Christ as Abel and Seth

The Restoration reveals the beginning of the world as a family drama of birthright, sacrifice, and lawful heirship. In The Abel Paper: The Incarnation of Yahweh and Satan, Fred C. Collier gathers scriptural, Jewish, and early Christian evidence for the doctrine that Abel and Seth were not merely early sons of Adam, but two distinct early incarnations of Jesus Christ before His Meridian-of-Time mission as Messiah.

That statement should be read plainly. Fred identifies Abel and Seth as two probations of Christ: Abel as the accepted and sacrificed Firstborn witness at the beginning of this world, and Seth as the appointed seed who continued the righteous line after Abel’s blood was shed. The doctrine therefore belongs with Reincarnation and Multiple Mortal Probations, because it treats Messiahship as a preparatory work moving through earlier estates before the Atonement of Jesus Christ in the Meridian of Time.

Restoration Scriptures on Firstbornship and Lineage

D&C 93 identifies Christ as the Firstborn who was “in the beginning with the Father.” D&C 107 places Abel and Seth within the earliest Patriarchal order under Father Adam, and then describes Seth in language that reaches beyond ordinary lineage: Seth was “a perfect man,” bore the express likeness of his father, and could be distinguished from Adam “only by his age.”1

Fred’s Abel study presses that point directly. He observes that Joseph Smith’s revealed statement concerning Seth draws Genesis 5 into the same field of meaning as Hebrews 1, where the Son is the express image of the Father. Read with D&C 93, the passage becomes a Restoration witness that Joseph already possessed the core categories needed to understand Seth as Christ in an earlier probation: Firstborn Son, express likeness, perfect man, and lawful heir under Father Adam.2

This reading is also supported by the April 1860 Orson Pratt dispute before the Quorum of the Twelve. In that meeting, Elder Orson Pratt objected that he had heard President Brigham Young teach that Jesus had a body of flesh and bones before He was born of the Virgin Mary. The statement does not settle every detail by itself, but it is an important early witness that President Young was associated with a doctrine of Christ’s premortal or prior embodied life before the Meridian of Time.3

Abel, Cain, and the Firstborn Conflict

Genesis and the Book of Moses present Abel as the keeper of sheep whose offering was accepted, and Cain as the rebellious brother whose rejected offering ended in murder.4 That record belongs naturally to the higher doctrine of Priesthood and birthright. Abel’s accepted sacrifice points toward the Lamb; Cain’s envy and violence reveal the adversarial pattern that seeks power without righteousness.

Fred’s broader argument also identifies Cain with Lucifer and with the scriptural “son of perdition” pattern. In the Book of Moses, the Lord tells Cain that he will be called Perdition and that he was before the world; Isaiah 14 describes Lucifer’s attempted ascent and fall; and Fred brings these passages together with Jewish traditions concerning Samael, the serpent, to argue that Cain was the son of that adversarial being rather than a true son of Adam.5

Seth and the Resurrection Pattern

After Abel’s death, Eve bore Seth and declared that God had appointed another seed in Abel’s place.6 This is not merely a genealogical replacement, but a resurrection-pattern witness: Abel returned in Seth to continue the righteous line and the Messianic work under Father Adam.

The Book of Revelations states the point in revelatory form. Fred explains there that Abel’s death opened or established a Telestial Resurrection on this world — reincarnation to a telestial mortal body, exemplified in Seth — whereas Christ’s later death in the Meridian of Time established the resurrection unto Eternal Life.7 This is why the Abel/Seth doctrine is not a side issue. It links Adam-God, Messiahship, sacrifice, resurrection, and multiple mortal probations into one Restoration pattern.

An Ancient Witness: The Testament of Abraham

The Testament of Abraham, commonly dated by scholars to the first or second century A.D., presents Adam in an exalted judicial role over His posterity with Abel as an additional righteous judge presiding in the heavenly judgment scene. This witness shows an ancient Jewish and Christian understanding of Adam and Abel in roles far higher than later, orthodox readings allow.8

New Testament scholar Andrew Chester has discussed how this text therefore identifies Father Adam as the Ancient of Days, and moreover Abel as “the angelic Son of Man” (or “Son of Adam”). This is striking because it shows that mainstream scholarship can recognize the same groundbreaking implications in the text regarding the ancient Israelite understanding of the nature and identity of God.9 Together with Joseph Smith’s revelations and Fred’s Abel study, the Testament’s imagery is a remarkable corroborative witness.

Related Study

Notes

  1. D&C 93:21–23; D&C 107:40–43. ↩
  2. Fred C. Collier, The Abel Paper: The Incarnation of Yahweh and Satan at the Beginning of the World, 35–36; compare Genesis 5:1–3 and Hebrews 1:1–3. See also Jesus Christ as the Father and the Son, 8, 22 n.58. ↩
  3. Office Journal of President Brigham Young, 1858–1863, Book D, Appendix C, April 5, 1860, 437; see also Collier, The Abel Paper, v; Jesus Christ as the Father and the Son, 22 n.58. ↩
  4. Genesis 4:1–10; Moses 5:16–41. ↩
  5. Moses 5:24; Isaiah 14:12–15; Collier, The Abel Paper. ↩
  6. Genesis 4:25; Moses 6:2–3. ↩
  7. Fred C. Collier, The Book of Revelations, 40; see also the sections headed “Regarding Sammael and Cain” and “Some of What the Old Testament Originally Taught Regarding Cain and the Children of Cain & Seth and the Children of Seth.” ↩
  8. Testament of Abraham A 11–13, in E. P. Sanders, trans., “Testament of Abraham,” in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (1983), 871–902; Michael E. Stone, trans., The Testament of Abraham: The Greek Recensions (Society of Biblical Literature, 1972), 27–34. ↩
  9. Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 71–72; for additional excerpts from Chester’s remarks, see Robert Boylan, “Andrew Chester on Adam being the ‘Ancient of Days’ in The Testament of Abraham”, Scriptural Mormonism, September 18, 2018. ↩