I am trying to remember a story I read somewhere about how someone used to sepia prints in the 1968 Era to claim the newly rediscovered papyri was not what was described in some of the early contemporary accounts of the papyri because no red ink could be seen on the sepia copies. The person making this claim did not realize these were sepia copies and not color prints.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Are you thinking of this?

http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... hp?p=89262

Gee.

John Gee.

No that link is referring to something else entirely.

When Charles Larsen published his book back in the 90's the apologists jumped all over it, attacking every little point. One of their pet peeves was his claim that he was the first to publish the papyri in color. They claimed that the Church published them in an Ensign issue back in 1967. Thus, Larsen was an anti-Mormon liar who couldn't be trusted, etc.

But in reality that photo was not color, it was sepia.

The sepia photos also made it difficult to see the rubrics (red ink) which was a key point for Hugh Nibley who argued that the historic description of the Book of Abraham included rubrics, and since there were no rubrics in the extant papyri, then logic dictates that we do not have the papyri used to produce the Book of Abraham.

Of course Nibley knew full well that the extant papyri contained rubrics, but he though he could hide this fact from the public because at the time, no color photos were available and there was no indication that color photos would ever be available.

He also conflated two descriptions of the papyri to argue that the Book of Abraham contained rubrics when in fact the description points to the Book of Joseph containing rubrics. The context of the description says that among the two rolls, the one that was in bad condition without rubrics, was the sources for the Book of Abraham. This fits well with what we have today in the Book of Hor.