Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Facsimile 2 of the book of Abraham is maybe one of the most mysterious of our pieces of scripture. And on the one hand you've got Egyptologists saying that we've disproved the Book of Abraham because the hieroglyphs in the facsimiles can just be translated and it's game over. On the other hand, you've got a lot of Latter Day Saints who have speculated about oh, this is like esoteric temple teachings. How can we decode this to see like the true meaning underneath? And so today it would be fun to decode like what can we actually know about facsimile to how do we make sense of these critical perspectives, some of the faithful perspectives people have. So today for Informed Saints we've brought on guest John Gee. John Gee is a scholar of Egyptology. You got your master's at Berkeley, your PhD at Yale, and you are widely published in the field, not just with Latter Day Saints, but in the broader field of Egyptology.
So welcome John Gee. Anything else you'd like to add?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Probably the less the better.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Excellent.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Well, it is worth noting that he is not just a generic Egyptologist, but he's well published on the type of document that Facsimile 2 is, which is a hypocephalus. If I'm not mistaken, that's your word of the day.
[00:01:11] Speaker D: Hypocephalus. Right. And we'll throw up on the screen here. John's publications in mainstream peer reviewed Egyptological venues.
So not some navel Gaving Mormon apologist press or something that people might want to claim. We're talking hard hitting mainstream Egyptology. So we have the perfect guy on Informed Saints to talk about hypocephaly with us today.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: And I think it's a good point because when we think of all the other facsimiles, we got facsimile one, which is about the sacrifice of Abraham allegedly. Facsimile three is this presentation scene, but they're all rectangular and then we've got this circle and it doesn't seem to match what the other two are doing. It doesn't seem to interact with the Abraham story as much. So what is facsimile 2?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: So let's start with the fancy term hypocephalus. Okay, this comes from a Greek expression, under the head, which is based on a mistranslation of an Egyptian text which says that you would place these things khertep, which is literally under the head, but idiomatically means at the head. So you Find them both on the top of mummies and, and on the back of mummies heads. So sometimes they're under the head, but unless you're standing the mummy on its head, which they wouldn't do because that's a curse in Egyptian. It's not actually under the head, it's just at the head.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: So this facsimile isn't actually part of maybe the larger papyrus scroll that would be part of the book of Abraham. You're saying this is a different artifact
[00:02:45] Speaker B: and it's on, it's.
I mean you, you can read the owner's names on the various, on the various facsimiles. Not really on facsimile 1, but facsimile 1 is part of a roll and it has the name and genealogy of the owner of the roll.
So we know who that belongs to in facsimile 3 has that same name. Facsimile 2 is A, has a different name.
[00:03:08] Speaker D: His name is on the. If you're looking the facsimile, it's on the middle register, the left side of hieroglyphs. And it's on the lowest line there.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Yeah, lowest line.
[00:03:17] Speaker D: Lowest line there. So we know his name is Sheshon.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: People who acquired these separated out the papyri from the mummies they were associated with. And then when they sold them in lots, they would just grab some of this and grab some of that and put it together.
And so in order to reconstruct it, you have to go through there are about 15 to 20,000 objects that they had. And you have to go through there and sort them into appropriate piles, which is a daunting task to say that least.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: So to help people maybe visualize or for context, Is this just a circular drawing or would it have actually been like a circular piece of papyrus?
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Well, there are some that are papyri, most of them are on linen, some are on lead placard, some of them are lead, some of them are on copper. Right. Ceramic.
Supposedly there's one of gold, but there's only one photograph of that and it's lost the object itself. Go figure.
It was excavated in the 70s and it's, it's missing now. So there's no way to really confirm.
And unfortunately the picture isn't enough that you can even see any details on it.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: How many hypocephali are there in Egypt between.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: About that we know, about 100 to 120.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:49] Speaker D: They've been cataloged. This is a book that catalogs the ones that we do know. Tamash Mekish the hypocephalus. And without getting necessarily into much of the weeds of Mecish's work from an Egyptological perspective, the book is valuable for the photographs it has of our known hypocephaly. So, yeah, he catalogs about what, 150 or so.
We should point out too, maybe, as we're talking about hypocephaly. If you go through the photographs we have from Mekesh and other scholars, it should be pointed out that no two hypocephalae really are alike, that they are customizable. Many of them are unique. You range everything from like, there's some that, like, it has just like a cow in the middle. Others are very elaborate. There's one that has like three onks, you know, on the round. So the people owning a hypocephaly could kind of customize what they wanted. We do get general types, you know, general kinds of forms or types, but they are customizable.
[00:05:38] Speaker C: So we have to say. I think. And I don't. I'm certainly not the expert, but I have looked over a lot of those photographs. I read your article creating a typology for some of the different.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Well, Mekish has used a different typology. And so, you know, I suppose at some point I ought to put together a table to organize. To organize all the different typologies.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: But the point being, there are some not 100% universal, but there are some common motifs that show up in a lot.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: There are of them.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: So why would you create a hypocephalus and put it behind a mummy's head? What's its purpose, its function?
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Well, so the text that all the Egyptologists and it's a good working hypothesis claim that is associated with it says that you put it at the head or around the neck in order to do one of two things. You do it for Pharaoh in order that it will destroy his enemies in the present life, or that you give it to someone who is deceased so that they can pass through any gate that they encounter in the next life.
It's almost like your yarmulke serves as your temple recommend.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Interesting temple recommend or a passport of sorts.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: It lets you get it. Yeah, it's your.
Yeah, it's as though you wear the right type of hat and it'll let you through the interesting.
The different area of the.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: And that text that you're referring to, that's Book of the Dead 162.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Book of the Dead 162.
[00:07:24] Speaker D: Yeah. The title for Book of the Dead 162, which we can read here to give kind of viewers a sense of what's going on here. It is said to be a spell for causing flame to be under the head of a, or at the head of a glorious being.
And it says, kind of reading through a little bit here, at one point it says you place a flame under Ra's head and behold, he is in the divine afterlife in Heliopolis. You cause him to become like one of those upon the earth, meaning he's alive again, he's resurrected. Right.
And then it goes on down a little ways to say, this is a great and secret book, do not allow anyone's eyes to see it, for that would be an abomination. He who knows it, meaning the book, and keeps it secret, he will continue to exist. Right. So there's afterlife stuff going on here. There's some esotericism in the sense that it also gives these names of these figures as you're supposed to recite these secret names in order to gain passage into the afterlife. So a lot to kind of pick apart there, but maybe that gives us a little sense of what's in Book of the dead 162.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: So a hypocephalus being some kind of adornment on the head, a headdress, a cap, a hat of some kind, metaphorically, that is associated with like glory and light and it gives you glorification, says
[00:08:37] Speaker D: you are a strong God who comes to the one that summons him. Right.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: I mean, that's what I think has Latter Day Saints would find interest in for our own modern temple worship, the idea of entering into eternal life and needing to be properly attired in order to pass through certain gates. Very interesting.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Well, there are two stages to the issue. So let's start off with the big issue. The big issue, people everybody wants to know about is does Joseph Smith's interpretations match the ancient Egyptian interpretations?
And there are all kinds of problems with this. But the first one is that rather than an ancient Egyptian interpretation, we often substitute a modern Egyptologist's interpretations. And those are not the same thing.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: I've got an article in Egyptological Venue pointing out that almost none of the identifications that Egyptologists to that point had proposed for the figures actually matched what the figures were labeled as on the documents. So there what I'm hearing you say
[00:09:51] Speaker A: is that like when Egyptologists have very confidently said, like, oh, Joseph Smith's interpretations are completely wrong, because this is what the facsimile really Means these are what these characters completely, 100% surely are. You're saying that maybe there's an overstated confidence there and maybe they're not entirely correct in their identifications.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Well, but to be fair to them, they're not trained in the appropriate specialty.
Not very many Egyptologists deal with Greco Roman Egypt. Most of them deal with. Right. You want to deal with the pyramids, you want to deal with the Valley of the Kings. That's New Kingdom. You want to deal with Middle Kingdom literature.
And those are all good things to specialize in and to be aware of. And they are experts in those areas.
But.
It's at least a thousand years off of the time period you're dealing with. So it's a little bit like saying walking up. Most of us are fairly confident in the modern world, but if we want to go back a thousand years, what are the chances that what we say based on way things work in the modern world apply during the age of the Vikings?
[00:11:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: What is the script of Egyptian on facsimile 2? Is that demotic?
[00:11:23] Speaker B: No, the script on facsimile 2 is hieroglyphs.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And more or less a standard hieroglyph.
But what's interesting is Joseph Smith Papyrus one, because the first few lines, which are to the right of facsimile 1, are in Ptolemaic temple glyphs, and the ones to the left are in hieratic.
[00:11:49] Speaker D: Oh, really? Yeah. You got the columns of the temple glyphs, then the lines of hieratic, the rows of hierarchic.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: And so they're using both of them.
Occasionally the scribe will actually throw demotic signs into the hieratic.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Oh, very helpful.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: That's setting up. How do you determine what an ancient Egyptian would understand by it? Now then you have the problem. What did Joseph Smith understand by the facsimiles?
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Do you think that facsimile two has any relationship to Abraham? Three, because it does talk about Kolob, and we have Kolob.
That's kind of the astronomical chapter.
I mean, I'm just curious to what your thoughts are on that.
[00:12:31] Speaker D: That's what I've always assumed.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: There's always some relation. But you look at the end of chapter one in the book of Abraham, it says he's going to talk about first the creation and then the planets and the stars.
And facsimile two in Joseph Smith's journals, where it's always the. The one on astronomy.
So the way it's laid out in the outline that Abraham supplies in the Beginning of the book.
The explanation to facsimile 2 would come after the creation. The creation.
And so we don't have it because
[00:13:08] Speaker A: the book of Abraham ends at chapter five, which is the creation of the world. But we don't even get to the Adam and Eve story.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: So we mentioned the inscriptions. So let's just run through the inscriptions. Yeah, you have the. So facsimile 2 was not complete in Joseph Smith's day. And so if you start with the rim inscription, it goes down through. And about two thirds of the way through, it drops out and has other hieratic characters from elsewhere in the papyri put in. Basically, what we have here is you have the figures on the left.
We can read those.
[00:13:46] Speaker D: So starting from the top at like 12 o'. Clock.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: No, I mean, you start at the
[00:13:50] Speaker C: bottom or the top.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: So the block of ones to the
[00:13:52] Speaker D: left in the middle.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: So the rim inscription, you start at the top at 12 o' clock, and you go around counterclockwise.
And so about two thirds of the way through, it drops out.
The block of text in the middle register on the right is damaged. You can't read that. Yeah, the block of text above the boat. Above the boat on the top register, on the top left is ungrammatical.
And there's a real debate on how to read the signs. And poor Quentin. Barney got hot friend, who we had
[00:14:38] Speaker D: on the show, so.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Because he got in there and he had Michael Rhodes, who reads it one way and I read it another way, we just.
And he's trying to do a defense on these things.
And Mike and I don't agree on a couple of the signs.
And poor Quentin knew that.
And then when you have the section, you have the lower section on the bottom, and then there's some lines below that that's also ungrammatical.
So, yeah, those are all words. And you can get two or three of them together into a phrase. But the whole thing is constructed. The way it's constructed is ungrammatical in Egyptian, and it's ungrammatical on all the parallels as well.
So what on earth is going on there?
So what's really interesting is the only block of text we can read is that middle register on the left.
And I think that's 8 through 12 or something like that.
Those are the ones that Joseph Smith says, if the world can figure this out, so let it be everything else.
All of the stuff that's ungrammatical or incomplete says will be given in the Lord's own due time.
[00:16:03] Speaker D: Now he also says though of those figures contain writings that cannot be revealed into the world, but is to be had in the holy temple of God. So that's in figure 8. And then 9 ought not to be revealed at present time. 10 also 11 also if we'll confront.
He punts on the rest of them. He says we'll be giving the time of the lord for Figures 12 through 21. But that chunk there, he says they are to be had in the temple.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: Right. And there actually are.
You can find parallels to that for phrasing in the Ptolemaic temple gate at Karnak.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Really?
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Yes. I have an article on this.
[00:16:38] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:16:38] Speaker C: Whoa.
[00:16:39] Speaker D: If I may shamelessly plug. As do I. Some time ago, with some feedback from John and others, I took a stab at those hieroglyphs there on the left.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: The phrasing Joseph Smith gives for those explanations actually has some kind of ancient precedent.
[00:16:53] Speaker C: Well, the phrasing. The text itself in the thing has precedent in text, not the.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: This will be given.
[00:17:01] Speaker C: No.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: So these are. You actually fall find those in Egypt.
But the interesting thing is if this is to help you pass through the gate, it's interesting that you actually find them on gates.
[00:17:13] Speaker D: Yeah.
To pass through gates of the temple.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: So that I count as a bullseye for Joseph Smith. Even if you don't actually notice, he doesn't translate anything. But the fact that we can.
We can read something on the. The left hand side on that block of text and the rest of it we can't read completely for various reasons. Right.
[00:17:40] Speaker D: I'd say we can read it and there is a temple context for it. As Josephine says, there's supposed to be. Speaking of a temple context for some of these, if I may be so bold as to take a stab at the rim inscription here with one of the world experts for it. I know some of it.
Well, you can tell me if you think I'm crazy, but I at least can see two references to the temple of the Bennu bird in Heliopolis.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Oh, you. You can see that. Okay, I will go for that. I was just.
[00:18:09] Speaker D: I'm not going to present the whole thing.
[00:18:10] Speaker C: Yeah, I was just going to say
[00:18:12] Speaker D: there's another temple connection in the Rim inscription of the temple of the Phoenix. The Benu bird. Not Phoenix, Arizona. Ancient Heliopolis.
So there seems to be another temple connection there.
Enoch, Jabayu, whatever that is. I am the.
In the. In the.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: That was where the second word going to trip you up?
[00:18:31] Speaker D: No, that one. That one is. I'm going to punch on but it is. I am the something in the temple of the Benu bird at Heliopolis.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: You can, you can. There's no real agreement on what that second word is.
It could be the adventure.
It could be the one in the sarcophagus. Yeah, it could be the redeemer. It could be. There's just.
We don't know enough to. I mean, you can try translating it. And there are lots of decent shots. Are any of them correct? That's another question.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: So you say there's a gap in the rim. And so you mentioned that that was pulled from elsewhere in the papyri. They just filled in some words. Do I assume that's the printer, Reuben Hedlock doing that? And then like the whole picture missing that we have an interpretation for.
[00:19:21] Speaker D: And people get mad at Joseph Smith for that. Which. I want to see what your thoughts are on this. Cause in the center figure you're missing the head. And on the top right, you're missing that entire little quadrant there. And Joseph Smith puts in the solar bark with the sun God Ra with the crown of light on his head,
[00:19:36] Speaker B: which oddly enough, you get solar barks in.
[00:19:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I did what I was gonna say. I've seen that like a very similar scene.
[00:19:42] Speaker D: We'll show examples here on the screen. But there are the hypocephalae. But there's either one boat, one boat with the solar mark, or there's two. So that's. I mean, look for a second here, if Joseph is just pulling stuff out of thin air, he can put anything. The papyri there. Why not put the one with the deceased before the three gods, Right. Or something. Right.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: But also that central figure that he gets multiple heads on it when it usually has multiple heads.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: Yeah, that was another one. I was going to say. I didn't realize I've seen this image before, but I just never registered that the heads are missing in that central figure. And part of it is because I've looked at other hypocephaly and I'm like, oh, yeah, that looks.
That looks like what the central figure often looks like.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Does he just have a drawing? Is the assumption or speculation that Joseph Smith is fabricating stuff to put in there, that he actually knew what it originally was and the drawing got damaged? Or is this the printer interpolating what should go there? How do we.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: We have some from Joseph Smith's journals where he gives Reuben hedlock and facsimiles 2 and 3 actually have engraved by Reuben Hedlock on them.
Facsimile 1 was also engraved by him.
He did an amazing job, if you think about what he has to do.
He's carving it into metal and he's carving away all of the.
He's putting carving in where there's blank space on the text. He's doing it two size and he's flipping it mirror image, and he has no idea what he's looking at.
So under those conditions, the facsimiles are amazing.
[00:21:21] Speaker D: So even if there are some questions about what facsimile 2 looked like originally, before it was damaged, I think at least there's a defensible case to be made for we'll say Joseph Smith's restorations or how it gets published as facsimile 2. Putting the boat up there on the top. Right. There's plenty of precedent for that and other hypocephalae. And even though the central figure typically has four heads, here he has two. There are other hypocephalae where it's just two heads in the central figure.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:47] Speaker D: So it's an open question.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: It's in the range.
So let's move to that cow.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: So Joseph Smith identifies that as what, the sun.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to talk about the problem with the ancient Egyptian one, and I've got an article coming out that points this out.
You have two different identifications in hypocephaly, but if you sort them out, you find that the ones from Achmeim equate it with Hathor, and the ones from Thebes equate it with Methyr.
Now, those are names and they don't mean anything to most of us, certainly most modern Americans. But the identification changes depending on the location where this was used.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: And this pyri is coming from.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: This one is coming from Thebes.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Thebes, okay.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: But it's the great. The fullest one is the great cow who gave birth to the sun.
And there are a whole bunch of inscriptions. And the interesting thing is, and Stephen's got a chunk in his dissertation dealing with part of this is the great cow gave birth to the sun. The fullest explanation of that comes from Esna. But we also find that identification in the Ptolemaic temple gates at Karnak.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Huh?
[00:23:13] Speaker D: Once again, connecting it with the temple, with astronomy, with creation. And if you look at, it's a creation myth where the cow comes out of the primordial waters and she gives birth to the sun on her horn.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Well, and if you read the Esna astronomical text, it can be both the Earth and the Sun.
[00:23:30] Speaker C: Right. At the same time.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: At the same time.
But the point I wanted to make with that is that the interpretation of these is not constant in Egypt, different locations will interpret the same figure to be something else.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: So we really can't be overconfident one way or another. Joseph Smith got this totally wrong. Joseph Smith got this totally right. But within the range of interpretations, you are saying that Joseph Smith identifies some kind of solar connection with this, and you're saying that there is some kind of solar connection with that cow.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Oh, there absolutely is a solar connection.
What the solar connection is may vary from place to place, and it depends.
We wish we knew more.
[00:24:16] Speaker D: Should we do one more? The easiest one, Figure six, right next to the cow.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Figure right next to the cow, Joseph
[00:24:20] Speaker D: Smith says represents this Earth in its four quarters, meaning presumably the cardinal directions of northeast South Australia.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And we've got a nice little sarcophagus that's in the Cairo Museum or was in the Cairo Museum. Who knows where it is now that identifies those characters with the four winds
[00:24:40] Speaker A: being associated with different parts of the Earth.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah, the quadrants of the Earth. And the interesting thing is if you go back in history, you find that they're not Egyptians.
Ancient Egyptians aren't consistent about which of the six figure goes with which quadrant or which corner of the Earth. The idea is that together they represent the four corners. But you may not be able to specifically say this one always represents this direction.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:12] Speaker D: We have an article in our. Maybe we should shamelessly plug this, our Guide to the Book of Abraham that came out with BYU studies.
John and I and Kerry Muhlstein and John Thompson were co authors on this. I think when we had Kerry on. We also mentioned it here as well. But we have some articles on these figures in facsimile too, including Figure 6.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: It's great when Egyptologists support something like this, but their track record of correctly interpreting the figures is not the best. And so we want to make sure that we understand what an ancient Egyptian can understand about that.
And we are just thrilled when an Egyptologist will agree with that.
And the tendency is to want to jump the gun on something that clearly is a lot of. Yeah, it needs a lot of study, a lot of care, and you need to be careful about how you do it. And.
[00:26:13] Speaker D: But there are some guys on Tick Tock, John, that have some very strong feelings about this. You know, I, I'm sure they listen to them. Or should I listen to you? I don't know.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: Yeah, they, they, they have some strong feelings about it, but the, you know, my entire career I've been having people tell me that, you know, two degrees in Egyptology and so forth. They don't need any training to be able to tell me that I'm wrong. And based on whatever they feel and, you know, it's the Dunning Kruger effect writ large where the less you know about something, the more you're convinced that you have the right answer and the
[00:26:57] Speaker D: more confident you are.
[00:26:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Can I ask why half of the hypocephalus is upside down? Am I supposed to read it upside down or am I supposed to turn it around? Like, why is it like that?
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Well, I turn it upside down because after all, if you're going to read the glyphs on the bottom, then you need to turn them upside down. They're all oriented that way.
Doesn't help make sense of the inscription because as they say, it's not grammatical. This just does not follow the rules that we're supposed to follow.
But there is an orientation on this and some Egyptologists actually turn it around and put that cow figure right side up at the top.
The places where they've put one of these at the head of the mummy is our best indication of the correct orientation of these figures.
And that's another thing that Joseph Smith got right, or Reuben Hedlock, because that's actually the way from what we can tell, that the Egyptians oriented these things.
But there is probably a reason that it's upside down.
And I wish I knew what that was.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: Well, I was just going to say, because I did read some of your papers on hypocephaly and I do think maybe one thing that might be worth communicating here is a lot of Joseph Smith's interpretations on here do have to do with astronomy. And I think you even mentioned in
[00:28:32] Speaker B: his journals this is referred to as the astronomical cut.
[00:28:36] Speaker C: The astronomical cut. And there does seem to be an association in some of what we talked about here with astronomical things. There does seem to be an association with hypocephaly and astronomical.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: And I have a whole article on that.
[00:28:48] Speaker C: You have a whole article on that. So I think that's kind of an interesting connection there.
[00:28:53] Speaker D: Again, I'm thinking like if Joseph Smith is just making this all up, this can mean anything. He can make it into any whatever fantastical thing. He happens to know. It's involved with astronomy, with creation, with the sun, the moon and the stars. Right? And yeah, demonstrably we have those connections.
[00:29:10] Speaker C: And you know, you just look at the picture and certainly I Think for maybe an Egyptologist, there might be some things you see and you're like, oh yeah, that's astronomical or whatever. But for your average person looking at this picture, like, are you going to think sun, moon, stars or the firmament
[00:29:25] Speaker D: here in Figure 4, right. A signifying expanse of the firmament. Which is funny because on that figure, figure four. Just a quick little side note in looking at some of the commentary at the temple of Horus at Edfu, one Egyptologist I know identified Horus spreading out his wings in the creation myth at Edfu as signifying the firmament or the heavens above the temple at Edfu. So, so that's a neat little parallel there. So yeah, having any kind of astronomical connection with facsimile two, just look at it and like, what do you see there? If you're not a specialist, Joseph happens to know, oh yeah, this is an astronomical document that includes a book of Abraham. Astronomy.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: If you think about the general membership of the church, facsimiles have been cited in general conference. As far as I can tell, only one time.
That was before I was born and I'm no longer a young spring chicken.
So they. Only a few years ago I went through all of the church manuals and the only times that the facsimiles ever showed up was in an optional primary activity in one. Sounds like a fun rotating five, four year course. Now we've changed primary teachings a couple times since then, but for the most part we don't use these at all. They are not a key part of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
They provide an interesting puzzle for us. It says that you can find these things in the temple. And we know in the temple they say you're taught by the Spirit and the Spirit can teach you things about them.
But you know, as a scholar, if, if I had an angel came down and explained the facsimiles to me, what can I do with that?
Because as a scholar the only authority I have is the evidence and the arguments that I can present. I don't have any ecclesiastical authority.
If God appeared to me and explained the facsimiles, I couldn't tell anybody.
I wouldn't be authorized to and the interpretation wouldn't have to be taken as valid by anybody else.
So these aren't really key to anybody's salvation.
There's nothing writing on them.
This is not like if the tomb wasn't empty on the third day. We have a big problem if the facsimiles aren't interpreted just right. We don't have a big Problem. This is not a key part of our religion.
It plays almost no role in our religion and the daily lived experience of Latter Day Saints.
So harping on a point that in the end isn't important, you know, it doesn't say in Matthew 25 that we'll divide the sheep and the goats and whether you understand the facts.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: It's not acceptable.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: No, that doesn't figure in. That's not.
Not the most important thing. It's not that they're unimportant, but you got to put them in their place. And they play a very, very, very small role in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: A very small role, but a very freaking cool one that I think for a good reason.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: It's the only pictures we've got in the scriptures. Right. So, yeah, it's not the keystone of our religion. Not the keystone of our religion. This is putting a little perspective on that. If you don't understand it, that's okay.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: I love that. And if, if you want to dive into more of this, there's so much you can do.
[00:33:10] Speaker D: We've got oodles of books, examples.
[00:33:11] Speaker A: But I will recommend a guide to the Book of Abraham. This one was published by BYU Studies pretty recently and it probably represents the most recent conglomeration of the best minds on the Book of Abraham. All of the well, minus.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Although this is. This is the only one that's still in print.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Oh, there you go.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: But this one is available on the Internet.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: So the Book of Abraham facsimiles is not the keystone of our religion, but they are super fascinating. Very cool. And before you have a confident opinion either way, we always need to check our assumptions and make sure we understand what we don't know about Egyptology and the Book of Abraham. So remember, you can study deeply and still believe boldly. And we'll see you next time,
[00:33:56] Speaker B: Sam.
