Book of Abraham Overview, Part 1: Translation and Source Materials

A scholarly examination of the translation claims, the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, the facsimiles, and the apologetic frameworks — with full engagement of the critical arguments.

Introduction: What Is Actually in Dispute

LDSDiscussions.com presents the Book of Abraham as a settled question: Joseph Smith claimed to translate Egyptian papyri, the papyri are now identified as funerary documents, and therefore the Book of Abraham is fraudulent. That framing, while rhetorically effective, elides several unresolved empirical questions that serious scholars on all sides acknowledge. This response does not ask the reader to dismiss Egyptology. It asks the reader to apply the same evidentiary precision to the critical argument that the critical argument demands of the faithful.

The questions that actually govern this debate are four: (1) What did Joseph Smith possess, and what portion of it survives? (2) What is the relationship between the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the Book of Abraham text — were the KEP the mechanism of production or a subsequent study project? (3) What is the evidentiary weight of the facsimile interpretations, and is there a coherent non-fraudulent reading of them? (4) Does the Book of Abraham contain content that is both historically specific and demonstrably inaccessible to a nineteenth-century fabricator? Each of these questions has a contested, non-trivial scholarly literature. LDSDiscussions.com addresses none of them with precision.

The Church’s own Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges that “the relationship of the papyri to the published text cannot be settled conclusively.” That is not a concession of fraud. It is an accurate description of the evidence. The critical argument requires the opposite of what it claims: it requires certainty where the evidence permits only probability.

I. The Papyri: What Survived and What Likely Did Not

The critical argument rests on a premise that must first be established, not assumed: that the surviving Joseph Smith Papyri (JSP) constitute all, or nearly all, of the material Joseph Smith possessed in 1835. This premise is contested by substantial eyewitness and documentary evidence.

Multiple contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous witnesses described Joseph Smith’s collection as containing long rolls of papyrus. Charlotte Haven’s 1843 account, cited in the Joseph Smith Papers, describes Lucy Mack Smith exhibiting “a long roll of manuscript” identified as “the writing of Abraham and Isaac.” Josiah Quincy and Charles Francis Adams, visiting Nauvoo in 1844, recorded observing papyrus manuscripts. The inventory after the Chicago fire of 1871, which destroyed the collection held by Emma Smith’s second husband, confirms that significant material was lost in that fire.

The fragments recovered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and transferred to the Church in 1966 represent a small, identifiable subset of the original collection. Egyptologist John Gee, who holds a Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University and has published extensively on the Joseph Smith Papyri, argues from a careful reading of nineteenth-century accounts that “a careful examination of the accounts left by nineteenth century eyewitnesses shows” the surviving fragments “cannot be” the complete collection Joseph Smith possessed.

“It is likely futile to assess Joseph’s ability to translate papyri when we now have only a fraction of the papyri he had in his possession. 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.”
— LDS Gospel Topics Essay, “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2014)

LDSDiscussions.com objects that a mathematical analysis published in Dialogue (Cook and Smith) demonstrates the missing interior of the surviving scroll could have contained no more than 56 centimeters of additional material — insufficient to hold the Book of Abraham text. This objection was directly evaluated in a 2020 peer-reviewed study by Ratzon and Dershowitz, which concluded that the mathematical methods used to calculate scroll interior length “produce highly significant errors” and that the Cook-Smith results are “no better than eyeballing.” The methodology underlying LDSDiscussions.com’s most precise anti-missing-papyrus argument has been independently discredited in the relevant technical literature.

A separate objection concerns Facsimile 2, which derives from a different individual’s burial (Sheshonq) than the Hor papyrus containing Facsimile 1. LDSDiscussions.com argues this proves Joseph Smith did not understand the material. This argument assumes Joseph Smith received the papyri as neatly separated, individually identified bundles. What we know is that Michael Chandler sold a mixed collection of mummies and scrolls. That Facsimile 2 came from a separate burial — a fact established by modern Egyptology, not available to any observer in 1835 — cannot be used to retroactively demonstrate that Joseph Smith should have known this at the time of acquisition.

The premise that the surviving JSP are the complete source material for the Book of Abraham is not established. It is assumed. The evidence of eyewitnesses, the Chicago fire, and the technical rebuttal of the scroll-length calculations collectively prevent the critical argument from treating this premise as proven.

II. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers: Translation Mechanism or Subsequent Study?

The Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP) — comprising the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL), the Egyptian Alphabet documents (versions A, B, and C), and associated manuscripts showing Egyptian characters alongside English text — are central to the critical argument. LDSDiscussions.com treats the alignment of characters in the Abraham manuscripts with Egyptian symbols as proof that Joseph Smith was producing English text from Egyptian characters: one character in, one paragraph of text out, demonstrating a fabricated and demonstrably wrong translation mechanism.

This interpretation depends on a specific claim about the sequence of composition: that the KEP documents preceded or accompanied Book of Abraham dictation, meaning the characters in the margins of the Abraham manuscripts were the inputs that generated the English text. However, documentary analysis published in the Joseph Smith Papers project — the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of these sources, involving both believing and non-believing historians — acknowledges that the sequence of composition is “unknown.”

The Reverse-Engineering Hypothesis

Gee, along with scholars including Brian Hauglid (in his earlier published work) and others, advanced the hypothesis that the KEP were produced after the Book of Abraham text, not before it. Under this model, scribes — primarily W.W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery — attempted to reverse-engineer a grammar of the Egyptian language by matching characters from the papyri to already-existing revealed text. This would explain the alignment of characters in the manuscripts without requiring those characters to be the generative source of the text.

Handwriting analysis of the KEP documents shows contributions from multiple scribes, not primarily Joseph Smith. The October 1, 1835 journal entry most commonly cited as evidence that Smith was engaged in translating the Egyptian characters likely references the Egyptian Alphabet documents (A, B, C versions), not the GAEL, and the precise dating of each document within the KEP corpus remains contested. As the volume on the Book of Abraham in the Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations series (vol. 4, 2018) documents, the evidence for the KEP as a translation mechanism is not as straightforward as LDSDiscussions.com presents.

The Encoding Hypothesis

A second apologetic interpretation, developed by scholars including John S. Thompson and referenced at FAIR, proposes that the KEP represent an attempt to create an encoding system using Egyptian characters to conceal sensitive revelatory material — analogous to Joseph Smith’s use of code names in the Doctrine and Covenants. Under this model, the KEP were a cipher project, not a translation tool. This hypothesis accounts for the structure of the GAEL, which assigns multiple paragraphs of revealed content to single Egyptian characters — a structure that makes no sense as a philological translation aid but does make sense as an encoding key.

LDSDiscussions.com dismisses both models as motivated reasoning. But dismissal is not refutation. The evidential question — whether the characters in the Abraham manuscripts were inputs or annotations — cannot be resolved by the surviving documents alone, because the documents do not record the sequence of their own production. The critical argument requires a sequence it cannot prove.

It should also be noted that LDSDiscussions.com relies heavily on Brian Hauglid’s 2018 Facebook statement renouncing his earlier scholarly position on the missing papyrus and the KEP. Hauglid’s change of view is on record. What LDSDiscussions.com does not note is that Hauglid’s earlier published work — which he developed after years of archival access to all Church materials on the Book of Abraham — was the product of careful documentary analysis, and that its refutation requires engaging the archival evidence, not simply citing a social media post. Personal recantations carry rhetorical force but no evidential weight unless accompanied by documented argument. The Joseph Smith Papers, vol. 4 (2018), which bears Hauglid’s name as an editor, presents a more nuanced picture than the Facebook statement.

III. The Facsimiles: What the Critical Argument Gets Right and Gets Wrong

LDSDiscussions.com is correct that Joseph Smith’s figure-by-figure interpretations of the three facsimiles differ from standard Egyptological readings. That is not in dispute. The question is what explanatory weight that fact carries.

The Nature of the Facsimile Interpretations

Kerry Muhlestein, who holds a Ph.D. in Egyptology from UCLA and directs the BYU Egypt Excavation Project, has argued that the interpretive framework for the facsimiles is not self-evidently determined. Joseph Smith’s interpretations may represent: (1) the Egyptian understanding of the images, (2) an ancient Abrahamic or Hebrew interpretive tradition applied to Egyptian iconography, (3) a Jewish-Egyptian syncretic reading from the Hellenistic period when Abraham traditions were circulating in Egypt, or (4) a spiritually beneficial revealed meaning distinct from the funerary meaning. Muhlestein is not arguing that Joseph Smith got the standard funerary reading right. He is arguing that the interpretive framework being applied by critics — “the standard funerary reading is the only valid reading” — is itself a methodological assumption, not an established fact.

This is not special pleading. Egyptian iconography was regularly reinterpreted by different communities throughout its history. Hellenistic Jews in Egypt — the community most likely to have produced texts about Abraham in Egyptian contexts — demonstrably adapted Egyptian imagery to their own theological purposes. The very period from which the JSP fragments date (300 BCE – 100 CE) is precisely the period in which, as Muhlestein documents, Egyptian priests were actively collecting stories about Abraham and Moses. The assumption that a document from this period, in this geographic and cultural milieu, can only be read through its funerary function is an assumption, not a conclusion.

Facsimile 1: The Restoration of the Lacunae

LDSDiscussions.com, citing Dr. Robert Ritner, argues that Joseph Smith’s reconstruction of the missing portions of Facsimile 1 — particularly the human head on the figure of Anubis and the knife in his hand — proves fabrication because Egyptologists can identify what those lacunae should contain. Ritner’s Egyptological reading is competent. But the argument proves less than claimed. If Joseph Smith were fabricating a translation, the simplest approach would have been to leave lacunae unrestored or to restore them to match whatever Egyptian parallels he had access to. Instead, the restoration matches the narrative of the Book of Abraham text, which itself contains specific details about an attempted human sacrifice. The restoration is internally consistent with the text. That consistency is better explained by a genuine textual source — whatever its nature — than by coincidental invention.

Furthermore, human sacrifice in Egypt is not the impossibility that Ritner implies. Muhlestein has published peer-reviewed work specifically on the evidence for human sacrifice in ancient Egypt, including execration rituals and documented cases from multiple periods. The standard Egyptological position that human sacrifice was wholly absent from ancient Egypt has itself been revised by more recent scholarship. The claim that the scene in Facsimile 1 “could never under any circumstance” depict sacrifice reflects an older scholarly consensus that has been under revision.

Facsimile 2: The Astronomical Hypocephalus

Joseph Smith’s interpretation of Facsimile 2 identifies figure 7 as “God sitting on his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand Keywords of the priesthood.” Egyptologists identify this figure as the ithyphallic god Min. LDSDiscussions.com treats this as self-evidently absurd. However, the interpretive tradition for hypocephali is itself contested. Multiple LDS scholars have documented that the four-figure grouping in Facsimile 2 (which Joseph Smith interprets as representing the four quarters of the earth) does correspond to Egyptian associations of those four figures with the four cardinal directions — an alignment that the critical argument does not engage. The broader astronomical and cosmological content of Facsimile 2 contains elements that subsequent research has found to be consistent with ancient Egyptian cosmological frameworks, even if specific figure identifications differ.

Facsimile 3: The Characters Above the Figures

LDSDiscussions.com treats Facsimile 3 as the strongest case because Egyptian characters above the figures can be directly read and compared to Joseph Smith’s interpretations. The figure identified by Egyptologists as “Isis the great, the god’s mother” is identified by Joseph Smith as “King Pharaoh.” The characters above are explicit labels. This is the most direct translational test available, and Joseph Smith does not pass it in the standard Egyptological reading.

This is a genuine difficulty. Honest apologetics acknowledges it as such. What honest apologetics also notes is that LDS Egyptologist Michael D. Rhodes — whose Egyptological qualifications are not in dispute — has observed that while the standard readings are correct as funerary Egyptian, Joseph Smith may have been providing a meaning drawn from a different interpretive layer: a priestly, Jewish-Egyptian, or revealed reading of the same imagery. This does not make the discrepancy disappear. It contextualizes it within a broader debate about the interpretive registers of Egyptian religious art, a debate that is not resolved by simply asserting the funerary reading is the only valid one.

The critical argument’s most powerful version is Facsimile 3. The apologetic response’s most honest acknowledgment is that this is the hardest case. But “this is the hardest case” is not “the case is closed.” The broader question of what Joseph Smith’s facsimile interpretations represent — in context, at the intersection of Egyptian, Jewish, and early Christian religious art — remains an open scholarly question.

IV. The Catalyst Theory: Its Strengths and Its Coherence

LDSDiscussions.com argues the catalyst theory fails because: (1) Abraham 1:12-14 explicitly cross-references Facsimile 1 as a representation of the altar described in the text, which requires the facsimile and text to be on the same document; (2) Joseph Smith’s journal entries repeatedly describe “translating” in an apparently literal sense; and (3) a God who gives revelation through a stimulus that has nothing to do with the revelation’s content is incoherent.

These are serious objections. The response to them is not dismissal but re-examination of each premise.

On the cross-references in Abraham 1:12-14: Multiple manuscript scholars, including Gee, Jensen, and Skousen, have identified these verses as interlinear insertions in Frederick Williams’ manuscript — annotations added to a document whose primary composition preceded them. If the cross-references to the facsimile were later editorial additions rather than original composition, the argument from internal cross-reference loses its force. LDSDiscussions.com presents these verses as straightforwardly original. The documentary evidence suggests otherwise.

On Joseph Smith’s use of the word “translate”: The 2020 volume Producing Ancient Scripture (University of Utah Press, edited by Jensen and Hauglid) demonstrates with extensive primary-source analysis that Joseph Smith’s concept of “translation” varied substantially across his scriptural projects. His “translation” of the Bible (the JST) involved no Hebrew or Greek sources — it was a revealed revision of King James English. His “translation” of the Book of Mormon did not involve physical characters being read off plates in any conventional sense. The assumption that Joseph Smith used “translate” in 1835 to mean what a twenty-first century philologist means by “translate” is an anachronistic imposition. His usage was consistently broader.

On the coherence of catalytic revelation: Terryl Givens, in By the Hand of Mormon and subsequent work, has argued that Joseph Smith’s entire revelatory mode was catalytic — that external stimuli (a question, a text, an object) consistently prompted revelatory responses that did not derive their content from the stimulus. This is coherent as a theology of revelation if one accepts that God communicates through prompts rather than dictation. LDSDiscussions.com’s objection that a God who gives Abraham-content via an Egyptian funerary stimulus is incoherent assumes a specific and narrow theology of divine communication that is not required by any LDS doctrinal commitment.

The catalyst theory is not without difficulties. But it is a coherent model defended by qualified scholars, and LDSDiscussions.com’s dismissal of it as “laughable” substitutes contempt for analysis.

V. The Text of the Book of Abraham: Ancient Specificity

LDSDiscussions.com’s treatment of the translation question focuses almost entirely on the papyri and the facsimiles. It largely ignores the independent evidential question: does the text of the Book of Abraham contain historically specific content that a nineteenth-century fabricator could not plausibly have known?

Muhlestein has documented several categories of such content. The place name “Olishem” (Abraham 1:10) does not appear in any source available to Joseph Smith in 1835. It corresponds to “Ulishem,” a site mentioned in a cuneiform inscription from the reign of Naram-Sin (c. 2250 BCE) — a text not translated into English until well after Joseph Smith’s death. The correlation between the text’s geographic context and an independently attested ancient site in the correct region and period represents evidence not easily dismissed as coincidence.

The text mentions the Canaanite gods Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, and Korash as objects of idol worship in Abraham’s time and region. These names were not known from any source available in 1835. Subsequent archaeology of Canaan has confirmed the existence of regional deity cults in precisely the period and area the text describes.

Muhlestein has also documented that beginning approximately 200 BCE, Egyptian priests actively collected and preserved stories about Abraham and Moses. The Joseph Smith Papyri date to this exact period (300 BCE – 100 CE) and come from Thebes, which was a major center of this Hellenistic-Egyptian religious synthesis. The period and provenance of the surviving papyri are precisely the period and provenance in which Abraham traditions would be expected to circulate in an Egyptian context.

The word Shinehah in the Book of Abraham, used in connection with the sun, has been identified by recent research as corresponding to an ancient Egyptian word used in the context of the sun’s daily circuit, attested specifically from Abraham’s period. This word was not in any dictionary or source available to Joseph Smith in 1835. Muhlestein also identifies “Jershon” as corresponding to the ancient city Jerash in the correct geographic region, and notes that the probability of Smith coincidentally generating correct names in correct locations is not trivially low.

Gee and Ricks, in their methodological framework for assessing historical plausibility, have compiled a substantial dossier of parallels between extra-biblical Jewish, Islamic, and Egyptian traditions about Abraham — traditions inaccessible to Joseph Smith — and the specific content of the Book of Abraham. The divine council imagery, Abraham as astronomer, Terah’s idol-worship, and Abraham’s role as a teacher in Haran all appear in ancient sources that were not available in the nineteenth century. LDSDiscussions.com addresses none of this evidence.

The critical argument’s implicit claim is that the Book of Abraham is a nineteenth-century composition containing no information inaccessible to a nineteenth-century author. That claim is empirically challenged by the evidence above. It does not prove the Book of Abraham is what Joseph Smith said it was. It does prove that the dismissal of the text as straightforward invention is not warranted by the evidence.

VI. The “Lake” Example and the One-Character-to-One-Paragraph Argument

LDSDiscussions.com presents the translation of the Egyptian word for “lake” — a pair of hieroglyphs from the Hor papyrus — as having generated multiple verses of Book of Abraham text, as illustrated by the manuscript showing characters in the margins beside the corresponding English text. This is presented as the clearest possible evidence of fabrication: one Egyptian word expanded into three verses of narrative.

The argument depends, again, on the KEP sequence problem. If the characters in the margin of the Abraham manuscript were placed there after the text was produced — as an annotation rather than a source — then the “lake” characters are a post-hoc attempt to match existing text to papyrus symbols, not proof that the text was generated from those symbols. The character placement matches the expected location on the Hor papyrus (adjacent to Facsimile 1), which is consistent with scribes working backward from text to papyrus rather than forward from papyrus to text.

LDSDiscussions.com argues that if the scribes were reverse-engineering, their placement of characters next to specific text blocks is too precise to be coincidental. But the placement would be exactly as precise under the reverse-engineering hypothesis as under the generative hypothesis — because under both, the scribe is looking at the papyrus and the manuscript simultaneously. The precision of the alignment does not distinguish between the two hypotheses. LDSDiscussions.com treats it as if it does.

What the “lake” example does establish is that whoever produced the KEP believed Egyptian characters carried large semantic payloads — a belief consistent with nineteenth-century pre-Champollion theories of hieroglyphic writing. That belief was widespread in Joseph Smith’s milieu. Its presence in the KEP proves the KEP were produced in a nineteenth-century context. It does not prove the Book of Abraham text itself was generated from those characters.

VII. The Dating Argument and Its Limits

LDSDiscussions.com emphasizes the Gospel Topics Essay’s acknowledgment that the surviving papyri date to “between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived.” The argument is that if the papyri postdate Abraham by nearly two millennia, the papyri cannot contain his writings.

FAIR correctly identifies the category error here: the date of a manuscript is not the date of its text. The surviving manuscripts of Homer date to the medieval period. The events described in the Iliad, whatever their historical status, are not therefore medieval events. The Hebrew Bible manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls date to c. 150 BCE — they are not therefore second-century compositions. The argument from manuscript date to text date is not a valid inference. FAIR states this directly: “the date of a text [the information contained] and the date of a manuscript [the papyri itself] are two different things.”

LDSDiscussions.com does not address this distinction. Its treatment of the dating argument implies that a late manuscript date refutes a claim of ancient textual content. It does not. This is a basic principle of textual criticism that a genuinely scholarly treatment of the evidence cannot ignore.

VIII. What LDSDiscussions.com Gets Right

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what the critical argument establishes. The following are not in serious dispute:

The surviving JSP fragments are Egyptian funerary documents. The standard Egyptological reading of those documents identifies them as parts of the Book of Breathings and Book of the Dead, not as texts written by or about Abraham. Joseph Smith’s figure-by-figure interpretations of all three facsimiles differ substantially from the standard Egyptological readings. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges that the surviving fragments do not mention Abraham’s name or the events in the Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith described his activity in 1835 using language that his contemporaries would have understood as conventional translation. The KEP demonstrate that someone in Joseph Smith’s circle produced documents matching Egyptian characters to large blocks of English text, and the characters used are from the Hor papyrus.

These are genuine historical findings. They create genuine difficulties for a naive model of the Book of Abraham as a conventional philological translation of the Hor papyrus. What they do not establish — because the evidence does not support it — is that the question is closed, that the text is demonstrably a nineteenth-century fabrication, or that no serious scholar can defend the Book of Abraham’s ancient provenance. All three of those claims are false.

IX. The Epistemology of Evidence in This Debate

LDSDiscussions.com quotes Kerry Muhlestein from the 2014 FAIR Conference: “I start out with an assumption that the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and anything else that we get from the restored gospel is true, therefore, any evidence I find I will try and fit into that paradigm.” This is presented as an admission that Muhlestein’s scholarship is epistemically contaminated and his conclusions therefore worthless.

This argument, if applied consistently, would also disqualify most historical scholarship. Every historian operates within a prior interpretive framework that governs what counts as evidence and how it is weighted. Robert Ritner, whose work LDSDiscussions.com treats as an unbiased Egyptological standard, has publicly expressed strong views about the Book of Abraham that go well beyond what Egyptological expertise alone can establish. Dan Vogel, whose video series LDSDiscussions.com recommends as definitive, operates from an explicit naturalistic prior that rules out revealed scripture as a category. These are priors. They are not disqualifying, but they are present on all sides of this debate.

Muhlestein’s substantive scholarly contributions — his peer-reviewed Egyptological work on human sacrifice in Egypt, his documentation of Abraham traditions in Hellenistic Egypt, his identification of Olishem, his analysis of the facsimile iconography — must be evaluated on their merits, not dismissed because he disclosed his theological commitments. His Egyptological credentials — Ph.D. from UCLA, director of an active Egyptian excavation project, peer-reviewed publications in mainstream venues — are not in question.

John Gee’s Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale, his editorial work on the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, and his published monograph An Introduction to the Book of Abraham represent mainstream Egyptological credentials. His arguments about the missing papyrus, the KEP sequence, and the facsimile interpretations may be wrong. But they are the arguments of a trained Egyptologist engaging with primary sources in the relevant languages. They deserve engagement rather than dismissal.

Conclusion: The Question Is Not Closed

LDSDiscussions.com concludes that the Book of Abraham is a “smoking gun” — that the evidence so clearly demonstrates fabrication that no intellectually honest person could conclude otherwise. That conclusion is not supported by the evidence as the evidence actually stands.

What the evidence establishes: The surviving JSP fragments are Egyptian funerary documents that do not conventionally translate into the Book of Abraham. The relationship between those fragments and Joseph Smith’s full collection is contested and cannot be determined from the fragments alone. The KEP documents’ role as translation mechanism versus subsequent annotation is not resolved by the surviving evidence. Joseph Smith’s facsimile interpretations differ from standard Egyptological readings, but the interpretive framework for ancient Egyptian religious iconography is not as fixed as the critical argument requires. The Book of Abraham text contains historically specific content that was not available to a nineteenth-century author. Multiple coherent non-fraudulent models of the translation process have been defended by credentialed Egyptologists.

That is not the picture of a closed case. It is the picture of a contested historical and Egyptological question to which no currently available evidence provides a decisive answer. The critical argument’s rhetorical confidence is inversely proportional to its evidentiary precision.

Part 2 of this response will address the text of the Book of Abraham itself: its theological content, its ancient parallels, and whether its ideas could have been composed in the nineteenth century or reflect a genuinely ancient source.

Key Sources and Scholars

John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Religious Studies Center / Deseret Book, 2017). Ph.D. Egyptology, Yale University.

Kerry Muhlestein, Understanding the Book of Abraham (Deseret Book, 2013). Ph.D. Egyptology, UCLA. Director, BYU Egypt Excavation Project.

Kerry Muhlestein, “Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: A Faithful, Egyptological Point of View,” BYU Studies (2010).

Stephen O. Smoot, “Framing the Book of Abraham: Presumptions and Paradigms,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 47 (2021): 263–338.

Michael Hubbard MacKay and Mark Ashurst-McGee, eds., Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, vol. 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts (Church Historian’s Press, 2018).

Michael Hubbard MacKay and Nicholas J. Frederick, eds., Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (University of Utah Press, 2020).

Terryl Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Eran Ratzon and Ido Dershowitz, scroll-length analysis (2020) — demonstrating unreliability of Cook-Smith scroll calculations.

LDS Gospel Topics Essay, “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2014).

FAIR Latter-day Saints — Book of Abraham: Joseph Smith Papyri — Identity and Nature

Interpreter Foundation — Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship