Kevin Graham wrote:I posted this at MAD last night and was banned as soon as the mods saw it. I did this because there is a joker over there by the name of Robert F. Smith who keeps blathering about "scholarship" this and "scholarship" that, always trying to justify the harsh criticism presented by FARMS scholars when attacking other non-LDS scholars.
Since when have you been squeamish about harsh attacks, Kevin? Your sudden attack of concern for intellectual decorum and civility is astounding.
He said that was part of scholarship, and he loves to fall back on the three stooges of Mormon Egyptology whenever making arguments regarding the Book of Abraham.
Ritner destroys their credibility.
Highly doubtful, at the very least.
Given Kevin's long, long history of carefully editing, massaging, and cherry-picking the aspects of other's arguments that make his own case look sterling, while equally carefully making sure that other aspects of those arguments that tend to undermine and weaken his own remain well hidden, we'll have to wait and see what those Ritner has attacked have to say about these matters at greater length to look at the relative strengths and weaknesses of both sides, to whatever degree they exist.
In any case, Ritner is spinning his wheels in the same quicksand critics have been spinning there's for the last forty years. Even the title of Ritner's book,
The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition is misleading: we don't have the complete corpus of "the Joseph Smith papyri" such that a "complete edition" could be written. We have the small, fragmentary remains of what was a substantial body of documents that we know existed from eyewitness accounts of both members and non-members of the Church during the 19th Century, and as there is no reason to believe the Sensen or
anything else in our possession at present was the source for the Book of Abraham, and no reason to believe that Joseph Smith believed the documents we have were such a source, all Ritner has done here, in essence, is whack another mole in the endless attempt to discredit the Book of Abraham without anything approaching the documentary evidence that would be required to attempt such as task.
Every modestly educated LDS knows that none of the Joseph Smith papyri we now have are the source of the Book of Abraham, and they also know that Joseph never claimed they were.