Question: Do Mormons use 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 as a "proof text" to support the Three Degress of Glory?

Is 2 Corintians 12:2-4 used as a "proof text" by Latter-day Saints?

The next "proof text" the authors consider is 2 Corinthians 12:2-4: "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such a one caught up to the third heaven..."

They start off in their usual way, with the circular assumption that we are basing our doctrines upon passages like this, rather than teaching doctrine from the scriptures, which is not quite the same thing. They then skim lightly over the scholarly tradition of Jews in a rather evasive way with the claim:

Using these passages to validate the idea of three kingdoms making up heaven ignores the Jewish tradition Paul would have known. According to that tradition, paradise was the abode of God, the place of eternal joy for God's people. However, Jewish custom never viewed a first or second heaven as alternative eternal destinations. Rather, these referred to the atmospheric heaven (the sky) and the galactic heaven (the universe).7

If this sounds remarkably, even anachronistically modern, it's because it is. It turns out not to be Jewish at all: their reference is to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment-era Protestant commentator Matthew Henry, who writes:

It was certainly a very extraordinary honour done him: in some sense he was caught up into the third heaven, the heaven of the blessed, above the aerial heaven, in which the fowls fly, above the starry heaven, which is adorned with those glorious orbs: it was into the third heaven, where God most eminently manifests His glory.8

Such a glaring error leads one to believe that perhaps they don't think people will check their footnotes-another sign of the "down-market" audience for which their book seems to be intended.

Even before we examine the Jewish custom that Paul actually would have been exposed to (we can, I trust, excuse Paul for not being exposed to Matthew Henry's commentary), let me point out that even Protestant views about what the "third heaven" is are all over the theological map. (McKeever and Johnson here commit yet another act of co-opting, but this time at the expense of other Protestants.) According to Ronald R. Day, of "Restoration Light,"9 the first world and heaven were the pre-Flood universe, the second world and heaven are the ones we live in now, and the third world and heaven are yet to come after Christ's second coming.10

While it is true that many conservative Protestant groups accept this modern, anachronistic view of Matthew Henry's of an atmospheric heaven, a stellar heaven, and a divine Heaven, not all Protestants believe this is the only possible interpretation. A question-and-answer session on the Website of a relatively liberal non-denominational church known as The Rock shows that many Protestants are acquainted with the genuinely ancient traditions, as given in pseudepigraphal works such as the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Testament of Levi, to the effect that there was a kind of hierarchy of spiritual heavens.11 The New Testament pseudepigraphal work The Apocalypse of Paul also has this tradition. (See below for specific quotations.)

Glass admits that whereas "Some of the noncanonical writings give detailed descriptions of multiple heavens, up to seven more more [,] Paul was not necessarily thinking of these when he wrote of his mystical transport into the third Heaven (2 Cor. 12.2); an alternate explanation is that the expression indicates a high degree of spiritual exaltation."12 So we can take our pick: either ancient Jews believed in a hierarchical series of heavens, and a visionary trip through them was a common theme of Jewish (and even Christian) apocalyptic writings, or Paul was using the "third heaven" as the epitome of the highest degree of exaltation-exactly as Latter-day Saints would put it.

In any case, regarding the atmospheric model espoused by Matthew Henry, while some Greeks believed in a variant of this (such as Pythagoras and others), ancient Jews believed no such thing. Did the modern, anachronistic Biblicist view come from a neo-Hellenistic (early post-Christian era Greek philosophies) source, as so much of modern creedal Christian doctrines have, or is this just a coincidence? That's a subject for further study, and outside the scope of this review. History of the Belief in a Three-part Heaven

Let's take a look at what Jews and early Christians really believed. Before we start, let's point out that simply mining the Church Fathers and pseudepigrapha for references that defend one's point of view is akin to proof-texting and in and of itself, doesn't prove anything. However, even finding one reference in the patristic and pseudepigraphal writings is sufficient to destroy an "argument from absence". That is, if McKeever and Johnson say, in effect, "Jews and early Christians never believed x" and we succeed in finding even one solitary reference to x then we have proven their assertion wrong. Proving that it was a common or even normative (authoritative or orthodox) belief is something else altogether, but fortunately McKeever and Johnson's style of criticism tends to lean towards the absolute: things are either all or nothing. And this kind of position is easy to demolish.

Having said that, it so happens that there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to sources contemporary with or within a few centuries of Paul, sources that showed consistently what ancient Christians and Jews believed in-enough, as it happens, to establish not just an objection to an argument from absence, but an actual consensus. And that consensus is exactly the opposite of what McKeever and Johnson claim. The following sections examine only a sample of quotes both from modern commentaries and ancient sources to show that the normative belief of early post-Apostolic Christianity and contemporary Judaism was in a multi-tiered Heaven in the LDS sense of different mansions corresponding with the achievement of different levels of earthly valour. Modern Christian Scholarly Commentary: The Anchor Bible

Orr and Walther have this commentary on the term "third heaven":

The third heaven. The original text (=a) of T Levi [Testament of Levi] 2:7-10; 3:1-4 seems to have conceived of the heavenly spheres as three in number, in the third of which Levi found himself standing in the presence of the Lord and his glory. Later, however, this material was re-worked to refer to a set of four additional heavens, conforming the narrative to the common Jewish and Christian tradition about seven heavens, as in Apoc Mos [Apocalypse of Moses] 35:2; 2 Enoch 3-20; b. Hag [Babylonian Talmud tractate of Hagiga]; Ascension of Isaiah; Apoc Paul [Apocalypse of Paul] 29, etc...The otherworldly journey is a common feature in ancient apocalyptic literature.13 Modern Christian Commentary: Daniélou (Roman Catholic)

The LDS commentator Seiach14 quotes,

Jean Daniélou [a Roman Catholic theologian and cardinal] has recently shown that contemporary Jews had further developed this three-step attainment of God's glory into a system of three heavens: the heaven of God, the heaven of stars, and the heaven of meteors.15 ....

That this three-tiered heavenly world was also recognized by the original Christians is evidenced by the Savior's mysterious saying that the 'seed of the Kingdom' (i.e. the saved) would bring forth fruit 'some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold' (Mt. 13:8, 23). That this was also an esoteric doctrine, is suggested by the fact that it was introduced by the usual covert signal: 'Who hath ears, let him hear' (Mt. 13:9). As might be expected, 'orthodoxy' soon forgot it, either expanding the three heavens to seven (see below), or reducing them to a single place reserved for 'all' who are 'saved by grace,' without further effort on their part.

Nevertheless, for several centuries, the original Church continued to speak of a graduated system of heavens and rewards, just as the Saviour had taught (Mt. 16:27). The very early Church Father, Papias, for example, understood that the Saviour's three degrees of 'fruitfulness' (Mt. 13:8, 23) corresponded to the Pauline three 'heavens' or 'glories' (1 Cor. 15:41). According to him (as recorded in the first century account of Polycarp),16 the 'Elders' agreed that 'Those who are deemed worthy of an abode in Heaven shall go there, others shall enjoy the delights of Paradise, and others shall possess the splendor of the City.17 For everywhere the Saviour will be seen, according as they shall be worthy who see him. But that there is this distinction between the habitation of those who produce an hundredfold, and that of those who produce sixtyfold, and that of those who produce thirtyfold; for the first will be taken up into Heaven; the second class will dwell in Paradise, and the last will inhabit the City; and that on this account the Lord said, 'In my house are many mansions,' for all things belong to God, who supplies all with a suitable dwelling place, even as his word says, that a share is given to all by the Father, according as each is or shall be worthy (Relics of the Elders, 5).

By the 'Elders' Papias meant the Primitive Community, including the Apostles, whose oral traditions he had diligently preserved as he himself heard them. 'If anyone chanced to be a fellow of the Elders,' he wrote, 'I would enquire as to their discourse, what Andrew, or what Peter said, or what Philip, or what Thomas or James or what John or what Matthew or any other of the Lord's disciples...For I did not think that things out of books could profit me so much as the utterances of a voice which liveth and abideth.'18

Endnotes

7 Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson, Mormonism 101 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2001), 172.

8 Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary of the Whole Bible (McLean, Virginia: MacDonald Publishing Co., 1706), 6:641.

9 A conservative Protestant denomination, and no friend to Latter-day Saints: see http://reslight.addr.com/

10 http://reslight.addr.com/thirdheaven.html

11 http://www.rockinauburn.com/columns/thirdheaven.htm

12 Thomas Francis Glasson, "Heaven," Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), 271.

13 Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians. Anchor Bible, Vol. 32A, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984), 525.

14 Eugene Seiach, Ancient Texts and Mormonism: Discovering the Roots of the Eternal Gospel in Ancient Israel and the Primitive Church, Second Edition (Salt Lake City: Eugene Seiach, 1995), 572.

15 Jean Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), 174, quoted in Seiach, Ancient Texts and Mormonism, 571.

16 In Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Vol. 3:4.

17 Ante-Nicene Fathers, I:154, fn.

18 Quoted by Eusebius, "Preface to Papias," Historia Ecclesia, III.39:3-4. See also "Fragments of Papias" V at http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-43.htm#P3497_597426