Icontropy and Book of Abraham Facsimiles: Shulem Has Met His Match!

[_Philo Sofee]

I think Philo is just trying to wind up Shulem's Grand Key to see if he emits high-energy Hah-ko-kau-beams.

Well, my guess is that Shulem will rise to the occasion through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash, which is the governing power, and anubitize his so-called "challengers".

[_Shulem]

So what's the Mormon line, then?

Joseph Smith got hold of some pages from the Book of Breathings, and the pictures inspired him to receive a revelation ... which he thought was a translation of his pages of hieroglyphics but really wasn't ... because what it really was, was a direct divine transmission of a completely different text that had once been composed by Abraham based on the same pictures that Smith saw, because that's just how old the Book of Breathings is.

Would that be it? To a non-Mormon it sounds far-fetched, all right, but I can imagine it might seem more plausible to Mormons, and also be hard to disprove.

This classifies so-called communion with the Mormon Holy Ghost as confusion and disorder, consisting of error, and misunderstanding -- a lack of clarity in believing in things that are not as they are or as they were, and as they never will be. We are to understand that the Mormon Ghost leads his victim down a rabbit trail of deception whereby recipients are led to believe things that are not true. This snake oil the apologists are attempting to sell is evil and insidious -- deception.

To the Mormon Holy Ghost, I say: Depart from me, you lying spirit!

[_Shulem]

anubitize his so-called "challengers".

So far the "challengers" or defenders of the faith have not publicly taken up the issue of the missing jackal nose hacked out of the original lead printing plate of Facsimile No. 3.

Why have they ignored this? Because it scares them! It takes them to a place they don't want to go. It only serves to bring them before me where they will have to face an apologetic nightmare. I will ram it down their throats and make them choke on it.

[_Themis]

So what's the Mormon line, then?

Joseph Smith got hold of some pages from the Book of Breathings, and the pictures inspired him to receive a revelation ... which he thought was a translation of his pages of hieroglyphics but really wasn't ... because what it really was, was a direct divine transmission of a completely different text that had once been composed by Abraham based on the same pictures that Smith saw, because that's just how old the Book of Breathings is.

Would that be it? To a non-Mormon it sounds far-fetched, all right, but I can imagine it might seem more plausible to Mormons, and also be hard to disprove.

That is what apologists call the catalyst theory and has some support found mostly in apologetic communities. It doesn't represent the church's position. An even smaller number of people have taken a similar view of the Book of Mormon being inspired fiction.

Another popular theory is the missing scroll theory which admits the papyri text we have is not the Abraham story but that one really did exist in Joseph's possession. In some ways it's like saying someone put Dr Who's Horton hears a Who story in someone's grave who has reinterpreted the story but decided not to change anything to the story, but just add some new text at the end of DR Who's story that explains the new interpretations of his story. Interesting though that with all these portions we have found that all come from Hor's/DR Who's book but none from the much longer claimed new story.

[_Fence Sitter]

So what's the Mormon line, then?

Joseph Smith got hold of some pages from the Book of Breathings, and the pictures inspired him to receive a revelation ... which he thought was a translation of his pages of hieroglyphics but really wasn't ... because what it really was, was a direct divine transmission of a completely different text that had once been composed by Abraham based on the same pictures that Smith saw, because that's just how old the Book of Breathings is.

Would that be it? To a non-Mormon it sounds far-fetched, all right, but I can imagine it might seem more plausible to Mormons, and also be hard to disprove.

As with most things Mormon, there is no "Mormon line" beyond obedience to current leadership. Pretty much everything within Mormonism is subject to the arbitrary changes the church makes euphemistically called "ongoing revelation", and the current teachings and beliefs surrounding the Book of Abraham are no exception.

With the rediscovery of the papyri, Nibley established the basis for much of the apologetics we have seen on the Book of Abraham from LDS scholars for the past 50 years. This is basically the claim that the Book of Abraham is on the missing portions of the scroll, that the Book of Abraham and the facsimiles can be reasonably seen as a Hebrew text interpreted through a Ptolemaic era lens, that the KEP are a reverse engineering project directed and driven by W.W. Phelps which attempted to translate Egyptian from a now missing original Book of Abraham translation which was finished before the KEP was created. In other words, Joseph Smith could and did translate Egyptian. Of course this meant that there was a need for LDS Egyptologists who could defend such a position.

Recently the catalyst theory is gaining traction. As time and time again, any Egyptologist not named Nibley, Gee or Muhlestein, has pointed out, the translations where we can compare the original glyphs or text to Joseph Smith's or the scribes translations are not correct. Shulem may have said something about this in regards to Facsimile 3 on occasion.
We are seeing signs within the church of a move toward the catalyst theory. The publication of Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, V. 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts strongly supports it. Utube videos of talks given by both Hauglid and Robin Jensen (see here) strongly support it, and now with Gee being fired from the MI and not really being welcomed into any other department at BYU, we see how Book of Abraham Egyptian "scholarship" is viewed by Mormon scholars in general. Not only is the work of BYU Egyptologist viewed poorly by circles within Mormonism but there is increasing evidence being produced by LDS scholars like Hauglid, Jensen, Bokovoy, McGee, Taves, Hardy, MacKay and others who are willing to acknowledge that Joseph Smith couldn't translate Egyptian, or the Book of Abraham is not a literal translation of an Abramic autograph or that it is simply inspired pseudepigrapha. Along with that we are seeing people like Brian Hauglid openly supporting the work of Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe which firmly establish the Book of Abraham as a 19th century production.

It must be really difficult for someone like Gee to watch his own church support the work of other scholars within the church which basically invalidates his own life's work. The BYU Egyptologist have to have a missing scroll, evidence which says that is where Joseph Smith found the Book of Abraham and have to show the KEP was done after all the Book of Abraham was produced. Unfortunately for them the Church and all non Egyptian scholarship at BYU and elsewhere is proving those theories to be false.

Smoot may want to rethink his career choice.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Shulem may have said something about this in regards to Facsimile 3 on occasion.

Wait...Shulem has discussed Facsimile 3 on occasion? Darn, I must have missed it.

[_Philo Sofee]

Shulem may have said something about this in regards to Facsimile 3 on occasion.

Wait...Shulem has discussed Facsimile 3 on occasion? Darn, I must have missed it.

It's news to me.......

[_Shulem]

Fig. 5. Is called in Egyptian Enish-go-on-dosh; this is one of the governing planets also, and is said by the Egyptians to be the Sun, and to borrow its light from Kolob through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash, which is the grand Key, or, in other words, the governing power, which governs fifteen other fixed planets or stars, as also Floeese or the Moon, the Earth and the Sun in their annual revolutions. This planet receives its power through the medium of Kli-flos-is-es, or Hah-ko-kau-beam, the stars represented by numbers 22 and 23, receiving light from the revolutions of Kolob.

Bullseye, baby.

[_Manetho]

So if critics of Mormonism merely point out that the Book of Abraham doesn't line up with ancient Egypt, then Hamblin's short post is a pretty decent rebuttal, I think. The next question, though, is whether any ancient Jews might really have co-opted hieroglyphics and Egyptian imagery for the Book of Abraham. That might sound plausible to someone like me who knows practically nothing about ancient Egypt and not much more about ancient Jews, but I wouldn't be surprised if an actual expert simply burst out laughing at the ludicrous suggestion.

Whether the Book of Abraham could be ancient Jewish iconotrophy of Egyptian originals doesn't sound to me like the kind of question about which we really know nothing. Yet Hamblin doesn't mention anything at all about what scholars of ancient Egypt or ancient Judaism have to say on this point. This silence is the thing that disturbs me about Hamblin's blog post.

I'm not an expert, but I know a good amount, and the idea that Jews would appropriate take Egyptian funerary scenes and appropriate them wholesale is very implausible, to say the least. There was a fair bit of Egyptian religious iconography in the Canaanite region in the early first millennium BC, and If I recall correctly the early Jewish monarchy inherited some of it, but that was limited to individual symbols, like the ankh, and the iconography of certain Canaanite deities, the latter of which ceased to appear in Israel and Judah as Jewish monotheism solidified. Adopting individual symbols is a lot easier than adopting a whole scene. Images of Anubis embalming the dead or Osiris greeting the dead would have had no currency in Canaan, let alone among Jews, because they're deeply embedded in Egyptian religious beliefs, which neither Canaanites nor Jews shared.

Of course, if Hamblin wants to claim that Jews appropriated Egyptian funerary texts to illustrate the Book of Abraham, they would have to have done it after those funerary texts were composed. Facsimiles 1 and 3 come from a text that only dates to the second century BC. At that time, Judaism was going through a massive struggle over whether Jewish monotheism was compatible with Greek culture, which had been the culture of the rulers and the influential classes across the eastern Mediterranean, including both Egypt and Judea, since Alexander the Great. Ultimately, the anti-Hellenizers won that fight, at least in Judea.

Egyptian religion didn't have the same kind of pressure from above or the same cultural cachet as Greek traditions did but was subject to the same Jewish phobia of idolatry. I doubt that the Jews who lived in Egypt at the time would have seen any reason to adapt it for their own use, and they certainly would have seen good reasons not to. Moreover, the same point I raised above applies in this period: the facsimiles are whole scenes, not disconnected symbols. How often do people take whole paintings from a culture other than their own and re-label them to tell a completely different story? Finally, the illustrations copied by the facsimiles include hieroglyphs, which by this time were a very inaccessible type of writing, used only for Egyptian religious purposes. Ordinary people writing in Egyptian would have used Demotic. Imagine Latin in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, if it were written in a script that was totally unfamiliar and unreadable to you, and you'll get an idea of how inaccessible hieroglyphs were by this time. Why would Jews ever use such a system, or the illustrations accompanying it, when both the script and the images bore the taint of idolatry and when the latter even included images of idolatrous gods? It makes no sense.

[_Shulem]

Why would Jews ever use such a system, or the illustrations accompanying it, when both the script and the images bore the taint of idolatry and when the latter even included images of idolatrous gods? It makes no sense.

Well said. You're right, it doesn't make sense. The Jews steered clear of Egyptian idolatry and served only one god, Jehovah. This apologetic is concocted by LDS apologists for the sole purpose to detract and get people to take their eyes of the ball. It's complete trickery! They are trying to cloud the issue and confuse everyone with idiotic conversations of Jews assimilating Egyptian iconography in order to excuse Joseph Smith's ridiculous claims.

There is no Egyptian king's name in Facsimile No. 3. Joseph Smith was mistaken. Joseph Smith was wrong.