212The 1859 catalog of the St. Louis Museum quotes Seyffarth as saying, "The papyrus roll is not a record, but an invocation to the Deity Osiris . . . and a picture of the attendant spirits, intro ducing the dead to the Judge, Osiris." 16 Dr. Seyffarth may have been looking at two fragments now known as IIIA, Court of Osiris (on the throne), or perhaps Facsimile 3 in the Book of Abraham, or some other fragment presently unknown.
If Peterson's name were "Tanner", and he were an anti-Mormon writer, the use of ellipses would earn him a scathing review in the pages of FROB. Even moreso, since the information he has omitted provides crucial context and disallows the obfuscation in which he engages in the following sentence.
Here is the full entry from the Museum Catalog:
“These mummies were obtained in the catacombs of Egypt, sixty feet below the surface of the earth, for the Antiquarian Society of Paris, forwarded to New York, and there purchased, in the year 1835, by Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet, on account of the writings found in the chest of one of them, and which he pretended to translate, as stating them to belong to the family of the Pharoahs’ – but, according to Prof. Seyffarth, the papyrus roll is not a record, but an invocation to the Deity Osirus, in which occurs the name of the person, (Horus,) and a picture of the attendant spirits, introducing the dead to the Judge, Osirus [sic]. The body of one is that of a female, about forty – the other, that of a boy, about fourteen. They were kept by the Prophet’s mother until her death, when the heirs sold them, and shortly after, were purchased for the Museum.”
I have bolded the portion that is omitted by Dr. Peterson's ellipses. It informs us that the document Professor Seyffarth viewed contained the name of the deceased, Horus, and so cannot have been the "two fragments now known as IIIA, Court of Osiris (on the throne)," as Dr. Peterson suggests. (Those two fragments are in the possession of the Church anyway, and so would not have been part of the now-destroyed St. Louis Museum collection.) Rather, it must have been the vignette known among Mormons as Facsimile 3. In other words, Dr. Peterson suggests that the roll Seyffarth says was "not a record, but an invocation to the Deity Osirus" might have been the Book of Dead roll rather than the Book of Breathings roll (from which Joseph Smith claimed to have translated Abraham's record). If he were correct, then the Seyffarth statement would afford no evidence against the Missing Papyrus Theory (MPT). Unfortunately for the MPT, he is patently incorrect, as the missing portion of the Seyffarth quote informs us.
Despite my objection to his treatment of this quotation, I bear Dr. Peterson no ill will, and sincerely hope that he is resting well in a blissful paradise. My condolences to the family.
-CK