Appearance
Papyri
The claim:
"Egyptologists have also since translated the source material for the Book of Abraham and have found it to be nothing more than a common pagan Egyptian funerary text for a deceased man named 'Hor' around first century C.E. In other words, it was a common Breathing Permit that the Egyptians buried with their dead. It has nothing to do with Abraham or anything Joseph claimed in his translation for the Book of Abraham."[1]
The CES Letter calls the Book of Abraham "the smoking gun" — "the issue that has completely obliterated my testimony of Joseph Smith and his claims."[2]
The argument is straightforward: Joseph said the papyri contained Abraham's writings. Egyptologists read the papyri. They're funerary documents. Therefore the translation is a fraud.
But are the recovered fragments actually what Joseph translated?
We have 2.5% of what Joseph owned
In 1835, the Church purchased a collection of Egyptian antiquities from Michael Chandler — four mummies and multiple papyrus scrolls.[3] Eyewitnesses consistently described substantial material. One visitor recorded that a scroll, "when unrolled on the floor, extended through two rooms of the Mansion House."[4]
After Joseph Smith's death, the collection was sold. Most ended up in a Chicago museum. Scholars long assumed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed everything.
Then in 1967, eleven papyrus fragments surfaced at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Church received them on November 27, 1967.[5] Egyptologists identified the fragments as portions of a Book of Breathings Made by Isis for a priest named Hor (ca. 200 BC) and a Book of the Dead for a woman named Tsemminis.[6]
The characters on these fragments have nothing to do with Abraham. Both Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree.[3:1]
So far, the CES Letter's framing holds. Here's what it skips.
Reconstructing the original collection
John Gee (PhD Egyptology, Yale) applied a mathematical formula developed by German papyrologist Friedhelm Hoffmann — based on papyrus winding circumference — to estimate how much material originally existed. The Hor scroll alone was missing roughly ten feet of text. Across the full collection, over eighty feet of papyrus may have existed.[7]
| Joseph's full collection | What was recovered in 1967 | |
|---|---|---|
| Material | Multiple long scrolls plus fragments | Eleven small fragments from two documents |
| Described size | "Extended through two rooms" | Less than two feet pieced together |
| Percentage | ~100% | ~2.5% |
The CES Letter treats the recovered fragments as though they are the whole collection. They represent a small fraction. The long scroll — the one eyewitnesses associated with the Book of Abraham — is gone.[4:1]
Why the fragments survived separately
The eleven recovered fragments had been glued onto heavy paper during the Kirtland period (1830s) — physically separated from the scrolls and preserved as mounted display pieces.[4:2]
Kerry Muhlestein (PhD Egyptology, UCLA) documented that in Ptolemaic-era Egyptian manuscripts, vignettes (illustrations) were routinely separated from their associated texts by considerable distances. This wasn't unusual — it was "endemic" to Books of Breathing documents specifically.[8]
The fragments that survived were the ones mounted for display. The scrolls that weren't mounted were the ones destroyed. The CES Letter assumes the surviving display fragments are the translation source. That assumption is doing all the work.
Further Reading
The Church's Gospel Topics Essay on the Book of Abraham addresses the papyri directly and openly. It was published in 2014 — not as a response to the CES Letter, but as part of a broader effort to engage difficult historical questions.
Six reasons the funerary text isn't the source
Kerry Muhlestein identified six specific arguments against the assumption that the Book of Breathings text adjacent to Facsimile 1 is the source of the Book of Abraham:[8:1]
| # | Argument | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Separation precedent | Vignettes and texts were routinely separated in Ptolemaic manuscripts. No known Book of Breathings copy places a Facsimile 1-type vignette adjacent to its text. |
| 2 | Internal evidence | Abraham 1:14 says depictions of "the idolatrous gods" appear "at the beginning" of the record — suggesting Facsimile 1 was distant from the main text. |
| 3 | Hebrew characters | Eyewitnesses mentioned "Hebrew characters" on source materials. No surviving fragment contains Hebrew. |
| 4 | Eyewitness identification | Multiple witnesses identified the long scroll — not the small fragments — as the Book of Abraham source. |
| 5 | Physical mounting | Fragments were glued to paper before the Saints left Kirtland, preserved separately from the scroll material. |
| 6 | Misalignment patterns | Wrong images were frequently paired with wrong texts in this period. The surviving configuration proves nothing about original arrangement. |
No single argument here proves the missing scroll theory. Together they demolish the assumption that "adjacent text = source text."
The Kirtland Egyptian Papers aren't what critics think
The CES Letter points to the Kirtland Egyptian Papers — also called the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL) — as proof Joseph tried to translate from the Book of Breathings and failed.[9]
The documents are real. Created between July and November 1835, they contain columns of Egyptian characters alongside English text, some of which matches the Book of Abraham.[10]
Critics read this as a translation key: Joseph assigned English meaning to specific Egyptian characters from the Hor scroll, and those assignments are wrong. If that reading is correct, the case is strong.
What the papers actually show
The "translation key" reading has problems.
Timing. Joseph's journal entries indicate translation began almost immediately after acquiring the papyri. The GAEL project started later — after portions of the Book of Abraham text already existed.[10:1]
Direction of dependence. William Schryver conducted a statistical analysis of the GAEL vocabulary. Over 90% of the meaningful terms in the Alphabet documents appear in Abraham 1-3, not in comparable Genesis passages. The English text came first; the Egyptian character assignments were layered on afterward.[11]
Handwriting. Joseph Smith's handwriting appears on only 2 of the 16 GAEL pages. The bulk was written by W.W. Phelps. Phelps created similar symbolic characters in a May 1835 letter to his wife — before the papyri even arrived in Kirtland.[12]
Overwriting. In some places, Egyptian characters were written over existing English text — physically impossible if the characters were being translated into English.[11:1]
| Evidence | What it suggests |
|---|---|
| Translation predates GAEL project | GAEL was not the translation tool |
| 90%+ vocabulary overlap with existing Abraham text | GAEL depends on the English, not the reverse |
| Joseph's hand on only 2 of 16 pages | Project was primarily Phelps's work |
| Characters overwrite English text | Characters were added after, not translated from |
| Phelps used similar characters before papyri arrived | The symbolic system predated the Egyptian manuscripts |
The Joseph Smith Papers Project distinguished between two separate projects: an effort to decipher the Egyptian language (the GAEL) and the production of the Book of Abraham text — noting that "neither project's mechanics are specified."[10:2]
Worth Acknowledging
The Kirtland Egyptian Papers don't look good at first glance. Columns of Egyptian characters matched to English text naturally suggest translation. But on close examination, the direction of dependence runs the wrong way for the critic's case.
How did the translation work?
The Gospel Topics Essay is candid: "Neither the Lord nor Joseph Smith explained the process of translation of the book of Abraham."[3:2]
Three frameworks have been proposed by Latter-day Saint scholars:
| Theory | Core idea | Strength | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Missing scroll | Joseph translated from a now-lost portion of the collection | Eyewitness accounts; only 2.5% survives; fragments were mounted separately from scrolls | The source material is gone — impossible to verify |
| Catalyst | The papyri prompted revelation about Abraham without being a direct translation source | Consistent with how D&C 7 and the Book of Moses were produced; the Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges this | Doesn't explain why scribes connected specific characters to specific text |
| Semitic adaptation | A Jewish redactor in the Ptolemaic period attached an Abrahamic text to Egyptian papyri | Kevin Barney showed ancient precedent: the Testament of Abraham adapted Egyptian imagery for Jewish purposes[13] | Hypothetical — no direct evidence of this specific adaptation |
The Gospel Topics Essay presents both the missing scroll and catalyst theories as legitimate: Joseph's study of the papyri "may have led to a revelation about key events and teachings in the life of Abraham, even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri."[3:3]
The CES Letter acknowledges none of these. It presents one reading — Joseph translated the Book of Breathings and got it wrong — as though it's the only possibility.
The manuscript dating fallacy
The CES Letter emphasizes that the papyri date to "between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived."[1:1]
This is true of the manuscripts. It says nothing about the text.
Every ancient text we possess survives in copies far later than the original composition. The oldest Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts of Isaiah date to roughly 150 BC — over five centuries after Isaiah lived. Nobody concludes Isaiah didn't write Isaiah because the manuscripts are late copies.
| Text | Author's era | Oldest surviving manuscript |
|---|---|---|
| Book of Isaiah | ~700 BC | ~150 BC (Dead Sea Scrolls) |
| Homer's Iliad | ~750 BC | ~200 BC (fragmentary) |
| Plato's Republic | ~380 BC | ~895 AD |
| Book of Abraham papyri | Abraham's era (~2000 BC) | ~200 BC–100 AD |
The date of a copy is not the date of a text. If the Book of Abraham derives from an ancient Abrahamic tradition that was copied, translated, and recopied over centuries, the papyri's date is exactly what you'd expect.[14]
The strongest critical argument
Robert Ritner (University of Chicago Egyptologist) published the most thorough critical assessment: the Kirtland Egyptian Papers link specific Hor scroll characters to specific Book of Abraham passages, and those characters are simply funerary formulae. Ritner concluded Joseph attempted a conventional translation and failed.[15]
The early Egyptologists the CES Letter quotes — Breasted, Petrie, Sayce — said essentially the same thing in 1912. F.S. Spalding assembled their opinions and predicted the Church would collapse over the issue.[16]
B.H. Roberts read Spalding's critique and responded: "Nothing of this kind happened however, 'Mormonism' was not moved a peg by the critique."[17]
The critical argument rests on two assumptions:
- The recovered fragments are what Joseph translated from.
- The Kirtland Egyptian Papers represent his actual translation method.
Both are contested. And the missing 97.5% makes definitive conclusions impossible.
What Joseph Smith couldn't have known
If the Book of Abraham is nineteenth-century fiction, it should contain nothing unavailable in Joseph's world. The text fails that test repeatedly. A few examples — the full catalog is covered in Anachronisms & Source Texts.
The Plains of Olishem. Abraham 1:10 names this location. For nearly two centuries, critics dismissed it as invented. Then Akkadian texts surfaced containing the toponym Ulisum — in northwestern Syria, the region associated with Abraham's world. The O/U and S/SH shifts are standard Semitic sound correspondences.[18]
Human sacrifice for religious nonconformity. The Book of Abraham opens with Abraham on an altar, about to be killed for rejecting local gods (Abraham 1:5-12). In 1835, scholars rejected the idea of Egyptian-context human sacrifice. Kerry Muhlestein's dissertation documented that it did occur, and that "typically the sacrificial victim was struck with a blade and then burned" — matching the Book of Abraham's description precisely.[19]
Abrahamic traditions unavailable in English.
| Book of Abraham detail | Ancient source | Available to Joseph Smith? |
|---|---|---|
| Abraham nearly sacrificed for rejecting idols | Apocalypse of Abraham, Genesis Rabbah, Book of Jubilees | No — translated into English decades to centuries later[20] |
| Abraham teaching astronomy to Egyptians | Josephus, Pseudo-Eupolemus, a 3rd-century Egyptian temple papyrus | Josephus yes; the others no[18:1] |
| Famine in Chaldea prompting departure | Book of Jubilees, Genesis Rabbah | No[14:1] |
| Pre-mortal council and creation knowledge | Apocalypse of Abraham, 1 Enoch, Dead Sea Scrolls | No — Dead Sea Scrolls discovered 1947[18:2] |
| Priestly authority predating Moses | Dead Sea Scrolls Melchizedek texts | No[18:3] |
"Shinehah." The Book of Abraham identifies this word as referring to the sun. Later Egyptological research discovered the Egyptian term Shaneha/Shinehah referring to the sun's course — vocabulary unavailable in Joseph Smith's lifetime.[14:2]
Plural "Gods" in the creation account. The Book of Abraham renders the creation with "the Gods organized" rather than "God created." This matches the Hebrew Elohim (grammatically plural) and ancient Near Eastern divine council theology — concepts Joseph had no scholarly access to before his Hebrew study began in 1836, after the translation.[21]
The Facsimiles article covers the facsimile evidence in detail. The Anachronisms & Source Texts article provides the full catalog of ancient content.
The Church acknowledged this in 1968
The Gospel Topics Essay doesn't claim to have all the answers:
"The relationship between those fragments and the text we have today is largely a matter of conjecture."[3:4]
"The veracity and value of the book of Abraham cannot be settled by scholarly debate concerning the book's translation and historicity."[3:5]
The Church acknowledged the funerary text identification in 1968 — in the Improvement Era, forty-five years before the CES Letter was written.[22] This isn't a recent concession forced by critics. It's been publicly known for over half a century.
What the CES Letter leaves out
The CES Letter devotes more space to the Book of Abraham than to any other topic. What it omits:
- The recovered fragments represent approximately 2.5% of what Joseph possessed.
- Eyewitnesses identified a destroyed long scroll as the translation source.
- The Kirtland Egyptian Papers' vocabulary depends on the existing English text — the direction of dependence runs opposite to the critic's claim.
- The Gospel Topics Essay explicitly presents the catalyst theory as a legitimate possibility.
- Multiple details in the text match ancient sources unavailable in the 1830s.
- The date of the manuscripts says nothing about the date of the text.
None of this proves the Book of Abraham is what it claims to be. This is a genuinely difficult topic, and honest people land on different sides. But the CES Letter presents a fraction of the evidence and calls the case closed.
Bottom line: The CES Letter treats the Joseph Smith Papyri as a smoking gun — Egyptologists read the fragments, they're funerary texts, case closed. But the fragments represent roughly 2.5% of what Joseph possessed. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers' direction of dependence runs against the critic's reading. And the Book of Abraham contains ancient details Joseph Smith had no way of knowing. The case isn't closed. It's barely open.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," pp. 36-37. ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 50. ↩︎
"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 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Kerry Muhlestein, "Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: Some Questions and Answers," Religious Educator 11, no. 1 (2010). https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-11-no-1-2010/egyptian-papyri-book-abraham-some-questions-answers ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Jay M. Todd, "Egyptian Papyri Rediscovered," Improvement Era 71, no. 1 (January 1968): 12-16. ↩︎
Michael D. Rhodes, "The Hor Book of Breathings: A Translation and Commentary," Studies in the Book of Abraham 2 (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2002). ↩︎
John Gee, "Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 20, no. 1 (2008): 113-138. Gee applied Friedhelm Hoffmann's mathematical winding formula to estimate the original scroll lengths. ↩︎
Kerry Muhlestein, "Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham," in No Weapon Shall Prosper (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2011). https://rsc.byu.edu/no-weapon-shall-prosper/egyptian-papyri-book-abraham ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," pp. 37, 45. ↩︎
Brian M. Hauglid and Robin Scott Jensen, eds., The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts (Salt Lake City: Church Historian's Press, 2018). https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/intro/introduction-to-revelations-and-translations-volume-4 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
William Schryver, "The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers," presentation at the FAIR Conference. Schryver's statistical analysis found over 90% of meaningful GAEL vocabulary overlaps with Abraham 1-3, indicating the English text preceded the character assignments. ↩︎ ↩︎
W.W. Phelps, letter to Sally Phelps, May 1835. Phelps used symbolic characters resembling those in the GAEL before the papyri arrived in Kirtland. See discussion in John Gee, "Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 20, no. 1 (2008): 113-138. ↩︎
Kevin L. Barney, "The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources," in John Gee and Brian M. Hauglid, eds., Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2005), 107-130. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/astronomy-papyrus-and-covenant ↩︎
Kerry Muhlestein, Let's Talk About the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2011). ↩︎
F.S. Spalding, Joseph Smith Jr., As a Translator (Salt Lake City: Arrow Press, 1912). ↩︎
B.H. Roberts, response to Spalding critique, cited in FAIR, "Detailed Response to CES Letter, Book of Abraham." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Detailed_response_to_CES_Letter,_Book_of_Abraham ↩︎
John Gee and Stephen D. Ricks, "Historical Plausibility: The Historicity of the Book of Abraham as a Case Study," in Historicity and the Latter-day Saint Scriptures (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2001). https://rsc.byu.edu/historicity-latter-day-saint-scriptures/historical-plausibility-historicity-book-abraham-case-study ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1494&context=jbms ↩︎
The Apocalypse of Abraham was first translated into English by George H. Box in 1919. The Book of Jubilees was first translated by R.H. Charles in 1902. Neither was available in Joseph Smith's environment. ↩︎
Stephen O. Smoot, "Framing the Book of Abraham: Presumptions and Paradigms," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 47 (2021). https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/framing-book-abraham-presumptions-and-paradigms ↩︎
Jay M. Todd, "Egyptian Papyri Rediscovered," Improvement Era 71, no. 1 (January 1968): 12-16. The Church publicly discussed the funerary text identification within months of receiving the fragments. ↩︎