William Schryver wrote:beastlie:
So what is the "far more definitive" reason to reject Nibley?
There are only two options here: either you are being deliberately obtuse or merely naturally obtuse. While I have long suspected it is the former, more and more I am being forced to conclude it is the latter.
Beastlie, dear, I have answered this question multiple times.
Even Wade Englund has answered the question (see
here.)
Frankly, I don’t know what more to do in your case. You appear to simply be incapable of grasping the arguments as I have presented them, and this despite the fact that so many others, of equal or even lesser apparent intellectual acumen, have been able to easily do so.
So apparently Wade has identified the “far more definitive” reason to reject Nibley’s theory other than the suggestion that Joseph Smith and his cohorts
deliberately included nonEgyptian figures in the KEP. Let’s see if we can find it from the post Will linked. I had already responded to this post of Wade’s and identified the weakness in this “something far more definitive”, which I will mention below. But first I’ll go through each part.
Wade
We, or at least I, have argued that the KEP may have been intended, in part, as a cipher to keep information hidden (temporarily in some cases) so as to preserve faith, protect the sacred from the profane, and prevent misuse of the sacred knowledge.
I have also argued that KEP were intended as a "pure language", with the presumed hope that it would be used one day to enlighten the minds of those with ears to hear and eyes to see.
Will tells us, in his talk, why he was able to reject any suggestion that the KEP had anything to do with translating the Book of Abraham:
”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.”
So this premise that Wade offered is based on the KEY that the characters “were not even Egyptian and do not appear on the papyri.”
Wade
I have argued that the KEP are very much like ciphers that many a sane person has used over the last several millenia. (See my paper)
Again, this dependent on the “key” that Will helpfully emphasized in his talk (aside from whether or not these men could have possibly imagined this was a workable cipher)
What I have essentially told you is that while Masonry does have Egyptian ties and uses symbols that are, or were thought to be Egyptian, those Egyptian/Masonic symbols were not the one's used for several of the characters in the KEP. The pig pen Masonic cipher characters were not Egyptian, and were not thought to be Egyptian.
First, I don’t recall Wade offering any evidence that characters from the pigpen cipher were definitively NOT thought to be Egyptian, but aside from that, it isn’t supposed to matter, according to Will.
Wade:
I have repeatedly provided evidence and arguments and reasoned clarifications, not only when introducing my claim, but also when challenged on the claim. You are free not to accept the evidence, but the evidence has been presented.
How odd. In the post that Will claims identifies the something “far more definitive” as a reason for rejecting Nibley’s theory
other than the fact that non-Egyptian characters were used Wade keeps claiming that they would have known the figures weren’t Egyptian. He seems to think it matters. How odd.
Wade
At least Chris and I are in agreement that the KEP characters were drawn from a variety of sources, some papyri and some not. At the very least, the decision as to which characters, and how many, and from where to cull the characters, was clearly arbitrary.
This is a very misleading use of the word “arbitrary.”
Wade
No. I spoke hypothetically (for the sake of argument) about not knowing if I would have reason to reject the "Rosetta Stone" theory were the condition met to my satisfaction. As clarified previously, the conditions have yet to be met to my satisfaction, and in fact I am pursuaded otherwise. So, the hypothetical is at this point moot.
Once again, Wade’s sticking point is that the hypothetical has not been met. Whether or not he will recognize or admit it, by emphasizing this, he admits that
he thinks whether or not Joseph Smith thought the characters were Egyptian matters. This coming from Will’s most ardent fan, and in the very post in which Will claims Wade explains why it doesn’t matter if Joseph Smith and his cohorts thought the figures were Egyptian, because there is a “far more definitive” reason to reject Nibley’s theory.
Wade
As Will has iterated, and I have reiterated, and both of us have quoted directly from Will's presentation, the primary reason Will rejected the "Rosetta Stone" theory, is because it was clear to him that the EXPLANATIONS (not to be confused with the characters) were dependant, in part, upon revelations received prior to the papyri arriving in Kirtland. Will explicitly states: "To the extent this lexicon was built partially on texts that have no relationship to the Egyptian papyri; texts that were written not in Egyptian at all, but in English, then the Alphabet and Grammar simply could not have been intended as a tool to decipher the papyri. Indeed, the more I considered the evidence in this new light, the more I came to believe that these men were not focused on translating the Egyptian papyri at all!"
Perhaps you have confused what Will argued in his presentation with what I have been arguing here and at MaDB. I have been the one making the argument you mentioned--though, after revisiting Will's presentation, I believe his is the more compelling point.
Apparently this is the something “far more definitive”. Yet I fail to see how this justifies rejecting Nibley’s theory. As I replied to Wade soon thereafter:
beastie
Nibley's theory wasn't that the A&G was being used as a tool to decipher the papyri. It was that the already translated papyri were being used to create a Rosetta Stone to translate future Egyptian documents.
The explanations appear to be intended to be layers of meaning that can be ferreted out of one text. The more complex layers of meaning were probably only accessible to those with some secret knowledge that enabled them to recognize it. If Joseph Smith and his cohorts believed that Egyptians did, in fact, have some access to that secret knowledge, then it makes sense that the higher layers of meaning would allude to that information only recognized with secret knowledge: knowledge Joseph Smith obtained through other revelations.
So, Will, if the fact that Joseph Smith included nonEgyptian characters is irrelevant to your theory, then why do you call that realization a KEY?