Gadianton wrote:This may mean that his simplistic view of the Bible contrasts with a deeply, deeply, deeply nuanced version of Egyptology?...On the one hand, the Bible in plain KJV English can be proof texted to serve Mormon theology with all the cultural shaping doing work in the background (as symmachus mentioned elsewhere) whereas Egyptology, this totally alien domain, needs an incredible amount of relativism to soften it up, and make ancient Egypt look like the Holladay area.
Hi Gadianton,
That's the impression I get from what I have read so far of this review, especially in comparison to his approaches in the Bokovoy exchange earlier this year and his blogging about early Mormon history.
Typical of the FARMSian book review, I am 15 pages into the "review", and although John Gee in the first two pages questions Ashment's honesty and competence and calls the Tanners "anti-Mormon," he has not yet even told us what the hell the book he is reviewing contains. All I know is that it has something to do with magical papyri containing the name Abraham, information I could get from the title, but he doesn't lay out their arguments in the slightest--although, he keeps saying, they're wrong, whatever they are--so I have to piece together what their arguments are from Gee's theoretical musings which quickly make the work under review recede into the background. But, whatever that argument might be, there is a whole lot of softening up, as you put it, to prepare us for the fact that so little can actually be known for certain in Egyptology (references to famous critics of positivism like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Novick more than a few times in this "review" so far, and skimming along I see he quotes a more obscure but probably more significant critic for him, a theo-bureaucrat named Bruce McConkie). So, yeah, we need a sophisticated approach in examining magical papyri containing the name "Abraham" or variations of it in Old Coptic from the Greco-Roman period, an approach that contextualizes these texts in their ritual setting. Such an approach makes the Book of Abraham's claims possible, even if it doesn't prove them, because ultimately it is not susceptible to empirical proof or disproof one way or the other; it's more nuanced than that.
By comparison, on the question of Joseph Smith's knowledge of the Bible, well, of course, since it is impossible to know about any text unless you have your own personal copy, we know that the Prophet was totally ignorant of the Bible because he didn't buy one until 1829. Case closed.
Your thoughts on the "review"?
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie