A few questions for Shulem

[_Shulem]

MG
How did Kerry Shirts explain or tease out the unknowns and/or issues in regards to that?

With really lopsided Nibley apologetics that's how. I was trying so hard to be another Hugh Nibley I never bothered to read the other side, the actual Egyptologists, except as Nibley's lens focused on them. My research was derivative at best, and ignorant of the reality of the situation at worse. I was never so wrong. Sigh...... all those damn years, never to be recovered......

MG puts his stock in Joseph Smith's Egyptology couched in LDS apologetic nonsense that makes a mockery of ancient Egypt. But we have modern Egyptology which is backed by collaborated professional research using sound methods through various disciplines needed to restore the true knowledge of ancient Egypt.

LDS Egyptian revelation is bogus and LDS apologetic responses concerning it are shameful. This business about the "the jury is not out yet" is nothing but a ploy to buy time in formulating new excuses and applying apologetic tricks to phony arguments.

Mormons are liars. All of them. It's disgusting.

[Guest]

I appreciated your willingness to help us understand more of the background/history to the statement I was referring to initially. I am not opposed to those that would conclude that Joseph Smith may have either made this statement and/or approved of it.

Unlike you, LDS Egyptologist John Gee is opposed and asserts that the "assumption" that Joseph Smith wrote the Explanations is not "provable". He attempts to distance the Explanations of the Facsimiles from the Book of Abraham and questions the very idea that Joseph Smith authored the Explanations.

Here is a video link to a discourse he gave at BYU on this very point:

Begin at 13:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVAEC1wJFqY

But how is one to know what Joseph Smith knew of Egyptian? Well let's start with the Facsimiles, everyone assumes that Joseph Smith wrote the Explanations to the Facsimiles from the Book of Abraham; we cannot however prove that he did.

Incredible. John Gee tells us that everyone just assumes it. I guess the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo just assumed it too, including Joseph Smith who published his revelations as "The Book of Abraham" and took all the glory for own vanity sake.

Simply incredible that John Gee speaks with such a forked tongue. He's a liar and a disgrace to Egyptology.

One cannot with certainty use the Explanations of the Facsimiles as a source of Joseph Smith's knowledge of Egyptian or lack thereof

Oh yes we can and we do!

[_Themis]

Mormons are liars. All of them. It's disgusting.

Not really. Both of us were tbm's at one time. I like to think all of us when we look at different issues we have different levels of bias. I describe it in some ways how much we want to believe something is true and how much we just want to know what is true. If some issue is not related to things like religion or politics people usually don't have much, if any, desire to believe one way or the other. They will just want to know what is true and will usually be fairly unbiased. Not so with Mormonism. Almost everyone in the church, like ourselves, have a high level of wanting the church to be true. It greatly affects us in how we see any evidence related to the church. Our level of wanting to know what is really true has to be higher then our wanting to believe the church is true in order to be less biased and see and interpret the evidence accurately.

Until one wants to believe more then they want to know what is true, they will tend to give too much weight to poor arguments and evidence and give little weight to good arguments and evidence. Especially if the desire to believe is very high as it is with tbm's. People like MG and DCP are classic cases of this. Both have most of their family and lives within the church. DCP is even worse because his job is dependent on being a believer. It's extremely hard to get to a point of wanting the truth more, and can take many years or never happen for a lot of people.

I should add John Gee is in the same Boat as DCP. His job is dependent on being a believer and using his knowledge to defend the church. He went to school with a job at BYU already guaranteed. This creates a huge desire to want to believe the church is true.

[_Shulem]

Would you mind sharing what Nibley thought about the Fac.3 issue

http://www.boap.org/LDS/Hugh-Nibley/TrFac.html

THE THREE FACSIMILES FROM THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM

Perhaps the neatest bull's eye that the Prophet Joseph makes in the Explanations, is in designating Figure 5 in Facsimile No. 3 as "Shulem, one of King's principal waiters."

You call this a bull'seye?

Where is the name "SHULEM" written in hieroglyphs? Now that would be a bull'seye if the name was actually in the Facsimile as tricky Joe said it was.

I call it a lie. A big fat lie that rolled off the lying tongue of Joe Blow Smith. And you, Hugh, are a liar too.

[_Shulem]

Would you mind sharing what Nibley thought about the Fac.3

You know what? When it comes down to it what really matters is what Joseph Smith thought of Facsimile No. 3. Doesn't that seem reasonable? What Smith said is what counts. What Smith testified of and published is what matters! The Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo believed the Explanations of Facsimile No. 3 as revelations from God -- the dead Egyptian language being resurrected and translated into English. That is exactly what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints used to profess and believe. But the church today, well, it's a different church run by a different mindset altogether.

Right?

[_fetchface]

But how is one to know what Joseph Smith knew of Egyptian? Well let's start with the Facsimiles, everyone assumes that Joseph Smith wrote the Explanations to the Facsimiles from the Book of Abraham; we cannot however prove that he did.

This type of reasoning is a double-edged sword. If you apply this reasoning consistently to the Mormon system, it becomes impossible to support anything. I understand the temptation on the apologist's side to do this. The evidence is uncomfortable and so it becomes tempting to raise the evidential bar to exclude it. However, we can use Gee's statement against him to defeat every one of Joseph's propositions. For example:

But how is one to know what Joseph Smith knew of [God]? Well let's start with the [revelations in the D&C], everyone assumes that Joseph Smith wrote the [revelations]; we cannot however prove that he did.

The level of evidence that the historical record leaves that Joseph was involved in his now-canonized revelations and the now-canonized explanations to Facsimile 3 are the same. You can't set a bar that one will clear and the other won't.

[_Shulem]

The level of evidence that the historical record leaves that Joseph was involved in his now-canonized revelations and the now-canonized explanations to Facsimile 3 are the same.

The evidence presented in this thread pretty much proves that Joseph Smith authored, tendered, and presented the Explanations of the Facsimile for publication in the official church periodical of the Times and Seasons. All revelations for the whole church come from the President of the Church:

1. The Book of Mormon

BY JOSEPH SMITH, JUNIOR
AUTHOR AND PROPRIETOR
PALMYRA:
PRINTED BY E.B. GRANDIN, FOR THE AUTHOR
1830

Translated by Joseph Smith, Jun.

2. The Doctrine and Covenants

The
Doctrine and
Covenants
of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Containing Revelations Given to Joseph Smith, the
Prophet with Some Additions by His Successors
in the Presidency of the Church

3. The Pearl of Great Price

The
Pearl of
Great Price
A Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith First Prophet, Seer, and Revelator to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The bottom line: The canonized revelations, translations, and narrations of the Facsimiles came from Joseph Smith. I don't care what John Gee or Hugh Nibley say.

[Guest]

Nibley wasn't an Egyptologist. He was a historian with some training in Egyptology. If you want to see what a highly trained Egyptologist thinks of Hugh Nibley's translations and transliterations, as well as those from Gee, Muhlestein & Rhodes, see The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Editon by Robert Ritner. If one is really interested in seeing a scholarly work on the Joseph Smith papyri this is well worth the $25.00. Of special interest in Ritner's work is the fact that he has taken the time to provide his own translations as well as all other translations of the Joseph Smith papyri for comparison purposes, so after each of his translations would see how the same passage was translated by people like Baer, Parker, Rhodes, Nibley and Gee.

For those who do not have Ritner's book, here are a few quotes regarding Ritner's opinion of Nibley's ability to translate/transliterate Egyptian. Bracket comments are mine.

In 1975 Nibley attempted... a translation of the unrestored portions of Fragments XI and X .[The Hor scroll on which we know the Book of Abraham was supposed to be according to Joseph Smith's translation itself and the KEP]Nibleys volume was expressly composed to provide a Mormon rebuttal to the interpretive analysis of Egyptologist, including Baer, with whom he had studied briefly and informally. These word for word, incomplete translations produced such results as "(avenger of) father his Horus (of) Edfu has enfolded body being about to deify spirit thine as do gods all," and were recognized by Nibley as "nonsense". Moreover, his transliterations defy both conventional and internal systems, with inconsistency and conflation of alphabetic signs, punctuation, etc. While intended to highlight his quibbles over the nature of translations (to defend Joseph Smith's use of the term), Nibley's interlinear method of literal translation would necessarily produce gibberish from any language.

Tacitly acknowledging this source of embarrasment, Jon Gee and Michael Rhodes have attempted to justify Nibley's methods---while promptly dropping them---in their heavily reworked "re-edition" of the 1975 volume. Noted Gee,
"we need to explain the numerous changes we have made in this new edition of Nibley's 1975 Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri/ First, we have returned the Egyptian transliterations to the standard transliteration system..."

The retention of many of Nibley's errors show clearly that the work of Nibley. rather than that of Baer, was the immediate source from which Rhodes began his work

On page 125 alone Ritner has 12 footnotes that all start "Misread by Nibley".

Ritner is also pretty direct when it come to what he thinks of Jon Gee's apologetic work. Thought the translation portions of the book are footnotes that start out "Misread by Nibley and followed by Gee and/or Rhodes."

Since Gee has publicly claimed that his Yale degree justifies his apologetic interpretations, I was constrained to deny that I (as his former advisor) had any involvement in these writings, See the sarcastic claim by Gee [in The Hagiography of Doubting Thomas] 1998, p. 176:

"Since I have a Ph.D in Egyptology, I am an expert. All anti=Mormon should therefore unquestioningly accept my opinion."

Gee's apologetic assertions, I stress again, would not have been acceptable in his coursework. I gain no personal pleasure--and remain deeply saddened--by the need to disavow my former student.

[_Shulem]

The Book of Abraham consists of both the story and the Facsimiles. The text of the story is inseparably "connected" with the Explanations of the Facsimiles. Joseph Smith and the early Latter-day Saints believed this absolutely. Even the saints in England believed this as printed in the Millennial Star, 15 July 1851, 217:

The Book of Abraham -- a translation of some ancient records that fell into the hands of the church a few years since from the catacombs of Egypt, purporting to be writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand upon Papyrus; translated from the Papyrus by Joseph Smith. Connected with this translation are three fac-similes from the papyrus.

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/MStar/id/2335/rec/13

[_Philo Sofee]

[quote]John Gee wrote:
But how is one to know what Joseph Smith knew of Egyptian? Well let's start with the Facsimiles, everyone assumes that Joseph Smith wrote the Explanations to the Facsimiles from the Book of Abraham; we cannot however prove that he did.


Incredible. John Gee tells us that everyone just assumes it. I guess the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo just assumed it too, including Joseph Smith who published his revelations as "The Book of Abraham" and took all the glory for own vanity sake.

Simply incredible that John Gee speaks with such a forked tongue. He's a liar and a disgrace to Egyptology.

John Gee wrote:
One cannot with certainty use the Explanations of the Facsimiles as a source of Joseph Smith's knowledge of Egyptian or lack thereof


Oh yes we can and we do!
[/quote]

It is just staggering how silly this apologetic is. Does Gee think anything through anymore?!