Sunday, May 20, 2012

Smoking Gun #1: The Book of Abraham

This is the first issue on curious_mormon's top 10 smoking guns. I'll refer you to the sources in the original document; this is an analysis of the evidence for, and arguments for and against the significance of one of the top intellectual issues inherent in Mormonism.



1. The Book of Abraham facsimiles are translated incorrectly.

Summary: Joseph Smith claimed to translate an account written by Abraham on papyrus. If you turn to the "facsimiles" in the Book of Abraham, you can see that he had likenesses made of parts of the papyrus, numbered the sections, and gave detailed explanations of the characters and figures in each section. The papyrus still exist and have been examined by modern experts. Joseph's explanations do not remotely agree with the agreed-upon translations by both Mormon and non-Mormon experts. (Here's a link to a translation of part of the papyrus by BYU professor Michael D. Rhodes; here's a complete translation of the entire thing by Robert K. Ritner.)


Significance: Joseph is unique in that he has so far been the only Church President to claim to translate ancient documents; this ability is apparently not utilized by modern church leaders. For most of the revelations and translations produced by Joseph, we have to choose whether or not to take him at his word, as there is no surviving evidence that could give or detract from his account's credibility (for example, according to Joseph, the golden plates were taken back by an angel, so no one today can evaluate them.) The Book of Abraham is the glaring exception; it is the only translation of an ancient document made by Joseph for which we still have the original source document. It seems fair to evaluate Joseph's ability as a translator based on this, the only evidence we have of his ability. Based on scholars' consensus against Joseph, it is clear that he did not possess the ability, divine or otherwise, to translate ancient documents. The fact that he led people to believe he had translated the papyrus makes his incorrect translation fraudulent.


Defense: the Church does not acknowledge the discrepancy between Joseph's translation and that of experts. The Book of Abraham is still a part of the "standard works" of the LDS church and is considered the word of God. It is frequently mentioned in general conference, such as in this 2011 talk by apostle Richard G. Scott on "The Power of Scripture."

FAIR, a group of LDS apologists (people that try to explain why the church could still be true in spite of evidence to the contrary), has responded to the issue of the Book of Abraham generally, but not to the translation of the facsimiles. Here's a link to FAIR's arguments on the topic of the Book of Abraham on topics such as Book of Abraham content and age.

While FAIR does not address the discrepancy either, they do suggest that the Book of Abraham contains things that "Joseph couldn't have known," such as claims of parallels between Book of Abraham names and actual Egyptian names (or Egyptian words mixed with words in other regional languages.) Jeff Lindsay makes a similar argument - "I will agree that a literal translation of the Egyptian characters does not necessarily provide the commentary or "translation" that Joseph added with the figures, but in many cases his comments show surprising correlations with what some scholars have learned in recent years."


Response: The supposed parallels with Egyptian names are debatable; see MormonThink's discussion of the topic here. Still, even if this was a valid point, it's tangential to and does not obviate the problems with the mistranslation of the facsimiles. Even if Joseph's translation contains things he "couldn't have known," it's still provably incorrect.

Sometimes it's difficult to reason about religious things the same way we would about others, so let me give an analogy to try to describe why this argument does not resolve the issue.

Suppose you have in your possession a book, written in Arabic. You don't read Arabic, but you let me take a look at the book. I immediately exclaim, "hey, this is a story about Cinderella!" I take the book from you and proceed to generate a translation, containing an account about Cinderella. Only, some parts are very different; for example, this Cinderella story takes place in outer space.

You then give the book to several of your friends, who are all professors of Arabic. They tell you that the book is the Quran, and predictably doesn't mention Cinderella at all.

What would you think of my ability to translate Arabic? I must be either crazy or deliberately trying to deceive you.

Now, what if you found out that there was actually a large body of space-themed Cinderella fanfiction that I "couldn't possibly have known about?" Does this change the fact that I've clearly just made up a story that is not contained in the document I was translating?


Conclusion: in spite of apologetics on the subject, the current state of the evidence still demonstrates overwhelmingly that Joseph's translation of ancient Egyptian documents is fraudulent, calling into question his ability to "translate" anything.

LDS apologist John Gee, who understands the discrepancy, has said that "those who seek to know the truth of the book of Abraham will have to wait upon the Lord." The idea of "waiting" suggests that we have "no evidence" but that such evidence could be uncovered. This is not the case; what we have, in fact, is another case of contradictory evidence.

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