The Godhead, Evidences in the Early Christian Church

by Robert Rosskopf

"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. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us. "
(D&C 130:22)

"And Simon said: 'I should like to know, Peter, if you really believe that the shape of man has been moulded after the shape of God.' And Peter said: 'I am really quite certain, Simon, that this is the case…. It is the shape of the just God.'"
(Clementine Homilies 16:19, in ANF 8:316.)

"The Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance. But the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous and formed in the likeness of poetic fictions." (Origen, Homilies on Genesis 3:1, translated by Ronald E. Heine (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 89.)

Socrates and Plato held that (God is) the One, the single self-existent nature, the monadic, the real Being, the good: and all this variety of names points immediately to mind. God therefore is mind, a separate species, that is to say what is purely immaterial and unconnected with anything passible. (Plutarch, quoted in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 14:16, translated by E.H. Gifford (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1903), 812.)