I subscribe to the JDKD* theory.


*Joseph Didn't Know Dick

Hi Runtu,

Thanks, wow, I have never heard of th RT (Reinterpretation Theory) before. So does David think the actual writing on the papyri was Abraham's?

Is he going along with Gee and the MST (missing scroll theory)?

Hi TD and Runtu (my two favorite posters),

What acronymical theory does Smith's Papyri alphabet fall under?

And, by the way, do you know where the original is or where a facsimile may be obtained?

I never seem to get a straight answer when I ask this.

inc.

Seriously,

To see Smith's egyptian alphabet, wouldn't that be a simple pass/fail?

I mean, either it parallels the Rosetta Stone translation or it's ABLOCT?

Is this a fair assesment?

(a butt load of crap theory)

Last I heard, most well informed apologists embraced the CT (catalyst theory), or maybe the MT, (mnemonic theory).

The last one is -- and this has come up for a number of people who really were sort of shattered for a while -- is the problem of the Book of Abraham. Could you talk about that and your own understanding of it? ...

The Book of Abraham is a lesser-known text in the Mormon canon of Scripture. It's part of what's called the Pearl of Great Price, and it purports to be a document written by the hand of Abraham that was recovered by Joseph Smith, translated [from] a group of papyri that he recovered while living in Kirtland, Ohio. The papyri were lost for a long time, ... and eventually the papyri came back to the church, and people were saying, now this is a real chance to test Joseph Smith's claims as a translator, as a prophet: Do the papyri match up with what Joseph Smith gave us? And the answer is no; ... they don't, if you translate them in a conventional Egyptological way, give you the text of the Book of Abraham.

Now, there are several possible responses to that. The one that I personally find the most persuasive is we only have a small part of the collection. We have possibly about 11 or 12 percent of the papyri that belonged to that collection, ... so it's very possible that there was a text that would be translatable, even by a conventional Egyptologist, into the Book of Abraham, but we don't have it now. But even that seems to me not altogether necessary. We know that Joseph didn't translate in the way that a scholar would translate. He didn't know Egyptian, ... so he was getting it by revelation. That even opens up the possibility to me that even if Joseph thought he was getting it from the papyri, he may not have been. How would he have been able to know? I'm not saying he wasn't. My own preferred solution to this is to say that he was, and the papyrus is missing. ...

What they ought to be focusing on is the book itself, which I think is a remarkable thing. It has ties to the ancient world all over the place in very interesting ways, which I think Joseph wouldn't have come up with. ... I would defend it by saying, look, we've got this translation; let's look at the content of the book itself. Does it hold up? My argument would be yes, it does, and that that's where people ought to be focusing. The papyri were a deceptively clear indicator; in fact, they may not indicate anything. ...

The original width of the papyrus was correctly estimated by Baer as being about 150–55 cm, allowing for textual restorations and the now lost Facsimile 3.33

...

33 Baer, p. 127, n. 113. There is no justification for
Gee’s unsubstantiated attempt to more than double this
figure to “320 cm (about 10 feet)” in Gee, A Guide to
the Joseph Smith Papyri, pp. 10 and 12–13. Gee presumably
wishes to allow space for a supposedly “lost
hieratic text” of The Book of Abraham; his figure
derives from the average length of a manufactured
(blank) Ptolemaic papyrus roll—not comparable, individual
documents cut from such a roll.

The apologists readily admit that the Egyptian Alphabet is, as you say, a butt load of crap. But they tell us that Joseph Smith had nothing to do with the GAEL, which was just Joseph's scribes trying their hand (unsuccessfully) at translating the Egyptian. If I understand the argument right, Chris Smith and Brent Metcalfe argue that the GAEL are the scribes' copies of Joseph's translation, which, if it's true, nullifies the missing scroll theory.

No. You're confused on some important points. The "GAEL" is not the same as "KEPA" which are different from the "KEPE" which are different from the "JSP".

You're currently confusing the GAEL with the KEPA. [Head spins around 360 degrees ...]

Look, I've always maintained that this is not a topic for the faint of heart, nor for those who want everything to be tied up in a neat simple box. The KEP are a box of sometimes related, and yet often very unrelated documents dating back to 1835.

No one left any notes about what they represented.

That's what people are trying to figure out.

I will only claim that the initial conclusions were largely incorrect. Very incorrect in many ways.

Hello Truth dancer,

Most LDS Apologists believe in the Missing Papyrus theory for the Book of Abraham. The Following is from part an interview that the Chief LDS Apologist, Daniel C. Peterson gave with PBS.




( Link: http://www.pbs.org/Mormons/interviews/peterson.html , Bold Emphasis Mine. )



However, The Following is from what Egyptologist Professor, Robert K. Ritner stated:




( Link: http://www.bookofabraham.com/ritner_article.pdf )



Here are some other Links for some more information about this important Topic:



SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE JOSEPH SMITH PAPYRI:
http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no82.htm


Chapter 5 - Do Papyri Fragments=Book of Abraham?:
http://www.bookofabraham.com/boamathie/BOA_5.html


Conventional Translation Denies All Evidence:
http://web.archive.org/web/200710280536 ... /id622.htm


The Book of Abraham II:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=656


Has John Gee Pulled Another Fast One?:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3650


Why Nibley and Gee cannot be trusted:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3715


A General FYI on missing papyrus and such:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3942


Book of Abraham/Papyri/Long article:
http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Abraha ... ng_article


Book of Abraham/Size of missing papyrus:
http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Abraha ... ng_papyrus


New Book of Abraham Thread on MAD:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8646

Thanks for the links, Brackite,

Seems there is always a reference to something that has been lost or otherwise misplaced.

You wonder why it is nearly always the important stuff and not the inconsequencial musings of a lowly uninspired scribe.

No one except Metcalfe could have! (And whoever else had copies of his photos.)

No one had access to the originals,

While concurring that the Book of Breathings does not contain red characters and does not appear to be "beautifully written" or "perfectly preserved," the argument is offered that the description of a scroll having red ink only applies to only one of two scrolls, and that the scroll with the red ink was the Book of Joseph, not the Book of Abraham. However, the description of the original scrolls makes no distinction between the Book of Abraham and the Book of Joseph. To say that Oliver was "giving pride of place" to only one record while seeming to describe both is unconvincing to me. Furthermore, other eyewitnesses, as noted above, described the papyrus records containing the writings of Abraham and Joseph in much the same terms, mentioning red and black ink, giving no hint that the two records looked different.