Critics Call It Un-Biblical. Scholars Call It Ancient
- Gary Toyn
- 3 hours ago
- 10 min read
Summary: Non-LDS scholars didn't set out to validate key doctrines of the restoration. Their research did it for them.
Here's something most people never learn in Sunday School: the Old Testament we read today is not a complete record of what ancient Israel believed.
This is not an attack on scripture.
It is not a claim that the Bible is unreliable.
It is simply what the text itself suggests. The Bible openly records that scrolls were found, that kings ordered religious reforms, and that scribes compiled and edited sacred records. Scholars who have spent careers studying those editorial fingerprints have reached a broad consensus: the Hebrew scriptures we have today reflect the theology of a reform movement, and that movement made choices about what to include and what to leave behind.
That is not a controversial claim among those who study ancient biblical history. The debate is about the details, not the basic fact. And the basic fact raises a question worth asking:
If something was left out, what was it?
The Deuteronomist Editors
The short answer involves a group of editors that scholars call the “Deuteronomists,” or for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them the “Editors.”
Around 621 BCE, during the reign of King Josiah, workers repairing the Jerusalem Temple found a scroll described in 2 Kings 22 as “a Book of the Law.” Its discovery set off a sweeping religious reform. Regional shrines were torn down. Worship was centralized in Jerusalem. And the Hebrew scriptures were compiled and edited with a clear agenda.
Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman spent years tracing those editorial fingerprints. His book Who Wrote the Bible? is a careful, readable account of what he found. His conclusion: the Editors did not just preserve old texts. They shaped them. They cut some things, reframed others, and in doing so, fundamentally changed the ancient religion they claimed to be preserving.
What the Ancient Religion Actually Looked Like
If we want to understand the faith of ancient Israel, we have to look at the whole picture. That includes the Bible, of course. But scholars also use the Dead Sea Scrolls, other early Jewish writings like 1 Enoch, and the wider ancient world those texts came from. When scholars step back and look at all of it together, a much richer and more complex religious world comes into view.
Mark S. Smith is one of the most respected scholars in this field. In The Early History of God and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, he lays out the evidence carefully. Ancient Israel’s earliest religion included what the texts call a divine council: a heavenly court of beings called the “sons of God,” or bene Elohim, who worked alongside the God of Israel.
This is not a fringe theory. It is documented in the scriptures themselves, if you know where to look.
Psalm 82 opens with God standing in a divine assembly, speaking directly to other divine beings. Deuteronomy 32:8, as it appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls, says God divided the nations “according to the number of the sons of God.” Later manuscripts changed that phrase to “the sons of Israel.” That small edit made a significant difference.
Archaeologist William Dever adds another layer. His book Did God Have a Wife? draws on decades of fieldwork across Israel. He found widespread evidence of a goddess figure, Asherah, being worshipped alongside Yahweh. She is the divine feminine. For some, she is the Heavenly Mother. (see note 2.)
The Editors considered this idea an abomination. The physical record suggests it was simply what most Israelites practiced.
The picture that emerges is rich and surprising. Before the reform movement reshaped things, ancient Israelite religion included a heavenly court, divine mediators, a divine feminine figure, cosmic covenant rituals, and a temple seen as a real intersection of heaven and earth. Much of that was quietly edited away.
A Methodist Scholar Finds Something Unexpected
Dr. Margaret Barker was not looking for Joseph Smith. She is a British Methodist biblical scholar. She was simply following her research.
Over several decades, Barker developed what she calls Temple Theology. Her core argument is straightforward: the Editors were reformers. Reformers with a clear theological agenda, and they purposefully suppressed a much older religious tradition.
That tradition did not disappear. It survived in what scholars call apocryphal literature, (texts excluded from the official biblical canon,) including the Books of Enoch and other early Christian writings, as well as in the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Jewish mystical texts. (see note 1.) Dr. Barker’s books, including The Gate of Heaven, The Great Angel, and Temple Theology, lay out this case in careful, documented detail.
Barker is not a fringe figure. She served as president of the Society for Old Testament Study, one of the most respected scholarly organizations in her field. Her work is peer-reviewed and widely respected in academic circles.
Here is what her research found about the ancient temple priesthood. The High Priest was not simply a religious administrator. On the Day of Atonement, he entered the Most Holy Place and underwent a ritual transformation. He was anointed with sacred oil. He wore specific symbolic vestments. He received a new sacred name. He emerged understood as a divine mediator, someone who had stood in the presence of God and been changed by it.
She also found that the idea of human beings becoming genuinely divine was not a late heresy introduced by strange theologians. It was a core belief of the oldest layers of Israelite religion, rooted in the “sons of God” traditions and preserved in Enochic literature that the Editors helped push out of view.
And then she made an observation that should stop any Latter-day Saint in their tracks. A family leaving Jerusalem around 600 BCE would have departed at a very specific historical moment: right as the Editors were accelerating their reform agenda. Whatever theology they carried with them would have included beliefs and practices that, within a generation or two, were going to be edited out of the surviving Hebrew record.
It's how she described the Book of Mormon's timeline.
Where Four Doctrines Line Up
Barker was eventually invited to speak at Brigham Young University. As a practicing Methodist, she engaged with LDS scholars there and was candid about what she found. But she has said, in public and in print, that the parallels are striking.
Here is what that convergence looks like, one doctrine at a time.
Becoming Like God. Most Christian traditions treat the LDS doctrine of exaltation as heretical. But LDS doctrine affirms that human beings can progress toward the kind of life God lives. Critics have long called this "theosis" doctrine one of the most audacious claims of Latter-Day Saint theology, and it has been a frequent target of ridicule from other Christian traditions. But Barker’s research shows it is one of the best-documented beliefs of the oldest Israelite religion. Mark S. Smith’s work on the divine council confirms it. The “sons of God” in ancient Israel were not simply angels in the later Christian sense. They shared in divine identity. Joseph Smith taught this doctrine when no 19th-century theologian would have dared. Scholars have since found it in the oldest layers of the text.
A Council in Heaven Before This Life.
The LDS doctrine of a pre-mortal existence, in which God’s children were present at a heavenly council before the world was formed, is almost entirely absent from mainstream Christianity. Smith’s reconstruction of the ancient divine council, combined with Barker’s work on The Book of Enoch’s cosmology, describes exactly this framework. A heavenly assembly. A deliberation. A plan. It was standard in the oldest layers of Israelite religious thought. It was edited out.
Temple Ritual: Anointing, Clothing, and Sacred Names. Barker’s reconstruction of ancient priestly investiture is specific: ritual washing, sacred anointing, symbolic vestments, a new name, covenant oaths. She notes that almost none of this pattern survived into mainstream Christianity. The LDS temple preserves nearly all of it. She has called this parallel remarkable, and she has said so in academic settings, not just in conversations with Latter-day Saint audiences.
The Book of Mormon’s Theological Fingerprint. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Lehi’s family left Jerusalem around 600 BCE. The Tree of Life vision found in 1st Nephi connects a sacred tree to cosmic and divine meaning, a symbol Barker links directly to the pre-reform temple tradition. The theology embedded in the Book of Mormon reflects a pre-Deuteronomist Jerusalem.
Here is the striking part: Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830. The discovery of the scholarly concept of the Deuteronomists editors was formalized by scholar Julius Wellhausen in 1878. Joseph Smith died in 1844, and could not have reverse-engineered what scholars hadn’t yet discovered.
What This Evidence Does and Doesn’t Say
I need to be candid about the limits of this argument.
Margaret Barker is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mark Smith’s scholarly work on the divine council is not an endorsement of LDS doctrine. Richard Elliott Friedman’s research on biblical editing is not an argument for Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling.
What these scholars have done is reconstruct an ancient religious world view that looks very different from the Christianity that emerged after the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.
Yet the distance between First Temple Israelite religion and the post-Nicene world view is much larger than most Christians realize.
Of all the Christian traditions, Latter-day Saint theology sits closest to that ancient religious world. Its ancient roots are ones that scholarship is only now recovering.
A Restoration, Not an Innovation
Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer is quoted as saying:
“rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains the climate in which belief may flourish.”
That is exactly the right way to hold this evidence.
It does not prove the Latter-Day Saint claims of a Restoration.
It does not replace faith.
But for Latter-Day Saints wrestling with hard questions, it changes the climate.
It says: the things Joseph Smith taught were not invented in 19th-century upstate New York. They were known anciently. There is strong evidence that these doctrines were suppressed. And someone brought them back.
What Joseph Smith claimed was not that he had invented something new. He claimed he was guided to restore something old, something that had been lost, taken away, obscured. He described a Great Apostasy in which priesthood authority, sacred ordinances, and plain and precious foundational doctrines of the ancient church had been tampered with and removed from the earth.
But scholars who have spent their careers in the oldest layers of Israelite religion have found them hiding in plain sight. They include doctrines like:
A pre-mortal life, in which God's children existed as spirit beings before this world was formed.
A pre-mortal heavenly council that deliberated before creation.
A higher priesthood order traced to Melchizedek, documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls as a heavenly priestly authority predating and superseding the Levitical line.
A divine feminine2 presence in the heavenly order, documented archaeologically across ancient Israel and preserved in Proverbs 8.
Deification (theosis), the idea that human beings are on a trajectory toward the kind of life God lives. To eventually become like our Heavenly Parents.
Temple rituals built around anointing, sacred clothing, new names, and covenant oaths.
Baptism for the dead, referenced by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:29 as a known practice requiring no explanation.
Multiple degrees of glory after this life, a framework found in 1 Enoch, in Paul's account of the "third heaven," and in ancient Jewish cosmological texts.
Communal covenant living, mirrored almost exactly in the practices of the Qumran community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A Urim and Thummim for prophetic revelation, an instrument the book of Ezra specifically notes had been lost and would need to be restored.
Some critics called these doctrines heretical. Even unbiblical.
Some still do.
Some always will.
But the scholars have a different word for them.
Ancient.
Want to Go Deeper? Start Here.
Margaret Barker: The Gate of Heaven, The Great Angel, Temple Theology, The Lost Prophet, Temple Mysticism
Biblical Editing: Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? — Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History
Ancient Israelite Religion: Smith, The Early History of God and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism — Dever, Did God Have a Wife? — Heiser, The Unseen Realm
Dead Sea Scrolls: VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today — Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch
LDS Scholarship: Nibley, Temple and Cosmos and Mormonism and Early Christianity — Hamblin, "Temple Motifs in Jewish Mysticism" (scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/76) — Maxwell Institute: mi.byu.edu
Early Christianity: Ehrman, Lost Christianities — Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels — Finlan, Theosis
General Interest: Heiser, Reversing Hermon — Wilson, Our Father Abraham
Note 1 - Mysticism defined: The conventional terms "Jewish mysticism" refers specifically to the Hekhalot and Merkabah traditions that emerged after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. But Scholar William J. Hamblin has argued that these traditions were not abstract spiritual exercises but deliberate substitutes for lost sacred temple rituals, with practitioners ascending through degrees of glory to reach the throne of God. They focus on active, "covenantal" participation, using authorized, structured, and symbolic rituals to gain knowledge, power, and an intimate relationship with a personal God. See William J. Hamblin, "Temple Motifs in Jewish Mysticism," in Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Symbolism, ed. Donald W. Parry (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1994), 440-477. Available at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/76/
Note 2 - Divine Feminine: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms the existence of a Heavenly Mother but has not elaborated formal doctrine around her nature or role. The archaeological and textual evidence for a divine feminine presence in ancient Israelite religion, documented extensively by William Dever in Did God Have a Wife? and by Margaret Barker in The Great Angel, suggests this concept has deep roots in the oldest layers of biblical faith. That the Restoration acknowledged Her existence at all, in a 19th-century theological climate that would have found the idea scandalous, is itself worth noting.
Note 3 - Scholarly Scope: None of the non-LDS scholars cited in this article have endorsed the doctrines or practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their work is historical and critical reconstruction, not theological advocacy. The parallel noted are the author’s observation and are offered as context for faith, not as proof of any religious claim.
Full disclosure: I used an AI assistant to help research, outline, and draft this article. The thesis, the arguments, the editorial judgments, and the conclusions are entirely my own. I directed the research, verified the sources, and shaped every section. AI image generation tools also were used to produce the illustrations from prompts I wrote. I believe in being transparent about this. AI did not write this article. It helped me write it better.