jon wrote:In all of Gee's Egyptology study did he ever come up with an explanation of why Joseph got the translation of the facsimiles flat wrong?
Well, run your eyes over this article:
A Method for Studying the Facsimiles, John Gee, FARMS Review: Volume - 19, Issue - 1, Pages: 347—53
It is a book review, which begins like this:
Review of Allen J. Fletcher. A Study Guide to the Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham. Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2006. xi + 160 pp., with bibliography. $12.99.
The facsimiles from the Book of Abraham continue to fascinate, if only by their strangeness. The only illustrations in our scriptures, they attract attention not only because of their rough-hewn quality but by their very existence as a visual medium in the midst of the written word. Their unusual origin and foreign iconography make them the source of endless uninformed speculation. Allen J. Fletcher puts himself forward as a guide to the facsimiles.
Sounds hopeful, no?
But it ends like this:
Earlier in this review I referred to the desire to know the answer to the question: Does the interpretation of Joseph Smith match the interpretation of the ancient Egyptians, or does X=Y? We know that the interpretations of the Egyptologists typically do not match either those of the ancient Egyptians (Z=Y) or Joseph Smith (Z=X) and so they are simply irrelevant to the issue. But the unquestioned assumption is that the interpretation of Joseph Smith has to match the interpretation of the ancient Egyptians (X=Y). This assumption is related to assumptions and theories (both formal and informal) about the nature of the facsimiles. Several such theories do not require Joseph Smith's interpretation to be the same or even close to that of the ancient Egyptians. For example, ancient Jewish interpretations for various Egyptian scenes are known that differ considerably from the ancient Egyptian interpretations and to which Egyptological methods give us no clue.11 Before any conclusions can be drawn from any comparisons between the two, one needs to have an answer to the question: why do Joseph Smith's interpretations need to match ancient Egyptian interpretations at all? I do not intend to answer the issue here but merely to raise it. Critics should note that unless they can answer this question satisfactorily they have no case.
Conclusions
A book like Fletcher's might be useful to the extent that it is well done. To paraphrase what I have written on the subject elsewhere: If we ignore the ancient Egyptian identifications of the various figures in the facsimiles, we will construct an understanding of the facsimiles that bears no resemblance to the ancient Egyptian understanding. We will, in short, not understand them at all.12 In the end I found very little in Fletcher's book, at least in his interpretation of the figures according to ancient Egyptians, that I could agree with. One temporary conclusion must be stressed: To date there has been no methodologically valid interpretation of any of the facsimiles from an ancient Egyptian point of view.13 Much more work needs to be done before we can understand the facsimiles in their ancient Egyptian setting, and only then will it be meaningful to ask whether that understanding matches that of Joseph Smith (to the extent that we understand even that).
The sentences I have bolded are significant. They seem to amount to:
1. We don't really understand how ancient Egyptians would have understood scenes such as those shown in the facsimiles. [Really, is it that bad? We don't even understand who, on the whole, the figures in the facsimiles were supposed to be, even the ones with name labels over their heads?]
2. Even if we did have a precise understanding of (1), what right do we have to criticize Joseph Smith if his interpretations were different from those of the ancient writer and illustrator of the text? [Well, because he gave us the idea he was revealing the meaning of the ancient text, didn't he ...?]
OK ... Maybe that seems like an impressive position if you look at it the right way up.
[Edited to add: Note the interesting suggestion that we may not even understand how Joseph Smith interpreted the facsimiles, let alone the ancient Egyptians. Full-on intellectual omerta?]