Ok, comparing these two books might seem a bit odd, but let me explain. First of all, I’ve already done a few posts on Abraham. In the first, I compared the Book of Abraham to the Koran, and wondered if Joseph might have translated an Islamic text, because the story found in the Book of Abraham where Abraham destroys his father’s idols is quite similar to a Koranic tale. Then my second post on Abraham, I learned that this story is also found in the Jewish Midrash, so there is another non-biblical source for this story.
For those who don’t know the origins of the Book of Abraham, Joseph claims to have translated the Book of Abraham from some Egyptian papyrus that he purchased from a person exhibiting Egyptian artifacts. The papyrus were originally believed to have perished in a fire, though some of these scrolls were actually discovered in 1967, and translated by Egyptologists. The translation has no resemblance to the Book of Abraham, and seems to be a sort of funeral scroll. Therefore, some people charge that the Book of Abraham is really a fraud. Even if this is a fraud, how does this explain the similarities to the Jewish Midrash, and the Koran?
To counter these claims, Hugh Nibley notes that not all of the papyrus was found. Perhaps there were some funeral scrolls mixed in with the Book of Abraham, and perhaps the real Book of Abraham that Joseph translated was not found. Many critics scoff at this claim.
However, I have also been learning about the Gospel of Judas. Scholars have known for centuries that a gospel attributed to Judas existed, because of a reference by an ancient Christian priest named Saint Ireneaus in 180. The Christian canon did not exist in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and St Ireneaus was of the first Christian leaders to try to create a canon of Christian writings. He was one of the first to make the claim that there should be four gospels, and that many of the other gospels (at least 50 at the time) that were in existence at the time were false. He specifically mentioned the Gospel of Judas as an especially dubious heresy.
Until recently nobody knew the Gospel of Judas existed. Some Egyptian papyrus was discovered in 1978, and shopped on the black market for many years. (It was actually advertised in the classified ads in the New York Times, and sold or stolen several times on the black market.) There was even a National Geographic special announcing the discovery of the Gospel of Judas in 2006.
The discovery is very interesting, and the ancient document was written in an ancient form of Egyptian, called Coptic. (Is this “reformed Egyptian”?) The Coptic Christian Church still exists today, and dates from this early time period. The copy discovered isn’t quite as old at Ireneaus, but dates to about the 1600 years ago. It’s not quite as old as Ireneaus, but it certainly is ancient, and might be the same gospel he was referring to. Ireneaus was talking about a Greek text, but he Gospel of Judas is probably a Coptic translation of the original Greek text. (You may want to learn more about Gnosticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Library from my previous post on this.)
Prior to the National Geographic special, rumors that the Gospel of Judas had been found were rampant among the academic community. The book was mixed up with several other books (apparently these ancient Egyptians were trying to conserve papyrus), many of which had nothing to do with spiritual subjects. Someone apparently leaked a photograph of some of these papyri on the internet, and most scholars were of the opinion that the Gospel of Judas did not really exist. The internet photograph claimed that the writings were the Gospel of Judas, but the translation was obviously of another book. So, the Gospel of Judas find was deemed a hoax.
However, National Geographic obtained the papyrus, and had some modern scholars translate it. Sure enough, the internet photographs were genuine, but only contained a portion of the entire papyrus. The Gospel of Judas, was mixed in with some other writings, and it is an extremely important and interesting find in ancient Christian writings, because it shows a much greater diversity of Christian thought. The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text, which was a competing form of Christianity, and was just as big or bigger in some parts of the Roman Empire. When Constantine converted to Christianity, he converted to Orthodox Christianity, and then set about persecuting the Gnostics. Eventually the persecution forced them out of existence.
So, I want to quote from Bart Ehrmann’s book called The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. Bart is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and participated in the translation of this lost gospel. I just found some of the experiences with the Gospel of Judas as strikingly similar to Nibley’s theory about the Book of Abraham. From page 67,
In chapter 1, I described my trip to Geneva in December 2004. There I laid eyes on the Gospel of Judas for the first time. I was obviously elated by the possibilities. But as I returned from my trip I had more questions than answers. I had looked over some pages of the Coptic text but had no opportunity to study and translate them. What could be found on the pages I had seen?
…page 68
While still thrilled by the prospects, I found a discussion on the Internet that made my heart sink.
There is a Dutch blogger name Michel van Rijn who runs a very peculiar web site that specializes in debunking claims about modern art and ancient artifacts. Van Rijn had gotten wind of the Gospel of Judas story, tracked down some leads, and learned that National Geographic was planning to spend considerable time and effort promoting the release of the document and its translation-and presumably would make a lot of money off it. Van Rijn decided to explode the entire operation by publishing all the surviving materials before National Geographic itself had a chance to do so.
Van Rijn found an American scholar, Charlie Hedrick-a New Testament scholar I have known and liked for years-who claimed to have photographs of the Gospel of Judas and to have already made preliminary translations of them. In order to squash any speculation about the Gospel, and to beat National Geographic to the punch, van Rijn published the photographs and the translations. When I read them, I was massively disappointed.
The first text appeared to have nothing to do with Judas and Jesus. It was a Gnostic document whose main figure was someone called Allogenes, who prays to God and hears God’s answer. The text had Gnostic characteristics, and it would be of some limited interest to scholars of Gnosticism. But as far as Judas and Jesus were concerned, it was a complete bust.
…What I didn’t know at the time, but eventually came to realize, is that Hedrick had translated the wrong text.
My first indication that something was amiss came in July 1, 2005. I was in New York on other business and had set up a lunch date at the Harvard Club with Herb Krosney, whom I mentioned earlier as the investigative journalist who had originally tracked down the Gospel of Judas, found that it was owned now by the Maecenas Foundation in Geneva, interested National Geographic in the story, and more or less single-handedly pushed the story forward-leading eventually to my hurried trip to Geneva six months before. Over lunch in July I expressed my real frustration that the whole story was soon to collapse on itself, that there was not in fact much of a story at all, because I had read the Hedrick translation and frankly couldn’t understand why National Geographic was still interested in pursuing the matter.
…It was only later that I realized what had happened. As we will see in this chapter, when scholars first gained access to this manuscript and were able to determine its contents, they believed it contained fragmentary copies of three texts. Two of which were already known from earlier archaeological discoveries: the Letter of Peter to Philip and the First Apocalypse of James, copies of which had been discovered had been discovered among the writings of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945. The third text was the gold mine: the Gospel of Judas. But it was not until Florence Darbre, the expert in manuscript restoration, and Rodolphe Kasser, the eminent Coptologist responsible for editing and translation the text, had worked on the manuscript for three years that they realized what no one-including van Rijn and Hedrick-had before suspected. The final part of the manuscript contained not just one document-the Gospel of Judas-but two. The other one was a fragmentary copy of an otherwise unknown Gnostic treatise about this figure Allogenes. Hedrick had assumed that his photographs were from the Gospel of Judas. They weren’t. They were from a different text. This changed things drastically.
…page 70
One of the strangest facts about archaeological discoveries of early Jewish and Christian manuscripts is that the most spectacular finds are almost never made by trained archaeologists. Most of them are the result of pure serendipity. Moreover, they are typically discovered by people who have no idea what it is they have discovered and no sense of their real worth.
…page 71 [formatting slightly changed]
The limestone box contained four different manuscripts in codex form (that is, they were books, not scrolls). Later scholars would identify these ancient codices as follows. None of them, except the Gospel of Judas codes, has yet been published or otherwise made public:
1. A mathematical treatise, written in Greek
2. A fragmentary copy of the Old Testament book of Exodus, also in Greek
3. A fragmentary copy of some of the New Testament letters of the apostle Paul, written in Coptic
4. The codex containing the Gospel of Judas (as I will explain later, we have the complete beginning and end of the Gospel, and much of the middle, but some portions have not been lost because of the rough handling of the manuscript after its discovery; about 10-15 percent of the text is now unrecoverable), along with three other fragmentary texts, all of them Coptic:
a. The Letter of Peter to Philip (in a version slightly different from the one discovered at Nag Hammadi),
b. The First Apocalypse of James (also different from the Nag Hammadi version),
c. And the Gnostic treatise on Allogenes (which is a different work from the Nag Hammadi tractate that is entitled “Allogenes”)
The discovery of the Gospel of Judas, with the initial skepticism of its existence lends credibility to Nibley’s contention that the Book of Abraham might still be still missing, and that they were combined with other non-religious texts. Now, here’s what Bushman has to say regarding allegations that the Book of Abraham is a fraudulent document.
… page 290
The Abraham texts gave Joseph another chance to let his followers try translating. While working on the Book of Mormon in 1829, Joseph invited Oliver Cowdery to translate: he tried and failed. Now with the Egyptian papyri before them, Joseph again let the men with the greatest interest in such undertakings-Cowdery, William W. Phelps, Warren Parrish, and Frederick G. Williams-attempt translations. Parrish was told he “shall see much of my ancient records, and shall know of hiden things, and shall be endowed with a knowledge of hiden languages.”
Through the fall of 1835, the little group made various attempts. “This after noon labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with [brothers] O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps,” Joseph’s journal notes. They seem to have copied lines of Egyptian from the papyrus and worked out stories to go with the text. Or they wrote down an Egyptian character and attempted various renditions. Joseph apparently had translated the first two chapters of Abraham-through chapter 2, verse 18, in the current edition-and the would-be translators matched up hieroglyphs with some of his English sentences. Their general method can be deduced from a revelation given to Oliver Cowdery after he failed to translate the gold plates: “You must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you.” One can imagine these men staring at the characters, jotting down ideas that occurred to them, hoping for a burning confirmation. They tried one approach after another. Joseph probably threw in ideas of his own. Eventually, they pulled their work together into a collection they called “Grammar & A[l]phabet of the Egyptian Language,” written in the hands of Phelps and Parrish.
Of all the men working on the papyri, only Joseph produced a coherent text. What was going on as he translated? For many years, Mormon assumed that he sat down with the scrolls, looked at each Egyptian word, and by inspiration understood its meaning in English. He must have been reading from a text, so Mormons thought, much as a conventional translator would do, except the words came by revelation rather than out of his own learning. In 1967, that view of translation suffered a blow when eleven scraps of the Abraham papyri, long since lost and believed to have been burned, were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and given to Latter-day Saint leaders in Salt Lake City. Color pictures were soon printed and scholars went to work. The texts were thought to be papyri with his translation, and the same pictures appeared on the museum fragments. Moreover, some of the characters from the Egyptian grammar appeared on the fragments. The translation of these texts by expert Egyptologists would finally prove or disprove Joseph’s claims to miraculous translating powers. Would any of the language correspond to the text in his Book of Abraham? Some Mormons were crushed when the fragments turned out to be rather conventional funerary texts placed with mummified bodies, in this case Hôr’, to assure continuing life as an immortal god. According to Egyptologists, nothing on the fragments resembled Joseph’s account of Abraham.
Some Mormon scholars, notably Hugh Nibley, doubt that the actual texts for Abraham and Joseph have been found. The scraps from the Metropolitan Museum do not fit the description Joseph Smith gave of long, beautiful scrolls. At best the remnants are a small fraction of the originals, with no indication of what appears on the lost portions. Nonetheless, the discovery prompted a reassessment of the Book of Abraham. What was going on while Joseph “translated” the papyri and dictated text to a scribe? Obviously, he was not interpreting the hieroglyphics like an ordinary scholar. As Joseph saw it, he was working by inspiration-that had been clear from the beginning. When he “translated” the Book of Mormon, he did not read from the gold plates; he looked into the crystals of the Urim and Thummim, or gazed at the seerstone. The words came by inspiration, not by reading the characters on the plates. By analogy, it seemed likely that the papyri had been an occasion for receiving a revelation rather than a word-for-word interpretation of the hieroglyphics as in ordinary translations. Joseph translated Abraham as he had the characters on the gold plates, by knowing the meaning without actually knowing the plates’ language. Warren Parish, his clerk, said, “I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphicks as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of heaven.” When Chandler arrived with the scrolls, Joseph saw the papyri and inspiration struck. Not one to deny God’s promptings of Abraham and Joseph. The whole thing was miraculous, and to reduce Joseph’s translation to some quasi-natural process, some concluded, was folly.
The peculiar fact is that the results were not entirely out of line with the huge apocryphal literature on Abraham. His book of Abraham picked up themes found in texts like the Book of Jasher and Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. In these extrabiblical stories, Abraham’s father worshiped idols, people tried to murder Abraham because of his resistance, and Abraham was learned in astronomy-all features of Joseph Smith’s narrative. Josephus says, for example, that Abraham delivered “the science of astronomy” to the Egyptians, as does Joseph’s Abraham. The parallels are not exact; the Book of Abraham was not a copy of any of the apocryphal texts. In the Book of Jasher, Abraham destroys the idols of King Nimrod with a hatchet and is thrown into a furnace; Joseph’s Abraham is bound on a bedstead. The similarities are far from complete, but the theme of resisting the king’s idolatry and an attempted execution followed by redemption by God are the same. The parallels extend to numerous small details.
Joseph may have heard apocryphal stories of Abraham, although the Book of Jasher was not published in English until 1829 and not in the United States until 1840. A Bible dictionary published by the American Sunday School Union summed up many of these apocryphal elements. Whether Joseph knew of alternate accounts of Abraham or not, he created an original narrative that echoed apocryphal stories without imitating them. Either by revelation, as his followers believed, or by some instinctive affinity for antiquity, Joseph made his own late-and unlikely-entry in the long tradition of extrabiblical narratives about the great patriarch.
…page 293
In light of Joseph’s language study, the Egyptian grammar appears as an awkward attempt to blend a scholarly approach to language with inspired translation.
(A longer version of this post can be found on my blog.) So, what do you make of Nibley’s contention? Is it plausible?
Comments 19
Nahh, don’t buy it. You kinda touch on Joseph’s Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar (always in the church’s custody). The most damning evidence against the “translation” of the BOA in any other way than how we understand the word “translation”, exists there.
The JEAG contains a copy of some of the characters, in order, from the fragments of the papyrus that we do HAVE…IN ORDER. Joseph’s translation of those characters, appears on the right. The JEAG is like a glossary of what each character, in Egyptian, means to JS.
The “translation” of these specific characters (Joseph’s glossary) is not even close. This proves several things. First, Joseph was working from primary characters on the scrolls we have, not some faded, recycled paper, text written in invisible ink, or scripture published on what used to be funeral paper, vice versa. Second, since the characters in the JEAG are in order as they appear on a portion of the scroll we have, we know that those were the portions of the scrolls Joseph used….not some mysterious “missing scrolls” destroyed in fire. We also know how Jospeh translated those specific characters……and we are told by experts that Joseph’s translation of those specific characters are not even close. Those specific characters actually describe a common funeral theme…..to Joseph, they equated to the BOA. No matter how you slice it, Joseph did not seem to “translate” those specific characters correctly.
Also, we have to account for the fact that the figures (facsimiles) we now have in the BOA were on the papyrus Joseph used to generate the BOA, and those facsimiles were “translated” or desiphered by Joseph as scenes from Abraham’s life……scenes that apparently correspond to the translated text….or translated part of the text. Joseph’s description of those actual figures/facsimiles (what they mean) as they are found in our current scriptures….as a “translation” are on their face completely inaccurate.
I guess this is actually a more straight forward test….Joseph copied (or had copied) facsimiles that he believed described Abraham’s life from the papyrus. The facsimiles are in our scripture, today. Joseph’s “translation” of those facsimiles is in our scritpure today. The “translation” is wholly inaccurate. End of story?
Excellent narrative, MH. Interesting stuff. I don’t see how Nibley’s theory can be dismissed. It may be argued there is no evidence YET that other scrolls existed to match BOA, but the idea that scrolls and materials were all together and we may only have part of the actual scrolls is plausible.
when you look at the pattern of prior efforts to bring forth scripture (Book of Mormon, D&C Revelations, JST Bible), it seems to be consistent that Joseph was open to receiving revelation spurred by language, characters, and crystals but more heavily dependent on his reliance on the Spirit and gift of seer and revelator.
D&C 1:29 reads:
“29 And after having received the record of the Nephites, yea, even my servant Joseph Smith, Jun., might have power to translate through the mercy of God, by the power of God, the Book of Mormon.”
The “translations” were not of men, by a learned man, but of God by a young and inexperienced man who was an instrument in God’s hand to do some miraculous things. It is a mysterious thing. One that requires faith to understand, IMO.
To me, the amazing content is more important than the origins, although I admit my brain would like to have some confirmation the origins are conceivable. My guess is the efforts to prove or disprove the BoM and BoA will continue as they have for over 100 years.
Without starting a whole new topic, what were the origins of the JST version of the bible and are they similar to how you can explain BoA? In other words, was JSmith looking at the bible in Hebrew and his mind was opened to the important meanings and parts missing in our current KJV that may or may not have been a literal “translation”? If so, is this similar to looking at papyri and his mind opened to the important meanings God wants delivered through his propeht?
yes, kg mcb, you are basically correct. the jst and book of moses are essentially revelations and are not based on any physical document (except for the kjv.)
But JS didn’t claim that he used papyrus scrolls to “translate” the JST…..and we don’t have anything with which to compare the BOM (gold plates are gone). We’ve affirmed in scripture that the BOA is a “translation” of specific scrolls, and we have, codified in scripture, an example of exactly what he translated (the facsimiles). I realize ya’ll want to work with what you have, but on it’s face…..the BOA is not what it claims to be. Maybe it’s scripture, but it’s not a “translation” of the scrolls/facsimiles in our canon. Am I wrong?
Thank you MH for the interesting and detailed discussion of Nibley and Bushman’s take on the “Grammar and A[l]phabet of the Egyptian Language” and the missing papyri.
I should learn not to read Bushman, my blood pressure sky rockets. I went to Jesse’s “Papers” and read the revelation to Parrish in context and found it completely different than Bushman intimates. In the part you quote Bushman writes that Smith did not translate the characters of the Book of Mormon and then in another part he writes Smith did translate characters. For me, Bushman is playing games. Nibley did the same thing. Nibley admitted it was “all a game”. Nibely’s theories became a moving target. When his theory became so outlandish he had to throw it away, he then came up with another to fit his model.
After reading many works on the “Book of Abraham” I finally realized scholars like Gee, Nibley and Bushman were trying to stick a round peg in a square whole. The Book of Abraham is not an ancient Egyptian text and the scrolls Joseph had in his procession are fifth to first century BCE funerary texts. Once I realized this, the explanations and data fell into place. Stephen Thompson’s “Egyptology and The Book of Abraham” in Dialogue Spring 1995 helped place the Book of Abraham in perspective. I highly recommend it if a person is interested in this subject.
The churches position has been to take the Book of Abraham as scripture from God. To believe this one has to take it on faith. To twist the mind around Bushman and Nibley’s theories causes headaches.
One of the things that I think people fail to realize, is that the grammar we have is not Joseph’s translation. The Egyptian Grammar was not put forth by Joseph Smith. Remember than Joseph translated the characters, and allowed others (Cowdery, Phelps, etc) to try to figure out the translation. So, if there are mistakes in what the characters mean (which there are), then it is not Joseph who made them, but rather Cowdery, Phelps, etc. Remember, the “grammar” we have now is “written in the hands of Phelps and Parrish.
AT, what do you make of the similarities between the story of Abraham destroying his father’s idols, with the Koran and the Midrash? Did Joseph just strike upon a lucky coincidence?
Joe, do you have a link to that article?
MH, that’s a bit of a mischaracterization. The manuscript is in the handwriting of William W. Phelps and Warren Parrish, scribes to Joseph Smith, Jr. There are 4 pages in Joseph Smith’s handwriting…..we know Phelps and Parrish were Joseph’s scribes. We know from Joseph’s own journal that he spent his days on “translating” the BOA, with his compadres, Phelps and Parrish. So, just because it’s convenient, Joseph was out getting a burger when the mistranslations occurred?
But more importantly, the Egyptian Grammar sections that I alluded to have the symbols, in chronological order, as they appear in the papyrus. The Grammar document lists, to the right of those symbols, the “translation” as it appears in our modern day scriptures. Were my current scriptures the work of Cowdery and Phelps?
And how do you explain the facsimiles? We know that those are common funeral scenes…..not according to Joseph’s “translation” as it appears in the scriptures I got for Christmas last year.
Mormon Heretic,
Interesting that Bushman mentions Josephus and the Book of Jasher specifically, since the Messenger and Advocate in 1835 uses Josephus to help interpret the papyri, and the Times and Seasons in Sep. 1842 uses the Book of Jasher to help verify part of the Book of Abraham translation. Since 1835 and 1842 are the two years that Book of Abraham translation was occurring, it seems that Smith and his scribes had access to these texts at more or less the time of translation. I wonder if Bushman realized when he named these two specific texts that they are the very ones to which Joseph Smith had access. I suspect he probably did.
I am actually personally inclined to think that Joseph Smith did not use Jasher during the actual translation process. I don’t see good evidence for Jasher’s influence on the BoA text, and it didn’t get mentioned in the T&S until a few months after the BoA translation was finished and published. The similarities between Jasher and the Book of Abraham are few, whereas the differences are vast. Josephus, however, I feel quite certain was used as a source. In fact, Josephus’s Greek rendering of the Hebrew name for Egypt actually shows up (albeit modified) in the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar. The King James Bible and JST are also obvious Book of Abraham sources. These sources account for pretty much all of the most interesting parallels between the Book of Abraham and ancient Abrahamic traditions. (There’s no reason to think that those ancient Abrahamic traditions contain any accurate information about the historical Abraham, anyway.)
As for attributing the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar to the scribes, I believe that to be a fallacious apologetic. Keep an eye out for my article in the JWHA Journal this Fall, which among other things will rebut that view. The missing papyrus theory is another fallacious apologetic, as a responsible reading of the eyewitness and manuscript evidence shows. I presented a rebuttal of the missing papyrus theory at this year’s Sunstone West. My sessions should eventually be available for MP3 download at the Sunstone website.
Personally, I view the translation of the funeral texts as wishful thinking. I know some apologists prefer the idea that they really are illustrations, or that they have been altered (which they have) or that they were re-purposed (started as the Abraham story, but converted into some sort of resurrection myth and therefore are the basis for burial rituals. But, IMO, the idea that they were illustrations to go with the story was just JS’s wishful thinking.
I should add that the labels to Facsimile 3 are clearly and indisputably mistranslated. So why should we assume that the BoA is a literal translation of a missing papyrus, if the portions of the source text we definitely DO have are decidedly NON-literal?
It sounds like some of you have studied this more deeply than I have. If you have links to other materials, I welcome them. Bushman is the first (and really only) person I have really studied in relation to the Book of Abraham. I’m definitely interested in learning more about this. Christopher, I would definitely be interested in hearing that MP3, and I would love to learn more about Gee’s analysis.
MH I hope this helps.
Thompson
http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/dialogue&CISOPTR=26881&CISOSHOW=26807&REC=5
Gee
http://mi.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=47&chapid=268
This is not the article I was thinking for. I can’t find it now. This seems to be a pretty good example of Gee’s work though. The one I remember reading was about one of the facsimile’s 1 or 3, or the hydrocephalus. I can’t find it now.
I found a response by Christopher Smith to Gee while looking for Gee on google. I have not read this yet, so I have no comment.
http://chriscarrollsmith.blogspot.com/2008/01/john-gee-and-egyptian-test.html
I would like to respond MH to your comment “written in the hands of Phelps and Parrish”. This could be a slippery slope. With this reasoning we would have to throw out all of Smith’s revelations, speeches, talks and lectures, pretty much all of his journals, and his private conversations with Clayton, Woodruff, Richards, Young and everyone else. We would have to discount all but the first account of the First Vision and Moroni’s visit.
For me the GAEL is actually quite interesting to see Smith’s mind working. For me it shows his creativity and brilliance. As you read the GAEL and the first chapters of Abraham the developing theology is startling and impressive. I recall a friend saying to me, “look at the theology, it is quite enlightening”.
As for wading in to this subject. The volume of writings is over whelming. That is why most people have Nibley sitting on the shelf and feel all the answers have been given. Nibley alone produced thousands of pages of material. You have to be selective and pace yourself. I started reading about the Book of Abraham in 1985. Many times I was turned off by the lack of my own understanding. I just kept plowing along. It really was not until I read Thompson that the light bulb went on. I then understood what I was doing wrong.
I just found the Gee article I had read before.
http://mi.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=19&num=2&id=670
My full response is in moderation. I believe it has to do with all the links I provided.
Joe,
The blog post by me that you linked was not my response to Gee’s missing papyrus theory. Rather, it was a report on an encounter I had with Gee on a web forum a few years back that got pretty personal and heated.
I do not have a comprehensive statement of my argument against the missing papyrus theory online, but you can get a pretty good thumbnail of it here: http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7342&start=0
Thanks,
-Chris
Chris,
Sorry about the mistake. After reading the blog post I realized I had made a mistake. Unfortunately it was to late to correct. Thanks for the link.
I look forward to reading your article.
For all us Book of Abraham geeks, there will be at least one book and possibly three in the near future that will give us high resolution photos of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. Unfortunately so much of the discussion has been manipulated by or exclusive to those who have had access to the photo or original documents. Once one of these books is available people will have the ability to discuss the KEP is a more informed way.
Thanks for all the links! You’re going to keep me busy catching up on all this info.
I would note that the Egyptians did, contrary to what you might think from some of the essays, engage in human sacrifice, especially in the barley rituals, which made the Acheans rather sore from time to time (the Egyptians preferred red headed men, for the obvious reason, and did not have many of their own, so they tended to appropriate Hellenes).
Enjoyed this post.