Appearance
Book of Abraham
The CES Letter calls this section its strongest case:
"It is the smoking gun that has completely obliterated my testimony of Joseph Smith and his claims."[1]
The argument: Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Abraham from Egyptian papyri. We now have some of those papyri. Egyptologists say they're ordinary funerary documents — a Breathing Permit for a man named Hor. Therefore Joseph fabricated the whole thing.
That's the version designed to end the conversation. How much of the evidence does it leave out?
The fraction that does the heavy lifting
The CES Letter never mentions how much of the original papyri collection survives.
The answer: roughly 2.5%.
Joseph's collection included multiple long scrolls — one eyewitness said a scroll "extended through two rooms of the Mansion House." The eleven fragments recovered in 1967 are small pieces mounted on paper, physically separated from the scrolls. John Gee's mathematical reconstruction — using Hoffmann's papyrus winding formula — estimates over 80 feet of material originally existed.[2]
The CES Letter treats these fragments as the entire source. That's like finding a few pages of an author's desk papers and declaring them the manuscript of a novel.
Visual authority masking a weak foundation
Three side-by-side facsimile tables dominate the CES Letter's Book of Abraham section.[3] Twelve rows of mismatches between Joseph's identifications and modern Egyptological readings. The visual impression is devastating.
What's missing: the hits.
Joseph identified Facsimile 2, Figure 6 as "this earth in its four quarters." Egyptologists identify those four standing figures as the four sons of Horus — representing the four cardinal compass points. A perfect match the CES Letter's own table includes but never comments on.[4]
Kolob derives from Semitic qlb ("heart, center"). The name Shulem is attested in precisely two periods: Abraham's era and the Ptolemaic period. Abraham connected to a lion couch scene — Joseph's reading of Facsimile 1 — appears in Leiden Papyrus I 384, a third-century Egyptian document with Abraham's name written in Greek beneath the image.[4:1]
The CES Letter presents the misses without the matches. That's not analysis. It's curation.
Century-old expert witnesses
The CES Letter stacks quotes from Egyptologists calling Joseph's work "ignorant" and "impudent fraud."[5] Every quote traces to one source: F.S. Spalding's 1912 book. These scholars were working over a century ago, before the papyri fragments were even rediscovered, and before modern study of hypocephali and ancient Abrahamic traditions had developed.
Since 1912, Figure 6 has been shown to match Joseph's explanation perfectly. Sacrifice themes in Facsimile 1 have been confirmed by archaeology. The astronomical and creation connections in Facsimile 2 align with what Egyptologists now know about hypocephali. "Not one single word that is true" is no longer defensible.
The Church acknowledged the funerary text identification in 1968 — in the Improvement Era, 45 years before the CES Letter.[6] This isn't a concession forced by critics. It's been publicly known for over half a century.
A fabrication that keeps passing tests
A 19th-century fabrication should contain zero elements confirmed by later discoveries. The Book of Abraham keeps being right about things Joseph Smith had no way of knowing.
Four deity names — Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, and Korash — all have ancient Near Eastern attestations discovered after Joseph's death. John Gee calculated the odds of randomly generating four correct ancient deity names at roughly 1 in 6.62 x 10^22.[7]
Abraham 1:10 names "the plains of Olishem." For nearly two centuries, critics dismissed it as invented. Then Akkadian texts surfaced containing Ulisum in northwestern Syria near Abraham's homeland — with standard Semitic sound correspondences. In 2013, Turkish excavators at Oylum Hoyuk identified the site. Cuneiform was not deciphered until after Joseph's death.[8]
Abraham 3's cosmology works outward from earth, ranks bodies by orbital period, and uses an "encircling = governing" framework that is distinctively Egyptian — not Newtonian. A 19th-century fabricator would have used the heliocentric model everyone around him accepted. The text even contains a pun — spirits (akhw) and circumpolar stars (ikhmw-sk) — that only works in Egyptian.[9]
Over 100 ancient documents parallel the Book of Abraham's narratives — Abraham nearly sacrificed, idolatry in Ur, famine in Chaldea, astronomical teaching. The Apocalypse of Abraham wasn't available in English until 1919. The Book of Jubilees until 1902. The Dead Sea Scrolls until 1947.[10]
Bottom line: The "smoking gun" depends on treating 2.5% of a papyri collection as the whole thing, hiding the facsimile details Joseph got right, and ignoring a growing catalog of ancient content confirmed by post-1835 discoveries. The Book of Abraham keeps passing tests it shouldn't pass if Joseph made it up.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 50. ↩︎
John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, UT: RSC, BYU; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017), 25–34. Gee uses Hoffmann's scroll-winding formula to estimate original scroll lengths from the surviving fragments. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," pp. 38–45. ↩︎
John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (2017), 107–140. See also Kerry Muhlestein and John Gee, "An Egyptian Context for the Sacrifice of Abraham," Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 20, no. 2 (2011): 70–77. For Leiden Papyrus I 384, see "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 49. The quoted scholars — Breasted, Petrie, and Sayce — all appear in F.S. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator (Salt Lake City: Arrow Press, 1912). ↩︎
Jay M. Todd, "Egyptian Papyri Rediscovered," Improvement Era 71, no. 1 (January 1968): 12–16. ↩︎
John Gee, "Four Idolatrous Gods in the Book of Abraham," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 38 (2020). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/four-idolatrous-gods-in-the-book-of-abraham/ ↩︎
John Gee, "Has Olishem Been Discovered?" Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 22, no. 2 (2013). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol22/iss2/10/. See also Stephen O. Smoot, "In the Footsteps of Abraham: A New Discovery in Turkey," Interpreter 19 (2016): 189–193. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/in-the-footsteps-of-abraham/ ↩︎
John Gee, William J. Hamblin, and Daniel C. Peterson, "'And I Saw the Stars': The Book of Abraham and Ancient Geocentric Astronomy," in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2005). See also Kerry Muhlestein, "Encircling Astronomy and the Egyptians: An Approach to Abraham 3," Religious Educator 10, no. 1 (2009). https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-10-no-1-2009/encircling-astronomy-egyptians-approach-abraham-3 ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds., Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001). See also Hugh Nibley, Abraham in Egypt, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000). ↩︎