Book of Abraham
The Book of Abraham is a short book of Latter-day Saint scripture. Joseph Smith said he translated it from Egyptian papyri, scrolls of ancient writing the Church bought in the summer of 1835 from a traveling exhibitor named Michael Chandler, along with four mummies. He published it in 1842 in the Church's newspaper, the Times and Seasons, alongside three printed illustrations he called facsimiles and his own explanations of what they showed. One of the rolls he worked from was long. An eyewitness recalled that when it was unrolled on the floor it "extended through two rooms of the Mansion House."[1]
Most of that papyrus is gone. Kerry Muhlestein has gathered roughly two dozen separate accounts of long scrolls in Joseph's possession, friendly and hostile alike, and the bulk of that material burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, decades before anyone could photograph it.[1:1] What came back to the Church in 1967, the eleven small fragments the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been holding, is a sliver of what Joseph owned, mounted on stiff paper and physically separated from the destroyed rolls since 1856.[2]
Hold that number in mind, because the whole case turns on it. The CES Letter builds its argument on those eleven fragments, reads them as ordinary Egyptian funerary documents, and calls the result its "smoking gun" against Joseph Smith.[3] The fragments really are funerary texts, and that is granted below. But the CES Letter walks straight past the question that decides whether the smoking gun is even loaded. Are the surviving fragments the source Joseph translated from in the first place?
The section runs on three fronts: the papyri themselves, the three facsimiles and Joseph's reading of them, and the contents of the text set against the ancient world. On each one there is a hard fact to grant and a question the CES Letter skips.
What we can read, and what is missing
The hard fact belongs first. Read by Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists alike, the recovered fragments do not translate into the Book of Abraham. The strongest of them is a Document of Breathing, a short ritual text meant to carry a dead person safely into the afterlife, made for a Theban priest named Hor and dated to roughly 150 to 100 BC, long after Abraham. The Church's own magazine reported the funerary identification in 1968, forty-five years before the CES Letter existed.[4] The Gospel Topics essay on the book concedes it without hedging:
"None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham. Latter-day Saint and non–Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham."[5]
No serious response disputes the philology.
What the response disputes is the leap from "these fragments are funerary" to "the source was funerary." Those are different claims, and the gap between them is most of Joseph's collection. The eyewitnesses described long rolls; the eleven mounted pieces are not those rolls, a point the same essay grants when it notes that "much of the papyri accessible to Joseph when he translated the book of Abraham is not among these fragments."[5:1]
How much is missing is genuinely contested. John Gee, applying a standard formula for reconstructing a wound scroll from its surviving end, estimated Joseph may have possessed something like eight times the papyrus that survives. Critics Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith ran the calculation the other way and put the missing interior of the Hor scroll near 56 centimeters, too little on its own to hold the Book of Abraham.[6] The missing-scroll defense remains an open question, and the case for the book does not lean on it.
There is a harder admission still. Among the papers Joseph's scribes produced in 1835 is a set pairing Egyptian characters with English, and the first three verses of Abraham appear to lean on them, as if one character were being stretched to cover a paragraph. Brian Hauglid, the Latter-day Saint scholar who edited the standard critical edition of those manuscripts, concluded after years of close work that Abraham 1:1 through 1:3 shows real textual dependency on the character papers.[7]
This is a documentary judgment from one of the most prepared faithful scholars on the subject, not an outside critic's jab, and it is the single hardest concession in the section. Its limit deserves naming too: it reaches three verses, not the dozens that follow.
What it does not settle is what "translation" meant to Joseph in the first place. He produced the Book of Mormon by dictation while looking into a seer stone, not by parsing reformed Egyptian, and he revised the Bible with no manuscript in front of him at all. On that pattern the papyri may have been the occasion for revelation rather than a text decoded character by character.
That reading carries its own cost, since Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 point the reader to the adjacent illustration as though text and papyrus were joined. The detailed treatment of the papyri works through both models with their real prices. The narrow point here is that treating eleven fragments as identical to Joseph's source quietly assumes the very thing in dispute.
Joseph's explanations and the Egyptologists
The facsimiles are the one place the argument can be tested by eye. Three woodcuts ran with the 1842 text, each printed under Joseph's numbered explanation of the figures: Facsimile 1, a man on a lion-shaped couch with a figure standing over him; Facsimile 2, a round ritual disk the Egyptians called a hypocephalus and placed beneath a mummy's head; and Facsimile 3, a seated court scene. For two of the three the Egyptian writing survives right beside the picture, so Joseph's reading can be laid directly against an Egyptologist's.
Laid that way, much of it does not match. As early as 1912 the Episcopal bishop of Utah sent the facsimiles to eight Egyptologists, and their replies ran from skeptical to scornful; the CES Letter still quotes three of them, Flinders Petrie among them.[8] Robert Ritner, the late University of Chicago Egyptologist, gave the modern form of the same verdict in his 2011 critical edition.[9] The CES Letter compresses all of it to a scoreboard: by its count Joseph got perhaps one figure in twenty-one right.
The hard parts are real, and the facsimiles article takes them one at a time rather than waving them off. The sharpest is Facsimile 3. Joseph identified two of its figures as a king and a prince, but the Egyptian labels above them name the goddesses Isis and Maat, and the figures are drawn as women. There is no painless reading of that.
He called the jackal-headed figure, clearly the embalming god Anubis, a slave named Olimlah. Several of the names he attached to Facsimile 2, Oliblish and Enish-go-on-dosh among them, have no known Egyptian source at all. An account that skipped these would not be worth reading.
Facsimile 1 sits in between. Joseph read it as Abraham bound on an altar while an idolatrous priest moves to kill him, then rescued by the angel of the Lord; Egyptologists read the same scene as a routine embalming, the dead man laid on a lion couch and tended by a priest or a god. For a century critics kept a second objection in reserve, that Egyptians never practiced human sacrifice at all, so the scene Joseph described could not have happened.
Then a French team digging at the fortress of Mirgissa in the 1960s turned up a ritual execration burial, a decapitated foreigner laid beside a flint knife, and the flat denial fell apart.[10] That does not prove the Hor vignette is a sacrifice scene; the surrounding text is funerary, and that is not in dispute. What it retires is the older, sweeping claim that Joseph drew a scene Egypt would never stage.
And yet the scoreboard hides as much as it shows. Petrie put the strongest form of the case this way:
"It may be safely said that there is not one single word that is true in these explanations."[8:1]
Not one word. Place it against figure 6 of Facsimile 2 and the claim breaks. Joseph read those four figures as "this earth in its four quarters"; Egyptologists identify them as the four sons of Horus, a standard Egyptian emblem of the four cardinal directions. Those are the same statement. And no one had to strain for the match: the CES Letter's own scorecard prints the cardinal-directions meaning in its modern column.[11] One confirmed figure is enough to retire "not one single word."
Other readings hold up beside it. Joseph said of one portion of the hypocephalus that it could not be revealed to the world but was "to be had in the Holy Temple of God." He was calling the disk temple-restricted, and that is exactly what modern Egyptology finds: hypocephali were reserved for high temple clergy and their families.[12] Or take the man named Shulem in Facsimile 3. The form of that name, John Gee notes, "is attested only at two times: the time period of Abraham and the time period of the Joseph Smith papyri," and the natural form for someone borrowing from the King James Bible would have been Shillem, which Joseph did not use.[13]
Even the four idolatrous gods of Abraham 1 reward a closer look. Elkenah, the strongest of them, matches a Canaanite deity recovered from inscriptions excavated in the twentieth century, though the facsimiles article rates the weaker three rather than overselling the set.[14]
The facsimiles, then, do not net to a clean win or a clean loss. They net to something the scoreboard cannot show: a few readings Joseph had no ordinary way to reach, sitting beside a few he plainly got wrong.
What a forger could not have known
A fabricated text can hold only what its author could reach. Joseph finished the Book of Abraham in a frontier Ohio town with a King James Bible and the books of his century. Measured against that ceiling, the text keeps doing something a forgery should not. It nails specifics that nineteenth-century knowledge had no way to supply, because the evidence confirming them came out of the ground after he was dead.
One point cuts against the book, and it belongs up front. The text calls Abraham's homeland "the land of the Chaldeans," and "Chaldeans" is too late a word for Abraham's day. It reads as a translator's later label rather than a period term, and the King James Bible does the very same thing when Genesis calls the place "Ur of the Chaldees."[15] An anachronism that convicts the Book of Abraham convicts Genesis in the same breath.
The CES Letter's larger claim is that Joseph drew the book from sources of his own day, above all Thomas Dick's 1829 book The Philosophy of a Future State, which Joseph owned and Oliver Cowdery once quoted. The trouble is the direction of fit. The one book-length study of the question, by Edward Jones, found that Joseph contradicted Dick on nearly every point that mattered: Dick taught matter created from nothing, Joseph taught that matter is eternal; Dick taught a bodiless God, Joseph taught an embodied one.[16] People do not borrow a framework they invert at every turn.
Then the specifics the ground gave back. Abraham 1:10 sets a scene "at the head of the plain of Olishem," a name in no Bible or atlas Joseph could have opened. In 1974 a statue base inscribed by Naram-Sin of Akkad came out of northern Iraq naming a place Ulisum, and the cuneiform that records it was not read with confidence until 1857, thirteen years after Joseph was killed.[17] The identification is argued rather than proven, and the anachronisms and source-texts article weighs it with its caveats. But the natural source for the name was simply not available to copy.
The astronomy cuts the same way. The CES Letter reads Abraham 3 as a Newtonian universe, an 1800s model later overturned by Einstein.[3:1] But Abraham 3 has no gravity, no force laws, no infinite space, none of the machinery a man cribbing from popular science would write. It describes a hierarchical, earth-centered cosmos ordered by nearness to a divine throne, the shape of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy rather than Newton's.[18] The CES Letter reads it as too modern; the text reads as too old.
And the traditions around the patriarch. Ancient Jewish writings outside Genesis tell of Abraham nearly sacrificed by idolaters and delivered by an angel, and of Abraham teaching the Egyptians astronomy, the same beats that anchor Abraham 1 and Facsimile 1. Those texts reached English readers only in 1898 and later, and the Egyptian papyrus describing Pharaoh's attempt to sacrifice Abraham was not edited until the early twentieth century.[19] None of it sat on a shelf Joseph could reach.
Set the dates next to each other and a pattern shows. Cuneiform stayed unreadable until 1857; the statue that names Ulisum lay buried in Iraq until 1974. The Apocalypse of Abraham reached English readers in 1898, and the Egyptian account of Pharaoh's attempted sacrifice a few years after that.
Every one of those doors opened after Joseph Smith was dead, most of them long after. A forger needs to be lucky once. This text keeps coming up right in languages no one alive in 1835 could read.
Holding both at once
So two facts sit on the table, and both belong here. The fragments we can read are funerary documents, and a handful of Joseph's facsimile readings miss. The book those fragments are said to have produced carries detail after detail that a frontier translator had no way to invent, and a handful of his readings hit targets that surfaced only generations later. The CES Letter shows the first set at full size and leaves the second out of frame.
Weigh them against each other and the funerary identification settles less than the "smoking gun" language promises. It tells us what eleven surviving scraps say. It does not tell us what filled the rolls that burned, and it cannot explain Olishem in the cuneiform, the four quarters of the earth read correctly off a hypocephalus, a name like Shulem turning up in exactly the right two eras, an astronomy older than Newton, and Abraham traditions deciphered long after the translator died.
A fabrication should fail tests like these as the evidence accumulates. The Book of Abraham keeps passing more of them as the ground gives up its record. None of this resolves into a tidy verdict, and the section does not pretend the questions are all closed.
The Book of Abraham was never the foundation the faith rests on. That place belongs to the Book of Mormon, the record Joseph delivered by mouth across the spring of 1829 with no manuscript before him to read or revise. The papyri were lost and recovered, and the book they are tied to never depended on which fragments survived; the Book of Mormon is the production that two centuries of digging and scrutiny have only strengthened. When the Abraham question gets hard, that is where a reader can stand without fear of the next discovery. What this section asks is only that both facts be looked at, since the strongest case for the book is built from things no one in 1835 could have known to fake.
Kerry Muhlestein has catalogued roughly 26 distinct eyewitness accounts of papyri in Joseph Smith's possession (1835–1856), from friendly, neutral, and hostile sources. The "two rooms of the Mansion House" description is preserved by Hugh Nibley: "one of them when unrolled on the floor extended through two rooms of the Mansion House." See the Papyri article for citations to Muhlestein 2016 and Nibley. ↩︎ ↩︎
The long rolls described by 1840s visitors burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; the eleven mounted fragments returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 are physically distinct papyri, separated from the destroyed rolls since the 1856 sale of the collection. See the Papyri article. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," pp. 36–50. The "smoking gun" line ("It is the smoking gun that has completely obliterated my testimony of Joseph Smith and his claims") appears on p. 50; the Newtonian-astronomy argument appears on pp. 46–47. ↩︎ ↩︎
Hugh W. Nibley, "Phase One," Improvement Era (January 1968), openly identifying the recovered fragments as standard Egyptian funerary literature (a Document of Breathing for the priest Hor and a Book of the Dead for a woman named Tshemmin); reprinted in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 99–105. The rediscovery itself was reported in the same issue by Jay M. Todd, "Egyptian Papyri Rediscovered," Improvement Era 71, no. 1 (January 1968): 12–16. ↩︎
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics Essays (2014, current revision), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham?lang=eng. The original 2014 wording read "Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists agree"; the current essay reads "Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree." The CES Letter (p. 37) quotes the 2014 original wording. ↩︎ ↩︎
Andrew W. Cook and Christopher C. Smith, "The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 1–42, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-original-length-of-the-scroll-of-hor/. ↩︎
Brian M. Hauglid, public Facebook statement, December 19, 2018: "I no longer hold the views that have been quoted from my 2010 book," and "I wholeheartedly agree with Dan [Vogel]'s excellent assessment of the Abraham/Egyptian documents." The statement is reproduced and discussed in Jeff Lindsay, "A Precious Resource with Some Gaps," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 33 (2019): 13–104, https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-precious-resource-with-some-gaps; see also "Brian M. Hauglid," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_M._Hauglid. ↩︎
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. ↩︎ ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "Human Sacrifice," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/human-sacrifice; Kerry Muhlestein, Violence in the Service of Order: The Religious Framework for Sanctioned Killing in Ancient Egypt (Oxford: BAR International Series 2299, 2011); Jean Vercoutter et al., Mirgissa I–III (Paris: Direction générale des relations culturelles, 1970–1976). ↩︎
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/. ↩︎
John Gee and Stephen E. Lyon, "Research on Hypocephali," BYU Insights 24, no. 5, https://publications.mi.byu.edu/pdf-control.php/publications/insights/24/5/S00001-Research_on_Hypocephali.html. Catalogues 158 known hypocephali and identifies the Joseph Smith hypocephalus as a Type III specimen. ↩︎
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/. ↩︎
On Elkenah (Abraham 1:6; Facsimile 1) as a form of the Canaanite deity El qoneh ʾareṣ ("God who created the earth"), with the related Hittite Elkunirsha and worship documented across roughly 1,500 years, see Kevin L. Barney, "On Elkenah as Canaanite El," Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 19, no. 1 (2010): 22–35. The Karatepe inscription was discovered in 1946; relevant Hittite material was published in the twentieth century. See the Facsimiles article. ↩︎
Stephen O. Smoot, "'In the Land of the Chaldeans': The Search for Abraham's Homeland Revisited," BYU Studies Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2017): 7–37, https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/in-the-land-of-the-chaldeans-the-search-for-abrahams-homeland-revisited. ↩︎
Edward T. Jones, "The Theology of Thomas Dick and Its Possible Relationship to that of Joseph Smith" (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1969), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4839/. ↩︎
The place name Olishem (Abraham 1:10) is a proposed match for the Akkadian Ulisum named in an inscription of Naram-Sin of Akkad on the Bassetki statue, found in northern Iraq in 1974 and published in 1976; cuneiform was not read with confidence until the Royal Asiatic Society experiment of 1857. The identification is supported but not yet a settled consensus. See Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "The Plain of Olishem," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-plain-of-olishem, and the Anachronisms & Source Texts article. ↩︎
Abraham 3 describes a geocentric, hierarchical cosmos ordered by proximity to a divine throne, with no force laws or gravitational mechanics, closer to ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy than to Newtonian or post-Newtonian models. See Stephen O. Smoot, "'Created from This Material': Joseph Smith's Translation of the Cosmos in the Book of Abraham," and Kerry Muhlestein, "Encircling Astronomy and the Egyptians: An Approach to Abraham 3," Religious Educator 10, no. 1 (2009), https://rsc.byu.edu/study-faith/encircling-astronomy-egyptians-approach-abraham-3. Discussed in the Anachronisms & Source Texts article. ↩︎
Extra-biblical Abraham traditions (Abraham threatened with sacrifice by idolaters and delivered by an angel; Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians) appear in ancient sources unavailable to Joseph Smith in 1835: the Apocalypse of Abraham reached English print in 1898, and the Demotic papyrus Leiden I 384 recounting Pharaoh's attempt to sacrifice Abraham was edited only in F.Ll. Griffith and Herbert Thompson's 1904–1909 edition. See the Anachronisms & Source Texts and Facsimiles articles. ↩︎