Chap wrote:Take away Smith's 'creative additions', and you just have a perfectly normal (though damaged) ancient Egyptian 'resurrection-of-deceased-assisted-by-Anubis' scene .
Yup. But of course, I've been told by an apologist that we're not looking at the Book of Abraham in a sufficiently "nuanced" way.
Imagine, if you will, that you find a worn sheet of paper with mysterious lettering on it. Around the edges, the sheet is torn and is missing some of the text. You don't know what it is, so you take it to your neighbor, who claims to be an expert in restoring and translating documents. He says he'll tell you what it is once he has time to work on it.
He calls you and tells you it's ready. When you get there, you find that the missing portions now have an assortment of different-looking characters than the rest of the text, but your neighbor insists that the new text is what should have been there in the the first place.
You ask him what it means, and he tells you it's a section from Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" rendered in ancient Chinese. He gives you a line-by-line translation, including the "restored" text. You're quite pleased, and you go your way.
A few days later, you tell a Chinese-speaking friend about your exciting discovery. He asks to see it and says, "Oh, that's not a poem. It's a menu from the restaurant down the street." You go to the Chinese restaurant and find the same menu, only undamaged. Oddly enough, the text on the undamaged menu does not match the "restored" text on your original sheet.
So, you go back to your neighbor and demand an explanation.
Well, of course it looks like a menu, but this is an entirely different kind of document. You have to understand that an English redactor might have used a menu to record "The Faerie Queene," so you have to look at the sheet through an English perspective to see how this might have happened. And besides, we don't know how much of the original document is missing. For all we know, this sheet is part of a larger document wholly unrelated to the menu from the Chineses restaurant. You need to take a more nuanced approach.
But it's obviously a menu! You protest.
I see that you've decided to become a career critic of my abilities. I guess there's no hope for you.
