In 1904, Nels Lars Nelson, then-professor of English in BYU, addressed John 4:24, an all-too-commonly abused “proof-text” against Latter-day Saint theology, even today. As this was a discussion from over a century ago, perhaps some will appreciate how Nelson approached this text and attempted “counters” to LDS responses thereto:
This passage, the only one that would be swerved into a support of the Inco-Graechic conception of Deity, ought, in all conscience to be understood in consonance with the rest of the Bible. “God is a spirit.” Well, is not Christ also—are we not all spirits? The spirit is the man—the body is merely a house. If this interpretation does not satisfy, there is still another which would leave our Father in heaven a personal being. That is to consider the passage as referring to God, the Holy Ghost . . . “I am well aware,” says a Catholic writer, “that the Latterday Saints interpret this text as meaning a spirit clothed with a body; but what nearly the whole of mankind, Christians, Jews, Mohammedians, have believed for ages cannot be upset by the gratuitous assertions of a religious innovator of the last century.” Well, if it cannot, it cannot; if it can, it can—that is all there is to this argument. Those who see as the daring innovator sees, will follow him; others will not. “In the meanwhile it is well to bear in mind,” says Max Muller, “that the universality of an error does not help in the least to make it a truth. It may prove useful to have learnt from history the elementary lesson that no opinion is true simply because it has been held by the greater intellects, or by the largest number of human beings, at different periods in the history of the world.” (Nels L. Nelson, Scientific Aspects of Mormonism or Religion in Terms of Life [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904], 16 n. 1, 270 n. 1)
For more on John 4:24 and other texts, see, for e.g.:
