Many great and sacred things happened on the “high mountain apart,” which is known as the “Mount of Transfiguration” (see Matt. 17:1–3, 5). Peter called this mountain “the holy mount” (2 Pet. 1:18). One event of particular eminence is that Peter, James, and John received their endowments on this mount. President Joseph Fielding Smith stated that Jesus Christ “took the three disciples up on the mount, which is spoken of as the ‘Mount of Transfiguration,’ he there gave unto them the ordinances that pertain to the house of the Lord and that they were endowed. That was the only place they could go. That place became holy and sacred for the rites of salvation which were performed on that occasion.”208 Decades before this teaching, President Heber C. Kimball affirmed, “Jesus took Peter, James and John into a high mountain, and there gave them their endowment. . . . For the same purpose has the Lord called us up into these high mountains, that we may become endowed with power from on high.”209
A second event of eminence that took place on this same mount was that “the Savior, Moses, and, Elias, gave the keys to Peter, James and John on the Mount, when they were transfigured before him.”210 These keys included the authority to conduct temple work. Almost two thousand years later, Moses, Elijah, and others appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple and gave them the “same keys.”211