Translation: I consistently get thoroughly spanked in any debate here because I don't have the advantage of a "faithful" moderator to censor my opponents' words, so I am going to an echo chamber filled with fawning fanatics who will applaud my apologetic aspirations.

Why, Buffalo! Are you trying to imply something?

Yeah, Buffalo pretty much nailed that one.

Basically, I'm calling him a self-important, intellectually-impotent, Kool-Aid drinking douchebag -- in my own subtle way. :p

The circle remains unbroken ... all you need now is for The Dude to show up with his rug, a cold case, and a box of crackers.

Say, that is subtle.

Hello,

Mr. William "Gookie Cookie" Schryver is never one to shy away from male maturbatory fantasies.

V/R
Dr. Cam

Well, here is a representation that Schryver will no doubt consider a misrepresentation. Maybe he can post a clarification? Or maybe he can't.

It seems obvious that the second image below is very likely to represent a complete state of an image very closely related to the first. That makes it probable that the original image on the Joseph Smith papyrus was of Osiris with erect penis (as part of a well-known story about the begetting of Horus on Isis) attended by a jackal-headed Anubis, rather than of Abraham being sacrificed by a knife-wielding human-headed priest, as Joseph Smith imagined.

Perhaps this view is an old anti-Mormon chestnut that has been multiply refuted ... but the longer Schryver takes to give a reference to one of those refutations, the more the readers of this board, not all of whom are non-TBM critics, will (no doubt falsely) suspect that there is no refutation available.

Testimonies can be put at risk that way. Could a man with an answer to this anti-Mormon canard stay silent and still be true to his priesthood?

(Edited to add: Heck, I'd even settle for a reference to a detailed refutation from Nomad, if Schryver doesn't feel able to breath the polluted air here any more. Now how easy can I make it?)

Chap, My Dedicated Adversary:

I tell you what, I'll say just one thing about your theory, and then I must take my leave for the time being.

The thing Lanny Bell confirmed (and for which there is forensic evidence that I have identified on the original papyrus fragment in question) is that the supine figure on the lion couch had two hands raised. This indicates that the person on the couch is alive, and there would have been no hawk as is often found above the extended phallus. Neither would the person have been ithyphallic.

Bell recognized this fact, and that is part of the reason his proposed reconstruction has Anubis holding a cup.

More this deponent saith not ...

QFT. On which we may reasonably observe:

1. Anyone who wants to read Lanny Bell's arguments for themselves can find a link to download his paper via this site (see under the picture of the reconstructed vignette. It is notable that Lanny Bell, while he thinks the figure may have had two arms raised, does not at any point suggest that this is a human being who has not yet died: his arguments all assume either a resurrecting Osiris or a resurrecting human tomb occupant. None of the many figures whose images he refers to are a living person menaced with death by a knife-wielding attendant with a human head. It's good old jackal-headed Anubis as per usual, maybe with a cup, maybe just stretching out an arm or arms.

2. Assuming it to be the case that we could be assured that the figure on the Smith papyrus had two arms raised instead of the one on the Dendera relief, it was Schryver himself who told us that we should not expect all related vignettes to be identical. Here for instance is an ithyphallic Osiris on a couch without the Isis in hawk form, from Philae:



Can anyone locate any complete scene with an unmummified leg-splayed figure on the couch that is not identified by competent Egyptologists with a resurrecting Osiris, or a human tomb-occupant imitating him, hawk or no hawk?

3. Even supposing that the figure did have two arms raised instead of one, Schryver's notion that this means "that the person on the couch is alive" (and hence could be Abraham, not Osiris?) is bizarre. How does that follow? If Osiris is (in the sense implied by Schryver) not 'alive', but can still have one arm up, why couldn't he have two arms up and be as non-alive as ever?

Frankly, this response of Schryver makes little sense. Maybe Nomad can do better.

Chap, don't let your lying eyes deceive you into questioning Will's unsupported claims. It will only end in pain and shame for you. Joseph Smith and some Hellenistic Jew living in Alexandria by Egypt were able to see that the priest Nosferatu tried to cut into Abraham as he was waking up with a little morning wood. How can you deny it?

I feel inspired to offer my own interpretation of this famous facsimile:



Abraham: "Dear God, why didn't you have me get circumcised at eight days old? That is one f*****g huge knife! Is this going to hurt like a mother or what? Is that bird about to s*** on my bald head? NOOOOOOO!!!!"

Priest: "Hold still you little bitch, or I might whack your pecker clean off!"

LOL! You win the thread, if not the internets!

Something tells me you don't understand the meaning of the phrase.

So I go away for a day and all hell breaks loose. Sorry I missed out.

I don't think the problem is with Schryver's response, and I doubt I can do better than he already has. Exmormons always have a mind set that sets unreasonable demands for the "proof" of any of Mormonism's claims. For instance, I can't count how many times I have read an apostate post that suggested (in so many words) that they wouldn't believe in the Book of Mormon unless Moroni himself appeared on TV with the plates in hand, handed them over to non-Mormon researchers at a prestigious university, who then would decipher them to prove or disprove Jospeh Smith's translating abilities.

Somehow, I don't think that is going to happen, and it has nothing to do with whether or not there were Nephites, plates, interpreters, etc.

In any case, as far as the present topic is concerned, Idon't believe any one has suggested that examples of a living person on the couch, a knife in the hand, and a human head on the person holding it, would all be found in the same vignette. I think the question is whether or not all of those things are valid variations for the scene.

Now your getting it Will, although it may be to late for this SP. :)



I recall DP saying it would take a signed confession from Joseph Smith for him to stop believing the church is true. I am sure there are some unreasonable apostates and believers who won't change beliefs, but then I haven't seen any say that. I guess bringing it up is your way of saying you have no good evidence.

I am not sure what evidence you have that I am an apostate from the CoJCoLDS. In general, I have tried to follow the principle that an anonymous poster should not expect his or her readers to give credit to anything apart from the evidence and arguments put directly before them on the board. For that reason, I try (perhaps not always successfully, but I think generally so) to stick to an impersonal style which makes no reference to my background and experience. But if you feel more comfortable ascribing my rejection of Schryver's argument to apostate bitterness, I shall do nothing to stand in the way of your doing so.

But let's leave personalities and get down to the concrete:



I completely agree with that. Now of course we know why we need all those things you mention. It is because Joseph Smith produced a text, purporting to be by Abraham, in which the following words occur (Abraham chapter 1):



As we know "the representation at the commencement of this record" was reproduced by Joseph Smith in facsimile as follows:



The labels on the picture are explained below it in the Pearl of Great Price, including the following.

1. The Angel of the Lord.
2. Abraham fastened upon an altar.
3. The idolatrous priest of Elkenah attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice.

So the figure on the altar has to be a human being who, although in danger of being dead in the near future has not yet died. The attendant too must be human, and holding the knife he needs for the sacrifice.

There are two main kinds of problem here. In the first place, two crucial elements - the human head on the attendant, and the sacrificial knife - are not present on the papyrus itself, but were restored by Smith:



So we are dealing with a problem of restoration here: and if we want to restore a human-headed attendant wielding a knife, we have to find those elements somewhere else in the repertoire of 'couch scene' vignettes. That is common ground, it appears.

Now the most complete and recent review of the range of vignette elements that might be drawn upon for restoration, and indeed of all previous attempts at restoring the vignette we are discussing, appears to be the essay by Dr. Lanny Bell in the collection edited by Thompson and Der Manuelian Egypt and Beyond (Brown University, 2008) "The Ancient Egyptian 'Books of Breathing', the Mormon 'Book of Abraham' and the Development of Egyptology in America', which may be downloaded by clicking on this link. It takes about twenty minutes to read.

Bell's conclusions in this essay are fatal to all the elements needed to restore the damaged papyrus in a way consistent with Smith's facsimile, and with the story of Abraham's brush with death quoted above. Bell reviews a very large number of related scenes, and in none of them does he find evidence for a human attendant for a figure lying on a couch, whether mummiform or in the unwrapped and striding pose of this papyrus: when there is an attendant it is the jackal-headed Anubis all the way, apart from one instance where it is Amun-Re . As for the knife, Bell's review of iconographic possibilities leads him to conclude in his footnote 27 that "There is absolutely no justification for restoring a knife in Anubis' hand".

So no human priest, and no knife either. But can the figure on the bier be the living man Abraham, as the Book of Abraham requires? Again, no, according to Bell's thorough review. The figure on the couch, whether it is in mummy wrappings with limbs confined, or unwrapped and 'striding' as in the Smith papyrus, is always Osiris - either in the sense that it is Osiris himself or Osiris as personifying the hopes of a human tomb occupant for a resurrection similar to that of the god. The 'striding' figure is not a human being on this side of death, struggling in terror against the sacrificial knife, but one who has died awaking to new hope and life. Many of these figures have erect penises as a sign of their re-awaking vitality, while some do not. Bell inclines to think that the Smith papyrus was probably originally non-ithyphallic. I cannot (as noted in an earlier post) make any sense of Schryver's suggestion that the figure on the couch has to be alive (i.e. not yet having died, unlike Osiris and the human tomb occupants who have died and are resurrecting) because it has (in his view, following Bell) two arms raised rather than the one arm raised in most other such scenes. There seems no justification at all for this 'one arm dead, two arms alive' procedure, either in Egyptology or in simple common sense.

A non-iconographic point that needs stressing is that all these images make sense because those who viewed them knew the story of Osiris' resurrection and of his impregnation of Isis . This was a scene of hope and renewal for the figure on the couch, helped by the ministrations of the attendant figure if there is one - and the irony is that Smith interpreted it exactly the wrong way round as a depiction of attempted murder of a human victim by a knife-wielding attendant priest.

A final Egyptological point: no-one seems to have disputed that the bird-like figure near the head of Osiris is his returning ba-soul, rather than Smith's 'Angel of the Lord'.

For Smith's early readers, the fact that the 'writings of Abraham' translated by the prophet were accompanied by a picture apparently showing exactly the scene that 'Abraham' describes must have been a great reinforcement to their faith in Smith and his mission.

For a modern reader prepared to look at the evidence available today, Smith's misuse of a well-understood variant of a funerary scene of the resurrecting Osiris can only have the opposite effect.

Why don't you give up the usual psychoanalysis of the exmormons and start dealing with what we argue instead of what some mysterious people you say have argued. I've also seen LDS apologists like Pacman say that there is no amount of evidence that could possibly convince them the Church is based on fraud. Dan Peterson once said it would take an authenticated affidavit in Joseph Smith's handwriting, admitting it was all a hoax. When you've got folks like that on your side making such idiotic statements, then you're done talking about "reasonable' or "logical". You're beyond convincing no matter what the evidences says.

Nobody here demands proof, just a reasonable basis for belief in Schryver's apologetics. Neither you nor the villiage idiot has managed to convince anyone except a few choir members. That's it. People who were dying to accept anything faith promoting to begin with.

The only reason to accept Schryver's crazy-ass theories is because you're trying to maintain belief. That's it. That makes his theories inferior by default. There is no reasonable basis for any of his nonsense, which is why you can't even convince your own crowd. Some folks on the LDS side think Wilbur is out to lunch on these matters and is in fact making a fool of himself and apologetics as a whole. All he does is sit around and contemplate, "what possible scenario would there need to be in order for the critical view to be wrong" and then he dodges all the existing evidence, invents his own evidence and methodology and then force feeds it into whatever model he is trying to establish. It is a never ending cycle with this idiot, and he never finishes off an argument, he is always changing his position, pretending that makes him scholarly, but we all know it is because his models are always needing to dodge the evidences that are too powerful for him to gloss over or dismiss out of hand.

By contrast, we're able to maintain the same arguments for decades and persuade not only everyone on our side, but quite a few on your own. What happens is that when LDS members become convinced, and they start migrating over here with different monikers, you immediately call them exmormons and attack them on that basis alone. You don't deal with the fact that the arguments for your side are so friggin weak, you can't stop people from crossing over.

That is quite hilarious and it is an important point that shouldn't be overlooked. The power of an argument is determined by how many people it persuades, and whether it can persuade people who come from opposite viewpoints.

I'd guess the score is something like 51-0 in favor of the critics. You guys aren't even in the same ballpark. Once in a while you'll guys hit a foul ball, or maybe get a walk when dealing with uninformed critics, but you've never scored a single run and convinced anyone from the opposite team.