Facsimiles
The claim:
"Respected non-LDS Egyptologists state that Joseph Smith's translation of the papyri and facsimiles are gibberish and have absolutely nothing to do with the papyri and facsimiles and what they actually say."[1]
"(Joseph may have gotten 1 out of 21 translations correct!)"[2]
Three pictures sit at the front of the Book of Abraham. They are woodcut copies of drawings from the Egyptian papyrus Joseph Smith owned, and beside each one Joseph printed a list explaining who the figures are and what they mean. The CES Letter takes those explanations, lines them up against what trained Egyptologists say the same drawings show, and keeps score. Joseph loses almost every round. The tally it arrives at is that he "may have gotten 1 out of 21 translations correct."[2:1] The point is meant to be fatal: if a man who claimed to translate Egyptian by the gift of God misreads the very pictures he published, the gift was never real.
The core of that charge is accurate. Measured figure by figure against modern Egyptology, a lot of Joseph's labels do not match. Far from being a critic's smear, that is the reading the Church's own scholars accept. But "1 out of 21" is a number that does your looking for you, and once you look anyway, two things come loose. The score is wrong even by the CES Letter's own scorecard, and several of Joseph's explanations match facts about ancient Egypt that nobody in 1835 had any way to know. The deeper question of how Joseph "translated" at all, and whether the surviving scraps of papyrus are even the document he worked from, belongs to a companion page on the papyri; this one stays on the three printed pictures.
The one figure they can't score as a miss
Look first at the figure the CES Letter's own table gives away. On the second facsimile, the round disk, figure 6 shows four small figures Egyptologists call the four sons of Horus. Joseph's explanation says they "represent this earth in its four quarters," meaning its four directions, north, south, east, and west.
That is not a lucky paraphrase. The four sons of Horus really were tied to the four cardinal directions in Egyptian religion, and this is not a Latter-day Saint claim. On the wall of Ramesses III's mortuary temple, each of the four is shown traveling to a fixed compass point: one south, one north, one east, one west.[3] Mainstream reference works on Egyptian religion say the same thing. The old standard E.A. Wallis Budge, no friend of Joseph Smith, wrote that the four "became at a later period the gods of the cardinal points and the lords of the four quarters of heaven."[4] Geraldine Pinch's Oxford handbook on Egyptian mythology says they "were also associated with the four directions."[5]
And the CES Letter knows this. In its own scorecard, the modern column next to figure 6 reads that the four sons of Horus "can represent the four cardinal points of earth." Joseph said four quarters of the earth; the experts say four directions of the earth; the CES Letter prints both side by side and still counts the round as a loss. The Church's Gospel Topics essay flatly notes of Joseph's "this earth in its four quarters" reading that "[a] similar interpretation has been argued by scholars who study identical figures in other ancient Egyptian texts."[6] The other twenty can be argued; the one cannot. If the explanations have "absolutely nothing" to do with the figures, why is Joseph's reading sitting in the CES Letter's own expert column?
He named what the object was for
The second facsimile belongs to a specific Egyptian object called a hypocephalus, a small round disk that priests placed under the head of a mummy. Joseph could not have read a textbook on these, because the modern study of them did not exist. Yet he said something about this one that turns out to be exactly right.
Of figure 8, the band of writing around the rim, Joseph wrote that it "cannot be revealed unto the world; but is to be had in the Holy Temple of God." For all its scripture cadence, the sentence makes a plain, checkable claim: this object belongs to the temple, and it is not for ordinary eyes. Modern Egyptology agrees in detail. Disks like this one were "exclusive pieces of funerary equipment reserved for the high clergy" and their families who held positions in the great temples, places like Amun's temple at Karnak.[7] Scholars have catalogued 158 of these disks from around the world.[7:1] [8] The disks even functioned as restricted instruments inside the temple, used for things like astronomy.[7:2]
So whatever the verdict on the individual gods drawn on the disk, Joseph got the nature of the thing right. He looked at a circular Egyptian amulet that no scholar in his world could explain and said it was a temple object holding writing too sacred for the public. A century and a half of Egyptology has confirmed that the hypocephalus was precisely that, a temple-restricted artifact of the priestly elite. A forger working from guesswork does not guess that.
Names in the wrong century
The strongest thread runs through the names. Several names Joseph attached to figures look invented, and for a long time critics said exactly that. The trouble for that charge is that some of the names later turned up in the ancient record, in places and forms a man in 1835 New York could not have reached.
Take "Elkenah." Joseph used it for one of the gods on the first facsimile, and it appears nowhere in the Bible, so it reads like a made-up word. Then archaeology caught up. There was a Canaanite high god whose title was El-qoneh-ha-arets, "God who created the earth," and "Elkenah" is a natural short form of it. Worship of this god is now documented across the ancient Near East, from the Hittite capital down to Jerusalem, over roughly fifteen hundred years. The key inscription confirming the name was dug up at Karatepe in 1946, more than a century after the Book of Abraham went to print. Kevin Barney is the scholar who traced this out; a BYU Studies survey that builds on his research puts it this way: "No deity of that name is mentioned in the King James Bible, but in the last century archaeologists have unearthed evidence of his worship."[9]
"Shulem" is sharper still. On the third facsimile Joseph names a figure "Shulem, one of the king's principal waiters." The whole argument comes down to one letter. If Joseph had pulled the name out of his King James Bible, he would have written "Shillem," the form that actually appears there (Genesis 46:24). He did not. He wrote "Shulem," with the u, and that exact form is attested in only two windows of history: the era of Abraham, and the much later Greco-Roman era from which Joseph's surviving papyrus actually comes.[10] John Gee, who worked through the ancient sources, sums it up: "The form of Shulem's name is attested only at two times: the time period of Abraham and the time period of the Joseph Smith papyri."[10:1] Even the job title fits. An Egyptian phrase meaning "butler of the ruler" shows up on a monument from roughly Abraham's period.[10:2]
A coined word has no archaeology. These two keep surfacing anyway, in the right ancient soil and in the wrong form for someone copying out of a Bible. Neither one proves the whole book ancient on its own, and a couple of Joseph's other names have no such backing at all. But a man inventing names in 1835 should have left behind dead ends, not names the next century would confirm.
The labels on the third facsimile
The hardest single fact is on the third picture. Above each figure the Egyptian papyrus carries a written label, and those labels can be read; they name Egyptian gods. Two of the figures are drawn as women and labeled, in the Egyptian, as the goddesses Isis and Maat. Joseph identified both as male royalty, a king and a prince. Egyptologists have said so bluntly for over a century. A.H. Sayce, one of the very scholars the CES Letter quotes, wrote that Joseph "turned the Goddess into a king."[11] And he did. The faithful side has a real answer for part of it, that in the Greco-Roman period Isis was in fact given titles normally reserved for the reigning Pharaoh, so a "Pharaoh" register around her is not invented.[12] But that defense gets you to Isis as a royal queen, not to Isis as a male king, and Joseph said male king. The mismatch is the most direct one in the whole section, and it stays a difficulty.
Two more concessions belong here. Joseph called one figure on the third facsimile "Olimlah, a slave," where the Egyptian label plainly names the god Anubis; unlike Elkenah or Shulem, this one has no ancient parallel propping it up, and it is the single weakest identification in the set.[13] And several names on the second facsimile, Oliblish, Kae-e-vanrash, Enish-go-on-dosh, and a few others, have no confirmed Egyptian or Semitic root at all. Their origin is simply unknown, and no amount of four-quarters matches changes that.[14]
The deepest version of the criticism skips the scorecard entirely. It belongs to Ritner, and his point is methodological: Joseph and the men around him called this work "translating Egyptian," the surviving papyrus does not yield Joseph's English by any defensible reading of the script, and the modern explanations that rescue the case (that the papyrus was a prompt for revelation rather than a text decoded letter by letter) are twentieth-century reframings of a nineteenth-century translation claim.[13:1] [15] That argument gets its full hearing on the papyri page, where the translation question actually lives. And one Latter-day Saint scholar who edited these manuscripts for their official edition came out of that work agreeing with the critics' reading.[16] The labels say what they say, the gender mismatch is real, and the weakest identifications have no defense.
Hits and misses
"1 out of 21" is the kind of number that ends a conversation. If Joseph scored that badly, why spend another minute on the pictures? But the scorecard's own page hands you figure 6 as a real match. Joseph named the hypocephalus a temple object and Egyptology agrees. He wrote "Elkenah" and "Shulem," and both surfaced in ancient places and forms he had no way to copy. Set those beside the genuine difficulties, the two goddesses read as men, the slave with no parallel, the names with no roots, and the result is a split decision rather than a clean knockout: real hits alongside real misses, more than any one-number summary has room for.
Proportion matters too. The facsimiles are the most specialized arena in Latter-day Saint scripture, and the record above, hits and misses together, is as much of a final score as the evidence allows. But this contest was never the main event. A reader who wants to know whether Joseph Smith told the truth should take that question to the Book of Mormon and ask it there, at full scale, rather than leave it to three small pictures.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," no. 3, p. 46. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 44 (parenthetical "Joseph may have gotten 1 out of 21 translations correct!" beneath the Facsimile 2 sources block). ↩︎ ↩︎
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "The Four Sons of Horus (Facsimile 2, Figure 6)," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol61/iss4/46/; Pearl of Great Price Central, "The Four Sons of Horus," https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/the-four-sons-of-horus-facsimile-2-figure-6/. ↩︎
E.A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1904), 1:210 ("these four gods became at a later period the gods of the cardinal points and the lords of the four quarters of heaven"); cf. 1:491–92 (per-direction assignments: Hapi north, Tuamutef east, Amset south, Qebhsennuf west). Vol. 1 at https://archive.org/details/godsofegyptianso00budg. ↩︎
Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩︎
"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. The body text near footnote 40 of the essay states the four-quarters interpretation of Facsimile 2 figure 6 has been argued by scholars studying similar Egyptian figures (footnote 40 itself cites Maarten J. Raven on body-orientation theory, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Egyptologists [2007], 2:1569–70). ↩︎
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "The Purpose and Function of the Egyptian Hypocephalus," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol61/iss4/43/; Pearl of Great Price Central, "The Purpose and Function of the Egyptian Hypocephalus," https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/the-purpose-and-function-of-the-egyptian-hypocephalus/. The 158 census and the "exclusive pieces of funerary equipment" characterization are cited there to Tamás Mekis's hypocephalus catalogue (their nn. 4–5). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Cf. John Gee and Stephen E. Lyon, "Research on Hypocephali," Insights 24, no. 5 (2004), print only; the Maxwell Institute URL that once hosted it is dead with no archived copy. The live carrier for the census is Smoot et al., "The Purpose and Function of the Egyptian Hypocephalus" (see that footnote), which reports 158 known hypocephali catalogued and/or published, citing Tamás Mekis's catalogue The Hypocephali. ↩︎
Kevin L. Barney, "On Elkenah as Canaanite El," Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 19, no. 1 (2010): 22–35, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol19/iss1/5/; "The Idolatrous God Elkenah," BYU Studies, https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-idolatrous-god-elkenah; Pearl of Great Price Central, "The Idolatrous God of Elkenah," https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/the-idolatrous-god-of-elkenah/. ↩︎
John Gee, "Shulem, One of the King's Principal Waiters," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 19 (2016): 383–395, https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/shulem-one-of-the-kings-principal-waiters; archive at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol19/iss1/18/. See also Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "Shulem, One of the King's Principal Waiters (Facsimile 3, Figure 5)," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol61/iss4/51/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
F. S. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator: An Inquiry (Salt Lake City: Arrow Press, 1912), https://archive.org/details/josephsmithjrast00spala. Spalding submitted the facsimiles to eight Egyptologists and Semitists (Sayce, Petrie, Breasted, Mace, Peters, Mercer, Meyer, von Bissing); all eight returned responses unfavorable to Joseph Smith's interpretations, with the eight responses varying in tone from dismissive to merely skeptical. The Petrie, Breasted, and Sayce quotes used by the CES Letter on p. 49 are all from this pamphlet. ↩︎
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "Isis the Pharaoh (Facsimile 3, Figure 2)," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol61/iss4/50/; Pearl of Great Price Central, "Isis the Pharaoh," https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/isis-the-pharaoh-facsimile-3-figure-2/. ↩︎
Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2011/2013); publisher page at https://www.signaturebooks.com/books/p/the-joseph-smith-egyptian-papyri. ↩︎ ↩︎
John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017), discussion of Facsimile 2 figure-name etymologies. ↩︎
Robert K. Ritner, "The 'Breathing Permit of Hôr' Thirty-four Years Later," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 97–119 (Facsimile 3 label translations at 114–15); revised as "'The Breathing Permit of Hôr' Among the Joseph Smith Papyri," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 62, no. 3 (July 2003): 161–180. The "black jackal Anubis into a Negro slave" characterization of Joseph's Olimlah identification appears in this material and is reprinted in the 2011 Complete Edition. ↩︎
Jeff Lindsay, "A Precious Resource with Some Gaps," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 33 (2019), https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-precious-resource-with-some-gaps. Documents the Hauglid Facebook statements ("I no longer hold the views that have been quoted from my 2010 book in these videos"; "I wholeheartedly agree with Dan's excellent assessment of the Abraham/Egyptian documents in these videos"), supplies the character-level census at pp. 30–31 (of 62 characters assigned meanings, four clearly connect to papyrus characters, three more possibly; "At best, then, ... only 7 of the 62"), and notes that the Jensen/Hauglid 2018 volume cites Robert Ritner at least 49 times and Hugh Nibley zero times. ↩︎