Moroni interrupts his narrative for a moment in order to contemplate the wonderful visions which Moriancumer had been given of our Lord, both in His spiritual and His material body as we commonly understand those terms. Now Moroni adds the information that the body in which our Lord manifest Himself to Moriancumer was, both in manner, that is to say, functions or acts, and appearance the same as that in which He showed Himself to the Nephites (3 Nephi 11:8-12).
The reality of the human body. In our day and age, at the present stage of development of religious thought, the reason for the importance which Moroni evidently attached to a correct belief in the reality of the human body, including the earthly tabernacle of our Lord, may not be apparent. But when we remember that Christianity during its early days was seriously threatened by a philosophy that denied this reality, we can understand these paragraphs.
According to Platonian philosophy, in the fifth century B.C., reality belongs only to general ideas of objects, such as horse, man, etc., not to individuals, viz., this horse, this man. The latter are not temporary, fleeting copies of the real existences, shadows on the wall, as it were. The species, not the individual, is the real thing. Influenced by such speculations, first the Essenes and then the Gnostics formed some strange ideas. Some of the latter imagined a duality in everything. They believed in two gods, one of which was good, omnipotent, and omniscient, while the other, the demiurge, was weak and imperfect. It was the latter that created the tangible universe and man. Matter was, therefore, imperfect and evil; something from which to be liberated, or saved. And salvation was attained, either by strict asceticism, killing natural desires by not yielding to them, or satisfying them, or, taking an opposite course and creating complete indifference to all earthly pleasures by overindulgence—libertinism. Between the supreme God and the demiurge there was a connecting chain of angelic beings called “principalities and powers,” gradually decreasing in perfection and therefore approaching near enough to humanity to serve as mediators between God and man. These are the fulness, or pleroma, of the Godhead.
In the imagination of some of the early philosophers, there were also two Christs, one material and one spiritual. The latter, they held, came upon our Lord in His baptism and departed from Him before His death. There was, therefore, no resurrection of the body. Others held that the birth, life, and death of our Lord were illusions, imaginary and not real historical facts.
St. Paul brands all such philosophy as Vain deceit. He warns against an asceticism that exaggerates the importance of abstinence from food and the observance of holidays. But he urges a life of righteousness. He warns against making angels the object of worship, because all the fulness of the Godhead—the connecting chain between God and man—dwells in Christ, who is the head of all principalities and powers—all angels, whatever their station in the divine government may be. (SeeColossians 2:8-23)
John brands that class of philosophers as antichrists, because they deny that Jesus is the Christ, and he says that their appearances indicate that the end of the world is near (1 John 1:1-2). There was no illusion. He was as real in His humanity as in His Godhood.
Dr. Joseph Angus remarks (Bible-Handbook, p. 585) that the errors of Gnosticism in its many forms proved more fatal to Christianity than persecution itself. It was the serious consequences foreseen that prompted some of the Apostles, following the inspirations of the Divine Spirit, to turn the full authority of their Priesthood and their holy Apostolic calling against both the heresies and the authors thereof. No doubt Moroni, enlightened by the spirit of prophecy, foresaw the apostasy and its sources, and was thus given to realize the importance of a correct picture of our Lord in His twofold nature, the human and the divine, as well as the true knowledge of the Plan of Salvation. This, it seems, made him pause to contemplate more fully the visions of Moriancumer.