Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The following segment was cut from a
[00:00:01] Speaker B: previous episode due to time constraints.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Enjoy this discussion and watch the full
[00:00:06] Speaker B: episode for more on this topic.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: So, okay, with all that throat clearing and all, the road has been paved. Let's go back. Carrie, that story I told you, give me an assessment of that. Of that account or that narrative about the Book of Abraham.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: So. And you're right, I don't. I actually don't have a TikTok account, I'll have to admit. But my son shows me TikTok stuff.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: Stuff.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: So he manages my media stuff. But I've seen it on YouTube all sorts of other places. And so I'll give you kind of a little.
It makes me chuckle when I think of this, but I've seen on so many YouTube things like, they'll say the dark secret that Mormons don't want you to know is about this. All the things you just explained. And I feel like answering, well, the dark secret they don't want you to know is that they actually haven't done their homework.
They don't know what they're talking about. They're missing a ton of information. So all of the things they're telling you are wrong. That's their dark secret because they don't actually know the story. They've looked at a teeny tiny part of the story and swallowed a bunch of misconceptions. Some people maybe are intentionally deceiving. I think most of them, they've just swallowed the teeny little bits they've heard here and there. They don't have the time, energy, or desire to get really into it and look at the whole story. So they sell you this little teeny piece that is not representative of what actually happened.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: And so that's their accidental dark secret. I don't want to malign them. I think they don't mean to be purveying false information, but they are. They're just plain telling falsehoods without realizing it.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: Well, humans seek after simplicity. Just naturally we want to comprehend something. And so when something like the Book of Abraham is confusing, well, let's simplify it down into a narrative we can understand.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: And the more that I'm not an Egyptologist, but the more I've, like, studied the papers people have published on the Book of Abraham and try to understand the arguments around, like, okay, well, what's the relationship between the papyri and the Kirtland Egyptian papers?
[00:02:01] Speaker B: And.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: And this. And how did he translate? Did he use the seer? So did you know all of that? I'm like, oh, this is very, very complex. And all these people presenting these arguments like, there's so much disagreement even among like faithful Latter Day Saints and among critics of like, what's really going on here? And so it just like, it was a humbling moment of like, there is so many layers to understand what's really happening with this papyri in the Book of Abraham.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: We're in a world of 30 or 10 second sound clips. That's the world we live in.
Well, when you want to give a 30 or 10 second sound clip of a complex issue, you will by nature not be giving a very accurate thing. And that's exactly what someone who is trying to say the dark secret is. They translated this and it was wrong. That's what they're doing. They're taking advantage of the 30 second sound clip, whereas the real story is more than 30 seconds. And if you don't want to invest more than 30 seconds, then you're not going to find out the truth. But you honestly really don't care that much about the truth if you're not willing to invest more than 30 seconds. So I hope here, let's jump in and give some complex stories.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Give some context. So maybe a few things we can acknowledge.
There are some aspects of this narrative that are true. For example, it is true that the papyri fragments that the church recovered in 1967 have been translated.
You and I have even looked at them together. We can read them and so we can tell you, and we're both faithful Latter Day Saints. And it is true those papyri fragments do not render a text that resembles our Book of Abraham text. Right. The fragments we have belong to two. We call them funerary texts just because they were discovered in a funerary context. But they're more. They were used in other contexts, but they're called funerary texts called the Book of Breathings and the Book of the Dead. Am I right so far?
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Yeah. So that part of the story is true that you hear on TikTok and things like that.
So help explain to us why that's inadequate, though that fact alone is not adequate to show the Book of Abraham is all fraud, because most people just sort of stop there. Okay, they've translated the fragments. It's not the Book of Abraham. It's funerary text. And I can go away, walk with the impression Book of Abraham's a fraud. Why is that inaccurate?
[00:04:06] Speaker B: It's because people have made an assumption and they haven't gotten into the whole Story. Right. So the assumption people have made is that the text that is adjacent to that drawing must be the source of the Book of Abraham, which is a reasonable assumption. I don't fault anyone.
[00:04:19] Speaker C: Most of my textbooks have pictures and then texts that go along with that picture.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Although I would guess that most of your textbooks also have a text that says, see Figure 2.3. And Figure 2.3 is two pages away.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: So that's the part we forget. Right. So we make that assumption. Reasonable assumption. Now you have to test it. And when we test it. Well, there are a couple ways to test it. And most of the ways we can test it give us inconclusive evidence that says maybe we're good in that assumption and maybe not. But we can look at the whole story. We have enough people who saw the fragments. They saw. Joseph Smith heard from Joseph Smith or his mother or different people what he's translating from to get the whole story. And when you look at the whole story, it becomes clear there's agreement from everyone that spoke about it that Joseph Smith is translating from the large roll, which is not what these fragments are. They're saying it after this fragment has been cut off. Well, we don't know if it was cut off. We don't know exactly how we get it, but we know that it's mounted to paper and it's a separate.
And all of these eyewitnesses tell us that he's translating from something else. So what we need to do is read the rest of the story, which tells us, well, this isn't what Joseph Smith was translating from. So it's completely irrelevant whether it says anything about Abraham, because no one is actually claiming that it should say anything about Abraham. It's a different text. We shouldn't expect it to say anything about Abraham.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: So the papyri we have is not the totality of the papyri that Joseph Smith originally received.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: No. And this. So maybe as we get into this, let's back up and look at a larger issue.
And that is, and I take this tack in my book that you've been referencing, let's talk about the Book of Abraham, where. And I had to kind of wrangle with the editors a little bit to get them to agree to this. But where. What we do to begin with is tell all the stories. The story of Abraham, the story of the guy who owns this, the story of Joseph Smith receiving the papyri, what he does with the papyri. Because I have found that once people know the entire story, if they know the whole thing. When we get into the questions, then they just say, oh, yeah, why are we even worrying about that? That's not an issue. People just didn't understand. Right.
So part of the story is that Joseph Smith receives, besides some mummies, he gets four mummies. He also acquires two rolls of papyri. One is called the larger roll and one is the smaller roll. It's still fairly substantial, but the larger roll seems to be very, very large.
And then a bunch of fragments. We don't know exactly how many fragments we can identify at least several.
So that tells us that there's plenty of texts Joseph could be translating from. If he is translating from one of these papyri. And that's a different story. Right. But there's plenty of text on there, and most of it died in. Or died in a manner of speaking.
It was burned. Yeah, burned in the Great Chicago Fire. Right. So we have what's left to us, a very small percentage of what Joseph Smith originally had. And we can verify from the eyewitnesses that this is not what Joseph Smith was translating. So anyone who says this is what he's translating is claiming to know better than the people who were there. That's never a good place to be historically. That's not a safe thing to say, but that is what they're saying.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Okay, so you said that people believed that Joseph Smith would likely have been translating from this larger role. But does that mean that, like, what was included in all of that papyri, the Book of Abraham, let's see, is like five chapters long?
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very short.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: So it's very, very short. And are you suggesting that the long roll, I mean, how much text could that have included?
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it could have had a lot. So. And we should be clear that we know we don't have the whole Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith was saying he was going to publish more, and he didn't. So what we have is short. We don't know how long what Joseph was going to give us, had he given it all to us, we don't know how long that would have been. But the longer roll, and there's been some debate and controversy over how long it would have been.
But applying formulas that Egyptologists have used in a number of places and a number of times, and that we've now been able to verify, is fairly reliable. I mean, nothing's going to be perfect but fairly reliable in predicting the length of papyri. This is somewhere around 40ft long. That's. That's one of the longer. It's not the longest, but it's one of the longer papyri rolls out there. It's not unheard of. There are plenty of examples.
It likely would have had a number of different texts on it, which is also not uncommon or unheard of to have several different kinds of texts on papyrus.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: So if we don't have the roll, how on earth do we know how long? Like what calculations are you making to determine how long are you taking the fragments we do have?
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Yeah, you look at the fragments we do have and you look at the. You can see on them when it was wound up and kind of got smashed you the length of, of how long it would be in between each fold and how it gets progressively longer. Yeah, how it gets progressively longer because of course the inside is smaller than the outside. And then you can use that to extrapolate what the whole thing.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: Oh, very interesting.
[00:09:18] Speaker D: One of the reasons people will say, well, this must be what Joseph Smith was translating from is because you have what's clearly the image facsimile 1 was based on right there. And of course the text of the book of Abraham says, you know, in verses 12 and 14, 14, you know, he's describing his almost sacrifice and he says, I refer you to the image at the beginning of this record.
So, you know, so people kind of put those two pieces together and say, well, this is that image. So this must, you know, the text next to it must be the. The beginning of Abraham, chapter one.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:56] Speaker D: So what would you say to that?
[00:09:59] Speaker B: There are a couple of things to look at there. First of all, I would argue that that suggests it's not that, because that would be. Right. You've got some columns right next to, on the right hand side and some columns on the left hand side of that drawing, verse 12 and 14. That's going to be like right next to the drawing. So you wouldn't say at the beginning of this record. At the beginning suggests it's at least a little ways away from it. Right. It's not the drawing right here. Yeah, See left, yeah. In fact, it's likely would come before the drawing. Right. That text would likely come as you're reading right to left, which is what they would have been doing.
That likely would have come before the drawing if it were where Joseph Smith is saying it is in verse 12 and 14.
[00:10:44] Speaker D: So the image wouldn't be at the
[00:10:46] Speaker B: beginning, it would actually be after it. Or if not, then it's just right here. Right. I mean, so that text suggests it's Some distance. But we also don't know exactly when that line is added. So in our earliest manuscripts, we have of the Book of Abraham, that is actually added above the margin or above the line. Yeah. So it's added in there. Some people have suggested that that's when it's first added.
I'm not completely convinced of that because that's a manuscript that doesn't have any drawings on it. So it wouldn't make sense to add in. See the beginning of this. Oh, there's nothing here. Right. I think it probably is from the original, but we don't know because it's added in later. We just don't know when that would have been at or how, where it is on the papyrus or anything along those lines. So there's not as much we can do with that information as we would like.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: So it could have been like Joseph Smith or whoever his scribes were at the time, just helpfully indicating. It's like a scribal gloss, saying, hey, look at the image to understand what this passage is saying. Or it could have been original to papyri Abraham saying, and I've included an
[00:11:53] Speaker B: image for you, but it's a ways away. In fact, I'm just thinking of. I don't know why I've never thought of this until right now. For quite a while I've wondered, or I think it's likely that that earliest manuscript we're talking about is what they are using when they publish the Book of Abraham. I think there are a number of little clues that make me think that may be what they're using.
And it's not the original dictation manuscript, by the way. It's a copy of something, either the original dictation or a copy.
[00:12:22] Speaker C: And we don't have the original dictation.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: We do not. But I think that may be what they're using. And so now it makes me think of if they are publishing this and the facsimile one is actually at the beginning of this newspaper thing, that maybe they add it in there for the newspaper publication. I think that's a.
[00:12:40] Speaker D: In preparation for publication, they insert it into the text.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: But I don't. I have no idea. We have no way of proving or disproving this. It's just speculation, but it could work.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Yeah, you're. You're putting a lot of weight on. On two little verses from the Book of Abraham combined with these assumptions people have about what they assume the source of the Book of Abraham must be. And I can understand with that assumption how you can get there, how you can arrive at that conclusion. I think, though, what your work and others have shown is it's a questionable assumption. Right. Let me read here a statement from the Church's Gospel Topics essay. And this is one I see thrown out there all the time on TikTok on social media as the Mormon Church admits the Book of Abraham is false. Right. So here's what it says, which, by
[00:13:22] Speaker B: the way, I helped write this.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
Oh, there you go.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: Right, yeah.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: Confessions of.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: I mean, I didn't do the actual writing, but I help with that part. And so, yeah, if, if we're going to say the Mormon Church is admitting, then I would be part of admittance.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: So here's what it says. None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mention Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the Book of Abraham. Latter Day Saint and non Latter Day Saint Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the Book of Abraham. The though there is not unanimity even among non Latter Day Saint scholars about the proper interpretation of the vignettes on these fragments. And then it says they've identified these fragments as being from the third century B.C. okay, so the way I see it quoted in this story, they quote that.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: I want to follow up because just about two paragraphs later or so two or three paragraphs later, it says it is likely futile to assess Joseph's ability to translate papyrin when we now have only a fraction of the papyri he had in his possession. As you were saying, eyewitnesses spoke of a long roll or multiple rolls of papyrus. Since only fragments survive, it is likely that much of the papyri accessible to Joseph when he translated the Book of Abraham is not among these fragments. The loss of a significant portion of the papyri means the relationship of the papyri to the published text cannot be settled conclusively by reference to the papyri. That is hugely significant context to add to this statement that people tend to either ignorantly are unaware of or I think purposefully leave out there dishonestly when they're quoting this. So as we've kind of discussed here, just to kind of sort of wrap it up for our, for our audience, it's not a matter of is there missing papyri, it's how much missing papyri and have we identified the source of Joseph Smith, what he believed to be the source of his translation?
