Light and Truth

Two sections take the vocabulary of John’s prologue — light, truth, the Word, fulness, grace for grace — and put it to a use the prologue does not: as the name of a substance that was never made and cannot be.

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. D&C 93 and D&C 88 speak in a first-person divine voice; D&C 130 and D&C 131 are recorded in a first-person human voice whose speaker is not named in most of their verse text. Recipients and speakers are named here only where a verse names them, and D&C 131:5 states its own date inside the verse text, quoted here as verse text.

Standing disclosure — KJV-overlap material. This page reports verbal correspondence with the King James text as textual fact, including where the correspondence follows the KJV’s English translation. What that correspondence implies about the origin of the Doctrine and Covenants text — in any direction — is an external question outside this wiki’s scope.

Account

A record inside a revelation

The distinctive structure of D&C 93 is that a first-person divine voice quotes a second first-person voice. The revelation names him — “And John saw and bore record of the fulness of my glory, and the fulness of John’s record is hereafter to be revealed” (D&C 93:6) — and then the quoted voice speaks in its own person four times: “And I, John, bear record that I beheld his glory” (D&C 93:11); “And I, John, saw that he received not of the fulness at the first” (D&C 93:12); “And I, John, bear record, and lo, the heavens were opened” (D&C 93:15); “And I, John, bear record that he received a fulness of the glory of the Father” (D&C 93:16). The revelation states that what is printed is partial and that the remainder is promised: “if you are faithful you shall receive the fulness of the record of John” (D&C 93:18).

The quoted material tracks the prologue of John’s gospel closely and diverges from it in a way this page reports without scoring.

[Textual] — near-verbatim quotation. () - D&C 93:2: “And that I am the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world” - John 1:9: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

Divergences: “that lighteth” for “which lighteth,” and the grammatical person — the gospel describes a light in the third person, the revelation predicates it of a first-person speaker (“I am”). “the true light” stands at exactly four frozen verses in the corpus: John 1:9, 1 John 2:8, D&C 88:50, and D&C 93:2. The second Doctrine and Covenants carrier makes the same first-person predication — “I am the true light that is in you” (D&C 88:50).

[Textual] — verbatim quotation. () - D&C 93:3: “And that I am in the Father, and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one—” - 3 Nephi 11:27: “and I am in the Father, and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one.”

The only divergences are the revelation’s opening “And that” and its closing dash where the record’s verse has a period. Neither text names the other. A shorter form — “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” — stands at John 14:10 and 3 Nephi 9:15; the full “and the Father and I are one” tail (D&C 93:3, 3 Nephi 11:27) is what distinguishes this pairing.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 93:8: “Therefore, in the beginning the Word was, for he was the Word, even the messenger of salvation” - John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The word order inverts — “in the beginning the Word was” (D&C 93:8) for “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) — and the two continuations differ entirely: the gospel’s is a pair of clauses about the Word and God, the revelation’s an apposition — “even the messenger of salvation” (D&C 93:8) — that the gospel does not carry.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 93:10: “The worlds were made by him; men were made by him; all things were made by him, and through him, and of him.” - John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

The gospel makes the point once and then states it negatively; the revelation states it three times with widening subjects and closes on a triple preposition — “by him, and through him, and of him” (D&C 93:10) — which has no counterpart in the gospel verse.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 93:11: “I beheld his glory, as the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, even the Spirit of truth, which came and dwelt in the flesh, and dwelt among us.” - John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Three separated elements of the gospel verse — the beholding of glory, the only-begotten comparison, and “full of grace and truth” — occur in the revelation in a different order and without the gospel’s parenthesis. The revelation adds a title the gospel verse does not carry at this point: “even the Spirit of truth” (D&C 93:11).

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 93:12: “And I, John, saw that he received not of the fulness at the first, but received grace for grace” - John 1:16: “And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.”

The phrase stands at exactly four frozen verses in the corpus: these two, D&C 93:20, and Helaman 12:24. The gospel verse says the fulness is received by “all we”; the revelation says of the Son that “he received not of the fulness at the first” (D&C 93:12) and reached it by increments — “continued from grace to grace, until he received a fulness” (D&C 93:13), a progression the gospel verse does not describe.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 93:15: “the heavens were opened, and the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove, and sat upon him, and there came a voice out of heaven saying: This is my beloved Son.” - Matthew 3:16: “the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him”

Divergences: “in the form of a dove” (D&C 93:15) against “like a dove,” and “the Holy Ghost” (D&C 93:15) against “the Spirit of God” (Matthew 3:16). The voice belongs to the next verse of the account — “And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17) — where the revelation’s version stops at “This is my beloved Son” and does not carry the closing clause.

Light as a substance, not only a figure

D&C 88 extends the vocabulary from a person to a physics. The light “proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space” (D&C 88:12) and is described in one verse as three things at once: “The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed” (D&C 88:13). The section names it — “This is the light of Christ” (D&C 88:7) — and attaches it to the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth in four consecutive verses (D&C 88:7–10).

[Textual] — verbatim quotation. () - D&C 88:49: “The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not; nevertheless, the day shall come when you shall comprehend even God” - John 1:5: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

The only divergence in the shared run is the tense of the last verb — “comprehendeth” for “comprehended.” The revelation then does something the gospel verse does not: it reverses the failure into a promise, and it does so by keeping the same verb (“you shall comprehend even God” — D&C 88:49).

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 88:48: “I say unto you, he hath seen him; nevertheless, he who came unto his own was not comprehended.” - John 1:11: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”

The subject-clause matches almost exactly; the predicate does not. The gospel says his own “received him not”; the revelation says he “was not comprehended,” which carries the verb of the preceding gospel verse into the position of this one.

Intelligence, and what was not created

The revelation’s furthest-reaching claim is a denial. “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29). It attaches independence to that same category — “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:30) — and then draws the consequence for agency directly: “Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man” (D&C 93:31).

“the light of truth” stands at exactly three frozen verses in the corpus: D&C 88:6, D&C 93:29, and D&C 124:9. All three are in the Doctrine and Covenants; the phrase has no carrier elsewhere in the frozen corpus. The section supplies a two-term gloss for the same thing at D&C 93:36: “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.”

Two later statements press the material claim further. “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131:7); “We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter” (D&C 131:8). D&C 93 had already coupled the two: “For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33), with the converse stated in the next verse — “And when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:34).

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 130:22: “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.” - Luke 24:39: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”

The phrase stands at exactly four frozen verses in the corpus: Luke 24:39, D&C 129:1, D&C 129:2, and D&C 130:22. Both verses use the same test — a spirit is what does not have flesh and bones — but apply it to different subjects: the resurrected Christ’s own body in the gospel, and the distinction among three persons in the statement.

Knowledge that survives

Two short statements make knowledge itself the thing carried across death: “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection” (D&C 130:18); “And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come” (D&C 130:19). A third states the negative flatly: “It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance” (D&C 131:6). The instruction that follows from this in D&C 88 is practical and unusually broad — “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118), extended in an earlier verse to “the wars and the perplexities of the nations… and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms” (D&C 88:79).

Significance

The vocabulary is borrowed and the use is not. In the prologue of John’s gospel, light and truth are said of a person; in these sections the same words name a category that includes the person but is not exhausted by him — a light that fills space and governs law (D&C 88:12–13), a substance that was never made (D&C 93:29), a spirit that is matter (D&C 131:7). The consequence the text itself draws is the one worth noticing: because intelligence was not created, agency is not a grant but a property — “here is the agency of man” (D&C 93:31) follows directly from “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it” (D&C 93:30). A reader can check the borrowing clause by clause, as this page has. Whether the extended use is what the prologue meant is a question about the earlier text that this wiki does not settle for it; what these sections claim is reported as their claim.

Key references

D&C 93:1–18 — the record of John quoted inside the revelation; the promised remainder
D&C 93:23–36 — intelligence uncreated; independence; agency; spirit and element
D&C 88:6–13 — the light of Christ; light as law filling space
D&C 88:45–50 — the kingdoms as light-bearers; the uncomprehended light reversed into a promise
D&C 130:18–22 — intelligence rising with us; the bodies of the three persons
D&C 131:6–8 — saved in ignorance; all spirit is matter
John 1:1–16 — the prologue whose vocabulary the sections carry

John the Beloved · Degrees of Glory · Opposition and Agency · Messiah · The Resurrection · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants sections 88, 93, 130, and 131 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-references quoted from John 1, Matthew 3, and Luke 24. 1 John 2:8, Helaman 12:24, D&C 124:9, D&C 129:1–2, and D&C 88:50 are cited inside distribution disclosures rather than registered as connections of this page.

Every quote is verbatim from the frozen source text, cited to its exact reference and checked character-for-character; no quote crosses a verse boundary. Ten connection records are registered here, all [textual] and all asserted_by: wiki. The naming question is worth stating precisely: D&C 93:6 names John and attributes a record to him, but it does not name a book, chapter, or verse, and the wiki does not mint an attributed-quotation record on a person’s name alone — so the pairings with the gospel are the wiki’s. Ruled at the 2026-08-10 editorial review: they stay asserted_by: wiki — John is named, but the section quotes a record whose fulness it says is yet to be revealed (D&C 93:6), and the frozen gospel does not carry the section’s wording. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing.