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Difference between revisions of "Criticism of Mormonism/Books/One Nation Under Gods/Appendix A"
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| − | + | The ''Book of Abraham'' was "translated" by expanding single Egyptian characters into entire paragraphs of text. | |
| − | | | + | |misinformation=The author assumes that the Kirtland Egyptian Papers were created prior to the Book of Abraham being dictated, when the opposite is true. |
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| + | {{:Question: In the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, why is each Egyptian character matched to an entire paragraph of English text?}} | ||
=Further reading= | =Further reading= | ||
Revision as of 13:51, 11 December 2014
- REDIRECTTemplate:Test3
Contents
- 1 Response to claims made in "Appendix A: Abraham's Book?"
- 1.3 Claim
- The information on the scrolls was "penned by none other than Abraham...and Joseph."
- According to the book, Joseph "was positive" that he could translate the Book of Abraham scrolls because "the inscriptions were so similar to those on the Book of Mormon golden plates..."
- The book claims that "modern Mormons" believe that the Book of Abraham "proves" Joseph Smith's "powers of translation."
- Author's quote: [T]he ancient documents Smith acquired were only copies of common Egyptian funeral texts; namely, The Book of Breathings (which Smith turned into the Book of Abraham) and Book of the Dead (which Smith said had been written by the Bible's Joseph).
- Joseph's interpretations of the facsimilies has been rejected by Egyptologists.
- The book reproduces a reconstruction of what Facsimile 1 is alleged to have looked like from Charles M. Larson's book By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus. The author assumes that Larson's reconstruction is valid, noting, among other things that Joseph Smith "missed drawing in the falcon altogether" and that he "incorrectly drew the hand positioning of the figure lying down."
- The author completely omits the fact that the Church published an article in the Improvement Era soon after the discovery of the papyrus fragments that acknowledged that they were from the Book of Breathings.
- The scrolls were written approximately 2000 years after Abraham's death, and were therefore could not have been written by his hand as Joseph claimed.
- 1.10.1 456-457 - The Book of Abraham was "translated" by expanding single Egyptian characters into entire paragraphs of text
- 1.10.2 The author(s) of One Nation Under Gods make(s) the following claim:
- 1.10.3 FAIR's Response
Response to claims made in "Appendix A: Abraham's Book?"
| Postscript | A FAIR Analysis of: One Nation Under Gods A work by author: Richard Abanes
|
Appendix B: Failed Joseph Smith Prophecies" |
449
Claim
- Author's quote: Surely Smith would be able to translate the writings, thereby proving his God-given abilities.
Author's source(s) - Author's opinion.
- Joseph was not translating the scrolls in order to provide some sort of proof of his "God-given abilities." This is simply a sarcastic statement on the part of the author.
- Sarcasm
449
Claim
- The information on the scrolls was "penned by none other than Abraham...and Joseph."
Response449
Claim
- According to the book, Joseph "was positive" that he could translate the Book of Abraham scrolls because "the inscriptions were so similar to those on the Book of Mormon golden plates..."
Author's source(s) - No source provided.
- Joseph believed he could translate the Book of Abraham because he said he had translated the Book of Mormon "by the gift and power of God."
- If Joseph is perpetuating a fraud, as the author believes, why on earth would Joseph be positive that he could translate an ancient document when he knew he had made up the existence of the Book of Mormon plates? This theory is not even self-consistent.
- Book of Abraham information
450
Claim
- The book claims that "modern Mormons" believe that the Book of Abraham "proves" Joseph Smith's "powers of translation."
Author's source(s) - No source provided.
- No, "modern Mormons" simply believe that Joseph translated the Book of Abraham from papyri by the gift and power of God.
450
Claim
- Author's quote: [T]he ancient documents Smith acquired were only copies of common Egyptian funeral texts; namely, The Book of Breathings (which Smith turned into the Book of Abraham) and Book of the Dead (which Smith said had been written by the Bible's Joseph).
Author's source(s) - No source provided.
- It is unclear how the author developed his association of the Book of Breathings with the Book of Abraham and the Book of the Dead with the writings of Joseph.
450-451
Claim
- Joseph's interpretations of the facsimilies has been rejected by Egyptologists.
Author's source(s) - Statements are provided in the main text by Dr. A.H. Sayce (Oxford, England), Dr. W.M. Flinders Petrie (London University), James H. Breasted, Ph.D. (Haskell Oriental Museum, University of Chicago), Dr. Arthur C. Mace (Assistant Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Egyptian Art), and Professor S.A.B. Mercer, Ph.D. (Western Theological Seminary, Custodian Hibbard Collection, Egyptian Reproductions).
451
Claim
- The book reproduces a reconstruction of what Facsimile 1 is alleged to have looked like from Charles M. Larson's book By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus. The author assumes that Larson's reconstruction is valid, noting, among other things that Joseph Smith "missed drawing in the falcon altogether" and that he "incorrectly drew the hand positioning of the figure lying down."
Author's source(s) - Charles M. Larson, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look At the Joseph Smith Papyri, 1985, 1992 edition.
455
Claim
- The author completely omits the fact that the Church published an article in the Improvement Era soon after the discovery of the papyrus fragments that acknowledged that they were from the Book of Breathings.
Response- To have included this, of course, would fly in the face of the author's constant assertions throughout the book that the Church hides any information that might be potentially embarrassing.
- Book of Abraham/Joseph Smith Papyri/Identity and nature
- Notable omissions
455
Claim
- The scrolls were written approximately 2000 years after Abraham's death, and were therefore could not have been written by his hand as Joseph claimed.
Response456-457 - The Book of Abraham was "translated" by expanding single Egyptian characters into entire paragraphs of text
The author(s) of One Nation Under Gods make(s) the following claim:
The Book of Abraham was "translated" by expanding single Egyptian characters into entire paragraphs of text.
FAIR's Response
Question: In the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, why is each Egyptian character matched to an entire paragraph of English text?
The KEP may have been an attempt to "reverse engineer" the Book of Abraham translation against the Egyptian papyri
Once the Book of Abraham translation was complete, a unique opportunity existed to use the completed translation in an attempt to match it against the Egyptian characters on the papyri and produce a correlation between English and Egyptian. The Church addresses this possibility on LDS.org:
Some evidence suggests that Joseph studied the characters on the Egyptian papyri and attempted to learn the Egyptian language. His history reports that, in July 1835, he was “continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arrangeing a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.” This “grammar,” as it was called, consisted of columns of hieroglyphic characters followed by English translations recorded in a large notebook by Joseph’s scribe, William W. Phelps. Another manuscript, written by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, has Egyptian characters followed by explanations.[1]
The reverse engineering hypothesis gains traction once we see that the translation of the Book of Abraham (as some have supposed are demonstrated by the characters in the margins of the translation manuscripts) and the characters in the GAEL:
Yet some have supposed that the Egyptian Alphabet was the tool used to create the translation. In order to assess whether this could be the case or not, I conducted research to test the assumption. First, I located all of the phrases in the Egyptian Alphabet that also appear in the Book of Abraham. I then compared the Egyptian characters next to those phrases to the Egyptian characters adjacent to the matching lines in the early Book of Abraham manuscripts. Of the twenty-one times I found text in the Egyptian Alphabet that matched text in the Book of Abraham, I found only one time that the corresponding Egyptian characters matched, four times when part of the characters matched, and sixteen times in which there was no match whatsoever. Clearly the Egyptian alphabet was not used to translate the papyri, nor is there any demonstrable relationship between the characters on the papyri and the text of the Book of Abraham. This is not surprising since the characters come from fragments of papyri that eyewitnesses noted were not the source of the Book of Abraham.[2]
Even further evidence of this is the presence of Hebrew in the GAEL. This is further explicated by Jeff Lindsay[3]
Further reading
| Template code | Inserts this reference | Click to edit |
|---|---|---|
| {{To learn more box:responses to: 8: The Mormon Proposition}} | To learn more box:responses to: 8: The Mormon Proposition | edit |
| {{To learn more box:''Under the Banner of Heaven''}} | To learn more about responses to: Under the Banner of Heaven | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Robert Price}} | To learn more about responses to: Robert Price | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Ankerberg and Weldon}} | To learn more about responses to: Ankerberg and Weldon | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Ashamed of Joseph}} | To learn more about responses to: Ashamed of Joseph | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Beckwith and Moser}} | To learn more about responses to: Beckwith and Moser | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Beckwith and Parrish}} | To learn more about responses to: Beckwith and Parrish | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Benjamin Park}} | To learn more about responses to: Benjamin Park | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Bible versus Joseph Smith}} | To learn more about responses to: Bible versus Joseph Smith | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Bible versus Book of Mormon}} | To learn more about responses to: Bible versus Book of Mormon | edit |
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| {{To learn more box:responses to: CES Letter}} | To learn more about responses to: CES Letter | edit |
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| {{To learn more box:responses to: Denver Snuffer}} | To learn more about responses to: Denver Snuffer | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Dick Bauer}} | To learn more about responses to: Dick Bauer | edit |
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| {{To learn more box:responses to: Rod Meldrum}} | To learn more about responses to: Rod Meldrum | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Roger I Anderson}} | To learn more about responses to: Roger I Anderson | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Ronald V. Huggins}} | To learn more about responses to: Ronald V. Huggins | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Sally Denton}} | To learn more about responses to: Sally Denton | edit |
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| {{To learn more box:responses to: Vernal Holley}} | To learn more about responses to: Vernal Holley | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Walter Martin}} | To learn more about responses to: Walter Martin | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Wesley Walters}} | To learn more about responses to: Wesley Walters | edit |
| {{To learn more box:responses to: Will Bagley}} | To learn more about responses to: Will Bagley | edit |
- ↑ "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics (8 July 2014).
- ↑ Kerry Muhelstein, '"The Explanation Defying Book of Abraham" in A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History (ed.) Laura Harris Hales (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016) 85.
- ↑ Jeff Lindsay, “A Precious Resource With Some Gaps” Interpreter: a Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 33-2 (2019) pp. 35-58 off-site