I must admit that this essay by Gee really got my goat. His little swipes at "the critics" were both ill-informed and just plain petty, and had no place in a "scholarly" publication. Here is just a taste:
The smallest group, comprising about one half of one percent of Mormons-- according to my informal, admittedly unscientific surveys-- thinks that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham from the existing fragments that were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [...] Critics routinely assert that the Latter-day Saint position is the one that is actually the least popular of all. They want it to be our position because it is the most convenient straw man.
I have never seen a critic assert that it is the "Latter-day Saint position" that the Book of Abraham papyrus was translated from the extant fragments. Not only would the Church have to be stupid to hold such a position (since it's patently untrue), but the critics would have to be stupid to
think the Church holds such a position (which of course is what Gee is trying to say-- that the critics are stupid).
The argument of the critics, rather, is that it is the
historic position of
Joseph Smith and his associates that the Book of Abraham was translated from the extant fragments. Gee's survey has no bearing on that question, and he knows it. Ironically, he has set up a straw man straw man.
The newspapers garbled the story by wrongly making Atiya the discoverer of the documents [...]
Actually, everything I've read suggests that it was Atiya himself who baldly lied to reporters about the papyri's discovery. In this he may well have been complicit with Hugh Nibley, who had known of the papyri's location for more than half a decade and who made Egyptologists like Klaus Baer and John Wilson promise not to tell. But by all means, blame the newspapers.
Critics want to minimize the amount of papyri originally owned by Joseph Smith, preferably to an amount not much more than what we currently have, because they do not want a Book of Abraham to have ever existed. As Richard Bushman has noted, "people who have broken away from Mormonism . . . have to justify their decision to leave. They cannot countenance evidence of divine inspiration in [Joseph Smith's] teachings without catching themselves in a disastrous error." So critics who have left the church cannot allow Joseph Smith to have gotten anything right, even as a guess or by accident. They will go to extreme lengths and propound convoluted theories to have something else, anything else, to believe in. The critic Dale Morgan, himself a defector, wrote in a moment of candor: "With my point of view on God, I am incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing. If God does not exist, how can Joseph Smith's story have any possible validity? I will look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church." So the critics cannot allow themselves to say, as Latter-day Saints can say, "Whether or not there was a Book of Abraham actually contained on the portion of the papyri that did not survive is something that cannot be determined by scholarly means."
A Latter-day Saint who has faith, that is, trust in God, can examine such issues without being bothered or without having to know all the answers to all the questions we might have.
When I read this, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Clearly Gee is projecting. He cannot countenance the possibility that there was no Book of Abraham on Joseph Smith's papyri, so he will do or say
anything to convince himself and others that there was. It is his theory that is convoluted. The last line reminds me of charity's remark that she knows Joseph Smith is a prophet, so she can be pretty open-minded.
Best,
-Chris
