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Is the Book of Abraham proof that Joseph Smith was a fraud? Our critics certainly seem to think so. I mean, it's an open and shut case, right? They found the papyri and Joseph's notebooks, and the translation does not match, right? Well, a few months ago, my friend Hayden Carroll and I were digging into this topic and found some of the newest research. And to be honest, it blew our minds. This is a game changer. The bottom line is that the critics are simply wrong and demonstrably have been making some really bad assumptions about the documents and papyri for at least the last 50 years. I know this is a long one, but I promise if you stick around to the end, you will never see this topic the same again. Here is Hayden with the details.
So, recently an ex-Mormon apologist named Kobby Reddish went on multiple ex-Mormon channels to make it seem as though Jacob Hansen was being dishonest about the Book of Abraham during his conversation with Alex Okconor. But before we get into this topic, it's important to understand what documents we have and what documents we don't have. First of all, we do not have all of the papyri that Joseph Smith had. For some reason, critics simply ignore the fact that we know that some of the portion of the papyri Joseph Smith had was held in a Chicago museum that eventually burned down. Also, historians have looked at the descriptions of the papyri from eyewitnesses, and it seems clear that a good deal of what Joseph had is missing.
And the earliest contemporary source describing the content of the acquisition comes from W. W. Phelps who wrote a letter to his wife Sally in Missouri 3 weeks after Chandler arrived. Phelps wrote, "There were two papyrus rolls besides some other ancient Egyptian writings with them. These papyrus rolls, according to Phelps, contain the records of Joseph and Abraham." Whether both were on the same scroll or one on each is not clearly specified by Phelps. In December 1835, Oliver Cowry wrote to William Fry, similarly stating that there were two rolls of papyrus with two or three other small pieces of papyrus with astronomical calculations, epitaphs, etc. were found with others of the mummies. He also stated that the writings of Abraham and Joseph were beautifully written on papyrus with black and a small part red ink or paint in perfect preservation. Again, it isn't entirely clear whether both records were on the same scroll or on separate rolls of papyri based on these observations, but Cowry does state that Abraham and Joseph's writings included black and red ink.
By 1842, some of the fragments of papyri were already preserved in a chest of drawers and framed in glass. Henry Caswell, an Anglican clergyman, visiting Nauvoo, wrote, "Joseph proceeded to what appeared to be a small chest of drawers. From this he drew forth a number of glazed slides like picture frames containing sheets of papyrus with Egyptian inscriptions and hieroglyphics." In no uncertain terms, Caswell observed JSP1 or facsimile one in the Book of Abraham as part of this collection of papyrus fragments framed in glass. Quote, pointing to the figure of a man lying on a table. He, Joseph, said, "That is the picture of Abraham on the point of being sacrificed. That man standing by him with a drawn knife is an idolatrous priest of the Egyptians. Abraham prayed to God who immediately unloosed his bands and delivered him." End quote.
So no later than 1842, a number of papyrus fragments, either ends of rolls that were damaged and or some of the other papyri that Phelps and Cowry referred to were preserved in glass frames and cabinet drawers. This is further confirmed two years later and a month before Joseph's martyrdom when Josiah Quincy Jr. and Charles Francis Adams visited at Nauvoo and Quincy wrote, "Some parchments inscribed with hieroglyphics were then offered to us. They were preserved under glass and handled with great respect." We know, however, that not all of the papyri were framed in glass. On February 19th, 1843, Charlotte Haven wrote to her mother about her visit in Nauvoo and described her experience with the mummies and papyri, explaining that Lucy Smith, opened a long roll of papyrus on top of a long table, set her candlestick down, and explained that the roll contained the writings of Abraham and Isaac. Either Lucy or Charlotte probably meant Abraham and Joseph. Charlotte also mentioned seeing another roll of Papyrus. There are other eyewitness accounts, but time will not permit further exploration here. That's certainly been addressed previously as well.
My purpose is to point out that there were two rolls of papyrus separate from the fragments of papyri that were preserved in glass frames. It seems that the fragments preserved under glass comprised a lot of papyri that were sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. While the two rolls and some other fragments would eventually end up in Woods Museum in Chicago and subsequently burned in the great Chicago fire of 1871. Now, aside from this, we know from eyewitness accounts that the record of Abraham and Joseph contain black and red ink. Hor's document of breathing made by Isis has no rubrics or no red ink in any of its extant papyri fragments. Those who claim we can be certain that we have all the papyri are simply ignoring this data and intentionally being misleading and overstating their case. It is simply a fact that we do not have all of the papyri Joseph Smith owned. What we do have are some of the papyri that Joseph Smith owned.
The other thing we have are known as the Kirtland Egyptian papers. Critics of the church just assume that these documents are Joseph's attempt to translate the papyri. But people who claim this have never actually dug into the Kirtland Egyptian papers. Before anyone makes claims about the Kirtland Egyptian papers, they need to ask themselves what are these documents and not simply assume that they were manuscripts of Joseph's translation of the Book of Abraham. The reality is that a close examination of the Kirtland Egyptian papers reveals some really fascinating things that most critics are totally unaware of. The following is a presentation given by the researcher William Shrivever.
What are the Kirtland Egyptian papers? There are four alphabet documents, one counting document, two small notebooks, seven Abraham manuscripts, and two documents containing copies of characters from the Joseph Smith papyri. The Egyptian alphabet consists of three nearly identical documents in the handwriting of respectively William Phelps, Joseph Smith, and Oliver Cowry. For convenience today, I will refer to these documents as the alphabet. It is almost certainly these documents to which the following entry in the history of the church refers. "The remainder of the month, I was continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients." This is, I believe, a very deliberately worded statement that contains more import than is readily apparent. I shall yet return to it near the end of my remarks today.
Here we see all four pages of William Phelps's alphabet document side by side. 136 characters were selected for treatment in the alphabet. They are listed in the leftmost column of four sheets of paper. This list of characters is divided into five unequal parts. The first part contains 23 characters, the second part 59 characters, the third part 17 characters, the fourth part 14 characters, and the fifth part 24 characters. Of the 136 total characters selected for the alphabet, 69 were assigned sounds. Of the 69 characters to which sounds were assigned in the alphabet, 49 of them were also assigned explanations. 67 of the Egyptian alphabet characters were never assigned sounds nor explanations.
The fourth document in the alphabet group is entitled "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language." For convenience today, I will refer to this document as the grammar. The grammar is an extension of the alphabet and is dependent on it. It references only the 69 characters to which sounds had already been assigned in the alphabet. The 20 characters assigned sounds but no explanations in the alphabet are assigned explanations in the grammar. The alphabet and the grammar represent the same project in two stages. The alphabet sets the boundaries of the whole thing by defining which characters are going to get explanations as well as the basic meaning of most of them. The grammar then is used to add multiple levels of additional explanation for the same characters. The grammar attests the same table format established in the alphabet documents listing characters, sounds, and explanations. Okay? So, you have these characters followed by the sound they make, then the explanation for what it means in English.
But are these characters Egyptian? Are they from the papyri that Joseph Smith had? The answer may surprise you. Many people simply assume these documents were Joseph trying to translate the papyri. But is that what the documents indicate? It has been asserted that the Egyptian alphabet and grammar was the modus operandi by which Joseph Smith purported to translate the papyri. In other words, they claimed that Joseph Smith created the alphabet and grammar as a tool to translate the papyri. Though Hugh Nibbi and others vigorously objected to Howard's argument, I am aware of no one having attempted to rigorously assess its viability, nor am I aware of anyone ever having published a defense of it. It simply assumed the status of conventional wisdom by unremitting repetition. This is very important.
Should we assume that these alphabet and grammar documents were the tool Joseph Smith was using to translate the Book of Abraham? What if instead we could show that the alphabet documents were actually dependent on the Book of Abraham and not the other way around? This would mean that these documents were produced after the Book of Abraham translation and not before. So what is the evidence of the dependency of the alphabet and grammar on a pre-existing text of the Book of Abraham?
Being a computer programmer by trade, I approached the problem as would a database analyst. I began by creating a data table with the basic information of the alphabet documents. I assigned a sequential index number to each of the 69 characters to which sounds had been assigned in the order in which they appeared. I then created individual data elements for the document, the sound as transcribed in that document, and the explanation provided for the character. In the process of creating this data table, it occurred to me to analyze the data by breaking it down into even more fundamental components. Therefore, I created a new data table containing every substantial word used in its explanations. Substantial words were defined as those conveying substantial meaning. For example, articles such as "the" or "a" and conjunctions such as "and" and "but" were excluded. I further categorized each of the substantial words as either unique or generic. Here are some examples.
I then performed a rigorous inventory of every instance of these substantial words as attested in the five chapters of the Book of Abraham as well as Genesis chapters 12 and 15, which chapters contain the biblical text corresponding to the same periods of time in the life of Abraham. The Genesis chapters were designed to serve as control texts for the analysis. I assigned an index number based on the alphabetical order of the substantial words. I then associated with each substantial word the corresponding verses in the comparison texts where the word was attested, keeping account of the number of times and in which verses each word was attested. Here is the detailed reference from the study for the substantial word "king." In column one are the explanations from the alphabet in which the word is attested. In column two are the verse references and relevant extracts from the comparison texts where the word is attested. In column three is the count of how many times that word was attested. Here we see the detailed reference for the substantial word "government." And finally, the detailed reference for the substantial word "water."
One of the first things that became apparent in the process of this particular study, before attempting to quantify anything, is that we are quite obviously dealing with a very limited set of unique words with very specific applications. As opposed to a more non-contextual selection of wide-focus building block words that one would reasonably expect to encounter in a document intended as a tool to decipher an unknown text. Instead, we encounter words and phrases focused on a narrow subject matter. As a result, what was intuitively evident to me was that this thing was being driven by an already known text rather than being a means by which to produce an as yet unknown text. The substantial words are almost all proper nouns that form a lexicon of people, places, and things, almost all of them from the Book of Abraham and often very uniquely so. If, as Mormon critics have argued for the past 40 years, the alphabet and grammar was produced before the text of the Book of Abraham was received and was the means by which that text was subsequently translated from the papyri, then how likely is it that the would-be translators would include virtually nothing but unique words and phrases from an as yet unwritten book?
Okay, so this may seem complicated, but it's really not. Think of it like this. Say you have a document with the following words on it: Froto, Bilbo, ring, Gandalf, birthday, fireworks, Shire, 111, Pippet, Mary, Hobbit, and dozens of other words that correspond directly with the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings. What is more likely? That this person made a random list of words up that they were later going to use to create a story, or that this person already had the story, that this person already had The Lord of the Rings and had read the first chapter? You see, the thesis of the alphabet and grammar as a papyri deciphering tool presupposes that the authors don't already know the text their tool is being designed to produce. But that is not what we find in the substantial words of the alphabet document.
Summary conclusion. Analysis by substantial words strongly suggests a dependency of the alphabet on a pre-existing text of much of the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham. This is a big deal because it means that the alphabet and grammar documents are made after the Book of Abraham is given, not before. The alphabet and grammar is dependent on a story that has already been written. We are able to discern within it the complex contextual elements of the Book of Abraham only because we already know the story, and the complex interrelated aspects of the references we find simply could not have been achieved unless the whole story had already been produced. In short, there is too little of the story of the Book of Abraham in the alphabet and grammar for it to have been used to produce the story, yet too much of the story for it not to be dependent on the rest of the story.
Do you see what he is saying here? It's like finding a giant list with tons of specific random elements from the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings. There's not enough there to produce the story, but there is too much there to say that the list is not dependent on the story. The bottom line is this: The Egyptian alphabet and grammar documents were not used to produce the Book of Abraham, but were documents given after the Book of Abraham was given. But this only leads to more questions. What on earth are these documents? But if, as has been asserted for the past 40 years, these documents were not prepared as a tool to decipher the papyri, what then was their purpose?
I discovered that several of the explanations in the alphabet and grammar documents were dependent not on text from the Book of Abraham, but rather on very recognizable passages from others of Joseph Smith's prior revelations, most prominently section 76 and 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Okay, this again is a big deal. What this means is that we know that parts of the grammar and alphabet documents were for sure dependent on preexisting texts like the Doctrine of Covenants. We could spend an hour discussing nothing but the dependencies on material not found in the Book of Abraham. Think about that. Huge portions of these Egyptian grammar and alphabet documents have nothing to do with the papyri or the Book of Abraham.
Character 46 makes clear reference to the celestial kingdom where God resides. Character 47 merely references another kingdom governed by different laws and as such constitutes nothing more than a placeholder for what we shall see must be the terrestrial kingdom. Character 48, however, was provided with expansions beyond "another kingdom governed by different laws," explanations that clearly indicate its relationship to specific language employed in section 76 to describe the telestial kingdom. There are three components attested. Subjects of this kingdom suffer the wrath of God until some future period, or in the words of section 76, "until the fullness of times." Next, and this is the most striking of the correspondences, we read that "the inhabitants of this kingdom differ one from another in glory," which is precisely what we read in section 76: "As one star differs from another star in glory, even so differs one from another in the celestial world." Finally, we read that "in this kingdom, the subjects behold not the face of God. For where God and Christ dwell, they cannot come, worlds without end."
Next is character 49, which very succinctly references the language from section 88 that describes "a kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory." Thus, we see in the explanations given to four successive characters from the alphabet and grammar very particular references to specific passages from those two giants of Joseph Smith's previously received revelations, sections 76 and 88. Right in order, this so-called grammar and alphabet of the Egyptian language is making reference to the celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms, followed immediately by the kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory. I went on to identify several additional references that are clearly dependent on other passages from the Doctrine of Covenants.
Okay, so again, we are left asking, if these documents were clearly not the documents used as the tool to translate the Book of Abraham, then what are they? I confess I was rather befuddled by this finding, and it took me several days of contemplation before I began to appreciate its import and its implications. First of all, I came to see that my initial hypothesis could not possibly be true. To the extent this lexicon was built partially on texts that have no relationship to the Egyptian papyri, texts that were written not in Egyptian at all, but in English, then the alphabet and grammar simply could not have been intended as a tool to decipher the papyri. Indeed, the more I considered the evidence in this new light, the more I came to believe that these men were not focused on translating the Egyptian papyri at all.
One of the keys to this conclusion was my discovery that of the 69 characters to which explanations were assigned, most of them are not even Egyptian and do not appear on the papyri. Hold on, think about that. How could this have been a document meant to translate Egyptian characters when most of the characters on the document are not even Egyptian? Let me repeat: Most of the characters explained in the Egyptian alphabet documents are not Egyptian and do not appear on the Egyptian papyri in question. A few of the characters are Egyptian and can be found on the papyri, but not in any one place and not in any order and not with any discernible relationships. They appear to have been selected arbitrarily. Of the 69 characters given explanations, some of them are clearly invented, some are composites. In other words, they are formed by combining two or more previously used characters. And much to my surprise, I discovered that several of the characters can be traced to ciphers used by the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.
So, let's pause a minute to review the important elements of evidence at this point in the investigation. First of all, we're dealing with a document whose text is dependent on and informed by the Book of Abraham, as well as others of Joseph Smith's previously received revelations. It employs a mixture of some Egyptian characters, some apparently invented characters, and other characters selected from centuries-old ciphers. Okay, so again, I want to emphasize this: The alphabet and grammar of the Egyptian language document is not a bunch of Egyptian characters, but rather it's some Egyptian characters and a bunch of other characters. It is almost certainly dependent on the Book of Abraham and has some sort of connection with symbols found in Masonic ciphers.
So the question he is trying to figure out is, what are these documents? The next clue in our mystery comes in the form of what may well be the most instructive two pages of the entire collection of documents known as the Kirtland Egyptian papers: the Egyptian counting document. Why is this document so instructive? Because it more clearly than all the others demonstrates the fundamental purpose of the project of which it is an integral part. As I mentioned earlier, the Egyptian counting document lists a series of characters with names and English explanations. What is most interesting, however, is that the characters in the Egyptian counting document are very obviously not Egyptian. They have no relationship whatsoever to the papyri. I just want to emphasize here that you have a document called "Egyptian Counting Document" with nothing on it that is Egyptian. So why would they call a document the "Egyptian Counting Document" but not use any Egyptian characters they had on the papyri in their possession?
As I pondered the ramifications of these facts, the conclusion became obvious to me. What we have here is a tool not intended to decipher Egyptian, but rather one intended to decipher the descriptive English text of the cardinal numbers. It constitutes a specimen of what is known in cryptography as a cipher key. The characters which are not Egyptian and which do not come from the papyri are intended to be a cipher representing the English words in the explanations column. Do you see what he means? In linguistics, there is a practice known as cryptography where you make a coded language. This way, you can encode confidential messages using symbols no one can understand unless they have the cipher key. Thus, this character means six. So, why is this document entitled "Egyptian Counting"? There is absolutely nothing Egyptian about it. Nothing at all. Why then did they call it Egyptian? Well, the answer to that question is, in my judgment, the key to understanding the underlying motivations and design of both the Egyptian counting document and the Egyptian alphabet and grammar. Simply put, the evidence strongly suggests that these documents were never designed as a tool to translate the Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith did that by revelation. Rather, the alphabet, grammar, and counting documents appear to have been intended to render the English text of the prophet's revelations into some kind of cipher that these men apparently believed to be typical of language as practiced by the ancients. Not that they would have called it a cipher by any means. No, I believe the term they would have used to describe what they were doing is "translation," not of Egyptian papyri, mind you, but of already written English texts into a set of characters of their own selection and invention. Nevertheless, these tables they produced in the process of their translation project have the effective function of a cipher key.
Now, before you say this sounds strange, just know that Masons and other groups would use ciphers in Joseph's day to keep certain information confidential. In the Egyptian counting document, the various elements of a cipher key are clearly attested. The character column contains the cipher value. The English explanation column contains the substitution value for the cipher character. But what was the underlying motivation of these men? What is the purpose of this cipher? Remember, all of this was going on at the same time the Doctrine and Covenants was being prepared for publication. Several of these revelations were considered so sensitive in nature that they had begun to employ coded names to hide the identities of people and places. There is a substantial body of historical evidence demonstrating this desire to encipher information such that it was only understandable to those who possessed the key to the encrypted data.
In addition to encryption, there were other motivations driving this Egyptian alphabet project. Specifically, an interest that precedes by many years their encounter with Egyptian papyri in July of 1835. This interest was undoubtedly influenced by a larger body of European philosophical thought dating back to at least the 17th century. Literature that speculated concerning the nature of the language of the ancients. William Phelps was extremely interested in the notion of something he termed "pure language." His interest was contagious. And both Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowry manifest a similar longing for what they imagined was the purity of language as delivered by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden. They spoke and wrote frequently concerning their belief that human language had been corrupted through the years, the confounding of the languages at the Tower of Babel being merely the beginning of the deviation from the original purity of the primordial Adamic tongue. In the mind of Phelps and the others, Egyptian was apparently believed to have somehow avoided the confounding of the languages at the Tower of Babel. Egyptian therefore became a term that for them was synonymous with pure language. Thus, they see no contradiction in titling as "Egyptian Counting" a document that contains not a single element that is Egyptian. Nor do they perceive any contradiction in titling the other documents "Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar" and "Alphabet of the Egyptian Language," notwithstanding the fact that most of the characters they translate are not Egyptian, nor are the source texts themselves.
Again, the evidence strongly suggests that the alphabet and grammar was never intended nor designed to decipher anything. Quite to the contrary, it was a short-lived attempt to construct an idiographic cipher and lexicon whereby those who produced it took selections of Joseph Smith's body of revelatory texts written in English and assigned to them simple character values. In their minds, the capacity of a single character to represent a word or a sentence or even an entire paragraph of over a hundred words was typical of what they believed to have been the pure language of the ancients. Don't misunderstand. I have encountered no evidence to date that they believed they were actually restoring the language of Adam. Although it is possible they believed that some of the characters they produced had come to them through inspiration. No, it appears they were merely producing their own rendition of what they believed pure language would be like. The point is that deciphering Egyptian scrolls was not their purpose. The kind of translation they were attempting ran in the other direction.
Indeed, William Phelps had already executed the first example of a practical attempt to do just that several weeks before Michael Chandler and his Egyptian papyri ever rolled into Kirtland, Ohio. In this letter to his wife Sally, written more than a month before Chandler and his mummies turned up in Kirtland, Phelps includes an extract from the earliest known example of his encryption template, his cipher key. He entitled it appropriately, "A Specimen of Some of the Pure Language." Here we see a table almost identical in format to those used in the alphabet and grammar. In the left-hand column are written six characters, followed by a column of sounds and English explanations that derive from elements of Joseph Smith's previously received revelations. Another intriguing aspect of this table is that three of the characters are identical to characters used in the Masonic cipher.
But here's where it gets really interesting, because a little less than two months later, Phelps reuses these same six characters in the Egyptian alphabet documents. Not only that, but he assigns to these six previously used cipher characters six new sounds and six completely new explanations. In this new cipher key, this new specimen of some of the pure language, the explanations assigned to these manifestly generic characters are related to different previously received revelations, primarily the recently revealed Book of Abraham. The evidence is abundant and compelling. These pure language tables appear to be designed to function as a kind of idiographic cipher and lexicon. Obviously, Phelps introduced dozens more characters when he built the pure language cipher table for the Egyptian alphabet. But the presence of these six characters from his earlier specimen confirms the evidence already adduced that a cipher key is precisely what these documents are designed to be. They would no doubt have called it a translation key or something like that. In any case, its function is identical to a typical substitution cipher key. We see the exact same characters in exactly the same order, yet with different sounds and different explanations, but the underlying purpose is the same: to serve as a type of pure language cipher. In fact, a close examination of the characters employed in the Egyptian alphabet reveals that no fewer than seven of the characters are derived straight from the Masonic cipher, underscoring the common functions of the two things.
I have now identified no fewer than four separate pure language cipher keys, as well as another one that is referenced but now lost. The earliest example is found in the letter from Phelps to his wife in May 1835. The next example is the Egyptian counting document, where a new set of invented characters are the cipher, and English words that spell out the corresponding numbers are the substitution value. The third example is the Egyptian alphabet and grammar. Some of the same characters from the Phelps letter are employed as ciphers in the key, but with different sounds and explanations. Now, there is one hugely important thing to keep in mind here: A single character can be used to encode entire paragraphs of text in these cipher keys that Phelps was making. But you see, the substitution values for this cipher key are not going to be single letters, but rather entire words or even sentences and paragraphs.
This next part is really important. The best evidence against the Book of Abraham is the fact that among the Kirtland Egyptian papers, we have manuscripts of the Book of Abraham. And on the left-hand side of these are characters from the papyri. However, we can now see that at this time, Parish, Phelps, and others were making various cipher keys related to Joseph's revelations using characters from the papyri. And Trior makes a compelling case that these are exactly what the manuscripts were. The fourth example of a pure language cipher key is the Abraham manuscripts authored by Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parish. Just as the Egyptian alphabet cipher key divided the characters into parts and the explanations into degrees, so also the first line of these two manuscripts tells us that the characters that follow are designated as being from the second part of this particular cipher key, and their accompanying explanations are designated as being in the fifth degree. Again, this is very important. Items in the fifth degree were parts where single characters were related to entire paragraphs. Thus, the first cipher character has a substitution value of "I sought for mine appointment unto the priesthood according to the appointment of God unto the fathers concerning the seed." And the second cipher character has a substitution value of "My fathers having turned from their righteousness and from the holy commandments which the Lord their God had given unto them unto the worshiping of the gods of the heathens." And it goes on with individual characters drawn from the papyri in the fashion John G. is described, representing entire paragraphs from the text of the Book of Abraham.
Well, there is so much more, but the time is exhausted. I've had to leave so much out that I would have preferred to include. I would have liked, for example, to spend at least half an hour detailing the evidence supporting the conclusion that it was William Phelps who was the dominant and driving force behind this entire project. But that will have to await another day. At the start of my presentation today, I cited this entry in the history of the church. In light of the evidence and arguments I have just presented, I want to revisit this sentence and see if perhaps we can now view it a bit differently. We'll divide it into two parts. The first part reads, "The remainder of the month, I was continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham." Note well the phrasing: "engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham." It refers to the Book of Abraham as a fait accompli. And so it was, as the textual evidence persuasively demonstrates. They began the so-called Egyptian alphabet project focused on the previously received text of the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham, then later expanded their focus to others of Joseph Smith's revelations. They were at least partially motivated by the prevailing atmosphere in Kirtland circa 1835 when the need was felt to encrypt sensitive information from Joseph Smith's revelations. In addition, there is a considerable body of historical evidence suggesting their fascination with the notion of a pure language of the ancients. To be sure, in the course of their cipher project, they employ the term "Egyptian," but the text-critical evidence is conclusive on this point. "Egyptian" simply cannot mean for them, in the context of this project, what we have always believed it to mean. Only when we come to see that in their minds, Egyptian was synonymous with pure language can we begin to understand how they could entitle as "Egyptian Counting" a document that contains not a single Egyptian element whatsoever.
Returning to the journal entry, we read that they were also engaged in "arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients." The textual evidence strongly affirms that this cannot mean the Egyptian language as practiced by the Egyptians. No, their focus is much wider than that and goes back before Babel, driven by their notions of what constituted the pure language of the antediluvian fathers. I believe these are the ancients to whom reference is made in this brief description of their activities in the summer of 1835. Even so, regardless of what their underlying purpose was in producing these materials, the essential element of understanding concerning the Kirtland Egyptian papers is that they are dependent on the Book of Abraham and not the other way around. Contrary to what has been commonly believed for the past 40 years, the evidence strongly suggests that nothing in the collection of documents known as the Kirtland Egyptian papers was used in the translation of the Book of Abraham. All of these materials come afterward and are substantially dependent on a pre-existing text of the Book. The evidence also strongly suggests that the text of the Book of Abraham must have been translated by Joseph Smith in the same way he had produced the text of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses, and the translated parchment of John known as Doctrine and Covenant section 7, by revelation. There is no evidence that he attempted any sort of what we would term an academic translation of Egyptian papyri. The textual evidence simply will not support such a thesis. The purpose of the alphabet and grammar materials was extraneous to the papyri.
Now, despite all of the available information, critics will still pretend that the alphabet documents were Joseph's attempt to translate the Book of Abraham. I want to draw people's attention to these three characters. There's a you can see that circle with an X through it, or a cross through it, a circle with half a cross through it, and then a circle that's filled in. What you see in the left-hand side of that left-hand image is, and the Joseph Smith Papers scholars are able to delineate it down to this level of detail. They have come to the opinion that the characters, the Egyptian characters in that alphabet are in Joseph Smith's handwriting, but the English words written to the side of them, right to the right, are in Oliver Cowry's handwriting. Unfortunately, it's clear Colby has not studied this issue in depth because he doesn't realize that the characters he is referring to with the circles and crosses are not even Egyptian characters at all.
Ever since Gerald Tanner analyzed the Kirtland Egyptian papers in the 1960s, the strongest argument against the Book of Abraham has been that the Book of Abraham manuscripts are in the handwriting of people like W. W. Phelps and Warren Parish, because critics assume these are translations, and without the information we have gone over previously, you can see why that is. Here is the standard argument. Okay, perfect. So if people can see that, they can see this character right here. This English text over here is the text of the Book of Abraham, like the text of the Book of Abraham as we have it today. So these are the original manuscripts. We have character matched with this character. Character matched with this character. We can scroll down. Character matched with this character. Character matched with this character.
So he's pointing out that on the right, we have the Book of Abraham manuscript from the Kirtland Egyptian papers that Shrivever was talking about in the previous videos, and on the left, he has the papyri, and he is correct that there is a character match between the papyri and these manuscripts. But he simply assumes that these must be translations without considering that Phelps and the others who wrote these very documents were doing in that time in the process of creating ciphers to encode entire paragraphs of text to a single character, and that they would use these characters from the papyri for that purpose. And if this sounds too convenient, consider this: Did you know that Joseph Smith explicitly commented on these very characters and said that the Lord had not given him a translation for them? I'm going to repeat that: the very characters Colby is talking about here are ones that Joseph Smith explicitly said the Lord had not given him a translation for. The papyri Colby is referring to is called JSP11. Remember that Tim Barker in 2020 did a deep dive on JSP11 and Joseph's commentary about it in a presentation on this that critics simply ignore. What we do have is commentary directly from Joseph Smith about JSP11. I want to repeat that again: What we do have is direct commentary from Joseph Smith about JSP11. And it was Grant Huard and Gerald Tanner who actually made this observation, but they stopped just short of its implications, just as every single one of their successors have done. Tanner and Huard wrote, "It is interesting to note that not only the manuscripts of the Book of Abraham, but also Facsimile 2 includes portions of this book of breathing. Evidently, the original of Facsimile 2 was damaged. The missing areas on this drawing have been filled in with insertions from other documents to make Facsimile 2 as it now exists." End quote. They're referring to a drawing from the Nauvoo Egyptian papers of a damaged hypocephalus. The actual hypocephalus was presumably burned in the Chicago fire as well, but this drawing, which clearly became facsimile number two in the Book of Abraham, has been preserved. Willard Richards probably drew the hypocephalus since he wrote the explanations for the figures of this facsimile in the Nauvoo Egyptian papers. The hieroglyphs for facsimile 2 did indeed come from other parts of the Joseph Smith papyri.
So what he's saying is that the original drawing of facsimile 2 had parts missing. So they decided to try to fill in the missing part using characters from JSP11, the document KBY was referencing earlier, to fill in the gaps. I've highlighted a third of the hypocephalus rim of figure 18, the right-hand side of the rim, and half of figures 13, 14, and 15 on the right-hand side as well, just as Huard and Tanner depicted in their 1968 article. These highlighted portions can all be traced back to JSP1. Starting with the rim or figure 18, I've laid the semi-circular text in a horizontal row. The text was inserted upside down, but when turned right side up and flipped around, the text can be aligned with hieratic text in JSP11 from rows 2, 3, and 4. The transfer of hieratic text to the hypocephalus isn't as clean as one might have hoped for. But a clear match can be made when looking closely at JSP1 in facsimile number two. And in the case of JSP11, row 4 from Book of Abraham manuscript C. Now regarding row two, I think there's some ambiguity regarding the hieratic characters drawn, but these seem to be the closest matches. So whether that's duplicated or a separate character is a little bit ambiguous, but either way, the rest of it is certainly clear that text from JSP11 comprise the text in figure 18, part of 13 and 14 and 15. So similarly on figures 13, 14, and 15, these figures also need to be turned right side up and flipped around. Although the numbering from figures 12-15 in the original 1842 publication of the Book of Abraham was printed upside down as well, meaning the Arabic numbers were upside down, potentially indicating that the text was deliberately inserted upside down. Nonetheless, the text can be aligned with the hieratic text in JSP11 once again on row 4.
If they were indeed taking text that they believed was from the Book of Abraham, surely when Joseph explained the facsimile, he would have said that these portions were portions of the story of Abraham, right? Well, we'll see. So based on Huard and Tanner's theory, using our current versification, Abraham 2:1 through most of 2:2 and half of chapter 2:9 through all of chapter 2:8 were all included in facsimile number two. Fortunately, we know what Joseph had to say about this text since he provided the explanations to Facsimile 2. Joseph's response is that the explanations will be given in the own due time of the Lord. And he concludes his explanations by saying, "The above translation is given as far as we have any right to give at the present time." In other words, literally all of the JSP11 hieratic characters included in Facsimile 2, Joseph Smith deliberately declined from commenting upon because he believed that the translation would be given at some future time in the own due time of the Lord. Joseph clearly indicates that he did not translate JSP11. Did you get that? When Joseph Smith himself looks at those very characters KBY and other critics say are the Book of Abraham, Joseph says that he has not been given the translation of them. And all of this aligns with the notion that the Kirtland Egyptian papers were not the tools used by Joseph to produce the Book of Abraham, but rather were a part of Phelps' linguistic projects and the use of ciphers. My argument rebuttal to Huard and Tanner and the hundreds of accounts since 1968 by others who have repeated this argument is that Joseph Smith concretely provided direct evidence in Facsimile 2 that he never translated JSP11, and that the answer has been under our heads this entire time.
So let's sum this up. There are two theories to account for the Book of Abraham. The first is the catalyst theory, which again, I believe is a live option. However, today we have been exploring the missing scroll theory, and there is one simple question to ask: Do we have the source text of the Book of Abraham? That's just untrue, Jacob. We do have the source text of the Book of Abraham. Like I just said, we have it. It's there. You see how critics like to overstate their case. I was talking with Sandra Tanner the other day. That is the only flex I will make in this video about who I've been talking to. But I was talking to Sandra Tanner the other day, like the OG queen of ex-Mormonism or whatever you want to call her. Yeah, it was a great conversation. We had a great time. And I talked to Sandra, and she, her and Gerald went through the documents that Joseph had done where he tried to translate individual characters from the Book of Abraham, and they matched them up to where they are on the papyri. So Nemo, like many other critics, is running on arguments by Gerald and Sandra Tanner that are over 50 years old. He's not engaging with the most recent scholarship which we've gone through today.
There is one more aspect to the Book of Abraham, and that's the facsimiles. So far, we have been talking about where the text of the Book of Abraham came from. But the facsimiles are doing something very different. The first thing to recognize is that the facsimiles are copies of drawings, not text. Here's what I mean. Imagine you found a page from a children's book where essentially all of the text was ripped away, but what was left was just the illustration page. Then someone came to you and asked, "What is the meaning of that drawing?" Do you see how this is different? Interpreting the meaning of a drawing is very different from interpreting the meaning of a particular text. Joseph Smith did give his interpretation of the drawings associated with the papyri. And while some of his interpretations do align with modern Egyptological understandings, most do not. And critics are quick to jump on this as proof that Joseph was a fraud. But this is not a new criticism. And recently, Dr. Carrie Muellstein once again explained what the critics miss about the nature of the facsimiles. But before we get to his commentary, keep in mind that Dr. Muellstein is an Egyptologist with many published books and articles on the subject, a director of archaeological digs, an expert in ancient Hebrew, and currently serves on the board of governors in one of the largest Egyptological organizations in the world. This is someone who knows what he's talking about. How
Do you deal with these, um, these facsimiles? So it seems that some people think that these facsimiles are their disconfirming evidence of, of Joseph's prophethood. Do you have any insight on that as an Egyptologist?
Yeah, and this is a really common thing. I would say a lot of people, this is, they hear these things online, and this is one of the frustrating things is you can get these little clips. Um, it's, it's to me, it reminds me of politics, right? Mhm. In politics, it's so easy to give a 30-second half-truth clip that's a great soundbite that everyone latches onto when truth is, is, and, and issues are complicated, and people don't want to listen to the five-minute explanation. They want the 30-second soundbite, even if it's not accurate, right? And that's what's going on here. I'm not saying he's making things up because I don't know his intent. He's probably heard all of the, the things that are old. Uh, I mean, I just find the same arguments keep getting cycled around even though they've been disproved. We've disproved them. We've shown what's wrong with them again and again and again and again, and they just keep going around because they're great 30-second soundbites, and most likely he's just been taken in by someone and hasn't, probably not equipped to do the, the homework and find out what's wrong with that argument, right? Too.
One of the, the basic arguments is, "Oh, well, Joseph Smith says that these facsimiles should be understood and explained this way, and Egyptologists typically say they should be understood this way, right?" There are, again, that's a nice 30-second soundbite. Here's the more complex, uh, history or understanding of how can you study these things? And it's never that simple. There are a whole bunch of hidden assumptions within just saying that. All right. So, one of them is that Egyptologists can accurately tell you what those pictures mean. And, and I'll just give you a couple of examples of the, the difficulty with that as an Egyptologist. And I'm, I'm talking about our own limitations. And a good scholar will recognize and be upfront both about their limitations and about their, the lens they bring with them, and, and, and the fact that they can't be fully objective. They, they bring a lens with them. All right. So, we, we do have limitations.
The, these drawings, at least the ones that we, we still currently have, and the ones we can, well, we can, we can get a decent date on all three of the facsimiles, um, and they're from roughly 200 BC, all right? Most of the drawings that we have good information or good evidence on are from much earlier than that, and we can say much earlier, they would interpret this, this way, they would interpret this, this way, and even then, we know we're saying, well, most of the time in these situations, you're always on shaky ground. If you start to ever say always, I just said that, right? You're always on, anyway. Okay, caught myself. But anyway, um, right, you, you just know there are going to be exceptions in Egyptology. So, but you also know that if they interpret a certain figure or a drawing or something like that in 1250 BC, they're going to interpret it differently in 200 BC. I mean, there's no doubt that's going to happen. But we often just keep giving the answers we know from this time period and, and, and putting them on top of this time period. That's, that's kind of shaky ground anyway.
So, just to clarify, this, the same image or the same Egyptian figure could be seen, it could be interpreted one way in this time period, and the people understand it a different way in this time period. Yes. And this is, or even, you, you see a drawing of a person that you'll say, okay, that person has to be this figure, and then you find out, oh, well, actually, in this setting, it's a different figure that looks the same, and in this setting, it's a different figure that looks the same. That happens to Egyptologists all the time. Well, I think because it's Egyptian, sometimes people, because we're so unfamiliar with it, we just kind of give up all of our critical thinking, and it's like, oh, but like when you remember that these are pictures, if you showed someone 2,000 years ago or 500 years ago, a political cartoon from today with no text, who knows what meaning they would come up with. That's exactly right. And you also have to remember that when you're talking about Egyptology, you're talking about a 3,000-year plus period of time. Obviously, things change over 3,000 years, right?
As one specific example, the kind of drawing that Facsimile 2 is, we call it a hypocephalus. And, um, the different characters in there, and what they, by characters, I don't mean the writing, but the, the figures, the, the people looking characters, or the cow, or whatever. Um, even among Egyptologists, there were a couple of different camps, like, no, this is this, no, this is this, and there was some disagreement. Um, but we couldn't say for sure because they weren't labeled. And my, my colleague, so this is an LDS Egyptologist, but a very good one, John Gee, he found an example of one where a number of those characters, they had labeled. And it turns out that we were mostly wrong. Both camps were mostly wrong. Yeah. But people had been saying for a long time, see, Egyptologists say it means this, and Joseph Smith says it means something different. So, he must be wrong. When the Egyptologists were, are now demonstrably wrong on those things, right? Interesting. So that's the thing we have to be careful of is saying, okay, we know what Egyptologists, that Egyptologists can tell us what an ancient Egyptian would have seen in this. Yeah. Right. That's what most people are saying. They, they say Egyptologists say it means something different. But what they mean is, well, the ancient Egyptians would have seen it this way, and there aren't any ancient Egyptians to ask. So we go to Egyptologists. And that's, that's already a disconnect.
But the other problem is, we don't know. Is Joseph Smith telling us how all ancient Egyptians would have seen this? Is he telling us how ancient Jews would have reinterpreted Egyptian drawings because we know they did? Yeah, we have lots of examples of them taking stories and, and drawings, things like that, and interpreting them differently. So, I'll come back to that in a little while. Um, we also have to say, maybe he was giving us what a specific set of, of ancient Egyptians would have seen in this. So, I'll come back to that in a second. Or he may have just been saying, this is what we need to get out of it, regardless of, of what ancient Egyptians would have seen out of it, right? We're, we're making a lot of assumptions about what Joseph Smith is, is doing, and then saying, okay, now we've absolutely proved that he's wrong based on our assumptions that may, in some cases, are demonstrably wrong, and in some cases, we don't know if they're right or wrong, right? Yeah.
So, just as an example, we do know that around 200 BC, which is when these papyri were created, um, around 200 BC, there were priests in Thebes, and this was one of these sets of both sets of papyri that we still currently have were owned by a priest or a priestess in Thebes. Um, that they were collecting stories from Greece, from Jews, and from other places as well. But those are the two largest non-Egyptian populations in Egypt at the time are Greeks and Jews. They were collecting those stories and incorporating them into their own religious beliefs and practices. All right? So, for example, uh, we can find spells of, if you want to know the name of God, or you want to call God down to visit you on a high mountain, you become Moses, right? Well, that makes sense. They know the Moses. Do you have that spell? Could we maybe pull it out? I don't have it right on me. No. But, uh, but it would be nice. Then we can maybe have God come down and do this video for us. But, uh, and you know, and, and we know they were incorporating Abraham. We can demonstrate they're using Abraham in their video.
So, is Joseph maybe telling us what a spec, this specific Egyptian priest, what he would have seen in this as he mixes Egyptian and Jewish practices together in the same rituals and texts, which we know they were doing? This is very important to keep in mind. The Egyptians were mixing Jewish iconography and ideas into their own religion during the time period these facsimiles come from. So let's imagine there was a group of Christians in ancient India who began using Hindu icons to represent Christian stories. Let's just say that you saw a drawing of Vishnu walking on the water next to a boat with 12 cows in it. An expert would say that's Vishnu, and they would be right. But if this image was produced by a group of Hindus who were known to mix Christian and Hindu symbols and stories, you can see how this could also be interpreted as Jesus walking on the water. It's important to remember that we know that Egyptians would mix Jewish and Egyptian traditions together, including stories about Moses and Abraham. So maybe he's telling us that, and that would work really well with this.
So, we know that the priest who owned, there's an ancient Egyptian priest, 200 BC. Yeah. His name is, his name is Hor. And he lived where you say? Thebes. And Thebes. He's a priest in Karnak, a priest for Amun-Ra, for, uh, Men, and for Khonsu. And we know that this group in this area, people were collecting Judeaic tradition and stories. And so, and there was a sizable population of Jews in Thebes at the time. And so, if the Book of Abraham is what we understand it to be, a person like Hor is exactly the person we would expect to own it. Exactly who you would expect to own it. That's, is that's right. Exactly who you expect to own it. And all of that information that's not from the Book of Abraham, you know, in English that we read. That's all from the papyri? Correct. Uh, well, no, that's from Egyptological, lots of Egyptological sources. I see. I see. About Thebes and everything. But then identifying the owner of the, that's from the actual papyri. Yeah. Identifying the owner is from the papyri. Yes. Is, is it papyri or papyri? Depends on how you want to say it. Uh, I mean, we're just, we're anglicizing Greek words. So, however you want to do it. Right.
When we talk about these facsimiles, to your point, we could ask ourselves, what did this facsimile mean to Joseph Smith? Or what did, you know, God want us to understand from this? We could ask ourselves, what does this facsimile mean to who, you know, owned the, I guess, the, that creation of it. So, I guess the idea is, Abraham lived much older than 200 BC. He was 2,000 BC. And so the Book of Abraham would have had to have been, you know, kind of like we see with Bible manuscripts, copied and copied. That's exactly right. A copy of a copy of a copy with people redacting, people adding layers, like happens with all scriptural texts. Yeah. And was the, the most, you know, was the guy who owned this copy of? Well, well, I don't know if he owned the copy of the Book of Abraham. We'll come back to that in a minute. But he at least owns the papyrus fragments that we still have. I see. That has, and, and, and the original, Facsimile 1 is a facsimile of, he owned that. Okay. Gotcha.
So, let's go back to, to, um, how people might interpret these drawings, right? Because that's again the claim. Well, Joseph Smith says they mean this, but Jose, but Egyptologists say they mean this, so it can't be. So, let's, uh, we'll just use as an example, Facsimile 3, which has, uh, a person seated on a throne. And typically, you'd look at that drawing as an Egyptologist and say, "Oh, that's, that's Osiris." All right? And you find lots of what we call stelae, and also papyri or stone, like kind of round-top stone, uh, texts, basically. And, um, you find lots of them showing Osiris on that throne, but actually, you find a number of them who say it's Abraham, or Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on the throne. Mhm. So, people who say, "Oh, that, you, you would never, that can't be Osiris." Even if it's labeled in this case, Osiris, or whatever, if, if we know there were people from that time period who were interpreting it as Abraham. So, anyone who says that can't be Osiris, I mean, Abraham, it's Osiris, they're just wrong because the Egyptians sometimes said it was Abraham. Yeah, we have examples of it. We know that's the case. So, you're, when he says this, that it, that that's incorrect, uh, that that it couldn't be that way Egyptologically, it's just factually wrong. It could be that way. Uh, in fact, the Savior himself took a, and we have this in the New Testament. He takes an Egyptian story where someone after they die is in the bosom of Osiris, but he changes it to the story of it's a poor person and a rich person story in the afterlife. And the rich person is, is suffering, and the poor person is in the bosom of Osiris. When the Savior gives that as a parable, he calls it Lazarus, and he's in the bosom of Abraham. You just like Egyptians. That seems to be the equivalent. You switch Abraham and Osiris.
Um, Jews and, and others were doing that, right? We can find, um, associations of Facsimile 2 with Abraham. We can find associations of Facsimile 3 and 1 with Abraham. All of them at one point or another are in some way associated with Abraham by Egyptians. And just, that, I mean, just think, what are the odds of that? Yeah. That Joseph Smith finds three Egyptian drawings, says that these are associated with Abraham, and we find out that those kinds of drawings actually are associated with Abraham. Your odds of guessing that, well, are really, really low. I think it takes more faith to, to disbelieve Joseph Smith is right than to believe he's right on that one, for sure. Uh, so, and there are lots of examples of that, and we could tell you all sorts of things like, um, we won't go into all the details, but I could show you example after example where, well, actually, this element of the facsimile that Joseph Smith says represents this, I can find an Egyptological example of it. Not every element, I, but my guess would be, give us enough time to study, and we will find every element. But, but whether it be the names of the gods underneath the altar, whether it be that, that this crocodile is associated with Pharaoh, astronomy is one you've talked about before. Exactly. Right. I mean, there are so many things that line up that anybody who tells you, no, these drawings cannot mean this, doesn't know the facts.
Right now, I'm not going to, the, the, uh, earlier Egyptologists that in 1912, they asked about these. I'm not going to blame them. They were looking, Egyptology is still a new field. They were looking at the generalities. It's only as we go in and look for these specific things that we say, "Oh, look." Yeah, this does happen. One, something I remember you saying was that your favorite, one of your favorite textbooks on Egyptology, you can no longer use it, but it was only published, what, how many years ago? So, it was published when I was an undergrad in college. So, that's now like 30 years ago. But, and it's, in a sense, obsolete now. Yeah. And that's true. I mean, you never get a textbook that's 10 years old. Yeah. Because all textbooks that are 10 years old have wrong information in them. Now, I'm saying textbooks. I'm not saying like, if you get a copy of War and Peace, it's going to be the same, right? But a textbook has wrong information in it if it's very old because we keep finding out that what we thought we knew, we actually didn't know. But people lose their testimonies over what we thought we knew. Yeah. Interesting.
So, just a final note on this little first piece. So, as we've kind of divided up, there's the facsimiles that don't, that allegedly don't match with what Egyptologists say. To wrap that up, we would say that that is a, a very strong oversimplification. To say that all Egyptologists agree on this, and that they have the same conception now that they did in 1912, would just be a, a very reductive way to view it. And, and also that we don't, again, we don't know that Joseph Smith is telling us, yeah, what the average Egyptian would have seen in the drawing. Right. There are just so many assumptions laden into that that it, it should be embarrassing that we don't notice those assumptions, but we all do that all the time. Yeah.
Now, as you have seen today, the Book of Abraham is a complex topic. Critics who pretend they know exactly what the Kirtland Egyptian papers are, or who act as if there is only one way to interpret the illustrations from the papyri, are just wrong. I highly recommend watching the full version of the presentations I've referenced today, which are in the description. I also have linked Steven Smoot's excellent book on this topic, the BH Roberts Mormonner page on the Book of Abraham, and Proof of Great Central.org for those who want some of the best research around this topic. The reality is that there are still a lot of questions out there about the Book of Abraham. Were these papyri just a catalyst for revelation about Abraham? Is there a scroll that was burned in the Chicago fire that contained the source for the Book of Abraham? The fact is, we just don't know for sure. And I think it's the unresolved nature of these kinds of questions that often lead people to concerns about this topic. I hope that today you walk away realizing that so many of our critics are just not up to date on the latest research.
In the end, I have a deep love for the Book of Abraham. It teaches incredible doctrines and leads us closer to Jesus Christ and helps us gain a better understanding of who we are as children of God. I have a testimony of that, regardless of how it came to be. What we have in the Book of Abraham is something inspired of God.