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After reading Ritner's write up about the hypocephalus in the new Smith-Pettit volume The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition I thought I might share some of my initial thoughts.

After quite a few years of doing research on the Book of Abraham and then reading Stephen Thompson's excellent article on the Book of Abraham in Dialogue, I came to the conclusion Apologists (FARMS, FAIR, and MI) are trying to put a square peg in a round hole. In everything they do with the Book of Abraham and papyri this is what they are doing. So the reader cannot get involved in the minutia of their arguments. It is a black hole and designed to suck the reader in and destroy them!

I want to make this clear, Michael Rhodes two volumes on the papyri are excellent works and the following is NOT a criticism of this work, I am just trying to make some random observations:

What is interesting, is that everything Rhodes has translated with the papyri does not match one thing Smith said was there. NOT ONE THING!!!!!! Not the vignettes that make up the facsimile 1 and any of the hieroglyphics or hieratic writing. Even if Smith guessed at one character correctly, so what. I can look at cave man drawings and often come up with their intent. But Smith got everything wrong!

In this new volume; the photos and the history by Mike Marquardt is top notch. Robert Ritner's translation is now going to be the best we have and the volume we will have to turn to for understanding the papyri. Marc Coenen is THE MAN when it comes to the Book of Breathings Made By Isis, which is Smith's Book of Abraham papyri. His chapter is short, but he writes everything that needs to be said.

I think this book is great. The quoted text below by Ritner is priceless. Smith took hieratic text from a funeral text from a different time period and put them upside down and backwards into the hypocephalus to replace missing pieces. Smith had no idea what in the hell he was doing.

On page 223 Ritner writes the follow:

VIII. Text of 4 horizontal columns (Smith’s Figs. 12, 13, 14 and 15). The beginning of each line is lost and has been restored wrongly in later editions by the insertion of hieratic text from the Breathing Permit of Hor and the Book of the Dead of Ta-sherit-Min, copied upside down and backwards to the direction of the hypocephalus text.

Something else for you all to think about. As I commented, Rhodes has translated the Book of Abraham papyri and none of it matches Smith's Book of Abraham. It is an Egyptian funeral text.

If Rhodes had the gold plates of Mormon. What would his translation look like? Would it look anything like the Book of Mormon translated by Smith?

Joe Geisner wrote:
Something else for you all to think about. As I commented, Rhodes has translated the Book of Abraham papyri and none of it matches Smith's Book of Abraham. It is an Egyptian funeral text.

This.
This is why the Church is demonstrably a fraud.

Joe Geisner wrote:Something else for you all to think about. As I commented, Rhodes has translated the Book of Abraham papyri and none of it matches Smith's Book of Abraham. It is an Egyptian funeral text.

If Rhodes had the gold plates of Mormon. What would his translation look like? Would it look anything like the Book of Mormon translated by Smith?

That is one of the most interesting questions I have heard on this board for a long time.

What if there were ancient gold plates, or something that looked like gold, , but Joseph Smith translated them wrongly, just like he did the Book of Abraham vignettes (and probably the rest of it too)? That scenario might explain why the Book of Mormon looks so much like 19th C pseudepigrapha, but preserves the value of the witness testimonies who say they really saw and handled the plates ...

The fact he knew he couldn't really translate them might explain why he had to get rid of them after the Book of Mormon was finished, in case anyone turned out to be able to really be able to identify and decipher the script. The Anthon MS would've course have been a deliberate blind, not copied from the plates at all, so as to conceal the real nature of the original script. What a terrible loss to archeology just to enable a man to get famous by starting a new religion!

(I am not serious about this ... but all the same ...)

Joe,

Thanks for the reviews you have been doing. Please do more.

Did Ritner or anyone else comment on the length of scroll issue?

Something else for you all to think about. As I commented, Rhodes has translated the Book of Abraham papyri and none of it matches Smith's Book of Abraham. It is an Egyptian funeral text.

This.
This is why the Church is demonstrably a fraud.

The fact that the Egyptians often changed history and meanings to promote their gods and avoid embarrassment of the ruling elite (such as Abraham and Jehovah's victory over their priest) demonstrates that it is fraudulent to use that kind of reasoning to show the LDS Church is a fraud.

bcspace wrote:The fact that the Egyptians often changed history and meanings to promote their gods and avoid embarrassment of the ruling elite (such as Abraham and Jehovah's victory over their priest) demonstrates that it is fraudulent to use that kind of reasoning to show the LDS Church is a fraud.

How do we know that it's a fact that the Egyptians changed history and meanings to promote their gods and avoid the embarrassment of Abraham and Jehovah's victory over their priests?

bcspace wrote:

This.
This is why the Church is demonstrably a fraud.

The fact that the Egyptians often changed history and meanings to promote their gods and avoid embarrassment of the ruling elite (such as Abraham and Jehovah's victory over their priest) demonstrates that it is fraudulent to use that kind of reasoning to show the LDS Church is a fraud.

You don't have to believe me. It's just cheaper if you do.

bcspace wrote:
The fact that the Egyptians often changed history and meanings to promote their gods and avoid embarrassment of the ruling elite (such as Abraham and Jehovah's victory over their priest) demonstrates that it is fraudulent to use that kind of reasoning to show the LDS Church is a fraud.

Let me see if I can understand this reasoning. In order to protect their Gods from embarrassment some scribe thousands of years after Abraham was dead copied a text that Abraham wrote in his own hand onto a scroll but changed every single word to protect these Gods?

Fence Sitter,

Ritner spends a couple of pages discussing the issue, but on page 87 Ritner writes:

"As a result of this uniformity, the original size of the papyrus is not in doubt. With textual
restorations and the now lost Facsimile 3, the papyrus will have measured about 150–155
cm. At most, the papyrus might have been expanded by the inclusion of a further, middle
vignette, as found in Papyrus Tübingen 2016, but on the basis of the known parallels
there is no reasonable expectation of any further text."

From everyone (meaning Egyptologists, not Mormon apologists) I have read, this is consistent with previous scholars. Ritner does cite Andrew Cook and Chris Smith's article in Dialogue.

Fence Sitter wrote:

bcspace wrote:
The fact that the Egyptians often changed history and meanings to promote their gods and avoid embarrassment of the ruling elite (such as Abraham and Jehovah's victory over their priest) demonstrates that it is fraudulent to use that kind of reasoning to show the LDS Church is a fraud.

Let me see if I can understand this reasoning. In order to protect their Gods from embarrassment some scribe thousands of years after Abraham was dead copied a text that Abraham wrote in his own hand onto a scroll but changed every single word to protect these Gods?

I wonder if Bcspace can back up this insane reasoning. He did say it was a fact. I call CFR that they changed history and meanings to promote their Gods and avoid embarrassment over Abraham who we have so little evidence that he actually existed. I also notice he never gives any detail for this line of thinking.