CK:
Not all the papyri were cut up. The remainder of the Hor Book of Breathings, in fact, remained a roll. I believe I worked out that it would have been about 3-5 feet long, even after the first part was cut off. I think that that would satisfy Ms. Haven's "long roll" requirement.
And exactly how did you “work out” this conjectured length?
I'm also sick to death of arguing with Will, who is making the same old claims I thought we'd put to rest ages ago.
What “old claims” did I make, Chris? Or have you simply assumed that I was saying something I wasn’t?
Did you, by the way, actually listen to/read all of Sam Brown’s paper? Sam makes a very convincing and
documented argument for the extent to which Phelps was the primary driving force behind the EAG (or GAEL, or whatever acronym you prefer).
As far as the claims you assert were “put to rest
ages ago,” I would argue that the debate has just barely
begun. Here we are on the verge of having both sides of the argument make the first truly substantive installments in the debate, and you are acting like the contest was decided “ages ago”?
The fact is that you know a
little of what Metcalfe/Wright/Ashment/et al. are going to argue in their upcoming book. But you know next to nothing about what Hauglid/Gee have been doing in the past few years. You have come to take almost for granted the key premise that KEPA #2 and #3 are what Metcalfe has long argued: simultaneous transcripts of Joseph Smith’s original oral translation/dictation of the Book of Abraham.
If so, you’re in for a few surprises.
And despite the various errors that Nibley admittedly made in his original
The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers – a frequent target of your haughty derision – most of his conclusions were absolutely correct, and I am convinced that he will be vindicated to a great extent as time goes on – especially in terms of his sense that Phelps was the primary catalyst behind the “project” represented by much of what we now call the KEP.
In any case, as I have always maintained, the best thing to ever happen to Book of Abraham apologetics will be to have high-quality images of the KEP available to a wide audience. Until then, don’t feel too bad if few people “in the know” take seriously your confident pronouncements about what claims have been “put to rest ages ago.”