Justified True Belief

(P1) The Book of Abraham is Joseph Smith's most testable translation claim: he specified the source material, the author, and the content, making it uniquely vulnerable to physical verification. + Unlike the Book of Mormon, whose golden plates conveniently disappeared, the papyri Smith used to produce the Book of Abraham survived. That makes this argument different in kind from all the others: it is not a matter of interpreting prophecy or weighing competing testimonies. It is a matter of comparing a specific claimed translation against the original source document that still exists. (1) Smith's claim was explicit and specific. - The heading of the Book of Abraham, still printed in every LDS edition of the Pearl of Great Price, reads: "A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus." - This is not a vague claim to inspiration. It is a factual claim about a physical object: this papyrus was written by Abraham himself. The text it contains is Abraham's own writings. Joseph Smith translated it. - Each of these three claims, the authorship, the content, and the accuracy of the translation, is independently testable. (2) The papyri were purchased in 1835 from a traveling mummy exhibition. - In June 1835, a showman named Michael Chandler arrived in Kirtland, Ohio with a collection of Egyptian mummies and papyrus scrolls excavated from tombs near Thebes. Smith and other Latter-day Saints purchased the collection. - Smith immediately announced that one of the scrolls contained "the writings of Abraham." He began translating it in July 1835, also producing a document called the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL), in which he assigned English meanings to Egyptian characters. - The papyri were thought lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In 1966, eleven papyrus fragments from Smith's original collection were discovered in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1967 the museum transferred them to the LDS Church, which published them in its magazine the following year. - The physical source material for the Book of Abraham now exists, was professionally authenticated, and has been examined by Egyptologists around the world.

(P2) Every specific, testable claim Smith made about the papyri has been conclusively refuted by Egyptology, including by LDS scholars, and the LDS Church's own official essay now concedes the core problems. + (1) What the papyri actually are. - The recovered fragments are standard Egyptian funerary documents, specifically a copy of the Breathing Permit of Hor (also called the Book of Breathings), prepared for a deceased Theban priest named Hor, son of Usirwer. They date to approximately the first century AD, roughly 2,000 years after Abraham would have lived. - The papyrus was not written by Abraham. It does not mention Abraham. It has nothing to do with Abraham. The LDS Church's own Gospel Topics Essay (2014) acknowledges: "None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham." - The same essay further states: "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." This concession comes directly from the Church itself. (2) The three facsimiles, examined and refuted. - Smith published three drawings from the papyri as Facsimiles 1, 2, and 3 inside the Book of Abraham, each with detailed explanations of what the figures represent. Every one of these explanations has been contradicted by Egyptological analysis. - Facsimile 1: Smith identified the scene as Abraham fastened upon an altar, about to be sacrificed by an idolatrous priest. Every Egyptologist who has examined it identifies it as a standard embalming or resurrection scene from the Book of Breathings: the god Anubis (jackal-headed) tending to the body of the deceased Hor on a funerary bier. Smith misidentified the corpse as Abraham, the jackal-headed Anubis as a false priest, and the funeral vessels beneath the couch as the gods Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh. None of these identifications correspond to anything in Egyptian religion or any known mythology. - Facsimile 2: Smith identified this as a representation of celestial astronomy, assigning figures to concepts like "the governing ones" and "the residence of God." Egyptologists identify it as a hypocephalus, a disk-shaped funerary amulet placed under the head of the mummy Sheshonq to protect him in the afterlife. The figures on it are standard Egyptian mythological figures whose identities are labeled in hieroglyphs that say nothing resembling what Smith claimed. - Facsimile 3: Smith identified the scene as Abraham sitting upon Pharaoh's throne, teaching astronomy to the Egyptian court. Egyptologists identify it as the presentation of the deceased Hor before Osiris, the god of the dead. The enthroned figure Smith called Abraham is Osiris. The figure Smith identified as Pharaoh is the goddess Isis. The figure Smith called the waiter is the goddess Maat. The jackal-headed figure he identified as a slave is the god Anubis. The hieroglyphs at the bottom of the scene identify these figures by their correct Egyptian names. (3) The Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language: Smith's translation method exposed. - Alongside the Book of Abraham, Smith produced the GAEL, a document in which he assigned English meanings to Egyptian hieratic characters, effectively creating what he presented as an Egyptian-to-English grammar. - When Egyptologists examined the GAEL, the verdict was unambiguous. Egyptologist I. E. S. Edwards of the British Museum described it as "largely a piece of imagination and lacking in any kind of scientific value." Even Hugh Nibley, one of Mormonism's foremost apologists, called it "of no practical value whatever." - The GAEL shows Smith assigning entire paragraphs of English text to single Egyptian characters. In one documented example, a hieratic character that means nothing more than the letter "w" in Egyptian was assigned by Smith a complex meaning referencing the patriarch Abraham. This is not a gap in translation or a difference of scholarly interpretation. It is a wholesale fabrication of meaning from symbols whose actual content is independently verified. (4) The Kirtland Egyptian Papers connect the surviving fragments directly to the Book of Abraham text. - A collection of documents known as the Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP), produced during the same period as the translation and in the handwriting of Smith's own scribes, show Egyptian characters from the surviving fragments arranged alongside paragraphs of the English Book of Abraham text. These documents connect the existing papyri, the ones that turned out to be funerary documents, to the Book of Abraham translation. - In 2019 the LDS Church's own Joseph Smith Papers project stated it is "clear that Joseph Smith and/or his clerks associated the characters from the surviving Breathing Permit of Hor papyri with the English Book of Abraham text." - The source document is a pagan Egyptian funerary text for a dead priest named Hor. The claimed translation is the writings of Abraham the patriarch. No scholar working from the actual Egyptian content would arrive at the Book of Abraham. The gap between what the document says and what Smith claimed it says is total.

(C) Therefore, the Book of Abraham is not a translation of ancient scripture written by Abraham. It is a fabrication built on a pagan Egyptian funerary document, and every testable element of Smith's translation claim has been refuted by the physical evidence. + (1) This is the most falsifiable and most thoroughly falsified of Smith's claims. - With the Book of Mormon, apologists can always appeal to the missing golden plates. With failed prophecies, apologists can argue about conditionality and interpretation. With the Book of Abraham there is no such escape. The source document exists. It has been translated by scholars with no stake in the outcome. It is a funerary text for a man named Hor. It has nothing to do with Abraham. - The LDS Church's own essay concedes the central point: the characters do not match the translation. That concession, made by the institution whose authority depends on Smith being a true prophet, is the most important admission in this entire argument. (2) The implications cascade through all of Mormonism. - If Smith could not translate Egyptian, the same prophetic gift of translation he claimed to possess for the Book of Mormon is called into question. The methods differed in their mechanics, but both rested on exactly one source of verification: Smith's own unverifiable claim to divine inspiration. If that claim is demonstrably false for the Book of Abraham, for which we have the physical source document, it cannot simply be assumed true for the Book of Mormon, for which the plates have conveniently disappeared. Both stand or fall on the credibility of the same man claiming the same gift. - The Book of Abraham also contains distinctive LDS doctrines not found in the Bible or the Book of Mormon, including the plurality of gods, the pre-existence of souls, and the concept that God organized existing matter rather than creating ex nihilo. If the Book of Abraham is fraudulent, these doctrines lose their only scriptural foundation. (3) The response of LDS leadership has been telling. - When BBC journalist John Sweeney pressed LDS Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland on the Book of Abraham discrepancy in his 2012 documentary, Holland replied: "What got translated got translated into the word of God. The vehicle for that, I do not understand and don't claim to know and know no Egyptian." - This is a remarkable concession from a sitting apostle of a church that sustains its leaders as prophets, seers, and revelators. The man whose title includes "seer" responds to a question about his church's founding scripture by saying he knows nothing about Egyptian and does not understand the vehicle of translation. That is not the confidence of a man whose institution can account for the evidence. See also: • Mormonism: Fraudulent Prophetic Claims • Mormonism: Failed Prophecies

LDS Gospel Topics Essay, "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham." ChurchofJesusChrist.org, 2014. Joseph Smith Papers Project, Introduction to Book of Abraham Manuscripts (2019). Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011. Klaus Baer, "The Breathing Permit of Hor: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1968): 109-134. (Baer was Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute; he personally examined the papyri and his translation remains the foundational scholarly analysis. His comments on the GAEL appear throughout this volume and in his associated correspondence with LDS scholars in the same period.) Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975. (Published by the LDS Church's own press. Nibley's admission that the GAEL is "of no practical value whatever" appears in his extended engagement with the papyri in this volume, making it an internally LDS-sourced concession.) Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011. (Covers all three facsimiles in full; Ritner's translations are cross-referenced against the Kirtland Egyptian Papers. His methodology follows Baer's 1968 framework and incorporates thirty additional years of Egyptological advance.) Brian M. Hauglid, A Textual History of the Book of Abraham. Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2011. (Documents the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and their connection to the surviving fragments; published by BYU's own research institute.) Jeffrey R. Holland, interview with John Sweeney, BBC documentary The Mormon Candidate, March 2012.

+ The surviving papyrus fragments are not the source of the Book of Abraham. Smith translated from a longer scroll that was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The existing fragments are funerary documents, but the Book of Abraham came from a different, now-lost section of the collection.

1. The missing scroll theory was invented after the fragments were translated, not before. For over a century, the LDS Church and its leaders described the Book of Abraham straightforwardly as a translation of the papyri Smith purchased. No one proposed a "missing scroll" theory during Smith's lifetime, during the decades when the papyri were on display in Nauvoo, or during the century they were thought lost. The theory appeared only after the fragments were recovered in 1966 and translated as funerary documents. A hypothesis adopted specifically to insulate a prior belief from new disconfirming evidence is not a historical argument. It is motivated reasoning. 2. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers directly link the surviving fragments to the Book of Abraham text. The KEP, produced in Smith's own time in the handwriting of his scribes, show Egyptian characters from the surviving Breathing Permit of Hor arranged alongside paragraphs of the English Book of Abraham. This is contemporaneous documentary evidence, not post-hoc speculation. The LDS Church's own Joseph Smith Papers project stated in 2019 that it is "clear that Joseph Smith and/or his clerks associated the characters from the surviving Breathing Permit of Hor papyri with the English Book of Abraham text." The Church's flagship archive has confirmed the connection its apologists deny. 3. Even if a missing scroll existed, the facsimile interpretations still fail. The three facsimiles Smith drew, labeled, and published as part of the Book of Abraham are from the surviving fragments, not from any hypothetically missing scroll. Facsimile 1 is JSP I, which we have. The surviving fragments are the physical source of the published illustrations. Smith's explanations of those specific, existing images have been examined by Egyptologists and found to be completely wrong in every identifiable detail. The missing scroll theory rescues nothing about the facsimiles, which remain falsified regardless of what any lost papyrus might have contained.

+ Smith did not necessarily perform a word-for-word translation. He may have used the papyri as a catalyst or mnemonic device that allowed God to reveal the Book of Abraham by inspiration. The word "translation" in Smith's context meant something broader than a linguistic decoding.

1. Smith's own heading rules out the catalyst interpretation. The Book of Abraham is subtitled "A Translation of some ancient Records... the writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus." Smith did not say "A revelation received while meditating on papyri" or "A spiritual impression prompted by an Egyptian scroll." He said translation of a specific record written by a specific person. The catalyst theory requires redefining the plain meaning of the word Smith himself chose to describe what he was doing. 2. The catalyst theory makes the Book of Abraham unverifiable by design. If Smith could receive any content by revelation regardless of what the papyrus actually said, then there is no possible evidence that could falsify the Book of Abraham. The papyrus could be a grocery list, a tax receipt, or a child's doodle, and Smith could still claim God revealed Abraham's writings through it. A theory that cannot in principle be falsified is not a historical claim. It is a theological refuge constructed specifically to make the evidence irrelevant. This is a significant departure from Smith's own framing, and it was adopted only after the papyri proved to contain nothing related to Abraham. 3. The catalyst theory is not how the Church presented this for 180 years. Church leadership described the Book of Abraham as "translated by the Prophet from a papyrus record taken from the catacombs of Egypt" throughout its entire institutional history until the papyri reappeared. The catalyst theory was not a position held by Smith, by Brigham Young, by any nineteenth-century LDS leader, or by the Church as an institution until the physical evidence made the traditional position untenable. Adopting a new theory of "translation" only after the old one is refuted by physical evidence is not a principled theological development. It is an accommodation to unwelcome facts. 4. The catalyst theory destroys the doctrinal authority of the Book of Abraham from the inside. This is the point LDS apologists rarely follow through on. If the content of the Book of Abraham came by free divine revelation rather than from Abraham's actual papyrus, then the distinctive doctrines that exist only in the Book of Abraham originate with Joseph Smith's own mind and inspiration, not with the ancient patriarch. The Book of Abraham is the only LDS scriptural source for several of Mormonism's most distinctive theological claims: the plurality of gods (Abraham 4-5), the pre-mortal existence of souls (Abraham 3:22-23), the concept that God organized existing matter rather than creating ex nihilo (Abraham 4:1), and the Kolob cosmology. If the catalyst theory is correct, every one of these doctrines rests on Joseph Smith's personal revelation rather than on ancient Abrahamic scripture. The apologist who adopts the catalyst theory to rescue the Book of Abraham has, in the same motion, severed its doctrinal claims from their only claimed ancient foundation.

+ Egyptology is not a perfect science. Scholars disagree about interpretations, and our understanding of ancient Egyptian develops over time. It is arrogant to assume modern Egyptologists have definitively closed the question on what these ancient documents mean.

1. There is no meaningful scholarly disagreement on the basic content of these documents. Egyptologists do debate nuances of translation, iconographic symbolism, and ritual context. They do not debate whether the Breathing Permit of Hor is a document about Abraham. The papyrus opens with a preamble addressed to the deceased Hor, names Hor's father Usirwer, calls on the gods of the Egyptian underworld, and follows the standard liturgical structure of the Book of Breathings found in dozens of other known examples. Abraham's name is not in the text. This is not a contested interpretation. It is a basic reading of a document type that Egyptologists have encountered nearly thirty times in their field. 2. The objection proves too much. If the possibility of scholarly error is sufficient to keep the Book of Abraham credible, the same logic would require keeping alive every other disputed translation claim in history. We accept that the Rosetta Stone was correctly deciphered. We accept that Linear B turned out to be an early form of Greek. We accept that Dead Sea Scrolls were correctly identified as Jewish scripture. In each case, independent scholars working from the same physical evidence reached the same conclusions. The same is true of the Joseph Smith Papyri: Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists reached the same conclusion. The LDS Church's own essay acknowledges this agreement. Invoking the theoretical fallibility of scholars does not change a finding that crosses ideological lines. 3. The Church itself concedes the Egyptological verdict. The LDS Gospel Topics Essay does not claim Egyptologists are wrong about the papyri. It states explicitly that "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." The Church's response is not to dispute the Egyptological reading but to propose alternative theories of translation that sidestep it. Arguing that Egyptologists might be wrong is a position the Church itself has not taken.

+ Even if the papyri are funerary documents, the Book of Abraham contains genuine ancient details Joseph Smith could not have known in 1835: accurate Egyptian cosmological concepts, the name Kolob paralleling Egyptian astronomical terminology, details about Abraham's life consistent with ancient Near Eastern culture, and pre-mortal soul theology with Egyptian parallels. These would be impossible for an uneducated 19th-century farm boy to fabricate. Hugh Nibley and other LDS scholars have documented these parallels extensively.

1. Thematic parallels between two bodies of ancient literature are not evidence of translation. The standard being proposed here is: if any content in the Book of Abraham resembles something from the ancient world, Smith must have had genuine access to ancient knowledge. But this standard would validate almost any religious text set in an ancient context. The question is not whether the Book of Abraham contains ideas that also appear in ancient Egyptian or Near Eastern sources. The question is whether Smith translated those ideas from the papyrus he claimed to translate. The Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the surviving fragments show he did not. A man can write a novel set in ancient Rome that contains accurate details about Roman culture without having translated a genuine Roman manuscript. Thematic resonance with antiquity is not proof of translation. 2. The parallels Nibley documented are often inexact, debated, or common to the broader ancient world. Hugh Nibley spent decades building the case for authentic ancient content in the Book of Abraham. His scholarship is serious and should be engaged seriously. But critics of his work, including Egyptologist Robert Ritner and historian Edward Ashment, have documented consistently that Nibley's parallels frequently involve: (a) concepts broad enough to appear in any ancient Near Eastern religious tradition; (b) Egyptian material from periods centuries removed from Abraham's era; (c) interpretive leaps that require assuming the conclusion in order to find the parallel; and (d) parallels that, when examined closely, fit standard Egyptian funerary theology better than they fit Abrahamic religion. Even granting that some parallels are genuine, a handful of accurate cultural details does not authenticate a text. The presence of some true details in a fabricated account is expected, not surprising. 3. The facsimile problem is not rescued by thematic parallels, and it is the decisive test. Smith did not merely claim that the Book of Abraham contains ideas consistent with ancient Egypt. He published three specific drawings from the papyri, labeled every figure in them with named identifications, and presented those identifications as translation. The hieroglyphs on Facsimile 3 name the figures directly. Smith's identification of those labeled figures is wrong in every case that can be checked. If Smith's claimed prophetic gift of translation failed at the level of reading labeled images whose content is specified in the document itself, the argument that he compensated by receiving accurate thematic content through some other channel requires us to believe that God corrected the failure of Smith's translation gift through inspiration, while never correcting the specific translated identifications that are demonstrably false. That is not a coherent account of how divine translation works.

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