Love this:



I've been saying this all along. This coupled with Anubis's missing snout is going to prove the death of the Book of Abraham!

It's very important that we bear in mind that Joseph Smith considered the Facsimiles to be part of the Book of Abraham -- revelations and translations. In fact, it could be argued that the Explanations of Facsimile No. 2 were considered to be Joseph's finest translations -- more important than the story contained in the chapters of text. Apologists have long tried to water down the importance of the Facsimile Explanations and focus on the story contained in the chapters. They do this because they know they can't defend the Explanations.

I assert that Joseph Smith considered the Explanations of Facsimile No. 2 to be his finest hour as a translator and the most important element of the entire Book of Abraham. Apologists be damned for the ____ liars they are. President NelSatan is a ____ liar and I wish the bastard would drop dead.



(No alcohol tonight, Shades, so THERE!!)



What you see is what you ____ get!

You're thinking of the original scroll that contained Facsimile #1. The one featuring the snout removal was Facsimile #3.


Yes, but only regarding Facsimile #1, the Abraham on the altar scene.


Because Facsimile #3, the Abraham in Pharaoh's court scene, wasn't missing that part.


That's entirely possible, but only regarding the part of the scroll which contained Facsimile #3, since we have the part containing Facsimile #1 and know for a fact that it's missing Anubis's head.

As for what happened to the papyrus containing Facsimile #3, it's anyone's guess, as Shulem explained earlier.

Thanks, guys. The Book of Abraham has always been a sort of jumbled mess to me, and I appreciate the efforts to succinctly explain the basics of the scroll in relation to the Book of Abraham as its printed in the canon.

- Doc

Remember that the Hor scroll and the Ta-Shert-Min scroll had been cut into sections and placed under glass in boxes to preserve them. So getting separated later on was not that big of a deal since they were already in sections. Two weeks after Lucy's death (they were a source of income to Lucy but evidently not very important to Emma) Emma sold "four Egyptian mummies with the records with them" to Abel Combs who then sold two of the mummies and some of the papyri to the St Louis museum. That is probably when facsimile #3 and the missing 24" of the Hor scroll got separated from what we have left of it right now. Combs nor the buyer could read Egyptian and probably had no idea or even cared which segments were originally part of which scrolls.

When the St Louis museum closed, the part of the Joseph Smith Egyptian artifacts it owned were purchased by James Woods and in about 1863 made their way to the Chicago museum where they are believed to have been destroyed in the Great Chicago fire of 1871.

Combs kept two of the mummies and all of the extant papyri the church owns today. Whether or not he kept more is unknown. The fate of the mummies is unknown but the papyri passed down to Combs nurse, Charlotte Benecke Weaver who in turn gave them to her daughter Alice Heusser, whose husband sold them to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. The Museum kept them until 1967 at which time it decided to sell them to raise money. The LDS church arraigned for an anonymous donation to the museum in return for the 11 segments.

Right, it seems that Emma wasn't concerned with preserving the original handiwork of one of the most important people in all of holy writ, Abraham. Emma only cared about her immediate financial needs and willingly dumped Abraham's personal writings down the rabbit hole.

Recall you said in another thread:



Nope, Emma didn't give a rat's ass about the so-called authenticity of the papyrus and what it meant to have an actual autograph of Abraham and his story written in his own hand. All she cared about was where she was going to get the money for her next dress. What a ____. She remarried just three years after Joseph's death and did so on Joseph's birthday! She sure had the last laugh. What a ____!

I think this is looking at it from the wrong perspective... I personally think this just goes to show that Emma knew the papyrus had *nothing* to do with Abraham or ancient Biblical writings.

If Emma truly believed the papyrus said what Joseph claimed it did, I don't believe she would've dumped them at the first chance she had.

I have no idea what she truly believed overall about Joseph and Mormonism, but I am pretty sure that this tells you what she thought about the authenticity of the Book of Abraham.

I think she saw Mormonism as a means to support her family and elevate her stature in the community. Mormonism was a means to an end for her.

I agree. I don't think for a minute that Emma believed Joseph Smith translated the Egyptian papyrus. I think she knew the whole thing was a hoax and just kept her mouth shut and went along with it. She knew Joseph better than anyone which means she knew he was nothing but a liar and a conman. Just so long as she gets a new dress and hat on a regular basis she was okay with it all.

Hey guys,

I'm the guy who wrote that annotation of the essay.

It occurred to me that when the day comes that a local leader, friend, or neighbor calls me on the carpet for my disbelief it would be handy to have my notes embedded in an official church document that responds directly to the manipulative and less-than-completely-honest way the church often "answers" questions. Of course the confrontation I was anticipating never happened because nobody actually wants to know about this stuff.

Thanks to those of you out there who have done important leg work on this topic. I'm glad to be in the presence of Shulem, if you are the guy who discovered the Anubis desnouting. About 10 years ago the church put the papyri and plates on display for one day and it was really a treat to see them face-to-face. I wish I had known about nose job then so I could have observed it directly.

Thanks for the compliment! I like compliments.

Yep, I was the guy that discovered the missing snout on the plate. That's not saying that someone else might not have noticed it prior to me but I'm the first person to have noticed it and make it public.

Please tell us more about the essay annotation. That sounds interesting. The essay is a weak and flimsy apologetic piece of trash put out by the church. All the "what ifs" and "could bes" are clear indicators that the church has no answers but only more questions to add to questions already remaining. The church is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it allows for both the missing roll theory and the catalyst theory to be viable options. It can't have both. But clearly we see the church is playing both sides of the fence. The church is run by cowards who are professional liars in every regard. The leaders of the church are trained to lie and have lived lies to such an extent that they even believe the lies they tell themselves. You know it's bad when you can talk yourself into your own lie. This is the kind of people that are running the church, habitual liars with tongues crafted in deceit.

Well, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

I always loved the Book of Abraham. I had so much respect for it I was even able to resist coloring the pictures when I was a kid. I used to sit in church and read the facsimile translations and think, oh boy, it says here that I'm going to get to learn this ancient secret when I go to the temple! I was so excited to buy Nibley's translation when it came out but then so perplexed by the absence of the Book of Abraham in that text. What the hell?

The ground started slipping out from under me about as quickly as I could shore it up with apologetics coming out of FARMS, but that just opened me up to all of the other problems. At some point I realized that I had walked all the way through the forest of apologetics and came out the other side with the realization that it had all been a smoke screen.

I could console myself with the thought that, although I found a lot of what the apologists were doing abhorrent, there was still a chance that inspired leaders might be able to give some reasonable answers. But when the official essay came out it made it very clear that the leaders had nothing. They were so clueless that they either didn't understand how bad the apologetics were or they were complicit. But what really riled me was exactly what you pointed out. These essays are multiple choice questions. They throw a lot of mutually exclusive "answers" at you as if they were really answers and they leave it up to you to pick the one that works best for you.

They don't care what's true, just as long as they keep you on the hook.