Nomad wrote:Did you publish a defense of Richard Howard's argument that the KEP were the modus operandi for translating the papyri?
Where? When?
I read your Whitmer Assoc. paper. It looked to me to be more of a denial of Howard's argument than a defense. That's how I saw it. In fact, If I recall correctly, you pretty much shot down most of his argument and were just looking at Abr 1:1-3. Do you believe the KEP was what Joseph Smith used to translated the papyri?
From my JWHA paper:
"In 1968, Jay Todd suggested that the Grammar was reverse-engineered from the Book of Abraham. Richard P. Howard drew the opposite conclusion, writing in 1970 that the Alphabet and Grammar was the modus operandi in the Book of Abraham’s translation. A year later Hugh Nibley rejected Howard’s proposal, preferring the view that the Grammar merely quoted fragmentary Book of Abraham phrases. Decades later, the debate remains more or less polarized between these positions, and little progress has been made toward a satisfactory resolution.
"The present essay will argue, contra Todd and Nibley, that the Book of Abraham translation manuscripts are dependent on the bound Grammar and Alphabet manuscript rather than the other way around. The recognition of the Grammar as the modus operandi for part of the Book of Abraham translation provides a window into the creation of a scriptural text."
So yes, I defended the
modus operandi thesis, for at least a portion of the Book of Abraham.
As an aside, it should be noted that I (following Hugh Nibley) and William (following me) probably mischaracterized Howard's thesis. Upon re-reading the Howard essay since publishing my paper, I realized that he wasn't making a claim about the relationship of the Egyptian Alphabet to the translation manuscripts, but rather about the relationship of the Egyptian characters to the English text. The
modus operandi Howard was referring to was simply that the English text of Abr. 1:4-2:18 was "created under the stimulus of each of the Egyptian markings [in the manuscript margins]."
The misunderstanding of Howard's thesis arose because of the way Howard referred to the translation manuscripts as part of the "Alphabet and Grammar" material. The Tanners' 1966 publication of
Joseph Smith's Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar made no distinction between the Alphabet and Grammar and the translation manuscripts, and this was the only edition of the Egyptian papers Howard had access to. When Nibley introduced a distinction between the translation manuscripts and the Alphabet and Grammar in 1971, Howard's meaning became confused.