DaddyB wrote:You are misinterpreting what the church is saying. They are not claiming that Abraham was not the original author. They are only claiming that he did not write on the actual pieces of papyri that Joseph had. There is a big difference. Believers in the Bible have no problem accepting the idea that Paul wrote with his own hand the epistles to the Corinthians or the other epistles, but we know today that the epistles in our Bibles were not translated from the actual material that Paul wrote on. This really is pretty simple stuff and nothing to be concerned about. I see no contradiction at all. Here is a short video of an Egyptologist explaining this principle:
http://mormonchallenges.org/papyri-not-so-old/
Hi DaddyB,
Welcome to the forum.
Most of us understand the distinction that the Church is now trying to make between an autograph and a copy of an original. This distinction is only being made recently as it becomes more and more apparent that it was physically impossible for Abraham to have written on a piece of papyri created 2 thousand years after Abraham was supposed to have lived.
The point we are making is this isn't what Joseph Smith thought. Joseph Smith thought he had original documents written by Abraham & Joseph. The problem is not as simple as you might think or Muhlestein tries to describe.
At this point most people within the church and outside the church agree that the Joseph Smith papyri were not an autograph of Abraham or Joseph for that matter. The question becomes, then, what is the Book of Abraham and how did it get translated?
Option 1.
It is an accurate translation of something Abraham wrote during his life time. In order to believe this one has to explain how it that somehow survived hidden for 2000 years to appear intact in one place around 150-200 BCE only to remain hidden again for another 2000 years and to make its way to Joseph Smith in America to be translated, at which time, just the papyri that references Abraham and Joseph is lost while the rest of it conveniently survives to be rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century. It should be noted that every contemporary description from Joseph Smith's time of what is on the papyri itself can be identified on the extant pieces and all the extant patches can be matched to locations on other extant sections.
It should be noted that, contra claims by Gee, Cook, Smith and Ritner have conclusively shown that the missing section of the Hor Scroll is no where near long enough to contain even the translated portions of the Book of Abraham, let alone the volumes claimed by others that it would be once it was full translated. Also what happened to the Book of Joseph? It is not on the pieces we have left.
You might be interested in what David Bokovy has to say about the Book of Abraham being a translation of something the Abraham might have written. He is a faithful LDS scholar with a PhD. in Hebrew studies who recently wrote
Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis–-Deuteronomy in which he states
Besides the new understandings of the Book of Abraham brought on by modern Egyptology, the conclusions of Historical Criticism and the Documentary Hypotheses pose challenges for traditional perspectives on this book of scripture. Chief among these is the Book of Abraham textural dependency on late Judean sources that came into being over a millennium after the time of Abraham, making it impossible to directly connect the book of scripture with the ancient Patriarch
These few problems are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to trying to actually connect the papryi to something Abraham actually wrote. As these issues become more and more apparent the church itself is moving away from such claims as we can see from the changes in the headings in the Book of Abraham itself and in the recent church essay which tries to argue for both a missing scroll theory and a catalyst theory, theories that are mutually exclusive.
Which leads us to Option#2 which is the catalyst theory.
Now that the church itself is suggesting that the papyri may not have had anything to do with the Book of Abraham it raises questions about other claims Joseph Smith made regarding translating the Book of Mormon. How do we know the golden plates actually contained a historical record? Did God just inspire Joseph Smith to create a prop to be used as a catalyst to make up the Book of Mormon? Why was it even necessary for Mormons at the time of Joseph Smith to spend scarce money to buy the Egyptian relics if they were merely a prop? Joseph Smith didn't need anything to create the Book of Moses?
Again these are just a few questions the catalyst theory raises.
When we move away from the papyri being an actual autograph it creates as many problems, maybe more, than it solves.
