Understanding KEP and Book of Abraham issues

[_Bob Loblaw]

Tobin's First Vision?

[_sock puppet]

We are created beings ourselves, but that doesn't prevent us from creating. I don't see the two as being mutually exclusive. God can be both as well.

Who created God?

Elmer Gantry?

[_sock puppet]

Tobin's First Vision?

At last a visual that allows me to distinguish between the two personages, elohim and jehovah! elohim has pink hair and jehovah sea-foam green.

[_ludwigm]

Tobin's First Vision?
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At last a visual that allows me to distinguish between the two personages, elohim and jehovah! elohim has pink hair and jehovah sea-foam green.

But both of them have Ken eczema...

[#img] http://wumocomicstrip.com/img/strip/-WM ... -07-21.gif[#/img]

[_Tobin]

Who created God?

Elmer Gantry?

Joseph Smith said this about it:

If Abraham reasoned thus—If Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. Paul says that which is earthly is in the likeness of that which is heavenly, Hence if Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He had a Father also? I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it.

[_Fence Sitter]

Recently I discovered another issue which is interesting. We know that there were two scrolls connected to the old man mummy who was Hor. (Pharaoh himself according to contemporary descriptions.) They are a Book of Breathings (the Hor scroll and the generally accepted source of the Book of Abraham) parts of which are still in the possession of the Church and a Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead papyrus which was prepared for Hor is in the Louvre. These two scroll date to about 150 BCE.
The Louvre Hor Book of Dead is also badly damaged but its dimensions are about 58" long and 12-13 1/2" tall.
Somewhere between Lebolo removing Hor from his tomb in Egypt and Chandler selling the remaining artifact collection in Kirtland, the Hor Book of the Dead was separated from the mummy and made its way to the Louvre. It would be interesting to compare the two scrolls to see if they were created by the same scribe, but I digress.

In addition to the Hor scroll, the Joseph Smith collection contained another scroll, which he identified as the Book of Joseph. This is actually a Book of the Dead prepared for someone named Ta-sherit-Min which I presume was one of the female mummies; in any case it was not from Hor. The age of this scroll is somewhere after 500 BCE.

So in order for The Book of Abraham and The Book of Joseph to reach Joseph Smith one is required to believe the following:
1.Two complete, long, unknown works by Abraham and Joseph were kept in Egypt for around 2000 years.
2. Egyptian scribes would take common vignettes from Egyptian funerary documents and just slightly change them so they represented scenes from the Book of Abraham. Note that an Egyptian scribe would not have included a vignette of a sacrifice scene (someone holding a knife) as part of a funerary document because the Egyptians believed these scrolls had actual power and a knife wielding caricature would not be included as it would be a threat to the deceased. Maybe we have a Jewish scribe?
3. Two different scribes working hundreds of years apart took two different extremely rare Jewish texts and inscribed them in the middle portions of common burial documents for members of a different religion, in the case of the scroll with Facsimile #1 that scribe would been able to place the scroll unexamined by anyone else on the mummy because of note#2 above.
4.The two scrolls are buried hundreds of years apart on separate mummies neither of which had reason to have Jewish texts like these included as part of their funerary documents.
5. These two mummies make their way to Joseph Smith two thousand years later with the only known copies of these two texts.
6. Joseph Smith translates a portion of one scroll and promises volumes to come from the rest of both scrolls.
7. After Joseph Smith's death every single piece of text from both scrolls that contained either the Book of Abraham or the Book of Joseph was lost, in spite of the fact that the length of the scrolls required to contain those books would far exceed those portions in existence. None of the extant fragments or torn piece, of which there are dozens have anything to do with Abraham or Joseph.

In the end, we are not asked just to believe that we happen to be missing the entire portion of a one of a kind scroll that was buried with Hor which made its way to Joseph Smith and then was lost, we are asked to believe this happened twice, once with Hor and once with another mummy buried at a different time, perhaps hundreds of years apart.

Fool me once.

[_Chap]

7. After Joseph Smith's death every single piece of text from both scrolls that contained either the Book of Abraham or the Book of Joseph was lost, in spite of the fact that the length of the scrolls required to contain those books would far exceed those portions in existence. None of the extant fragments or torn piece, of which there are dozens have anything to do with Abraham or Joseph.

In the end, we are not asked just to believe that there is a large missing portion of a scroll that was buried with Hor which made its way to Joseph Smith and then was lost, we are asked to believe this happened twice, once with Hor and once with another mummy buried at a different time, perhaps hundreds of years apart.

That is an excellent point, and one that I do not think I have ever seen before.

For every extra 10 cm of missing scroll that you argue once existed with the Book of Abraham on it, the more difficult becomes your task in explaining why the only bits of the scroll that survived were those sections with no part of the Book of Abraham on them.

There are other good reasons for thinking that the Book of Abraham is the result of fraud or delusion by Joseph Smith - but this is certainly a new one.

[_sock puppet]

Who created God?

Elmer Gantry?

Joseph Smith said this about it:

If Abraham reasoned thus—If Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and John discovered that God the Father of Jesus Christ had a Father, you may suppose that He had a Father also. Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way.

Thank you, Tobin, for reminding us how through rhetoric, JSJr drew out the Mormon god by projecting onto that canvas human experience. Of course, it was not convincing enough to JSJr or for JSJr simply to claim that Mormon god revealed to JSJr that Mormon god has always existed, or was created in this 'natural' way. This is one more point of evidence that JSJr created Mormon god in JSJr's own image. Then of course, why? See my Elmer Gentry post.

[_Fence Sitter]

Another issue brought up by David Bokovoy some time ago is the dependency of chapters 4 & 5 of the Book of Abraham on the Bible. Note that this also argues strongly against the missing scroll theory.

Says David.

we can establish that chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Abraham derive from the Bible, not the other way around and that these two separate versions of creation were originally written sometime during the Assyrian control over Jerusalem. In addition, they were not complied into the form that the Book of Abraham presents until after the exilic time period. Given these facts, someone who still wishes to believe that a missing segment from the Joseph Smith papyri contained the actual Book of Abraham would need to argue that a Jewish author living in Egypt penned the text as a piece of pseudopigraphy and that the account appeared attached to a segment of the scroll in Joseph Smith's possession. Unfortunately, I honestly cannot see any good reason to accept this view historically, in fact, it is also highly problematic, albeit much less so than the impossible view that Abraham himself penned the original version

[_Bob Loblaw]

we can establish that chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Abraham derive from the Bible, not the other way around and that these two separate versions of creation were originally written sometime during the Assyrian control over Jerusalem. In addition, they were not complied into the form that the Book of Abraham presents until after the exilic time period. Given these facts, someone who still wishes to believe that a missing segment from the Joseph Smith papyri contained the actual Book of Abraham would need to argue that a Jewish author living in Egypt penned the text as a piece of pseudopigraphy and that the account appeared attached to a segment of the scroll in Joseph Smith's possession. Unfortunately, I honestly cannot see any good reason to accept this view historically, in fact, it is also highly problematic, albeit much less so than the impossible view that Abraham himself penned the original version

I wonder why they didn't hire him at BYU.