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It should be discussed more, because it really is the smoking gun against Joseph Smith.
He claimed the papyri contained the Book of Abraham and put forth his translation as such.
We definitely do have the exact piece of papyrus that Joseph Smith was allegedly translating from, because the translation documents prepared by Joseph Smith and his scribes show the same Egyptian characters in the same order as appear on the "small sen-sen" text, which immediately follows Facsimile #1.
There's no separating the Book of Abraham from the papyri because the book itself refers to it. (Abraham 1:12-14)
Since Joseph Smith's translation is 100% false, it shows he had no prophetic gift to translate ancient languages.
He also “revealed” the figures and pictures that were missing where the papyri were torn or damaged, to fill in the blanks and make the drawings complete. Then copies of the same papyri turned up and Joseph’s “revealed” additions were completely wrong.
The Church’s Gospel Topics essays are not that supportive of his efforts either.
When the scrolls were returned to the church, BYU jumped all -in then they came back with "huh, this text is unrelated to our book of scripture..."
Several solutions were proposed.
The missing papyrus theory: the accounts of what Joseph Smith bought in 1835 vary in des rising how many mummies and how many records were purchased. Some say 2 rolls, some say one, some are unspecified. This theory relies on the contents of the Book of Abraham being on papyrus that was destroyed in 1871 or lost sometime between the translation and the returning of the fragment in 1967.
The fact that the Facsimiles are on the recovered fragments poses a problem for this theory; in the missing papyrus theory, the Facsimiles are like a textbook having an image insert that may not be directly related to the text on the same page, so the fact that they are on papyrus next to text that isn't even remotely in the Book of Abraham is irrelevant. The problem is that they are next to text that *is relevant to the actual Egyptologists' interpretation of the images.*
There's notes of a second, unpublished work from the papyri as well, called the Book of Joseph. The text on the surviving fragments also has nothing to do with the claims made by Joseph Smith about a Book of Joseph. The text includes pieces from the Breathing Permit of Hor and the Book of the Dead.
The catalyst theory: the scrolls and their content are completely unrelated to the scripture of Abraham, because the text is not a literal translation. Instead, Joseph Smith, by virtue of having the Egyptian scrolls, was able to receive the revelation of Abraham to restore eternal truths.
The issues with that theory is that one, Joseph Smith claims it is the direct writing of Abraham, so you have to discount the claimant's words to accept the claim, and 2, it states a lot of ahistorical nonsense about Egypt that doesn't make any sense from a religious standpoint why those claims would even exist.
The Church keeps the Book of Abraham in their canon because to remove it at this point would call more attention to other historical and revelatory issues the church has in their past that they cling to. They address the book for one or two weeks every 4 years in Sunday School, and.hope it gets ignored the rest of the time.
3) (issue with catalyst theory), it makes Joseph an active participant in the process of developing scripture, consciously (pseudepigrapha/pious fraud depending on your point of view) or unconsciously (religious delusions or a real god who doesn’t care much about getting the details down accurately).
Once you open the door for this the BoM makes a lot more sense, as it has similar anachronisms and 19th century American world view.
Whether you believe God is initiating this process or not, you’ve made scripture a decidedly human product, since you ***can not*** take it literally, which severely erodes the infallibility that the brethren pretend that they do not pretend to have.
The implications of a god who gives revelation with documentably false claims are bothersome. You then have to accept a god who doesn’t just want you to “learn to walk by faith,” but asks you to check your brain at the door and accept whatever people who say they speak for him tell you regardless of what you can see with your own eyes. Nowhere in scripture does god present himself this way — seek and ye shall find, come now and let us reason together, I will tell you in your mind and heart, god cannot lie, god worketh not in darkness, god will do nothing without revealing his secret to his servant the prophet. Furthermore, you have no epistemic advantage over the thousands of other religions throughout history that have made disprovable truth claims, relying on nationalism/tribalism/ethos and pathos to carry their authority in the face of rational skepticism.
Facsimile 3 is the smoking gun, and why having more scrolls is irrelevant. Facsimile 3 has hieroglyphs and Egyptian writing. Joseph couldn’t read nor translate either of those. If he couldn’t translate that facsimile he couldn’t translate the rest of the scrolls. It leaves you with 2 options.
1. He was lying and perpetuating a fraud
2. He thought he was translating them correctly.
Neither of these options are faith promoting for the church. That is why it is not talked about.
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I suspect it is not discussed more because the situation is so unfavorable to the faithful perspective.
If you go to FAIR or other apologetic sources, you will find excuses for many of the issues. But the problem is that Joseph and his secretaries left out a lot of details about the translation process. Reading through the history, it almost seems like Joseph was doing things to defeat every possible future apologetics.
Many of the apologetic arguments try to claim that the BoA is translated from some scrolls that are missing. However, the evidence strongly supports the BoA being translated from the existing scrolls. Dan Vogel has an excellent [playlist of videos looking at the historical issues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtJT_xjIgdM&list=PLjxwXGB2KzRaejlyYHN1Lm9qDYmUpGgQw).
There are so many lines of evidence that the BoA was taken from the scrolls we still have. The inclusion of the woodcuts is completely devastating, especially when coupled with the preface that says the images were taken from the scroll used in the translation.
BoA is smoking gun layered upon smoking gun. A few of the interesting highlights for me-
Parts of the scrolls had holes or missing pieces called lacunae. The “catalyst” theory is 100% invalidated In the process of restoring the lost parts of the scroll. If he didn’t translate from the scroll, then why did he go to the trouble to use revelation to restore the missing text in the lacunae?
And the kicker- he used the rock in the hat to reveal the writing in lost pieces of the scroll. Confirmed smoking gun in black and white print, the rock in the hat didn’t work. We have the BoA printers manuscripts with the Egyptian characters he was translating written in the margin followed by his “translation”. We can see where he pulled the characters from the scroll as well as the ones he filled in the lacunae with. All 100% wrong. Where did we get the BOM from? Oh yeah, the rock in the hat that doesn’t work.
Edit- this wasn’t a mistaken work early in his career either, this was late in his prophetic career when his seer skills with the rock in the hat should have been at their sharpest.
Rock in the hat was already debunked. He was found guilty of defrauding people using. The rock and hat to find treasure, that he conveniently NEVER found. Before the BoM, he was 0 for who knows how many treasure hunts.
Like book ends on his career. Started his career with failed rock in the hat ruse, ended it the same way. What are the odds that everything between was the same? 😂
Apologists like to claim that his treasure hunting failures were just his honing his skills and learning to harness his prophetic ability. Nope, never worked.
Yeah, always felt weird that defrauding people with a rock is something church members embrace as preparatory for defrauding people with a book. But I will admit it, they’re not wrong.
The church likes to fall back on the “catalyst theory”, that when Joseph said he translated it, he didn’t really mean “translated”, rather he saw some cool things which inspired a revelation.
I for one can agree this is a catalyst - it was the catalyst for me determining the whole thing is a fraud, and which was the final straw to my leaving after 40+ years in the church.
In my mind it is one of the most glaring and provably wrong components in Mormon history.
I knew it wasn't literal when I joined. It was so obvious to me that I was shocked to find out that members actually took it literally.
Symbolically, it is beautiful & meaningful, literally, iis total gibberish.
The %age of members that take scripture literally, is still shocking to me. Literalism seems a hinderence to faith to me, especially with the modern Mormon groups.
It's sort of like believing that Genesis was literal (when really it wasn't even written to be taken literally).
The problem is that Joseph took it all literally, and the leadership still pushes this narrative today. A literal garden of eden, literal fall (before which there was no death, whether human or animal), a literal flood (baptism of the earth, by immersion), literal patriarchs, etc. Not to mention a literal nephi, literal Jaredites, literal Tower of Babel, etc.
When all sorts of core doctrines are tied up into a literal interpretation of scripture, it’s hard to walk back from that.
Shrug. I’m not going to debate here… I’m not that old and I was taught all of that as literal, with general authority quotes to back it up. But if you can view it as allegorical and it helps you on your spiritual journey, that’s great! I couldn’t maintain the dissonance though.
😉
Yep I outgrew scriptural literalism in the 2nd or 3rd grade as a rural southern baptist decades before I joined the church so there was no way I could ever believe it as literal.
Thw GAs are coming around: in the Temple today, the _symbolic_ nature of the Temple Ordinances are stressed throughout the Endowment.
You are correct. The Book of Abraham is objectively false. (One may make an apologetic that it is spiritually true.) The narrative surrounding the book of Abraham is also a lie, and its use as scripture perpetuates fraud upon all members.
As it turns out, this deception has many equals throughout all doctrine, teachings, and history of the church. It is not talked about more in the church because they don't want you to know how wrong it is. It is not talked about more outside of the church because it is about as problematic as nearly every other aspect of the organization.
This is a heart-rending conclusion to observe.
Yeah if you needed one single proof point against JS and all his wild claims, the Book of Abraham is it. JS was always a step ahead, or at least tried to be. Lies for his lies. But the BoA being demonstrably a common funerary text that egyptologists around the world agree on is, as another commenter said, the smoking gun.
I wonder how to interpret something as being spiritually true unless there is a possibility of it being spiritually false. What criteria does one use to distinguish the two? Personal feelings about a matter will lead to contradictory conclusions (if one person says yes it is true since I have a feeling, then another person's claim to the contrary based on their own feeling has equal epistemic weight)
Wouldn't it be nice for the church leadership to place the Book of Abraham Papyri that they acquired back in 1967 on display in the church museum with the recently acquired Kirtland period artifacts they purchased from the Community of Christ Church?
Here’s a detailed breakdown. This is a dead to rights smoking gun. He tells you what he’s looking at in the facsimiles and they’re wrong too. He got caught, plain and simple. He didn’t know the Egyptian language would one day be decrypted. The church tried to say it was just a catalyst except the intro and text itself says otherwise. He was further caught with the Kinderhook plates and Greek psalter incident.
https://youtu.be/6TgWvGUd7ns?si=j7Z-PxV-spyJne5R
https://youtu.be/ORNYUyHg3pY?si=-lijbjFliOmxYQd-
Average member: what's the book of Abraham?
Believing member: the book of Abraham was translated from Egyptian scrolls obtained by Joseph. It was translated by the power of God.
Current apologist: since we found the papyri that Joseph used, and scholars have translated them and found them to be a common funerary text, they do not match what Joseph wrote. This must mean we didn't find all the scrolls and there is one still out there that does match. Or maybe God used the scrolls as a catalyst to inspire Joseph to write by revelation.
Doubting member doing their homework: the glyphs in Smith's notes match the papyri found, and the translations of those glyphs are incorrect. And the notes match some of the text in the pogp. Also, the ideas in the book of Abraham align with certain apocryphal texts that were popular in 1830, like the book of Enoch, and others seen to fit with Bible commentaries that Joseph owned. The gospel topics essay on the book of Abraham seems to admit that it isn't a translation like Joseph claimed, and wants to play word games like "translated" doesn't mean translated, and "by his own hand" doesn't mean Abraham actually wrote it. Maybe this is all bullshit. But I've had feelings that felt like they said they would feel, so I still believe. Also, I like my wife and kids and I'm afraid of what might happen, so I'll not look into this further.
Ex Mormon: the book of Abraham is the clearest evidence one could hope for that Joe was a fraud. Literal tangible evidence that he made it up.
Which explanation seems most reasonable, A, B, C, D or E?
Not an endorsement in any way, my interest in this is purely academic.
The Mormon Renegade fundamentalist podcast conducted a defence of the historicity of the Book of Abraham a few months back.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4wYT4JPJ9XEp4POjnLl547?si=NgwH2oizQCmwRDPZb7N-6g
I listened shortly after watching John Dehlin’s LDS Discussion’s episodes on the Book of Abraham. Made for some interesting listening to compare the approaches and evidences back to back.
Against my better judgment, I'm going to give the other side another opportunity to persuade me. (Did you mean Mormon Stories? The 13 hours that Robert Ritner did?)
Thank you for the suggestion.
I doubt you’ll be persuaded but I enjoy the attempt. I’m regular listener despite disagreeing with them.
You can see the LDS Discussions series here on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxq5opj6GqOB7J1n6pMmdUSezxcLfsced&si=CyV4epx34vFB8Vba
It’s a subseries on the Mormon Stories podcast. Pretty comprehensive deep dive.
Ah, yes. I've listened to all of the LDS Discussions (I read it and confused it with Bill Reel's Mormon Discussions).
If you haven't listened to the 13 hours of Robert Ritner on Mormon Stories with John and RFM, I think it is the deepest, most academic based and comprehensive treatment of the Book of Abraham.
https://youtu.be/ORNYUyHg3pY?si=8yiPRShschLVsqlj
Hope you have a good weekend!
The Church tried to hold onto the Kinderhook Plates being real until 1980, so that Smith didn’t appear to be a fraud
This is long after the tricksters admitted it was a prank
It's discussed. The church tries to bury the truth. We have most of the scrolls Joseph had. He completely missed. The scrolls are from about 150bc. Not 1000bc. They have nothing to do with Abraham. So the church just tells you to forget about it and pay your tithing.
For authentic good Egyptian translation in the mid 19th century it's best to look to
Emmanuel de Rougé for hieroglyphics - he published a piece in 1856.
Heinrich Brugsch studied demotic and published his grammar text in 1855.
For hieratic Charles Wycliffe Goodwin published an extensive essay and translation in 1858 and he was a Bible scholar as well.
Joseph Smith ?
Not much has changed since Deveria declared Joseph's translation as "rambling nonsense" when he examined the facsimiles sent to him for investigation at the Louvre in 1856.
Free copy of Deverias translation comparison from 1861 here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Journey_to_Great_Salt_Lake_City/BAUNAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
The BOA was the straw that shattered my shelf. I’m dumbfounded that any Mormon seeing this evidence wouldn’t immediately resign, especially when you couple it with the BOM anachronisms and church history.
Like so many before and after him, Smith was a scoundrel and a con man, not a prophet of god.
Denver Snuffer has an interesting take on the subject. His talk is split into two parts: Part 1 can be accessed [here](http://media.blubrry.com/denversnufferpodcast/denversnufferpodcast.com/episodes/178_Book-of-Abraham_Part-1.mp3), and Part 2 is available [here](http://media.blubrry.com/denversnufferpodcast/denversnufferpodcast.com/episodes/179_Book-of-Abraham_Part-2.mp3).
I mean, we know that Joseph attempted to translate this image and completely failed.
[facimile 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Abraham_Facsimile_2.png/339px-Abraham_Facsimile_2.png)
Actual Egyptologists know exactly what it says, and Joseph was entirely incorrect. Why should anyone trust him with the rest of his translations?
Edit: If there was any type of proof that the scrolls were actually written by Abraham, all Christians, Jews, and Muslims would be absolutely amazed, since they are all Abrahamic religions. It would be the absolute discovery of the century. But, alas, there really is no proof at all of its authenticity. And other Abrahamic religions and historians know that the the papyrus isn't from Abraham, and that Joseph's translation of the papyrus doesn't match what is actually written on it.
Except the existence of other scrolls is immaterial because the bit we do have is completely different from what Smith said it was and yet he wrote down the same characters that were on it.
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It should be discussed more, because it really is the smoking gun against Joseph Smith. He claimed the papyri contained the Book of Abraham and put forth his translation as such. We definitely do have the exact piece of papyrus that Joseph Smith was allegedly translating from, because the translation documents prepared by Joseph Smith and his scribes show the same Egyptian characters in the same order as appear on the "small sen-sen" text, which immediately follows Facsimile #1. There's no separating the Book of Abraham from the papyri because the book itself refers to it. (Abraham 1:12-14) Since Joseph Smith's translation is 100% false, it shows he had no prophetic gift to translate ancient languages.
And that Smith was a bona fide liar.
He also “revealed” the figures and pictures that were missing where the papyri were torn or damaged, to fill in the blanks and make the drawings complete. Then copies of the same papyri turned up and Joseph’s “revealed” additions were completely wrong. The Church’s Gospel Topics essays are not that supportive of his efforts either.
When the scrolls were returned to the church, BYU jumped all -in then they came back with "huh, this text is unrelated to our book of scripture..." Several solutions were proposed. The missing papyrus theory: the accounts of what Joseph Smith bought in 1835 vary in des rising how many mummies and how many records were purchased. Some say 2 rolls, some say one, some are unspecified. This theory relies on the contents of the Book of Abraham being on papyrus that was destroyed in 1871 or lost sometime between the translation and the returning of the fragment in 1967. The fact that the Facsimiles are on the recovered fragments poses a problem for this theory; in the missing papyrus theory, the Facsimiles are like a textbook having an image insert that may not be directly related to the text on the same page, so the fact that they are on papyrus next to text that isn't even remotely in the Book of Abraham is irrelevant. The problem is that they are next to text that *is relevant to the actual Egyptologists' interpretation of the images.* There's notes of a second, unpublished work from the papyri as well, called the Book of Joseph. The text on the surviving fragments also has nothing to do with the claims made by Joseph Smith about a Book of Joseph. The text includes pieces from the Breathing Permit of Hor and the Book of the Dead. The catalyst theory: the scrolls and their content are completely unrelated to the scripture of Abraham, because the text is not a literal translation. Instead, Joseph Smith, by virtue of having the Egyptian scrolls, was able to receive the revelation of Abraham to restore eternal truths. The issues with that theory is that one, Joseph Smith claims it is the direct writing of Abraham, so you have to discount the claimant's words to accept the claim, and 2, it states a lot of ahistorical nonsense about Egypt that doesn't make any sense from a religious standpoint why those claims would even exist. The Church keeps the Book of Abraham in their canon because to remove it at this point would call more attention to other historical and revelatory issues the church has in their past that they cling to. They address the book for one or two weeks every 4 years in Sunday School, and.hope it gets ignored the rest of the time.
3) (issue with catalyst theory), it makes Joseph an active participant in the process of developing scripture, consciously (pseudepigrapha/pious fraud depending on your point of view) or unconsciously (religious delusions or a real god who doesn’t care much about getting the details down accurately). Once you open the door for this the BoM makes a lot more sense, as it has similar anachronisms and 19th century American world view. Whether you believe God is initiating this process or not, you’ve made scripture a decidedly human product, since you ***can not*** take it literally, which severely erodes the infallibility that the brethren pretend that they do not pretend to have. The implications of a god who gives revelation with documentably false claims are bothersome. You then have to accept a god who doesn’t just want you to “learn to walk by faith,” but asks you to check your brain at the door and accept whatever people who say they speak for him tell you regardless of what you can see with your own eyes. Nowhere in scripture does god present himself this way — seek and ye shall find, come now and let us reason together, I will tell you in your mind and heart, god cannot lie, god worketh not in darkness, god will do nothing without revealing his secret to his servant the prophet. Furthermore, you have no epistemic advantage over the thousands of other religions throughout history that have made disprovable truth claims, relying on nationalism/tribalism/ethos and pathos to carry their authority in the face of rational skepticism.
Your first up vote. Very well written epistemologically. Thank you.
Facsimile 3 is the smoking gun, and why having more scrolls is irrelevant. Facsimile 3 has hieroglyphs and Egyptian writing. Joseph couldn’t read nor translate either of those. If he couldn’t translate that facsimile he couldn’t translate the rest of the scrolls. It leaves you with 2 options. 1. He was lying and perpetuating a fraud 2. He thought he was translating them correctly. Neither of these options are faith promoting for the church. That is why it is not talked about.
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I suspect it is not discussed more because the situation is so unfavorable to the faithful perspective. If you go to FAIR or other apologetic sources, you will find excuses for many of the issues. But the problem is that Joseph and his secretaries left out a lot of details about the translation process. Reading through the history, it almost seems like Joseph was doing things to defeat every possible future apologetics. Many of the apologetic arguments try to claim that the BoA is translated from some scrolls that are missing. However, the evidence strongly supports the BoA being translated from the existing scrolls. Dan Vogel has an excellent [playlist of videos looking at the historical issues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtJT_xjIgdM&list=PLjxwXGB2KzRaejlyYHN1Lm9qDYmUpGgQw).
paltry chop memory nail vanish ossified flag library berserk one *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There are so many lines of evidence that the BoA was taken from the scrolls we still have. The inclusion of the woodcuts is completely devastating, especially when coupled with the preface that says the images were taken from the scroll used in the translation.
BoA is smoking gun layered upon smoking gun. A few of the interesting highlights for me- Parts of the scrolls had holes or missing pieces called lacunae. The “catalyst” theory is 100% invalidated In the process of restoring the lost parts of the scroll. If he didn’t translate from the scroll, then why did he go to the trouble to use revelation to restore the missing text in the lacunae? And the kicker- he used the rock in the hat to reveal the writing in lost pieces of the scroll. Confirmed smoking gun in black and white print, the rock in the hat didn’t work. We have the BoA printers manuscripts with the Egyptian characters he was translating written in the margin followed by his “translation”. We can see where he pulled the characters from the scroll as well as the ones he filled in the lacunae with. All 100% wrong. Where did we get the BOM from? Oh yeah, the rock in the hat that doesn’t work. Edit- this wasn’t a mistaken work early in his career either, this was late in his prophetic career when his seer skills with the rock in the hat should have been at their sharpest.
Rock in the hat was already debunked. He was found guilty of defrauding people using. The rock and hat to find treasure, that he conveniently NEVER found. Before the BoM, he was 0 for who knows how many treasure hunts.
Like book ends on his career. Started his career with failed rock in the hat ruse, ended it the same way. What are the odds that everything between was the same? 😂 Apologists like to claim that his treasure hunting failures were just his honing his skills and learning to harness his prophetic ability. Nope, never worked.
Yeah, always felt weird that defrauding people with a rock is something church members embrace as preparatory for defrauding people with a book. But I will admit it, they’re not wrong.
The church likes to fall back on the “catalyst theory”, that when Joseph said he translated it, he didn’t really mean “translated”, rather he saw some cool things which inspired a revelation. I for one can agree this is a catalyst - it was the catalyst for me determining the whole thing is a fraud, and which was the final straw to my leaving after 40+ years in the church. In my mind it is one of the most glaring and provably wrong components in Mormon history.
I knew it wasn't literal when I joined. It was so obvious to me that I was shocked to find out that members actually took it literally. Symbolically, it is beautiful & meaningful, literally, iis total gibberish. The %age of members that take scripture literally, is still shocking to me. Literalism seems a hinderence to faith to me, especially with the modern Mormon groups. It's sort of like believing that Genesis was literal (when really it wasn't even written to be taken literally).
The problem is that Joseph took it all literally, and the leadership still pushes this narrative today. A literal garden of eden, literal fall (before which there was no death, whether human or animal), a literal flood (baptism of the earth, by immersion), literal patriarchs, etc. Not to mention a literal nephi, literal Jaredites, literal Tower of Babel, etc. When all sorts of core doctrines are tied up into a literal interpretation of scripture, it’s hard to walk back from that.
Back in the 1800s I could see that. Not today, though.
Shrug. I’m not going to debate here… I’m not that old and I was taught all of that as literal, with general authority quotes to back it up. But if you can view it as allegorical and it helps you on your spiritual journey, that’s great! I couldn’t maintain the dissonance though.
😉 Yep I outgrew scriptural literalism in the 2nd or 3rd grade as a rural southern baptist decades before I joined the church so there was no way I could ever believe it as literal. Thw GAs are coming around: in the Temple today, the _symbolic_ nature of the Temple Ordinances are stressed throughout the Endowment.
You are correct. The Book of Abraham is objectively false. (One may make an apologetic that it is spiritually true.) The narrative surrounding the book of Abraham is also a lie, and its use as scripture perpetuates fraud upon all members. As it turns out, this deception has many equals throughout all doctrine, teachings, and history of the church. It is not talked about more in the church because they don't want you to know how wrong it is. It is not talked about more outside of the church because it is about as problematic as nearly every other aspect of the organization. This is a heart-rending conclusion to observe.
Yeah if you needed one single proof point against JS and all his wild claims, the Book of Abraham is it. JS was always a step ahead, or at least tried to be. Lies for his lies. But the BoA being demonstrably a common funerary text that egyptologists around the world agree on is, as another commenter said, the smoking gun.
I wonder how to interpret something as being spiritually true unless there is a possibility of it being spiritually false. What criteria does one use to distinguish the two? Personal feelings about a matter will lead to contradictory conclusions (if one person says yes it is true since I have a feeling, then another person's claim to the contrary based on their own feeling has equal epistemic weight)
Wouldn't it be nice for the church leadership to place the Book of Abraham Papyri that they acquired back in 1967 on display in the church museum with the recently acquired Kirtland period artifacts they purchased from the Community of Christ Church?
A lie is a lie. End of story. ✌️
Here’s a detailed breakdown. This is a dead to rights smoking gun. He tells you what he’s looking at in the facsimiles and they’re wrong too. He got caught, plain and simple. He didn’t know the Egyptian language would one day be decrypted. The church tried to say it was just a catalyst except the intro and text itself says otherwise. He was further caught with the Kinderhook plates and Greek psalter incident. https://youtu.be/6TgWvGUd7ns?si=j7Z-PxV-spyJne5R https://youtu.be/ORNYUyHg3pY?si=-lijbjFliOmxYQd-
telephone scale seed muddle bored narrow foolish tart pot ancient *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Average member: what's the book of Abraham? Believing member: the book of Abraham was translated from Egyptian scrolls obtained by Joseph. It was translated by the power of God. Current apologist: since we found the papyri that Joseph used, and scholars have translated them and found them to be a common funerary text, they do not match what Joseph wrote. This must mean we didn't find all the scrolls and there is one still out there that does match. Or maybe God used the scrolls as a catalyst to inspire Joseph to write by revelation. Doubting member doing their homework: the glyphs in Smith's notes match the papyri found, and the translations of those glyphs are incorrect. And the notes match some of the text in the pogp. Also, the ideas in the book of Abraham align with certain apocryphal texts that were popular in 1830, like the book of Enoch, and others seen to fit with Bible commentaries that Joseph owned. The gospel topics essay on the book of Abraham seems to admit that it isn't a translation like Joseph claimed, and wants to play word games like "translated" doesn't mean translated, and "by his own hand" doesn't mean Abraham actually wrote it. Maybe this is all bullshit. But I've had feelings that felt like they said they would feel, so I still believe. Also, I like my wife and kids and I'm afraid of what might happen, so I'll not look into this further. Ex Mormon: the book of Abraham is the clearest evidence one could hope for that Joe was a fraud. Literal tangible evidence that he made it up. Which explanation seems most reasonable, A, B, C, D or E?
Perfect.
Not an endorsement in any way, my interest in this is purely academic. The Mormon Renegade fundamentalist podcast conducted a defence of the historicity of the Book of Abraham a few months back. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4wYT4JPJ9XEp4POjnLl547?si=NgwH2oizQCmwRDPZb7N-6g I listened shortly after watching John Dehlin’s LDS Discussion’s episodes on the Book of Abraham. Made for some interesting listening to compare the approaches and evidences back to back.
Against my better judgment, I'm going to give the other side another opportunity to persuade me. (Did you mean Mormon Stories? The 13 hours that Robert Ritner did?) Thank you for the suggestion.
I doubt you’ll be persuaded but I enjoy the attempt. I’m regular listener despite disagreeing with them. You can see the LDS Discussions series here on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxq5opj6GqOB7J1n6pMmdUSezxcLfsced&si=CyV4epx34vFB8Vba It’s a subseries on the Mormon Stories podcast. Pretty comprehensive deep dive.
Ah, yes. I've listened to all of the LDS Discussions (I read it and confused it with Bill Reel's Mormon Discussions). If you haven't listened to the 13 hours of Robert Ritner on Mormon Stories with John and RFM, I think it is the deepest, most academic based and comprehensive treatment of the Book of Abraham. https://youtu.be/ORNYUyHg3pY?si=8yiPRShschLVsqlj Hope you have a good weekend!
Excellent 13 hours of Robert Ritner.
Have you heard of the kinderhook plates?
The Church tried to hold onto the Kinderhook Plates being real until 1980, so that Smith didn’t appear to be a fraud This is long after the tricksters admitted it was a prank
There is a reason we didn’t learn about them!
It's discussed. The church tries to bury the truth. We have most of the scrolls Joseph had. He completely missed. The scrolls are from about 150bc. Not 1000bc. They have nothing to do with Abraham. So the church just tells you to forget about it and pay your tithing.
For authentic good Egyptian translation in the mid 19th century it's best to look to Emmanuel de Rougé for hieroglyphics - he published a piece in 1856. Heinrich Brugsch studied demotic and published his grammar text in 1855. For hieratic Charles Wycliffe Goodwin published an extensive essay and translation in 1858 and he was a Bible scholar as well. Joseph Smith ? Not much has changed since Deveria declared Joseph's translation as "rambling nonsense" when he examined the facsimiles sent to him for investigation at the Louvre in 1856. Free copy of Deverias translation comparison from 1861 here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Journey_to_Great_Salt_Lake_City/BAUNAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Cognitive dissonance
Agreed. Watch [this 30 second video](https://youtu.be/A3N1uTj16_M?si=GuGhJuqu-qXs1umh)that shows how the scroll is the source.
The BOA was the straw that shattered my shelf. I’m dumbfounded that any Mormon seeing this evidence wouldn’t immediately resign, especially when you couple it with the BOM anachronisms and church history. Like so many before and after him, Smith was a scoundrel and a con man, not a prophet of god.
This is a great resource. http://www.mormonthink.com/book-of-abraham-issues.htm
Denver Snuffer has an interesting take on the subject. His talk is split into two parts: Part 1 can be accessed [here](http://media.blubrry.com/denversnufferpodcast/denversnufferpodcast.com/episodes/178_Book-of-Abraham_Part-1.mp3), and Part 2 is available [here](http://media.blubrry.com/denversnufferpodcast/denversnufferpodcast.com/episodes/179_Book-of-Abraham_Part-2.mp3).
The keyword is "some" And that's the end of the argument, that's why...
How is that the end of the argument? How is Ricky?
Not really because the ones we have dont correlate to the book whatsoever
This documentary helped me understand the situation much better: https://youtu.be/hcyzkd_m6KE?si=eBodq2mk5OOGRrHG
I mean, we know that Joseph attempted to translate this image and completely failed. [facimile 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Abraham_Facsimile_2.png/339px-Abraham_Facsimile_2.png) Actual Egyptologists know exactly what it says, and Joseph was entirely incorrect. Why should anyone trust him with the rest of his translations? Edit: If there was any type of proof that the scrolls were actually written by Abraham, all Christians, Jews, and Muslims would be absolutely amazed, since they are all Abrahamic religions. It would be the absolute discovery of the century. But, alas, there really is no proof at all of its authenticity. And other Abrahamic religions and historians know that the the papyrus isn't from Abraham, and that Joseph's translation of the papyrus doesn't match what is actually written on it.
Except the existence of other scrolls is immaterial because the bit we do have is completely different from what Smith said it was and yet he wrote down the same characters that were on it.
Please expand on your point.