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CES Letter

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 20

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Part 20: CES Letter Polygamy & Polyandry Questions [Section A]

by Sarah Allen

 

I have to admit, of all of the different sections in the CES Letter, polygamy is the one I’ve been dreading. It’s such a messy subject, and there are going to be high emotions over it no matter what. The “questions” are angrier and more slanted, and everything is twisted to such a degree that it’s just not going to be particularly pleasant. I’m also not as well-read on this subject as I am on some of the others that interest me more, but I’ve still done a fair amount of research and I do have a testimony that plural marriage was instituted by God. That might be controversial to some people, but it’s true. I got my answer on that a long time ago. Regardless, this should be an interesting set of questions/concerns for all of us.

One of the things that also truly disturbed me in my research was discovering the real origins of polygamy and how Joseph Smith really practiced it.

So, right away, this is an interesting comment. We hear online all the time that people had no idea Joseph ever engaged in polygamy until they finally learned the truth. I assume that’s at least similar to what Jeremy means here when he says he discovered “the real origins.”

That’s honestly something that I just don’t get, particularly when those people further claim that the Church was hiding it from them or lying to them. It’s in the D&C, it’s in multiple fiction and nonfiction books published by Deseret Book and the Church itself, it’s been discussed in Church magazines and manuals, it’s been on Joseph’s Wikipedia page for twenty years, etc. I realize that not everyone has the same experiences growing up, and some people are taught more than others. It happens with a lay ministry. And it’s true that during parts of the 20th century, this aspect of Church history was deemphasized and some sources were harder to find before the internet was a thing. But even then, it was always available information. I understand that discovering something you didn’t know can be a blow. I really, truly do. However, you can’t accuse a church of hiding something from you when it’s in multiple public, official publications up to and including their canonized scriptures.

Just some quick background on this, at least as far as my experience goes: like a lot of us whose ancestors were early members of the Church, I have polygamists in my family history. I was also taught in Primary that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both had multiple wives. Again, I realize that wasn’t the case for everyone, but it was for me. Additionally, I am a single sister who has never been married and who has no children at this time. In at least two of my neighborhoods growing up in Utah, there were polygamists living nearby, both several blocks away on my same street.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 19

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Part 19: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section J]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

This has been a long section of “questions” and we’re not quite done yet, but I think we’ll be able to wrap up the Book of Abraham section this week and move on to the next set of questions next week. I’m sure everyone’s getting ready for a change in topic by now, so it’ll be good to dive into something new.

This entire post may as well be about source bias as anything else. To start the ball rolling on this week’s group of accusations (they are less actual questions this week and more biased statements masquerading as facts), Jeremy Runnells links to a commentary video about an interview Elder Holland did for a BBC documentary (which aired in the US on PBS) on our church during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run.

As some quick background, John Sweeney, a reporter for the BBC, put together a documentary titled The Mormon Candidate that was…well, to put it bluntly, it was insane. It was like something out of the National Enquirer. I remember watching it and thinking, “Wait, isn’t the BBC supposed to be reputable?” You can watch the full documentary here, but I couldn’t find any clips of just Elder Holland’s interview without slanted commentary insinuating that he was lying.

The documentary was full of errors like repeatedly confusing chapels and temples, interviews with polygamists (whom we are apparently “afraid of”) and crazy ex-members who made claims about the Church having them followed, “Mormon spies” who are trained by the CIA to keep tabs on the members who are “considered dangerous,” and a very heavily edited interview with Elder Holland. Sweeney repeated the claim from The Godmakers that we believe we each get our own planet when we die, as well as that we believe we are the only chosen people of God. He claimed that the Church is in charge of the Utah state school system. He highlighted the re-drawing of Facsimile 1 by Charles Larson that a noted, non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologist called “seriously flawed.” He claimed that Joseph Smith was convicted of being a fraud in New York, which there is no evidence of. Joseph was charged, yes, but the supposed victim of his fraud, Josiah Stowell, testified in Joseph’s defense (as did several of his family members) and Stowell later joined the Church, in which he remained a faithful member until his death.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 18

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Part 18: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section I]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

I’m going to plow through as many of these questions as I can today, and hopefully, we can get finished this week or next week and move on to the next set of questions. Jeremy spends a lot of time going through all of the supposed Book of Abraham controversies he’s managed to find, and he insinuates in places that the Church hid them from the public or only acknowledged them recently. FAIR has compiled a list of the many different responses to these supposed controversies by the Church and by its members, which you can find here. Many of the things described in this portion are refuted in these publications (and thank you to Spencer Marsh for sending me that resource!). If you want to do further reading on any of these topics, that bibliography is a great place to start researching. With that, let’s jump into the next comment.

86% of Book of Abraham chapters 2, 4, and 5 are King James Version Genesis chapters 1, 2, 11, and 12. Sixty-six out of seventy-seven verses are quotations or close paraphrases of King James Version wording. (See An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, p.19)

It’s actually 83% and 64/77 verses that correspond, which just seems like a silly mistake to make in my opinion. It took a little time to compare them but not any real effort, so it’s surprising that neither Jeremy Runnells nor Grant Palmer checked that basic math before making that claim. As an example of one of the verses that doesn’t have a match but is one of my favorite verses in all of the Pearl of Great Price, look at Abraham 2:16, which says, “Therefore, eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed….” I think that’s such a beautiful thought, and we don’t find anything like it in Genesis. [Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 18

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 17

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Part 17: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section H]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

Since we finished Facsimile 3 last week, you might be thinking that we’re done with the facsimiles, but we’re not. Jeremy Runnells gives a slanted and mocking—but useful—recap of all three facsimiles in his next question/concern. This will give us a chance to review everything we’ve gone over so far. After that, we’ll move on to other facets of the Book of Abraham, and then I want to culminate this section with an overview of the evidence in favor of its historicity, because there is a decent amount of it and I think it’s important to learn its strengths as much as, if not more than, the criticisms against it. The Book of Abraham contains some of our most beautiful, unique doctrines, and throwing it out because you don’t know the research would be tragic.

To begin, Jeremy states the following:

Respected non-LDS Egyptologists state that Joseph Smith’s translation of the papyri and facsimiles are gibberish and have absolutely nothing to do with the papyri and facsimiles and what they actually say.

As I hope I’ve shown over the last few weeks, this is not an accurate assessment of either the papyri or the facsimiles. While it’s true that some Egyptologists make those claims, modern Egyptologists are very often wrong when guessing what ancient Egyptians believed their figures to represent, and moreover, they rarely have any of the proper training in the correct time period and in the Demotic script being used that would be necessary to make those professional assessments. We also don’t know whether we should even be looking at the Egyptological explanations for the facsimiles, or whether they should be Jewish interpretations or something else entirely. Even if we should be looking for Egyptian interpretations, Egyptians were famous for having multiple meanings for their artwork and often encouraged different interpretations.

Beyond all of that, both the 1859 St Louis Museum catalog description  and its reprint from 1863 were taken from the work of Gustavus Seyffarth, the only Egyptologist ever to study the long roll of papyrus that was named by eyewitnesses as the source of the Book of Abraham. The catalogs stated definitively that there was another text on the roll after the Book of Breathings. That text was titled “The Beginning of the Book of …”, but then the description cuts off and doesn’t say what that book actually was, and unfortunately, the long roll was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The eyewitnesses clearly separated the roll from the fragments in their descriptions. When they talked about the source of the Book of Abraham, they were talking about the roll, and when they talked about the glazed slides, they were talking about the fragments. Because of all of this, we can’t say that the Book of Abraham translation has nothing to do with the papyri, because the bulk of the papyri doesn’t exist anymore. All we can say definitively is that the translation has nothing to do with the fragments, beyond the fragment of the image from Facsimile 1.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 16

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Part 16: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section G]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

Facsimile 3, like Facsimile 1, is difficult to classify because it doesn’t have the standard features that it should if it was a “common” scene “discovered elsewhere in Egypt.” Once again, also just like Facsimile 1, there are accusations of the facsimile being “altered” and “wrong”. As Quentin Barney explains:

The assumption that parts of Facsimile No. 3 had been “changed” or “badly drawn” was held by the majority of individuals quoted in [Franklin] Spalding’s work. Archibald Henry Sayce, for example, argued that “the hieroglyphics, again, have been transformed into unintelligible lines,” and “hardly one of them is copied correctly.” William Flinders Petrie appeared to have trouble with both the text and the figures, stating that the figures were “badly drawn” and the text was “too badly copied.” Another claimed that “Cuts 1 and 3 are inaccurate copies of well-known scenes on funeral papyri.”

I haven’t mentioned Franklin Spalding yet, but his work will come up in a later post, so I wanted to take a quick moment to elaborate on that. Franklin Spalding was an Episcopalian Bishop who wrote to a bunch of Egyptologists about the Book of Abraham and then, in 1912, published the findings of those who responded that were critical of Joseph in a book titled Joseph Smith, Jr., as Translator: An Inquiry Conducted. B.H. Roberts, Joseph F. Smith, Hugh Nibley, and others rebutted this work, most notably in the February 1913 edition of The Improvement Era and in Nibley’s Abraham in Egypt. Jeremy Runnells quotes from several of these Egyptologists later, though, so we’ll discuss it all more than.

So, was the facsimile altered by Joseph or anyone else? We don’t know. We don’t have the original and there are no mentions of it being damaged or altered, but that’s yet another unanswerable question about the Book of Abraham. Anyway, these criticisms that the scene has been changed contribute to the fact that Facsimile 3 doesn’t fall neatly into categorization. Sometimes referred to as “the most neglected of the facsimiles,” much of what has been said about it has been incorrect.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 15

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Part 15: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section F]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

I’m going to dive in and start discussing what Joseph’s interpretations of what the figures on Facsimile 2 mean compared to what “modern Egyptologists say,” but first, I do want to point out that on this facsimile, there are a lot of numbered entries where Joseph says he’s not allowed to translate those figures yet while the Egyptologists have a description. Jeremy Runnells stacks them up in such a way as to imply that Joseph was incompetent by comparison, but Joseph could not read Egyptian. His translations and explanations were given to him by revelation.

The scriptures are full of verses comparing the wisdom of God to the wisdom of men. It’s not surprising these interpretations don’t match in every case, particularly when, as we’ve pointed out, those figures could be “read” multiple different ways by multiple different groups of people. As Hugh Nibley said, “In viewing them today, we must bear in mind the principle [of] … the ‘plurality of approaches,’ which states that the Egyptian, far from being adverse to giving more than one interpretation to a character, rejoices in putting as many meanings and associations as possible into every situation. Any one figure could stand for more than one idea, deity, force or principle, so that one may not say ‘this figure cannot be Re because it is Atum.’ On the hypocephalus, to make things more interesting, all the symbols, each with its multiple meanings, are drawn together into a circle where they are closely interrelated, suggesting a great wealth of possible interpretations.” It’s also not surprising that, if those figures were interpreted as having to do with temple worship and covenants the way we discussed last week, God would not allow Joseph to reveal them to a worldwide audience. But even with those caveats, there is a surprising amount of information that aligns between the various explanations. Regardless of what Runnells is trying to imply, Joseph was not incompetent, and his interpretations of these figures do hold up against ancient Egyptian and Jewish thought.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 14

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Part 14: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section E]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

We’re talking about Facsimile 2 today. I’ll have to discuss the facsimile explanations next time, since there’s background we need to cover for those to make sense. Anyway, Facsimile 2 is what is known as a hypocephalus:

Facsimile 2 belongs to a class of Egyptian religious documents call hypocephali (Greek: ipokefalos, hypokephalos), “under the head,” a translation of the Egyptian hry-tp with the same meaning). A hypocephalus is a small, disk-shaped object, made of papyrus, stuccoed linen, bronze, gold, wood, or clay which the Egyptians placed under the head of their dead. They believed it would magically cause the head and body to be enveloped in flames or radiance, making the deceased divine. The hypocephalus symbolized the Eye of Re or Horus, that is, the sun. The scenes portrayed on it relate the Egyptian concept of resurrection and life after death. To the Egyptians, the daily rising and setting of the sun was a vivid symbol of the resurrection. The hypocephalus itself represented all the sun encircles, the whole world. The upper portion represented the world of men and the day sky, and the lower portion (the part with the cow) represented the netherworld and the night sky.

Pearl of Great Price Central elaborates:

Today there are 158 known hypocephali which have been catalogued and/or published. Based on their attested chronological and geographical distribution, “it is clear that the hypocephalus [did] not become a widespread funerary object” in ancient Egypt. Instead they “remained exclusive pieces of funerary equipment reserved for the high clergy and for the members of their families who occupied” high-ranking positions in the temple, especially the temple of Amun at Karnak, the temple of Min at Akhmim, and the temple of Ptah at Memphis. Although hypocephali themselves appear to be later creations, the mythological and cosmological conceptions contained in hypocephali have apparent forerunners in earlier Egyptian texts.

According to Spell 162 of the Book of the Dead, hypocephali served a number of important purposes: to protect the deceased in the afterlife, to provide light and heat for the deceased, to make the deceased “appear again like one who is on earth” (that is, to resurrect them), and to ultimately transform the deceased into a god. Hypocephali were also conceived of (and even sometimes explicitly identified as) the magical eye of the sun god Re that consumed enemies with fire. Their circular shape and function to provide light, heat, and protection naturally lent themselves to this conceptualization in the minds of the ancient Egyptians.

While these might perhaps have been the primary purposes of hypocephali, it is clear from the explanatory rubric of some copies of Spell 162 of the Book of the Dead and from other surviving evidence that they also served non-funerary roles. For example, hypocephali or objects that served the same purpose as hypocephali were used as divinatory devices in the Egyptian temple and as astronomical documents. This is especially significant since Joseph Smith’s interpretation of Facsimile 2 draws connections to the temple and features several astronomical elements. Hypocephali also shared a conceptual link with temple gates. In this capacity they served, among other things, to keep out enemies and admit friends into sacred space and shared a focus on creation motifs. Once again, this parallels some of Joseph Smith’s explanations of Facsimile 2 which emphasize creation.

In summary, while hypocephali served a number of important religious and ritual purposes for the ancient Egyptians, they ultimately “point[ed] toward the Egyptians’ hope in a resurrection and life after death as a divine being.”

 

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 13

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Part 13: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section D]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

Today, we’re going to start talking about the facsimiles, beginning with Facsimile 1. Facsimile 1 is pretty unique, not just among the other Book of Abraham facsimiles but also among other similar known scenes, which are often referred to as “lion couch scenes.” This is the only facsimile that we actually have the original copy of. We don’t have the originals of Facsimile 2 and Facsimile 3 anymore. Facsimile 3 was described on one of the scrolls in the 1863 Wood Museum catalog, showing that it was among that papyri that burned in the Chicago Fire.

To begin with, this is what we have in our scriptures today. It’s an engraved copy of the original with numbered explanations of what the figures mean. This is the papyri fragment showing the facsimile. You’ll note that in the fragment, there are pencil markings filling in missing pieces, which I’ve circled in teal on this copy. We don’t know who penciled in those missing pieces or when they did it, but eyewitness testimony does suggest at least some of those missing pieces were intact when Joseph first received the papyri. There are at least two eyewitness descriptions of what seem to be the original vignette. So, maybe Joseph filled it in, maybe he didn’t. We honestly don’t know. There are claims it was filled in incorrectly, which seems to be partially true and partially untrue.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 12

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Part 12: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section C]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

As the beginning of the next question in the CES Letter is basically a retread of the previous one, I’m just going to skim over it really quickly as a brief recap.

Egyptologists have also since translated the source material for the Book of Abraham and have found it to be nothing more than a common pagan Egyptian funerary text for a deceased man named “Hor” around the first century C.E.

As we went over previously, the papyri fragments have been translated and do reflect funerary texts, which the Church confirmed just over a month after they received them. As we also went over, we certainly cannot say they were the source material for the Book of Abraham. Joseph himself said otherwise, and even if you don’t believe him, numerous other eyewitnesses all confirmed that it was the long roll that was the source material, not the fragments mounted under glass. Since the fragments are all we have today, we can’t confirm the eyewitness testimony. However, whether you believe in the catalyst theory, the missing scroll theory, or some other theory entirely, if we trust in Joseph Smith, the one thing we know for certain is that the fragments are not the source material for the Book of Abraham, no matter how many times Jeremy Runnells insists that they are.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 11

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Part 11: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section B]

By Sarah Allen

 

Before I get started, I just wanted to reiterate that these are all answers that work for me personally. They may not work for you, and that’s fine. My point in all of this was not to say that this is the only way to view something, but to show that there are answers out there if you go looking for them. If someone who is not a scholar or a professional apologist or researcher can find the stuff I’m posting with a little digging, imagine what else you could find out there if you tried, you know? And some evidences that are convincing to me won’t be convincing to you, and vice versa. That’s okay. Find what is convincing to you. Investigate the stuff you have questions about. Don’t just take my word for it, or the words of critics. Dive in yourself and do the research and see what you can find. Don’t just take one source at its word. Evaluate the different sources, as Reddit user lord_wilmore recently advised. You’ve all seen just how many different sources I’m drawing from to write these posts. There’s never just one. Even when I find a response from someone whose opinion I trust, I still often look for additional sources. I read the footnotes, and I read the sources my sources draw their opinions from. My hope is that these posts will encourage all of you to do the same when you come across a question you can’t immediately answer.

So, that said, let’s dive into some controversy, shall we?

We know this is the papyrus that Joseph used for translation because the hieroglyphics match in chronological order to the hieroglyphics in Joseph’s Kirtland Egyptian Papers, which contains his Grammar & Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL). Additionally, the papyrus were pasted onto paper which have drawings of a temple and maps of the Kirtland, Ohio area on the back and they were companied by an affidavit by Emma Smith verifying they had been in the possession of Joseph Smith.

First of all, that second sentence is completely out of place. No one from the Church that I’m aware of with any degree of authority has never denied that the papyrus fragments the Church has in its possession are some of the papyri that Joseph had. If someone out there did ever make that claim, it certainly was not in an official capacity while speaking for the Church. As I stated last week, the Church announced the fragments were in fact Joseph’s and that they were funeral documents a month after receiving them. This has never been in dispute, and tacking on the sentence to imply that it was in dispute is sketchy. [Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 11