In case you haven’t heard, LDS Inc has updated their scriptures. Â Most of the changes are cosmetic, apparently, but Peggy Fletcher Stack notes some that aren’t so cosmetic: changes that reflect views on race and polygamy. Â But what’s confusing me is the spin that’s going on with these changes. Â In Stack’s article, almost everyone she interviews talks about how refreshing and helpful these changes are. Â Yet, some of them are lies and half-truths. Â Take the change in the heading to Official Declaration 2:
The Book of Mormon teaches that “all are alike unto God,†including “black and white, bond and free, male and female†(2 Nephi 26:33). Throughout the history of the Church, people of every race and ethnicity in many countries have been baptized and have lived as faithful members of the Church. During Joseph Smith’s lifetime, a few black male members of the Church were ordained to the priesthood. Early in its history, Church leaders stopped conferring the priesthood on black males of African descent. Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice. Church leaders believed that a revelation from God was needed to alter this practice and prayerfully sought guidance. The revelation came to Church President Spencer W. Kimball and was affirmed to other Church leaders in the Salt Lake Temple on June 1, 1978. The revelation removed all restrictions with regard to race that once applied to the priesthood.
Okay, yeah, that’s a quote from the BofM, but the BofM also says dark skin is a curse from god. Â But the big whopper is this line, “Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice.” Â Really? Â That’s the best you can do? Â So, the idea that blacks were less worthy in the pre-existence that was taught from the pulpit, was pervasive in the teachings of numerous prophets, and was largely considered doctrine, doesn’t count. Â Huh? Â That’s funny.
Now, I get that it’s not entirely clear why a formal policy was developed disallowing blacks from the priesthood right around the time Joseph Smith died. Â But the justification that arose to defend the policy was everywhere, and there isn’t a hint of admission or recognition of or apology for that racist doctrine in this supposedly refreshing and “modern” version of the scriptures.
Another change appears to be a “victory” for reason and evidence, but it’s actually just an under-handed compromise. Â The new introduction to the Pearl of Great Price now calls it “an inspired translation,” code for those in the know that it is really “completely fabricated and indefensible.” Â This is a great compromise. Â For the people in the pews who don’t know any better, they won’t catch the difference and will be none the wiser. Â But for those who do know better, now they can say, “See, the church doesn’t claim Joseph was making a literal translation either.” Â Ignoring the fact that all the evidence suggests he thought he was.
I’m sure some people are going to get on my case for criticizing these efforts. Â They’ll say things like, “Come on, they’re making efforts. Â Can’t you give them some credit?” Â To those people I say, “No. Â These aren’t efforts to be more open and honest. Â These are efforts to cover their asses and more carefully hide the truth. Â I’ll give them credit when they say, “The Pearl of Great Price was just made up by Joseph Smith. Â It wasn’t any more a translation than the Book of Mormon the musical is a translation of the sealed portion of the golden plates” or when they say, “We used to teach really racist things. Â We’re sorry. Â The people who taught that obviously were not inspired or they would have known better. Â We don’t speak with god any more than anyone else does. Â We’re a bunch of old, white men running a corporation and carrying on a charade.” Â When they say those things, then I’ll give them props. Â No props for lies and half truths.
Wow!! I guess aerin was right. It also makes it look like the church beaurocracy is happy to let unofficial sources market-test ideas (like de-canonizing the BOA), then embracing the successful ones.
Personally, I favor the view that Joseph actually did literally translate the Book of Abraham.
That’s after having studied all the controversies.
Let me guess. All the arguments that Joseph had some papyri that he literally translated, are substantial and well reasoned, whereas all the arguments that he simply concocted stuff were all so retarded that you could barely read them.
Nope. The Book of Abraham is a complex topic. Hard to navigate. Holding a critical position here is not “retarded.”
A metacomment: I want to make clear, for anyone not currently following other threads, that Parker is quoting and referencing Seth in his use of the word “retarded.” See http://mainstreetplaza.com/2013/02/27/the-mormon-apogee-of-affirming-the-consequent/comment-page-3/#comment-113637
The Book of Abraham isn’t complex at all. And neither is its origin.
Yes, there are reductionist arguments that make this a simple question.
I reject them.
the Book of Abraham is only complex if one works assiduously to make it artificially so. One can of course reject the obvious, logical explanation for its origins and glaring inconsistencies and downright silliness, which is that it’s a far-fetched fiction of Joseph Smith’s creation. But one can do so only if one is willing to espouse ludicrous explanations that defy logic and sense, which is why virtually no one, including the hierarchy of the LDS church, believes or defends those explanations any more.
It would be helpful to me if you would identify the simple question that you reject, and the complex question that you accept.
@1 – I’m doing the ‘I was right’ dance right now!
Parker, I presume the “simple narrative” that you had in mind is that Joseph Smith bought a mummy, and was delusional enough, or dishonest enough to claim he could translate the scroll with it and told a “tall tale” about Abraham with it. A claim that is now debunked based on readings of independent Egyptologists that differ from Joseph’s.
I find this to be unlikely on the evidence.
You can correct me if I presume wrong about your narrative.
My counter is that the Egyptologist’s only analyzed a small scrap of the scroll Joseph was actually working on – so we have little way of knowing the context that the pictograms were placed in. Which makes the traditional Egyptological readings of the facsimiles inconclusive at best. You have to get into a fairly involved reading of early Mormon history to determine scroll length and how Joseph handled it.
So there’s one discipline someone who wants to master this debate has to be competent in – early Mormon history, and possibly even methods of determining scroll thickness, etc.
Secondly, Hugh Nibley did a lot of his own Egyptological work pointing out how Joseph’s readings actually were OK from an Egyptological standpoint. This puts him at odds with the other Egyptologists and you can pick which you find more credible.
I don’t really care much about Nibley’s work because his Egyptological readings don’t impact my own argument much one way or the other. But we have at least established a mastery of Egyptology as being necessary to master this debate as well. So there’s two disciplines.
I tend to prefer Kevin Barney’s argument on the subject -which points out that asking for a traditional Egyptology reading of the Facsimiles is asking the wrong question in the first place – since this is a Canaanite story, not an Egyptian one.
On this argument, a Canaanite scribe or scholar living in Egypt, or using Egyptian writing while living elsewhere, simply wrote down the Caananite story of Abraham and did a cut-and-paste job of traditional Egyptian funeral imagery to use in his own story. Possibly even drawing some of the images differently. Kind of like how commercial websites use stock photos to advertise. The scribe just thought – “hey that’s a neat Egyptian pictogram that basically more or less says what I want to say here… let’s use it!”
So now you have to have a firm basis in how scribes operated in the ancient world and how they put together their writings to know whether this explanation works or not. Ancient textual analysis is another discipline we have to add to the list.
And we have another – how would a Canaanite have viewed the Egyptian pictograms and altered them? So you have to have a mastery of ancient Canaanite languages and texts. Not to mention, you need this in order to discover if there are parallel narratives that match Joseph’s Abraham story in the ancient Middle Eastern milieu. That usually involves at least two or three languages, if not more.
You also need to have a mastery of the old Jewish rabbinical tradition to know whether the Abraham story as told by Joseph fits or not.
No, it’s not simple. It’s highly complicated.
And quite frankly, no one with a mere mastery of Egyptology alone is competent to rule decisively on the question of the Book of Abraham’s authenticity. For instance – Robert Ritner – the Egyptologist who usually features prominently in modern half-baked expose videos on this topic.
Why on earth would anyone need to be “competent” in early Mormon history to judge the accuracy of the purported “translations” Joseph supposedly made of the scrolls?
That’s like claiming someone would need to be proficient in French cooking to determine whether someone else had made a reliable French translation of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.”
You don’t have to know a thing about Mormonism, in 1840 or 2013 or at any point in between, to judge the accuracy of a translation made by a Mormon. That’s ludicrous.
As for the rest of Seth @11–like I said, the book of Abraham is complex only if one works assiduously to make it so.
You are right, I wasn’t presuming anything–or at least anything you discussed. You made a distinction between simple question(s) that you reject, and complex question(s) that you accept. I ask for a distinction between the two. You provided arguments to support the Book of Abraham as being what the Church claims it to be. I agree that arguments can be simple or complex, but your point was about questions being simple or complex, and that’s what I was (am)interested in–the question that you accept and the one you reject.
I make no distinction between the word “argument” in this case and the word “question.”
I meant question more the way you’d use the phrase “point at issue.”
Well, as a generalization, I am reasonable confident that most will distinguishing between a question and the arguments made to answer the question, in this or any other case. So I am back to my original point: The Book of Abraham is not complex, nor is its origin. And that brings us to your response that you prefer the complex arguments to the reductionist simple ones (or at least I think that is what you intended to say). And that gets us back to your position that you favor the source of the argument not its substance. And, that just puts a damper on the discussion, doesn’t it.
The Book of Abraham was directly translated by the power of God from an Egyptian scroll in Joseph’s possession, which was subsequently lost or destroyed, perhaps in that one fire. We have a description of the scroll and it doesn’t match the surviving scrolls. So the Abrahamic scroll is lost or was destroyed. It’s as simple as that.
If we didn’t have a description of the Abrahamic scroll, I could understand all the speculation, but the description establishes that it once existed and it is not in our collection. End of story.
Then there’s this:
The Abrahamic scroll itself shows two authors, not one, so it wasn’t written by Abraham himself. See
http://ldsanarchy.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/the-two-authors-of-the-book-of-abraham/
This “second author†was essentially a scribal commentator — interjecting commentary where he/she felt it appropriate to add explanations.
He got a hold of these records (of both Abraham and Joseph), or as he says, “the records have come into my hands | which i hold unto this present time†and “the records of the fathers | even the patriarchs | concerning the right of priesthood | the lord | my god | preserved in mine own hands.†Also, “a knowledge of [these things] | as they were made known unto the fathers | have i kept | even unto this day | and i shall endeavor to write some of these things upon this record | for the benefit of my posterity | that shall come after me.â€
So, it looks like some patriarch, who inherited these records, decided to write them upon these multiple scrolls, addressing himself to some unnamed person (perhaps both his name and the name of the person he was addressing were included in the scrolls that are missing), with the understanding that these scrolls would be for the instruction of his posterity, and he takes it upon himself to not just write the scriptures which he possessed, but to also expound them to his posterity, doing, essentially, what the Nephite missionaries did, reading and expounding the scriptures to their investigators, walking them through them from beginning to end.
The scrolls then, would, of course, be copies of the writings of Abraham and Joseph. And since this is a mixture of scriptural quotation and commentary, there would possibly be portions, perhaps even great portions, dedicated to mundane matters, meaning just writings of the original author talking about things that do not have to do with sacred things. In other words, it may have been a group of scrolls that dealt in both secular and scriptural matters, for the instruction of posterity.
Of particular emphasis, though, by this unnamed author, is his focus on the right of the priesthood, the creation, the stars and planets and delineating the chronology from him back to creation, almost as if these scrolls were to demonstrate that he, and his seed, were entitled by lineage to the right of the priesthood. (And because of this emphasis, I suspect the author was male.)
Of the facsimiles the scribal author states, “i will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record,” meaning the first (mundane) scroll, not the Abrahamic scroll.
This view very easily explains a whole lot of the mystery.
@16:
Hardly. The church and the Metropolitan Museum of Art still have quite a few of the fragments of the source text, enough to establish that it was not what it claimed.
How do you not know these things, anarchist?
No, I find the substance of the simple argument to be unsatisfying.
For instance, claiming that you have an accurate picture of the entire scroll Joseph was using, when multiple independent accounts describe it as extending through multiple large rooms when unrolled.
I guarantee you nothing that big survived. Which makes it suspect at best to claim that any modern translation attempts have anything like a clear picture of what Joseph Smith was working with.
RE #11: That was a beautiful illustration of two logical fallacies: moving the goal posts and the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Seth basically made it “impossible” for anyone to disprove the legitimacy of the Book of Abraham by giving ridiculous criteria for what would be required to understand the situation. I’m sure Seth will disagree for some reason I can’t imagine, but Occam’s Razor seems particularly apt here. Which is more probable: That a known fraud and charlatan made something up, or that there was a hidden, deeper message on that scroll?
RE #18: I’m not going to debate this. Seth, take issue with the experts:
https://dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/The-Original-Length-of-the-Scroll-of-Hor.pdf
And, FYI, these same authors responded to Barney’s criticism of their article in a recent issue of Dialogue and illustrated quite compellingly that Barney is a clueless moron.
The LDS church, by it’s own definition (http://www.lds.org/manual/gospel-principles/chapter-31-honesty) “There are many other forms of lying. When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth. Whenever we lead people in any way to believe something that is not true, we are not being honest.” is NOT BEING HONEST.
Too bad Will Schryver turned out to be such a jackass in his personal life that his work casting doubt on that entire paper couldn’t be published. His conclusions weren’t that bad. If he hadn’t been a raving misogynist online, perhaps the refutation could have reached a wider audience.
Unfortunately, he was his own worst enemy – and I certainly couldn’t endorse publishing him with his online antics on record. Too bad though – the Dialogue article isn’t even remotely the last word on scroll length here.
Oh, there’s a transcript published of John Gee responding to the arguments made in the Dialogue article profxm linked to here:
http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2012-fair-conference/2012-book-of-abraham-i-presume
Since Abraham is not an actual person as portrayed in the Bible, it would be rather hard to translate his writings.
A couple books I recommend– from 1975, “Abraham in History and Tradition” by John Van Seters, and from 2001, “The Bible Unearthed” by Isreal Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
If people are still writing (and filming) Sherlock Holmes stories, why not write be inspired to write Abraham stories?
Suzanne, just about everyone in LDS apologetics isn’t under the impression we did have the actual documents held by Abraham himself. Carbon dating on the scroll decided that issue decisively enough. Most scholars (of whatever ideology) believe that if Abraham is a real person, we have what we have about him from oral tradition. Even the earliest documents mentioning him are hundreds of years after his death.
So what did Joseph Smith literally translate?
Did some drunk Egyptian from the first century get his jollies from making up stories about mythical people from other countries and stashing the stories in with funeral texts.
Despite the impressions of LDS apologetics, the Book of Abraham wasn’t canonized because church leaders thought it was based on oral traditions written hundred of years after someone who may not have existed.
And I don’t get why some people are so hell bent on proving a literal translation of some unknown dudes pseudepigrapha.
I find it far more plausible, that Joseph Smith is the creator of the Book of Abraham which may or may not be inspired.
Suzanne, if you’re not even going to read my explanation the first time, what’s the point of repeating it?
I’ve met Kevin Barney, and — while the argument attributed to him by Seth @11 is ridiculous — I wouldn’t say that Kevin Barney is a “clueless moron.”
Do you have a link to the response? I’d be curious to read it.
Seth has brought up this point on MSP before:
From what I’ve read, these Egyptian writings (that the Canaanite scribe supposedly cut and pasted) are copies of known works that were composed more than a thousand years later than Abraham’s time.
Chanson, you can read what is sometimes termed the “Canaanite Redactor” theory here:
http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=40&chapid=168
And Kevin Barney is the author. You can judge for yourself whether I did an acceptable job – off the top of my head – of summarizing the gist of it or not.
@25 Suzanne,
It looks to me that Joseph Smith translated a record consisting of multiple scrolls made by someone (I’ll call him the scribal author) who lived long after Abraham and who copied the sacred writings of Abraham and Joseph of Egypt (which were in his possession) into his record, sacred writings (written by the power of the Holy Ghost) that are missing from the other books of scripture that we possess. The scribal author made the record for his posterity in order to teach them about God, divinely revealed astronomy and many other things.
Joseph began translating the portion dealing with the writings of Abraham and was able to publish a small portion of the translation before his death as the Book of Abraham. The other larger portion of the translation went missing or was destroyed. The writings of Joseph of Egypt were never translated (written down) though Joseph Smith very well may have read them using the gift and power of God.
After Joseph’s death the scrolls were scattered here and there, there was a fire, stuff was destroyed, but some Museum ended up having fragments that belonged to the original scroll collection. Unfortunately, the surviving fragments were not the Abrahamic scroll, so the sacred writings are still missing or have been destroyed. Like the Book of Mormon, which is an abridgment that is not even the hundredth part of the full account, the latter-day saints ended up receiving just a very small portion of what was on those sacred scrolls.
The Book of Abraham is exceptional for a whole lot of reasons. It contains not only a unique theology found nowhere else, giving us more information about the things of God, but its astronomy accords with modern plasma cosmology, plasma mythology, the Saturn myth, etc., to a startling degree, all of which is yet more evidence that it is the real deal, a bona fide document of antiquity. There is no way Joseph could have known of these things or made this stuff up. Nobody is that good of a guesser.
As Seth said above, it has been instrumental in making Mormon scholarship much, much better. And there are many other things that make the text exceptional, which I won’t get into here. In my estimation, the Book of Abraham is a real gem in the scriptural canon. Plus it’s fun to watch the anti-‘s knee jerk reaction to it!
Anarchist, I hope you’re not talking about this discussion here. If we’re going to have a reasonable discussion about this, I object to dismissing the critical arguments with the loaded term “anti-“.
The thing is that the facsimiles reproduced in the Book of Abraham aren’t just “pictograms”, they contain some actual writing — writing which can be read by people who know ancient Egyptian. They also contain notes by Joseph Smith pointing to actual bits of text, with Joseph Smith’s translation of what that text is supposed to say. For many of these JS said they are not to be revealed at this time, but for some he gave translations, and those translations are wrong. Perhaps this is a “knee-jerk reaction” but I would take that as a strong indication that Joseph Smith’s translation of the Egyptian scrolls that were in his possession is inaccurate.
chanson,
Critical arguments I’m all for. But I have yet to see a single one that invalidates Joseph’s translation of the facsimiles. There is simply no smoking gun anywhere. And yet, that is where there should be one: in the facsimiles. That is where all the critical arguments should focus and where the theory that the Book of Abraham is fake should be able to easily establish itself as fact. But it doesn’t, not even there.
For every “the translation is wrong” pronouncement by an expert, there is also an “ah, but there is evidence that it could mean this another thing, also,” which other thing always happens to be the very thing that Joseph translated it as. Time and time again the song is the same, the end result always the same. After awhile it just sounds like whining, like grasping at any damn straw you can find to take Joseph down. But the critics have yet to do it. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for years for the experts to prove the facsimiles wrong and each time they announce victory, new Egyptian research shows his translation is accurate. The more we learn about Egyptian, its language and culture, the more right Joseph is shown to be.
Now, if you can, chanson, show me a smoking gun. Show me concrete evidence that Joseph’s translation is wrong. Evidence that has no contradictory evidence attached. No “it can be this and also that.” I just want something that everyone researching the document says it can only be this and so Joseph is wrong. Can you do that, chanson? Can you give me a smoking gun that no apologist has been able to answer, or that has no evidence of a possible other explanation?
If you can, then cough it up. If you can’t, then admit that the theory that you and others here have that the Book of Abraham was made up by Joseph is just that: a theory, and one that has no concrete evidence to support it. In other words, your belief in it is a question of faith.
I’ll tell you what. Let’s make Seth the apologist arbiter. Seth is a part of FAIR, right? You bring up something that hasn’t already been addressed by an apologist. We’ll then ask Seth if that has already been addressed and if there is an alternative interpretation which supports Joseph’s translation. If it has already been addressed, I’ll take a look at it, if it is online, and we’ll go from there.
Surely there ought to be overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that will convince this ol’ anarchist that he got hoodwinked, right? So, show me Joseph was wrong. Take him down, if you can.
When I was at BYU, I bought a book by a Mormon Egyptologist that translated the hieroglyphs in the facsimiles. Even though the scholar was Mormon (and I bought the book at the BYU bookstore), it was pretty clear from what he wrote that JS’s “translations” were not close enough that any reasonable person would call them translations. (I think the author included an opinion that JS’s translations were closer than random guesses, but did not provide a statistical model for this assertion.)
I wish I still had the book, but it actually shouldn’t be that hard to do this analysis ourselves. As I recall off the top of my head, in one of them, JS claims that the characters above the hand of one of the figures is a name (and he gives the name). If he’s right, that would be very impressive. The characters are right there — it shouldn’t be too hard to verify.
Anyway, though, this tangent (is the Book of Abraham a literal translation of the papyrus studied by JS or not?) is a little bit ironic, considering the point of the OP. Let me remind you:
Which sounds like the CoJCoL-dS has just canonized interpretation (b) from the second-to-last paragraph of the article linked @19:
(Correct me if I’m wrong, wasn’t that interpretation originally proposed by Hugh Nibley?)
Anyway, if you are sure that the BoA is a literal translation of one of the Egyptian scrolls that Joseph Smith had in his possession — why bother convincing me? Looks like you should be trying to convince the correlation department of the church!
Before we begin this, should you accept this challenge, chanson, I want to be clear on what I mean by incontrovertible evidence.
You say that Joseph’s translations were wrong. Okay, but just saying they are wrong is not good enough. I want all the right translations as incontrovertible proof that he was wrong. That’s translations in plurality. In case you still don’t get my drift, I’ll spell it out for you.
So, given that Egyptian is a mult-leveled language, it is not enough to give a basic-level machine translation, which gives a character by character meaning. No, I want all the levels of Egyptian, so that I have incontrovertible proof that what Joseph wrote doesn’t work on any level.
Not all languages are multi-leveled like Egypt, but to give you another example, consider Hebrew. There are four levels to Hebrew understanding: simple (PASHAT), hint (REMEZ), search (DRASH) and hidden (SOD). The simple understanding will not be the hidden understanding. So, taking Hebrew as an example, were Joseph to translate a Hebrew text into its SOD meaning and you wanted to prove Joseph was a fraud, you would have to give me FOUR levels of meaning for the text to make your case. Giving me just the simple understanding and saying you won just proves that you are ignorant of Hebrew.
The same applies to Egyptian. So, now that we know the ground rules, please enlighten me with the evidence of your faith.
@34 So, you’re saying it doesn’t bother you in the slightest that the CoJCoL-dS doesn’t agree with you anymore on this point…?
Looks like we were typing at the same time…
Shulem, yes, I’ve already looked into that. (No need for Seth on this one.) There is already an explanation for that. It’s funny you would bring that up as the first one. Every time I talk to a disbeliever about Abraham, Shulem is the first thing that is brought up. And yet it has a fairly simple explanation.
You got anything else?
Re: the new intro, I think the scholars are just playing it safe. We don’t have the scroll (even though we have descriptions of it) and since part of the membership believes Joseph translated from the scroll, while a smaller part believes it was just a Book of Moses type revelation, they opted for something every believing Mormon could agree on: that it was inspired and that it came into existence at the time the scrolls were acquired. If the Abrahamic scroll ever is found, or even just a part of it that confirms the translation came from it, we’ll get yet another “adjusted” intro.
The church doesn’t agree with me? I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Most in the church believe in a missing scroll. A minority believe the strict revelation theory. I’m in the majority on this one.
Oh, well, if there’s already an explanation for that, then I’m satisfied.
Did you read the original post? Here’s the part I’m talking about:
The point is that anyone who’s familiar with the issues surrounding the Book of Abraham knows that the main competing explanations are (as you say) “a missing scroll” and “the strict revelation theory”. The new (church-published) edition of the Pearl of Great Price has an introduction that endorses the latter theory. So you can sit here and debate the atheists about this all you want, but that ship has already sailed away without you.
An update to #19…
Seth kindly emailed me outside the comments to note that I got a reference wrong. Cook (co-author with Smith in the original) did not take issue with Barney but with Gee, who responded to them in Dialogue. He even provided the reference:
Andrew W. Cook, “Formulas and Facts: A Response to John Gee,†Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 45/3 (Fall 2012): 1-10.
So, I really meant to say, they made “Gee” look like a moron, not Barney. Thanks, Seth, for the kind correction.
Chanson, LDS Anarchist has already dealt with the new introduction (#36). The “scholars,” i.e. prophets, seers and revelators, are just “play it safe.” If the Abrahamic scroll surfaces “we will get another ‘adjusted’ intro.”
Doesn’t that answer all your questions, and strengthen your faith, knowing that the Brethren are playing it safe (as though that is news).
Also, it seems like someone needs to say this…
The “missing scroll” theory seems an awful lot like the “we have no idea where the Book of Mormon took place” theory. Initially, Mormons all thought the Book of Mormon took place in Central America, but, as evidence came to light indicating that was clearly not true, apologists began to claim that the location was “unknown.” The same appears to be happening with the Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith claimed to translate some of the Egyptian in the scrolls that we do have, and he got those translations wrong according to all reputable Egyptologists today. We KNOW that. But, rather than admit Joseph was a fraud (which was already established given his treasure seeking activities), the apologists are now suggesting “a new scroll” that I don’t recall being mentioned in the historical record (though I’m sure Seth and LDS Anarchist will find some obscure reference to these other scrolls in order to correct me).
Both of these responses by apologists accomplish the same thing: They move the question from the realm of the empirical and falsifiable into the realm of the non-falsifiable. It’s quite convenient.
Can we definitively illustrate that the Book of Mormon is not a record of the “primary” Native American ancestors? Yes. But can science definitively illustrate that the Book of Mormon is not a record of anyone’s ancestry? Well, no. Because who is “anyone”? Or, if we go with the limited geography model… Can science definitively illustrate that the Book of Mormon is not the record of a small group of people who popped into the Americas at some point and then had all of their genes largely wiped out, so as to be unidentifiable in the larger population of Americans? No. So, non-falsifiable.
Can we definitively illustrate that the scrolls Joseph purchased and that were recovered in a Chicago museum are the Breathing Permit of Hor? Yes. But can we definitively illustrate that some other text that no longer exists was not the Book of Abraham? No. Because it no longer exists, just like the Book of Mormon. How convenient. The evidence is gone.
By moving this issue out of the realm of the falsifiable, apologists can conveniently keep their hopes alive that Joseph wasn’t a fraud. To the independent observer, this makes the whole thing even more fanciful and improbable. But it works for the person who starts with belief, then changes the evidence and facts to align with belief.
Isn’t it interesting how often “facts’ used to support one position, have to be changed to support a subsequent argument.
By the way, I never said anything about a “missing scroll” – I neither endorse nor reject that idea. All I’ve said is that I don’t find it convincing that what survived today is the majority of what Joseph Smith was working with.
As for convenient… yeah, certainly is.
Almost as if God didn’t want you to have hard evidence to abdicate to, but rather make the decision based on faith. That makes a lot of sense to me. After all, a lot of the examples of people who God actually indisputably revealed himself to didn’t turn out well at all. We ought to be grateful he’s nice enough NOT to do something similar with us.
Seth @43:
Except, of course, that there’s NO ONE whom “God actually indisputably revealed himself to.” There are only people who CLAIM God revealed himself to them–you know, like Joseph Smith. People do dispute that he saw God, you know, so it’s clearly disputable. Heavens, we can dispute it right here and now. Though I certainly won’t dispute that Joseph Smith didn’t turn out well at all.
Parker @40:
Yeah, that drives me nuts. It’s an argument used to explain why we can’t talk about Heavenly Mother: “Oh, of course she’s real, but we can’t talk about her because we’ll be even more unacceptable to the rest of the world if we announce that we worship a goddess! People will think we’re even weirder!”
I thought God’s servants were supposed to stand up boldly for the truth, no matter what the cost, not play it safe!.
I mean, they could boldly stand against gay marriage and pay the cost in money, membership and respect that the their bankrolling of Prop 8 cost them, but they can’t stand up for Heavenly Mother or the Book of Abraham?
What a bunch of cowardly losers.
I’ve read various explanations. My point being what’s the big deal about the scrolls.
Everyone in Nauvoo was all a twitter cuz they had the writings of Abraham.
But if it’s just the inspired translation of a grocery list no matter how ancient, what’s the whoop?
So what did Joseph Smith literally translate.
I can have go at this inspired thing
If I was a fair minded person, and I did a cross cultural comparison with certain Grecian vases, than any reasonable person can clearly see that figure 7 on facsimile 2 is Heavenly Mother with a dildo.
Now that a whoop. I think I like LDS apologetics.
Suzanne, are you going to give any indication that you read my first explanation of my views or not. So far, you don’t give any indication of having done so.
@47: Seth frequently fails to give any indication that he’s read anyone else’s comments–or even paid attention as he’s written his own. And now he’s demanding to know if someone else has read his comments? Nuh-uh.
I have given my views on on a so called Canaanite redactor or whoever else and his so called grocery list from who knows what so called missing scroll. Of which you neither reject or endorse.
Maybe a future Tom Brown novel was sent back in time to be hidden in a mummy. God works in mysterious ways.
People can make sorts of convoluted stories of how Joseph Smith translated the sacred fiction about Abraham.
What’s so special about this fiction that God has to resort to such complicated means.
It’s much simpler to me that a Book of Breathing turned up in Nauvoo, and it inspired Joseph Smith to create the Book of Abraham.
Then your summary is incorrect Suzanne.
Because no one is talking about making up anything. The Canaanite Redactor concept is one of a Canaanite scribe writing down the story of Abraham – either from already existing documents in his possession, or from an oral tradition, or perhaps a mixture of the two.
No one was talking about him making up a story in the first place. Which was why I felt you hadn’t even read what I laid out.
Besides, any Canaanite in exile period or before it educated enough to read and write in Egyptian wouldn’t have been “some drunk.” He would have been a respected intellectual elite of the day. Skills like that were highly prized in those days.
Incidentally, if you stop trying to read the Facsimiles in an Egyptian context, but rather in a context of ancient Canaanite theology – Joseph’s interpretation is downright uncanny in its accuracy.
In fact, the entire Book of Abraham demonstrates the sort of mastery of ancient Canaanite religion, cosmology and narrative that no man alive in Joseph Smith’s day possessed.
Which is why – on the evidence – I find the “he made it up” explanation improbable. He didn’t have the education to do so – no one alive on the planet in his day did.
Oh please.
“In fact, the entire Book of Abraham demonstrates the sort of mastery of ancient Canaanite religion, cosmology and narrative that no man alive in Joseph Smith’s day possessed.”
LDS Apologetics are the ones who make things up. And they make up some whoppers. If it wasn’t for the Word of Wisdom, I’d think they’d be drinking.
Seth @50:
Actually, Seth, MOST people here are talking about how Joseph Smith made stuff up.
The fact that YOU are not “talking about making up anything” doesn’t mean that “NO ONE is talking about making up anything.”
Oh, and this:
check it out:
Joseph Smith had all the education he needed, including a general understanding of astrology as it was understood in the early 19th century and so forth, to make up the absolutely crazy shit in the Book of Abraham.
Basically accuracy, Seth. Basic accuracy and a grasp of what is actually going on in the conversation–they would really help right now.
You seem to believe that ancient Egyptian is some sort of mystery, and that modern people haven’t actually succeeded in learning this language and how it is written.
This is a little bit like if someone who didn’t speak any French found a copy of “Le Petit Prince” and claimed it was a tale of Thor, written by Norse scribes around 50 AD — and reproduced a few pages accurately and lost the rest. Then, when someone who speaks French says “Actually, that’s Le Petit Prince, and you mistranslated the writing the you copied from it.” Your argument is equivalent to saying, “Of course his translation seems wrong if you ask someone who speaks French to translate it — what you really need is to have it translated by an expert in Old Norse!”
Chanson, you’re talking about two separate issues.
I was talking about the reading of the imagery in the Facsimiles. I wasn’t talking about the Egyptian text portions that have been dealt with.
Except of course that the facsimiles are Egyptian.
This is like looking at the illustrations in “Green Eggs and Ham” and saying, “You can’t judge them by American culture or modern English. You have to go back and interpret them according to the beliefs and languages of the Anglo-Saxons.”
I was talking about the Egyptian text even if you weren’t.
There are quite a number of places in the Facsimiles where JS specifically indicates a portion of Egyptian text and writes his translation of that portion of text. And the thing is that even the Mormon Egyptologists don’t claim that his translations of the texts are accurate.
For example, turn to Facsimile #3. It says “Prince of Pharoah, King of Egypt, as written above his hand.” OK, take the characters above his hand. They say something. Do they say “Prince of Pharoah, King of Egypt” or not? It’s not a complicated or ambiguous question.
Similarly the one mentioned earlier: “Shulem, one of the King’s principal waiters, as represented by the characters above his hand.” Do you have an example of an Egyptologist who positively affirms: “Yes, that’s what those characters say!”…? “Here, this group of characters says ‘waiter’ and this is the part that says ‘Shulem.'” I have my Egyptian dictionary handy, to follow the translation.
RE: #50
Except, Thomas Dick? Theologian Thomas Dick was basically spouting similar ideas to those that Joseph Smith incorporated into the Book of Abraham, and it’s not improbable that Smith was familiar with Dick’s ideas. So, again, which is more likely: that some Canaanite redactor placed the Book of Abraham in with a Breathing Permit and that part was conveniently burned or that Joseph Smith made it up, all the while cribbing Thomas Dick?
I’ll put my money on Joseph cribbing Dick!
(And, yes, that’s a great sentence.)
What similar ideas?
Look, I’m all for another good Spaulding conspiracy theory – but you’ll have to be specific.
The one with which I’m most familiar is Kolob, which Dick suggests in “The philosophy of a future state.” He uses terminology that Smith adopted and presents a number of similar ideas.
http://archive.org/details/thephilosophyofa00dickuoft
Dick never mentions the word “Kolob” – the closest he gets is mentioning the “throne of God.” It’s not completely implausible that Joseph came into contact with Dick’s book in the library at Manchester. But really, Joseph’s own theology in Abraham contradicts Dick on a lot of crucial points. It’s hard to believe he was using Dick as a model.
For one thing Joseph flatly denies Dick’s assertions of creation ex nihilo. Dick also stated that God existed alone and needed no inferior intelligences – that God was perfectly happy in his own solitary glory without need of us. Something that couldn’t be more antithetical to Joseph’s core theology.
Also Dick declared that God was a spirit without physical form and that we will never understand God, ever. All of which Joseph flatly refutes. I can’t see Dick really appealing to Joseph’s theological views – even if we grant for the sake of argument they were Joseph’s own creation.
I realize Brodie was a fan of this concept – but she didn’t really do much to solidify the connection beyond vague circumstantial inferences. This was always Brodie’s problem. She was eager to find a reason, ANY plausible reason for Joseph’s work other than the explanation Joseph offered. So really, all a connection had to be for her was theoretically possible for it to be good enough for her to use – even if it was unlikely.
I’m not suggesting it is perfect, but even the “throne of god” idea made it’s way into Joseph’s writings, a la:
From Facsimile 2.
https://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/abr/fac-2?lang=eng
profxm – the “throne of God” is also in the Bible.
Isn’t that a more likely spot for Joseph to borrow the imagery from than an contemporary theologian with whom Joseph fundamentally disagreed on many points?
Why? The fact that he didn’t slavishly reproduce every single idea of a model means that he couldn’t have read, reacted to, and based many of his own ideas on another text?
It’s like that super weird passage in the short book of Mormon, about infant baptism. It so obviously doesn’t belong there in terms of the narrative; it’s so clearly an addendum. That to me was always evidence that the book was a 19th century creation, because that was a 19th century debate.
It seems extremely likely that Joseph went through Dick’s various ideas, adopting the ones he liked, discarding the ones he didn’t. That’s evidence of influence, not evidence of lack of influence, especially given how anxious Joseph appears to correct what he apparently perceived as Dick’s errors.
In any event, it’s clear that your earlier assertion that “no man alive in Joseph Smith’s day possessed” this supposedly special “sort of mastery of ancient Canaanite religion” you claim Joseph Smith’s translation demonstrates is utterly wrong and without merit.
So is most of the stuff in the Book of Abraham. You previously argued that all that stuff reflected some sort of special knowledge. Now you’re saying anyone could have come up with it, because it’s in the bible?
RE: #62
But the reference to the throne of god combined with god living on another planet, both of which are ideas that could have been cribbed from Dick, are in the Book of Abraham. It could be coincidence, but it could also be influence.
And, returning to something I’ve repeated several times, we can think about this probabilistically: Which is more likely, that Joseph was sent divine knowledge while receiving an “inspired translation” of Egyptian papyrii or that he borrowed some ideas from a book he was reading and incorporated them into a new bit of writing that he claimed was based on some papyrii he had recently purchased? My money is on the latter.
@38 chanson,
chanson, you haven’t listened to the rules very well. I am not convincing you, you are convincing me. I want a smoking gun. Give me a smoking gun. Give me all the levels of Egyptian translation that proves that what Joseph wrote was incorrect. If you cannot prove him wrong by providing the correct translation of all the levels of Egyptian meaning, then you have only proved your ignorance of Egyptian and that you believe (have faith) that he is wrong. That’s not good enough. All that shows is that he still may be wrong or he still may be right.
I say he is right in his interpretation on one of those levels. So it is up to you to prove him wrong. I will accept all concrete evidence to the contrary. I am open to the evidence, but it must show indisputably that the interpretation is wrong for every level. The Shulem character criticism doesn’t work because on one of those levels the representation of the characters actually does show a high-ranking butler, just as Joseph said that they did in the characters above his hand. Dumb luck on Joseph’s part, I’m sure, right?
Let’s just brush that lucky guess aside and move onto another that you mentioned here, the prince of Pharaoh. Was Pharaoh, King of Egypt written above his hand? On one level, yes it was. Can we really call this dumb luck, chanson, and still consider ourselves intelligent people? Why not take a person who has never seen the facsimiles and ask them to do an interpretation without them seeing what Joseph came up with? How much dumb luck do you think the average person would have in guessing correctly any of these characters and figures? How much dumb luck should we ascribe to Joseph? At what point in all our insistence at ascribing dumb luck to Joseph’s correct interpretations do we ourselves begin to look like stubborn, dumb asses? At what point do we begin to make asses of ourselves, chanson?
So, please provide me the correct interpretation of all levels of the Egyptian characters so that I can see why you disbelieve the interpretation Joseph gave. Give me the smoking gun. If you cannot do that, (and that goes for anyone else,) then please be intellectually honest with me and admit that Joseph’s interpretation may have been correct on one of those levels. If you cannot admit that, then you are being dishonest.
Now, I ascribe Joseph’s correct interpretation to the power of God in him. You can disbelieve that if you will and still retain intellectual honesty. But what is easier to believe, that Joseph guessed all this stuff correctly or that God revealed it to him? Guessing is preposterous to me. Revelation is preposterous to you. But guessing is also preposterous to you. So, how does your mind deal with this? He had no way of learning this stuff during his time, for this knowledge was not available at that time. So, if he didn’t guess it, study it, or have it revealed by God, how is Joseph getting these interpretations correct? Aliens?
Again, I look forward to all the new Egyptian discoveries and scholarly works of antiquity. I predict that as we learn more about the past, Joseph will increasingly be vindicated. But you will still stay in your stubborn beliefs, won’t you?
So, let me get this straight, LDS Anarchist, you are claiming:
1) Every Egyptian heiroglyphic has 4 levels of meaning, according to you.
2) chanson would have to prove that Joseph got everything wrong on every level of meaning.
Yet, you give one source for their being 4 levels of meaning, and we don’t know how credible that source is. Also, you are making a supernatural claim, which means the burden of proof falls on you, not chanson, to prove that he was correct on at least one level, not on chanson to disprove the supernatural abilities of Smith. So, LDS Anarchist, I reject your assumption and your premise.
Go ahead and prove how he got everything right!
LDS Anarchist @66
Does this pompous nozzle really think he gets to establish rules for how things happen on MSP and how chanson has to interact with him?
Wow. That just might take the mansplaining cake.
Anarchist never go onto an atheist forum and try to claim they have the burden of proof.
Ever.
About anything.
You’ll discover a whole new world of hurtful words.
That said Anarchist, I think you’re being a bit unreasonable in your proof demands here.
Seth,
Never tell an anarchist not to do something.
@71:
Good thing then that you’ve shown that you’re not a real anarchist. As you’ve demonstrated so thoroughly by writing something like “chanson, you haven’t listened to the rules very well,” you have the utmost allegiance to rules. You formulate them, announce them, and expect to see them followed. You care nothing for and know nothing of anarchy.
Perhaps spellcheck screwed up on your name? Perhaps you mean to call yourself lds antichrist? It would fit.
Btw, Seth, this is not an atheist forum, this is a “A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.”
One more thing, Seth.
“The burden of proof” is on the shoulders of the non-religious quarter. People of faith do not have to prove anything. We rely on religious testimony, belief and faith.
I testify that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. I say that the Holy Ghost manifested this information to me and now I’m telling you. I don’t have to prove anything, merely to testify to what was manifested to me.
The unbeliever, on the other hand, must furnish proof, for he cannot rely on mere religious testimony, belief and faith. He says, “Joseph Smith didn’t translate the Book of Abraham correctly.” I say, “Prove he didn’t.” And he must, otherwise he shows himself as much a man of faith as me.
So, no, Seth, I am not being unreasonable in my proof demands.
Well, best of luck pursuing your argument then.
As for who this community is for – you can draw your own conclusions about that from your own reception. I’ve certainly drawn my own.
Thanks for the pat on the back. I figure this forum is for me, since I’m someone interested in Mormonism. Based on the warm welcome I have received, I’m seriously considering taking up a permanent residency here.
Anarchist, I see you’d like to turn this into a battle of “my experts vs. your experts”, but the point is that this is a question where anyone reading this can check the experts’ work.
To illustrate what I mean by that, have a look at this page that I scanned at random from “Egyptian Language, Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge:
Now, I am willing to grant Seth’s argument that the parts that are just pictures might mean different things to different people. I am only talking about the parts where Joseph Smith claims to translate texts written in Ancient Egyptian language which are visible on the Facsimile (namely much of Facsimile #3 and almost all of the translated portion of Facsimile #2).
Do you have an example of someone who knows how to read and translate Ancient Egyptian writing who claims that Joseph Smith’s translations of those texts are accurate?
If so, did that person produce an explanation of the translation (like the page from Budge above) so that we can see that the translations are accurate?
As far as I’ve seen from the apologetic literature, even the Mormons who can read ancient Egyptian don’t claim that the text portions of the facsimiles are translated accurately. But if you can produce one who does make that claim, let’s have a look.
Maybe I should start my own religion! What do you guys think?
chanson, we seem to be talking past each. I’ll try to put this in the simplest possible of terms and maybe then you will understand what is necessary. This is not a battle of “my experts vs. your experts.†I’ll accept all the experts, yours and mine, as telling the facts. But as we are dealing with a multi-leveled language (Egyptian), to make an accurate assessment of Joseph’s wrongness, I’ll need to know all the possible meanings of the characters, both the basic, literal translation as well all the possible high-level symbolism.
I tried to use Hebrew as an example of a multi-leveled language, but apparently you (and others) didn’t get my drift. So let’s use a language a little closer to home as an example, say, English. Let’s take the double entendre.
A sign reads:
You might wonder if you’ll see the salesman who sold you your bed waiting patiently behind it come nightfall to see if you truly enjoy your new sleep experience. (Now this might be termed the basic, literal translation.)
Or you may just believe that the store that sold you the bed feels so strongly about their beds that they are guaranteeing your comfort. (This might be termed a high-level symbolic meaning.)
Now, let’s imagine that “We stand behind every bed we sell” is an Egyptian phrase and that Joseph Smith translates it into “We guarantee your comfort.” Then along comes an Egyptologist and he says, “This man Joseph Smith is a fool. This phrase has nothing to do with guarantees or comfort. The man is an obvious fraud! The characters are talking of standing and beds as anyone who has studied Egyptian knows!”
Now, the expert is correct that the phrase is talking of beds and standing. That is technically correct, on a very basic level. But his assessment of Joseph’s translation is flat out wrong because Joseph’s translation was more advanced, giving the deep-level symbolism of the phrase. In other words, both the expert and Joseph are correct in their translations, but only the expert has shown himself as the ignorant fool.
In like manner, for scholarship to prove Joseph wrong, it is not enough to give the basic level meanings. The deeper levels must also be brought out and shown to contradict what Joseph wrote.
Remember, you are dealing with me, a believer, therefore, if there is any plausible high-level symbolism that can fit the characters and which match Joseph’s translation, you have failed to prove your case that Joseph’s translation is wrong. Good luck and Godspeed.
Since I’m in the mood…
All languages to some extent are multi-leveled. For example, take any person you want and teach them a written foreign language, say Spanish or French, or some other language that they don’t already know. Teach them enough vocabulary to be able to read, perhaps, a newspaper, but don’t teach them a single idiom. Now have them read a literary work filled with idioms and see how much they understand.
Although they will understand the words on the page, the deep meanings of the idioms will entirely escape them. Every culture in the world develops idioms in their languages. It’s just human nature.
From the Wikipedia:
So, do the Egyptologists, I wonder, know the Egyptian idioms?
Before we begin “to make an accurate assessment of Joseph’s wrongness” let’s see if we can find any evidence of his rightness.
I see before me a text, written in Ancient Egyptian, and beside it a translation written by Joseph Smith. A few seconds of Googling will turn up some translations of the texts by people who know Ancient Egyptian, and none of them match what Joseph Smith wrote.
So my question is this:
1. Are you claiming that Joseph Smith’s translations of the visible passages written in Ancient Egyptian are accurate? Yes or no?
2. If yes, can you back this claim with a page (like the one @77) explaining the translation?
I’m perfectly happy to discuss the finer points of Ancient Egyptian writing (Budge’s chapter 3 on “Hieroglyphs as Ideograms, Phonetics, and Determinatives” is quite interesting), but first we need to establish what question we’re even answering.
An accurate assessment of rightness or wrongness (take your pick) requires the same thing. What is needed in this case are all the levels of possible meaning. The question to ask is not whether what you found on Google matched what Joseph wrote. The question to ask is whether what you found on Google (or in a book) covers all possible levels of meaning. If it does not, it is insufficient to make an assessment of either rightness or wrongness in Joseph’s case, because his translation is high-level symbolism.
How do we know this? Because you gave two examples of his correct translations already: Shulem and Pharaoh. Neither translation works on the basic level (and so you thought they were incorrect because that is the only level you were looking at), but both are uncannily accurate on a highly symbolic level. (In the case of Shulem, identifying Osiris with a high-ranking butler is plausible in Egyptian lore. That’s high-level symbolism, baby! And the cross-dressing prince is 100% pure Egyptian. Totally plausible in Egyptian lore, very heady stuff and so deeply symbolic as to almost have been revealed by some divine source. Score two for Joseph. We better stop there. He’s beginning to make the intellectuals look like idiots.) Therefore we can assume that all his other translations work on this very deep level of understanding.
Now, if you don’t want to make that assumption, then at the very least we must say that two sets of characters were translated on deeper…shall we call them idiomatic?…levels. The rest of the translations don’t work on the basic levels, so we can say they may or may not work on deeper “idiomatic” levels. Until scholarship gives us the deeper levels, we can’t say for sure one way or another that Joseph was wrong. You can choose to believe he was wrong, but that isn’t based on any facts or scholarship, because all you are working with is the basic level.
Therefore, unless you know all the deeper levels, it is intellectually dishonest to say that Joseph’s translations are wrong. The most you can say is that they don’t work on a basic level, which does nothing to prove their rightness or wrongness.
Now to answer your questions. 1, Yes. 2, I back everything up with my own personal revelations given to me by the power of the Holy Ghost. I am a man of faith. What the hell do I need a page in a book for to back up a religious claim? My claim that Joseph’s translations are accurate is not based on scholarship, but on the revelations of God to me. The Holy Ghost doesn’t work with a limited data set like scholars do. So when She says something’s true, I believe. But scholarship will eventually bear out everything he translated. The more information about the past they discover and the more they learn about these ancient languages, the clearer the picture everyone will get about just how right he was. But by then unbelievers will just ditch the scholars and think of some other reason not to believe Joseph’s testimony. I think the “alien theory” I mentioned above could be a good candidate.
No one knows how Joseph translated the Book of Abraham. Did he use the Urim and Thummim? Did he just do it by revelation sans instruments? We call it a translation, but it has more of an interpretive feel to it, which makes me suspect the use of the Urim and Thummim (Nephite interpreters).
From the Wikipedia:
When we think of interpretation, we think of oral speech. But the Nephites called the Urim and Thummim interpreters because they enabled a person to convey the meaning of the person who wrote a written text as if they were there explaining what they meant to say. In other words, the devices allowed for exceptional accuracy. You weren’t working so much with the words on a page, which are quite easily misconstrued, as is so amply demonstrated by many of the comments of this blog, but with the thoughts and intentions and feelings of the original author. This understanding was then conveyed in the seer’s language, using whatever vocabulary he happened to have.
@74 LDS anachrist:
The non-religious quarter–or even the more reasonable religious quarter, since there are many religious people who know, quite fully, that claims like yours, LDSA, are false–has proven to the satisfaction of almost all reasonable people that Joseph Smith was an utter fraud.
The fact that you “rely on religious testimony, belief and faith” for your ideas means that your demands that someone prove something to you is dishonest and disingenuous, since you have absolutely no intention of accepting any proof.
In other words, you are a liar and a fraud, just like the false prophet whose lies you worship.
But here’s the thing: I know Joseph Smith is a liar, a lecher and a fraud not only through intellectual means, but through faith. I am actually a religious person, though I choose not to discuss my faith here. But I do have a testimony of certain things, so I will bear it now, and you may then rely on it.
I bear testimony that Joseph Smith was a liar, a lecher and a fraud. I know, through faith and prayer, that he was an agent of darkness who intentionally deceived as many people as he could. He did it because he desired the praise of men, the bodies of women, and wealth. I bear testimony that the church Joseph Smith founded is tainted by his greed, his lust, and his lies.
This isn’t to say that the church never does any good, or that all who belong to it are as evil as its founder. No. It is not the whore of the earth, merely the whore of Joseph Smith. But even whores can do good things and bear good children.
LDS Anarchist, LEAVE YOUR WHORE. CEASE YOUR ABOMINATIONS.
God is not pleased with you.
p.s. How many foreign languages do you speak? I”m guessing none, given how you discuss idioms and layers of language and so forth. If you do speak any, what are they and how did you learn them? How do you know when you speak a foreign language that you are saying what you think you’re saying? How do you trust the idioms?
Every word is a symbol. That is words symbolize a concrete object or an abstract concept–“tree,” “love.” for example. A symbol can have more than a single symbolic meaning, but the context generally limits the range of meanings, which is certainly true of meanings, as in your example a merchant standing behind his/her product.
So, I agree with you that words have both connotative and denotative meanings. But what I hear you saying, and of course I am reading at a basic level and you may be writing at a deeply symbolic level (to use your words), which means that we cannot communicate–but I’m interpreting your words to say that Joseph used a word meaning that so called language experts have not yet discovered. Once they do Joseph will be vindicated.
Is that what you are saying, or do you have specific examples that Joseph’s translation of certain words has been verified as an acceptable translation by language experts?
Plausible and correct are not automatically equal. The fact that some of translations are plausible does not mean that they are in fact accurate representations of the original text’s meaning.
No, we don’t have to say that. All you even claim to have shown is that the translations are plausible. There is no idiomatic level on which “plausible” means “absolutely conclusive incontrovertible proof of an assertion.”
People do translation all the time. Some do it for a living; some do it for necessity. Not just vocabulary but the art of translation can be taught and learned, without supernatural means. http://www.writinguniversity.org/department/translation-workshop
No, you better keep going. Because finding out that you think “plausible” translations are proof of “correct” translations is pretty useful. Keep writing. Keep explaining. Keep show how weak the basis for your argument and your faith really is.
I would join chanson’s religion in 78.
Also, wanted to point out that we know what hieroglyphs mean because of the Rosetta Stone (not to be confused with the language learning software).
I’ve actually seen the Rosetta Stone in person. On it, it has examples of ancient greek and egyptian. The stone hadn’t been found when the Book of Abraham was translated. No one at the time (JS translated the BofA) had any idea what hieroglyphs stood for.
Of course, if you agree with LDS Anarchist’s explanation, the rosetta stone only explained one level of Ancient Egyptian.
Oh, and this:
It’s actually a shitty translation, a bad freshman comp level paraphrase. To stand behind the quality of the beds you make and sell is not at all the same thing as guaranteeing the comfort of anyone who buys your bed. They might have back pain. They might discover, once they get the bed home and sleep on it, that the bed is actually too soft or too hard for their preference. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the bed–it might be the best-made bed in the world.
But of course you haven’t guaranteed their comfort, only the quality and workmanship of the bed you sold them. Their comfort is out of your control.
So only a fool would say that “We stand behind every bed we sell” is acceptably translated as “We guarantee your comfort.”
and that has nothing to do with idiomatic constructions. That has to do with understanding the basic notion of a guarantee and what it is actually possible to guarantee. You have to be smart enough to understand that concept in the first place.
And again, people who work in translation are aware of this stuff. The concept of idioms is a basic one for people who deal with translation on a regular basis. They account for this stuff in their work.
Actually it was found in 1799, and, as the Greek was easily translated, work on deciphering the Egyptian began almost immediately. A full translation was announced in the 1820s. But most of the world didn’t pay attention or care that scholars were learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and most of the world considered them indecipherable.
In other words, Joseph could have learned, by reading better newspapers and/or asking God better questions, that people would someday be able to verify some of his translations. Or perhaps he did know that means of checking his translations were becoming available, but he was too much of an arrogant egomaniac to care. As LDS Anachrist keeps saying, you’d have to be intellectually dishonest not to admit this very real possibility.
Did you hear the one about the psychiatrist at the mental hospital. He had three patients who each thought they were Jesus Christ. He put them in a room together to see the effect of meeting each other.
They each remained supremely confident that that they were Jesus Christ.
And all the kings egyptologists and all the kings near eastern archaeologists can not prove to those three, that they are not Jesus Christ.
@91: Suzanne–maybe all three of them were Jesus Christ. If Christ can be everywhere at once, why shouldn’t he choose to live three simultaneous mortal lives? After all, in an infinite universe, it is possible that a dead Jewish guy would reincarnate in three guys at once. We’d be intellectually dishonest not to admit that this is so. Right? LDS Anachirst? You’ll admit that this is possible, right? You of course would not want to be intellectually dishonest.
OK, so you don’t claim that any of the people who have translated the visible ancient Egyptian texts written on the Facsimiles affirm that Joseph Smith’s translations of them are correct.
To paraphrase your remarks @82 & @83, the reason Joseph Smith’s translations aren’t accurate literal translations is because he’s translating the ‘deeper “idiomatic†levels’ — but you don’t provide any link to any translation of the literal level, much less an explanation of how those literal sentences correspond to Joseph Smith’s translations on an idiomatic level.
That’s all I wanted to establish. If you want to continue to have an apopgetico-philosophical discussion of what it means for a translation of a written text to be “right” or “wrong”, go ahead.
News of scholarly discoveries probably didn’t travel fast in those days. I think Joseph Smith was aware that there was a lot of interest in translating Egyptian writing (but not how advanced it already was), and he was sincerely interested in trying his hand at deciphering it himself. That’s what his “Egyptian Grammar” would suggest.
He also tried his hand at learning Hebrew and German. Though formally uneducated, he was a bright fellow.
LDS Anachrist @80:
It’s impossible to teach someone enough vocabulary to be able to read a newspaper and not have them learn a great many idioms in the process.
A case in point: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/us/politics/congress-ready-to-start-work-on-budget.html?hp&_r=0
here’s the headline:
Here’s a paragraph from the article:
Take a crack at and be under fire are idioms.
More to the point, the first semester of any foreign language course is spent learning basic idioms. “How are you?” is, after all, an idiom. “What’s up?” is an idiom. “I need to use the bathroom” is an idiomatic euphemism for “I need to pee or shit.” “Everybody” is an idiomatic expression for “a lot of or all the people.” The translation is French is not “tous les corps” or “chaque corps,” but “tout le monde.” The translation in Chinese is not “mei yige shenti” but “da jya,” or “big family.” And yet, when we translate “da jya” into English, we don’t say “big family” but “everybody” or “everyone”–though not, for some reason, everysoul or everymind.
In short, LDS Anachrist, you have no real idea what idioms truly are or how they function in language, in second-language acquisition, or in translation.
therefore, nothing you say about idioms can be taken seriously.
He was homeschooled, by relatives who worked as teachers.
We recognize homeschooling today as an acceptable means of gaining a genuine education. I’ve had very bright, ambitious college students who were homeschooled. Why should people 200 years ago have been any different?
There’s literal:
All of which literally means the English idiom “kick the bucket,” which doesn’t literally mean that one kicks a bucket, but that one dies.
In other words, there’s literal and then there’s literal.
When I said Joseph literally translated the Book of Abraham from the Egyptian on the scroll, I meant he did it literally. Capeesh?
Now apply the same principle to Egyptian.
Btw, a double entendre is not something that can be read more than one way. It is something that is intended to be read more than one way.
For instance, “Joseph Smith felt a burning in his bosom when he contemplated loving service for all mankind–and an even stronger burning when he contemplated loving service for all womankind.”
THAT is a double entendre, because “service” also has a sexual meaning. Whereas “We stand behind every bed we sell” is not a double entendre–unless it is intended it as a dirty joke.
Some languages can do things that other languages simply cannot. Hebrew, of course, is the prime example of that, but Egyptian appears to be another one. You can use these languages like other languages and produce a Rosetta Stone, but they are also useful for communicating religious mysteries, meaning things for initiates only.
The Book of Abraham deals specifically in such religious mysteries, so although you can read it like a Rosetta Stone, that is only the basic level and will only reveal one layer of possible meaning. Joseph’s translation was on the religious elite, priestly or initiate level, not on the level of the Rosetta Stone.
@98:
Oh, heavens, you poor little thing. Did you find some translation software?
Do you not realize that translation software is programmed to understand idioms?
For instance, consider the French you quote:
Why on earth would “eat dandelions by the roots” literally mean “kick the bucket”?
It is self-evidently not a literal translation for “kick the bucket,” because “kick” is “donner des coups de pied” and “bucket” is “godet.”
Rather, it is an idiom for “to die.”
In other words, the translation is not literal but figurative.
In other words, there’s literal and then there are people who don’t understand what literal is.
Sure. When you said Joseph literally translated the Book of Abraham from the Egyptian on the scroll, you had no idea what you meant or what you were saying.
Sure. The principle here is that you don’t understand idioms, literal translations, or figurative translations.
Therefore, applying the same principle, you don’t know what you’re talking about and all your points are inaccurate.
Never mind any scrolls. Joseph Smith included the Faksimiles in the Pearl of Great Price to support the claim that he had translated an Egyptian text into English.
The Faksimiles do not mean what Joseph Smith said they did. That ought to be the end of the discussion for any reasonable person.
Of course, people can disagree with that but those people would be less than honest or exceptionally stupid. Sorry but that’s all there is to say about that “dispute.”
Obviously it doesn’t end the discussion for anyone but a religious or atheist fundamentalist Hellmut. Saying – “he got the facsimiles wrong, so I can ignore the rest of it” is close-minded.
It is. Notice who is arguing that the question is still open, and notice how reasonable their arguments are.
Seth,
I been curious about a couple of things. Are you still on board with LDs Anarchist arguments regarding the Book of Abraham? He has born his testimony, in a typical standard way. Does your testimony parallel his, particularly that his Holy Ghost inspired witness trumps anything else? And, finally, how do you feel about him politely telling you to mind your own business?
Just curious.
No, he’s on his own making this argument. I haven’t been following it too closely. What I have followed is interesting, but I can’t say I agree with it in all particulars.
I don’t mind him telling me to mind my own business whatsoever – since it was what I was planning on doing already. And since I’d already told him pretty-much that he was on his own with this one, the response was only fair, don’t you think?
As for witness of the Holy Spirit trumping all else… I don’t have enough from him to answer that anyway.
What counts as a witness from the Holy Spirit for one thing?
Secondly, I’m not particularly eager to start ranking which types of witness are more potent than others and how much so. Call me agnostic on that subject if you like.
And yet another take on the new heading:
“The Book of Abraham is identified as an inspired translation of the “writings of Abraham,†not a translation of “Egyptian papyri†that contain the writings of Abraham. And with this single statement, the Church has successfully thrown out a plethora of poorly made apologetic videos and articles trying desperately to prove that somehow, the Book of Abraham literally appeared on the Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith held in his possession.”
http://www.withoutend.org/book-abraham-apologetic-war-pt-1/
“What counts as a witness from the Holy Spirit for one thing?”
Isn’t that the question that people on this board has raised, to which you have objected so strenuously?
No Parker, that is not the “question” that people on this board raised.
The people on this board you are referring to were not asking questions about what the spirit was at all. They’d already pretty firmly made up their minds about what they thought the “witness of the holy spirit” was.
Parker, nothing in that heading change prevents anyone from arguing a literal translation whatsoever.
All it does is allow people to actually posit the “catalyst theory” without immediately getting shouted at by ex-Mormon fundamentalists about how the LDS Church doesn’t allow that theory.
110 Maybe so, but you don’t help them out when you suggest you don’t know either.
111 Am I to read that as a dismissal of what you consider a retarded statement? So back up and try again, because your comment doesn’t make sense. He isn’t attacking the Book of Abraham at all, just poorly constructed speculative apologetics (and have we not been exposed to that recently), which it seems to me you would be happy to have not cluttering up the world that you work so hared to defend.
What makes you think I want my religion simplified Parker?
He’s got a point, Parker. Look how hard he’s working to complicate the Book of Abraham so much more than it deserves.
Actually, since you asked the question, Seth, my reading of you is that you need as much complexity in every phase of your life as possible.
Well-observed sir.
As Holly and Parker have explained, translators do take into account idioms and multiple meanings. So, what you’re left with is the claim that all of the Egyptian-language texts that Joseph Smith translated in the Facsimiles — though they say things that are familiar and clearly legible to people who speak ancient Egyptian — they just happen to have additional (unknown-to-anyone-who-speaks-ancient Egyptian) idiomatic meanings. All of them. And this is being asserted without evidence by someone who doesn’t claim even the most rudimentary ability to read ancient Egyptian.
Even though Seth and Anarchist have done a pretty impressive job of demonstrating that an apologist can explain away anything for someone who wants to believe, I hope you guys at least understand why many people see this as a “smoking gun”. If you don’t, please review my Facsimile #4 @78 — because that’s what the BoA facsimiles look like to people who aren’t already convinced that Joseph Smith is a prophet. That’s why the “safe” route for the CoJCoL-dS is to back away from the claim that the Book of Abraham was translated from those papyrus scrolls.
Parker @108 — I was going to link to that article to!! It’s really interesting. In particular, he makes a very interesting point surrounding the fact that the papyrus scrolls are from completely the wrong time period.
Here’s a representative quote:
Seth, Anarchist — go give this guy what for!! Now that you’ve won the debate here, will you please go bear your testimony to this guy that he just doesn’t understand ancient Egyptian idioms?
p.s. I’m not kidding. I know it’s easy for you guys to dismiss us as “atheist fundamentalists” (@103). Well, David Bokovoy is “a serious student of the Bible and the Ancient Near East, and a believing Latter-day Saint who accepts the Book of Abraham as scripture.” I would be very curious to know his reaction to Anarchist’s “unknown idioms” theory and Seth’s “a Canaanite scribe copied some Egyptian texts and intended them to mean something else” theory.
The parentheticals in the Book of Abraham actually have the feel of a scribe writing explanatory commentary. See here:
http://ldsanarchy.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/the-two-authors-of-the-book-of-abraham/
As far as I know, I’m the only one who has either noticed this or brought it up.
LDS Anarchist — I’m glad you’ve started commenting on our blog.
I would like to mention, however, that debating apologetics isn’t really the point of Main Street Plaza. Most of our regulars have been out of the CoJCoL-dS for a long time, aren’t itching to deconvert people, and don’t really care if you believe Joseph Smith’s annotations of the Book of Abraham facsimiles are accurate translations or not.
If you engage people on these questions, obviously we’ll respond, but note that the topic of the OP wasn’t “How can we see that the Book of Abraham disproves Joseph Smith’s translating abilities?” but rather “What do you think of the fact that the CoJCoL-dS has decided to change the claims made in the introductions to the standard works?” So, a little more current-events oriented.
I read your blog and find it quite interesting. (You’ve perhaps seen that I link to you occasionally in SiOB.) I think it would be unfortunate if our discussion here got stuck on repeating some apologetic arguments that have been covered I-don’t-know-how-many times on apologetics sites all over the Internet.
That said, if you’d like to take up your debate over whether the Book of Abraham was really translated from the Egyptian scrolls or not with David Bokovy and the folks on Worlds Without End (Bokovy says it wasn’t), I would be very curious to see what they think of your theories, including the one you just linked.
Chanson, I think Blake Ostler is doing just fine engaging Bokovoy over there, I’ll leave him to it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Bokovoy has already encountered the Canaanite Redaction theory and engaged it somewhat online.
I don’t really “bear my testimony” to anyone the way most people think of the term. And of course, I’m not going to let your use of the phrase “explain away anything” slide. I think in large measure, it’s the non-believers in the BoA who are “explaining away” a good deal of things. That’s one of the primary reasons for keeping the rhetorical battle over the BoA “simple.”
As it happens, I don’t dismiss everyone here as “atheist fundamentalists.” Some of the arguments presented here are certainly fundamentalist. And you unquestionably have a few fundamentalists here as regulars. But I’m talking more about a world view than individuals. While I occasionally personalize debates, it’s generally unintentional.
By the way – I do acknowledge that the BoA is a difficult apologetics issue. I do not think the arguments from the critics are “stupid.” I think the argument over the City Creek Mall is stupid. I don’t think the argument over the Book of Abraham is stupid. Hopefully that clarifies things a bit.
“I don’t really ‘bear my testimony’ to anyone the way most people think of the term.”
I would very much like to hear your testimony.
@122 The “bear testimony” remark was not directed at you, it was a reference to the last paragraph of Anarchist’s comment @82. Thanks for your clarifications.
Seth @122:
The fact that you generally don’t know and can’t control what you’re doing in a conversation isn’t really a mark in your favor, Seth, and is one of the reasons others find it hard to converse with you. You really ought to work harder to be more aware of what you’re doing and try to make your comments match your intentions.
@120
You know, there’s this thing you can do with writing: you can intentionally shape it to sound a particular way. Many writers do it quite deliberately. Fiction writers can make up conversations that never happened and shape it to sound like realistic dialogue. You don’t read it and say, “Oh, this dialogue sounds like stuff real people would say! That’s proof that these supposedly fictional characters are actually real people!” Academics writing scholarly articles can shape their work to sound like just about every other scholarly article ever written. You don’t read one and say, ‘Oh, this is proof that a particular author actually found this text lying around and decided to publish it under her name!” Someone writing explanatory commentary, even completely made up commentary for a completely made up text, can shape it to sound like other commentary he’s read. You don’t read it and say, “Oh, this is proof that the commentary was written thousands of years ago!”
At least, you don’t if you’re reasonable and sane.
In fact, you’ll note that an individual writer can go back and forth between quite a few different voices. Having written in one voice in one text doesn’t prevent the writer from adopting another voice or other voices, either in the same text or subsequent texts.
While we’re at it, people have written fake scripture. The fact that the bible has a particular “feel” to it doesn’t mean others can’t try to reproduce that feel, though many reproductions are decidedly inferior–the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham and all the other fictional works of Joseph Smith, for instance.
If you want to see how it’s done, watch this: http://youtu.be/xOrgLj9lOwk
@121 Holly,
Perhaps you blinked and missed it, but you will notice that my first comment in #16 gave my own understanding of where the BoA came from, which allowed people from the get-go to know my believer’s take on this issue, an important thing to know before engaging in the premise of the post.
In #25 I then responded to a question Suzanne had asked.
You got offended by my use of the word “anti” and then you, chanson, engaged me in debating apologetics in #30, the very thing that you say “isn’t really the point of Main Street Plaza.” Now, perhaps you didn’t mean it as engagement, but I took it as such, for you had veered into new territory: the accuracy of the translation, which is an apologetics topic.
Now, you said,
In like manner, since you engaged me on this question, I responded. If you do not want this forum to engage in apologetics, then not initiating it yourself would be a good place to start, don’t you think?
What followed in #31, etc., was my response to your comment over accuracy in #30, in which I turned the tables on you and said that the burden of proof is on your shoulders, not mine.
That was duly noted and answered by me back in #36, again which you apparently missed.
Now, if you want to drop the whole “debate” and “apologetics’ thing, fine, we can agree to drop it and we can agree to disagree. I don’t find many of the apologetics issues all that interesting, any how.
However, I will make an observation concerning this blog, because although debating apologetics is apparently off the table, debate and more specifically, contention seems to be the standard fare here. Pretty much any view point I’ve brought up on this forum, of whatever topic, has been summarily contradicted by someone here. The impression I get is that if one expresses a believer’s view, that whatever that believer said must be immediately struck down (contradicted) and called nonsense.
The quickest way to end a conversation is to insult the intelligence of the person you are talking to. No one stands for being called an idiot or a dupe. I unintentionally insult the intelligence of people all the time by my use of the word ignorant to describe people who have not studied certain topics (people instead take it as an insult and think I’m calling them stupid) or in other ways, such as when I introduce new topics or understandings a person has never heard of from any other quarter and doesn’t know how to respond to it because it takes time for it to sink in and be processed. (For example, my use of “spirit is a type of plasmoid” and backing it up with D&C 131. None of you had ever heard of such a concept and could only ridicule it, even though it sorta made sense to your minds as they scrambled to comprehend the principle.) So, I’m used to people being offended by what I say or write.
Nevertheless, what I notice on this forum is not the standard offense taken by something new that I’ve introduced, but a general feeling of hatred for any support shown toward the gospel, the church or Joseph Smith. This a very different feeling and it causes a knee-jerk response. I’ve often joked off-line that I bet I could make a comment here that the sky is blue and someone would follow up with an, “No, it isn’t!” In other words, the contradictions seem to be made for the sake of being contradictory, because the person who said the sky is blue is a believer.
All that said, I will continue to comment from a believer’s perspective on anything I find here that catches my attention and which I find interesting. If that pisses people off, so be it.
Correction:
#127 should have been addressed to:
@121 chanson
not Holly.
LDS anachrist @127:
Right. And it’s the understanding and point of view not just of a believer, but of an apologist. You were an apologist out of the gate, and offered no one anything to respond to but apologist ideas.
You also go out of your way to be insulting, my little man–either that, or you’re incapable of understanding the meaning of many of your statements (which further undermines your already dubious assertions about how language works). Notice your very first words @127: “Perhaps you blinked and missed it, but….”
which is an insulting way of saying that someone missed something you consider important.
You’ve been guilty of what you say is the quickest way to end a conversation, and then you profess astonishment that people not only disagree with you, but react personally to your personally insulting statements.
Perhaps you are too ignorant (that’s not an insulting word, right, according to you?) to ever have heard the old adage, “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.” You might google it.
You are, after all, a guest here. You’ve been a very badly behaved guest who, for no reason except his own sense of entitlement, has expected to be treated nicely by hosts he’s rude to.
First, it’s super flattering to know that this blog is so important to you that you often discuss it off-line and have come up jokes about it! Wow! You must really care about what people here think of you, if you spend that much time discussing the blog offline!
Second, why don’t you sometime try making here a statement as self-evidently accurate as “the sky is blue” or as universally accepted as “the earth is round” and see what kind of reaction you get? Remember: it has to be self-evidently true or generally accepted as fact–you can’t expect people, as you have in the past, to accept that a “plausible” translation is undeniably true.
It’s part of the whole empirical approach to life: rather than simply asserting that something is probably one way or another and believing your assertion, you can actually test it out and see if you’re right. Provided you’re interested in having an accurate view of the world instead of just feeling justified in your own assertions and prejudices, it can be a really useful thing.
p.s. Still wondering: do you actually speak a single foreign language? While the spirit has given me an answer I accept as accurate, I do find it useful to get external verification. Doing so helps me hone my ability to hear and understand spiritual confirmations.
to demonstrate that people who study language actually have genuine expertise and are aware not only of idioms but of all sorts of details and nuances and arcana that laypeople are generally utterly oblivious to, I offer this fun little Ted talk. it’s seven minutes long, and explains texting in a very cool way: http://youtu.be/yoF2vdLxsVQ
I was just looking at the comments on that thread, and even Blake Ostler doesn’t appear to be arguing that JS translated the Book of Abraham directly from the papyrus:
In other words, he also uses the “Joseph Smith received the BoA as a revelation” to explain away the inconvenient writings on the Facsimiles.
I think it’s funny that nobody in that discussion even acknowledges this comment:
I can’t decide if that commenter is serious or if he’s a troll, but it would have been interesting to see the faithful apologists answer that one.
Of course, I think it is essentially answered in part 2 of that discussion. Here’s my favorite part:
In other words, now the Book of Abraham — like the Book of Mormon — can be transferred to the realm of the non-falsifiable!! Very tempting, don’t you think?
Of course it’s tempting. But it also has a lot of support for it as well. It’s not just being motivated by a desire to make the “walls” as unassailable as possible.
Just for clarity sake, here are the major apologetic approaches to defending the Book of Abraham as things now stand:
1. The missing scrolls. There were additional scrolls that were lost, or portions of scroll that were lost and are no longer in human possession. This argument hinges on historical descriptions of the scrolls and their measurements.
2. The interpretation overlay. The book of the Dead is what is on the scrolls, but ancient Hebrews interpreted the Egyptian text and gave it a meaning associated with Abraham. Joseph translated the Hebrew/Canaanite applied meaning.
3. The catalyst. The text Joseph received was by revelation and did not correspond to any text on any of the scrolls in his possession. The scrolls served only as a catalyst for receiving the revelation.
As you mentioned #3 is probably one of the most newly popular theories among apologists and denizens of the bloggernacle. Bokovoy has openly declared enthusiastic support for this idea.
Kevin Barney has been the latest to outline the interpretation overlay argument with his Canaanite redactor idea that I mentioned. I personally like this theory the best, but it has it’s problems. In fact, I wouldn’t even go so far as to call Barney a strong advocate for this argument. I have reason to believe from his online material that he actually favors #3.
As for #1, that argument is favored by John Gee and he’s been having the back-and-forth over scroll thickness that we mentioned earlier in our discussion. It should be pointed out that there is pretty strong evidence that Joseph Smith had another scroll in his possession besides the one that survived. And we certainly don’t have that scroll.
I’m open to #3, and I could probably live with being forced eventually by the evidence to accept that argument. However, I’m reluctant to go there unless the case is too compelling to disregard.
I detected just a hint of wistfulness in your remarks Chanson, and I have to say I agree with the sentiment somewhat. Don’t worry though – I’ll be sure not to make too much of it.
Right, but my point was that @122 you seemed to be suggesting that Blake Ostler was supporting either theory #1 or #2 (like you), but his comment seems to say he is supporting #3.
You detect incorrectly. I’m just curious as to why you and Anarchist spent so much effort trying to convince us that the Book of Abraham was literally written on those scrolls that JS had, whereas you don’t seem to care that none of the believing apologists are strongly arguing in favor of that position.
No, that’s correct. I’m not too worried about the other apologists taking a different preference than me. And I didn’t mean to say Ostler agrees with me either. I simply felt he was doing a good job qualifying a lot of Bokovoy’s assertions in that discussion.
Thing is – none of these theories exist in total isolation from each other. They’re all available as overlapping and somewhat supporting theories. For instance, you can believe in both 1 and 2 at the same time. 3 tends to sit a bit more alone from the others, but even that is still looming over my opinions like some sort of fallback position.
Seth @132:
Several of my friends posted on facebook about a display on the BOA that they saw yesterday at the Church History Library in a special one day only display–including original sections of the original papyri. My friends included photos.
And guess what? There were sections that Joseph didn’t even claim to translate. Quite a few of them, apparently.
Given that he never claimed to have translated all of the scroll, how does its size prove anything?
Holly, Joseph Smith was a man. Size proves everything!
🙂
(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)
I read the article that ProfXM linked earlier. In a nutshell, it’s this:
There was a scroll that had been rolled in a cylinder for a couple of thousand years containing the ordinary funeral documents of the mummy. Apologists claim that the cylinder contained the Book of Abraham in addition to the standard breathing papers of the deceased, but the paper showed that the scroll was the right length to contain the book of breathing and nothing else.
@137: Right. And I’m pointing out that there were untranslated texts, so the size of the scroll has to account for them as well. You start factoring in these untranslated texts and whatever had to be there because the apologists claim JS did translate that–and how big does the darn thing get? I mean, to invoke Profxm @136, just how much of a man was Joseph?
Scroll length is currently a completely disputed topic.
Then it’s probably not a very solid basis for any sort of proof of the BOA’s authenticity, is it, Seth? Which I believe has been part of the point of this thread from the beginning.