Excellent scholarship, Doctor Scratch. As always, you inspire us with your keen eye and finger on the pulse of Mopologetics. Here we have Smoot, who is, in many ways, the ideal frontman for the new era of Mopologetics. He can appeal in his special nerdy way to people under 40. He even bucks the stereotypes of Mormon masculinity in ways that are compatible with Millennial and younger generations' sensibilities.Doctor Scratch wrote: ↑Sun Nov 01, 2020 4:05 amThe Book of Abraham is like the Kobayashi Maru of Mopologetics: it’s the ultimate “no-win situation,” and that’s why old-guard people like DCP, Welch, Hamblin, and Midgley would never touch it with a ten-foot pole. They have *always* farmed this stuff out to Gee, and they haven’t always been very supportive when he’s gotten slammed for doing “their” dirty work. But here comes Smoot! He no doubt fancies himself the James T. Kirk of Mopologetics, but in order for that to work, he’s going to have to figure out how to reprogram the system so that he can win. And he seems clueless about how to do that. (Hint: only the actual Captain Kirk can figure out how to do that, and guess what? Captain Kirk is a fictional character, just like Captain Moroni!)
At base, though, is he not just part of Gee's arsenal of cannon fodder in a pattern that goes back to ZLMB? I mean, it used to be that Kevin Graham was that person, but he hit the eject button as soon as he realized that Brent Metcalfe seemed to understand the evidence of the papyri and KEG better than Gee, and then it dawned on Kevin that Gee was actually holding out on him and only parceling out the latest ad hoc defense that obscured the truth: that Book of Abraham apologetics were completely bankrupt. Kevin said goodbye to Book of Abraham apologetics and Mormonism too not long thereafter.
Smoot is perfect, though. He does not have another gig that we know of. (I hope he does as he certainly is more than capable.) He has just enough training and is quite intelligent, and he is utterly committed to the cause. Finally, he, like others, loves to cross sabres and insult critics. Smoot could stick with this cause forever, and, although I think that would be unfortunate, there are much worse things he could be doing, such as work for Steve Bannon, etc.
In any case, this argument about Egyptian narrative structure is just another in a long line of silly arguments that show the apologists flailing desperately again. I have never quite understood why Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees should be writing in Egyptian. If it was a later Egyptian author writing this, then I am not sure why we need to be concerned about its value regarding Abraham. Well, it is about Abraham in the same sense that any non-Fundamentalist scholar or reader considers him to be in any old text. Now, that is no problem for me. But then I am not the person who has insisted for so long that these texts had to be "by the hand of Abraham" or "by the hand of Mormon" in order for them to be super cooler than other ancient texts and worthy of special notice and admiration. Once the hand of Abraham is taken out of the picture, it is not clear to me why Hellenistic Egyptian writer A is any better than Joseph Smith as a purveyor of stories about Abraham.
I mean, that is cool with me. I don't need Joseph Smith's stories about Abraham to be written by the hand of Abraham for them to be cool. That, however, is precisely what the apologists have always insisted must be the case until the Hellenistic-Roman-era author theory was introduced. Now we see Smoot telling us that the author must have written the whole thing in a special Egyptian narrative style which "Abraham," if anyone is to make the first error of thinking the mythical hero we encounter in the Bible is a real person, would do with all of his experience in "Egyptian?"
You know, Herodotus likely visited Egypt and yet he did not start writing his Histories in Egyptian or using Egyptian narrative style/organization, at least to my knowledge. I can't recall anyone having argued such a thing. But here, in Mormonia, we have a young guy with an MA in Egyptology telling us that a 19th century text "translated" from Heaven knows what and claiming to be about the Biblical Abraham is clearly following such an ancient Egyptian narrative pattern?
Mopologists seem somewhere along the way to lose all sense for how plain bonkers stuff like this looks. That said, it is always popcorn viewing for those of us who enjoy following these hijinks. Whether it is the Ghost Committee or Tiberius Julius Alexander's Book of Abraham translated by the scribes working in the Library of the Serapeum in Alexandria, it is always a wild theory and a wild ride.
