Where we are
In the Bible, Genesis 5 is the chapter most people's eyes slide right off — the long genealogy, so-and-so lived so many years and begat so-and-so, all the way from Adam to Noah. Moses 6 takes that bare list of names and opens it up, and what's inside is astonishing: a primordial scripture called the Book of Remembrance, a pure original language, the call of the prophet Enoch, and then the entire Christian gospel — repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, the name of Jesus Christ — preached to Adam, by name, thousands of years before Bethlehem.
That last point is the whole engine of the chapter, and it's one of the boldest claims the Restoration makes. The usual story is that Christianity started with Jesus in Galilee. Moses 6 says no — the gospel started with Adam, it has always been the same gospel, and what looks like a long religious history is really one faith handed down and repeatedly lost and restored. If that's true, then the Latter-day Saints aren't a recent branch off the Christian tree; they're claiming the root.
And this is the chapter where Enoch walks on — which matters for our purposes, because the Enoch material is where the apocryphal convergences stop being merely interesting and start being hard to explain. One of them, a single name, may be the strongest case in this whole project. I'll get there, and I'll be careful with it.
Five movements: the genealogy, the Book of Remembrance, and the pure language (vv. 1–25); Enoch's call (vv. 26–47); and Enoch preaching the gospel that was given to Adam, ending in Adam's own baptism (vv. 48–68).
The Book of Remembrance and the pure language (verses 1–25)
And a book of remembrance was kept… in the language of Adam… and by them their children were taught to read and write, having a language which was pure and undefiled. — Moses 6:5–6
Two ideas here, and both run against the grain of how we usually picture the ancient world. First, there was writing from the very beginning — Adam's children kept a record, a "Book of Remembrance," the first scripture. Second, there was a single pure language, "undefiled," able to carry the things of God without distortion, before Babel scattered speech into confusion.
Enoch's call (verses 26–47)
The Spirit falls on Enoch and a voice sends him to preach to a hard people — "their hearts have waxed hard, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes cannot see afar off." (That's a precise little diagnosis of apostasy, by the way: it's not mainly an intellectual problem but a sensory one — the spiritual organs going numb. Isaiah will describe the same three-sense shutdown, heart and ears and eyes, centuries later.) And Enoch's answer to the call is the answer every real prophet seems to give:
Why is it that I have found favor in thy sight, and am but a lad, and all the people hate me; for I am slow of speech? — Moses 6:31
Too young, too hated, can't speak well. It's almost word for word what Moses will say at the burning bush — "I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue" (Ex. 4:10) — except Enoch says it a thousand years earlier. It's Jeremiah's "I cannot speak: for I am a child" (Jer. 1:6). It's Joseph Smith's "obscure boy." There's a pattern, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
And then the Lord gives Enoch promises that should sound familiar: "thou shalt abide in me, and I in you" — that's John 15, the vine and the branches, preached to Enoch millennia before John wrote it. He anoints Enoch's eyes with clay so he can see — the very gesture Jesus will use to heal a blind man (Jn. 9:6). The whole call is studded with things we think of as distinctively New Testament, showing up at the dawn of the world.
But here, at verse 40, comes a single detail I have to slow all the way down for, because it may be the most remarkable thing in the entire chapter:
And there came a man unto him, whose name was Mahijah, and said unto him: Tell us plainly who thou art, and from whence thou comest? — Moses 6:40
A man named Mahijah comes to question Enoch. Hold that name. We'll come back to it, because of where else it turns up.
The gospel preached to Adam (verses 48–68)
Enoch preaches, and what he preaches is the gospel of Jesus Christ — explicitly, by name:
Be baptized in the name of mine Only Begotten Son… even Jesus Christ, the only name which shall be given under heaven, whereby salvation shall come unto the children of men. — Moses 6:52
The name "Jesus Christ" is spoken into the world thousands of years before the Incarnation. The "only name under heaven" doctrine that Peter will preach in Acts 4:12 — that's here first, given to Adam through Enoch.
And then the verse that gives the Father and the Son their oldest names:
In the language of Adam, Man of Holiness is his name, and the name of his Only Begotten is the Son of Man, even Jesus Christ. — Moses 6:57
This quietly solves a puzzle that has nagged readers of the Gospels forever. Why does Jesus call himself "the Son of Man" — over and over, eighty-some times, his favorite title for himself? The usual answer points to Daniel 7. But Moses 6:57 goes deeper: the Father's name in the original language is "Man of Holiness," so the Son's name is, naturally, the "Son of Man." When Jesus calls himself that, he isn't borrowing from Daniel. He's using his oldest name, the Adamic one. The title is older than Daniel, older than Moses, older than Eden.
The chapter ends with Adam himself going down into the water, being "born of the Spirit," and hearing the voice declare him "after the order of him who was without beginning of days or end of years" — the Melchizedek priesthood, named here for what it always was, the order that simply is eternal, that Melchizedek was later named after rather than the other way around. And the closing line opens the door to everyone: "thus may all become my sons."
The name in the buried book
Now back to Mahijah — and this is where I want to be most careful, because careful is what makes it land.
I've tried all through these essays to flag the cases where Joseph could have had a source, because the honesty is what makes the rest believable. So let me be equally clear about this one: the Book of Giants is not a case like that. It was sealed in a cave near the Dead Sea while the Roman Empire was young, and no human being read it again until a Bedouin shepherd stumbled into the caves in 1948. The name Mahaway, the messenger sent to question Enoch, sat in that buried scroll for nineteen centuries — and the same name, attached to the same role, questioning the same prophet, sits in a book of scripture a young man dictated in a farmhouse in 1830. I'm not going to tell you what to conclude from that. I'll only say that I've spent this whole project being skeptical of easy parallels, and I don't have an easy explanation for this one.
How this chapter changes the reader
Moses 6 hands the disciple a long pedigree and a short comfort.
The pedigree: your faith is not new. Every distinctive thing about it — baptism by immersion, the gift of the Holy Ghost, the name of Christ, the priesthood "without beginning of days" — was preached to Adam at the start. What you belong to isn't a recent invention; it's the oldest thing there is, lost and found again across six thousand years, and the doctrine never actually changed. Whenever the faith starts to feel too peculiar, this is the chapter to sit with: it's the receipt showing the gospel runs all the way back to the first man.
And the comfort is in how God calls people. He keeps reaching for the young one, the hated one, the one who can't get the words out — and then filling the mouth he chose precisely because it was slow. If you've ever ruled yourself out of being useful to God on the grounds that you're not enough — not trained enough, not eloquent enough, not impressive enough — Moses 6 says you've described the standard candidate. "Open thy mouth, and it shall be filled." Enoch did, and a thousand years before Moses, a stammering boy nobody liked became the prophet who would build Zion.