For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; . . . And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews (2 Ne. 29:12-13).

There's one more hint that the book in Lehi's vision is, or represents, the brass plates. When the contents of the plates of brass are summarized, one prophet is singled out for special mention. The plates contained

the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah (1 Ne. 5:13).

Jeremiah perhaps receives special mention because he was Lehi’s contemporary (all the prophets, even the new guy!) and because, as a different Nephi would put it centuries later, Jeremiah was “that same prophet who testified of the destruction of Jerusalem” (Hel. 8:20).

Of the specific contents of the book in Lehi’s Jerusalem vision we have but this one sentence:

Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations! (1 Ne. 1:13)

And this is clearly a condensed paraphrase of one of the prophecies of Jeremiah:

I have seen thine adulteries, and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom, and thine abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem! (Jer. 13:27)

So this book — which may have been presented to Lehi by Joseph of Egypt, contained the words of Jeremiah, and filled him with the Spirit of the Lord — may have been identical to the brass book of Laban, a record kept in Egyptian by the descendants of Joseph, which also contained the words of Jeremiah, and which also filled Lehi with the Spirit of the Lord.

To me this makes more sense than the theory that the twelve apostles came down 600 years before their birth to tell him about the imminent destruction of Jerusalem.