Markk wrote:
My biggest question right now is why code a text no one can read anyway? I keep asking this question and haven't seen a response...did I miss it?
MG
You didn't miss it.
Here's more information from Will's talk that contradicts what he is now asserting:
“The Egyptian Alphabet documents are dependent on and informed by a pre-existing text of the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham.”
First, I have to comment again on this: Will assigns words “unique” versus “generic” with no apparent rhyme or reason – “eternity” is unique yet “heaven” is generic???? And yet the results of his graphing of these words provide the basis for his assertion that it must have been based on an already known text. That is a significant flaw. I admit, I cynically wonder if Will’s assignment of “unique” and “generic” was back-engineered to support the theory he’d already designed.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, critics believed the Book of Abraham originated in the mind of Joseph Smith, so it would be expected that the elements he was “translating” for the KEP would be words that would end up in the Book of Abraham. He already knew the story: it was in his mind. Will reveals his inability to put aside his believing biases with this statement:
“Any thesis of the Alphabet and Grammar as a papyri deciphering tool presupposes that the authors don’t already know the text their tool is designed to produce!”
No, if, as critics presume, Joseph Smith was the author of the Book of Abraham, then he had the text already in his mind. He knew what he was going to produce. Now, it’s possible Joseph Smith thought this text was put in his mind by GOD, via revelation, as he may have believed with the Book of Mormon (note: Joseph Smith didn’t have to look at the gold plates to produce the text, so he didn’t have to look at the papyri to produce the Book of Abraham – it was already in his mind via “revelation”), so Joseph Smith then proceeded to try to match the “translation” that God had revealed to him with the actual figures on the papyri in order to produce a tool that could be used for future translation of Egyptian – which, of course, Will pretends to dismiss (more on that later).
“The Egyptian Alphabet references a story that has already been written.”
So, according to Will, Joseph Smith had already written the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham, and then used that to create the KEP by matching portions of the Book of Abraham text to the figures on the papyri.
Doesn’t this actually hurt the “missing scroll” theory?
All this seems to do, to me, is to alter the chronology of events, which is, in the end, pretty irrelevant. Here are the two possible chronologies:
1. Joseph Smith creates the KEP before translating the Book of Abraham, and then uses that KEP to translate the Book of Abraham.
2. Joseph Smith translates the Book of Abraham before creating the KEP, and then uses the translation of the Book of Abraham to create the KEP.
No matter the chronology, the two texts are obviously interdependent, which, it seems to me, is exactly what has to be disproven to support the idea of a “missing scroll.”
Besides this, even if the KEP were produced after the Book of Abraham, of course there would be a strong match between “unique” words later found in the Book of Abraham: they were looking at the same figures. If “God” told Joseph Smith that the character “Zool” in the Book of Abraham had to do with the “right of priesthood”, when Joseph Smith wanted to use “Zool” in the KEP, why wouldn’t it match?
Let’s experiment with French. Let’s say I want to translate the following:
Au commencement, Dieu créa les cieux et la terre.
Now I look up specific words in a French dictionary, and create a translation tool : « Dieu » means « God » and « cieux » means « heaven » and « terre » means « earth ».
Now I set about to translate the entire sentence and find:
“At the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.”
Oh my Lord!! How could this be????? The fact that the words “heavens” and “earth” ended up in my final text can only mean one thing: my original translation tool had to be dependent on a PRE-EXISTING TEXT.
Now, so Wade doesn’t misunderstand my point, let’s try the experiment again, this time more closely simulating the Book of Abraham. I still want to translate “Au commencement, Dieu créa les cieux et la terre. »
But this time I’m going to rely on GOD to help me translate, since I now don’t know French and no French dictionary is available.
GOD tells me that the word “Dieu” means President, the word “cieux” means United States” and the word “terre” means Canada. So now I “translate” the entire phrase and find:
The President of the United States just blew up Canada with a nuclear (or: nucular) bomb!!
Wow. Since the words matched, that must mean that my translation tool was dependent on a pre-existing text.
Which it was. The one in my head.
”There are many references in the Alphabet and Grammar to others of Joseph Smith’s previously received revelations. If the Alphabet and Grammar is partially dependent on texts that have no relationship to Egyptian papyri, then it cannot have been intended as a tool to decipher the papyri.”
Wait a minute. Didn’t Will tell us he was going to demonstrate why Nibley’s “reverse engineering” could not be correct? Why the sudden shift? Could it be because if the KEP were actually reverse engineered like the Rosetta Stone, then including references to others of Joseph Smith’s revelations wouldn’t be the problem that Will presents it as being, because the KEP could have been mainly intended to translate other Egyptian documents?
But to support his point that this could not be so, Will starts emphasizing the very point we have dismantled here, and the point which he now appears to be back-pedaling from:
”These men were not focused on translating the papyri at all. One of the keys to this conclusion was my discovery that of the 69 characters to which explanations were assigned, most of them are not even Egyptian and do not appear on the papyri!”
Now, if you listen to the tape in which Will makes this assertion, on part 2, you can hear the emphasis in his voice: this is a “key”. This is important. This is why he was able to dismiss Nibley’s reverse engineering theory. And lest there is any doubt, he then says:
Let me repeat. Most of the characters explained in the Egyptian Alphabet documents are not Egyptian, and do not appear on the Egyptian papyri in question.”
And yet now he claims to not care at all if, in fact, Joseph Smith probably [b]did think the characters were Egyptian. And, of course, Will proceeds to mention that the characters were obtained from a Masonic cipher, without ever mentioning the fact that it was likely Joseph Smith believed those figures were, in fact, Egyptian, because that was a very common myth about Masonry.
In discussing the Counting Document, Will again affirms how important it is to his theory that elements contained on these documents are not even Egyptian:
”What is most interesting, however, is that the characters in the Egyptian Counting Document are very obviously not Egyptian.”
He underlined “not” in case you missed how important this is.
And yet now Will claims to not care that Joseph Smith probably believed the characters were, in fact, Egyptian? Will even supports my assertions here by telling us that one of the Masonic ciphers was based on Sanskrit characters. So, while the Wades of today insist that Joseph Smith would have recognized Sanskrit, the reality is that, due to the common myths about Masonry and ancient Egypt, Joseph Smith probably thought they were Egyptian characters.
Will asks in hushed tones of great import:
”Why is this document title Egyptian Counting? There is nothing Egyptian about it. Nothing at all.”
Will, since you asked, I’ll give you the answer. Joseph Smith, like so many others of his time period, likely believed that Masonry had ancient Egyptian connections, and actually used real Egyptian figures in its symbols and ciphers. So he thought the things that you, today, post Rosetta Stone, can confidently identify as having “nothing Egyptian about it”, were, in fact, Egyptian.
Will admitted that Nibley’s reverse engineering, the Rosetta Stone theory I’ve been reminding Wade about, seemed the natural explanation, and the manner in which Will claimed to dismantle that theory was by proving that the elements in the documents weren’t even Egyptian.
And that is why the fact that Joseph Smith likely believed those elements to be, in fact, Egyptian, destroys Will’s theory in this particular regard. Now, he may be correct that the KEP preceded the Book of Abraham: I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care. But he certainly hasn’t disproven Nibley’s reverse engineering theory, and that is exactly what he needs to disprove, and he knows it. That’s why he emphasized the fact that there was “nothing Egyptian” about some of the KEP, and that’s why I can confidently state that he is now back-pedaling, despite his claims otherwise.
I know I will never get an answer to my question about whether or not Will knew about the Masonic/Egyptian connection and just ignored it, but I’m guessing that he simply didn’t know about it. Will has proven himself willing to stomp and bluster his way through difficult issues, so I think he would have mentioned it and pretended to debunk it, had he known. I really think he just didn’t know about it, and that is truly horrible research. It’s not some great secret. My god, Will even uses the Rosicrucian cipher!!! The Rosicrucians were all about ancient Egypt. I first was exposed to this on my mission to France.
Will again reminds us how important it is to his theory that nonEgyptian elements were used in the KEP when discussing his inherently contradictory theory of pure language (contradictory in that he tells us repeatedly that they viewed the Egyptian language as having escaped the corruption of the Tower of Babel so hence, was synonymous with “pure language”, but then telling us that the “pure language” theory meant they did not intend to translate Egyptian):
”Thus, they see no contradiction in titling as Egyptian Counting a document that contains not a single element that is Egyptian. Nor do they perceive any contradiction in titling the other documents Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, notwithstanding the fact most of the characters they translated are not Egyptian, nor are the sourced texts themselves. ”
Whoops! Now Will tells us that it is irrelevant to his theory that Joseph Smith may have, in fact, believed that elements he obtained from a Masonic cipher, were, in fact, Egyptian!!!!
