The Specter of the Book of Abraham Continues to Haunt Mopologetics

[_Shulem]

Because facsimiles 1 and 3 are not Egyptian documents. The have already been appropriated, and already have a new context (which comes with a new meaning). And when symbols, images, texts, or anything else gets appropriated, they take on new meanings that don't have to be connected to the past meanings.

You are more than welcome to quote JOSEPH SMITH, Oliver Cowdery, and those who presented the Book of Abraham to the Times and Seasons in order to support your wild claims.

[_Shulem]

I wonder if those that paid for the artifacts would have ponied up their money had they known that they weren't really buying the schtick of Joseph and Abraham? Or that Joseph Smith really couldn't read the documents?

They believed they had authentic autographs. They believed Joseph Smith was actually translating Egyptian into English.

Joseph Smith & a LITERAL 3500 Year Old Abraham Autograph

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Dr. Shades writes:

If the Book of Abraham was the Jehovah's Witnesses' problem, would you give them the same free pass?

No. This is something of a pet peeve I suppose. If you read my 2016 FairMormon presentation, I had a fair amount to say about this issue with regard to the Book of Mormon, and the way that the Book of Mormon gets conflated inappropriately with the Gold Plates.

I am not saying that you cannot be critical of the Book of Abraham (or the Book of Mormon). What I am trying to say is that we shouldn't refer to the Book of Abraham, or the facsimiles as being the same as the Egyptian papyri. Paul will argue (and he does argue) that we should pay attention to what Joseph Smith said - but that's an entirely separate argument. I think that critics can appropriately argue that if Joseph Smith believed that he was restoring the papyri to their original form, that he blew it. But that kind of argument needs to preserve the distinction between the modern text (which includes the facsimiles) and the ancient text from which they were derived. Because no matter what Joseph Smith was doing, or even what he thought he was doing, he wasn't trying to restore Anubis.

Or perhaps in a different way, you could argue that if Joseph Smith was trying to restore the papyrus to its original form, then he should have restored Anubis differently. I think that's an argument you can make (and which can be responded to if someone wanted to). But to say that the figure in the facsimile is Anubis, when the figure isn't drawn like Anubis, and where the description of the figure in the facsimile says that the figure is something other than Anubis, doesn't accurately describe what we are looking at in the facsimile.

The facsimiles aren't simply copies of an earlier document. They contain changes. And our familiarity with Egyptian funerary texts allows us to produce hypothetical originals from which the facsimile was derived. And we can discuss the facsimile in terms of how it is different from that hypothetical original. And the fact that we do speak of these differences should point to this fact that we need distinguish between the facsimiles and the original documents. I am just asking for a more careful discussion (from both critics and believers) where we don't conflate one with the other, and end up making arguments that don't help us move the discussion forward.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Fence Sitter writes:

Because the gold plates are not Nephite documents. The have already been appropriated, and already have a new context (which comes with a new meaning). And when symbols, images, texts, or anything else gets appropriated, they take on new meanings that don't have to be connected to the past meanings. So these are modern Mormon documents.

We don't have the gold plates. They were a Nephite document. But, when Nephi quotes Isaiah, and reinterprets it in a completely different context (and explains to us that this is what he is doing), he has appropriated a source and given it a new context, and new meaning. Meaning which its original audience could never have derived from that text. So the Book of Mormon suggests to us (assuming that it contains a description that has accurate elements) that its authors were also appropriating and reusing older material in new contexts. This is nothing new, of course, to anyone who has engaged in the study of ancient texts and their histories (in particular biblical studies).

I discuss this whole idea with respect to the Book of Mormon in this article here:

https://www.mormoninterpreter.com/nephi ... t-reading/

And in my 2016 FairMormon presentation here:

https://www.fairmormon.org/conference/a ... cative-act

The Book of Mormon (not the Gold Plates) is a modern text. And if it is translated well (in the way that we understand good translation today), then it includes interpretive elements that are far more meaningful to us as modern readers than to any potential ancient audience who might have read the gold plates. It is simply the nature of texts and language. As I noted near the end of that presentation:

When we approach the text of the Book of Mormon, our studies need to be cognizant of the Book of Mormon as a modern text – and as a text that has been recontextualized for a modern audience – a text whose author was potentially aware of the interpretations that would be given to the text, and the implication of those interpretations on issues contemporary with its first readers. Should we be surprised to sometimes find our own questions reflected back at us from its pages?

Ben McGuire

[Guest]

This is not the case.

Why?

Because facsimiles 1 and 3 are not Egyptian documents. The have already been appropriated, and already have a new context (which comes with a new meaning). And when symbols, images, texts, or anything else gets appropriated, they take on new meanings that don't have to be connected to the past meanings. So these are modern Mormon documents. And so there is no Anubis in facsimile 1. There was an Anubis in the original piece of Egyptian art from which facsimile 1 was derived. We shouldn't conflate these two things. (This also goes for believers who want to conflate the two in the other direction by suggesting that the meaning that Joseph Smith provided should be understood as the real meaning of the Egyptian originals ....)

Bro. McGuire,

Below is a Hellerick triaxial boreal projection (HTBP) of the globe of the Earth. Rational individuals understand that this is a mathematical projection of the surface of a sphere onto a plane.

Certain irrational, incurious, abjectly ignorant (or all three) individuals believe this projection is evidence for a flat Earth, and indeed would have others believe the same. There are even formal societies of such believers of which the International Flat Earth Research Society is but one example.

Like many Mormons' "belief" in the Book of Abraham, some members of these Flat Earth Society organizations do not really think that the Earth is flat. Nonetheless, many members (perhaps even most, given the effects of social media) irrationally believe that such is the case and continually strive to re-interpret, misunderstand or misrepresent the overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary.



One might say that these individuals have appropriated the Earth's HTBP, and for them it is strong evidence that the Earth is indeed flat. Belief in a flat Earth is, of course, utter nonsense. And one must work continuously and diligently to attempt to rationalize the mountain of adverse data in order to maintain such unfounded belief.

Flat Earth Believer appropriation of the circular mathematically valid HTBP as evidence for the nonsensical hypothesis that the Earth is flat is exactly analogous to your appropriation of the rectangular scenes from a copy of the Hor Book of Breathings as evidence that the Book of Abraham is what the LDS Church claims it to be. Both hypotheses are demonstrably nonsense.

We do have sense in the form of:The Hor Book of Breathings: A Translation and Commentary, by Michael D. Rhodes (2002). And then there is the nonsense: “The Book of Abraham,” The Pearl of Great Price Student Manual (2000)"

Does that make sense?

Only if the Earth really is flat, my friend.

[_aussieguy55]

Ben, in another life you would have been a good lawyer getting your guilty client off. No missing manuscript. He "used" the Book of Breathings.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Mr. McGuire,

Why does the Church call them facsimiles? I'm having trouble following your logic.

- Doc

[_Shulem]

Mr. McGuire,

Why does the Church call them facsimiles? I'm having trouble following your logic.

- Doc

Let's be clear about something. What the church says today means nothing. It's what the church said in JOSEPH SMITH'S day that means everything. The Book of Abraham was first printed in the Times and Seasons and later canonized in 1880. The original introduction in the Times and Seasons is:

A FAC-SIMILE FROM THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM

which means "an exact copy"

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Google says the same thing in 2018.

- Doc

[_Shulem]

Google says the same thing in 2018.

- Doc

Google truly is god.