Who Authored the Mormon Couplet?

The Mormon doctrine of deity is frequently expressed in the famous couplet, "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become." Typically this couplet is attributed to Lorenzo Snow. Recently Clair Barrus argued on his blog that Brigham Young is the true author. His argument was overstated, and he has since edited the post to soften his conclusion. Nevertheless, Barrus highlights a fascinating discrepancy in the sources: Brigham Young and Lorenzo Snow each claimed that this was a special revelation to himself.

Here is how Snow told the story to his sister Eliza:

The Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon me the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I saw as clear as the sun at noonday, with wonder and astonishment, the pathway of God and man. I formed the following couplet which expresses the revelation, as it was shown me: "As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be." I felt this to be a sacred communication, which I related to no one except my sister Eliza, until I reached England, when in a confidential private conversation with President Brigham Young, in Manchester, I related to him this extraordinary manifestation. (Eliza R. Snow, Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow, Salt Lake City: Deseret News Co., 1884, pp. 9–10.)

This account dates Snow's revelation to 1840, just prior to his mission to England. Snow's son LeRoi later claimed that Snow told Joseph Smith of the experience upon returning to Nauvoo in 1843, and Smith confirmed that it was a true revelation (LeRoi C. Snow, Improvement Era, June 1919, p. 656). Possibly Snow's revelation influenced Smith's famous King Follett Discourse, which claimed, "God himself was once as we are now . . . you have got to learn to become gods yourselves . . . the same as all gods have done before you."

Contrary to Snow's telling of the story, however, we have the following account of an 1849 meeting where Young claimed that he was the one to whom the couplet was revealed in England:

Brother Lorenzo Snow made some remarks on the character of Jesus Christ, and asked for light. I replied:

While on a mission to England, the following came forcibly to my mind -- As God was, so are we now; as he now is, so we shall be.

Although Young told the story in response to a question from Snow, Snow apparently didn't jump up and shout, "You big fat liar! That was my revelation!" So we have a puzzling dilemma. Who do we believe? And why the discrepancy?

One possibility is that Lorenzo Snow's biography misreports one or more aspects of these events. It is framed and phrased as an autobiography, but Eliza Snow is named on the title page as the author. Additional research is required to determine whether the work reflects the mind of Lorenzo, or merely of his sister-- and whether the claim that Lorenzo authored the couplet is repeated in other primary sources.

Another possibility is that one or the other of these men was misremembering the course of events. Perhaps, for example, Snow had the revelation, but Young formulated the couplet. (The fact that both men claimed revelation, though, complicates this explanation. One wouldn't think that they'd misremember something like that.)

Alternatively, Young may have claimed the experience for himself in order to keep Snow's experience confidential, or in order to make the doctrine authoritative. (We might imagine Young telling this story to Snow with a wink and a nudge.) Or perhaps Young had had the same insight Snow had had, which is what sparked the conversation in Manchester in the first place.

What is clear is that further research is required. I glanced through Snow's letters and journals on the Special Collections DVD, but didn't turn up anything couplet-related. A search of Young's vast corpus of letters and journals might be more fruitful, but would also be an enormously time-consuming project. But still, a mystery this important shouldn't remain unsolved. The researcher who cracks this case will get at least a journal article out of it, so all you grad students need to get crackin'!