LDS Discussions — A Faithful Response

LDS Expanded Essay: Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham

A point-by-point scholarly response to the ldsdiscussions.com annotated critique of the Church’s Gospel Topics Essay

The ldsdiscussions.com annotated essay on the Book of Abraham presents itself as a definitive refutation of LDS faith claims, promising that its commentary renders the Church’s official essay an implicit admission of fraud. That framing rests on a series of confident assertions that do not survive contact with the primary literature. This response examines each major claim in the order presented, supplying evidence, scholarly context, and methodological analysis that the annotation omits.

The discussion is organized around six categories of claim: (1) the identity and provenance of the papyri; (2) the Kirtland Egyptian Papers as translation evidence; (3) the missing-papyri argument; (4) the facsimile interpretations; (5) ancient-world content; and (6) the catalyst-revelation model. A concluding section addresses the annotation’s rhetorical methodology.

I. The Papyri: What We Actually Know

Claim: “There is no longer any dispute” that the existing papyri are the source of the Book of Abraham

The annotation states with categorical confidence that the Hor Book of Breathings (Papyrus Joseph Smith I, or PJS 1) is definitively the text Joseph Smith translated, and that scholars universally agree on this. This characterization is false in two distinct respects.

First, the claim of universal scholarly agreement conflates two separate questions: (a) what the surviving fragments contain — answer: Ptolemaic-era Egyptian funerary texts — and (b) whether those surviving fragments are the same portion of papyrus Joseph Smith used to produce the Book of Abraham text. Scholars unanimously agree on (a). Claim (b) is contested by a body of serious academic scholarship. LDS Egyptologist John Gee (Ph.D., Yale; Professor of Egyptology, BYU) and Kerry Muhlestein (Ph.D., UCLA; Director, BYU Egypt Excavation Project) have both published extensively arguing that the surviving fragments are not the portion Joseph translated.

Second, the annotation dismisses the missing-scroll evidence by claiming it “comes from a single third-person, third-generation account” via Hugh Nibley. This is inaccurate. The evidence for additional papyrus material is multi-sourced and independent:

  • Charlotte Haven’s letter (1843): An outside visitor to Nauvoo — not a Church member, not connected to Nibley — described seeing “a long roll of manuscript” in Joseph Smith’s possession.
  • Josiah Quincy (1844): A distinguished Boston politician and future Harvard president described multiple large scrolls during his Nauvoo visit, noting their impressive physical scope.
  • Joseph Smith’s 1835 purchase record: The artifacts acquired from Michael Chandler included four mummies with multiple papyrus rolls. The surviving 13 fragments held by the Church represent a small fraction of the material multiple complete rolls would contain.
  • The 1856 sale inventory: When Emma Smith sold the artifacts after Joseph’s death, the inventory describes materials beyond what the Metropolitan Museum fragments represent.

The annotation’s treatment of the Cook-Smith scroll-length calculation (Dialogue, 2010) as definitively closing this question is overstated. Cook and Smith calculated the missing portion of PJS 1 specifically — one identified scroll. Their calculation does not account for the other scrolls purchased alongside the mummies, which contemporary independent accounts describe as substantial in number and size.

The honest scholarly position is that the surviving fragments represent a small fraction of what Joseph Smith possessed. Whether the Book of Abraham text was produced from surviving PJS 1 material, from now-lost scroll portions, or through a revelatory process independent of direct character-by-character reading remains an open question. The annotation presents one answer as settled consensus. It is not.

II. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers: Translation Source or Reverse Engineering?

Claim: The KEP prove character-by-character translation from PJS 1

The annotation treats the Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP) as smoking-gun evidence that Joseph’s scribes were producing the Book of Abraham text by translating characters from PJS 1 in sequence. The annotation is emphatic: “We have translation manuscripts that prove this.” This claim is more contested than the annotation acknowledges, and the internal evidence cuts strongly against it.

The KEP documents consist of two types: the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL) and the Egyptian Alphabet documents (EA). The critical methodological question is the production sequence: did the EA documents precede the Book of Abraham text (making them a translation mechanism), or did they follow it (making them a reverse-engineering effort applied to a revelation already received)?

Several lines of evidence favor the reverse-engineering model:

  • Ink and handwriting analysis: The Joseph Smith Papers Project editors noted that the EA documents show signs of being composed after text was already available — the scribes appear to be assigning characters to existing phrases, not discovering phrases from characters.
  • Internal structure of the GAEL: The GAEL assigns elaborate multi-layered meanings to individual characters that have no parallel in actual Egyptian grammar or any known linguistic system. This is consistent with an attempt to construct a systematic “grammar” around a received revelation, not with a working translation tool.
  • Independence evidence: Pearl of Great Price Central’s analysis notes that “most of the Book of Abraham is not textually dependent on any of the extant Egyptian-language documents. The inverse is also true.” If the KEP were the translation mechanism, we would expect near-complete textual overlap with the Book of Abraham text. We do not find this.
  • The “reverse Rosetta Stone” model: John Gee and Kerry Muhlestein have proposed that Joseph’s scribes were attempting to construct an Egyptian grammar by working backward from a translation Joseph had already received — essentially trying to deduce the “language” from revealed text. This is the most parsimonious explanation of the GAEL’s anomalous internal structure.

The annotation acknowledges that “four pages of the notebooks are in Joseph’s own handwriting” as if this settles the direction of causation. It does not. Joseph writing in the GAEL demonstrates his engagement with the project; it does not determine whether the GAEL was generating the Book of Abraham text or systematizing a revelation already received.

The honest assessment is that “almost every aspect of these documents is disputed: their authorship, their date, their purpose, their relationship with the Book of Abraham” (Pearl of Great Price Central). The annotation presents a single interpretation of contested evidence as proven fact.

III. The Facsimile Translations: Misreading the Evidence

Claim: Joseph’s facsimile translations are “totally wrong” and rejected by all Egyptologists

The annotation presents a side-by-side comparison of Joseph Smith’s Facsimile 3 identifications versus Egyptologist readings, using this as its clearest evidence of prophetic failure. The argument is more nuanced than the annotation allows.

The Core Methodological Flaw

Interpreter Foundation scholars and John Gee have identified a fundamental methodological problem with how critics evaluate the facsimile explanations: they assume Joseph Smith’s explanations must correspond to the standard Egyptian religious meanings of these symbols as understood by Ptolemaic-era Egyptians. But there is no a priori reason this must be true. If the facsimiles preserve traditions connected to Abraham, they would reflect the meanings of those symbols as understood in an Abrahamic-Semitic context, not as reinterpreted by Ptolemaic Egyptian priests 2,000 years later. John Gee has noted: “The interpretations of the Egyptologists typically do not match either those of the ancient Egyptians or Joseph Smith” — the Egyptologist consensus is itself an interpretation layer applied to symbols whose original meanings were already culturally transformed by the time the Ptolemaic copies were produced.

Facsimile 1: The Lion Couch Scene

The annotation characterizes Facsimile 1 as a routine embalming scene that Joseph incorrectly identified as Abraham’s near-sacrifice. Several findings complicate this claim:

  • Uniqueness of the vignette: Kerry Muhlestein and John Gee have both documented that Facsimile 1 is anomalous among lion-couch scenes. No other known example shows a reclining figure with both hands raised, wearing clothing (neither nude nor mummified), with a crocodile beneath the couch. Muhlestein states: “There is no known case of any vignette remotely like Facsimile 1 that is associated with the type of text adjacent to it.” Calling it a “standard embalming scene” is itself a methodological error.
  • Human sacrifice in ancient Egypt: The annotation implicitly assumes human sacrifice was absent from ancient Egypt, making Joseph’s identification impossible. This assumption was defensible in the 19th century but has been overturned. Muhlestein’s peer-reviewed research documents indisputable evidence for human sacrifice in classical ancient Egypt — a finding virtually unknown in Joseph Smith’s era. The Book of Abraham’s depiction of attempted priestly sacrifice reflects authentic ancient Egyptian practice, not anachronistic invention.
  • The Leiden Papyrus (I 384): A papyrus in the Leiden collection independently associates the name of Abraham in Greek with a lion-couch scene, suggesting that Egyptian scribal traditions themselves connected Abraham’s narrative to this type of vignette — precisely the convergence the annotation claims does not exist.
  • Restoration of missing portions: High-resolution analysis of the original papyrus shows ink traces consistent with Joseph’s restoration of the priest’s knife-wielding hand. Early eyewitness testimony that the original showed “a Priest with a knife” provides independent corroboration. The reconstruction critics prefer — showing a complete bird wing — is their hypothesis, not established fact.

Facsimile 3: Gender Identifications

The annotation highlights that Joseph identified figures Egyptologists read as female (Isis, Maat) as male (Pharaoh, a prince). This is presented as obvious error. But Egyptian gods routinely crossed gender presentations in different contexts, and male priests and officials in some ritual contexts wore female deity costumes to perform specific ceremonial roles — a documented practice in Egyptian religious contexts. The annotation’s mockery of this point treats a documented Egyptological phenomenon as an absurd apologetic invention.

Facsimile 2: The Hypocephalus

The annotation characterizes Joseph’s restored characters in Facsimile 2 as “random” and “upside down.” Michael Rhodes (BYU) and Kerry Muhlestein have examined the hypocephalus and found that the theological content Joseph assigned — including references to the highest god, creative power, and cosmic governance — has substantial correspondence with what Egyptologists find hypocephali actually contain, even where specific names and descriptions diverge. The claim that Figure 8’s identification as temple-restricted content is simply “wrong” because the actual text references Osiris Sheshonk confuses textual divergence with theological falsification. The theological substance Joseph describes — divine governance, cosmic mystery, restricted sacred knowledge — is precisely what Egyptian hypocephali address.

IV. Ancient-World Content: Evidence the Annotation Dismisses

Claim: There are no genuinely ancient elements in the Book of Abraham unavailable to Joseph Smith in 1835

The annotation acknowledges only Olishem as a possible ancient-world parallel, then minimizes it. This treatment ignores a substantial body of convergent evidence that the annotation does not address.

Olishem

Abraham 1:10 references a plain called “the plain of Olishem.” This name appeared in no known text available to Joseph Smith or any of his contemporaries. It was identified in 1985 by John M. Lundquist as corresponding to Ulisum (variant: Ulishum), attested in inscriptions of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin (circa 2254–2218 BC). The Naram-Sin texts locate Ulisum in northwestern Syria — precisely the region of Abraham’s homeland. In 2013, archaeologists at Oylum Höyük, near the Turkish-Syrian border, identified the site as ancient Ulisum. The phonetic correspondence (Olishem / Ulisum), temporal correspondence (Naram-Sin’s era matches Abraham’s traditional dating), and geographic correspondence (northwestern Syria) represent three independent lines of evidence pointing to an authentic ancient place name that was completely unknown to 19th-century scholarship.

Abraham’s Near-Sacrifice Narrative

The Book of Abraham’s account of Terah’s household idolatry, the attempted sacrifice of Abraham, and God’s deliverance appears in at least six ancient extra-biblical sources: the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Book of Jubilees, Josephus (Antiquities 1.7), the Midrash Rabbah (Genesis Rabbah 38), the Talmud (Tractate Baba Bathra), and multiple early Islamic traditions. The specific narrative details — Abraham’s rejection of his father’s gods, the priestly attempt on his life, divine rescue — are consistent across these independent ancient traditions. Joseph Smith had access to none of these texts in 1835. Their convergence with the Book of Abraham narrative constitutes a datum that a forgery hypothesis cannot adequately explain.

The Pre-Mortal Council in Heaven

Abraham 3–4 describes a pre-creation divine council in which spirits were chosen for earthly missions. This theological concept appears prominently in the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Qumran Community Rule and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice), in ancient Mesopotamian council-of-gods narratives, and in early Jewish midrashic traditions. The specific portrayal of pre-mortal identity and election was not a feature of any Protestant or Catholic theology available in 1835, nor of any available scholarly synthesis of ancient Near Eastern material. Joseph Smith had no literary model for this content. Its subsequent confirmation across multiple independent ancient textual traditions constitutes meaningful evidence of ancient sourcing.

Astronomical Traditions

The annotation attributes the Book of Abraham’s astronomical content to Thomas Dick’s Philosophy of a Future State (1830) and Thomas Taylor’s translation of Proclus (1816). Thematic similarities to 19th-century popular science do not preclude simultaneous correspondence to ancient materials. Multiple independent ancient sources document Abraham as an astronomer-theologian:

  • Josephus (Antiquities 1.8.2) records that Abraham taught astronomy to Egyptians during his Egyptian sojourn — independently corroborating the Book of Abraham’s portrayal of Abraham as an astronomer-theologian in Egypt.
  • Islamic traditions (multiple Hadith and Quranic commentaries) independently record Abraham as a student of celestial phenomena who reasoned from the stars to monotheism.
  • The Book of Jubilees (2nd century BC) describes Abraham as a student of celestial omens who sought astronomical knowledge from his father’s library.

None of these sources were available to Joseph Smith in English translation in 1835. Their convergence with the Book of Abraham is not addressed by the Dick-Taylor source-hunting argument.

Chiasmus and Ancient Literary Structure

Abraham 3:22–23 contains a sophisticated chiastic structure in which physical cosmological descriptions are precisely mirrored by spiritual council parallels. Chiasmus as a Semitic literary device was unknown to Western scholarship until the 19th century, and its specific application to Hebrew scriptural texts was not documented in any source available to Joseph Smith in 1835. Its presence in the Book of Abraham is consistent with authentic ancient authorship.

V. The Catalyst Theory: Misrepresented as Admission of Defeat

Claim: The revelatory translation model contradicts Joseph Smith’s own words and is a post-hoc apologetic invention

The annotation treats the catalyst model — that the papyri served as an occasion for revelation rather than as a character-by-character source — as a desperate invention contradicted by Joseph’s own statements. This reading misrepresents the evidence in three ways.

First, the Book of Mormon precedent. Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon did not involve looking at the gold plates in the conventional sense — by his own account and the accounts of multiple witnesses, he read from a seer stone placed in a hat. The plates were often not present in the room. Yet the translation is described throughout as “from the plates.” The word “translation” in Joseph Smith’s usage clearly encompassed revelation-by-instrument that did not require direct reading of source characters. The annotation acknowledges this for the Book of Mormon but then inexplicably insists the same methodology could not apply to the Book of Abraham.

Second, Warren Parrish’s testimony supports the catalyst model. The annotation quotes Parrish (“I have sat by his side and penned down the Egyptian hieroglyphics as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration from heaven”) as evidence against the catalyst theory. Read carefully, Parrish’s own words say the Book of Abraham came “by direct inspiration from heaven” — which is precisely what the catalyst model holds. The annotation treats a direct confirmation of the revelatory model as a refutation of it.

Third, John Whitmer’s 1835 description is the catalyst model in period language. Whitmer wrote that “Joseph the Seer saw these Records and by the revelation of Jesus Christ could translate these records” — explicitly linking the translation to divine revelation rather than linguistic skill. This is a contemporary witness describing the revelatory translation model.

The annotation’s rhetorical move is to contrast a “real” translation (character-by-character linguistic rendering) with a “revelatory” translation and treat only the former as genuine. But this distinction is the annotation’s own construction, not one that Joseph Smith or his contemporaries applied. The consistent model across all of Joseph’s translation projects is revelation mediated by sacred objects and focused study — a model the catalyst theory accurately describes.

VI. The Annotation’s Rhetorical Methodology

Cherry-Picking and Citation Reversal

Throughout the annotation, sources are cited in excerpts that reverse the meaning of the original. The Parrish example above is one instance. Another is the annotation’s use of Richard Bushman’s statement that “the dominant narrative is not true; it can’t be sustained.” Bushman, a committed Latter-day Saint historian and author of the standard Joseph Smith biography Rough Stone Rolling, made this remark specifically about the simplified devotional narrative presented in Sunday School contexts — not as a conclusion that Joseph Smith was a fraud. Bushman has written extensively in defense of Joseph Smith’s historicity and authenticity. Presenting his remark as a concession to the critic position misrepresents his position and his life’s scholarly work.

Misapplication of Occam’s Razor

The annotation repeatedly invokes Occam’s Razor to argue that “the simplest answer” is fraud. Occam’s Razor is a principle for selecting between theories that equally explain the evidence — it does not instruct us to prefer the theory requiring the fewest positive claims when one theory accounts for more of the evidence. The ancient-world parallels documented in Section IV (Olishem, the sacrifice narrative, the council in heaven, the astronomical traditions) are evidence that requires explanation under any hypothesis. A forgery theory must account for how a 19th-century frontier revivalist with limited formal education produced a text with convergent ancient Near Eastern content across multiple independent corroborating traditions — content that was not available in any English source in 1835. Invoking Occam’s Razor while omitting this evidence set is not a logical argument. It is a rhetorical shortcut.

Treating Scholarly Honesty as Admission of Fraud

The annotation characterizes the Church essay’s willingness to hold open multiple hypotheses as desperation — “throwing every possibility at the wall.” This misunderstands how scholarship of ancient texts operates. When the evidence for a document’s production is incomplete, responsible scholarship holds multiple hypotheses open while pursuing the evidence further. The history of ancient textual scholarship — including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, and Ptolemaic Egyptian corpora — regularly involves multiple competing theories about transmission, redaction, and authorship. The willingness to acknowledge what is not yet known is a mark of scholarly seriousness, not evasion. The annotation’s preference for a single definitive conclusion drawn from incomplete evidence is the intellectually weaker position.

VII. What the Church Essay Actually Concedes — and What It Does Not

The annotation frames the Church’s Gospel Topics Essay as an implicit confession of fraud. A careful reading reveals this framing is inaccurate. The essay concedes the following:

  • The surviving papyrus fragments contain funerary texts, not the text of the Book of Abraham.
  • Joseph Smith did not possess professional Egyptian linguistic expertise.
  • The exact translation process is not fully documented and cannot be reconstructed with certainty.
  • There is no unanimity about the interpretation of the facsimile vignettes.

The essay does not concede that the surviving fragments are definitively the source Joseph translated. It does not concede that the facsimile explanations are simply wrong. It does not concede that the Book of Abraham contains no authentic ancient content. It does not concede that the revelatory translation model is incoherent. The annotation systematically reads the essay’s acknowledgment of uncertainty as concession of fraud — a logical leap the evidence does not support.

A document that holds open questions honestly is not a document confessing dishonesty. The distinction matters for any assessment of the Church’s intellectual integrity on this question.

Conclusion

The ldsdiscussions.com annotation of the Book of Abraham essay presents a confident case that rests on four structural problems: (1) treating genuinely contested scholarly questions as settled consensus; (2) selectively citing sources in ways that reverse the meaning of the originals; (3) dismissing extensive ancient-world content evidence that has no adequate explanation under a forgery hypothesis; and (4) applying a definition of “translation” that Joseph Smith and his contemporaries did not use.

The scholarly reality of the Book of Abraham is genuinely complex. The existing papyrus fragments are not the text of the Book of Abraham as conventionally understood. The GAEL documents likely reflect a failed attempt to construct an Egyptian grammar around a revelation already received. The facsimile explanations diverge from standard Egyptological interpretations in ways that resist simple resolution. These are real challenges that honest LDS scholarship acknowledges.

But the Book of Abraham also contains ancient Near Eastern content — including a unique place name (Olishem/Ulisum), an independently attested sacrifice narrative, a pre-mortal council tradition, and astronomical theology with ancient corroboration — that has no satisfactory source in Joseph Smith’s 1835 literary environment. A genuinely rigorous treatment of the Book of Abraham requires accounting for all the evidence, not only the evidence that supports a predetermined conclusion.

References and Further Reading

Primary LDS Sources

• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham,” Gospel Topics Essays (2014). churchofjesuschrist.org

• Joseph Smith Papers Project — Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (circa July–December 1835). josephsmithpapers.org

Scholarly Apologetics

• John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book / Religious Studies Center, 2017).

• Kerry Muhlestein, “Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: A Faithful, Egyptological Point of View,” in No Weapon Shall Prosper, ed. Robert L. Millet (2011). scholarsarchive.byu.edu

• Kerry Muhlestein, Let’s Talk About the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022).

• Val Sederholm and John Gee, “Scriptures with Pictures: Methodology, Unexamined Assumptions, and the Study of the Book of Abraham,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. interpreterfoundation.org

• John M. Lundquist, “The Plain of Olishem,” BYU Studies. byustudies.byu.edu

• “Evidences that Support the Book of Abraham,” FAIR Latter-day Saints. fairlatterdaysaints.org

• “The Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the Book of Abraham,” Pearl of Great Price Central. pearlofgreatpricecentral.org

• “Book of Abraham: Facsimile 1,” FAIR Latter-day Saints. fairlatterdaysaints.org

Critical Sources Consulted

• Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011).

• Andrew W. Cook and Christopher C. Smith, “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hor,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (2010): 1–42.

• ldsdiscussions.com, “LDS Gospel Topics Essay: The Book of Abraham Historicity (Annotated).” ldsdiscussions.com