Book of Abraham
Expert Analysis of the Book of Abraham
“In
more recent times
the half-dozen leading Egyptologists who have been
asked to examine the facsimiles agree that they were ordinary funeral
documents
such as can be found on thousands of Egyptian graves.”
- No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie, p. 175
“It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith’s impudent
fraud.... Smith has turned the Goddess [in Facsimile No. 1] into a king
and
Osiris into Abraham.”
- Dr. A.H. Sayce,
“... these three facsimiles of Egyptian documents in the ‘Pearl of
Great Price’ depict the most common objects in the Mortuary religion of
Egypt. Joseph Smith’s interpretations of them as part of a unique
revelation through Abraham, therefore, very clearly demonstrates that
he was
totally unacquainted with the significance of these documents and
absolutely
ignorant of the simplest facts of Egyptian writing and civilization.”
- James H. Breasted, Ph.D, Egyptologist, Haskell
Oriental
Museum, University of Chicago, as cited in Joseph Smith Jun. As a
Translator,
p. 26-27
Concerning Facsimile No. 1:
“This is a well-known scene from the Osiris mysteries, with Anubus, the
jackal-headed god, on the left ministering to the dead Osiris on the
bier. The penciled restoration [done by Joseph Smith Jr.] is
incorrect. Anubus should be jackal-headed.”
- Professor Richard Parker, Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and
Chairman of the
Department of Egyptology at
“Richard A. Parker is the Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Chairman
of
the Department of Egyptology at
- Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought,
Summer 1968,
p. 86
“I myself studied Egyptian hieroglyphics at UCLA several years ago in
the
hope of resolving some of the problems connected with the ‘Book of
Abraham’ in Joseph Smith’s favor. Unfortunately, as soon as I
had learned the language well enough to use a dictionary I was forced
to
concede that Joseph Smith’s translation was mistaken, however sincere
it
might have been. Facsimile No. 2 in the Pearl of Great Price
contained
enough readable writing to convince me that it had purely Egyptian
significance. This was a disappointment....
“After the appearance of the photographs of the papyri... I made some
attempt to translate the ‘Book of Breathing(s)’ text.... It belongs
to a kind of literature which is alien to Christianity and to our
Church....
“Let us not lose sight of what I think is the primary importance of
this
papyri find. It can free us from our dilemma about excluding
Negroes from
the Priesthood. Perhaps our Father in Heaven intended the papyri
to come
to light now just for that purpose.”
- Naomi Woodbury, Mormon scholar, Dialogue: A
Journal of
Mormon Thought, Autumn 1968, p. 8
“I must conclude that Joseph Smith had not the remotest skill in things
Egyptian-hieroglyphics. To my surprise one of the highest
officials in
the Mormon Church agreed with that conclusion... privately in
one-to-one
[c]onversation.”
- Thomas S. Ferguson, Scriptural Exegete for
Translation
Services of the
“
- Stan Larson, Quest for the Gold Plates, p. 138
“Is it possible that a record written by Abraham... containing the most
important revelations that God ever gave to man, should be entirely
lost by the
tenacious Israelites, and preserved by the unbelieving Egyptians, and
by them
embalmed and deposited in the catacombs with an Egyptian priest?... I
venture
to say no, it is not possible. It is more likely that the records are
Egyptian.”
- William S. West, “A Few Interesting Facts
Respecting
the Rise, Progress and Pretension of the Mormons,” pamphlet, 1837, as
quoted in Stan Larson, Quest For the Gold Plates, pp. 89, 122
“To any one with knowledge of the large class of [Egyptian]
funeral
documents to which these belong, the attempts to guess a meaning are
too absurd
to be noticed. It may be safely said that there is not one single word
that is
true in these [i.e., Smith’s] explanations.”
- Dr. W.M. Flinders Petrie, London University; quoted
in F.S.
Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., As A Translator, 1912, p. 24
“To sum up, then, these three fac-similes of Egyptian documents in the
‘Pearl of Great Price’ depict the most common objects in the
mortuary religion of Egypt. Joseph Smith’s interpretations of them as
part of a unique revelation through Abraham, therefore, very clearly
demonstrates that he was totally unacquainted with the significance of
these
documents and absolutely ignorant of the simplest facts of Egyptian
Writing and
civilization.”
- James H. Breasted, Ph. D., Haskell Oriental Museum,
University of Chicago; quoted in F.S. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr.,
As A
Translator, 1912, pp. 26-27
“I return herewith, under separate cover, the ‘Pearl of Great
Price!’ The ‘Book of Abraham,’ it is hardly necessary to say,
is a pure fabrication.... Joseph Smith’s interpretation of these cuts
is
a farrago [confused mixture] of nonsense from beginning to end.”
- Dr. Arthur C. Mace, Assistant Curator, Metropolitan
Museum
of Art, New York, Department of Egyptian Art; quoted in F.S. Spalding, Joseph
Smith, Jr., As A Translator, 1912,p. 29
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hugh Nibley and the Defense of the Book of
Abraham
“We have often been asked
during the past months why we did not proceed
with all haste to produce a translation of the papyri the moment they
came into
our possession. Well, for one thing others are far better
equipped to do
the job than we are, and some of those early expressed a willingness to
undertake it. But, more important, it is doubtful whether any
translation
could do as much good as harm.”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, BYU Studies, Spring 1968,
p. 251
“... the presence on
the scene of some of the original papyri,
including
those used by the Prophet in preparing the text of the Book of Abraham
and the
facsimiles wi their commentaries, has not raised a single new question,
though,
as we shall see, it has solved some old ones.”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, Improvement Era, May 1968,
p. 54
Richard A. Parker,
egyptologist who declared the sensen papyrus as
part of
the Egyptian Book of Breathings and nothing else, is credible even to
top
Mormon scholars:
"[Richard] Parker [is]
the best man in America for this particular
period
and style of writing.”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, speech at the
“Did he [Joseph Smith,
Jr.} really think he was translating? If
so
he was acting in good faith. But was he really translating?
If so,
it was by a process which quite escapes the understanding of the
specialists
and lies in the realm of the imponderable....
“Today nobody claims
that Joseph Smith got his information through
ordinary scholarly channels. In that case one wonders how any
amount of
checking along ordinary scholarly channels is going to get us very far.”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon
Thought,
Summer 1968, p. 101
“Of particular
interest to us is the close association of the Book of
Breathings with the Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham. It can be
easily
shown by matching up the fibers of the papyri that the text of Joseph
Smith’s Pap. No. XI was written on the same strip of material as
Facsimile Number 1, ... our ‘Sensen’ Papyrus is closely bound to
all three facsimiles by physical contact, putting us under moral
obligation to
search out possible relationships between the content of the four
documents.”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, BYU Studies, Winter 1971,
pp.
160-161
“A few faded and
tattered little scraps of papyrus may serve to remind
the Latter-day Saints of how sadly they have neglected serious
education....
Not only has our image suffered by such tragic neglect, but now in the
moment
of truth the Mormons have to face the world unprepared, after having
been given
a hundred years’ fair warning.”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, BYU Studies, Winter 1968,
pp.
171-172
“ ‘The papyri scripts
given to the Church do not prove the Book of
Abraham is true,’ Dr. Hugh Nibley said... Wednesday night.
‘LDS scholars are caught flat-footed by this discovery,’ he went on
to say. According to Dr. Nibley, Mormon scholars should have been
doing
added research on the Pearl of Great Price years ago. Non-Mormon
scholars
will bring in questions regarding the manuscripts which will be hard to
answer
because of lack of scholarly knowledge on the subject.... Dr. Nibley
said
‘worldly discoveries are going to bury the Church in criticism’ if
members of the Church don’t take it upon themselves to become a people
of
learning.”
-
BYU's Daily
Universe, Dec. 1,
1967
“I don’t consider
myself an Egyptologist at all, and don’t
intend to get involved in the P.G.P. [Pearl of Great Price] business
unless I
am forced into it....”
-
Dr. Hugh Nibley, “Letter to Dee Jay Nelson,”
June 27, 1967, reprinted in Mormonism – Shadow or
Reality? by
Sandra and Jerald Tanner, p. 308
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“One life-long
defender of Joseph Smith [
-
Wesley P. Walters, “Joseph Smith among the
Egyptians,” The
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society,
v.
16, Winter 1973, p. 45
“At that time
[December 2, 1970], Thomas Stuart Ferguson told us
frankly
that he had not only given up the Book of Abraham, but that he had come
to the
conclusion that Joseph Smith was not a prophet and that Mormonism was
not true.
He told us that he had spent 25 years trying to prove Mormonism, but
had
finally come to the conclusion that his work had been in vain. He said
that his
training in law had taught him how to weigh evidence and that the case
against
Joseph Smith was absolutely devastating and could not be explained
away.”
-
Sandra and Jerald Tanner, relating correspondence
with
Ferguson, Mormonism:
Shadow or Reality?,
p. 103
“Nibley’s Era articles
on the Book of Abraham aren’t worth a
tinker – first, because he is not impartial, being the commissioned and
paid defender of the faith. Second, because he could not, he dared not,
he did
not, face the true issue: ‘Could Joseph Smith translate Egyptian?’
I clipped every one of his articles, and have them in a single file –
and
I have reviewed them – looking in vain for that issue.”
-
Thomas Ferguson to James Boyack, March 13, 1971;
see Mormon
Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters, p. 261
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Miscellaneous Book of Abraham Quotes
“A
collection of pa[p]yrus manuscripts, long believed to have been
destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871, was presented to The Church of
Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints here Monday by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art.....
Included in the papyri is a manuscript identified as the original
document from
which Joseph Smith had copied the drawing which he called ‘Facsimile
No.
1’ and published with the Book of Abraham.”