The Resurrection

One sentence in the Doctrine and Covenants defines a word the rest of scripture uses without defining it: the soul is the spirit and the body together. Everything the sections say about resurrection follows from that.

What this page maps. Modern revelation, reported as the text gives it. D&C 88 and D&C 29 speak in a first-person divine voice; D&C 76 is a first-person plural vision report. Sections’ occasions, dates, and places are outside this wiki’s source text except where a verse states them.

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

The definition, in three consecutive verses

The argument is compressed into three one-line verses that define a term and then apply it: “Now, verily I say unto you, that through the redemption which is made for you is brought to pass the resurrection from the dead” (D&C 88:14); “And the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15); “And the resurrection from the dead is the redemption of the soul” (D&C 88:16). Read in order, the three make the resurrection the redemption of a composite rather than the rescue of a part.

The record had stated the same composition without the definitional form.

[Textual] — paraphrase. () - D&C 88:15: “And the spirit and the body are the soul of man.” - 2 Nephi 9:13: “and the spirit and the body is restored to itself again, and all men become incorruptible, and immortal, and they are living souls”

Both verses put the spirit and the body together and both reach the word “soul” in the same breath; the grammatical route differs, since Jacob’s sermon narrates a restoration and the revelation states an identity. Divergence worth naming: the sermon says the spirit and body “is restored to itself again” and calls the result “living souls,” while the revelation says the two “are the soul of man” without a restoration verb at that point.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 88:27: “For notwithstanding they die, they also shall rise again, a spiritual body.” - 1 Corinthians 15:44: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.”

The revelation’s next verse holds the two terms together in a way the letter’s antithesis does not: “They who are of a celestial spirit shall receive the same body which was a natural body” (D&C 88:28) — the same body, not a replacement. Reported as a textual difference between the two passages, not scored.

Everyone comes forth

The revelations state the scope of the rising in unrestricted terms. “Michael, mine archangel, shall sound his trump, and then shall all the dead awake, for their graves shall be opened, and they shall come forth—yea, even all” (D&C 29:26); “For all the rest shall be brought forth by the resurrection of the dead, through the triumph and the glory of the Lamb” (D&C 76:39). The one exception is mapped at Sons of Perdition.

[Textual] — near-verbatim quotation. () The vision states which verse it is rendering, by chapter and verse: “we came to the twenty-ninth verse of the fifth chapter of John, which was given unto us as follows” (D&C 76:15). What follows diverges from the frozen text of that verse at two points. - D&C 76:17: “And shall come forth; they who have done good, in the resurrection of the just; and they who have done evil, in the resurrection of the unjust.” - John 5:29: “And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”

The opening five words are identical — “And shall come forth; they” (D&C 76:17, John 5:29). The divergences are the two outcome-nouns — “of life” reads “of the just”, and “of damnation” reads “of the unjust” — together with “they who” for “they that” and “in the” for “unto the”. The divergences are reported as textual facts and are not scored in either direction. “resurrection of the just” stands at exactly four frozen verses in the corpus: D&C 76:17, D&C 76:50, D&C 76:65, and Luke 14:14. This is the cleanest named-citation case in the section: the vision cites its source by chapter and verse before quoting it, so the record was minted asserted_by: "source" at the 2026-08-10 editorial review. The naming verse carries its own record as well (, D&C 76:15 against John 5:29), so the citation and the quotation are both visible in the register.

The order of the rising

D&C 88 sequences the resurrection against a series of trumps, and the sequencing is explicit about who is not yet included. Those alive at the coming “shall be quickened and be caught up to meet him” (D&C 88:96); “they who have slept in their graves shall come forth, for their graves shall be opened” (D&C 88:97); these are “Christ’s, the first fruits, they who shall descend with him first” (D&C 88:98). At the second trump comes “the redemption of those who are Christ’s at his coming; who have received their part in that prison which is prepared for them” (D&C 88:99). At the third come “the spirits of men who are to be judged, and are found under condemnation” (D&C 88:100), and of these the text says: “And these are the rest of the dead; and they live not again until the thousand years are ended” (D&C 88:101).

[Textual] — verbatim quotation. () - D&C 88:95: “And there shall be silence in heaven for the space of half an hour; and immediately after shall the curtain of heaven be unfolded, as a scroll is unfolded after it is rolled up” - Revelation 8:1: “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”

Divergences: “for the space” against “about the space,” and the tense (“there shall be” against “there was”). The vision of Revelation attaches the silence to the opening of the seventh seal; the revelation attaches it to the unveiling of the Lord’s face and carries no seal at that point.

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 88:110: “and swear in the name of him who sitteth upon the throne, that there shall be time no longer” - Revelation 10:6: “And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer”

Both attach the oath to a swearing angel and both close on the same clause, differing only in the auxiliary (“shall” for “should”). The revelation continues into a binding of Satan for a thousand years (D&C 88:110) that follows immediately on the oath; the vision of Revelation does not join the two at this point.

Where the earth goes

The revelation applies the same three-glory law to the ground itself: “the earth abideth the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law” (D&C 88:25); “notwithstanding it shall die, it shall be quickened again, and shall abide the power by which it is quickened, and the righteous shall inherit it” (D&C 88:26).

[Textual] — distinctive shared phrasing. () - D&C 88:17: “in whose bosom it is decreed that the poor and the meek of the earth shall inherit it” - 3 Nephi 12:5: “And blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

The beatitude promises the meek the earth; the revelation names two groups — “the poor and the meek” (D&C 88:17) — and makes the inheritance the object of a decree. The same promise stands in the corpus at Matthew 5:5 (“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”); the pairing above is with the Bountiful rendering because the revelation’s inheritance clause, like it, drops the “Blessed are” frame.

Significance

The distinctive move in these sections is not that the dead rise — the record and the New Testament both say so at length — but that the resurrection is given a definition tight enough to argue from. Because “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15), a disembodied state can be described as a bondage rather than a reward, which is exactly how a later vision describes it: “the dead had looked upon the long absence of their spirits from their bodies as a bondage” (D&C 138:50). And because the rising is universal in scope (D&C 29:26), the interesting question the sections raise is not who rises but into which glory — which is why the resurrection material and the three-glory material sit in the same two sections and interleave. A reader can check the definition, the scope, and the sequence directly; what the sequence implies about any timetable is not something these pages assert.

Key references

D&C 88:14–16 — redemption, the soul defined, resurrection as the redemption of the soul
D&C 88:25–32 — the quickened earth; the same body; the three quickenings
D&C 88:95–102 — the trumps and the order of the rising
D&C 29:26–28 — “yea, even all”; the right hand and the left
D&C 76:15–17 — the cited verse of John, and its rendering
2 Nephi 9:13, 1 Corinthians 15:44 — the spirit-and-body composite, and the spiritual body

Degrees of Glory · The Redemption of the Dead · Sons of Perdition · Atonement · Index · Connections

Sources

Doctrine and Covenants sections 29, 76, 88, and 138 (verse text only; headnotes excluded). Cross-references quoted from 2 Nephi 9, 1 Corinthians 15, John 5, Revelation 8, Revelation 10, 3 Nephi 12, and Matthew 5.

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. Seven connection records are registered here, all [textual]. Five are asserted_by: wiki; two — the vision’s naming of the verse of John by chapter and verse, and its rendering of that verse two verses later — were minted asserted_by: "source" at the 2026-08-10 editorial review. Distribution figures are counts of distinct frozen verses in the corpus, derived by search at the time of writing.