Book of Abraham
One of the papyrus rolls Joseph Smith bought in 1835, an eyewitness recalled, "extended through two rooms of the Mansion House" when it was unrolled on the floor. Kerry Muhlestein has gathered roughly two dozen separate accounts of long scrolls in Joseph's possession, friendly and hostile alike, and most of that material is gone: the long rolls burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, decades before anyone could photograph them.[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 will be conceded plainly below. But the 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?
What we can read, and what is missing
Here is the part the faithful case states up front and without softening, because pretending otherwise would forfeit the reader's trust. The recovered fragments, read by Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists alike, do not translate into the Book of Abraham. The strongest of them is a Document of Breathing made for a Theban priest named Hor, a standard Ptolemaic-era funerary text dated to roughly 150 to 100 BC, long after Abraham. The Church's own magazine reported the funerary identification in 1968, twenty-five years before the CES Letter existed.[4] 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. Eyewitnesses across the 1835 to 1856 period described long rolls; the eleven mounted pieces are not those rolls, a point the Church's Gospel Topics essay grants directly when it notes that "much of the papyri accessible to Joseph when he translated the book of Abraham is not among these fragments." 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 put the missing interior of the Hor scroll far lower. That dispute is worth following into the detailed treatment of the papyri, where the missing-scroll reading and the "catalyst" reading (revelation prompted by the papyri rather than literally decoded from them) are laid out with their real costs. The point here is narrower. Treating eleven fragments as identical to Joseph's source quietly assumes the very thing in dispute, and the affirmative models both turn on refusing that assumption.
What a forger could not have known
The papyri question is contested. The next one cuts cleaner, and it is the part of the Book of Abraham that ought to give a careful skeptic pause.
A fabricated text can only contain what its author could reach. Joseph Smith finished the Book of Abraham in 1835, in a frontier Ohio town, with a King James Bible and the books of his century. Set against that ceiling, the text keeps landing specifics that nineteenth-century knowledge had no way to supply, because the evidence confirming them came out of the ground after he was dead.
Take the place name. Abraham 1:10 sets a scene "at the head of the plain of Olishem," a name in no Bible, no atlas, and no commentary Joseph could have opened. In 1974 a copper statue base inscribed by Naram-Sin of Akkad was dug out of northern Iraq, naming a place Ulisum, and the cuneiform that records it was not deciphered with confidence until 1857, thirteen years after Joseph was killed.[5] The identification is argued, not proven, and the anachronisms and source-texts article weighs it honestly. But the most natural source for the name simply was not available to be copied.
Take the divine names. In Facsimile 1, Joseph labeled one of the idolatrous gods "Elkenah," another name absent from the King James Bible. A Canaanite deity El qoneh ʾareṣ turns up in inscriptions excavated in the twentieth century, the Karatepe text surfacing in 1946, with Hittite tablets preserving a related form, worshiped across the ancient Near East over roughly a millennium and a half.[6] Elkenah is the strongest of the four names Joseph supplied; the others are weaker and the facsimiles article rates each one rather than overselling the set. Constructing Elkenah to match a god archaeology had not yet recovered is, on the documented record, a strange thing to manage by guesswork.
Take the astronomy. The CES Letter argues that Abraham 3 reflects a Newtonian universe, an 1800s model later overturned by Einstein.[3:1] But Abraham 3 contains no gravity, no force laws, no infinite space, none of the machinery a man cribbing from popular astronomy books would naturally write. It describes a hierarchical, earth-centered system ordered by a divine throne, the shape of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy rather than Newton's.[7] The Letter reads it as too modern; the text reads as too old.
And the traditions surrounding the patriarch. Ancient Jewish writings outside Genesis tell of Abraham nearly sacrificed by idolaters and delivered by an angel, 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.[8] None of it was on a shelf Joseph could reach.
Holding both at once
So two facts sit on the table, and honesty keeps both. The fragments we can read are funerary documents, and the book those fragments are said to have produced carries detail after detail that a frontier translator had no way to invent. The CES Letter shows the first fact at full size and leaves the second entirely 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, Elkenah in the Canaanite inscriptions, an astronomy that reads older than Newton, and Abraham traditions deciphered generations 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 more of its record. None of this resolves into a tidy verdict, and this section does not pretend the questions are all closed. It asks 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. 44–45. ↩︎ ↩︎
Jay M. Todd, "Egyptian Papyri Rediscovered," Improvement Era 71, no. 1 (January 1968): 12–16. The Church's own magazine reporting the 1967 rediscovery and the funerary identification of the recovered fragments. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎