A Red Herring on Wikipedia...

[_Trevor]

Irregardless.



KA

Clearly you have no fear of the wrathful hands of an angry Shades. You have real cojones.

[_Trevor]

Personally, I think non-fundamentalist believers should just learn to accept pseudepigraphy as not only an acceptable, but perhaps also the predominating form of scripture composition. It already is in the Bible, so why not in the LDS canon as well? Joseph's authorship in the name of various ancient prophets was simply following a very ancient tradition of the heroic nom de plume.

Just wanted to add my personal Amen to this specific assessment. This precisely reflects my own personal views.

I am glad I am not alone on that one. I have thought this way for years and find it to be a completely reasonable position, and yet I have never discussed it with anyone who agreed on this particular point 100%. I hope we run into each other at the SBL someday so that we can chat about it further.

[_KimberlyAnn]

Irregardless.



KA

Clearly you have no fear of the wrathful hands of an angry Shades. You have real cojones.

I don't have cojones at all, unless you count the men I have by theirs.

/derailment

KA

[_Trevor]

I don't have cojones at all, unless you count the men I have by theirs.

/derailment

KA

Figuratively speaking, I believe you do.

/derailment

[_Danna]

I can only pull up a history for related pages coming under the same geographical category, which makes it looks like the Khaldi (people) page is new and not modified since creation [as opposed to Khaldi (God) - not actually related to the people apparently]. It doesn't include or link to anything remotely Kurdish, unlike the related pages. The area is nearer to Georgia and not in Kurdistan so I doubt the Khaldis are going to be much use to the Kurds.

See the discussion page for the article.

Thanks - I am not familiar with wiki behind the scenes! For some reason I managed to miss the tabs at the top of the page. I will be looking at discussion pages from now on - they look as interesting as the main page.

Anyway, keep an eye out for the Khaldi's being trotted out as Abraham's Chaldeans in the future. The crazy Kurdish apologists' shonky re-write of history would also be of benefit to DIY mopologists. I hope some historian apologist does look into the Khaldi - it would be a fantastic 'hit' if they really did exist in the bronze-age. From the sources cited on Wiki they cannot be dated earlier than Roman times.

[_Danna]

No one believes that Abraham wrote the scroll of Horus. Every believing LDS scholar in the world recognizes that it is an Egyptian funerary text that dates to the late Ptolemaic era.

Therefore, if the papyrus contained a book of Abraham like many LDS scholars maintain, then the account would have been either a reproduction of something Abraham wrote, incorporated directly into the scroll by an editor/author, or a later pseudopigraphic text incorporated into the scroll of Horus.

Either way, due to the lateness of the text, we would expect to find the term Chaldeans used as a reference to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia in the document. Again, it's an extremely fluid term used in Jewish writings.

The only way it would ever serve as a problem for the orthodox view is if one assumes that Abraham wrote the scroll of Horus which contained the account and again, no one believes that, so the argument is problematic.

I think I probably laid out my argument badly. Which is that the text could not have originated with Abraham himself, not that Abraham actually wrote the Horus scroll - the latter claim is so flaky that it took me a while to realize that you had read my argument that way.

Given the careful copying of scripture by Jewish scribes, I do not accept that the extensive involvement of the Chaldeans, Chaldea, and the Chaldean language in the Book of Abraham is simply a scribal gloss as may have occurred in Genesis, or that the word is simply describing astrologers. Whoever wrote the text believed that Abraham was born and raised in Chaldea, and that person was not Abraham.

You have introduced a hypothetical second option for authorship - a post-exilic Jew. I think this is unlikely. If the text was transmitted supernaturally, it makes no sense to bypass Abraham himself and transmit an error-filled fake (or pseudoepigraphia). This leaves the most likely transmission method for this option as actual translation of a physical document. Which is problematic for many reasons.

You have also pointed out the J/P blend in the Book of Abraham as a further indicator of post-exilic authorship and extraction from Genesis. I can't see how you can dismiss the Chaldeans when the same arguments apply to both issues (unless you are simply claiming both points indicate that Abraham did not write the Horus scroll). The J/P blend is an indicator of plagiarism of portions from existing scripture, but just as significantly the extensive discussion of things Chaldean indicates that considerable portions are pure invention and not derived from an existing story - scriptural or not.

As I understand it, you believe that JSjr did write the Book of Abraham? But that the text is still psuedoepigraphic scripture?

[_Sethbag]

However, given the fact that the issue of how the Book of Abraham came into being and who authored the text is entirely irrelevant for the book's spiritual/scriptural merit, I seriously doubt that most of the leaders have given the matter too much thought.

I can't agree with this. Mormonism hasn't got quite the same wiggle room that other religions might have to accept their claimed Prophets just making stuff up, however "meaningful" some might judge it to be.

Joseph is claimed as a translator of ancient documents through the gift and power of God, not as the original author of documents merely passed off as ancient through deceptive means and claims.

Joseph's works can be just as insightful as they can be, or just as filled with pearls of wisdom, however if Joseph cobbled them together from his own opinions, ideas gleaned from the works of others, and some contemporary theological speculation, then his works are about on the same footing as those of JRR Tolkien or Stephen King.

It's about the credibility. Believers have to think that a Creator of the Universe exists, who was willing to fashion us and endow us with reasoning faculties and intelligence, logic, and rationality, but who created said universe so that it looks as though he's not really there, and so that it looks as if his prophets aren't credible, and so that his acclaimed "words" simply have no credibility, or at best cannot truly distinguish themselves above and beyond the admitted fictional works of man.

Such a God cannot be taken seriously, or cannot be believed in by someone who thinks and uses his or her noggin for more than holding up their hat.