Appearance
Book of Abraham
The CES Letter calls the Book of Abraham its strongest case — the one issue where Joseph Smith can be tested as a translator and, in Runnells's view, proven a fraud:
"It is the smoking gun that has completely obliterated my testimony of Joseph Smith and his claims."[1]
The argument is straightforward. Joseph said he translated the Book of Abraham from Egyptian papyri. We now have some of those papyri. Egyptologists identify them as 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. What happens when you look at the parts the CES Letter leaves out?
The 2.5% that carries the whole argument
The CES Letter says "the original papyrus Joseph translated has since been found."[2] It never mentions how much of the original collection survives.
The answer: roughly 2.5%.
Joseph's collection included multiple long scrolls — one eyewitness described a scroll that "extended through two rooms of the Mansion House." The eleven fragments recovered in 1967 are small pieces mounted on paper. John Gee's mathematical reconstruction estimates over 80 feet of material originally existed.[3]
The long scroll that eyewitnesses associated with the Book of Abraham is gone. Treating the surviving fragments as "the source material" — as the CES Letter does — is like finding a few desk papers and declaring them the author's manuscript.
Stacking quotes from 1912
The CES Letter presents a wall of Egyptologist quotes calling Joseph's work "absolutely ignorant" and "impudent fraud."[4] Every quote traces to one source: F.S. Spalding's 1912 book.
These scholars worked before the papyri fragments were rediscovered, before modern hypocephali research, and before the explosion of ancient Abrahamic literature in the twentieth century.
The Church acknowledged the funerary text identification in 1968 — in the Improvement Era, 45 years before the CES Letter.[5] This is not a concession forced by critics. It has been publicly known for over half a century.
A scorecard designed to mislead
The CES Letter devotes seven pages to side-by-side facsimile tables — Joseph's identifications versus modern Egyptological readings — capped by a "1 out of 21 translations correct!" scorecard.[6]
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 figures as the four sons of Horus — representing the four cardinal directions. Perfect match.
Kolob derives from Semitic qlb ("heart, center"). The name Shulem appears in precisely two historical periods: Abraham's era and the Ptolemaic period.
The CES Letter's own tables contain these details. It never comments on them.[7]
Names Joseph Smith couldn't have invented
Four deity names in Abraham 1 — Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, and Korash — all have ancient Near Eastern attestations discovered after Joseph's death. Hittite Elkunirsha, Ugaritic "gods of Labana," Middle Bronze Age Mammigira, Hittite Kursha.
None were in any 1835 reference work. John Gee calculated the odds of randomly generating four correct ancient deity names at roughly 1 in 6.62 x 10^22.[8]
Abraham 1:10 names "the plains of Olishem." For 178 years, critics called it fiction. 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.[9]
The wrong astronomy — for the nineteenth century
The CES Letter claims Abraham 3 reflects a "Newtonian view of the universe."[10] The text says the opposite.
Abraham 3's cosmology works outward from earth, ranks celestial bodies by orbital period, and uses an "encircling = governing" framework. That is distinctively Egyptian geocentric astronomy — not Newtonian.
A nineteenth-century fabricator would have used the heliocentric model everyone around him already accepted. The text even contains an Egyptian-language pun — spirits (akhw) and circumpolar stars (ikhmw-sk) — that only works in Egyptian.[11]
Joseph Smith had no training in Egyptian.
Ancient parallels no one in 1835 could have read
Over 100 ancient documents parallel the Book of Abraham's narratives: Abraham nearly sacrificed, idolatry in Ur, famine in Chaldea, astronomical teaching at Pharaoh's court.[12]
The Apocalypse of Abraham was not available in English until 1919. The Book of Jubilees until 1902. The Dead Sea Scrolls until 1947.
Kerry Muhlestein assessed the cumulative alignment and concluded that coincidental fabrication is "virtually impossible." The CES Letter never addresses any of it.
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 Smith made it up.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 50. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 36. ↩︎
John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, UT: RSC, BYU; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017), 25–34. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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). See also Stephen O. Smoot, "In the Footsteps of Abraham," Interpreter 19 (2016): 189–193. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," pp. 46–47. ↩︎
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," Religious Educator 10, no. 1 (2009). ↩︎
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). ↩︎