Who is God?

Appearance on the Mountain in Galilee Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1308 to 1311)

Where Science Meets Religion by Trent Dee Stephens, PhD, for the Come Follow Me lesson June 5–11: John 14–17

We read in John 14:7, “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.”

I have addressed this statement and its implications in my book, The Infinite Creation: Unifying Science and Latter-day Saint Theology (Cedar Fort, 2020). Here I have included chapter 16, “Who is God?”

Chapter 16 Who is God?

During the winter of 1834-1835, the Prophet Joseph Smith and/or Sidney Rigdon gave seven Lectures on Faith as a course of instruction to the School of the Elders assembled in the Kirtland printing office. Part of Lecture Fourth states:

“…correct ideas of the character of God are necessary in order to the exercise of faith in him unto life and salvation, and…without correct ideas of his character, the minds of men could not have sufficient power with God to the exercise of faith necessary to the enjoyment of eternal life, and that correct ideas of his character lay a foundation as far as his character is concerned, for the exercise of faith, so as to enjoy the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Jesus Christ, even that of eternal glory…”1

Whereas the goal of early Church leaders was to teach the true character and nature of God and thus establish true faith among Christians, many of God’s characteristics and attributes could not have been appreciated at that early date. Modern scientific advances have contributed immensely to our understanding of the scriptures describing the characteristics of God and Jesus Christ.

As recorded in the 24th chapter of Luke, after His resurrection, Christ appeared to His apostles in a closed room. He told them to do two things: 1. Handle Him to see that He has a body of flesh and bones; “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.”2 and 2. Bring Him fish and honeycomb to eat. “And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat?”3 Why would Christ demonstrate to the apostles that he could eat? What does the resurrected Christ eating tell us about resurrected bodies? It appears to me that there is an infinity of information packed into that demonstration – information that could not have been comprehended before the past one hundred years.

After the Last Supper and after Judas had departed to betray the Savior, Jesus prayed to the Father in behalf of the remaining eleven apostles. During that prayer (John 17:3) he said, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”4 In the conversation leading up to that prayer (as recorded in John 14:7-9), speaking to Thomas, the Savior said,

“If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?”5

Unfortunately, that scripture, perhaps more than any other, has caused an enormous amount of misunderstanding throughout the history of Christianity. The confusion caused by taking this scripture literally rather than metaphorically has led to the abominable creed of the Trinity.6

When Joseph Smith entered the grove of trees near his family home in the early spring of 1820 to ask the questions, “Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?”7 He was apparently not questioning the common Christian belief in the Trinity; but what he saw would change forever our understanding of the Godhead: “…I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me…When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”8 In several other accounts of this vision, Joseph said that the two looked identical to each other.9 There is little wonder, then that Jesus would say to His apostles in Jerusalem, “…he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

In our ordinary lives, it is common for a son to be “the spitting image” of his father. When I attend my family reunions, many of my cousins delight in calling me “Ray” – my father’s name – because I look very much like him when he was older. I politely reply, “Thank you.” I recently attended my fiftieth high school reunion and greeted several classmates I had not seen since graduation day. More than one of them commented, “You look more like your father than you do yourself.” I could easily say to a stranger I meet, “If you want to know what my father looked like, just look at me. If you’ve seen me you’ve seen my father.”

The brother of Jared had a unique experience in human history:

“And it came to pass that when the brother of Jared had said these words, behold, the Lord stretched forth his hand and touched the stones one by one with his finger. And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord, for he was struck with fear. And the Lord saw that the brother of Jared had fallen to the earth; and the Lord said unto him: Arise, why hast thou fallen? And he saith unto the Lord: I saw the finger of the Lord, and I feared lest he should smite me; for I knew not that the Lord had flesh and blood. And the Lord said unto him: Because of thy faith thou hast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood; and never has man come before me with such exceeding faith as thou hast; for were it not so ye could not have seen my finger. Sawest thou more than this?”10

The brother of Jared, “…saw the finger of the Lord, … [which had the appearance of] flesh and blood.” The Lord told him “…thou hast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood…” It is obvious from this scripture that the brother of Jared saw what Christ would look like when he came to the earth. But what did the brother of Jared actually see at the time? Did he see only what would be or did also see what actually was at the time – the spirit Christ? Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe he was seeing the present and the future at the same time – such, perhaps, is the nature of infinity. Maybe Christ’s spirit finger looked exactly like what his mortal finger would look.

The Prophet Joseph Smith gave the following instruction to the Saints gathered at Ramus, Illinois, 2 April 1843:

“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. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.”11

Therefore, we can look to the characteristics of Jesus’ resurrected, immortal body in order to understand God’s eternal, immortal body.

In order to understand Christ’s resurrected body, we may ponder Luke’s accounts of Christ’s appearances to his disciples following His resurrection. He first appeared to two disciples as they journeyed to Emmaus, we read that after they reached Emmaus: “And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.”12

While Christ “sat at meat” with his two disciples at Emmaus, did he eat the “meat” or did he just watch them eat? We are not told for certain, but we can logically assume that as he “sat at meat” he ate with the disciples. A later encounter, however, leaves no question about Christ’s ability to consume food. Furthermore, on that occasion, Christ specifically demonstrated that He could eat food. After Christ appeared to the apostles, “…he said unto them, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.”13

It appears that Christ ate the fish and honeycomb specifically to prove to the apostles that he could eat – he ate before them – as in a demonstration. Was Christ just performing some sort of “trick” to “prove” he could eat – to what purpose? It doesn’t seem reasonable that Christ would just swallow food to prove that he could – without his intending for us to ponder the implications of that event. I believe he consumed food to teach us important, eternal truths about resurrected beings – with huge implications. To me, Christ’s purposeful gastrological demonstration provides critical data to our understanding the resurrection. Those data, apparently, tell us that the resurrected Savior’s digestive tract was intact and functional. The implications of those data could not have been understood by any of His disciples or their contemporaries, nor could the implications have been fully understood by anyone living more than a hundred years or so ago.

The Savior told his disciples, “I can of mine own self do nothing…I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.”14 Therefore, it appears that God told Jesus to demonstrate to the apostles that He could eat. It, therefore, appears that it is significant to God to let us know that the risen Christ could eat food. Christ told us that by seeing Him we are seeing God. Therefore, his gastrological demonstration must teach us that God, as an immortal, resurrected being with a body of flesh and bones, can consume food. It is obviously important to God that we know this truth about Him, as He commanded His son, after His resurrection, to eat fish and honeycomb before the disciples – and that this event was recorded in the scriptures.15

Furthermore, we have been told that the resurrected Savior can still partake of food and drink – at least that will be the case at the time of His Second Coming. He has told us:

“Behold, this is wisdom in me; wherefore, marvel not, for the hour cometh that I will drink of the fruit of the vine with you on the earth, and with Moroni, whom I have sent unto you to reveal the Book of Mormon, containing the fulness of my everlasting gospel, to whom I have committed the keys of the record of the stick of Ephraim…”16

Of course, it is entirely possible that consuming and processing food by a resurrected, immortal body is completely different from the way it is consumed and processed by mortals. At least two issues, however, argue against that proposition. First, the resurrected Christ apparently had the same body configuration as when he was mortal – including at least lips, teeth, and tongue. He apparently produced speech in the same manner he had done previously. His closest disciples could not distinguish His resurrected body from a mortal body – even though, in several cases, they didn’t quite recognize him as the Jesus they had known. The disciples on the road to Emmaus seem to have thought him to be a stranger, whereas, Mary thought he was a gardener. Maybe he appeared to be a different age, very likely with white hair rather than the dark hair they knew; or perhaps there was some other characteristic, than the Jesus they knew; but there seems no doubt that he looked completely human. His apostles in the closed room thought they had seen a spirit but he invited them to handle him. Second, formal logic and the scientific method teach us the principal of parsimony, which states that, without sufficient evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation is most likely the correct explanation.

With these ides in mind, let us assume that Christ’s digestive tract was much the same after the resurrection as it was before, and then discuss what we now know about digestion. The data from the resurrected Christ’s gastrological demonstration strongly suggest that resurrected beings have digestive systems where food is pulverized – by the teeth – mixed with digestive enzymes, and where individual nutrient molecules are absorbed through the intestinal cells lining the alimentary canal. In mortals, those nutrients then pass into the intestinal blood supply and are disbursed throughout the body by the heart where they are broken down to provide energy for cellular metabolism. Hemoglobin in the blood also carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues, where metabolism takes place. None of this information was known by any human before the mid-nineteenth century. Before then, breathing, digestion, and blood functions were mysteries. The possibility certainly exists that the liquid transport medium in mortals, i.e. blood, may be replaced by some other liquid in resurrected beings. At present, we simply have too little information to propose such an alternative, and parsimony tells us, at the present time at least, to continue using the story of blood.

Paul said to the Corinthians, “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”17Many people seem to take this phrase literally, believing that in heaven we will have bodies of flesh and bone but not flesh and blood. It is much more likely, however, that Paul was speaking metaphorically – describing the human condition. He said to the Galatians, “To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.”18 And to the Ephesians, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”19 In these last two scriptures, Paul seems to be using the term “flesh and blood” to refer to people in general.

Furthermore, if neither Paul, nor anyone else of his era had any idea what blood actually did, why would they be so specific about there being no blood in heaven? Ancient people believed for thousands of years that blood was the corrupting principle in the body, but did not know why. They reasoned that if no corruption could enter heaven, then that must include blood. They also had no idea what the heart actually did – they believed it was the mind – it was the source of love and devotion and courage. They had no idea it was actually a pump that propelled blood throughout the body. Therefore, if there is no blood in heaven, then there would be no need for hearts there either. Do resurrected beings have no hearts? People seem to find it easier to believe there is no blood in heaven than that there are no hearts in heaven. Of course, if blood is replaced by some other fluid, which is “immortal” but has all the same functions as blood, then the resurrected, immortal heart may pump that immortal fluid. In any event, it seems likely that the resurrected heart will pump something. We simply haven’t sufficient information to even hazard an intelligent guess at this time as to what that something might be – if not blood.

Glycolysis, also known as the Embden–Meyerhof pathway, which explains how humans break down carbon compounds from food to produce the energy necessary for life, was not worked out until the 1920s and 1930s, in Germany, by Gustav Embden and Otto Meyerhof – the culmination of over one hundred years of research by many people.20 Still, many people today have never even heard of glycolysis or Embden-Meyerhof. Those of us who have studied this critical pathway know that the last breakdown product of the Embden–Meyerhof pathway feeds into the citric acid cycle, which, in turn, feeds into the electron transport chain. The last step in the electron transport chain, which transfers the energy stored in hydrogen bonds (electrons) to produce ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the energy currency of the body), is the transfer of an electron to oxygen.21 Without oxygen as the terminal receptor in this long chain of events, the whole system comes to a screeching halt, not enough ATP is produced to sustain life, and the person dies within a matter of about six minutes.

Whereas a small portion of oxygen is dissolved in the plasma, most of the oxygen transported to the tissues (98.5%) is attached to hemoglobin molecules inside red blood cells – it’s the iron inside the hemoglobin molecule, bound to oxygen, that gives blood its red color. The connection between hemoglobin and oxygen was first proposed by the French physiologist Claude Bernard around 1870.22 Just as critical as the delivery of oxygen to tissues, is the removal of CO2, the waste product of glycolysis, from the tissues. If CO2 accumulates in cells, glycolysis slows down or stops completely and death follows. Veins carry CO2, dissolved in the blood, back to the lungs where it is exhaled and a new breath of oxygen-containing air is inhaled. Arteries then carry the fresh supply of oxygen-containing blood to the tissues.

The problem is that oxygen is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our very lives depend upon it, but on the other hand, it is one of the most dangerous elements on earth – or in space. Oxidation is named for the processes involving oxygen – the rusting of metal, fruit turning dark, the aging process, and general deterioration throughout the world are often the result of oxidation. It is critical within our bodies that oxygen is kept away from most tissues. That is why it is held captive within hemoglobin molecules, inside red blood cells, until it can be transferred to the mitochondria inside tissue cells where it is employed in the electron transport chain. If oxygen leaks out of the blood, such as occurs in a cerebral hemorrhage, oxygen in the blood will destroy the neurons with which it comes in contact. This double function of oxygen, life and death, is probably the greatest irony of mortality.

One way to combat oxidation is by means of antioxidants. We are constantly seeking, in our modern world, the perfect antioxidants – to help combat disease and put off the aging process. Maybe, from an eternal perspective, antioxidants are the secret to immortality. Perhaps that was the function of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. We are also told that there will be trees of life in the paradise of God.23 Perhaps those trees of life will be the secret of our future immortality. But dependence on some outside source, such as the tree of life, for our immortality would appear to make that immortality conditional – yet as we contemplate immortality, such a condition seems counter-intuitive.

Perhaps another solution to accomplishing immortality would be to get rid of our dependence on oxygen all-together. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt…But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt…”24 Possibly, the main difference between a mortal and an immortal being is that the oxygen-containing blood is replaced by some “spiritual” fluid in our veins and arteries that carries some other terminal receptor molecule for the electron transport chain. Or, maybe, the entire Embden–Meyerhof pathway – citric acid cycle – electron transport chain system will be replaced by some other enzymatic pathway in resurrected beings. We cannot, at present, propose what the elemental basis of such fluid might be. Oxygen occupies a unique position on the periodic table of the elements, and there is no place, that we know of at present, for any other element to perform the task performed by oxygen. Furthermore, at present, parsimony argues that it is far more likely that the mortal and immortal systems are more the same rather than different. If God has a heart, which I believe He has, then He has blood or some other fluid pumped by that heart throughout His body.

In our modern society, researchers are already looking for other fluids that can either supplement, or even replace blood in our circulatory systems. The main reason for such a search is to eliminate the technical problems and medical risks of blood transfusions. The ultimate goal of such research is to discover or create fluids that are alternative oxygen-transport systems. To date, however, no acceptable oxygen-carrying blood substitutes have been discovered, although some hemoglobin-based carriers and non-hemoglobin, perfluorocarbon-based carriers are under investigation.25 There, are however, liquid volume expanders widely available for medical cases where only volume recovery is necessary. Those systems still rely on the oxygen-carrying capacity of hemoglobin.

After the resurrection we may possibly look forward to life without the double-edged sword of oxygen, which is both life-giving and life-limiting. Our immortal “spiritual” blood will apparently transport absorbed nutrients (Jesus demonstrated that resurrected beings can eat) to the cells of our bodies. Within those cells, the Embden–Meyerhof pathway, citric acid cycle, and electron transport chain (or some equivalent system) will break down those nutrients to produce ATP (or some equivalent energy storage molecule). Critically, at the end of a series of enzymatic steps, some very efficient electron receptor will be there to accept that electron and keep the energy-producing system flowing smoothly. At present, we have no clue what that electron acceptor might be – if not oxygen.

Here, as often occurs in that gap between science and religion, we may either choose to stand firmly on the rock of proven scientific knowledge, or to take a “Leap of Faith” and discover a previously invisible bridge leading across the chasm to the cave of the Holy Grail. What marvelous wonders may await the inquisitive mind that ventures into that cave of grails? Who knows, by thinking outside the box concerning terminal electron receptors, some young person may be the person who discovers the ultimate oxygen substitute – the Holy Grail of blood chemistry – and wins the almost certainly, already earmarked Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Medicine for such a life-saving, life-prolonging discovery. Religious belief can often provide the needed faith to go beyond conventional knowledge and open whole new vistas of research.

What we can learn about God from this one demonstration of Christ’s ability to eat is, in my opinion, enormous. Putting the discussion of oxygen aside, the other implications of Christ’s eating fish and honeycomb, I believe, lead us to conclude that immortal, resurrected life is based on cellular life. Before cells were discovered in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries, people could believe that they – as well as resurrected beings were some sort of single, indivisible entity. Today, we have a difficult time even identifying with this belief for mortal humans. We now know that we are each composed of over thirty trillion cells – one hundred times more cells in a single human body than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. But most people have not applied that same information to the condition of a resurrected body. How would one build such a body without employing the individual building blocks of that body? How does one make a body of flesh and bone without muscle cells and bone cells? How does one make resurrected muscles pull on resurrected bones without causing individual muscle cells to contract – a process that depends on ATP? To me, the logical conclusion is that God is cellular. This discovery – or proposal, if you will – in my mind does not detract from God’s infinity, or omniscience, or omnipotence – but it does enhance our understanding of “the only true God” that we might have “life eternal.”26

Actually, many of the complex sugars we eat are broken down by bacterial enzymes in our gut, not by our own enzymes, which accounts for as much as 30% of our total digestion.27 It turns out that the bacterial cells in our bodies are roughly equal in number to our own cells, and many are critical to our normal healthy digestive functions.28 So if resurrected bodies can consume food, are our bacteria resurrected with us? Are there bacteria in heaven or is the celestial kingdom sterile? If we are eating food in the celestial kingdom – where does that food come from? If there is food there, then there must be death of something, and that something – be it fauna or flora – must parish in the process of being eaten. Christ demonstrated that he could not only eat honeycomb, but that he could eat fish as well. And if we consume food in heaven, there must be elimination of waste…

It’s only been over the past twenty years or so that we’ve begun to appreciate the microbiome living inside us and the vital role it plays in our own health, and we still have a long way to go. Yet compared to what people understood only fifty years ago, we have come a long way. As with everything else, the more we learn, the more questions are generated. As a result, our meager understanding of and questions about the resurrection were much simpler fifty or one hundred years ago – without the cells and the bacteria – than they are now. None-the-less, even though many questions persist and other questions arise, we now know much more about the nature of God – which he has commanded us to learn – than anyone has ever known before.

Another important clue to the characteristics of God is that He is the biological father of Jesus. In order for that to be the case, God would have had to contribute 23 chromosomes and one copy of each of approximately 20,000 genes toward Jesus’ genetic composition. The implications of God contributing just the right number of chromosomes and 20,000 genes in the correct order may be the subject of its own entire book.

Mark’s gospel emphasized the real-life, human, forty-six-chromosome-twenty-thousand-gene nature of Christ when His neighbors inquired,“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.”29

For most of human history since Jesus lived, people could believe that Christ was human because of some magical sleight of hand, much like a fairy turning the wooden Pinocchio into a real boy. Today, however, with our understanding of cells and chromosomes and genes, we understand that that age-old story of Pinocchio is just a fairytale. We must re-examine our understanding of the biological nature of Jesus Christ and His eternal Father. In my opinion, removing Christ from the Pinocchio paradigm in no way decreases His holiness or reality – quite the contrary, to me, Christ becomes much more a real person, who we can better understand, identify with, have faith in, and emulate.

Also, throughout most of human history, the virgin birth paradox was unexplained away as one of the mysteries that we shouldn’t delve into. Today we have enough background knowledge to, at least partially, begin to solve some of those mysteries; and we are expected to solve them to the best of our mental capacity if we are to “know…the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”30 Let it suffice to say here concerning the virgin birth that I grew up on a dairy farm where we milked about 75 cows at any given time. We never once had a bull set foot on our farm; every cow we owned was a virgin throughout her entire life; yet each year, each of those 75 cows gave birth to a calf by artificial insemination. If we, with our limited, finite knowledge of reproduction can accomplish such a minor feat, God, with his infinite knowledge, could certainly accomplish something similar or, indeed, much greater – not by magic but by the application of higher laws, laws that we are only now discovering.

As a result of modern revelation, the virgin birth paradox has moved away from the notion of some Pinocchio-like character being born to a woman who was a virgin, in the first century AD sense of the term, to an understanding of Christ’s necessary cellular composition and the possibility of Mary’s conception following artificial insemination of some sort, toward a paradox of trying to grasp how God, therefore, must have 23 pairs of chromosomes and 20,000 gene pairs in light of what we think we know about the randomness of evolution. An alternative explanation is that God is way ahead of our modern molecular technology. We have only recently discovered a natural process called CRISPR, which we are beginning to employ with amazing results in molecular biology. God’s infinite knowledge of that, and other molecular techniques, puts him light years ahead of us in knowing how to manipulate genes and chromosomes to accomplish His ends.

However, just like digestion and all other body functions, reproduction is a cellular event: a single cell from the male and a single cell from the female unite to form a new and unique human zygote – a single cell, which will develop, through time, into the thirty-trillion-celled adult human being. Jesus Christ went through the same exact development process as every other human being.31 He is able to lead the way for us into eternity because He is, for the most part, one of us. The part of His being that was unlike us – the part that was divine from the beginning – is the part we have not as yet discovered and probably never will. Faith, after all, is a necessary part of our progress into infinity.32

We will not meet for our Where Science Meets Religion discussions during the summer, but will resume discussions the first Thursday in September. Please join us then.

Trent Dee Stephens

trentdeestephens.com

References

1. Lectures on Faith, Lecture Fourth, The Attributes of God, item 1; http://lecturesonfaith.com

2. Luke 24:39

3. Luke 24:41

4. John 17:3

5. John 14:7-9

6. see Joseph Smith—History 1:19

7. Joseph Smith History 1:10

8. Joseph Smith History 1:16-17

9. josephsmithpapers.org/site/accounts-of-the-first-vision

10. Ether 3:6-9

11. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22

12. Luke 24:30-31

13. Luke 24:41-43

14. John 5:30

15. Luke 24:41-43

16. Doctrine and Covenants 27:5

17. 1 Corinthians 15:50

18. Galatians 1:16-17

19. Ephesians 6: 12

20. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Microbiology - Embden-Meyerhof Pathway/Krebs Cycle, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia, PA, 1992

21. Seeley, RR, Stephens, TD, and Tate, P: Anatomy and Physiology, McGraw-Hill, Dubuque, 8th edition, 2007

22. Bernard, Claude, Experimental Medicine, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, 1999

23. Revelation 2:7; 22:2

24. Matthew 6:19-20

25. Henkel-Honke, T.; Oleck, M., Artificial oxygen carriers: A current review, AANA Journal, 75: 205–211, 2007

26. John 17:3

27. 2010-08-exploring-role-gut-bacteria-digestion, phys.org, 2010

28. Sender, R, Fuchs, S, and Milo, R, Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body, PLoS Biol, 19:14: e1002533, 19 Aug 2016

29. Mark 6:3

30. John 17:3

31. Luke 2:40

32. Hebrews 11