CES Letter Answers

Appearance

Papyri ​

The claim:

"Originally, Joseph claimed that this record was written by Abraham 'by his own hand, upon papyrus' — a claim still prominent in the heading of the Book of Abraham. This claim could not be evaluated for decades as many thought the papyri were lost in a fire. The original papyrus Joseph translated has since been found and, as stated in the Church's July 2014 Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham essay, 'scholars have identified the papyrus fragments as parts of standard funerary texts…[that] date to between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived.'

We know this is the papyrus that Joseph used for translation because the hieroglyphics match in chronological order to the hieroglyphics in Joseph's Kirtland Egyptian Papers, which contains his Grammar & Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL). Additionally, the papyrus were pasted onto paper which had drawings of a temple and maps of the Kirtland, Ohio area on the back and they were companied by an affidavit by Emma Smith verifying they had been in the possession of Joseph Smith."[1]

"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.… It has nothing to do with Abraham or anything Joseph claimed in his translation for the Book of Abraham."[2]

"Of all the issues, the Book of Abraham is the issue that has both fascinated and disturbed me the most.… It is the smoking gun that has completely obliterated my testimony of Joseph Smith and his claims."[3]

The papyri argument is the centerpiece of the CES Letter's case against the Book of Abraham. The recovered fragments do not contain the Book of Abraham on any defensible philological reading; the Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP) appear to map specific Egyptian characters to specific verses of Abraham; the missing-scroll defense is mathematically contested; and the "catalyst" framework that has emerged as the most common faithful position is openly a 20th-century reframing of language Joseph himself used. These are real difficulties — including the hardest concession from inside the LDS academy — and the case against the Book of Abraham is not the smoking gun the CES Letter claims.

For the figure-by-figure analysis of Facsimiles 1–3, see Facsimiles. For the cosmology, KJV-Genesis paraphrase, and anachronism arguments (Chaldeans, Pharaoh, Thomas Dick), see Anachronisms & Source Texts.

Context and background ​

In late June or early July 1835, Michael Chandler arrived in Kirtland, Ohio with four Egyptian mummies and several rolls of papyrus that had been excavated from Ptolemaic-era catacombs near Thebes by Italian explorer Antonio Lebolo (d. 1830) and shipped to America after his death.[4] Chandler had been touring the eastern United States exhibiting the mummies and papyri.[4:1] On July 6, 1835, Joseph Smith and several associates purchased the four mummies and the rolls for $2,400.[4:2] Within weeks, Joseph announced that one of the rolls contained "the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."[5]

The translation work began immediately and continued in two periods: a Kirtland phase (July–November 1835), during which most of the surviving Book of Abraham manuscripts and the Egyptian-language documents were produced, and a Nauvoo phase (early 1842), when Joseph published the text in three installments in the Times and Seasons with the three woodcut facsimiles.[6] Joseph was killed in 1844 with the manuscript apparently incomplete (modern Abraham 5:21 is not a natural ending) and with no published account of his translation method.[6:1]

After Joseph's death the papyri passed to his mother Lucy Mack Smith, who exhibited them to visitors until her death in 1856, when they were sold by Joseph's widow Emma to Abel Combs.[4:3] Combs split the collection. Some pieces — mounted on heavy paper backing in 1837, when Phelps and Reuben Hedlock prepared them for display — passed through several hands until they entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947.[4:4] The remainder of the collection passed through several Midwestern museums; the long rolls eventually came to rest at Joseph H. Wood's museum in Chicago, where they were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.[4:5] [7]

In May 1966, Aziz S. Atiya — a University of Utah professor of Middle East history — recognized one of the Met's papyrus fragments as the original of Facsimile 1 from the published Book of Abraham.[4:6] In November 1967, the Metropolitan Museum gifted the eleven mounted fragments to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Within weeks the Improvement Era magazine published a detailed identification of the fragments by Hugh Nibley, openly describing them as portions of standard Egyptian funerary literature — a Document of Breathing Made by Isis ("Book of Breathings") for a Theban priest named Hor, and a Book of the Dead for a woman named Tshemmin.[8] The dispute over the meaning of the recovered fragments has continued for nearly six decades.

Provenance of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 1835–1968A horizontal timeline from 1830 to 1970 plotting ten events in the provenance of the Joseph Smith Papyri. Joseph-era acquisition and translation events (1835 purchase, 1837 mounting, 1842 publication) appear in blue. Loss events (1844 Joseph killed, 1856 collection sold and split, 1871 long rolls destroyed in the Chicago Fire) appear in red. Modern recovery events (1947 Met acquisition, 1966 Atiya identification, 1967 Met gifts fragments to the Church, 1968 Nibley publishes funerary-text identification) appear in amber. The destruction of the long rolls in 1871 and the return of eleven mounted fragments in 1967 are separated by 96 years and involve physically distinct papyri.The long rolls destroyed in 1871 are not the eleven mounted fragments returned in 1967183018501870189019101930195019701835Chandler arrives;Joseph purchasescollection for $2,4001837Phelps/Hedlock mountfragments on paper1842BoA publishedTimes and Seasons1844Joseph killed1856Collection soldto Combs, split1871Long rolls destroyedGreat Chicago Fire1947Mounted fragmentsenter Met Museum1966Atiya recognizesFacsimile 1 source1967Met gifts 11 fragmentsto the Church1968Nibley publishesfunerary-text IDJoseph-era acquisition & translationLoss / destructionModern recovery
The collection split in 1856; the long rolls Charlotte Haven and Josiah Quincy described in the 1840s were destroyed in the 1871 Chicago Fire. Ninety-six years later the Metropolitan Museum returned the eleven mounted fragments — a different set of papyri, physically separated from the destroyed rolls since the 1856 sale.

What the recovered fragments are ​

The eleven mounted fragments returned in 1967, along with a small additional fragment subsequently identified at the University of Chicago, came from at least two distinct documents.[9] The strongest fragments (designated Joseph Smith Papyri I, X, and XI) are portions of a Document of Breathing Made by Isis prepared for a Theban priest named Hor, son of Osorwer. The Hor scroll dates to c. 150–100 BC on the basis of paleographic and onomastic comparison with other documents from the same priestly archive.[10] The Hor scroll contained the source of Facsimile 1 (a vignette showing a deceased man on a lion-couch, surrounded by canopic jars and a hovering bird) followed by a short ritual text intended to grant Hor's spirit "breath" in the afterlife.[11]

A second group of fragments (PJS II–IX, IIIa–b) come from a Book of the Dead prepared for a woman named Tshemmin, also Theban, dating to the third or second century BC.[9:1] Two additional documents Joseph possessed — the Hypocephalus of Sheshonq (the source of Facsimile 2) and the Scroll of Amenhotep (the "Valuable Discovery" referenced by Joseph and known today only from a 19th-century copy in Oliver Cowdery's hand) — are not extant.[9:2]

Both Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree on the philological reading of the recovered fragments. Klaus Baer's 1968 Dialogue translation, Michael Rhodes's 2002 LDS-published edition of the Hor scroll, and Robert Ritner's 2011 critical edition all read the fragments substantially the same way: as standard Ptolemaic-era funerary literature.[12][11:1][13] The Gospel Topics Essay concedes this directly: "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."[14]

That concession is real and the article will not soften it. The recovered Hor Book of Breathings, read as Egyptian funerary literature in its native register, does not contain the Book of Abraham.

Composite reconstruction of the eleven mounted Joseph Smith Papyri fragments returned by the Metropolitan Museum in 1967, arranged side by side to show the three Hor Book of Breathings fragments (PJS I, X, XI) and the eight Tshemmin Book of the Dead fragments (PJS II through IX).
The eleven mounted fragments returned to the Church by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, reassembled into a single composite view. PJS I, X, and XI come from the Document of Breathing Made by Isis prepared for the Theban priest Hor; PJS II–IX (and IIIa–b) come from a separate Book of the Dead prepared for a woman named Tshemmin. Via Wikimedia Commons.

What's missing ​

The eleven mounted fragments are not all the papyri Joseph Smith possessed. This is uncontested — the Gospel Topics Essay states it openly: "Eyewitnesses spoke of 'a long roll' or multiple 'rolls' of papyrus. Since only fragments survive, it is likely that much of the papyri accessible to Joseph when he translated the book of Abraham is not among these fragments."[14:1]

Nineteenth-century witnesses, friendly and hostile, repeatedly described long rolls of papyrus in Joseph's possession after the mounted fragments were already mounted in glass frames in 1837.

  • Charlotte Haven, a non-Latter-day Saint visitor (March 5, 1843), watched Lucy Mack Smith open "a long roll of manuscript" identified as "the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit."[15]
  • Josiah Quincy Jr., mayor of Boston and a skeptical visitor three weeks before Joseph's death (April 25, 1844), was shown parchments preserved under glass. Joseph identified them: "That is the handwriting of Abraham, the Father of the Faithful…this is the autograph of Moses, and these lines were written by his brother Aaron."[16]
  • William I. Appleby, a Latter-day Saint convert (May 5, 1841), recorded viewing "four mummies, one male and three females, brought from Ancient Thebes in Egypt, saw the Rolls of Papyrus, and the writing thereon."[17]
  • Hugh Nibley preserved received tradition: "We are told that papyri were in beautiful condition when Joseph Smith got them, and that one of them when unrolled on the floor extended through two rooms of the Mansion House."[18]

Kerry Muhlestein has compiled approximately 26 distinct eyewitness accounts of papyri in Joseph's possession during the 1835–1856 period, drawn from friendly, neutral, and hostile sources.[19] The witnesses are not unanimous on every detail, but the descriptions of long rolls — visible after the fragments were already mounted in glass — cannot refer to the small mounted pieces in the Metropolitan Museum collection.

The quantitative reconstruction of the original scroll lengths is contested. John Gee applied Friedhelm Hoffmann's formula for calculating the original length of a wound scroll from the surviving end-fragments and concluded that the Hor scroll alone was missing approximately 1,250 cm — about 41 feet — of papyrus, and that Joseph Smith may have possessed roughly eight times the papyrus extant today.[20] Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith challenged Gee's reconstruction in Dialogue in 2010, arguing that Gee's measurements required "the papyrus to be impossibly thin," and recalculating that approximately 56 cm of papyrus could plausibly be missing from the scroll's interior.[21] Cook defended the math again in 2012.[22]

The honest summary: there is genuine disagreement among scholars about how much is missing. Gee's 41-foot estimate is contested, and the strongest critical reconstruction (Cook and Smith) yields a much smaller figure — roughly 56 cm of scroll interior — which on its own is not enough to contain a hieratic copy of the canonized Book of Abraham. But Cook and Smith's analysis is restricted to the interior of the Hor scroll specifically. It does not address the Tshemmin scroll's missing material, the entirely missing Scroll of Amenhotep, or the long rolls described by Haven, Quincy, and others that were destroyed in the 1871 Chicago fire.

Hor scroll reconstructions: Gee vs. Cook and SmithTwo horizontal bars at linear scale comparing the amount of missing papyrus claimed by each reconstruction of the Hor scroll. Gee's reconstruction (1,250 cm, blue) spans the full chart width. Cook and Smith's reconstruction (56 cm, amber) is a small bar at about one twenty-second the length. Below the bars, a scope-coverage box notes that neither reconstruction covers the Tshemmin scroll, the entirely missing Scroll of Amenhotep, or the long rolls destroyed in the 1871 Chicago Fire.Even on the strongest critical reading, three other categories of missing material remain02505007501,0001,250Centimeters of papyrus claimed missing from the Hor scrollGee (2008)whole scrollreconstruction~1,250 cm · ~41 feetCook & Smith(2010, 2012)Hor scroll interior~56 cm~22× smaller than Gee's estimateMaterial neither reconstruction coversTshemmin scroll (PJS II–IX, IIIa–b)Cook and Smith treat only the Hor scroll interior; the Tshemmin scroll's missing portions are not in scope.Scroll of Amenhotep ("Valuable Discovery")Entirely lost; known only from a 19th-century copy in Oliver Cowdery's hand.Long rolls destroyed in the 1871 Chicago FireWitnessed by Haven (1843), Quincy (1844), Appleby (1841), and others; never returned with the mounted fragments.
Cook and Smith's ~56 cm estimate is the strongest critical reconstruction of the Hor scroll interior — and on its own would not contain a hieratic Book of Abraham. But three other categories of plausibly-missing papyri sit outside the scope of every quantitative reconstruction.

The article does not lean on the missing-scroll defense as a load-bearing argument. The point is narrower: the eleven mounted fragments are not the totality of Joseph's papyri collection, and any argument that treats them as identical to the source Joseph translated from must reckon with eyewitness, archival, and quantitative evidence that they are not.

Why the surviving fragments don't settle the question ​

Even granting that the recovered fragments do not contain the Book of Abraham on a literal philological reading, several features of the surviving manuscripts prevent them from functioning as a clean disproof.

Vignette-text separation in Ptolemaic Books of Breathings is well-documented. In the Document-of-Breathing genre to which the surviving fragments belong, vignettes (illustrations) are not always tied to the adjacent text columns. Michael Rhodes's 2002 edition of the Hor Book of Breathings notes that the vignettes in late Ptolemaic copies of the genre are routinely independent of the surrounding text, drawn from a stock iconographic repertoire and inserted at the discretion of the copyist.[11:2] [20:1] Abraham 1:12–14 references "the representation that is at the commencement of this record" — modern critics treat this as a clean reference to the immediately adjacent Facsimile 1 vignette, but in Ptolemaic Book of Breathings practice, "the commencement of this record" might naturally point several columns away — or to a different scroll entirely in the same archive.

The fragments were mounted in 1837, before most eyewitness reports. Reuben Hedlock and Phelps mounted the small surviving pieces on heavy paper (with Kirtland-area maps and temple drawings on the back) in 1837 — partly to display them.[6:2] The long rolls Charlotte Haven, Josiah Quincy, and others described in the 1840s were physically distinct from the already-mounted fragments. The mounted pieces and the long rolls cannot be the same artifacts.

The hypocephalus and Scroll of Amenhotep are entirely lost. The original of Facsimile 2 (the Hypocephalus of Sheshonq) is not extant; the Scroll of Amenhotep — the "Valuable Discovery" — is known only from a 19th-century copy.[9:3] The recovered fragments do not include all the documents Joseph identified, and any judgment about "what the papyri contained" based on the eleven extant pieces is necessarily partial.

These features do not prove that the missing material contained the Book of Abraham. They establish a narrower conclusion: the surviving fragments cannot be treated as exhausting the question, and a purely fragment-based verdict on Joseph's translation source is overstated.

The Kirtland Egyptian Papers — the hardest test ​

The Kirtland Egyptian Papers — sometimes called the Egyptian Alphabet documents and the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL) — are the single most contested element in the modern scholarly debate about the Book of Abraham, and the place where the article must engage the strongest critical argument from inside the LDS academy.

What they are ​

The Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP) are a collection of approximately 16 documents produced primarily in 1835–1836.[6:3] They include:

  • Three "Egyptian Alphabet" documents (EA-A, EA-B, EA-C), each consisting of Egyptian-looking characters paired with English explanations.
  • The Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL) — a 108-leaf bound volume (~227 pages, of which only 34 are inscribed; the rest are blank) attempting a more systematic mapping of Egyptian characters to English meanings, organized into "degrees" and "parts" of speech.
  • Three Book of Abraham manuscripts (Manuscripts A, B, and C) containing the English text of Abraham 1:1 through 2:18 or 2:19, with Egyptian characters in the left margins paired with paragraphs of English.
  • Notebooks of copied Egyptian characters, including W.W. Phelps's "Notebook of Copied Egyptian Characters" from approximately early July 1835.[23]

The KEP are written primarily in the hand of W.W. Phelps, with significant additions by Warren Parrish and Frederick G. Williams, and small contributions in Joseph Smith's own hand on two documents.[6:4]

The strongest critical reading ​

The strongest critical case is not the CES Letter's broad claim that "the hieroglyphics match in chronological order." It is the much narrower and better-documented claim made by Christopher C. Smith in 2009 and revisited by Brian Hauglid in 2020: that Abraham 1:1–3 specifically shows textual dependency on the Egyptian Alphabet documents.[24] [25]

Smith's 2009 John Whitmer Historical Association Journal article argued that Abraham 1:1–3 reads as if "cobbled together from a series of dictionary entries":

This undoubtedly accounts for the choppiness and redundancy of these three verses, which stylistically are very different from the remainder of the Book of Abraham. Verse 3, for example, reads as though it has been cobbled together from a series of dictionary entries.[24:1]

The argument is empirical: the marginal Egyptian characters in the three Book of Abraham manuscripts come from the Hor Book of Breathings, the same characters appear (with the same explanations) in the Egyptian Alphabet documents, and the English text of Abraham 1:1–3 contains compound formulations (a single sentence stitched together from multiple distinct dictionary-entry-like glosses) that look like the output of a character-by-character translation procedure rather than fluent dictation. Smith and Cook elaborated complementary arguments about the writing-order and ink-interaction evidence in their 2010 Dialogue piece.[21:1]

The Joseph Smith Papers Project Volume 4 (Jensen and Hauglid, 2018) — the standard critical edition of all the BoA and Egyptian-language manuscripts — places these documents side by side and documents the textual relationships across a 600-page apparatus.[6:5] No first-person account from Joseph Smith explains the translation method. The introduction notes: "Smith's journal suggests that he and his clerks saw their study of the papyri as being divided into two separate but related projects" — the Egyptian-language work and the translating-the-records work — and "It is unclear when in 1835 Joseph Smith began creating the existing Book of Abraham manuscripts or what relationship the Book of Abraham manuscripts have to the Egyptian-language documents."[6:6]

Hauglid's reorientation ​

Brian Hauglid produced A Textual History of the Book of Abraham in 2010 from the Maxwell Institute — a strictly documentary work cataloguing manuscript variants — and co-edited the JSP Volume 4 with Robin Scott Jensen in 2018.[26][6:7] Hauglid is the credentialed Latter-day Saint scholar with the deepest documentary expertise on the Book of Abraham manuscripts. His earlier work was apologetic in framing; his post-2018 work is not.

In 2018 Hauglid stated publicly that he no longer held the apologetic views he had previously defended and was no longer interested in apologetic projects — a Facebook statement dated December 19, 2018. In the same statement Hauglid wrote that he "wholeheartedly agree[d] with Dan [Vogel]'s excellent assessment of the Abraham/Egyptian documents." Vogel's published assessment is that the Book of Abraham is a 19th-century pseudepigraphic composition rather than a translation of an ancient text, so Hauglid's stated agreement with Vogel is a strong statement, not a soft one.[27] In 2019, with Terryl Givens, he published The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism's Most Controversial Scripture with Oxford University Press — a book that engages catalyst theory critically and treats the documentary record on its own terms.[28] In 2020 he contributed a chapter, "Translating an Alphabet to the Book of Abraham," to Producing Ancient Scripture (eds. Mason J. Allred et al.), arguing for genuine textual dependency between the Egyptian Alphabet documents and Abraham 1:1–3.[25:1]

This is the single hardest concession the article must make. Hauglid is not Robert Ritner. He is the credentialed Latter-day Saint scholar who edited the standard critical edition of the BoA manuscripts and who concluded — from inside the LDS academy, with full access to the documentary evidence — that Abraham 1:1–3 has demonstrable textual dependency on the Egyptian Alphabet documents.

Worth Acknowledging

The faithful position cannot honestly claim that all credentialed Latter-day Saint scholars agree on the apologetic case. Brian Hauglid — the man who edited the critical edition of the Book of Abraham manuscripts — concluded after a decade of close documentary work that Abraham 1:1–3 shows textual dependency on the Egyptian Alphabet documents. That is not a Ritner-style external critique. It is a documentary judgment from one of the most prepared faithful scholars on the subject. Any honest faithful response must take that judgment seriously rather than wave it away.

The direction-of-dependence question ​

The dependency between the Egyptian Alphabet documents and Abraham 1:1–3 is documented. The direction of the dependency — whether the EA documents produced the BoA verses, or the BoA verses produced the EA documents — is contested.

Several pieces of evidence cut against the simple "EA documents are a translation key" reading:

W.W. Phelps's May 1835 letter to his wife Sally. Two months before the Egyptian papyri arrived in Kirtland (July 1835), Phelps wrote a letter dated May 26, 1835, on the back of which he wrote: "A Specimen of some of the 'pure language'" — characters in one column, terms in another, explanations in a third.[29] Hauglid himself documented in his 2015 RSC chapter that "the three Egyptian alphabet documents (EA) employ the same characters as those found in the 'Specimen' letter (albeit with different explanations)" and that "the first page and a half of the EA documents contain characters not associated with the papyri."[30] Joseph Smith's earlier "Pure Language" project goes back further — to a March 1832 document, "A Sample of pure Language given by Joseph the Seer as copied by Br Johnson," archived in the Joseph Smith Papers.[31] The cipher-style methodology of paired columns (character–term–explanation) existed before the papyri arrived. The EA documents are continuous with that prior project, not produced from a clean encounter with the Egyptian script — much harder to read as a pure decoding of newly-arrived Egyptian than as the application of Phelps's prior cipher methodology to a new script.

Schryver's 90% statistical analysis (with caveats). William Schryver presented at FAIR in 2010 a database-driven analysis of the meaningful vocabulary in the GAEL Alphabet and Grammar, comparing the words in the GAEL definitions against (a) what already existed in Abraham 1–3 and (b) what came later in Abraham 4–5 (which paraphrases Genesis 1–2). His finding: over 90% of the meaningful vocabulary in the GAEL Alphabet/Grammar appears in Abraham 1–3, but it is "rarely attested, if at all, in Abraham 4 and 5 and Genesis 12 and 15."[32] Schryver concluded:

Analysis by substantial words strongly suggests a dependency of the Alphabet on a pre-existing text of much of the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham.… Most of the characters explained in the Egyptian alphabet documents are not Egyptian, and do not appear on the Egyptian papyri in question.… What we have here is a tool not intended to decipher Egyptian, but rather one intended to encipher the descriptive English text.[32:1]

If Schryver is right, the dependence runs from the BoA to the GAEL — the existing English text was used to construct the alphabet, not the other way around. Caveat: Schryver's 2010 FAIR presentation has not been peer-reviewed, and Hauglid 2020 explicitly does not accept Schryver's reverse-dependency reading.[25:2] Schryver is one voice in the apologetic literature, not a settled scholarly finding. John Gee has separately offered an analysis arguing that only four to seven (depending on the count) of the GAEL's 62 characters have a clear connection to a character on the actual papyri — a finding cited in Jeff Lindsay's 2019 Interpreter review of JSP Volume 4 — though that count is itself contested by Hauglid and other scholars who read the documentary record differently.[33]

The Phelps prior-project lineage is the more defensible piece. Phelps's pure-language methodology predates the papyri's arrival; the EA documents extend that methodology to the Egyptian script; the Phelps-led documentary record is the strongest piece of evidence that the EA work was not a simple decoding of newly-encountered Egyptian. The Schryver 90% claim and the Gee 7-of-62 claim are auxiliary — they bolster the case if accepted but do not bear its full weight, because each is contested by Hauglid and others working from inside the LDS academy.

Joseph's hand appears on only two of the 16 KEP documents. Hugh Nibley summarized the manuscript-handwriting analysis: "What strikes one first of all is the overpowering predominance of one hand and mind in the work — those of Phelps."[34] The GAEL, the largest KEP document, is "written primarily in Phelps's handwriting" with later additions in Parrish's hand.[6:8] This does not by itself establish that Phelps was the author of the methodology — Joseph routinely dictated documents that scribes wrote in their own hands, as with the Book of Mormon dictation in Cowdery's hand. What it does establish is that the documentary evidence does not show Joseph executing the GAEL personally. Combined with the prior-project evidence above (Phelps's May 1835 pure-language letter; the March 1832 pure-language sample), the load-bearing argument is methodological lineage, not handwriting alone.

The faithful response, then, is that some textual relationship exists between the EA documents and Abraham 1:1–3, but the evidence is consistent with a reading in which the EA work followed Joseph's revealed text rather than producing it. The dependency direction is contested; the documentary record can be read either way; and the cumulative weight of either reading still leaves the rest of the Book of Abraham (60+ verses of chapter 1 plus chapters 2–5) unaccounted for by the simple "translation key" framework.

Honest acknowledgment ​

The matter is not closed. Hauglid's 2020 conclusion — that Abraham 1:1–3 has demonstrable textual dependency on the Egyptian Alphabet documents — is documentary, not impressionistic. The honest position, in summary: some textual relationship between the EA documents and Abraham 1:1–3 exists; the direction is contested; the dependency, even read most critically, is narrow — three verses, not the remaining 60+ verses of chapter 1 plus chapters 2–5; and neither reading explains the full production of the Book of Abraham.[35] This is the genuine difficulty. The article does not minimize it.

The translation-method question ​

If the recovered fragments do not contain the Book of Abraham on a literal reading, and if at least Abraham 1:1–3 has some textual relationship with the Egyptian Alphabet documents, what was Joseph doing when he produced the Book of Abraham?

The faithful literature has floated several frameworks: missing-scroll, strict catalyst, modified catalyst (revelation plus editorial harmonization), Semitic-adaptation, and revelatory-dictation-with-incidental-papyri. Each addresses some difficulties and leaves others. Rather than tour every option, this article picks the lane the cumulative evidence most strongly supports and lives with its costs.

The lane this article takes: modified catalyst with editorial harmonization ​

The most-defensible reading, given the documentary evidence, is a modified catalyst framework: Joseph received the Book of Abraham as a revelation prompted by the physical papyri (the Gospel Topics Essay's primary framing), but the relationship between the revealed text and the physical papyri was substantive enough that Joseph (and his clerks, in 1842) could and did harmonize the published text with the surviving vignettes — including the cross-references in Abraham 1:12 and 1:14.[14:2] [36]

This framework has two parts:

  1. The translation procedure was revelatory. Joseph translated by inspiration, consistent with all of his other translation work (Book of Mormon via seer stone; the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible without Hebrew or Greek manuscripts; D&C 7 from a parchment Joseph never possessed).[37] [38] [39] In Joseph's vocabulary, "translation" was a revelatory process that produced text from a divine source, with the physical artifact serving as a prompt rather than a transparent script. Catalyst theory is, at this level, a 20th-century refinement of Joseph's own self-understanding rather than a contradiction of it.[36:1]

  2. The papyri-text connection was substantive enough to harmonize. The strict-catalyst claim — that the papyri provided no substantive connection to the BoA's content — does not survive Abraham 1:12 and 1:14, where the BoA's text cross-references the facsimiles. The honest reading is that Joseph believed there was a real connection between the physical papyri and the revealed content, and post-revelation editorial harmonization between the text and the surviving vignettes occurred at points like the March 1842 Times and Seasons publication. This is more complex than strict catalyst — and the cost is real.

What this framework addresses, and what it costs ​

The modified-catalyst framework explains why Joseph and his contemporaries described the BoA as a translation in conventional vocabulary (because Joseph's "translation" did operate from a physical artifact, even if the procedure was revelatory); why all of Joseph's other revelatory translations — Book of Mormon, JST, D&C 7, Book of Moses — were also non-conventional in the same way; why the recovered fragments are funerary literature on their own philological terms without requiring the BoA to be a transparent decoding of those fragments; and why Hauglid's narrow EA/BoA 1:1–3 dependency can be accommodated without forcing the conclusion that the EA documents were the source of the text rather than a parallel project.[40]

The framework pays explanatory costs at three points. First, the harmonization-itself problem: if Joseph believed the recovered papyri were "only a catalyst," why did he harmonize the BoA's text with the surviving vignettes (Abraham 1:12, 1:14)? The honest answer is that "only a catalyst" is too strong — Joseph evidently believed the papyri were substantively connected to the revealed content. Modified catalyst lives with that; strict catalyst cannot. Second, the 1842 editorial-insertion question: the gloss "which signifies hieroglyphics" first appears in the March 1842 publication and is not in the 1835 manuscripts, which handles part of the cross-reference problem — but the broader Abraham 1:12 self-reference appears earlier and cannot be neatly dismissed as a 1842 addition.[36:2] Third, the Abraham 1:1–3 narrow-dependency question: Hauglid's documentary finding remains. Modified catalyst does not erase it; it relocates it as a parallel pure-language project rather than a transparent decoding of Egyptian into English.

Frameworks this lane sets aside ​

  • Strict catalyst. Cannot accommodate Abraham 1:12/1:14 cross-references without strain. Not adopted.
  • Strict missing-scroll. Cook and Smith's Dialogue analysis raises a real difficulty for Hor-scroll-interior versions of this claim (although it does not address the Tshemmin scroll, the Scroll of Amenhotep, or the long rolls destroyed in 1871). Not load-bearing in this article.
  • Semitic adaptation as a free-standing framework. Kevin Barney's J-redactor proposal is documented as a genre — Testament of Abraham, Apocalypse of Abraham, the Greco-Roman magical papyri tradition all show ancient Jewish adaptation of Egyptian material to Abrahamic narratives.[41] Examples worth naming: the Testament of Abraham (a 1st–2nd century CE Jewish work) demonstrably adapts the Egyptian Book of the Dead Chapter 125 psychostasy/judgment-scene vignette, with Osiris becoming Abel and the Egyptian gods becoming angels; Luke 16's Rich Man and Lazarus traces back to the Egyptian Setne Khaemwas tradition, with Osiris becoming Abraham and Amnte (the Egyptian underworld) becoming "Abraham's bosom."[41:1] [42] Barney's framework is engaged in figure-context in the Facsimiles sister article. It supplements but does not replace modified catalyst: it documents the genre-plausibility of finding Abrahamic content adjacent to Egyptian funerary vignettes, not the BoA's production process itself.

Joseph's translation procedure was revelatory ​

Direct evidence that Joseph translated the BoA by revelation rather than by character-by-character philology:

  • Wilford Woodruff (1842): "The Lord is Blessing Joseph with Power to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom of God; to translate through the Urim & Thummim Ancient records & Hyeroglyphics."[43]
  • Parley P. Pratt (1842): "The record is now in course of translation by means of the Urim and Thummim."[44]
  • Orson Pratt (1878): "I saw him translating, by inspiration, the Old and New Testaments and his inspired book of Abraham from Egyptian papyrus."[45]
  • Warren Parrish, the disaffected scribe: "I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Heiroglyphicks [sic] as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of Heaven."[46]
  • The hostile Cleveland Whig (August 1835): described Joseph examining the papyrus through "spectacles" — language some Latter-day Saint scholars (Smoot 2022) read as referring to Joseph's seer stone, though the report itself is hostile and ambiguous.[47] [39:1] (The original Urim and Thummim instruments associated with the Book of Mormon translation had been returned in mid-1829.[48])

Stephen Smoot's framing of Joseph's translation methodology is useful here: "Joseph Smith's conception of translation was, in many respects, expansive and idiosyncratic by contemporary standards." Smoot quotes Kathleen Flake approvingly: "Joseph did not think of himself as God's stenographer. Rather, he was an interpreting reader, and God the confirming authority."[36:3] [49]

If Joseph translated through revelation (consistent with all his other translation work), the entire framework of the CES Letter's argument — that the GAEL was Joseph's translation tool and the recovered fragments his linguistic source — is misframed. The KEP becomes a separate post-translation project: an attempt by Joseph and his associates to understand the Egyptian script in light of the already-revealed text, not the procedure that produced the text. This reframing does not eliminate every difficulty — Hauglid's 2020 dependency at Abraham 1:1–3 still requires explanation — but it relocates where the difficulty lives. The question becomes "what was the relationship between the revealed text of the Book of Abraham and the Egyptian-language project Joseph and Phelps undertook in parallel?" Modified catalyst answers: parallel, not source-and-translation.

Worth Acknowledging

The Book of Mormon translation parallel is real but not dispositive. Joseph's other translations establish that his "translation" vocabulary was always revelatory rather than academic-linguistic — useful for setting up the question. But the BoM was produced from an artifact (the gold plates) Joseph claimed to possess. The BoA case differs: the surviving fragments do not contain the BoA's content. The honest answer is that the modified catalyst framework's specific work for the BoA — physical papyri prompted, revealed text harmonized to the visible vignettes — is itself the proposal that has to do the load-bearing work, and the BoM/JST/D&C 7 parallels support but do not by themselves resolve the BoA case.

The strongest critical case ​

The CES Letter's papyri argument is a popularization of a deeper, older critical case. To engage that case seriously, the article must address it at its strongest, not in its rhetorical version on CES Letter pp. 36–50.

Robert Ritner's specific arguments ​

Robert K. Ritner (1953–2021), professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, was the most credentialed non-Latter-day Saint critic of the Book of Abraham's papyrus claims. His work is the philological core of the modern critical case.

In the 2000 Dialogue article "The 'Breathing Permit of Hor' Thirty-Four Years Later," Ritner produced a revised transliteration of the Hor scroll building on Klaus Baer's 1968 work, estimated the original papyrus width at ~150–155 cm (broadly consistent with Cook and Smith's reconstruction a decade later), and concluded:

There is no reasonable expectation of any further text and certainly nothing even vaguely resembling the alien narrative of The Book of Abraham. The true content of this papyrus concerns only the afterlife of the deceased Egyptian priest Hor.[50]

In 2011, Ritner published The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition through the Smith-Pettit Foundation — a book-length critical edition providing rigorous Egyptological readings of all the recovered fragments and the published facsimiles, presented as the most thorough non-LDS analysis of the JSP to date.[13:1] His 2014 essay-length response to the Gospel Topics Essay continues the same critique: the catalyst framework and the missing-scroll defense, in his judgment, do not preserve the Book of Abraham as a genuine ancient Egyptian text; they preserve it only as a 19th-century revelation that Joseph mistakenly believed was a translation of the surviving fragments.[51]

Ritner's specific arguments must be engaged on their own terms:

  1. The recovered Hor fragments contain a Document of Breathing Made by Isis, not Abrahamic content, on any defensible Egyptological reading. This is uncontested — Latter-day Saint Egyptologists Michael Rhodes and John Gee both produce substantially the same translation. The disagreement with Ritner is not about the philological reading of the recovered fragments but about whether that reading exhausts the question of Joseph's translation source.
  2. The catalyst framework is a 20th-century reframing of language Joseph himself used to describe a more conventional translation. Ritner is correct on this. The faithful response is not that the catalyst framework matches Joseph's own self-description (it doesn't) but that "translation" in Joseph's vocabulary was never conventional academic translation — for the Book of Mormon, the JST, D&C 7, or the BoA — and the modified-catalyst framework is a refinement of Joseph's revelatory framework, not a contradiction of it.
  3. The missing-scroll defense, evaluated on the Hor scroll interior alone, does not contain enough material for the BoA. Cook and Smith's analysis (which Ritner cites approvingly) limits what could be missing from the Hor scroll interior. The faithful response is that the missing-scroll possibility is not load-bearing — the article relies on modified catalyst, not missing-scroll, for the translation-method work.

Ritner's reading of the recovered fragments is sound on its own philological terms; it does not entail the broader verdict ("smoking gun") that the CES Letter draws from it. His philological analysis addresses what the surviving Egyptian text says; it does not by itself address the broader question of the Book of Abraham's relationship to the original papyri collection or to ancient Abrahamic traditions.

Other critical voices and faithful responses ​

Hauglid's reorientation (described above) remains the hardest concession the article must make from inside the LDS academy. What changed his mind was a decade of close work on the documentary edition of the BoA manuscripts (JSP Vol. 4, 2018), during which the textual relationships between the Egyptian Alphabet documents and Abraham 1:1–3 became inescapable to him;[6:9] his 2019 OUP volume with Givens then engaged catalyst theory critically rather than apologetically;[28:1] his 2020 chapter argued for genuine textual dependency — a documentary, not interpretive, claim.[25:3] The honest faithful response is to engage Hauglid's reasoning rather than dismiss him. The modified-catalyst framework adopted here holds for Hauglid's documentary finding: dependency at Abraham 1:1–3 is consistent with a parallel pure-language project that drew on the revealed BoA text rather than with the EA documents being the linguistic source of that text. Faithful Latter-day Saint scholars have responded directly: John S. Thompson's 2020 Interpreter article argues Hauglid and Givens read the documentary record through a too-narrow conception of "translation";[52] Stephen Smoot's 2025 Interpreter article frames the BoA as resisting "simplistic categorization" with "compositional layers" — a 19th-century translation layer overlaid on an underlying ancient text — drawing on Brant Gardner's methodology;[36:4] [53] Kevin Christensen's lengthy Interpreter response to Ritner's 2014 essay engages the same questions from a faithful framework.[54] Credentialed Latter-day Saint scholars disagree on how to read the documentary record; a careful reader has to evaluate the evidence rather than appeal to consensus.

Christopher C. Smith's 2009 JWHA article originated the narrow-dependency argument, and his 2010 Dialogue piece with Cook is the most rigorous critical scroll-length reconstruction.[24:2] [21:2] Smith's 2009 argument is that Abraham 1:1–3 specifically shows stylistic evidence of being produced by a character-by-character translation procedure. The faithful response — Phelps prior-project lineage; Schryver; Gee — does not deny that some textual relationship exists. It denies that the evidence resolves the direction of dependence. Smith's narrow-dependency argument is the strongest single piece of the critical case from inside the LDS academy; the faithful response addresses it but does not refute it cleanly.

Dan Vogel is the most prolific living naturalistic critic of the BoA's apologetic case. His 2021 Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique engages the BYU Studies 61/4 cluster directly, arguing that the apologetic framework as a whole functions through ad hoc accommodation rather than a coherent positive case.[55] Vogel is right that the recovered fragments are funerary literature; he is right that Joseph used the language of conventional translation; he is right that the catalyst framework is a 20th-century reframing. What the article does not concede is the verdict. Vogel reads the same evidence through a naturalistic interpretive frame that requires Joseph to have constructed the text from materials available to him in 1835; the article reads the same evidence through a modified-catalyst frame that takes the cumulative ancient-content evidence (Olishem, Mirgissa, Apocalypse of Abraham parallels) as positive features the naturalistic frame must explain. Vogel's case has not gone unanswered — Smoot 2025 engages it directly, and Gee's An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (2017) along with the BYU Studies 61/4 cluster (2022) provide synthesis-level apologetic responses.[36:5] [56]

Catalyst-theory falsifiability — addressed ​

The catalyst framework's falsifiability problem at Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 is handled by the modified-catalyst lane: Joseph believed the papyri were substantively connected to the revealed content, and post-revelation editorial harmonization between the text and the surviving vignettes occurred at points like the 1842 Times and Seasons publication. This costs the strict-catalyst position its cleanness — the article concedes that — but it preserves the broader catalyst architecture in a form that survives Abraham 1:12/1:14 without requiring the BoA to have been transparently decoded from Hor's funerary text. That is a real cost, not an evasion.

Manuscript date vs. text date ​

One element of the CES Letter's argument deserves direct refutation. The papyri date to 3rd century BC – 1st century AD. The CES Letter treats this as evidence the text of Abraham cannot be ancient: "These fragments date to between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived."

This is a category error. Every ancient manuscript dates to after the underlying text it preserves.

  • The oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscript (the Aleppo Codex, c. 930 AD) postdates the texts it contains by 1,000+ years. No one concludes that the Pentateuch was composed in the 10th century AD.
  • The oldest complete Greek New Testament (Codex Sinaiticus, c. 350 AD) postdates the apostolic age by 300 years. No one concludes that the Gospels were composed in the mid-4th century.
  • Plato's dialogues (4th century BC) survive in manuscripts from the 9th century AD — over a millennium later than composition. No one concludes that Plato's dialogues are 9th-century Byzantine forgeries.
  • Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (8th century BC) survive in complete form only in 10th–11th century AD manuscripts. The gap is similar.
  • Most of Isaiah (8th century BC) was, until the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery in 1947, known only from medieval Hebrew manuscripts roughly 2,000 years after composition. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ, ~125 BC) closed the gap to about 600 years and showed substantive text-stable transmission across that time.[57]

The 3rd century BC – 1st century AD dating of the recovered Hor fragments is consistent with the fragments being a Ptolemaic-era copy of a much earlier Abrahamic source. Manuscript date is not text date.

Egyptian convention specifically used phrases like [n-]ḏr.t=f ḥꜥ=f ("with his own hand") and m ḏbꜥw=f ("written with his own fingers") to identify the ancient author of a text even on much later copies — the Kamose Stela (~1550 BC) records a letter from Apophis "by the hand of the ruler of Avaris" though scribes physically wrote the stela; the Setne Khaemwas tradition references writings "of which Thoth was the one who wrote it with his own hand"; the Idrimi Inscription (15th century BC Syria, excavated 1939, first published 1949) is an autobiographical "I" account written on a statue produced centuries later than the events it narrates. For fuller treatment of Idrimi as an autobiographical-inscription parallel, see the Anachronisms & Source Texts sister article.[58] [59] [60] [42:1] On one reading — the reading the cumulative ancient-content case rests on — the Book of Abraham's heading ("by his own hand, upon papyrus") fits this ancient Near Eastern authorial idiom.

The "by his own hand" defense has a real cost. In 1835 American English, "by his own hand upon papyrus" most naturally means "Abraham personally wrote this text on this papyrus." That is what Joseph and his contemporaries would have meant. The ancient-idiom reading is a post-1939 (Idrimi) and post-1900 (Setne tradition published in Griffith) interpretive overlay; it is genuinely interesting only if there are independent reasons to think the text is ancient.[60:1] [61] [42:2] What the ancient-idiom defense does is establish that the heading is consistent with an ancient-Near-Eastern authorial convention — not that the heading proves ancient origin on its own. The cumulative ancient-content case (Olishem, Mirgissa, divine council, Apocalypse of Abraham parallels) is what gives the ancient-idiom reading its weight; absent that case, the 1835 plain-reading interpretation would be the natural one.

The article does not claim Joseph knew about the Egyptian [n-]ḏr.t=f ḥꜥ=f idiom. He did not. The Idrimi statue was excavated 95 years after his death; Egyptian was deciphered only in 1822 (Champollion); systematic Egyptological scholarship of authorial conventions matured in the mid-20th century. The point is narrower: the text of the Book of Abraham's heading uses a phrase that fits an ancient genre Joseph could not have known about. That is one piece of the cumulative case for ancient features; it is not, by itself, a proof.

Why the case isn't closed despite the difficulties ​

The recovered fragments do not contain the Book of Abraham. The KEP-BoA dependency at Abraham 1:1–3 is real. The missing-scroll defense is mathematically contested. The catalyst framework is a 20th-century reframing with a falsifiability problem that requires modified-catalyst's editorial-harmonization complication to handle. Each of these is a genuine difficulty. The article does not minimize them.

But the case for the Book of Abraham's authenticity does not rest on refuting the strict-philological reading of the recovered Hor fragments. It rests on several independent lines of evidence in the text of the Book of Abraham — content Joseph could not have known about in 1835 because the relevant ancient texts and archaeological discoveries had not yet been recovered or deciphered. For full development of these parallels, see the Anachronisms & Source Texts and Facsimiles sister articles. The relevant features, tiered by strength:

Strong matches (specific archaeological discoveries unavailable in 1835):

  • Olishem (Abraham 1:10). The Book of Abraham mentions "the plain of Olishem." A Naram-Sin (~2254–2218 BC) Akkadian inscription mentions a town called Ú-li-ší-imki near Ebla in northern Syria — a precise match in name, era, and rough location. Cuneiform was first systematically deciphered by Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks in the 1840s–1850s — after the BoA was published. The Naram-Sin inscription was first published critically by C.J. Gadd and L. Legrain in the Ur Excavations, Texts I volume (London: British Museum / Joint Expedition of the British Museum and University of Pennsylvania, 1928), 84 years after Joseph's death; Oylum Höyük was identified as the likely ancient Ulisum in 2013.[62] [63]
  • Mirgissa human sacrifice deposit. Abraham 1 describes "idolatrous priests" attempting ritual sacrifice of Abraham — long dismissed by 19th- and early-20th-century Egyptologists as inconsistent with Egyptian religion ("Egyptians did not engage in human sacrifice" was textbook Egyptology through approximately 1960). The Mirgissa execration deposit, excavated by Jean Vercoutter at the Egyptian fortress in Nubia in the 1960s and published in the Mirgissa excavation reports beginning in 1970, contained ritual wax figurines, a flint knife, and the decapitated remains of a foreigner — interpreted as evidence of actual human sacrifice in an execration ritual. Robert Ritner, William Kelly Simpson, and Kerry Muhlestein subsequently confirmed in mainstream Egyptology journals that human sacrifice did occur in Egyptian religious practice, especially in execration rituals.[64]

Moderate matches (parallel materials available later, but with some 19th-century availability concerns):

  • Apocalypse of Abraham parallels. The Apocalypse of Abraham — a 1st–2nd century CE Jewish work containing parallels to Abraham 1 (rejection of Terah's idolatry, near-sacrifice, deliverance) and Abraham 3 (heavenly ascent, divine throne vision, premortal existence of spirits) — first appeared in English translation in the Improvement Era in August–September 1898, with a more rigorous English edition by G.H. Box and J.I. Landsman in 1918.[65] Both postdate Joseph's 1844 death by 54–74 years. Caveat: the broader Jewish-pseudepigraphal Abraham tradition (Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo, parts of Josephus's Antiquities) — which contains the rejection-of-idolatry-and-deliverance narrative in less specific form — was available in 1835 in some editions. The strength of the Apocalypse of Abraham parallel rests on the specific shared features (heavenly ascent, divine throne vision, premortal existence of spirits) rather than the general rejection-of-idolatry narrative.
  • Idrimi-genre autobiographical inscription. Abraham 1–2 is written as first-person autobiographical narrative — a genre well-attested in Middle Bronze Age Syria and Egypt and absent from any 19th-century Christian biographical or homiletic writing Joseph would have known. The closest formal parallel — the Idrimi Inscription (15th century BC Syrian autobiography on a statue) — was discovered at Alalakh in 1939 by Sir Leonard Woolley and first published by Sidney Smith in 1949.[59:1] [60:2] Caveat: first-person narrative is a broad genre; Idrimi is one specific exemplar. The match is structural rather than verbatim. It establishes that the autobiographical-inscription genre existed in Abraham's cultural neighborhood in his approximate era, not that the BoA's specific features tightly track Idrimi.

Suggestive matches (theological/cultural patterns confirmed by later discoveries):

  • Divine council in Abraham 4–5. The plural-Gods framework of the BoA's creation account ("the Gods went down to organize man") was not standard Christian theology in 1842. It does match the Hebrew Elohim as a true plural and the divine council concept attested across Ugaritic (bn ʾilm), Phoenician, and earlier Akkadian sources. The Ugaritic tablets — the largest body of evidence for divine council religion — were not discovered until the 1929 excavations at Ras Shamra, 85 years after Joseph's death.[66] Caveat: 19th-century biblical criticism (Eichhorn, De Wette, the broader Documentary Hypothesis precursors) had already raised the plural-Elohim question. The Ugaritic evidence strengthens the plural-Elohim reading but does not by itself prove that Joseph's 1842 plural-Gods framework was unavailable to him without ancient Near Eastern data.

These are not the totality of the evidence — see the sister articles for the fuller catalogue. Each match has to be evaluated on its own merits. The strong matches (Olishem, Mirgissa) are tightly tied to specific discoveries with no plausible 19th-century alternative source. The moderate matches (Apocalypse of Abraham, Idrimi-genre) are tied to specific recoveries but have softer 19th-century-availability arguments. The suggestive match (divine council) is theologically interesting but compatible with some 19th-century biblical-critical chatter.

Ancient-content matches plotted against Joseph Smith's 1844 deathA tiered chart with three horizontal lanes (Strong, Moderate, Suggestive) sharing a year axis from 1840 to 2020. A dashed vertical line at 1844 marks Joseph Smith's death. Every supporting-evidence marker lies to the right of the 1844 line. Strong (green): Olishem with the Naram-Sin inscription published in 1928 (gap 84 years) and Oylum Höyük identified in 2013 (gap 169 years), and Mirgissa published from 1970 (gap 126 years). Moderate (amber): Apocalypse of Abraham first English in 1898 (gap 54 years) and the Idrimi inscription published in 1949 (gap 105 years). Suggestive (slate): Ugaritic divine-council texts from Ras Shamra in 1929 (gap 85 years). The cumulative gap range is 54 to 169 years post-mortem.Every ancient-content match rests on evidence recovered after Joseph Smith's deathStrong matchesspecific discoveries, no plausible 19th-c sourceModerate matchesspecific recoveries, softer 19th-c availabilitySuggestive matchestheological patterns compatible with 19th-c chatter184418701890191019301950197019902010Joseph Smith dies — 1844OlishemNaram-Sin inscriptionpublished 1928+84 yrsOylum Höyükidentified 2013+169 yrsMirgissaexecration depositpublished from 1970+126 yrsApocalypse of Abrahamfirst English translation1898 (rev. 1918)+54 yrsIdrimi inscriptionexcavated 1939,published 1949+105 yrsUgaritic divine councilRas Shamra tabletsexcavated 1929+85 yrsStrong — tight tie to specific discoveriesModerate — specific recoveries with caveatsSuggestive — theological pattern
Six supporting recoveries across three tiers, all to the right of Joseph Smith's 1844 death — gap range 54 to 169 years post-mortem. The cumulative pattern is what the prose tries to summarize: no individual match is multiplicative on its own, but every one of them required evidence Joseph could not have accessed in 1835 or 1842.

The case is not multiplicative. But several independent lines of evidence — each hard to explain on the fabrication theory — together point in a direction the recovered-fragments-are-funerary observation does not refute. A fabrication account must explain how Joseph guessed correctly on enough specific points across enough independent disciplines that the cumulative pattern becomes increasingly unlikely as the recoveries accumulate, even when each individual match is evaluated on its own terms.

The 1968 acknowledgment ​

One further point of clarification. The CES Letter frames the funerary-text identification of the recovered fragments as if it were a reluctant 21st-century concession by the Church to mounting critical pressure. That framing is mistaken on the historical record.

The Church received the surviving fragments from the Metropolitan Museum in November 1967. In January 1968 — only weeks after acquisition — the Church published in the official Improvement Era magazine that the recovered fragments contained Egyptian funerary text. Hugh Nibley's article "Phase One" described them as Books of Breathings and Books of the Dead and was reprinted later that year in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.[18:1] The Church's identification of the recovered fragments as funerary literature was its own immediate, openly-published academic identification — not a reluctant 2014 concession 45 years later.

Nibley's 1968 article both identified the fragments as funerary literature and immediately began the apologetic case (missing-scroll possibility, the catalyst-style framework, the broader case for ancient features in the BoA's text) that subsequent decades developed. The Church's posture from 1968 forward was not "the fragments are funerary, the BoA is therefore problematic" but "the fragments are funerary, and here is why that does not by itself settle the BoA case." The apologetic groundwork was contemporaneous with the academic identification, not a reluctant later concession. The corrective to the CES Letter framing is that the Church openly published the funerary identification in 1968 — and the apologetic framing began in the same article.

This does not change the philological reading of the fragments. It does correct the rhetorical framing that the Church spent decades hiding what was openly acknowledged from the moment the fragments were returned.

Assessment ​

The Book of Abraham case is harder to defend than the Book of Mormon. No first-person account from Joseph Smith explains the translation method.[6:10] The recovered fragments do not contain the BoA on any defensible philological reading. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers show at least narrow textual dependency between the Egyptian Alphabet documents and Abraham 1:1–3 — a finding documented from inside the LDS academy by Brian Hauglid in 2020, not just by external critics. The catalyst framework is openly a 20th-century reframing of language Joseph and his contemporaries used to describe a more conventional translation, and the modified-catalyst form this article adopts pays a real explanatory cost (post-revelation editorial harmonization) to accommodate the cross-references at Abraham 1:12 and 1:14. The missing-scroll defense, taken alone, is mathematically contested by Cook and Smith's Dialogue analysis of the Hor scroll interior. Robert Ritner's reading of the recovered fragments is sound on its own philological terms. The faithful response cannot pretend that all credentialed scholars — including credentialed Latter-day Saint scholars — agree on the apologetic case. They do not.

But the difficulty is not the smoking gun the CES Letter claims. The "smoking gun" framing requires the cumulative ancient-content case to fail decisively. It does not. The recovered fragments are not the totality of what Joseph possessed; eyewitnesses describe long rolls, mounted fragments cannot be those rolls, and quantitative reconstructions — even on the most critical reading — leave substantial scope for material the recovered eleven fragments do not contain. The KEP-BoA dependency is narrow (three verses) and contested in direction; the strongest piece of the faithful response is the methodological-lineage argument (Phelps's prior pure-language project, the May 1835 letter, the March 1832 sample) rather than the auxiliary statistical claims (Schryver, Gee), which remain contested. The modified-catalyst framework is consistent with the broader pattern of all of Joseph's other revelatory translations — D&C 7, Book of Moses, the Book of Mormon via seer stone — none of which fit conventional linguistic translation.

What survives all the difficulties is the cumulative ancient-content case in the text of the Book of Abraham. The 19th-century critical literature confidently dismissed the BoA's specific claims as historical impossibilities — Egyptians did not practice human sacrifice; "Olishem" was an invented place; Abraham's first-person autobiographical superscription was anachronistic; the plural-Gods creation framework was a 19th-century theological innovation. Twentieth-century archaeology and textual recovery has reversed every one of those judgments — not by parallel-grasping but by primary documentary discoveries (Mirgissa execration deposit excavated in the 1960s, Naram-Sin/Olishem inscription published 1928, Idrimi inscription excavated 1939 and published 1949, Ugaritic tablets 1929, Apocalypse of Abraham first English 1898). Each match is independently credible, not multiplicatively combinable — but several independent lines of evidence, each hard to explain on the fabrication theory, together point in a direction the recovered-fragments-are-funerary observation does not refute.

When the Book of Abraham case gets genuinely hard, what stands firm is the Book of Mormon. The Book of Abraham's ancient-content case is real; what makes the Book of Mormon the bedrock is that its production circumstances are cleaner — roughly 60 working days of dictation, no substantive revisions, no whistleblowers, no credible naturalistic explanation — and its cumulative case rests on fewer disputed pieces. The Book of Abraham is the harder case in the Restoration scriptural canon; the Book of Mormon is its bedrock. A reader unsettled by the genuine difficulty of the BoA case is not therefore obligated to follow the difficulty into a verdict against Joseph Smith's prophetic claims — the cumulative case for those claims rests in the convergence of all of Joseph's translation work, in the doctrinal and ecclesiastical coherence of the Restoration, and most tangibly in the existence of the Book of Mormon itself.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 37. ↩︎

  2. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 37. ↩︎

  3. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Abraham," p. 50. ↩︎

  4. Paul Mitchell, "Tangled Afterlives: The Mummies and Papyri of the Joseph Smith Collection," Expedition 58, no. 2 (Penn Museum, 2016), https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/tangled-afterlives/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. "The Book of Abraham," Times and Seasons 3, no. 9 (March 1, 1842): 704; reproduced in the canonical Pearl of Great Price. ↩︎

  6. Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid, eds., "Introduction to Revelations and Translations, Volume 4," in Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts (Joseph Smith Papers, Church Historian's Press, 2018), https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/intro/introduction-to-revelations-and-translations-volume-4. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. Lynne Watkins Jorgensen, "The Joseph Smith Papyri Affidavits and the Provenance of the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri," in The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: Cataloging Reference Materials (Brigham Young University, 1973); see also Walter L. Whipple, "An Analysis of the Textual Development of the Book of Abraham" (master's thesis, BYU, 1959), tracing the post-1856 collection's path through the St. Louis Museum and Wood's Museum in Chicago. ↩︎

  8. Hugh W. Nibley, "Phase One," Improvement Era (January 1968); reprinted as Hugh W. Nibley, "Phase One," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 99–105. ↩︎

  9. Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "What Egyptian Papyri Did Joseph Smith Possess?" BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/what-egyptian-papyri-did-joseph-smith-possess. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. Marc Coenen, "The Dating of the Papyri Joseph Smith I, X, and XI and Min Who Massacres His Enemies," in Egyptian Religion: The Last Thousand Years, ed. Willy Clarysse, Antoon Schoors, and Harco Willems (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 1103–1115. ↩︎

  11. Michael D. Rhodes, The Hor Book of Breathings: A Translation and Commentary (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2002). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. Klaus Baer, "The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1968): 109–134. ↩︎

  13. Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2011). ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. 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. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  15. Charlotte Haven, "A Girl's Letters from Nauvoo," Overland Monthly 16 (December 1890): 624. ↩︎

  16. Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past: From the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), 386. ↩︎

  17. William I. Appleby Journal, May 5, 1841, Joseph Smith Papers archive. ↩︎

  18. Hugh W. Nibley, "Phase One," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 101. ↩︎ ↩︎

  19. Kerry Muhlestein, "Papyri and Presumptions: A Careful Examination of the Eyewitness Accounts Associated with the Joseph Smith Papyri," Journal of Mormon History 42, no. 4 (October 2016): 31–50, https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jmh/article/42/4/31/222761/. See also the eyewitness-account compilation summarized at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_accounts_associated_with_the_Joseph_Smith_Papyri. ↩︎

  20. John Gee, "Some Puzzles from the Joseph Smith Papyri," FARMS Review 20, no. 1 (2008): 113–137; originally presented at the 2007 FAIR Conference, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2007-John-Gee.pdf. ↩︎ ↩︎

  21. 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/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  22. Andrew W. Cook, "Formulas and Facts: A Response to John Gee," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 45, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 1–10, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/formulas-and-facts-a-response-to-john-gee/. Cook reiterates that "the two formulas are completely equivalent. They are both exact expressions of an Archimedean spiral and they yield precisely the same results, if correctly applied." ↩︎

  23. "Notebook of Copied Egyptian Characters, circa Early July 1835," Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/notebook-of-copied-egyptian-characters-circa-early-july-1835/6. ↩︎

  24. Christopher C. Smith, "The Dependence of Abraham 1:1-3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar," John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 29 (2009): 38–54. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  25. Brian M. Hauglid, "'Translating an Alphabet to the Book of Abraham': Joseph Smith's Study of the Egyptian Language and His Translation of the Book of Abraham," in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, ed. Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020), https://www.academia.edu/45379569/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  26. Brian M. Hauglid, A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute, 2010), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/77/. ↩︎

  27. 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. ↩︎

  28. Terryl Givens with Brian M. Hauglid, The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism's Most Controversial Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎ ↩︎

  29. W.W. Phelps to Sally Phelps, May 26, 1835, with "A Specimen of some of the 'pure language'" on the verso. See Brian M. Hauglid, "The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian Project: A Knowledge of Hidden Languages," in Approaching Antiquity: Joseph Smith and the Ancient World, ed. Lincoln H. Blumell, Matthew J. Grey, and Andrew H. Hedges (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2015), https://rsc.byu.edu/approaching-antiquity-joseph-smith-ancient-world/book-abraham-egyptian-project-knowledge-hidden-languages. ↩︎

  30. Hauglid, "The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian Project," 2015 (cited above). ↩︎

  31. "Sample of Pure Language, between circa 4 and circa 20 March 1832," Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/sample-of-pure-language-circa-march-1832/1. ↩︎

  32. William J. Schryver, "The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, Part I" (FAIR Conference Presentation, August 2010), https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/august-2010/the-meaning-of-the-kirtland-egyptian-papers-part-i. Schryver's presentation has not been peer-reviewed; Hauglid (2020) does not accept Schryver's conclusion that the GAEL was constructed from a pre-existing Book of Abraham text. Schryver is one voice in the apologetic literature. ↩︎ ↩︎

  33. 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. Lindsay's review of JSP Volume 4 cites and discusses John Gee's character-mismatch analyses; on the count of GAEL characters with a clear connection to characters on the recovered papyri, Gee gives "only 4 (some say 7)" out of 62 in different treatments. The count is contested by Hauglid's reading of the documentary record. See also Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (2017). ↩︎

  34. Hugh Nibley, quoted in Hauglid, "The Book of Abraham and the Egyptian Project" (2015). ↩︎

  35. Expanded in V2.1: "1. Some textual relationship between the EA documents and Abraham 1:1–3 exists. 2. The direction of that relationship is contested. Schryver, Gee, and the cumulative case for Phelps's prior pure-language methodology suggest the EA documents derive from the pre-existing BoA text. Hauglid 2020 and Christopher Smith 2009 read the dependency in the opposite direction. 3. The dependency, even read in the most critical direction, is narrow — the first three verses of Abraham 1. It does not establish that the rest of the Book of Abraham (the remaining 60+ verses of chapter 1, plus chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5) was produced by the same character-by-character procedure. The remainder of the text shows no comparable dependency. 4. Neither reading explains the full production of the Book of Abraham. Even on the most critical reading, the rest of the text was produced by some other process — revelatory dictation, KJV-modeled production, or otherwise." This footnote carries the elaboration of the four-point summary moved from the V2.1 body of the "Honest acknowledgment" subsection of the KEP section. ↩︎

  36. Stephen O. Smoot, "Joseph Smith Jr. as a Translator: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 64 (2025), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol64/iss1/19/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  37. For overview see The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Book of Mormon Translation," Gospel Topics Essays (2013), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-translation?lang=eng. ↩︎

  38. Doctrine and Covenants 7; see Stephen O. Smoot interview, "How Did Joseph Smith Translate the Book of Abraham?" From the Desk, https://www.fromthedesk.org/how-did-joseph-smith-translate-the-book-of-abraham-smoot/. The Gospel Topics Essay on the BoA cites D&C 7 as a parallel revelatory-translation precedent (footnote 37). D&C 7 is a brief revelation about a parchment Joseph never possessed; the article cites it as a parallel for the revelatory aspect of Joseph's translation work, not as a direct structural analog to the BoA. ↩︎

  39. Stephen O. Smoot, "Did Joseph Smith Use a Seer Stone in the Translation of the Book of Abraham?" Religious Educator 23, no. 2 (2022): 64–107, https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-23-no-2-2022/did-joseph-smith-use-seer-stone-translation-book-abraham. Smoot argues that Joseph used the seer stone for the BoA translation in parallel with his use of it in producing the Book of Mormon. ↩︎ ↩︎

  40. Expanded in V2.1 across two body subsections ("What this lane addresses" and "What this lane does not address cleanly"). The lane sets aside strict catalyst (cannot accommodate Abraham 1:12/1:14 cross-references without strain), strict missing-scroll (Cook and Smith's Dialogue analysis raises a real difficulty for Hor-scroll-interior versions, though it does not address the Tshemmin scroll, the Scroll of Amenhotep, or the long rolls destroyed in 1871), and Semitic adaptation as free-standing (Barney's framework documents the genre-plausibility of finding Abrahamic content adjacent to Egyptian funerary vignettes but does not by itself explain BoA production). This footnote carries the methodology-explaining elaboration moved from the V2.1 body of the "What this lane addresses / does not address cleanly" subsections. ↩︎

  41. Kevin L. Barney, "The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources," in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, ed. John Gee and Brian M. Hauglid (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2005), https://scripturecentral.org/archive/books/book-chapter/facsimiles-and-semitic-adaptation-existing-sources. ↩︎ ↩︎

  42. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume III: The Late Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 125–151 ("The Setne stories"). The Setne tradition references writings "of which Thoth was the one who wrote it with his own hand" — a parallel to the "by his own hand upon papyrus" formula in the Book of Abraham heading. See also F. Ll. Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900) for the original critical edition. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  43. Wilford Woodruff, journal entry, February 19, 1842, in Wilford Woodruff's Journal, ed. Scott G. Kenney (Midvale, UT: Signature Books, 1983), 2:155. ↩︎

  44. Parley P. Pratt, "Editorial Remarks," Millennial Star 3, no. 4 (August 1842): 47. ↩︎

  45. Orson Pratt, in Journal of Discourses 20 (1879): 65 (preached October 1878). ↩︎

  46. Warren Parrish, letter to the editor, Painesville Republican, February 15, 1838 (letter dated February 5, 1838). Parrish was a disaffected former scribe at the time of writing. ↩︎

  47. Cleveland Whig, August 1835. Discussed in Smoot, "Did Joseph Smith Use a Seer Stone" (2022). The hostile reporter's wording is ambiguous; Smoot reads "spectacles" as referring to Joseph's seer stone, but the report itself is hostile and the inference is contested. ↩︎

  48. Joseph Smith returned the original Urim and Thummim instruments to Moroni in mid-1829, after the bulk of the Book of Mormon translation was complete. See Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 1: The Standard of Truth, 1815–1846 (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2018), ch. 5–6; cf. D&C 17 and Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 71. ↩︎

  49. Kathleen Flake, quoted in Smoot 2025 (cited above), 369: "Joseph did not think of himself as God's stenographer. Rather, he was an interpreting reader, and God the confirming authority." Smoot endorses the framing. ↩︎

  50. Robert K. Ritner, "'The Breathing Permit of Hor' Thirty-Four Years Later," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 91–119, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-breathing-permit-of-hor-thirty-four-years-later/. ↩︎

  51. Robert K. Ritner, "'Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham' — A Response," 2014 (originally circulated by Smith-Pettit Foundation); see also Mormon Stories interview, "Robert Ritner," episodes 1339–1341, https://www.mormonstories.org/robert-ritner/. ↩︎

  52. John S. Thompson, "'We May Not Understand Our Words': The Book of Abraham and the Concept of Translation in The Pearl of Greatest Price," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 41 (2020): 1–48, https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/we-may-not-understand-our-words-the-book-of-abraham-and-the-concept-of-translation-in-the-pearl-of-greatest-price/. ↩︎

  53. Brant A. Gardner, Engraven Upon Plates, Printed Upon Paper: Textual and Narrative Structures of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2023). Smoot 2025 explicitly draws on Gardner's compositional-layers methodology. ↩︎

  54. Kevin Christensen, "Eye of the Beholder, Law of the Harvest: Observations on the Book of Abraham," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 10 (2014): 175–238, https://cdn.interpreterfoundation.org/jnlpdf/christensen-v10-2014-pp175-238-PDF.pdf. ↩︎

  55. Dan Vogel, Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2021). ↩︎

  56. John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017). ↩︎

  57. For the Great Isaiah Scroll dating and significance, see Eugene Ulrich and Peter W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1.II: The Isaiah Scrolls (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXII; Oxford: Clarendon, 2010). For the Aleppo Codex and Codex Sinaiticus comparisons, see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), and Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩︎

  58. Stephen O. Smoot and John Gee, "By His Own Hand upon Papyrus," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/by-his-own-hand-upon-papyrus. ↩︎

  59. Sir Leonard Woolley, Alalakh: An Account of the Excavations at Tell Atchana in the Hatay, 1937–1949 (Oxford: Society of Antiquaries, 1955); E.L. Greenstein and David Marcus, "The Akkadian Inscription of Idrimi," Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 8 (1976): 59–96. ↩︎ ↩︎

  60. Sidney Smith, The Statue of Idri-mi (London: British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1949), the original critical edition of the Idrimi inscription. For an updated 21st-century treatment see Jacob Lauinger, "The Sacrifice of the Birds in the Idrimi Statue Inscription," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 65 (2013): 91–106. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  61. F. Ll. Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis: The Sethon of Herodotus and the Demotic Tales of Khamuas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900). ↩︎

  62. 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; John M. Lundquist, "Was Abraham at Ebla? A Cultural Background of the Book of Abraham," in Studies in Scripture, Volume 2: The Pearl of Great Price, ed. Robert L. Millet and Kent P. Jackson (Salt Lake City: Randall, 1985). ↩︎

  63. C.J. Gadd and L. Legrain, Royal Inscriptions (Ur Excavations, Texts I; London: British Museum / Joint Expedition of the British Museum and University of Pennsylvania, 1928). For the standardized academic citation see Douglas R. Frayne, Sargonic and Gutian Periods (2334–2113 BC) (RIME 2; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 132–134 (text 2.1.4.30). ↩︎

  64. 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). ↩︎

  65. E.H. Anderson and R.T. Haag, "Translation: The Apocalypse of Abraham," Improvement Era 1, no. 10 (August 1898) and 1, no. 11 (September 1898); G.H. Box and J.I. Landsman, The Apocalypse of Abraham (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918). For parallels see John A. Tvedtnes, Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001). ↩︎

  66. Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, "The Divine Council," BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022), https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-divine-council. For Ugaritic divine council scholarship see Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015). ↩︎

A faith-promoting resource for Latter-day Saints.

Copyright 2025-present