Episode Details

When RFM and Bill Reel joined Mormonism, they heard rumors that Early LDS Leaders had taught that Mary was impregnated by Heavenly Father via a sexual act. But the Church and its apologists insisted that such idea was a misconstrued out of context assumption and with a sleight of hand the problem was gone…. Or is it. Tonight on Mormonism LIVE, RFM and Bill Reel take a long hard look at where this idea comes from within the history and see if baby Jesus was in fact the illegitimate child of our heavenly father.

RESOURCES:

BRIGHAM YOUNG—APRIL 9, 1852—JD 1:50-51

https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/JournalOfDiscourses3/id/1861

(This is a BYU Library Digital Collections page)

 My next sermon will be….

Stems from D&C 130:22

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/130?lang=eng

1.     The father has a body of flesh and bones (resurrected from another world)
2.     There are three personages; if only one, this question would never come up; but because there are three, and because we are being hyper-literal about things; this question does come up, and BY resolves the question by saying Jesus is not the son of the Holy Ghost, but the son of the Father. 

• Heber C. Kimball: SEPTEMBER 2, 1860 “In relation to the way in which I look upon the works of God and his creatures, I will say that I was naturally begotten; so was my father, and also my Savior Jesus Christ. According to the Scriptures, he is the first begotten of his father in the flesh, and there was nothing unnatural about it.” [Journal of Discourses vol. 8:211]

 ORSON PRATT IN AGREEMENT!

ORSON PRATT—The Seer, Vol 1. No. 10, 1853 (page 158-59)

https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/NCMP1820-1846/id/18108

• Orson Pratt: the Holy Ghost gave her [Mary] strength to abide in the presence of the Father without being consumed, but it was the personage of the Father who begat the body of Jesus; and for this reason Jesus is called ‘the Only Begotten of the Father;’ that is, the only one in this world whose fleshly body was begotten by the Father. There were millions of sons and daughters who he begat before the foundation of this world, but they were spirits, and not bodies of flesh and bones [The Seer, 158.]

GOD MARRIED TO MARY—STARTS WITH ORSON PRATT?

• The fleshly body of Jesus required a Mother as well as a Father. Therefore, the Father and Mother of Jesus, according to the flesh, must have been associated together in the capacity of Husband and Wife; hence the Virgin Mary must have been, for the time being, the lawful wife of God the Father: we use the term lawful Wife, because it would be blasphemous in the highest degree to say that He overshadowed her or begat the Savior unlawfully. (Orson Pratt, The Seer, page 158)
• Inasmuch as God was the first husband to her, it may be that He only gave her to be the wife of Joseph while in the mortal state, and that He intended after the resurrection to again take her as one of his own wives to raise up immortal spirits in eternity. (Orson Pratt, The Seer, page 158)

NOTE: Orson Pratt was opposed to BY on the Adam-God Theory; i.e., that it was Adam who came and had sex with Mary; but Orson Pratt was totally on board with the idea that Elohim did the exact same thing!

 BUT THEN BRIGHAM YOUNG ECHOES THE IDEA

Brigham Young AUGUST 19, 1866 “The man Joseph, the husband