The mea culpa is below.
Chap wrote:Really? That is not for any of us to settle by simple declaration, at least not on the Celestial level at which this discussion is being conducted.
Nevo wrote:[I am sorry, Chap, but DrW's declaration that all of the Anthon transcript characters have been identified and that, moreover, they have all been identified as modern, is a whopper. Not only is it untrue, it is not even close to being true. You guys can't just make stuff up and pass it off as fact.
DrW wrote:Nevo,
Fair enough. I will take that as a reasonable CFR.
It may take some time to find the reference(s), but I have seen statements in the literature that they have all been identified (although I suppose that some may not agree with some of the matches).
I don't like being accused of telling whoppers (although given that I made the statement without providing the evidence, I suppose you were justified in doing so), so I will do my best to find the reference(s) this weekend and get back to you.
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ETA: I did not say that the characters were all modern. I said that they were contemporary and non-ancient. What I should have made clear (and did not) is that they were contemporary with Joseph Smith in that they would have all been available for Joseph Smith to copy, miss-copy and possibly alter slightly.
So, here is the best that I could do in finding the reference I read a few years ago claiming that all of the Anthon Characters could be attributed to scripts that were used by Irish Catholic clergy from approximately the 8th Century up to approximately the 17th century and beyod.
The thread on which I first saw this information was on the old MADBoard. The author of the post in which it was contained was Arc. The thread in question was not preserved when MADB became MDD.
In commenting on the now flushed MADB thread on Nov 28, 2009, I wrote the following on another board.
I noted that DCP was on the "Reformed Egyptian" thread on MADB and responded to Arc's initial post identifying many of the script characters as Tironian notes. DCP asked Arc to identify the source of the rest of the characters in the Anthon Transcript (clearly assuming that he could not do so).
When Arc showed that they were an old form of Gaelic and Ogham code, DCP did not come back to the thread to defend Joseph Smith or the Church. An apologist guy named hagoth7 conveniently invited Arc to take up the discussion on another thread on another section of the board.
The fact that DCP did not come back with a response and some of the other TBM's acknowledged that the Anthon Transcript was indeed made up of characters in use by Irish Catholics in the 8th - 17 Century was very interesting.
Apologists could claim that there is no evidence that Stephen Mack had the facsimile or shared it with Joseph. But in the end it does not matter. The bottom line is that the Anthon Transcript, accepted by both the RLDS and LDS Churches as genuine, is comprised of characters that have nothing whatsoever to do with Egyptian, Reformed Egyptian, Hebrew, or any other Semitic language.
Like the Kinderhook plates, the Book of Abraham papyri and the Greek Psalter incident, this bit of research is more confirmation that Joseph Smith was con man and a fraud, plain and simple.
Here is the graphic from Arc's post.
Arc provided references. Since the MADB thread in is gone, I cannot find them again.
So, in fairness to Nevo, I will concede that I was wrong in stating that all of the Caractors had been identified without having had the reference at hand. I should have said that the majority of the Anthon characters have been identified.
I would add that whether all or simply the majority of the characters have been identified makes little difference to the argument that the Anthon Transcript is simply a collection of what Joseph Smith believed to be ancient and characters that were copied down and identified as "Reformed Egyptian" with the intent to commit fraud. Without invoking magic, there is no other possible explanation.