When a travelling Egyptian exhibit passed through Kirtland, Ohio in the 1830s, Joseph Smith encouraged followers to purchase some mummies and Egyptian scrolls. Did these contain the Book of Abraham? Historian Dan Vogel tells us more about these scrolls.
Dan: So Michael Chandler came into Kirtland, Ohio in late June 1835 or probably July, but about the 3rd of July, I think it is, Joseph Smith sees them. You have to pay to see them, so people are paying to see the mummies. Joseph Smith is interested in the papyri, but not the mummies. But Chandler doesn’t want to sell them separately, because he wants to sell everything and go home, probably. Joseph Smith arranges with–there’s like three parties that get together, one of them is him. But he has a problem paying, of course. $2400 is quite a lot to purchase all of those. He purchases them, and shortly thereafter, announces that there’s two scrolls. One scroll he identifies with the record of ancient Joseph, and another one with Abraham. The earliest account we have of that is a 19th of July. William W. Phelps, writes a letter to his wife, because he was in Missouri, and he came to Kirtland and he’s helping Oliver Cowdery with the printing. He’s also arranging the 1835 Doctrine & Covenants, and he’s Joseph Smith’s scribe, and he works in Joseph Smith’s office. He and his son are staying with Joseph Smith. So he writes. His wife mentioned that no one could read these writings and that Joseph Smith has identified them as the writings of Abraham and ancient Joseph.
But was it the Book of Abraham?
Dan: They were discovered in Thebes, Egypt. They found a huge catacomb of mummies and mummies usually have three kinds of records, actually. They could have a Book of Breathings or a breathing permit, on their chest, usually in their crossed arms, sitting there. There was a Book of the Dead, or hypoocephalus, that round Facsimile II, under the head to hold the body heat. The breathing permit is to breathe in the next life. So, there were 11 mummies that made their way to America, and somehow, this Michael Chandler got a hold of them.
The papyrus fragments believed to contain the Book of Abraham were lost for decades in the Great Chicago Fire. What happened to them? Are some still lost? Historian Dan Vogel will answer these questions.
GT: So I guess in a nutshell, the Hugh Nibley line of reasoning is we’ve got these Kirtland Egyptian papers. They don’t match. The translation is incorrect from what we have. We lost it in the Great Chicago Fire. But there was something that was lost, which I guess, could we assume that that’s the book of Joseph that was lost in Chicago?
Dan: No, we have the book of Joseph, which is the Ta-Sherit-Min papyrus, which is part of the ones that are chopped up onto the thick paper that we have.
GT Those are the Joseph scrolls?
Dan That was identified as Joseph. In December of 1835, Oliver Cowdery, in the Messenger and Advocate described that papyrus including the Pillar of Enoch; also, the three in one God. There’s a little drawing of three figures.
So we lost the part that was intact, the two feet. We have one foot of the beginning part, facsimile one, and the next one, and then another fragment. Then there was two more feet, probably, that were missing, that included facsimile three. And the reason why we know that is because when Emma sold the papyri to Combs, and then Combs sold part of it to the St. Louis Museum, there was an Egyptologist there. I’m not remembering his name right off. But he gave a description of the papyri for the museum’s catalog. And in there he mentioned facsimile three.
GT: So, have we lost anything, then?
Dan: The name Osiris was on it, because the name Osiris is on this.
GT: So that’s the only piece that we lost?
Dan: Or that we know of; that we can exactly say. We don’t know.
GT: But, we have essentially, what Joseph said was the entire Book of Abraham, the entire Book of Joseph. We have those that we can still look at today. But those are really the Hor scroll and the Book of Breathing scroll. Is that correct?
Dan: Right. So, we don’t have the Amenhotep fragments. They could have been there. Facsimile two, the hypoocephalus, the round one was already pretty damaged, because they made a drawing of it and there’s parts missing, and Joseph Smith had Headlock fill in the missing part to make it look nice and neat. I don’t think he’s being tricky. I just think they’re just too fussy about it looking good. But, so those could have been among the ones that were burned, or they could have just totally fragmented and that’s why they had them copy parts into these books.
Historian Dan Vogel concluded his discussion on the Book of Abraham. He tells why he thinks some apologetic arguments about the Book of Abraham just aren’t valid.
Dan: [Hugh] Nibley tried to say, and the current apologists repeat it, that, “Oh, these characters in the column is just an exotic way of organizing all three documents, so that they know where to go to each paragraph, that’s the same.” The problem with that is that they really don’t begin each paragraph. They begin each part of the translation.
When you look really close, it’s not a paragraph where each character appears. Sometimes the paragraphs are split right in the middle of a sentence and another character, or there’s a fragment of a sentence, just about five words to a character. So they’re dividing the text up to line up with the characters. They’re not arbitrarily put in there for decoration or an exotic way of organizing the paragraphs. It’s very obvious. At the top of the third translation of the Book of Abraham, the one that has three verses in the handwriting of W. W. Phelps. At the top says, “Translation of records have been found in the catacombs of Egypt.” And in the other column “character.” Then Phelps takes the first character and numbers it one, the second character he numbers it two. Then over here he underlines, Chaldea one. Abraham two.
Then there’s a third character he wrote, which is a real elaborate one that is dissected in the alphabet. But it doesn’t number it, because it has a lot of parts. The other two just have one part. This one has a lot of parts. You read all over the place trying to match it up. But the translation next to it, if you look in the grammar, and you find that character, that’s the translation given that character.
It seems that no matter your opinion on the Book of Abraham, most scholars seem to agree that the translation does not match the characters on the scrolls. What are your thoughts on the Book of Abraham?
Wheat & Tares 
Does anyone know how much of the “seer stone” was used in the work of the translation of the BoA?
Wikipedia sites “Quinn, D. Michael (1998), Early Mormonism and the Magic World View ” to say that a stone was used for a portion of the BoA.
I’ve also read that Joseph used a white stone to translate it.
“What are your thoughts on the Book of Abraham?”
Its explanation of the concept of a continuum from great to small is brilliant, with God at the end that is greatest and amoeba probably at the other end. That’s an axis of greatness. Not mentioned but implied is an orthogonal axis of goodness, good versus evil. One person can be good and great, another can be evil and great, and so on.
Concepts of pre-existence emanate largely from the Book of Abraham. That there is a pre-existence is pretty well established, at least to me, since my daughter chose her name before she was born. What is unclear is how old is her spirit but I estimate very old indeed. When she was four years old I described her as four going on four million.
Having neither expertise in Egyptian languages nor holding the papyrus, I have decided to not decide the issue of factual accuracy of the translation. I allow for the possibility that it is not an accurate translation, or not a translation at all, or any of several other possibilities. It’s yet another thing for people to get exercised over when they’ve already decided to get exercised. But if you go down that road, all of Christianity is hardly any better established. No contemporaneous records AT ALL of Jesus Christ’s mortal existence. That’s incredible! Not very omnipotent; which suggests it is likely part of the plan.
I would be concerned if Joseph Smith fabricated the Book of Abraham out of the imagination of his mind; but if so, it is still brilliant and solves a few important theological dilemmas such as “why is there evil” and why are people not equal? A perfect, omnipotent God ought to be able to create perfect anythings.
I asked Dan about if the seer stone was used for Book of Abraham, and he said it was unclear.
Jeff Lindsay responds to Dan better than I certainly can:
https://mormanity.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-twin-book-of-abraham-manuscripts-do.html
The two ought to be read together, and then the reader can make up their minds.
“Its explanation of the concept of a continuum from great to small is brilliant…”
The “farm-boy-couldn’t-have-possibly-written-it” arguments, as bad as they are, do actually hold quite a bit firmer ground for the Book of Mormon (although not too much). Even if you believe that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, the book’s existence is quite amazing. But these arguments for the Book of Abraham are ridiculous. Please, is the Book of Abraham really all that amazing?
“But if you go down that road, all of Christianity is hardly any better established. No contemporaneous records AT ALL of Jesus Christ’s mortal existence.”
I simply cannot allow such egregious false equivalence to go unchallenged. Basically you’re saying that accepting the Book of Abraham to be historically true is the same as accepting Jesus to have existed. Please, spare me such ridiculous logic. Accepting a text that was brought about by some 19th-century visionary claiming to actually translate ancient Egyptian papyri (which Egyptologists later completely disproved) as the true words of Abraham is the same thing as accepting to be true the existence of a Roman-era Palestinian religious leader who wrote no texts himself, but whose followers wrote extensively about. Plus, Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions Jesus, serving as an independent source of the existence of some religious figure named Jesus who gained a name in Roman Palestine. So you’re right, believing in the mere existence of Jesus requires the same great leap of faith as believing in the historicity of a text purported to be Abraham’s words based on a debunked translation made in the 19th century. What planet do you live on?
John W writes “is the Book of Abraham really all that amazing?”
Yes, no, maybe so. Judgment is ALWAYS in the mind of the beholder and your beholding is different than my beholding.
“Basically you’re saying that accepting the Book of Abraham to be historically true is the same as accepting Jesus to have existed.”
What a strange conclusion! But yes, in a way that is correct. Christianity must be accepted on faith, so must the Book of Mormon be accepted on faith, so must be the Book of Abraham accepted on faith. You are free to choose one and ignore the others or any mix of what you believe and disbelieve.
If the city of Zarahemla was discovered would it prove the existence and nature of God? No. It would be a fine thing but no more faith promoting than was finding Jericho.
“What planet do you live on?”
It’s called DIRT. 😉
If it were proven that Joseph Smith invented the Book of Abraham, whole cloth fabrication not even a revelation, what impact would that have on me? I think very little. I’d probably reference the Book of Abraham less often. In my beholding, Joseph Smith isn’t all that important to the Gospel of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. If not him then someone else. What matters *is* the Gospel of God and the Kingdom of Heaven or whatever we are calling it this year.
I have responded to Jeff Lindsay’s critique. He only tried to overcome the evidence for Parrish and Williams writing Abraham 1:4-2:2 from Joseph Smith’s dictation simultaneously in November 1835. The evidence is that several times both make the same inline corrections, which can’t be explained as independent copying of an existing document. Gee and Muhlestein want the entire Book of Abraham to exist prior to the creation of the Egyptian Alphabets and bound Grammar to support their theory that W. W. Phelps (rather than Joseph Smith) created the Alphabets and Grammar from Joseph Smith’s translation. Lindsay speculates that Parrish was copying from an existing text while at the same time reading it out loud so that Williams could make another copy. This is nothing but an ad hoc invention to escape clear evidence against the translation-first theory. There is no evidence for such a manuscript existing. Why would Parrish and Williams begin at Abr. 1:4? Obviously they were continuing where Phelps had ended in the translation book. Parrish then copied his and Williams’ transcriptions with some slight editing into the translation book following Phelps’ short entry. He then wrote into the book from JS’s dictation Abra. 2:7-18. When Willard Richards created a printer’s copy in Nauvoo in 1842, he used the translation book, rather than Gee’s hypothesized text.
The scenario Jeff describes with Parrish reading out loud and copying at the same time isn’t born out by the physical evidence. JS’s journal for 19 November 1835 records that he was with Parrish and Williams and then it states that translating was done on that and the following day. This is the most likely time when the Parrish and Williams documents were created. We know JS dictated his texts to scribes. We have no evidence for the scenario Lindsay describes.
I should have written I live on JASOOM.
Dan Vogel writes “the evidence for Parrish and Williams writing Abraham 1:4-2:2 from Joseph Smith’s dictation simultaneously…”
Okay, I’ll admit that’s interesting! I do like well-sourced history.
“What a strange conclusion! But yes, in a way that is correct. Christianity must be accepted on faith, so must the Book of Mormon be accepted on faith, so must be the Book of Abraham accepted on faith. You are free to choose one and ignore the others or any mix of what you believe and disbelieve.”
According to your reasoning, the sacredness of suicide bombings against infidels and God’s reward of 72 virgins in the afterlife for so doing is accepted on faith. The efficacy of witch doctors performing child sacrifice to satisfy the demands of evil spirits in order to help people have business success (this is a real thing by the way, there have been cases in Kenya and Uganda) is also accepted on faith. Pray tell. What truth claims can’t you accept on faith (at least in the way you describe it)? In your mind, there is no gradation or difference between possibility and probability. You’re like the guy in Dumb and Dumber whose reaction to a girl telling him that there is a one in a million chance that they’ll get together is “so you’re saying there is a chance.”
And oh yes, believing in the existence of ancient city of Jericho (even before archaeological findings) and Zarahemla is totally the same thing. Because, you know, there is no difference between the mounds of evidence showing ancient Hebrews to have been making written records of traditional beliefs and religious stories dating back to the 3rd century BCE in and around the area of ancient Palestine (thus raising the plausibility that the people and places they spoke of were actually historical) and the practically zero evidence that there was an ancient Hebrew diaspora in the Americas the only evidence for which we have is a 19th-century visionary claiming to find and translate ancient plates from a language he did not know and for which we have no record. But of course none of it matters after all (even though I know you would be jumping and squealing like a giddy school girl at the sight of the ever-so-slightest finding that could be contorted into evidence), because we have faith.
John W asks “What truth claims can’t you accept on faith”
None. All claims are accepted on faith, or rejected on faith, and it remains on faith until you have tested it to your satisfaction.
“In your mind, there is no gradation or difference between possibility and probability.”
They aren’t in the same category. “Possibility” is qualitative, a Boolean value of either True or False; and only True or False.
Probability is quantitative; a value ranging typically from zero (where Possibilityh==False) to one. Any value of probability other than zero means possibility is “true”.