Do any objective, qualified, non-Mormon experts agree that early Christians thought that they could become gods?
Yes! For example, there is Father Jordan Vajda, who, as a Dominican Catholic Priest, completed his master’s thesis in 1998 at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His thesis, “‘Partakers of the Divine Nature’: A Comparative Analysis of Patristic and Mormon Doctrines of Divinization,” argues that LDS theology is surprisingly consistent with early Christian thought. Here are two excerpts cited by Daniel C. Petersen (“Editor’s Introduction: American Apocrypha?”, FARMS Review of Books, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2001, ix-xvi). The first is from the beginning of the thesis: Members of the LDS Church will discover that their fundamental belief about human salvation and potential is not unique of a Mormon invention. Latin Catholics and Protestants will learn of a doctrine that, while relatively foreign to their ears, is nevertheless part of the heritage of the undivided Catholic Church of the first millennium. Members of Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches will discover on the American
