More like three.
Wrong. Actually it’s been more than four years.
He appeared on the FAIR message board in the summer of 2006 as Al Ghazali, and he clearly knew next to nothing about the subject. After observing the debates on the matter, he decided Book of Abraham apologetics was in shambles, and decided he would address the matter. So he quickly obtained color copies of the KEP just shortly before his FAIR presentation in August 2006.
Wrong again. By then, he’d already had access to the originals and had been studying the high-resolution digital scans for over a year.
Where do you come up with this nonsense?
I always wondered how he (an Islam expert) managed to convince the Church that he should have access, for an apologetics conference, when John Gee (Egyptologist!) didn't get access for the publication of his book.
Gee’s book? You mean A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri? The focus of that little booklet was the papyri, not the KEP.
In any case, I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting in terms of the credentials Professor Hauglid’s brings to the analysis of the KEP, but the facts are that, in addition to his background in Arabic and Islamic studies, he is actually a Professor of Ancient Scripture at BYU. That seems to suggest a little more professional gravitas than your hero Metcalfe’s status as a technical writer for computer games!
Even so, the study of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers represents an entirely new field of study within the broader head of “textual criticism.” Text criticism, until now, has been almost exclusively a discipline working within the parameters described by the transmission of biblical texts. And only a fraction of the methodologies developed for biblical text criticism are applicable to the study of the KEP. For example, no one attempts to determine whether a biblical text derives from oral dictation or visual copying. Everything’s a copy. The questions largely revolve around establishing the stemmatics of the material.
What does this mean, then? It means that anyone—even highly-respected biblical text critics like Bart Ehrman or Bruce Metzger—would be starting almost from square one, as it were, when it comes to analyzing the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. It’s a whole new animal. The issues and questions are unique to the KEP themselves. Consequently, there are very few people, at present, who have any legitimate expertise in terms of KEP text criticism, and they are the few who have had high quality images of the documents. That is a very small group indeed. Fewer than a dozen people in the entire world! In this small group are included Brian Hauglid, Brent Metcalfe, myself, and a mere handful of others associated with Hauglid’s KEP project. I don’t know who, if anyone, Metcalfe has provided with satisfactory images based on the photos he has had for 25 years.
Again, I must emphasize: A professional career as a biblical text critic affords one very little in the way of credentials when it comes to analysis of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. Expertise must be developed “on the fly” and is, necessarily, an autodidactic endeavor—and then only when said individual has quality images with which to work.
You have suggested previously that Metcalfe is the foremost “expert” in the world when it comes to the KEP. I would argue, in rebuttal, that we have no way of knowing the extent of Metcalfe’s expertise in the field, because he has no publication record to establish either his conclusions or his methodologies. It could very well be that our friendly tech writer (Metcalfe) is everything you believe him to be. But one will search in vain for any definitive Metcalfe stance on the KEP. Even on message boards, he has committed himself to very little in the way of interpretive arguments. Only Edward Ashment has produced anything in the way of formal KEP analysis—and even his record is extremely sparse, although he is the origin of the whole “simultaneous dictation” thesis. We assume Metcalfe agrees with him, but I have yet to identify a single definitive statement to that effect among his many years of posts on internet forums.
Finally, (albeit only on message boards to date) I have provided a concise list of five (soon to be six) specific text-critical findings in terms of the KEPA documents. Those findings have been universally ridiculed by Metcalfe, you, and many of your friends here, but I am convinced of their legitimacy, and I am well into the process of preparing them for formal publication. Say what you will, I have at least developed, articulated, and defended definitive arguments. Others with access to high quality KEP images are doing the same thing. Metcalfe cannot make the same claim. He has promised to do so for 25 years. We have been working on it for a small fraction of that time, and yet we are now very close to placing the formal reports of our analysis in the public eye. This is not some "bluff" or wild fantasy dreamed up by William Schryver; some kind of crazy ploy to attract attention or confuse or stall or obfuscate or whatever it is that you people have dreamed up in your over-active imaginations.
And, notwithstanding Dr. Shades' delusions to the contrary, these things will shortly appear in print. Then the real debate can final begin.
You conclude with this final fantasy:
There must have been a serious "sit down" with the powers on high, to convince them that the KEP situation wasn't going to go away until they could get access to them and come up with apologetic theories to divorce Joseph Smith from the project.
Plain and simple: You have no idea what you’re talking about.
