Seeing the bodies of spirits

"Touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger" (Ether 3:4), said the Brother of Jared, apparently taking it for granted that the Lord had in some sense such appendages. When he unexpectedly saw that finger, his reaction is somewhat surprising.

And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord, for he was struck with fear.

And the Lord saw that the brother of Jared had fallen to the earth; and the Lord said unto him: Arise, why hast thou fallen?

And he saith unto the Lord: I saw the finger of the Lord, and I feared lest he should smite me; for I knew not that the Lord had flesh and blood (Ether 3:6-8).

The Brother later confirms, when asked by the Lord, that he has at this point seen only a finger -- just a finger, seemingly floating in the air and unattached to a body, touching the stones one by one. It seems to me that almost anyone seeing such an apparition would assume it to be a spiritual manifestation, not an actual flesh-and-blood finger. For example, when the disciples saw the flesh-and-blood Jesus walking on water -- something physical bodies don't normally do -- they assumed it was a ghost. Belshazzar even saw disembodied "fingers of a man's hand" (Daniel 5:5) but was only interested in decoding the words those fingers had written. The Brother, though, reacted differently: He already knew the Lord had "fingers" but was now shocked to discover that he had fingers that were entirely physical -- indeed, biological -- in nature. For him to have concluded this, I think the finger must have looked exactly like a physical finger, with nothing spiritual or ghostly about it (except for the fact that it was hovering in the air, I mean).

But of course this all happened several millennia BC, and the Being that the Brother saw, the future Jesus Christ, did not at that time have a body of flesh and blood. The usual Mormon understanding is that the premortal Jesus had a "spirit body" -- a quasi-physical structure, somewhat like the subtle or "astral" body of other traditions, corresponding in form to his future mortal body -- and that this is what the Brother saw. That's not what the Lord says to him, though.

And the Lord said unto him: Because of thy faith thou hast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood; and never has man come before me with such exceeding faith as thou hast; for were it not so ye could not have seen my finger (Ether 3:9).

He doesn't say, "You have seen my spirit body, which looks exactly the same as the physical body I will later take on." He says, "Thou hast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood" -- implying that the Brother has in some sense seen the future. He saw a physical finger because the Lord would in the future have an actual physical finger.

It wasn't a vision of the future in the ordinary sense, though. He didn't at this point see a vision of what Jesus would do in the future (as Nephi did, for instance). He saw what Jesus was at that time doing -- touching the stones with his finger -- but the Jesus that he saw doing this was not Jesus as he existed at that time (an invisible spirit) but as he would exist in the future, an incarnate Man.

The Lord proceeds to show the rest of himself to the Brother, calling that which he is showing "the body of my spirit":

Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh.

And now, as I, Moroni, said I could not make a full account of these things which are written, therefore it sufficeth me to say that Jesus showed himself unto this man in the spirit, even after the manner and in the likeness of the same body even as he showed himself unto the Nephites (Ether 3:16-17).

These expressions with of can be slippery and ambiguous. For instance, when we read of "the god of Elkenah" (Abr. 1:6), are we to understand that Elkenah is the name of the god himself, or -- by analogy with such phrases as "the god of Abraham" and "the gods of Egypt" -- the name of some person or place with which the god is associated? It is similarly unclear here whether Jesus means "the 'body' which is my spirit" (i.e., the "spirit body" of popular Mormon understanding) or "the body that pertains to my spirit" (because my spirit will later be incarnated in it). In my judgment, "my body of spirit" would be more natural for the first sense than "the body of my spirit." Of course Jesus' body in the latter sense didn't exist yet, but precognitive visions of the future are definitely a feature of the Book of Mormon, and as I have said, the Lord does seem to be implying that the Brother saw his future body.

Later in the same chapter, the Brother has another vision that seems as if it might be the same sort of thing:

And when the Lord had said these words, he showed unto the brother of Jared all the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth (Ether 3:25).

This has traditionally been interpreted as a vision of the entire past and future history of the earth (it is repeatedly referred to in Joseph Smith's Seer Stones as "the all-seeing vision"), but that's not what it says. It says that he saw all those who had been or would be "inhabitants of the earth." Only the people themselves are mentioned, nothing about past or future scenes or events. He could have had a panoramic view of all history, of course, but the context of his vision of Jesus strongly suggests another possibility: that he saw these past and future inhabitants in the same way that he saw the future Jesus.

Again, he didn't see scenes from Jesus' future life. Instead, he saw the pre-incarnate Jesus, doing what he was at that time doing (touching the stones), but doing it in the body into which he had not yet been born. If the popular Mormon understanding that the "spirit world" is all around us is correct, the Brother was at all times surrounded by the invisible spirits of those who had already died or had yet to be born. In this experience, these spirits became visible as Jesus had become visible, appearing in the bodies in which they had lived or would live. He didn't see those past and future lives; he saw the spirits doing whatever the spirits were doing at the time, but he saw those spirits as bodies.

Enoch perhaps had a similar experience:

And the Lord spake unto Enoch, and said unto him: Anoint thine eyes with clay, and wash them, and thou shalt see. And he did so.

And he beheld the spirits that God had created; and he beheld also things which were not visible to the natural eye; and from thenceforth came the saying abroad in the land: A seer hath the Lord raised up unto his people (Moses 6:35-36).

When you see a spirit -- something inherently invisible -- what exactly do you see? The same thing people typically see when they see "ghosts," presumably: The ghost manifests as the physical likeness of the person when he or she was alive, but you don't see their life. You see what the ghost is doing now -- wandering around "haunting" the place or whatever -- but you see the spirit as the body it once inhabited.

Another possible example of this sort of thing is the Transfiguration described in the New Testament:

And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them. And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them. And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses: and they were talking with Jesus. . . .

And suddenly, when they had looked round about, they saw no man any more, save Jesus only with themselves. And as they came down from the mountain, he charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of man were risen from the dead. And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean (Mark 9:2-4, 8-10).

This is slightly different, since Jesus was not a disembodied spirit at the time, but one interpretation of what happened is that Peter, James, and John saw Jesus as he would later be, after the resurrection. The description of the transfigured Jesus -- whiter-than-white clothing and, Matthew adds, a face that "did shine as the sun" (Matt. 17:2) -- is consistent with descriptions of resurrected beings. Here is Joseph Smith's description of the resurrected Moroni:

He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness. It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. . . . Not only was his robe exceedingly white, but his whole person was glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning (JS-H vv. 31-32).

As in the Gospels, it is the preternaturally white clothing that first attracts comment, being apparently even more distinctive than the shining face. Likewise, when the resurrected Jesus appears to the Nephites, the only description given is that "he was clothed in a white robe" (3 Ne. 11:8).

At the time of the Transfiguration, Jesus hadn't yet been resurrected and didn't look like that -- but somehow he did look like that for a brief period of time. Perhaps, like the Brother of Jared, the apostles were granted the temporary ability to see present-Jesus as future-Jesus. They saw Jesus doing what he was doing at the time -- staying with them on the mountain, talking with Moses and Elias -- but they saw him doing it in a sort of body that he did not yet have.

Moroni says that the Brother of Jared saw Jesus in "the likeness of the same body even as he showed himself unto the Nephites" (Ether 3:17), suggesting that he, too, saw the Lord's resurrection body before the resurrection had occurred. There is biblical precedent for referring to the resurrection body in language similar to "the body of my spirit":

So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:42-44).

I haven't yet thought through the details of how this sort of phenomenon might work, and what it might imply about bodies and spirits and resurrection and time, but I wanted to get the basic idea out there first.