Was Korihor Really an Atheist?

John W. Welch

Korihor is well-known as the infamous “Anti-Christ” who preached “against the prophecies … concerning the coming of Christ” (Alma 30:6). Among other things, Korihor taught that “there should be no Christ” (30:12), and when asked by Alma if he believed in God, he flatly answered in the negative (30:37–38). Because of this, modern readers of the Book of Mormon are accustomed to describing Korihor as an atheist, or someone who denied the existence of God. Others have even argued that Korihor is an anachronistic figure in the Book of Mormon since he espoused teachings that are congruent with Enlightenment philosophies such as Deism and other secular ideologies.

Ancient atheism, however, could and did sometimes take the form of denying that God(s) existed at all, but it might also involve efforts to redefine the nature of God(s) into something radically different from typical beliefs. For example, some atheists might simply deny the operative power of God(s) in the cosmos, or they might consciously rebel against the God(s), or undermine accepted ideas of piety by refusing to worship a given deity in the state religion. In so doing, a philosopher did not necessarily need to deny the existence of God(s) in order to be considered an atheist in the ancient world. Any of these variations may have been the case with Korihor.

Further Reading

Book of Mormon Central, “Was Korihor Really an Atheist?” (Alma 30:37–38), KnoWhy 532, (September 19, 2019.

Joseph Spencer, “Is Not This Real?” BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2019): 1–18.

Gerald N. Lund, “An Anti-Christ in the Book of Mormon—The Face May Be Strange, but the Voice Is Familiar,” in The Book of Mormon: Alma, the Testimony of the Word, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1992), 107–128.

John W. Welch Notes

References